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Avoiding False Conversions in Google Analytics

Preface

The first half of this post is a quick rundown of some of the standard ways in which your conversions could be going awry.

The second half of this post — everything after “How to filter conversions with Tag Manager” is an advanced way of intelligently filtering conversions using Tag Manager and cookies.

If you’re confident you’ve already covered your bases, feel free just to skip to the advanced section, I just feel it’s important to go through some of the basic stuff before diving into more complex solutions.

Avoiding false conversions

Aside from failing to record important data, one of the best ways to screw up your analytics is to record the wrong thing and lump it in with all the times you’ve recorded the right thing.

For example: if you’re counting conversions when you shouldn’t be, that can screw up automated ad bidding, how much you value individual channels, or even how well you think your business is doing. For this post, we’ll be referring to this issue as “false conversions”.

There are a huge number of ways you can track conversions in Google Analytics, and a huge number of ways to screw it up. This post is going to focus on some of the main ways you can mess up conversions when you’re basing them on users completing a form and then landing on a thank-you page.

We’ll cover:

Some useful tools
Things to check — how might users be accidentally converting?
How to protect destination-based goals from false conversions
An ideal event-based goal approach
How to protect event-based goals from false conversions

Useful tools

The tools below will help you with some of the checks in this post.

Chrome DevTools

F12 will open Chrome DevTools (you may need to press the “function” key depending on your keyboard). You can test JavaScript in “Console”, and view active cookies in “Application”.

Google Tag Manager preview

Google Tag Manager has a new preview which will show you what happens on a series of pages over time.

Adswerve dataLayer Inspector

This plugin summarizes dataLayer information in Chrome Console.

Analytics Tracking Monitor plugin

I’ve found this plugin really useful for checking what information is being sent to GA. One nice feature is being able to block hits from actually being sent to GA while recording what would be sent.

Tag Assistant

The Chrome Tag Assistant plugin will show you what Tag Manager tags are present on the page. If you click to record the session, it’ll also give you a breakdown of everything that’s happened on each page. That said — I don’t tend to rely on the recordings as much if I have Tag Manager access, because a lot of the useful information is covered between the new GTM preview and the tracking monitor plugin.

Tag Mapper

I created a free Tag Mapper tool to make it easier to see what impact Tag Manager changes might have. If you’re planning on changing something in your GTM account, you can see what else might be impacted. Likewise, if you’ve noticed that something is broken, it can help you find the root cause.

Things to check

It can be tempting to leap straight to a catch-all solution, but if you’re recording conversions when you shouldn’t be, that could be because your website visitors are doing things they shouldn’t be.

Let’s start with a quick rundown of checks you should do to make sure you’re not making the numbers look right by just ignoring problems on your site.

1. Are you only recording conversions on thank-you pages?

To check if you’re recording conversions on pages you shouldn’t be (like, every page on your site or something) have a quick look at the Reverse Goal Path report in Google Analytics:

Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path.

The first column on the left should show you where your goal conversions are taking place, unless you’re doing something unusual. If you’re seeing a bunch of pages in that column which you don’t expect, that’s a sign you need to change your criteria for conversions.

One thing to bear in mind here: if you’re recording conversions based on events rather than pageviews, and you’re seeing the wrong page appearing in that left-hand column, make sure your conversion event only ever fires after your pageview.

2. Are you linking to conversion pages in other ways besides form completions?

If you’re using any goals based on a user loading a specific page (like a thank-you page), and you know you’re only recording conversions on thank-you pages, another way you could be screwing things up is accidentally linking to those thank-you pages. If a user can click on the wrong link and end up on a conversion page, you need to fix that.

One way to check for this is using a tool like Screaming Frog to crawl the site and just see if your conversion pages appear. If they appear at all, you know that’s probably a problem. To find out how to fix the problem, you can select the offending pages and check the “Inlinks” panel, which will give you a list of where you’re linking to them.

3. Are users landing directly on thank-you pages?

A quick way to check if users are landing on your thank-you pages is to use segments. If you create a segment where the landing page is your thank-you page, you can get an idea of how often Google Analytics thinks users are landing on your conversion page.

Below, you can see a screenshot of the segment interface. I’ve set it to include any session where the first interaction was a user landing on a thank-you landing page. As you can see, that was the case for 339 sessions on this site:

Once you see how often users are landing on your thank-you pages, you can pinpoint the sources which are bringing those users to the site.

Below, I’ve applied a “lands on thank-you page” segment to the Source/Medium report, and it looks like we’re getting a bunch of direct sessions, but also some CPC sessions, and organic sessions elsewhere, too:

An important thing to bear in mind here is that this is based on what Google Analytics thinks is happening. It doesn’t necessarily mean users are landing on these pages directly from adverts. In fact, in this example, we know this isn’t always the case, and sometimes it’s a symptom of our tracking code being broken or confused in another way. Even so, it gives us some things to investigate.

For example:

Do we have adverts or other activity pointing straight to conversion pages?
Are our conversion pages indexed in Google?
Do we have a page in the middle of our conversion flow that isn’t being tracked?
Is our tracking code broken, or are users doing things on-site which would confuse GA?

3.1 Do you have adverts or other activity pointing straight to conversion pages?

I won’t be able to walk you through all of this, but all advertising platforms should allow you to check active landing pages. It’s also important to make sure that you don’t have any affiliates linking directly to conversion pages — either accidentally or maliciously — as you could be paying them a lot more than they deserve.

It may be harder to check non-paid links, like social media activity. That said, it’s worth spending the time checking. If you find you’re linking to these conversion pages by accident, you can work with relevant teams to put policies in place for that in future.

3.2 Are your conversion pages indexed in Google?

Google can be a frequent cause of conversion page issues. It’s a ravenous crawler. It’ll follow links inside and outside of your site, and if there’s a machine-crawlable link to your thank-you page, it’ll probably find it.

A quick way to check if Google has saved your thank-you pages (and might be sending users straight to them) is to search for the pages in Google.

Using “site:” filters Google results to just pages on your site. Using “inurl:” filters results to just pages that contain a specific string.

Below is an example of a check we did for one of our clients. We found that they had a lot of “thank-you” pages in the index (over 600). Some of those pages were fine, but it highlighted a number of conversion pages for us to deal with:

3.3 Is your tracking code broken, or are users doing things on-site which would confuse GA?

We don’t have time to go through all the things that could go wrong here. Some things to check are:

Are you missing tracking code on some pages? Perhaps you’re failing to record the user before they land on the thank-you page.
Do you have different versions of Google Analytics on different pages? This can, again, cause confused or split sessions.
Are you including UTM parameters on any internal links? Any website crawler should help you find this.
Do you have the wrong timezone set in GA? Sessions can’t cross “midnight” — if they do, GA will split them into two separate sessions.
Are you including important information on the thank-you page that could cause users to bookmark the page, or try to come back to it later? One solution here is to include pretty much nothing visitor-specific on the thank-you page, and assure them that you’ll email them details. It’s worth testing this to make sure it doesn’t hurt visitor confidence.
Do you have any forms, that take more than half an hour to fill out, and don’t record interactions in the meantime? You can avoid this by splitting the form into different pages and tracking when visitors fill out a form field or when they hit errors. Entirely aside from what we’re looking at in this post, but all of these things should help you make your forms more user-friendly.

Once you have all of those checked off, you can start to look at ways to improve the way you filter your conversion data.

How to protect destination-based goals from false conversions

If you have your goal type set to “Destination” in Google Analytics, that means that any time GA records a pageview for a specific page, it’ll count as a conversion.

You can make your destination goals require users to have visited other pages first by using a funnel. If you edit the goal and switch “Funnel” on, you can specify the steps leading up to the goal. This means you can make sure that you don’t record goal conversions when users land directly on your thank-you pages.

You can also use it to separate out different kinds of goal conversions. For example, if you use the same thank-you page for multiple forms, you could have one goal where the funnel involves traveling through one form page, and another goal which involves traveling through another.

This will work if you:

Have a smaller (and fairly static) number of different goals.
There is a small (and fairly static) number of ways users can legitimately complete each goal.

However, funnel steps don’t allow things like regex, so they aren’t very flexible. Also, you can only use funnels with destination-type goals. So, funnels won’t help if:

Your goals are event-based.
You have lots of ways users could reach a goal.
You have multiple teams managing the site, and it doesn’t make sense to keep track of all the ways users could reach a goal.

You should be aware that if you have a problem like internal UTMs or sessions timing out, these form funnels can mean you stop recording some conversions you should be. Seriously, make sure those problems are fixed.

The ideal approach: event-based goals

The ideal approach involves using event-based conversions rather than destination-based ones. You work with your developers so that as the users complete the form you tell GA that an event has occurred, rather than GA having to wait for a thank-you page pageview. GA then records each instance of that event as a Goal conversion.

Below is the criteria for one event-based goal conversion, if you haven’t seen them before and are struggling to picture how they’re set up. It records a conversion for this goal any time GA receives an event of the category “thank_you_page”:

The reason this is ideal is, you’ll only record a conversion when the user actually does what you want them to do. Most conversion goals based on pageviews are just us trying to guess what the user has done. That’s why you run into problems with destination-based goals, like users landing directly on your thank-you page without completing the form you wanted them to complete.

You might think it’s a bit strange to leave this “ideal” solution until so late in the post, but I’m doing so because this is often not the simplest solution. It can require the most work on the developer side, and you could be using something built into your CMS that your dev team has to edit, or even worse, you could be working with an external form solution that they have to hack their way into.

I’m bringing this solution up at this point because if you don’t already have this in place, you’ll need to convince someone to do it. Their first question may be “have you considered other options?” When you have that conversation, you can say:

We’ve made sure we’re only recording conversions on the right pages.
We’ve made sure users aren’t getting to those pages in ways we can prevent.
We’ve made sure there aren’t other issues with how we’re tracking the site.
Our conversion data is being polluted in a way we can’t prevent because we have to rely on thank-you pageviews.
We can’t filter out those conversions using Google Analytics.
The best way to make sure our data is accurate is to use events, and the most accurate events to use are ones that only occur when the user does exactly what we want them to.
If you can help me I’ll be your best friend.

An alternative to Google Analytics funnels

It could turn out that the events-based solution above is impossible. Life has its frustrations, we soldier on.

An alternative is to switch to event-based conversions anyway and use Tag Manager to handle it all yourself. Using Tag Manager and cookies, you can create a more flexible version of GA’s funnel to only send conversion events when users land on a thank-you page having visited a qualifying page. How does that work? In short:

When a user visits one of your qualifying pages, you put a cookie in their browser.
When the user loads a thank-you page, you check for the cookie, and, if it exists, you send a conversion event to Google Analytics. If it doesn’t, you don’t.
Then you clear the cookie.

That means you won’t record the following false conversions:

Users landing direct on thank-you pages.
Users accidentally clicking to thank-you pages when they haven’t visited the relevant form.
Users leaving the thank-you tab open, or bookmarking it, and clicking back to it later after their GA session expires.

The section below gets into some specific Tag Manager terminology (the most confusing being that a “Custom Event” and a “Google Analytics Event” are two different things entirely).

Some terminology to know

I’ve color coded Tag Manager terminology in blue and all Google Analytics terminology in orange, but if you find yourself getting lost, you might want to read around a bit or talk to a knowledgeable colleague or consultant.

Event: Something we send to Google Analytics to record a specific action.

Custom event: Something that happens on the web page, which we can use as part of the criteria for a Tag Manager trigger.

Trigger: A set of conditions we lay out in Tag Manager. When these conditions are all fulfilled at the same time, the trigger fires and usually activates a tag.

Tag: Something in Tag Manager that does something. This sounds vague because it could be almost anything from sending an event to Google Analytics to completely rewriting the page.

Variable: A piece of information in Tag Manager that we can easily reference in triggers, tags, or other variables.

Data layer: Structured information on the page which makes it easier to pass information to Tag manager.

How to filter conversions with Tag Manager

1. Make sure Google Tag Manager is installed on your site

It’ll need to be on every page. Google has shared a Tag Manager quick-start guide if you need further guidance.

If you’re switching from standard GA code to Tag Manager, make sure you don’t include both GA and Tag Manager, or you’ll double-count.

2. Tell Tag Manager every time a thank-you page is loaded

We’ll assume your thank-you pages are all the same type of page, so you can reasonably say to your dev team, “please make this change to all of our thank you pages”. Ask them to add something like the script below.

Example script

<script>
window.dataLayer.push({
“event”: “conversion”
});
</script>

If you need to test this process before getting the devs involved, you can try adding the code yourself by pasting it into the console using Chrome DevTools.

When the page loads, that script will add information to the data layer. Tag Manager will detect the change, and you can use it as one of the conditions for a trigger. In this case, Tag Manager would detect a Custom Event called conversion as this data is added. We’ll come back to that.

3. Tell Tag Manager every time a qualifying page is loaded

We’ll also assume there are some similarities between your qualifying pages. For one thing, they’ll probably all have a form on them. You can coordinate with your dev team to automatically add/activate a script any time one of those forms is added.

Example script

<script>
window.dataLayer.push({
“event”: “qualifying”
});
</script>

In this case, you’d see a Custom Event called qualifying. Again, you can test this by pasting directly into Console.

4. Whenever a user lands on a qualifying page, set a cookie

You’ll use your “qualifying” Custom Event as the criteria for a trigger. Below is a screenshot of the trigger setup:

Then you’ll create a tag which will be activated by that trigger. The tag will add some content to the page, in this case adding JavaScript (even though the tag type specifies HTML). The JavaScript will run as soon as it’s added and set a cookie for the user, that way you can pass information from one page to another.

Example script

<script>
// Get time 30 minutes from now (this is because the default GA session timeout
// is half an hour and we want our cookie timeout to match)
var dt = new Date();
dt.setHours( dt.getHours() + 0.5 );

// Set a cookie called ‘qualified’ with the value being ‘true’ which expires in 30 minutes
document.cookie = “qualified=true; path=/; expires=”+dt;
</script>

5. Get the cookie value

Use a Tag Manager variable to make sure you’re detecting the value of the cookie, which will give you the current value of your “qualified” cookie each time you check.

6. Determine whether you should filter the conversion

In step two, you created a dataLayer event that will occur on all of your final conversion pages.

Now you create a trigger which fires on your “conversion” event.

Then create a tag which is activated by that trigger, and creates another Custom Event.

Below is the custom HTML to add. It checks if your qualifying cookie is set to “true”, which shows the user has already visited a qualifying page this session. If it is true, you create another Custom Event called “create_filtered_conversion”. If it’s false, you don’t. Either way, delete the cookie by setting its expiry time to be far in the past.

Example script

<script>
// When we are about to fire a conversion – check if we should.
// If we should – create an event that will trigger the conversion
// otherwise, don’t. Either way – clear the cookie

// Get variables
var isQualified =

// Check if the conversion is qualified
if (isQualified === “true”){
// If the user has a qualifying cookie
window.dataLayer.push({
“event”: “conversion_confirmed”,
});
} else {
// Do nothing if we have determined the conversion shouldn’t fire
“”
}

// Set cookie expiry in the past to clear it
document.cookie = “qualified=false; path=/; expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00”;
</script>

7. Send event to GA

First you create a trigger which is waiting for that “conversion_confirmed” event.

Then you create a tag, activated by the trigger above, which sends the relevant event to GA. The specifics of the event sent to GA can be whatever you want, you just need to make sure they match the criteria of your goal in GA.

8. Don’t switch off your old conversions straight away

One nice thing about this is you can run it alongside your existing conversion tracking to see how often conversions are being filtered out. Keep your old conversion setup running for a while (how long depends on how often you get conversions).

Watch the two numbers and check if you’re filtering out loads of conversions. This check will help you spot mistakes in either the old setup or the new one.

Let me know what you think

Google Analytics will never be a perfect record of everything on your website, but these checks and processes should help you weed out some of the ways it can mislead you.

What do you think? What GA improvements do you think people have been missing? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @robinlord8. <strong style="color:orange" event

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SEO Competitive Analysis for B2B — Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Joyce.Obility

In the B2B space, it’s important to be realistic about who your competitors are.

Keeping that rule in mind, in our last Whiteboard Friday episode before 2021, guest presenter Joyce Collardé of Obility walks you through how to conduct a competitive SEO audit, helping you address your improvement areas and surpass your competition in the SERPs.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. Thank you for joining me today as we talk about SEO competitive analysis for B2B businesses. My name is Joyce Collardé. I am the SEO Supervisor at Obility. Obility is a digital marketing agency based out of Portland, Oregon, with offices in Austin and Boston and that specializes in B2B businesses.

So I wanted to talk about SEO competitive analysis because it is a really crucial part of your SEO strategy and of your SEO success. As you know, SEO doesn’t work in a vacuum. So if you want to be able to improve your SEO traffic, your click-through rate, your keyword position, and eventually your conversions, you have to be able to take the space of some existing competitors.

Today I’m going to walk you through the five phases of the competitive analysis. We’ll start with how to select your competitors. Then we’ll discuss the keyword distribution and what is important to understand the keyword distribution. Then we’ll discuss keywords and content gaps and opportunities. Then we’ll move on to technical health of your website and your competitors’ websites.

And we’ll finish with backlink analysis.

Selecting competitors

So selecting competitors is the step that is really important, especially in the B2B space, because the B2B space is very competitive, and in this space we have a few marketing giants like Oracle, AWS, Marketo, Google, that can be considered the de facto competitors for everyone.

Unfortunately, with that line of thinking, you are really missing out on a lot of interesting insights because those websites are so huge that they might rank for hundreds of thousands of keywords. Sometimes we see millions of links and have a Domain Authority of 98. So when you compare yourself to them, then it will be really difficult to actually find good nuggets of information about your website.

You will always be at the bottom, and it’s also really discouraging.

So I really would recommend that you are realistic about who your real competitors are. And nothing prevents you from refreshing your competitors in six months or a year from now if you feel like you’ve outgrown the competitors you selected in the first place.

One thing I want to highlight as well is that you should have different sets of competitors for each funnel stage. For example, let’s say your target keyword list includes definitional keywords like “what is cloud computing.” So your competitors for “what is cloud computing” might be ZDNet or TechTarget, for example.

But let’s say you want to target “cloud computing solution,” then your competitors could be IBM. But the intent of the user who is looking for “what is cloud computing” versus “cloud computing solution” or “cloud computing software” is very different, so you cannot target the same competitors for each level of the stage funnel.

You will miss out on a lot of good insights, too.

I also do want to point out that your competitors will be very different in different areas of digital marketing or even offline marketing. Your PPC, your paid search keywords, or your paid social keywords will not be the same as your SEO keywords.

Really the best way for you to identify good competitors is just to Google your target keywords. It’s really as simple as that. And then see who comes up and see what their strategies are.

Keyword distribution

So let’s take a look now at keyword distribution. One thing that I want to point out is that sometimes we audit competitors that seem like they’re ranking for thousands of keywords, and it’s a little intimidating.

But really ranking for thousands of keywords isn’t the end-all be-all. You should really pay attention to their keyword distribution. Out of those thousands of keywords, how many are branded, how many are not branded?

Of course, you won’t be able to rank for your competitors’ branded name. So you really have to focus on the non-branded keywords.

Also, those keywords, do they have a lot of volume? Are they really difficult to rank for? Are they ranking for hundreds of keywords with zero searches or 10 searches per month, for example? Are those the keywords that you really want to target? And if you do manage to take their place on the first page, is it really going to help your overall SEO strategy?

Another good thing to look at is diversification. Are your competitors only ranking for one keyword category, or are they targeting different categories? A competitor that, let’s say, ranks for only branded keywords or keywords that have very little search volume or that is targeting only one specific category wouldn’t be very dangerous keywords.

And as we talked about earlier, you should not have the same competitors for every set of target keywords that you are working with. So make sure that you repeat this step for each set of competitors.

Keyword gaps and opportunities

Next comes the content and keyword gaps and opportunities. So in this stage, you should really think about the keyword gaps — the content gaps between you and your competitors.

It’s not just how often do they post or what do they target. It’s also which topics do they publish on the most, or which topics do they focus on the most on their product or their solution pages. What kind of content type do they prefer? Are they publishing only blog posts?

Are they publishing mostly videos, glossary pages, e-books, white papers, webinars? You really have to pay attention to that, because if all of your competitors are using blog posts and then you come in with your webinar that people need to sign up for and give you their information, then you are not going to be able to beat them at their own game.

You have to kind of align to what is available in the competitive space.

Frequency is important, too. If your competitors publish twice a week on their blog or have a live demo every week, or release a new e-book every month that they will email to their customer base, you also have to align on that frequency.

I would say out of the competitive analysis, this is one of the most important stages because you really have to be aware of the type of opportunities that you are going for.

And it really comes back to what we were talking about earlier with the competitor selection. You have to be realistic.

It is very important to know what you’re going against. Otherwise, you can keep publishing blog post after blog post after blog post, but if you have not identified the proper competitors or have not identified the proper type of content that you need to create, all of those blog posts will not amount to improved performance on your site.

Technical health

The fourth stage of the competitive analysis is technical health.

So I think we can all relate to how annoying it is when you get to a website and it’s full of 404 errors and the links are broken and it’s too slow. It’s just a really bad user experience. And Google is very smart, and they know that we don’t like a bad user experience, and that if the user experience is bad, then they are going to put other websites above you.

So I did mention page speed, so don’t be scared. I know it’s always a huge ask to fix your page speed. But I would recommend that you use the Google PageSpeed Insights and take a look at those easier things to fix. One thing that comes up all the time is images being too big or too heavy, taking too long to load.

So if that’s the case, take a look at your main images and see if you can reduce the size of them. Usually, the images that are the heaviest are the ones that will be on your homepage slider or in the background on your product or solution pages. So just by fixing a few pages on your website, you could improve your page speed by several seconds, and we know it means a lot when you’re a user.

Definitely do those two steps with your competitors, too.

For example (you can do it with Moz or you can do an on-site crawl for any website), let’s say that all your competitors are missing H1s or are missing meta descriptions or have a lot of 404 errors, then you know those are the top priorities that you need to fix.

Again, think about your competitive advantage. If all your competitors’ websites are really slow, then fix your page speed first. If it’s a horrible user experience because you keep hitting 404 errors, fix your 404 errors first.

Backlink opportunities

The last part of the competitive audit should be the backlinks opportunities.

So you can use the Moz link discovery tool to find out about everyone’s lost and discovered new links. This makes link building a little more approachable than just saying, “Oh, I will target The New York Times,” because by looking at people’s competitors and lost and discovered websites, you can identify websites that probably know you, or know your competitor, or at least know your industry, and so may be more willing to link to you. Especially if they used to link to your competitor or are currently linking to your competitors.

Definitely do this for your own website as well, to identify the links that you have recently lost and that you can try to reacquire. I would recommend that you repeat this step on a monthly basis because you have better chances of reacquiring links that you recently lost rather than if you contact someone saying, “Oh, two years ago you used to link to me. Can you please link to me again?”

You’re out of that person’s thoughts. So try to stay on top of it. And you might have a lot of links at the beginning, but if you do it regularly, then it’s much more manageable.

Also, when we’re talking about backlinks, I would advise you to look at your competitors’ Spam Score and link diversity. For example, I did a competitive analysis recently and I saw that one of the competitor’s Spam Score was 23%, which I had never seen before.

It was so high. It was ridiculously high. So it made me happy in a way, because it seemed unachievable at first to get to the number of external links that they had, but then it turns out that the majority of their links were spammy. And with a Spam Score of 23%, I don’t think they’ll be able to carry on much longer.

Link diversity is also really important because you don’t want all links coming from blog posts or all links coming from one type of publication. So when you think about new links that you can acquire, definitely make sure that you have different types of websites linking back to you, that they’re using varied anchor text, that sort of thing, so that you don’t look spammy and you don’t end up with a Spam Score of 23%.

Time management

So I wanted to also talk a little bit about this pie chart over there. It was how much time you’re supposed to spend on each of these steps. So the biggest one, as I mentioned earlier, was the gaps and opportunities audit. That is really where you should spend the majority of your time.

Something that is also really important is the competitor selection as I talked about earlier. If you don’t have the proper competitors to audit, then you won’t get the helpful type of insight that you are looking for. Technical health would be the third most time-consuming, important step of this competitive analysis.

As we talked about, good user experience is very important. And the last two that should take you a little less time are keyword distribution and backlinks. So if you’re really, really pressed for time, you can forgo the backlinks for now and do it later and focus on that part of the on-site SEO.

Conclusion

So to recap, the five stages of the competitive analysis that you should include in your own competitive analysis are selecting the right competitors, auditing the keyword distribution, looking for content and keyword gaps and analysis, performing a technical check on your website and your competitors’ websites, and auditing your backlinks and the competitors’ backlinks.

If I can leave you with one more thing is really to be realistic. That goes back to the competitor selection and even when we’re talking about distribution. Be realistic in your target keywords. Don’t go for keywords that are extremely difficult if you are a website with a lower Domain Authority or you’re just starting with SEO.

And don’t go after those B2B giants if you’re a mid-market B2B company. Know that you can refresh this at any time if you feel like you’ve outgrown your competitors. So thank you again for spending time to talk about competitive analysis with me. Now go and audit those competitors.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

What’s Changed (and What Hasn’t): The 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey Results

Posted by morgan.mcmurray

You’re tired of hearing it and I’m tired of saying it, but 2020 really has been a year like no other. SEOs and marketers around the world had to deal with their day-to-day work moving home, alongside a host of natural disasters, civil rights issues, and a pandemic that will alter our industry and global economy for years to come.

We could have held off on launching this year’s reader survey, but we decided to move forward anyway because we know your work and your interests have been impacted, and we wanted to know how much.

I’m excited to share with you the results from that survey in this post. We’ll go through what’s changed — and what hasn’t — for our readership since our last survey in 2017, and detail what those insights mean for the Moz Blog in 2021.

Methodology

We published this survey in July 2020, with questions asking for details on the professional occupations of our readers, how those readers interact with the blog, and what those readers like to see from the blog. We also included COVID-19-specific questions to gauge the pandemic’s impact on our readers. The survey was shared on the blog, through email blasts, and on our social media accounts.

The percentages shared in the sections below are part of a total of 388 responses we received over four months. This is actually our first data point, showing that engagement with surveys has shifted drastically since our 2017 survey, which got nearly 600 responses in just one month. Given the interruptive nature of 2020’s events, we won’t let that difference discourage us from utilizing surveys in the future. Where able, I’ve compared 2020’s results to those of the 2017 survey, to better visualize the differences.

Answers were not required for all questions, so if something did not apply to a respondent, they could leave the answer blank or choose a variety of “no opinion” or “N/A” options.

We don’t typically include demographic or geographic questions in our reader surveys, but given the overwhelmingly positive response to the Gender Gap in SEO and Diversity and Inclusion in SEO surveys published this year, we will do so moving forward. Understanding the struggles SEOs and marketers face in the industry due to race, gender, and sexual orientation is imperative to understanding how to best work with and for everyone, and we acknowledge that shortcoming in this year’s survey.

Who our readers are

Let’s dive in. First up: the questions asking readers to tell us more about themselves.

What is your job title?

The word cloud below is an amalgamation of the top-used words in response to this question, and the size of the word correlates to the number of mentions that word received.

No surprises here: number one (by far) was “SEO”. Our readership remains heavily SEO-focused in their occupations, with content marketers coming in close second.

What percentage of your day-to-day work involves SEO?

That said, 2020 saw an increase in respondents in the lower percentage brackets of readers who use SEO strategies in their daily work, specifically the 1-10% and 41-50% ranges. This could be due, in part, to the broadening of tasks assigned to SEOs in the marketing industry, as several respondents also mentioned a need to wear multiple hats in their organization.

On a scale of 1-5, how advanced would you say your SEO knowledge is?

The majority of our readers remain intermediately knowledgeable about SEO concepts, leaving plenty of room for new learnings across skill levels.

Do you work in-house, or at an agency/consultancy?

While the majority of Moz Blog readers are still in-house SEOs and marketers, an interesting takeaway for us in 2020 is the increase of those who are independent consultants or freelancers from 11% in 2017 to just under 17% in 2020. We’ll make sure to take that into account for our content strategy moving forward.

What are some of the biggest challenges you face in your work today?

Far and away, the challenge most often mentioned in response to this question was the high volume and rapid cadence of new SEO information, new tools, and algorithm updates. Readers are struggling to determine what to focus on and when, what to prioritize, and what even applies to their work. We can certainly help you with that in 2021.

Other frequently-mentioned struggles were familiar to us from previous surveys, showing us that the SEO industry still needs to address these issues, and that the Moz Blog can continue offering up content in response. These issues included:

Lack of resources and cross-functional collaboration at work.
SEO prioritization at work.
Lack of consolidation in analytics and reporting tools.
Difficulty explaining the value of SEO to bosses/clients/non-SEOs.
Difficulty explaining what SEO CAN’T do to bosses/clients/non-SEOs.
Attracting new clients and customers.
Having to wear multiple hats.

How our readers read

Keeping in mind all that context of who our readers are, we dug into preferences in terms of formats, frequency, and subject matter on the blog.

How often do you read posts on the Moz Blog?

As an increasing number of readers rely on social media channels for their news and content consumption, the shift from frequent readers to “every once in a while” readers is not a surprise, but it is a concern. It also necessitates our incorporation of social media engagement as a top KPI for blog performance.

Given the multiple off-blog distribution methods and frequency of prompts to take this year’s survey, we saw a sharp increase in “non-reader” responses from 1% in 2017 to 6% in 2020. That said, it’s interesting that Moz email and social media subscribers who weren’t Moz Blog readers felt motivated to take a survey entitled “Moz Blog Reader Survey”. We’ve taken note of the topics requested from those respondents, in the hopes of encouraging more engagement with the blog.

On which types of devices do you prefer to read blog posts?

While desktop and laptop computers remain the most common way to consume blog content, mobile phone use saw an increase of nearly 10 percentage points. Mobile phones have only improved in the last three years, and it’s no secret that we’re using them more often for actions we’d normally take on a computer. As we move toward blog CMS improvements in 2021, mobile-friendliness will be a priority.

Which other site(s), if any, do you regularly visit for information or education on SEO?

Across the board, we saw a decrease in the number of respondents listing other SEO news resources, as well as the first instance of a social media platform in the top 10 resources mentioned. This only serves as further evidence that social media is continuing its growth as a news and content medium.

What our readers think of the blog

Here’s where we get into more specific feedback about the Moz Blog, including whether it’s relevant, how easy it is for readers to consume, and more.

What percentage of the posts on the Moz Blog would you say are relevant to you and your work?

While the trends regarding readers’ opinions on relevancy remained similar between 2017 and 2020, we saw about a 6% dip in respondents who said 81-90% of posts are relevant to them, and increases in the bottom four percentage brackets. These results, paired with the topic requests we’ll cover later, indicate a need to shift and slightly narrow our content strategy to include more posts specific to core SEO disciplines, like on-page SEO and analytics.

Do you feel the Moz Blog posts are generally too basic, too advanced, or about right?

Given the breadth of topics on the blog and the wide range of reader skill levels, we’re happy to see that, for the most part, readers find our posts just about right on a scale of too easy to too advanced.

In general, what do you think about the length of Moz Blog posts?

Similarly, it’s great to see that readers continue to be satisfied with the amount of content served up in each post.

How often do you comment on blog posts?

RIP, comment section. A trend we’ve seen over the last several years continues its downward slope: 82% of readers who took part in the survey never comment on posts.

When asked for the reasons why they never comment, we saw some frequent responses:

“I have nothing to add.”
“It wouldn’t add value.”
“I’m still learning.”
“I never comment anywhere.”
“I don’t have enough time.”
“Follow-up questions go unanswered.”
“I read posts in the RSS feed.”
“English isn’t my first language.”
“I’m not signed in.”

Blog comment sections and forums used to be the place for online conversations, so this drop in engagement certainly signals the end of an era. However, these concerns also give us some areas of improvement, like working with our authors to be more responsive and improving comment accessibility. But sorry to those who prefer not to sign in — without that gate, we’d be inundated with spam.

In contrast, here were the reasons for commenting:

“I have a question.”
“I have a strong emotional connection to the material.”
“I strongly agree or disagree.”
“I want to add my personal experience or advice.”

We definitely encourage readers who do have questions or concerns to continue commenting!

What, if anything, would you like to see different about the Moz Blog?

Outside the responses along the lines of “No changes! Keep up the good work!” for which we thank you, these were the top asks from readers:

More thoughtful feedback from and interaction with authors.
More variety and diversity in our author pool.
More video content.
More specific case studies, tests, and experiments.
More step-by-step guides with actionable insights showing how to solve problems.
Ability to filter or categorize by skill level.
Diversity in location (outside the US).

These are great suggestions, some of which we’ve already begun to address!

We also received only a few responses along the lines of “keep your politics out of SEO”, specifically referencing our Black Lives Matter support and our posts on diversity. To those concerned, I will reiterate: human rights exist beyond politics. Our understanding of the experiences our co-workers and clients have had is essential to doing good, empathetic work with and for them. The Moz Blog will continue our practice of the Moz TAGFEE code in response to these ongoing issues.

What our readers want to see

Which of the following topics would you like to learn more about?

Survey respondents could choose multiple topics from the list below in their answers, and the most-requested topics look very similar to 2017. A noticeable shift is in the desire for mobile SEO content, which dropped from being requested in 33% of responses in 2017 to just under 20% in 2020.

In 2020, we certainly had more content addressing the broader marketing industry and local SEOs impacted by the pandemic. To better address the relevancy issue mentioned earlier, the top four core SEO subjects of on-page SEO, keyword research, link building, and analytics (all included in over 50% of responses) will become blog priorities in 2021.

Which of the following types of posts would you most like to see on the Moz Blog?

The way readers want to consume those topics hasn’t changed much at all in the last three years — the desire for actionable, tactical insights is as strong as ever, with the request for tools, tips, and techniques remaining at 80% of respondents. These types of posts have been and will remain our go-to moving forward.

COVID-19

Moving into our last and newest section for the survey, we asked readers questions regarding the way in which they consume SEO-related content during the COVID-19 era.

Has your consumption of SEO-related content changed due to COVID-19?

Only 34% of respondents said that their consumption of SEO-related content had changed as a result of the pandemic, a number we expected to be higher. It’s encouraging to see that so many readers were able to maintain a sense of normalcy in this area.

Of those who did see a shift, these were the most common reasons why:

Job loss and job hunting
Shift to work from home and being online 24-7
E-Commerce industry shifts
Online engagement shifts and ranking and traffic drops
Loss of clients and constricting budgets
More time to read paired with less time or opportunity to implement learnings

Would any of the following topics be helpful for you as a result of COVID-19 impacts?

Along those same lines, the most popular topic requested as a result of COVID-19 impacts with 27% of responses was tracking/reporting on traffic and ranking drops. Content and marketing strategies during a crisis came in close second and third, with 24% and 21%, respectively.

The answers to these questions show us that pivoting our content strategy in spring 2020 to address areas of concern was helpful for about a third of our readers, and probably contributed to the relevancy issue for the other two-thirds. We’ll continue to include these topics (on a smaller scale) until we see the other side of this crisis.

What happens next?

Primary takeaways

You asked, and we hear you. Moving into 2021, we’ll be writing on more technical, core SEO topics along with issues on the business side of SEO. We’ll also be building out our Whiteboard Friday series to provide more fresh video content. And as always, we’ll strive to provide you with actionable insights to apply to your daily work.

Given the steep decline in comment section engagement, we’ll be encouraging our authors to be more responsive to questions, and to interact with you on social media. Make sure to follow Moz on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay up-to-date with the blog and our guest authors.

Finally, stay tuned, as next year we’re planning UX improvements to our blog CMS to address usability and accessibility concerns.

My genuine thanks goes out to those readers who took the time to give us their feedback. It is immeasurably valuable to us, and we’re looking forward to applying it to all the amazing content we have coming your way in 2021.

Have a safe and healthy holiday season, Moz fans, and happy reading!

Google’s December 2020 Core Update: By the Numbers

Posted by Dr-Pete

On December 3rd, Google announced that they were rolling out the latest Core Update. Initially, the bulk of the impact seemed to arrive on that date, with MozCast spiking at 112.4°F:

We measured above-average ranking flux in the three days prior to the update announcement, and a few days after the announcement, but the bulk of the flux seemed to occur on the roll-out day. (The dotted line represents the 30-day average prior to December 3rd.)

How did December 2020 compare to other Core Updates?

While technically the third largest named core update, Google’s December Core Update was very close in measured impact to the May 2020 Core Update and the August 2018 “Medic” Update.

Winners and more winners

Back in May, I came down pretty hard on winners and losers reports. I don’t want to discourage all core update analyses, but our rush to publish can produce misleading results, especially with multi-day updates. In May, I settled on a 7-day update analysis, comparing the full week before the update to the full week after. This helps better reflect multi-day roll-outs and also cleans up the noise of sites with naturally high flux, such as news sites (which often wax and wane on a weekly cycle).

Below are the top 20 overall winners in our MozCast data set, by percentage gain:

Note the 1-day comparisons (December 4th vs. December 2nd) vs. 7-day and in particular the orange values — five of our top 20 picked up considerably more gains after the bulk of the update hit. We also saw some reversals, but the majority of sites recorded their wins and losses early in this update.

Another challenge with winners and losers analyses is that it’s easy for large percentage gains and losses from small sites to overshadow larger sites that might see much larger traffic and revenue impact. Here are the top 20 winners across the 100 largest sites in our tracking set:

Note that New York Magazine picked up considerably more gains after December 4th. Of course, for any given site, we can’t prove these gains were due to the core update. While Apple’s App Store was the big winner here, a handful of big sites saw gains over +20%, and eBay fared particularly well.

Winningest content / pages

We tend to focus on domain-level winners and losers, simply because grouping by domains gives us more data to work with, but we also know that many of Google’s changes work at the page level. So, I decided to try something new and explore the winners among individual pages in our data set.

I stuck to the top 100 most visible pages in our data set, removed home pages, and then looked only at the 7-day (before vs. after) change. Here are the top 10 winners, along with their 7-day gain (I’ve opted for a text list, so that you can click through to these pages, if you’d like to explore):

+126% — https://www.cashnetusa.com/paydayloans.html
+65% — https://www.trulia.com/rent/
+58% — https://www.customink.com/products/t-shirts/4
+53% — https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/calculators/taxcaster/
+41% — https://www.whitepages.com/person
+40% — https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/gardening/advice/…
+38% — https://www.nerdwallet.com/mortgages/mortgage-rates
+33% — https://www.bankrate.com/calculators/mortgages/…
+26% — https://www.wellsfargo.com/mortgage/rates/
+23% — https://smartasset.com/mortgage/mortgage-calculator

It’s interesting to note a number of shifts in financial services and especially around mortgage rates and calculators. Of course, we can’t speak to causality. It’s entirely possible that some of these pages moved up because competitors lost ground. For example, https://www.mortgagecalculator.org lost 23% of their visibility in the 7-day over 7-day comparison.

While it’s interesting to explore these pages to look for common themes, please note that a short-term ranking gain doesn’t necessarily mean that any given page is doing something right or was rewarded by the core update.

What trends are you seeing?

Now that the dust has mostly settled, are you seeing any clear trends? Are any specific types of pages performing better or worse than before? As an industry, analyzing Core Updates has a long way to go (and, to be fair, it’s an incredibly complex problem), but I think what’s critical is that we try to push a little harder each time and learn a little bit more. If you have any ideas on how to expand on these analyses, especially at a page level, let us know in the comments.

What You May Have Missed: Moz Resources to Prioritize Community Learning and Professional Development in 2020

Posted by clschwartz

It goes without saying that 2020 has been a wild ride. If you’re like me, you’ve missed some exciting news or even taken some time away from all things digital when it felt like the world was just too much. At Moz, we created a lot of helpful content in 2020, publishing community resources, reports, and guides across topics like local SEO analytics, competitor analysis, keyword research, campaign management, and more. With all that coming your way, there’s bound to be some oversight. Here’s a recap of what you might have missed in the chaos that has been 2020.

The State of Local SEO Industry Report 2020

The State of Local SEO Industry Report 2020 provides a snapshot of local SEO — both before and during COVID-19 — helping you understand the trends, ideas, and biggest challenges shaping your work in the new decade.

We found that 43% of respondents thought there weren’t enough quality resources to train teams and clients. That insight led to some of the resources we created this year, and those we’ll be launching in early 2021.

How to Rank on Google

The freshly updated How to Rank on Google 25-step master checklist walks you through how to rank a page, from page ideation all the way to traffic pouring into your Google Analytics account. This framework for beginner to intermediate SEOs provides everything you need to get started.

The Keyword Research Master Guide

The Keyword Research Master Guide helps you understand exactly what content to create to best help achieve business goals and target relevant traffic. This guide provides concrete keyword research workflows that act as a practical place to start, and introduces intermediate and advanced SEO techniques that will help you step up your keyword game.

The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet

An enhanced web dev cheat sheet, this updated resource has been downloaded tens of thousands of times by SEOs and developers alike, to better align on the goals between both types of practitioners. It’s the go-to tool to explain technical and on-page best practices, and is easy to digest by all.

Maximize Return During Tough Times Through Testing

Posted by timaj100

We are living in a fast-moving time with new technology, ever-evolving social and political landscapes, and a pandemic on top of that. Any predictions about what to expect in 2020 for marketers was no doubt lightyears off what we’re experiencing now.

So what can we learn from this year as we move forward? You can bet things will continue to change and evolve in unpredictable ways. What worked last year might not work now. Heck, what worked last week might not work next week! How, then, can you be sure you’re getting the most out of your marketing efforts?

Evolving and finding opportunities

There are a few ways you can try to stay on top of things. No matter what, having a strategy for post-COVID is important.

Learn from others

For one, pay attention to those around you. Learn from your peers and competitors. Some may be sharing: read blogs, watch webinars, consume all you can in your space. But you can uncover even more by doing things like conducting a competitive analysis of other sites, advertising messaging, advertising spend, and content creation.

Learn from yourself and adapt

Pay attention to your own analytics and results closely. Take in what you are seeing and adapt. Have a willingness to branch out and pivot strategy based on what the data is telling you. Again, something that worked before may not be working now, and vice versa.

Always. Be. Testing.

Knowing for sure what is going to work for your business, in your space, and at this particular time is a tough task. So the only way to find out for sure and stay on top of the changing trends is testing. We’re all vulnerable right now — and any time tough circumstances fall on us. Figuring out a new course of action, whether it is macro marketing decisions or micro adjustments, is key.

What to test

It’s easy to sit here and say “test to see what works and go with that”, but that can mean a lot of things. As I tie this back into maximizing your return during tough times, let’s talk about where to start first as you look to elevate your marketing and drive revenue and return.

Too often I see brands being timid in times of crisis. There is something to be said about caution, but testing and learning shouldn’t be a risk — it’s an opportunity.

The reality is, every industry is being affected in different ways in 2020. But challenging times come for us all, and when they do, focus on these few areas first.

Advertising

Advertising is always one of the first areas I look to when testing. It’s a fantastic testing ground that is often more controlled, and in which it’s easier to identify new, successful opportunities. You can look at ad copy, keywords, landing page content, calls to action, audiences, and different strategies altogether within the advertising platform.

We’ve measured positive results for clients in varying industries and in different platforms by changing aspects of the ads we ran.

For an SMB bike helmet retailer, we focused on creating social media ads during the peak of the pandemic that showcased a single rider as opposed to a group, typically in a more open environment instead of the city. Copy was also shifted to emphasize things like “embrace open space” and alluded to socially distanced riding without explicitly saying.

Due to the economic uncertainty of the time, our client scaled back the budget by nearly 44% in April, contributing to a 43% decrease in overall impression share. Despite this overall decrease, the click-through rate (CTR) increased by 61% in that month, the return on ad spend (ROAS) jumped from 0.25 to 1.34, and overall purchases more than doubled.

We saw similar results in a PPC campaign for a network security client. As many employees began working from home, we needed to position our client as a security solution provider for remote workers. Competition rose during the pandemic, which resulted in higher click costs and, despite increasing the overall ad spend, fewer clicks.

To improve our ads, we updated the copy to speak to users in need of remote security solutions and included free trial messaging. We also moved away from taking users to the homepage, instead directing them to a product-specific landing page that served as a remote worker solution hub. Doing this helped to focus the user’s path of exploration to pages that are more relevant to them at the time versus a homepage where their scope of exploration is wider and less tailored.

Making these adjustments in our paid ad campaigns increased the CTR by 11% and conversions by 31%. And since we were sending users to a more focused landing page and not the homepage, the user’s path to conversion was shortened and the conversion rate increased by 44%.

Use your advertising as a way to learn and inform other marketing efforts. A great example of this is ad copy headlines. Consider A/B testing headlines to see which is more captivating and clickable, and then roll those findings out to title tags on the SEO side of things to see similar benefits there.

Content

Run A/B tests for different aspects of your on-site content. Conversion rate optimization is a powerful tactic. This might mean trying new copy, new design, new imagery, new calls to action, or simply title tags and on-page SEO updates. Really everything on your site, in your emails, or any pieces of content you have created falls into this category. I’m not suggesting overhauling things, but don’t just stick with the tried-and-true when the industry and users are changing around you.

To give you an idea of what testing can do, Portent ran an A/B test for a client to see which of two forms performed better, the original form they had been using or a modified version, which removed non-pertinent information from the top of the form.

Switching to the modified form increased form fills by 6% across all devices and a 14% increase on mobile devices. On top of that, phone calls increased by 22%—all from a simple A/B test.

Goals

Experiment with different ideas of what a conversion even is. If sales are down, consider something like driving more email sign-ups as an alternative. It may not be the primary end goal, but can still add value and contribute to your marketing funnel.

If lead form submissions are down, consider driving traffic to a white paper download, or some alternative value-add to the end user. As primary conversion points slow, look for other ways to drive value and build to the future productively.

Promotions

More specific to the e-commerce space traditionally, testing new and creative promotions and sales may help provide a much needed lift in conversion rates. In today’s space specifically, many customers are experiencing tough times, too. Something as simple as offering a discount, even if it’s a small one, could be what is needed to get them to purchase. You may need to get creative with your promotions to drive people to your site, especially when competition is fierce.

A streaming service client ran a campaign in April when competition in the streaming industry was extremely high. To really stand out against competitors, most of which were offering free trials or adding new content, we needed to take a different approach. We offered to pay someone to do what they were already doing during quarantine—bingeing TV.

This campaign resulted in the site gaining over 1,200 new links and media coverage on various online outlets, driving nearly 154,000 referrals to the site (a 634% increase in referral traffic period over period). Overall, we saw an 86% increase in organic traffic period over period and there were over 343,000 new sessions on the site, more than 83% of which were new users. We also offered an extended free trial during the campaign, resulting in over 650 conversions.

Outside the e-commerce space, find ways to lower the barrier to entry and boost conversion rates in the short term. That might mean pushing traffic to more simplified forms or just asking less of the individual converting. In circumstances like what we are currently experiencing, something is better than nothing.

How to test

The “how” of testing is very easily its own post with many layers to it, from user research to focus groups. For most that are trying to maximize return for their business, that can be overcomplicating things. That said, there are some simple things you can easily do to test smarter and learn quickly.

Research

To start, do your homework. As mentioned before, do competitive research and learn from others. Review the keyword landscape and understand search trends so you can make updates to copy and content intelligently. Know your audience and personas before making updates.

This is essentially taking the guesswork out of it. If you are going to the trouble of testing something new, have research and data to support your hypothesis.

Use tools

Marketing testing tools come in many different shapes and sizes. There really is something for all situations. Here are a few great tools that can help you accomplish the following:

Keyword research — Google Keyword Planner, Moz Pro, SEMRush, Ahrefs
Conversion rate optimization — Optimizely, Google Optimize
Email marketing tools — HubSpot, MailChimp, Constant Contact
Heatmapping — Hotjar, CrazyEgg, Lucky Orange
Landing page testing — Unbounce, Instapage

Hopefully, you’ve been using some of these or your own preferred tools already. Lean into your tools—they will make things easier and help you drive results more quickly.

Don’t rush

Set your tests up as scientifically as you can and require statistical significance before drawing conclusions. It’s easy to get impatient and quickly make changes when you see results coming in. But, let the data do the talking and give your tests time to run their course.

Have a testing budget

Remember: this is a test! It’s easy to see results that you don’t want, panic and pull the plug. If you are investing in testing, have a budget that allows for that.

Set clear goals and expectations

Before you start your test, define success. What are you trying to accomplish? Make sure all stakeholders have the same set of expectations for what you are trying to discover and what goals your test supports.

Wrapping it all up

Tough times happen. Many businesses are facing them right now and will likely continue to. Don’t give up hope. Do your research and be nimble. You can find where your biggest pain points are and thoughtfully test solutions.

And remember, testing never ends. It’s an ongoing process in the continuous quest to drive the best results you can.

How Lead Generation Tactics Can Boost Your Link Building Results

Posted by AnnSmarty

How effective is your link building campaign? I bet your answer is “I wish it could be better.”

Talking to business owners and executives on a daily basis, I have yet to meet one who would be satisfied with their link building strategy.

Everyone needs links, yet they are getting harder and harder to get.

The solution?

Change your link building mindset.

How link building is similar to lead generation

In any business marketing strategy, we’re really interested in one thing: sales.

Yet, if we keep focusing on that end goal, we won’t achieve much. A customer may need up to eight touchpoints before they finally make a purchase. If you only focus on that final sale, you’re missing out on all those extra steps that drive your customer to buy.

It may sound obvious (so I’ll stop here) but the point I’m trying to make is: Marketers cannot focus on the final sale. We need something in between — a secondary metric that will bridge the gap between “a stranger” and a “a buyer”.

This is where the notion of a “lead” came from, i.e. a contact which we consider our prospective/possible/future customer.

A journey from a “a stranger” to a “lead” is shorter and much more predictable than a journey from “a stranger” to a “a buyer”, and once we turn a visitor into a lead, we can reach out to them in a much more meaningful and personalized way (via email, Facebook re-marketing, on-site personalizations, etc.).

What does this have to do with link building?

In link building we need links, just like in marketing we want sales. But focusing on the final goal is just as limiting in link building as it is in marketing.

Very few link builders these days do anything beyond sending an email, then using automated follow-ups. There’s no “lead generation” in link building. It’s either “link or no link” reporting.

And that’s where that process is broken.

In link building, all those bloggers, publishers, editors, etc. may also need several touchpoints (from something beyond an email). Furthermore, they may not be proper decision makers within the publication you are targeting.

If you apply that lead generation process to link building, you may see much better results, and more importantly, those results will keep growing the more leads you acquire.

How to add lead generation processes to your link building strategy

1. Define your linking leads prior to creating content

In B2B marketing, this is called outcomes-focused data strategy, which basically means you need to know exactly what you want to achieve (the outcome) before you start developing your strategy of achieving said outcome.

This concept is — sadly — seldom applied to link building.

What usually happens:

The content team creates what they think is a great content asset.
The outreach team identifies website owners who are likely to be interested in that asset, and starts the outreach.

Both teams are working in isolation.

But what happens if you turn that process around?

The outreach team shows the content team what’s attracting links on a specific topic (with examples). This insight should come from prospect research, current or upcoming trends, from previous outreach campaign data, etc.
The content team (in collaboration with the outreach team) creates something better than what currently exists on that topic. At this point, both the teams may involve those linking leads in the actual content creation (by reaching out and asking for expert opinions on the topic).
The outreach team delivers that content to the contacts they identified prior to the content creation.

Depending on the outlined link building opportunities, the linkable assets should take a specific format or angle, for example:

Curated lists of resources: Make sure your article fits one of the existing categories in the list, better fills a gap, or fixes an existing broken link.
Links from influencers or experts: Prior to publishing your article, reach out to those influencers and get their quote (opinion) to include in your article. Influencers are more likely to link when they’re featured on that page.
Links from peers and friends: Follow those people everywhere and start interacting with them on a daily basis. Think of this as “lead nurturing” — increasing your chances of creating long-lasting partnerships.
Editorial links from popular blogs: Track down authors and editors of those sites and start interacting with them on social media. Consider inviting them to contribute a quote to your article as well.

By letting your link building research guide the content creation process, you will end up with a highly successful campaign that is still delivering links (without the need to do the active outreach anymore).

2. Organize your linking leads

As we said previously, in link building the end goal is a link. But different leads will need a different number of touchpoints to finally link. Plus, more links are better than one.

This is where a lead nurturing process comes into play.

Just like B2B marketers using different methods to “warm up” leads and take them close to a sale, in link building you will get many more links if you keep reaching out to your leads to remind them of your asset.

If you’re using an outreach tool (both Pitchbox and Link Hunter are good options, depending on your budget and complexity of your project), it will handle some of the lead nurturing for you. At the very least, any outreach solution will:

Save all the emails you sent
Update the email status and dates (replied, bounced back, followed up, etc.)

Many link building teams will find that sufficient. I recommend going further and using a solid customer relationship management approach, which would also include:

Creating a detailed profile for each lead (which would also include their sites and columns, social media profiles, etc.)
Reaching out on social media (through ads and/or manual outreach)

If you want to go even further, you can adopt a well-organized customer relationship management strategy towards your linking leads. To get you started, here’s a solid comparison of major CRM types, as well as lead generation and nurturing platforms allowing you to properly organize and monitor your link building prospects.

You can set your link acquisition workflow and automate some parts of it (like follow-ups) while being in full control of everything that is going on.

3. Find alternative contacts and decision makers within each publication

In B2B, this process is called “account-based marketing”, i.e. when you know exactly which company would make your ideal customer and you start researching how to best onboard it.

In link building, this strategy applies to huge multi-author publications that would make ideal and ongoing backlink providers for your content. Think of the New York Times, Mashable, or a huge research magazine in your niche.

Emailing one of their authors with a request to link to your study or your infographic may not be enough (in fact, it will hardly ever be enough).

To investigate publications I’m really interested in getting links from, I use the following tools:

I don’t use Linkedin for outreach, but I just love its company profiles, which show me which friends (or friends of friends) I have associated with those entities. I have been introduced to quite a few great publications this way:

Twitter bio search

While Linkedin may be useful to identify existing contacts, Twitter is great for building new ones. For bigger publications, all you need is to find people including that publication in their bios.

A tool called Twiangulate is a great and free option for doing that: Just specify the company name (or its Twitter handle) as a keyword and the tool will find all the Twitter profiles that include it:

Now create a separate Twitter list to keep in touch with all of them.

Website’s “About Us” page

This may seem obvious, but it’s often a missed step. Many publications list their whole editorial team with all the emails included on their “About” page.

Try developing an outreach strategy for each of those emails. For example, a CEO may not be the best contact to request a link from, but they may reply and give you clearer directions for who to speak with, so ask for a contact!

4. Diversify your touchpoints

In my experience, an email is still the most effective link building outreach method. Truthfully, I’ve seen better success with a follow-up email versus the initial email.

But other ways to reach out certainly increase your chances of hearing back. These include:

A simple Twitter follow or retweet (no requests here)
A DM (especially when journalists claim their DMs are open for pitches and ideas)
A comment on their personal site
A LinkedIn message
Adding a contact to a Twitter list (Twitter will notify them)
Tagging them on social media (especially when they’re referenced or quoted in your content)

The bottom line here: Simply being there may remind them of your request and prompt them to open your email.

5. Diversify your assets

With diverse touchpoints comes the need to diversify your assets. Your outreach will be more effective if you give your linking leads something of value to include in their article.

If your initial email and the first follow-up weren’t successful, try creating a visual summary (an infographic) in your second follow-up to give them something fresh.

The process may turn quite easy and effective if you provide your outreach and content teams with tools enabling them to handle the creation of those assets. These tools include:

Venngage (to create slideshows and infographics)
Google Docs (to create ebooks and whitepapers)
Surveys (to collect ideas and stats)
Invideo (to create videos)

6. Keep an eye on your team performance

Your team is everything. If you fail to train them properly or distribute tasks among your team members effectively, the whole process will fail to move along.

At the very least:

Include your outreach team in your social media marketing so they can extend their outreach methods beyond emailing. Tools like Agorapulse will help in that process. You can set up lists, monitor certain keywords, save and delegate certain updates to turn them into tasks, etc.
Track your outreach activity. Tools like Email Analytics will help you with that. It will generate daily and weekly reports showing you how actively your team was emailing and how many responses they got. It will also save all emails to backup conversations.

7. Optimize your landing page

Your linkable asset should make an instantly positive impression on the people you email. There may by different ways to achieve that, but certain things help for just about any SEO campaign:

Your page needs to be ad-free

I’ve seen lots of people not willing to provide “a free link” to a page that is monetized with ads. There’s no point in arguing with your linking leads on that. It’s easier to remove the ads from the page you’re actively link building for at the moment. Besides, more often than not, it’s very easy to do.

Create CTAs targeting your linking leads

This one is a little bit advanced, but it will help a lot. Adjust your CTAs on the linkable asset page to fit your linking leads rather than your regular ads.

For example, instead of “Sign up for a free trial”, you may include a press coverage link or invite visitors to download additional data or resources.

Using Facebook pixel to record everyone who initially landed on the site through your linkable asset is another great way to re-market your asset to your linking leads.

8. Keep an eye on those links

Very few people will reply to you saying they have indeed linked to your content. But knowing if they have is important because conversion is a crucial part in the lead nurturing process. It doesn’t stop your relationships with your lead, but it impacts your interactions going forward. Those leads who end up linking to you are your best friends. Cancel your follow-ups, thank them, and keep interacting with them on social media.

Again, if you are using an outreach platform, chances are the link tracking will be included. Otherwise, check out Site Checker that has a handy link monitoring feature included.

Conclusion

Safe links mean those we cannot control. This turns a link building process almost into a form of art, or a well-manufactured serendipity (one of my favorite business concepts). You need to do a lot before reaching your end goal, all while keeping your end goal in mind.

These days, when any site owner — professional or amateur — is bombarded with link requests, you need to up your link building game. Luckily, there’s a neighboring marketing area that you can learn from: lead generation. Adopt more complicated and more diverse outreach methods to acquire great links to your website. Good luck!

3 Creative Ways to Give Your Content Efforts a Boost — Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

We know that content is our doorway to earning countless SEO benefits for our sites. Admittedly, though, it’s too easy to get stuck in a rut after one too many content marketing campaigns.

In this 2017 holiday edition of Whitebeard Friday (see what we did there?), Rand offers three novel ways to add sparkle to your content creation efforts.

3 way to give your content efforts a boost

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

Video Transcription

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

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

1. Niche groups

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

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

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

2. Products and services

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

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

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

3. Content creators

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

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

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

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

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

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

How To Do Local SEO for Businesses Without Physical Locations in 2021

Posted by MiriamEllis

“My business makes local deliveries, but doesn’t have a storefront. How do I handle listings management?”

“I work from home. How should I be doing local SEO?”

“Are there any tips for doing local SEO for clients like NerdWallet or Credit Karma that serve all customers virtually?”

Queries like these about doing local SEO for businesses with nuanced, hidden, or no physical locations and with varied models of customer fulfillment are AMA FAQs and perennial topics on marketing fora. Attendees at the recent Moz Webinar on The ROI of Local SEO repeatedly asked about this subject.

Business owners and marketers who haven’t serendipitously discovered Google’s various guidelines are left wondering how to promote non-brick-and-mortar brands. Even where there’s awareness that such guidance exists, Google is continually evolving its stance. It’s easy to make mistakes, overlook updates, and miss out on opportunities.

The great news is, there are local marketing possibilities for almost every business type, but you have to know which pathway to follow, based on how the brand you’re marketing operates. In today’s column, I’ll help you identify your model along with the best opportunities available to you for being discovered by the maximum number of local customers.

Identify your business model

If you’re asking about how to do local SEO for something other than a brick-and-mortar brand, chances are, the business you’re marketing falls into one of four categories:

1. Service Area Business (SAB)

Most home services (plumbing, landscaping, housekeeping, etc.) fall into this category. You may or may not have physical street addresses that serve as headquarters or offices, but the defining feature of your business is that you serve nearby customers face-to-face at their locations, not at yours.

2. Home-based business

Your home address is your physical location, and you may either serve nearby customers at your house (like a daycare center), or go to nearby customers to serve them (like a dog walker), or you might do a combination of both (like a yoga teacher who teaches some classes at their home studio and some as private appointments at clients homes). The defining feature of your business is that you’re working out of your house.

*If you work from home but don’t ever meet face-to-face with customers for delivery or fulfillment of any kind, then you don’t fall under this category; you fall under category 3.

3. Virtual business

You conduct all transactions virtually, via phone, computer, shipping, and other remote means. Your business may be e-commerce (like the Dollar Shave Club), or offer digital services (like Credit Karma), or sell via print catalogue or other remote methodology. You may be operating out of one or more physical addresses and want to get the attention of customers in various regions or cities, but no customers ever come to your locations. The defining feature of your business is that you never interact in-person with customers.

4. Hybrid business

This category is a sort of catch-all that covers many variations.

One classic example is a restaurant with on-site dining where customers pay in person, curbside pickup where customers come to the location but may pay online, and delivery where customers pay online and drivers come to their homes.

Another variant would be a home services company like a security specialist with walk-in key grinding at a physical premise, at-home appointments for installation of new locks on doors, and e-commerce sales of security products.

Yet another hybrid would be a model like the Vermont Country Store, with its brick-and-mortar shops, e-commerce shopping, and huge volume of print catalog-driven sales.

Hybrid business models became more common in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, and there is no single defining feature of them. They are only united when all of them are looking for ways to increase visibility to customers in a specific local region.

In most cases, if the business you’re marketing is a hybrid, then your best bet will be to find the relevant opportunities in models 1-3, pair them with any applicable brick-and-mortar opportunities if those also match your model, and move forward with a very broad, hybrid strategy that seeks geographic visibility by every means possible.

Never do these things, regardless of your model

Before we begin listing out your model-based local SEO opportunities, now is the time to protect the brand you’re marketing from unwanted outcomes by avoiding missteps. No matter whether you’re trying to earn local visibility for an SAB, a home-based business, a virtual brand, or a hybrid, scratch these from your playbook:

Don’t set up unstaffed virtual offices or P.O. boxes in an effort to fake locations for the sake of creating local business listings.
Don’t set up strings of locations via the houses of staff, friends, or family members in an effort to fake operating multiple locations.
Don’t set up listings for vacation homes, model homes, or empty properties. You can list the sales office of such businesses, but not the properties being rented or sold.
Never, as a marketer, silently engage in violations of Google’s Guidelines. If you and a client choose together to risk a penalty or suspension for some reason, you’re agreeing to share the risk of potential disaster, but never undertake a forbidden strategy without the client’s knowledge.
Be careful about over-promising results or agreeing to unrealistic goals when competing against brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether Google is genuinely biased towards locations that display their street address is a subject of long debate, myth, and speculation. What can be said with certainty is that it’s tough competing for local visibility with brick-and-mortar brands when you aren’t marketing a brick-and-mortar brand, so go into the work with informed expectations instead of unachievable aims, based on how Google appears to be handling results for your key search phrases.

Now we’re ready to talk strategy!

How to do local SEO for Service Area Businesses

Abundant opportunities exist for service area businesses without public physical locations. In fact, updates to Google’s Guidelines in 2020 created a more favorable scenario for SABs. We’ll break your activities down into three sections: local, organic, and paid.

Local marketing for SABs

Your path to success begins in understanding Google’s requirements (which exist here and here) specific to SABs. You should read them in full, but I’ll excerpt the most salient points here:

In-person contact required

The guidelines state that SABs must make in-person contact of some kind with customers to be eligible for a Google My Business listing. However, during the pandemic, do not worry that your transition to contact-less services disqualifies you from inclusion. The business you’re marketing is still an SAB if it’s painting a house or delivering a meal while observing social distancing. Google likely needs to update its guidelines to make this clearer.

Hiding your address required

You’ll be providing an address to Google in the creation of an SAB listing. Even if it’s a home address, warehouse location, or other facility you don’t want the public to visit, you must have some sort of address. Then, Google’s guidelines state that you should tell them to hide the address when creating the SAB’s listing.

Google will automatically hide the address if you answer “no” to the question “Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?” when setting up a new listing.

There are many reasons businesses object to this requirement. As mentioned earlier, it’s long been debated whether hiding an address impacts a listing’s local rankings, but whether or not it does, listings with hidden address listings lack pins/markers on Google’s mapped displays, compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. It’s a definite disadvantage in terms of visual impact. The lack of a published address may also influence whether customers trust that a business is truly local to them, and this could adversely affect calls and leads.

Nevertheless, it’s Google’s position that this business model should hide its address, and clear its address from the GMB dashboard if it previously published one.

Setting a service area allowed

Older GMB listings had a feature that let you set a radius depicting the service area. On new listings, however, you must enter cities or postal codes to depict where your SAB serves. You can enter up to 20 such points. The boundaries of such areas shouldn’t exceed about two hours of driving distance from where the business is based.

No study has ever found that what you enter as your service area impacts your local rankings in any way. If you choose to depict them, it’s for the information of customers.

More than one listing allowed for some models

If the SAB you’re marketing has multiple, separately staffed locations about two hours apart from one another, and with non-overlapping service areas, you’re allowed more than one listing. I highly recommend having a unique phone number for each office, if possible.

Joy Hawkins has done a praiseworthy job summarizing the confusion that’s historically surrounded this topic, given that Google had previously stated that SABs could only have a single listing per state while not appearing to apply this rule to franchises. The latest addition of the two-hour context has made the guidelines better and clearer.

However, don’t create multiple listings for the different services the SAB offers. For example, an HVAC company may not have one listing for heater repair and another for air conditioner repair. Google sees this as just one brand, and it’s eligible for just one listing.

Other notes for SABs

A few last things to know:

Google defines the large, emergent field of ghost kitchens as SABs, so all of the above guidelines apply to this model.
It’s up to you whether you link from your SAB GMB listings to your website homepage or to local landing pages on your website. The former may provide a rankings boost due to homepages typically having the highest Page Authority. The latter may be better UX for your customers.
Don’t overlook the chance to create service menus in your GMB dashboard, listing out all the different offerings the business you’re marketing provides.
Beyond Google, you’ll be glad to know that other local business listings platforms don’t make listing SABs so complicated in regards to hidden addresses. Unless a specific platform states otherwise, feel free to display your address on your other citations, if you like, and enjoy the opportunity to prove to searchers that you truly are local to them.
Moz Local can help you get listed on directories that allow you to hide your address, if you prefer to keep that private.

Organic marketing for SABs

No surprise here that every service area business should strive to publish the best possible website it can. Just like a brick-and-mortar brand, you want a mobile-friendly, secure website that provides a great user experience, has a strong internal link structure, persuasive consumer-centric content, and steadily growing Domain Authority based on inbound links earned over time. You want to get this site ranking as highly as you can for as many of your important search phrases as possible.

Where things become confusing for SABs in the organic marketing scenario typically relates to the concept of landing pages. This topic is constantly being discussed at SEO fora, and so we’ll break it down here.

It’s a best practice for brick-and-mortar models to create a unique location landing page for each of their physical stores. The goal of these pages is to serve a specific local audience with content that’s been specially designed for their needs related to a particular store location. These pages can rank well organically and can be used as the landing page URLs for a multi-location model’s GMB listings. SABs with multiple physical offices can also create these types of pages as proofs of local-ness, even if customers don’t come to the offices.

But the big question is: what if the SAB serves a large area beyond its own physical location? Should location landing pages be created for the locales an SAB serves?

The answer is, yes, you should consider creating SAB service area landing pages if you have something unique to showcase in each service city, and if you limit coverage to a reasonable geographic area.

For example, a house painter in the San Francisco Bay Area could create some really beautiful, highly-converting landing pages featuring houses they’ve painted in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, even if they don’t have offices in each place. Each page could focus on different completed projects, historic information about design styles in each city, happy customers in each city, home maintenance tips based on the different microclimates of each city, etc. These pages could rank well and convert customers if developed with thought and care.

The two things I would recommend that SAB marketers avoid would be:

Creating duplicate or near-duplicate service area landing pages because there aren’t actually unique features about the services or customers in association with the different cities.
Creating vast numbers of these pages in an attempt to get a single location SAB to rank over a huge area, like a dozen counties or even a state.

Take an approach that makes sense for the customer, and focus on content that will answer their questions and meet their needs. Build a strong internal link structure to these pages, try to earn a few good inbound links to them, and track how they are ranking in the localized-organic results for desired keyword phrases.

Paid local marketing for SABs

Anyone who markets SABs knows that one of their key, historic pain points has been being unable to rank throughout their service area because of Google’s bias surrounding user-to-business proximity. Despite having a separate set of rules for SABs, Google continues to treat these models too much like brick-and-mortar storefronts, typically focusing their ranking opportunities around their given (but hidden) locations.

When your local and organic efforts are failing to earn the visibility you need throughout your focus service area, Google’s Local Services Ads program lets you pay to fill in the gaps. If the business you’re marketing is in a qualifying industry and geographic region, you can run these ads for the job types you want to do in the service area you want to cover, and pay Google for the leads they send. SABs can also simultaneously run Google Ads for additional paid coverage.

The downside to LSAs and Google Ads is that they require an investment (as opposed to the “free” visibility of local pack and organic results) and they increase local brand dependence on Google for revenue. Be sure you’re working hard to turn each Google lead into a repeat customer outside of Google’s lead gen loop. The upside to paid Google advertising is that it lets you pay for visibility you just can’t earn any other way. If it creates positive ROI for the brand you’re marketing, then it’s a worthwhile investment.

How to do local SEO for home-based businesses

Service area businesses may feel at a disadvantage because Google requires most of them to hide their addresses. For home-based businesses, the scenario is often the opposite: many owners of these models want to be sure their address is kept private and that and they don’t have confused customers showing up at their door expecting public premises.

But not all-home based businesses are the same in their requirements and opportunities. When marketing a home-based brand, ask the owner to select which of these scenarios fits their model:

1. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be public

This could be a daycare center, pet groomer, horse boarder, private instructor, or similar model. In this case, the business should invest in street-level signage and take every advantage of marketing themselves as a brick-and-mortar business. There’s nothing holding this business model back.

If the business is by appointment only, Google prefers that you set no hours of operation on your listing. Based on your chosen GMB categories, however, you may be eligible for Google’s booking features. And, you can choose to mention in the business description field that access is by appointment only.

2. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be private

Google doesn’t have clear enough provisions for this specific model, but basically you will be handling it as you would an SAB that needs to hide its address. Google wants you to clear the address from the Info section of the Google My Business dashboard. You can choose to add a service area.

If privacy is a special concern for a particular business, it’s important to know that if Google has any record of your home address, bugs or policy changes could lead to it being visible at some point.

Beyond Google, you can choose to list the business only in those directories that support hidden addresses. You likely will not be creating location landing pages for this model, but may want to focus your website’s content on hyperlocal city and neighborhood terms to seek as much nearby organic visibility as you can without an address.

3. I work from home and serve customers at their locations

This could be a plumber, accountant, housekeeper, or similar model where the home base of the business is the owner’s house, but they travel throughout a service radius for work. This model is just like a typical SAB, in that Google wants the address hidden and a service area designated for the listing.

It’s important to emphasize here that home-based SABs are not allowed on the Google Maps product and that Google’s workaround for this is that they can be included in Google My Business by virtue of hiding their addresses. Failure to hide the address could risk suspension and removal of the listing.

Beyond Google, feel free to either show your address if you’d like to on your listings, or only list on directories that support hidden addresses if privacy is important to you. And, just like other SABs, review the above section about whether your operations lend themselves to developing high quality, interesting landing pages to represent various cities in your service area.

4. I work from home and don’t serve any customers face-to-face

These waters became somewhat muddy in 2020 due to the public health emergency causing so many people to work from home, and so many models to replace in-person service with tele-appointments and other forms of remote communication.

In the past, virtual business models have been strictly excluded from having Google My Business listings. But so much has changed in the world due to the pandemic, and so I went directly to a Google rep to see how they may have adjusted their stance on this.

I asked how a professional like a therapist who used to have an office and see clients in person, but who is now working from home and seeing clients via telemedicine appointments, should be listing themselves. Since their model is now virtual, have they become ineligible for a GMB listing, or can they still be listed as a home-based business would have been pre-COVID-19?

Here’s the answer I received:

So, according to this representative, if the business formerly served customers in person and intends to resume face-to-face appointments when it hopefully becomes safe to do so in the future, then eligibility isn’t harmed. List the business as you would any home-based business, following the guidance shared above in this section. It would be a good thing if Google would update their guidelines to share this timely information.

However, if the business is fully virtual and has never served customers in-person, move on to the next section.

How to do local SEO for virtual businesses

E-commerce-only companies, purveyors of strictly digital goods and services, and large, national or international manufacturers and providers without storefronts all fall under the heading of “virtual business”. Questions most commonly arise in this sector from virtual brands that are frustrated by limits of competing fully with local, physical brands for online visibility.

To avoid wasting time and resources on dead-end strategies, it’s best to clearly outline what virtual brands can and can’t do to compete. And, we should also highlight grey areas.

Can’t do

Without offering in-person service, the virtual brand you’re marketing is ineligible for a Google My Business listing. Without having a physical address, it’s also ineligible. You may be able to list the business on some other directories, but in Google’s world, you cannot compete for local pack/local finder/maps rankings. Just cross it off the books.

Can do

You can compete for organic rankings with the content you publish and the links you earn to boost the Page Authority of that content.

You can compete for paid visibility via Google Ads with location targeting in regions that are important to you.

Grey areas

There are some cases in which a mainly-virtual business might qualify for a GMB listing, if they have a staffed headquarters that needs to be found, not by customers, but by associates like B2B partners. However, for virtual brands with national or international consumers, such a listing will not in any way help with competing for country-wide local pack rankings.

Localized organic visibility for virtual businesses

In recent times, Google reps have stated that 46% of searches have a local intent, and that it’s the location of the user that has a much greater impact on the search engine results they’re shown than other forms of personalization. For fully virtual businesses, none of this is good news, and Google heavy localization of their organic SERPs leaves e-commerce and other digital-only brands struggling to compete.

In a recent Moz webinar, an attendee asked how companies like CarInsurance.com can rank for searches formulated like “car insurance near me” when Google is most likely to give precedence to truly local businesses + major brands. The reality is, virtual businesses have to build all of the organic authority they can and find a way to localize some specific content as much as possible for the cities that matter the most to the brand.

A common approach that I can’t recommend is the development of thin, duplicate city-level landing pages for every city across the country. You see footers all over the Internet laden with links to dozens of city-level pages of very little value.

Rather, brands competing for extremely tough terms have to continuously invest in building authority to rival a Farmers Insurance or a Geico if they want to be seen as relevant by Google for prime organic visibility for head terms. And, where possible, create landing pages for top cities with truly top-notch localized information on them, sometimes adjusting optimization to target fruitful longer-tail terms.

This is no easy task, and it’s why so many virtual brands simply end up paying for placement instead of struggling for organic rankings. But take heart. The company our webinar attendee asked about, CarInsurance.com, is doing extremely well with this landing page for the longer tail search of “best cheap car insurance in San Francisco” when I search from my locale in the SF Bay The Moz Pro On-Page Grader shows what a strong effort has been made, and that there’s even a bit of room to do better with a few tweaks:

So find your geographic market competitors and audit them to discover where competition may be possible with the right mix of authority + winnable search phrases. Designed especially to help you understand which search terms to target for organic rankings in different geographic markets around the country is the Moz Pro beta of Local Market Analytics:

Local Market Analytics breaks new ground in offering you a multi-sampled view of your competitors in your chosen regions for the search phrases you most need to support with your best content. Be part of the beta of this exciting product in your quest to help a virtual brand compete with physical local businesses.

Summing up

There’s a fairly straightforward local marketing path for each non-brick-and-mortar model, but I predict that 2021 is going to be a year in which we’ll see further blurring of traditional, well-trodden lanes.

Clearly, more brick-and-mortar brands will adopt digital sales in the coming months to meet the demand for contactless fulfillment, becoming hybrids. Physical retailers will implement sophisticated e-commerce solutions on their own websites and tiptoe into Google Shopping with it’s “available nearby” filter.

Meanwhile, digital-only brands will continue to experiment with the Warby Parker approach of transitioning from full DTC sales to having physical stores, making them eligible for local pack rankings. I’d say 2021 looks less promising for such tests than the environment of previous years because of the obvious need to limit in-person shopping due to the pandemic.

And, also because of COVID-19, entrepreneurs who spent 2020 researching opportunities to support themselves by working from home may begin to enjoy their first hard-won successes in the new year. They will run the gamut of brick-and-mortar, SAB, virtual, and hybrid models, all from their living rooms.

The onus will be on Google to remain relevant by absorbing all this change and continually reevaluating whether their guidelines reflect current commercial reality or need new updates. Be on sharp lookout for new opportunities that may arise from guideline revisions and new Google features over the next few months.

For brands and their marketers, the task at hand is to identify the easy, medium, and hard local and organic wins based on the business model, and then supplement with paid inclusion where wins can’t be had in any other way.

Having trouble finding your wins? Contact Moz to learn how our SEO software can help. We’re wishing you good fortune in the year ahead!

The Correlation Between Authoritative Links and Ranking [SEO Study]

Posted by EricEnge

Over the past five years, our team at Perficient has conducted continuous studies to evaluate the lasting impact of links on rankings. These studies consistently show that links matter as a ranking factor, but they also show that Google is dialing up their emphasis on the quality/authority of those links. We can say this because of the strong correlation our most recent studies show between the Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) of linking pages and the rankings of pages receiving the links.

Each year, Moz has graciously provided us with access to their Link Explorer index, where we obtain the raw data to perform our analysis. In these studies, we perform Spearman Correlation analyses to show how the following variables correlate with ranking:

Number of links to the ranking page
DA of links to the ranking page
PA of links to the ranking page

Please note that Moz has never compensated us for including, or asked us to include, the DA and PA calculations — we have chosen to do that of our own volition. In fact, Moz staff only learned that we had done so in early October of 2020, even though we published the post with our findings on April 16, 2020 (to be honest, I was too busy to catch up with the Moz team and let them know). In short, there is no quid pro quo here.

Study methodology

Go ahead and jump down to the study results section if you just want to see how things turned out!

We have been conducting this study on a nearly annual basis since May of 2016. In 2016, we started with an initial query set of 6K queries, but have expanded to 32K queries over time. The queries were obtained by pulling keyword ranking reports for web sites in three different target market sectors, and then manually reviewed to remove any queries that were poorly formed or not relevant to that sector. The market sectors we looked at were technology, healthcare, and finance.

Here is the breakout of the size of the query sets across the five studies we have done so far:

May 2016: 6K queries
Aug 2016: 16K queries
May 2017: 16K queries
August 2018: 27K queries
December 2019: 32K queries

Each of the expanded query sets includes all of the queries from the prior studies, which allows us to track the results on a consistent basis all the way back to 2016.

In putting together this study, I also consulted with two experts in statistics: Paul Berger of Bentley University, and Per Enge, formerly of Stanford University. Because of the nature and structure of the data set, it was decided that the best approach was to calculate the quadratic mean of the Spearman Correlation for all the queries in the study.

I went with this approach because it uses the square of the correlation variables (where the correlation value is R, the quadratic mean uses R squared). This is important because the correlation variable R is useful to know, perhaps, but it does not allow you to make a specific statement about what it means in real world terms.

The R squared value, however, is more interesting. If you have an R squared value of 0.56, for example, we can say that 56% of the variability of the observed behavior Y (in our case, rankings) is caused by the test variable X (in our study, count of links, or DA/PA).

Here’s a visual on how this calculation process works:

Summary of the results

As part of the study, we pulled data on the growth of the Link Explorer index over time. Since we have data on the index size over three years for our 16K query set, we looked at this snapshot of the data to show how the Link Explorer index has expanded:

One of the core purposes of the study was finding the correlation between the number of links a page has and its ranking. Of course, the relevance and quality of the content are the most important factors in ranking — they have to be. That noted, here is the quadratic mean calculation result for how the quantity of links a page has correlates to its ranking:

This score is a bit down from past years (the August 2018 score was 0.293, but still indicates that the number of links to a page correlates in a meaningful way with the ranking of that page).

However, we also took a close look at the correlation of Moz DA and PA with the ranking of a page. Here are the results that we saw for that evaluation:

This shows that Moz DA and PA are both better predictors of ranking position than the total link count. The scores of 0.328 and 0.307 are both very strong correlation scores in an environment as complex as organic search.

This is an important finding, as it lines up with what many of us in the SEO community have believed for a long time: that the sites you get links from matters more than the sheer number of links. In addition, it’s likely that most of the pages ranking in our query set that had a large number of links likely had a significant number of higher authority links as well.

Please note that the Moz team has let me know they are working on an update to the algorithm that powers PA, which will be released in the near future, and they believe that this will improve these results.

Conclusion

This data confirms that obtaining links from more authoritative sites has more value than obtaining a large quantity of links. Google’s perspective of what makes better links is likely more nuanced than a simple metric like PageRank (the Google metric that DA and PA are most similar to). This may include evaluation of relevance to the topic, and the overall quality perception of the linking site.

As SEO professionals, increasing our own site quality and authority remains one of our core responsibilities in helping our sites, or our client’s sites, grow.

You can see the full original Links as a Ranking Factor study here.

Important Note: Google does not have access to Moz’s DA and PA metric data and Google does not use Moz DA or Moz PA as a ranking factor.

Preface

Avoiding false conversions

Useful tools

Chrome DevTools

Google Tag Manager preview

Adswerve dataLayer Inspector

Analytics Tracking Monitor plugin

Tag Assistant

Tag Mapper

Things to check

1. Are you only recording conversions on thank-you pages?

2. Are you linking to conversion pages in other ways besides form completions?

3. Are users landing directly on thank-you pages?

3.1 Do you have adverts or other activity pointing straight to conversion pages?

3.2 Are your conversion pages indexed in Google?

3.3 Is your tracking code broken, or are users doing things on-site which would confuse GA?

How to protect destination-based goals from false conversions

The ideal approach: event-based goals

An alternative to Google Analytics funnels

Some terminology to know

How to filter conversions with Tag Manager

1. Make sure Google Tag Manager is installed on your site

2. Tell Tag Manager every time a thank-you page is loaded

3. Tell Tag Manager every time a qualifying page is loaded

4. Whenever a user lands on a qualifying page, set a cookie

5. Get the cookie value

6. Determine whether you should filter the conversion

7. Send event to GA

8. Don’t switch off your old conversions straight away

Let me know what you think

Video Transcription

Selecting competitors

Keyword distribution

Keyword gaps and opportunities

Technical health

Backlink opportunities

Time management

Conclusion

Methodology

Who our readers are

What is your job title?

What percentage of your day-to-day work involves SEO?

On a scale of 1-5, how advanced would you say your SEO knowledge is?

Do you work in-house, or at an agency/consultancy?

What are some of the biggest challenges you face in your work today?

How our readers read

How often do you read posts on the Moz Blog?

On which types of devices do you prefer to read blog posts?

Which other site(s), if any, do you regularly visit for information or education on SEO?

What our readers think of the blog

What percentage of the posts on the Moz Blog would you say are relevant to you and your work?

Do you feel the Moz Blog posts are generally too basic, too advanced, or about right?

In general, what do you think about the length of Moz Blog posts?

How often do you comment on blog posts?

What, if anything, would you like to see different about the Moz Blog?

What our readers want to see

Which of the following topics would you like to learn more about?

Which of the following types of posts would you most like to see on the Moz Blog?

COVID-19

Has your consumption of SEO-related content changed due to COVID-19?

Would any of the following topics be helpful for you as a result of COVID-19 impacts?

What happens next?

Primary takeaways

How did December 2020 compare to other Core Updates?

Winners and more winners

Winningest content / pages

What trends are you seeing?

The State of Local SEO Industry Report 2020

How to Rank on Google

The Keyword Research Master Guide

The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet

Other content you may have missed

Evolving and finding opportunities

Learn from others

Learn from yourself and adapt

Always. Be. Testing.

What to test

Advertising

Content

Goals