Posted by AnnaleisMontgomery

With businesses making the move to serve their customers primarily online and the footfall of customers in physical stores dropping dramatically, the value of SEO has been rediscovered. Businesses are now paying closer attention to their online experience and how they can compete on the internet.

This post will offer a guide to businesses looking to enhance their organic reach and traffic, by providing some SEO solutions to issues they might be experiencing. This includes information suitable for businesses that haven’t engaged with SEO as a channel before, as well as those who have had more experience with it. The goal is to gain more traffic and increase conversions.

Scenario 1: You don’t know what keywords you should be ranking for

Targeting the right keywords is central to getting a return from SEO. Targeting the most valuable and relevant keywords to your product/service is crucial.

How to know what keywords to target:

• They should be relevant to your product/service offering
• They should have a search volume large enough to target an audience that is worthwhile. This can vary depending on the country, how specific your product/service is, and seasonality. Using your judgment is crucial here; your own knowledge about your specific industry and market will help you target the right keywords with the search demand relevant to your business.

Tools to conduct your keyword research:

1. Moz Keyword Explorer → a keyword research tool that offers access to millions of keywords that can help form your list. You can see keyword suggestions, current ranking websites, and all the metrics on the keyword itself.
   Cost: Create a free account to get you started.
2. Ahrefs ‘Keyword Explorer’ or ‘Keyword Generator’ → these tools are amazing for finding new keywords to target, variations, seeing their search volume, generating keyword ideas, and more. Cost: They offer a 7 day trial for $7.
3. Google Trends → is a platform that lets you look at the search trend for a select group of keywords. You can compare the keywords to each other, and look into the monthly search trends around the topic. Looking at these trends can also help you avoid targeting the wrong keywords. Sometimes, some keywords have a higher average monthly search volume when compared to another, however, the other keyword might suddenly receive a high search interest due to an emerging trend.
   Cost: It’s free!
4. Answer The Public → will let you view questions that are commonly searched for around your keyword. This can help with generating content ideas, as well as provide insight into the types of things people are searching for around your important keywords.
   Cost: It’s free!
5. Google Search Console → this tool helps you track the performance of your website in the organic search results, and is an excellent resource when it comes to SEO. It can be used to discover what keywords your website is currently ranking for, and what keywords are performing better/worse over a period of time. (If you haven’t already set this up for your site, please do so now!)
   Cost: It’s free!

After all this, you combine your keywords, de-dupe and filter them out accordingly, to keep relevant keywords that you want to target in a list.

What do I do once I have my list of keywords?

Optimize your website to include them! This can involve:

1. Updating your on-page metadata. 

• Page titles = should be unique to the page, clear and relevant, and under 60 characters (so it doesn’t get cut off in the search results). 
• Meta Descriptions = include important keywords, without “keyword stuffing” (which is when you cram a lot of keywords in together and it doesn’t read well). This should be up to 150-160 characters to avoid it being cut off. 
• H1s = these are the on-page headings, typically displayed at the top of the page, These should be relevant to the page, as they provide structure to the article and context to Google and the user.

2. Create content around the keywords. Tools like Answer The Public will provide you with some ideas of questions/topics asked around important keywords. Make a blog post out of those! Make sure you have a title for it that includes those keywords, and is easily understandable. Internal linking is also an important factor in pages ranking well. Link important pages (these are usually the pages that are most linked to on your site, such as those included in your main navigation), to those that you want to rank well. Passing link equity between these pages signals to Google that these pages are worth showing to the user.

For more information on keyword research and implementation, be sure to read through The Keyword Research Master Guide from Moz.

Scenario 2: Your rankings have dropped

You’ve noticed that your website has dropped from the search results for a few key terms, however, you’re unsure of the reason. To be honest, this is a bit of a black hole as there could be numerous reasons. If you’d like to read further into this issue, a few articles I recommend are Tom Capper’s article “Organic traffic down YoY? It’s not what you think…”, as well as “Using the Flowchart Method for Diagnosing Ranking Drops — Best of Whiteboard Friday”. However, to keep things simple, I’ll detail a few options that can be checked and are fundamental to rankings.

How to identify this issue:

• Spot check → the keywords that you know your website ranks well for suddenly aren’t ranking your site in the same position.
• “Average position” in Google Search Console → this metric shows the average position ranking of your website as a whole, as well as having a table that displays various keyword ranks.
• Rank trackers → A tool called STAT lets you enter in a list of keywords, which you then “run” to track over a few days. Once it’s finished tracking, you get access to up to date information on how keywords are ranking, for what pages and access to multiple reports surrounding the performance. This is a great tool to see what keywords are dropping in ranks, or increasing.

Ways to fix it:

1. Check robots.txt and sitemaps → to make sure Google is able to access them, and all pages that are included should be. (This is also included in a tech audit).
2. Technical SEO audit → will show you any technical issues that might be occurring on the site that have affected rankings. This can be done by running a crawl of your website (could use Screaming Frog or Deepcrawl, for example). Things that can arise are a group of 404 pages, noindex,nofollow directives, incorrect canonical tags, lack of internal linking, etc.
3. Errors and warnings → Google Search Console displays all the errors and warnings that are occurring on the site. These should be looked into, as they could affect the performance of pages.
4. Recent changes to your site → Changes such as redirects or rebranding can affect how your site performs in the search results. Depending on the scale of the change, organic performance can be expected to change, but if the pages are optimized and free of technical errors, no long term effect should occur.
5. Algorithm updates → As ranking algorithms determine how pages are ranked in the search engine result pages (SERPs), algorithm updates change the way your site adheres to their ranking guidelines and, as a result, how your pages rank. Keeping up to date with any algorithm announcements or glitches can help you keep track of your organic performance. Twitter is a good channel to get up-to-date industry news, and you can follow notable figures in the industry like Marie Haynes or Barry Shwartz (to name just a couple) for their commentary. In addition, tools like MozCast (free!) will show you the current level of volatility in the SERPs.
6. Make sure your key pages are being crawled and indexed → use the “Coverage” report in Google Search Console to check what pages are being indexed and what pages have warnings. You can also do a manual check on Google, by typing into the URL bar: site:yourwebsite.com/web-page-slug operator. No results will show up if your page isn’t indexed.

Scenario 3: Your user experience is poor

User experience has become more important than ever. Regardless of whether your website is ranking first for all important keywords (we’re talking in an ideal world), it won’t make a difference if users don’t know how to interact with your site once they’ve landed on it. They’ll drop off and go to your competitor. Ensuring you have a well developed user journey and usability on your website is critical to successful SEO.

How to identify this as an issue:

This is something that involves your judgement, as unfortunately there isn’t a tool that will tell you if your site is delivering a poor user experience. Generally, if you get frustrated when using your own site or there are some things that annoy you when you’re navigating other websites, that’s what we call a poor user experience. Some practices that can help highlight if this is an issue are:

• Run a survey to ask users about their experience on the site. For example, a common question to include would be, “Did you find what you were looking for?” This short but direct approach can facilitate a relevant and direct response from customers, which can be easily acted on. Some tools you can use for this include Google Forms, SurveyMonkey and WuFoo.

• Compare site speed with competitors. This can be done using a tool such as Crux, which can give you an indication of how fast/slow your site is in comparison.
• HotJar can show you how people navigate a page. This can highlight what areas they spend more time on, where they’re attracted to click, and what they’re missing.
• Google Tag Manager can record click tracking. This is helpful to see if people are acting on your calls to action, such as filling out a form or pressing a certain button.

Ways to fix it:

1. Optimize your on-page content. This involves updating any content on your website to ensure it’s relevant to your audience and up-to-date. Content should be easily read by someone who has no context to the product/services offered on the website. You can also:
   1. Optimise your content layout. For example, include a numbered list to show your content in a different form, which can help target featured snippets.
   2. Update any old blog posts with new, relevant information and optimize the meta data to include keywords.
   3. Make sure all metadata is relevant to the page and optimized.
2. Include CTAs. A clear call-to-action should be present on all pages. These could be included in the main navigation, so it appears on all pages, or placed near the top of each page. CTAs give direction and a point of action to the customer, ensuring that if they want to engage further, it’s easy to do so. For example, common CTAs include “Contact us”, “Sign up here”, or “Book Now”.
3. Is it easy to convert? When you land on the homepage, is the CTA clear? Are there any barriers that might stop a customer to complete that action (such as requiring a customer to login or register before a purchase)? Making the journey easy and clear from entering the site to converting is crucial, as obstacles can easily deter a potential customer.

Summary:

This guide discussed 3 common scenarios that digital marketers experience. Not knowing what keywords to target, or how to go about it can be difficult to navigate. By using the suggested tools and collecting relevant keywords to target your pages will help improve your rankings. The guide by Cyrus Shephard elaborates further on this. Similarly, being able to identify when your rankings have dropped is important to ensure you stay up to date with any issues that could be causing this fluctuation. If you’d like to read more about this, I recommend “SEO Rankings Drop: A Step-By-Step Guide to Recovery”. Lastly, serving a good user experience has become an important element in digital marketing. If you want to expand your knowledge on this, Rand Fishkin has more to share on this area. Hope this article was helpful and can provide some direction of areas that you can check when you’re faced with an issue and don’t know where to start!

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Posted by randfish

We all know how effective link building efforts can be, but it can be an intimidating, frustrating process — and sometimes even a chore. In this popular Whiteboard Friday originally published in 2017, Rand Fishkin builds out a framework you can still use today to streamline and simplify the link building process for you, your teammates, and yes, even your interns.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. As you can see, I’m missing my moustache, but never mind. We’ve got tons of important things to get through, and so we’ll leave the facial hair to the inevitable comments.

I want to talk today about how to prioritize your link building efforts and opportunities. I think this comes as a big challenge for many marketers and SEOs because link building can just seem so daunting. So it’s tough to know how to get started, and then it’s tough to know once you’ve gotten into the practice of link building, how do you build up a consistent, useful system to do it? That’s what I want to walk you through today.

Step 1: Tie your goals to the link’s potential value

So first off, step one. What I’m going to ask you to do is tie your SEO goals to the reasons that you’re building links. So you have some reason that you want links. It is almost certainly to accomplish one of these five things. There might be other things on the list too, but it’s almost always one of these areas.

• A) Rank higher for keyword X. You’re trying to get links that point to a particular page on your site, that contain a particular anchor text, so that you can rank better for that. Makes total sense. There we go.
• B) You want to grow the ranking authority of a particular domain, your website, or maybe a subdomain on your website, or a subfolder of that website. Google does sort of have some separate considerations for different folders and subdomains. So you might be trying to earn links to those different sections to help grow those. Pretty similar to (A), but not necessarily as much of a need to get the direct link to the exact URL.
• C) Sending real high-value traffic from the ranking page. So maybe it’s the case that this link you’re going after is no followed or it doesn’t pass ranking influence, for some reason — it’s JavaScript or it’s an advertising link or whatever it is — but it does pass real visitors who may buy from you, or amplify you, or be helpful to achieving your other business goals.
• D) Growing topical authority. So this is essentially saying, “Hey, around this subject area or keyword area, I know that my website needs some more authority. I’m not very influential in this space yet, at least not from Google’s perspective. If I can get some of these links, I can help to prove to Google and, potentially, to some of these visitors, as well, that I have some subject matter authority in this space.”
• E) I want to get some visibility to an amplification-likely or a high-value audience. So this would be things like a lot of social media sites, a lot of submission type sites, places like a Product Hunt or a Reddit, where you’re trying to get in front of an audience, that then might come to your site and be likely to amplify it if they love what they see.

Okay. So these are our goals.

Step 2: Estimate the likelihood that the link target will influence that goal

Second, I’m going to ask you to estimate the likelihood that the link target will pass value to the page or to the section of your site. This relies on a bunch of different judgments.

You can choose whether you want to wrap these all up in sort of a single number that you estimate, maybe like a 0 to 10, where 0 is not at all valuable, and 10 is super, super valuable. Or you could even take a bunch of these metrics and actually use them directly, so things like domain authority, or linking root domains to the URL, or page authority, the content relevance.

You could be asking:

• Is this a nofollowed or a followed link?
• Is it passing the anchor text that I’m looking for or anchor text that I control or influence at all?
• Is it going to send me direct traffic?

If the answers to these are all positive, that’s going to bump that up, and you might say, “Wow, this is high authority. It’s passing great anchor text. It’s sending me good traffic. It’s a followed link. The relevance is high. I’m going to give this a 10.”

Or that might not be the case. This might be low authority. Maybe it is followed, but the relevance is not quite there. You don’t control the anchor text, and so anchor text is just the name of your brand, or it just says “site” or something like that. It’s not going to send much traffic. Maybe that’s more like a three.

Then you’re going to ask a couple of questions about the page that they’re linking to or your website.

• Is that the right page on your site? If so, that’s going to bump up this number. If it’s not, it might bring it down a little bit.
• Does it have high relevance? If not, you may need to make some modifications or change the link path.
• Is there any link risk around this? So if this is a — let’s put it delicately — potentially valuable, but also potentially risky page, you might want to reduce the value in there.

I’ll leave it up to you to determine how much link risk you’re willing to take in your link building profile. Personally, I’m willing to accept none at all.

Step 3: Build a prioritization spreadsheet

Then step three, you build a prioritization spreadsheet that looks something like this. So you have which goal or goals are being accomplished by acquiring this link. You have the target and the page on your site. You’ve got your chance of earning that link. That’s going to be something you estimate, and over time you’ll get better and better at this estimation. Same with the value. We talked about using a number out of 10 over here. You can do that in this column, or you could just take a bunch of these metrics and shove them all into the spreadsheet if you prefer.

Then you have the tactic you’re going to pursue. So this is direct outreach, this one’s submit and hope that it does well, and who it’s assigned to. Maybe it’s only you because you’re the only link builder, or maybe you have a number of people in your organization, or PR people who are going to do outreach, or someone, a founder or an executive who has a connection to some of these folks, and they’re going to do the outreach, whatever the case.

Then you can start to prioritize. You can build that prioritization by doing one of a couple things. You could take some amalgamation of these numbers, so like a high chance of earning and a high estimated value. We’ll do some simple multiplication, and we’ll make that our prioritization. Or you might give different goals. Like you might say, “Hey, you know what? (A) is worth a lot more to me right now than (C). So, therefore, I’m going to rank the ones that are the (A) goal much higher up.” That is a fine way to go about this as well. Then you can sort your spreadsheet in this fashion and go down the list. Start at the top, work your way down, and start checking off links as you get them or don’t get them. That’s a pretty high percentage, I’m doing real well here. But you get the idea.

This turns link building from this sort of questionable, frustrating, what should I do next, am I following the right path, into a simple process that not only can you follow, but you can train other people to follow. This is really important, because link building is an essential part of SEO, still a very valuable part of SEO, but it’s also a slog. So, to the degree that you can leverage other help in your organization, hire an intern and help train them up, work with your PR teams and have them understand it, have multiple people in the organization all sharing this spreadsheet, all understanding what needs to be done next, that is a huge help.

I look forward to hearing about your link building prioritization, goals, what you’ve seen work well, what metrics you’ve used. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: Danny Sternfeld

In creating a Google My Business listing for your local business, making a data-based decision is one of the most important steps you’ll be taking. Just how influential are the categories you select?

Our recent State of the Local SEO Industry 2020 survey found that, out of all factors, GMB elements (which include categories) have the greatest impact on local pack rankings. Choose wisely, and these elements help ensure Google views you as a candidate for possible inclusion as a result for a set of search phrases. Choose wrongly and you can exclude yourself from this vital visibility.

Google categories can also play a role in determining which features will be available to you in your Google Business Profile/Google listing. For example, if you’re categorized as a “hotel”, you won’t be able to use Google Posts. If you’re categorized as an educational institution, you won’t be able to receive reviews. Meanwhile, if you’re categorizing your business in the auto dealership space, you’ll be allowed to have multiple listings for your departments and the car makes you vend.

Categories impact the attributes that will be associated with your business, the menus you can use, whether booking buttons are available to you, and whether you have primary or secondary hours of operation displayed.

In short, your choice of your primary and secondary categories contributes a lot to Google’s understanding and handling of your business. With so much riding on proper categorization, let’s empower you to research your options like a pro today!

When and where to choose Google categories

In creating a brand new Google My Business listing, one of the first thing Google asks you to do is to choose a category:

And, as Google says, you can change and add more categories later. Once you have access to your GMB dashboard, you’ll find your categories by clicking on the “Info” tab in the left menu and looking right below your business name, where the pencil icon will let you edit your categories:

You are allowed to select up to 10 categories. Your primary category is believed to have the greatest influence on your local rankings, and must be chosen with extra care:

You can edit your categories in the GMB dashboard any time you want to, with the understanding that doing so can substantially alter the rankings you’re experiencing for various search phrases.

How to choose Google categories

Here’s your step-by-step workflow for picking the Google categories that are best for your business, with the help of some great tools.

1) Determine your most important search phrases

First, create a list that includes:

• The type of business you operate (e.g. “supermarket” “medical center” “restaurant”) and its variants. For example, if you’re an attorney, list out the subtypes associated with your firm, such a “personal injury lawyer” or “tax attorney”. If you own a restaurant, include whether it’s an “Italian restaurant”, a “family restaurant” and other qualifiers. A supermarket might also be a “grocery store” or “natural foods store”.
• The full list of goods and services you offer. Your HVAC company offers heater repair, air conditioner repair, etc. Your landscaping company offers tree service, landscape design, yard work, etc. Your clothing store offers men’s clothing, shoes, jewelry, etc.

Next, take your list of keywords and enter them into your choice of free or paid keyword research tools to discover which terms have the highest potential search volume. For example, Moz’s Keyword Suggestions tool within Moz Keyword Explorer can help you determine the difference in search volume between two terms like “Mexican restaurant” vs. “taco shop”:

Note down the search volume for each term on your list.

Finally, refine your list down to a smaller set of terms that combine the highest search volume with being most relevant and important for your company. In most cases, this is the list you’ll move ahead with, although there are some cases in which you would choose to target lower volume search phrases because they are either a) less competitive, or b) a more exact description of what your business is.

2) Determine which categories your market competitors are using for your most important search phrases

Now, take your refined list of search phrases over to Google and begin searching for them in your local market. Your local market is made up of your customers’ locations in relationship to your business location. This could only be as large as your neighborhood, or it could include a whole city or several adjacent cities, depending on:

• Your business model
• The distance from which customers are willing to travel to get to your business
• The distance from which Google believes customers are willing to travel to get to your business

For example, a coffee shop might have quite a small local market if most of its customers arrive looking for a quick, convenient cup of coffee. Meanwhile, an amusement park might have a much larger local market because people are willing to go a greater distance to visit it. Google’s local results increasingly reflect their understanding of intent differently for different business models.

Here’s a screenshot of the market an Internet searcher in the North Beach district of San Francisco might see if they are looking for “pizza near me”:

Meanwhile, a searcher in California looking for a “sports arena” could be shown a market that encompasses more than half the state:

Now, make a list of all the competitors you discovered in your market while searching from the location of your business.

Next, be sure you’re using the Chrome browser and head over to Chrome webstore to download the awesome, free, new extension called GMBspy. Developed by George Nenni of Generations Digital, turning this extension on enables you to go to Google Maps, search for your market competitors and see their categories, like this:

You can look up competitors one by one, or just mouse around on the map to see the GMBspy extension data pop up. Google doesn’t automatically reveal all the categories a business is using and so this little tool saves so much time, and a lot of fiddling around with HTML to access that data. What a great development!

Note down all of the categories your market competitors are using. Pay special attention to the categories being used by the business ranking #1 for each of your refined search phrases.

3) Get category suggestions and leave no stone unturned

Your market might be full of highly active competitors who have wisely chosen the best categories, or it could be a less sophisticated scenario in which other companies are overlooking opportunities you might be able to discover.

Hop on over to PlePer’s GMB Category Helper and type in your business name and up to three comma separated search phrases. If you’ve not yet opened for business, you can just enter the street address of your proposed location instead of a business name. Then, go get a cup of tea or do a little exercise for five minutes and come back for this amazing data:

Based on your lat-long coordinates, PlePer shows you your current categories, the categories being used in your area, a list of category suggestions, and other useful information. Quite cool! The free version of this tool lets you do three such searches per day. Jot down any notable findings that were absent from using GMBspy.

And, finally, just to be sure you haven’t missed any potential opportunities, move over to PlePer’s full GMB category list:

It’s updated at least every 3 days, which is great because Google continuously adds and subtracts categories. Just select your language and country and hit the “fetch” button. This tool can be especially useful if you offer an unusual good or service and aren’t sure whether a category exists for it. Note down anything you feel might be relevant.

Finally, within the GMB dashboard, Google will also sometimes make suggestions about additional categories you might want to consider adding, like this:

In the above screenshot, you can see that our categorizing Moz as a software company is causing Google to suggest that we might also want to select “accounting software company”. In this case, the suggestion is irrelevant for Moz’s business model, but it’s a good idea to see if Google is making any valuable suggestions for your company.

You’ve now got all the data you need to make a selection, based on the categories that are applicable to your popular search phrases and that are being used (or overlooked) by your top market competitors. Well done!

A little extra GMB category savvy

Image credit: Thom Wong

Let’s boost your confidence about Google categories with a few more tips before you fill in your choices in the GMB dashboard. Answers to these FAQs could help you out with common predicaments:

1) How many GMB categories should I choose?

My best answer is: as many as are truly relevant to your business. Never add categories that don’t relate to your business. For example, if you’re marketing a pizza place, you obviously shouldn’t add hair salon as a category, or it can totally confuse Google, your customers, and even harm your rankings.

So long as each category is applicable, you should be fine. In the past, there has been much discussion about whether category dilution (choosing too many categories) could hurt your rankings.Local SEO Colan Neilsen’s recent study demonstrated the opposite — that adding more, relevant categories can positively impact your your visibility, rather than undermine it.

This is a good time to note that the Guidelines for representing your business on Google’s section on categories can be a bit confusing. It contains outdated information pertaining to a bygone era (pre-2013) in which businesses were allowed to custom create categories.

I don’t know why Google has never updated this section to remove the text about writing categories that describe what your business “is” rather than what your business “has”, since you’re automatically confined to choosing only Google’s own pre-approved categories, but, the odd state of this area of the guidelines has personally made me take the other recommendations in it with a grain of salt. For example, Google’s insistence that you should use as few categories as possible is somewhat dubious, though their recommendation that you only pick relevant categories makes perfect sense.

My advice is to experiment with any relevant category and see where it gets you in terms of visibility.

2) What should I do if Google doesn’t have a category I need?

Google has well over 3,000 categories for the US alone, and while this large index covers many business models, it’s not uncommon to find that something you offer isn’t represented. Sterling Sky founder, Joy Hawkins, recently highlighted a case in which a business owner went about requesting a new category from Google the right way, with abundant evidence of why a new option should be added. If a missing category is holding your business back, I recommend studying that GMB help forum thread and then creating one of your own, making the most convincing argument you can about why Google needs to include your category wish.

If, however, you can’t get Google to act on your request, your next best bet is to choose the category that most closely represents what your business is, and then use the business description field, images, and Google Posts to add more nuanced information about your goods and services.

3) How can I know if I’ve chosen the right categories?

This question most commonly arises in troubleshooting ranking failures. You think you’ve done all you can to rank for a particular search phrase in Google local packs/finders/maps, but you’re just not there. While there can be scores of factors contributing to that, it’s always smart to re-check that you haven’t excluded yourself by selecting the wrong category.

Go back to the map and fire up GMBspy again to see which categories the top ranking businesses are using. Do your categories match, or are you missing something?

Also, pay attention to your GMB Insights, Google Analytics and any other analysis software you’re using whenever you add or subtract a category from your GMB listing. If you see a sudden drop in any metric dating to changing your categories, you may have made a poor category alteration choice you will need to correct.

Finally, be aware that you’re not the only one controlling your categories. If you experience a drop in rankings and notice that your categories have been mysteriously altered, it could be stemming from a third-party edit or bad data out there on the local web. Local SEO Nikki Brown tells a scary story about a client whose rankings went from 1st to 31st due to an unexpected edit of their primary category, emphasizing the importance of making a category audit part of any rankings-related troubleshooting you engage in.

4) How should I use categories for a multi-entity business model?

Google’s guidelines allow some business models to have more than one listings for the same physical location of a business. These special scenarios include:

• Multi-department models, like a medical center with distinct departments for radiology, pediatrics, and emergency services
• Multi-practitioner models, like a real estate office with multiple agents, or a legal firm with multiple attorneys
• Multi-brand models, specific to the automotive industry, in which Google allows separate listings for dealerships that vend different makes of vehicles.

The guidelines recommend that each forward-facing department of a multi-department model should have distinct categories, and it’s considered a local SEO best practice to do the same for multi-practitioner scenarios, too. Diversifying your categories for multi-entity listings can sometimes lessen Google filtering some of your listings out of their results because you no longer have more than one entity competing for the same category terms.

A good way to think about category diversification for multi-entity models is that Google’s permission to have more than one listing is giving you the opportunity to increase the number of categories your overall brand can select. Instead of just having 10 categories, your total company could theoretically target 20, 30, 40, etc., substantially improving your potential visibility across a far wider array of search phrases.

5) When and why might I choose a less popular category?

There are scenarios in which you might encounter a set of local rankings you’re having extra trouble breaking into. For example, your physical location might put you just outside the map radius Google appears to be drawing for that search phrase, or your competitors may be discouragingly strong or dense on the ground.

In cases like this, you might want to experiment with going after a category that could be described as low hanging fruit —- something your keyword research and competitive audit showed you fewer people are searching for and fewer brands are employing. The foundational goal of managing Google My Business listings is to drive conversions/transactions for your company. If geography or competition are making it hard for you to win maximum revenue from a most popular category, you might find you can make up some of the difference by choosing a number of less popular categories that enable you to rank more easily or over a larger area of the map.

6) What about choosing categories beyond Google?

There’s a whole world of business listings beyond Google, and each directory or platform has its own system of categorization. Moz Local customers enjoy the tremendous convenience of selecting categories in the dashboard that automatically map to relevant categories across our partner network, but if you’re managing your listings manually, you will need to see what’s available on each site as you go.

To sum up

Your business will be best served by allocating time for the research and implementation phase of filling in the categories on your GMB listings. Don’t rush, be methodical, and you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you put in the work to make the best category choices. And check back periodically to see if new categories have become available that could win you new local SERP visibility and increased transactions.

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Posted by izzismith

Google Search Console is by far the most used device in the SEO’s toolkit. Not only does it provide us with the closest understanding we can have of Googlebot’s behavior and perception of our domain properties (in terms of indexability, site usability, and more), but it also allows us to assess the search KPIs that we work so rigorously to improve. GSC is free, secure, easy to implement, and it’s home to the purest form of your search performance KPI data. Sounds perfect, right?

However, the lack of capability for analyzing those KPIs on larger scales means we can often miss crucial points that indicate our pages’ true performance. Being limited to 1,000 rows of data per request and restricted filtering makes data refinement and growth discovery tedious (or close to impossible).

SEOs love Google Search Console — it has the perfect data — but sadly, it’s not the perfect tool for interpreting that data.

FYI: there’s an API

In order to start getting as much out of GSC as possible, one option is to use an API that increases the request amount to 25,000 lines per pull. The wonderful Aleyda Solis built an actionable Google Data Studio report
using an API that’s very easy to set up and configure to your needs.

You can also use something out of the box. In this post, the examples use Ryte Search Success because it makes it much easier, faster, and more efficient to work with that kind of data at scale.

We use Search Success for multiple projects on a daily basis, whether we’re assisting a client with a specific topic or we’re carrying out optimizations for our own domains. So, naturally we come across many patterns that give a higher indication of what’s taking place on the SERPs.

However you use GSC search performance data, you can turn it into a masterpiece that ensures you get the most out of your search performance metrics! To help you get started with that, I’ll demonstrate some advanced and, frankly, exciting patterns that I’ve come across often while analyzing search performance data.

So, without further ado, let’s get to it.

Core Updates got you down?

When we analyze core updates, it always looks the same. Below you can see one of the clearest examples of a core update. On May 6, 2020, there is a dramatic fall in impressions and clicks, but what is really important to focus on is the steep drop in the number of ranking keywords.

The amount of ranking keywords is an important KPI, because it helps you determine if a site is steadily increasing its reach and content relevancy. Additionally, you can relate it with search volumes and trends over time.

Within this project, we found hundreds of cases that look exactly like the examples below: lucrative terms were climbing up pages two and three (while Google perceives ranking relevance) before finally making it up to the top 10 to be tested.

There is a corresponding uplift in impressions, yet the click-through-rate for this important keyword remained at a measly 0.2%. Out of 125K searches, the page only received 273 clicks. That’s clearly not enough for this domain to stay in the top 10, so during the Core Update rollout, Google demoted these significant underperformers.

The next example is very similar, yet we see a higher altitude on page one due to the fact that there’s a lower amount of impressions. Google will likely aim to get statistically relevant results, so the fewer impressions a keyword has, the longer the tests need to occur. As you can see, 41 clicks out of 69K impressions shows that no searcher was clicking through to the site via this commercial keyword, and thus they fell back to pages two and three.

This is a typical Core Update pattern that we’ve witnessed hundreds of times. It shows us that Google is clearly looking for these patterns, too, in order to find what might be irrelevant for their users, and what can kiss goodbye to page one after an update.

Aim to pass those “Top 10 Tests” with flying colors

We can never know for sure when Google will roll out a Core Update, nor can we ever be fully confident of what results in a demotion. However, we should always try to rapidly detect these telltale signs and react before a Core Update has even been thought of.

Make sure you have a process in place that deals with discovering subpar CTRs, and leverage tactics like snippet copy testing and Rich Results or Featured Snippet generation, which will aim to exceed Google’s CTR expectations and secure your top 10 positions.

Of course, we also witness these classic “Top 10 Tests” outside of Google’s Core Updates!

This next example is from our own beloved en.ryte.com subdomain, which aims to drive leads to our services and is home to our vast online marketing wiki and magazine, so it naturally earns traffic for many informational-intent queries.

Here is the ranking performance for the keyword “bing” which is a typical navigational query with tons of impressions (that’s quite a few Google users that are searching for Bing!). We can view the top 10 tests clearly when the light blue spikes show a corresponding uplift in impressions.

Whereas that looks like a juicy amount of impressions to lure over to our site, in reality nobody is clicking through to us because searchers want to navigate to bing.com and not to our informational Wiki article. This is a clear case of split searcher intent, where Google may surface varying intent documents to try and cater to those outside of their assumptions. Of course, the CTR of 0% proves that this page has no value for anyone, and we were demoted.

Interestingly enough, this position loss cost us a heck load of impressions. This caused a huge drop in “visibility” and therefore made it look like we had dramatically been hit by the January Core Update. Upon closer inspection, we found that we had just lost this and similar navigational queries like “gmail” that made the overall KPI drop seem worse than it was. Due to the lack of impact this will have on our engaged clicks, these are dropped rankings that we certainly won’t lose sleep over.

Aiming to rank high for these high search volume terms with an intent you’re unable to cater to is only useful for optimizing for “visibility indexes”. Ask yourself if it’s worth your precious time to focus on these, because of course you’re not going to bring valuable clicks to your pages with them.

Don’t waste time chasing high volume queries that won’t benefit your business goals

In my SEO career, I’ve sometimes gone down the wrong path of spending time optimizing for juicy-looking keywords with oodles of search volume. More often than not, these rankings yielded little value in terms of traffic quality simply because I wasn’t assessing the searcher intent properly.

These days, before investing my time, I try to better interpret which of those terms will bring my business value. Will the keyword bring me any clicks? Will those clickers remain on my website to achieve something significant (i.e. is there a relevant goal in mind?), or am I chasing these rankings for the sake of a vanity metric? Always evaluate what impact this high ranking will bring your business, and adjust your strategies accordingly.

The next example is for the term “SERP”, which is highly informational and likely only carried out to learn what the acronym stands for. For such a query, we wouldn’t expect an overwhelming number of clicks, yet we attempted to utilize better snippet copy in order to turn answer intent into research intent, and therefore drive more visits.

However, it didn’t exactly work out. We got pre-qualified on page two, then tested on page one (you can see the corresponding uplift in impressions below), but we failed to meet the expectations with a poor CTR of 0.1%, and were dropped back down.

Again, we weren’t sobbing into our fine Bavarian beers about the loss. There are plenty more worthwhile, traffic-driving topics out there that deserve our attention.

Always be on the lookout for those CTR underperformers

Something that we were glad to act on was the “meta keywords” wiki article. Before we have a moment of silence for the fact that “meta keywords” is still heavily searched for, notice how we dramatically jumped up from page four to page one at the very left side of the chart. We were unaware of this keyword’s movement, and therefore its plain snippet was seldomly clicked and we fell back down.

After some months, the page one ranking resurfaced, and this time we took action after coming across it in our CTR Underperformer Report. The snippet was addressed to target that of the searcher’s intent, and the page was enhanced in parallel to give a better direct answer to the main focus questions.

Not only did this have a positive impact on our CTR, but we even gained the Featured Snippet. It’s super important to identify these top 10 tests in time, so that you can still act and do something to remain prominent in the top 10.

We identified this and many other undernourished queries using the CTR Underperformer Report. It maps out all the CTRs from queries, and reports on where we would have expected a higher number of clicks for that keyword’s intent, impressions, and position (much like Google’s models likely aim to do, too). We use this report extensively to identify cases where we deserve more traffic, and in order to ensure we stay in the top 10 or get pushed up even higher.

Quantify the importance of Featured Snippets

Speaking of Featured Snippets, the diagram below demonstrates what it can look like when you’re lucky enough to be in the placement vs. when you don’t have it. The keyword “reset iphone” from a client’s tech blog had a CTR of 20% with the Featured Snippet, while without the Featured Snippet it was at a sad 3%. It can be game changing to win a relevant Featured Snippet due to the major impact it can have on your incoming traffic.

Featured Snippets can sometimes have a bad reputation, due to the risk that they could drive a lower CTR than a standard result, especially when triggered for queries with higher informational intent. Try to remember that Featured Snippets can display your brand more prominently, and can be a great sign of trust to the average searcher. Even if users were satisfied on the SERP, the Featured Snippet can therefore provide worthwhile secondary benefits such as better brand awareness and potentially higher conversions via that trust factor.

Want to find some quick Featured Snippet opportunities for which you need only repurpose existing content? Filter your GSC queries using question and comparison modifiers to find those Featured-Snippet-worthy keywords you can go out and steal quickly.

You’re top 10 material — now what?

Another one of our keywords, “Web Architecture”, is a great example of why it’s so crucial to keep discovering new topics as well as underperforming content. We found this specific term was struggling a while ago during ongoing topic research and set out to apply enhancements to push its ranking up to the top 10. You can see the telltale cases of Google figuring out the purpose, quality, and relevance of this freshly renewed document while it climbs up to page one.

We fared well in each of our tests. For example, at positions 10-8, we managed to get a 5.7% CTR. which is good for such a spot.

After passing that test, we got moved up higher to positions 4-7, where we struck a successful 13% CTR. A couple of weeks later we reached an average position of 3.2 with a tasty CTR of 18.7%, and after some time we even bagged the Featured Snippet.

This took just three months from identifying the opportunity to climbing the ranks and getting the Featured Snippet.

Of course, it’s not just about CTR, it’s about the long click: Google’s main metric that’s indicative of a site providing the best possible result for their search users. How many long clicks are there in comparison to medium clicks, to short clicks, and how often are you the last click to demonstrate that search intent is successfully fulfilled? We checked in Google Analytics and out of 30K impressions, people spend an average of five minutes on this page, so it’s a great example of a positive long click.

Optimize answers, not just pages

It’s not about pages, it’s about individual pieces of information and their corresponding answers that set out to satisfy queries.

In the next diagram, you can actually see Google adjusting the keywords that specific pages are ranking for. This URL ranks for a whopping 1,548 keywords, but pulling a couple of the significant ones for a detailed individual analysis helps us track Google’s decision making a lot better.

When comparing these two keywords, you can see that Google promoted the stronger performer on page one, and then pushed the weaker one down. The strong difference in CTR was caused by the fact that the snippet was only really geared towards a portion of its ranking keywords, which led to Google adjusting the rankings. It’s not always about a snippet being bad, but about other snippets being better, and whether the query might deserve a better piece of information in place of the snippet.

Remember, website quality and technical SEO are still critical

One thing we always like to stress is that you shouldn’t always judge your data too quickly, because there could be underlying technical errors that are getting you down (such as botched migrations, mixed ranking signals, blocked assets, and so on).

The case below illustrates perfectly why it’s so much better to analyze this data with a tool like Ryte, because with GSC you will see only a small portion of what’s taking place, and with a very top-level view. You want to be able to compare individual pages that are ranking for your keyword to reveal what’s actually at the root of the problem.

You’re probably quite shocked by this dramatic drop, because before the dip this was a high-performing keyword with a great CTR and a long reign in position one.

This keyword was in position one with a CTR of 90%, but then the domain added a noindex directive to the page (facepalm). So, Google replaced that number one ranking URL with their subdomain, which was already ranking number two. However, the subdomain homepage wasn’t the ideal location for the query, as searchers couldn’t find the correct information right away.

But it got even worse, because then they decided to 301 redirect that subdomain homepage to the top level domain homepage, so now Google was forced to initially rank a generic page that clearly didn’t have the correct information to satisfy that specific query. As you can see, they then fell completely from that top position, as it was irrelevant, and Google couldn’t retrieve the correct page for the job.

Something similar happened in this next example. The result in position one for a very juicy term with a fantastic CTR suddenly returned a 404, so Google started to rank a different page from that same domain instead, which was associated with a slightly similar but inexact topic. This again wasn’t the correct fit for the query, so the overall performance declined.

This is why it’s so important to look not just at the overall data, but to dig deeper — especially if there’s multiple pages ranking for a keyword — so that you can see exactly what’s happening.

Got spam?

The final point is not exactly a pattern to consider, but more a wise lesson to wrap up everything I’ve explored in this post.

At scale, Google is testing pages in the top 10 results in order to find the best placement based on that performance. With this in mind, why can’t we ask people to go to the SERPs, click on our results, and reap the tasty benefits of that improved position? Or better yet, why don’t we automate this continually for all of our top-10-tested queries?

Of course, this approach is heavily spammy, against guidelines, and something against which Google can easily safeguard. You don’t have to test this either, because Marcus (being the inquisitive SEO he is!) already did.

One of his own domains on job advertisements ranks for the focus keyword of “job adverts”, and as you can imagine, this is a highly competitive term that requires a lot of effort to score. It was ranking at position 6.6 and had a decent CTR, but he wanted to optimize it even further and climb those SERPs to position one.

He artificially cranked up his CTR using clever methods that ended up earning a “very credible” 36% CTR in position nine. Soon in position 10, he had a CTR of 56.6%, at which point Google started to catch wind of the spammy manipulation and punted him down the SERPs. Lesson learned.

Of course, this was an experiment to understand at which point Google would detect spammy behavior. I wouldn’t encourage carrying out such tactics for personal gain, because it’s in the best interests of your website’s health and status to focus on the quality of your clicks. Even if this test was working well and rankings improved, over time your visitors may not resonate with your content, and Google might recall that that lower position was initially in place for a reason. It’s an ongoing cycle.

I encourage you to reach your results organically. Leverage the power of snippet optimization in parallel with ongoing domain and content improvements to not only increase the quantity and quality of your clicks, but the very experiences on your website that make an impact to your long-term SEO and business growth.

Conclusion

To summarize, don’t forget that GSC search performance data gives you the best insight into your website’s true performance. Rank trackers are ideal for competitor research and SERP snapshots, but the position data is only one absolute ranking from one set variable like location and device. Use your own GSC data for intrinsic pattern analyses, diagnostics, and growth discovery.

But with great data, comes great responsibilities. Make sure you’re finding and understanding the patterns you need to be aware of, such as struggling top 10 tests, underperforming snippets, technical faults, and anything else that deprives you of the success you work so hard to achieve.

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Posted by randfish

Have you ever tried to create 10x content? It’s not easy, is it? Knowing how and where to start can often be the biggest obstacle you’ll face. In this oldie-but-goodie episode of Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin talks about how you can develop your own 10x content to help your brand stand out.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about how to create 10x content.

Now, for those of you who might need a refresher or who haven’t seen previous Whiteboard Fridays where we’ve talked about 10x content, this is the idea that, because of content saturation, content overload, the idea that there’s just so much in our streams and standing out is so hard, we can’t just say, “Hey, I want to be as good as the top 10 people in the search results for this particular keyword term or phrase.” We have to say, “How can I create something 10 times better than what any of these folks are currently doing?” That’s how we stand out.

What is 10x content?

10x content is content that is 10 times better than the highest ranking result for a given keyword(s). Here are 119 Examples of 10x Content.

Criteria for 10x content:

• It has to have great UI and UX on any device.
• That content is generally a combination of high quality, trustworthy, it’s useful, interesting, and remarkable. It doesn’t have to be all of those but some combination of them.
• It’s got to be considerably different in scope and in detail from other works that are serving the same visitor or user intent.
• It’s got to create an emotional response. I want to feel awe. I want to feel surprise. I want to feel joy, anticipation, or admiration for that piece of content in order for it to be considered 10x.
• It has to solve a problem or answer a question by providing comprehensive, accurate, exceptional information or resources.
• It’s got to deliver content in a unique, remarkable, typically unexpectedly pleasurable style or medium.

If you hit all of these things, you probably have yourself a piece of 10x content. It’s just very hard to do. That’s what we’re talking about today. What’s a process by which we can get to checking off all these boxes?

Step 1 – Gain deep insight.

So let’s start here. First off, when you have an issue, let’s say you’ve got a piece of content that you know you want to create, a topic you know you’re going to address that topic. We can talk about how to get to that topic in a future Whiteboard Friday, and we’ve had some in the past certainly around keyword research and choosing topics and that sort of thing. But if I know the topic, I need to first gain a deep, deep insight into the core of why people are interested in this subject.

So for example, let’s do something simple, something we’re all familiar with.

“I wonder what the most highly-rated new movies are out there.” Essentially this is, “Well, okay, how do we get into this person’s brain and try and answer the core of their question?” They’re essentially asking, “Okay, how do I figure out . . . help me decide what to watch.”

That could have a bunch of angles to it. It could be about user ratings, or it could be maybe about awards. Maybe it’s about popularity. What are the most popular movies out there? It could be meta ratings. Maybe this person wants to see an aggregated list of all the data out there. It could be editorial or critic ratings. There’s a bunch of angles there.

Step 2 – We have to get unique.

We know that uniqueness, being exceptional, not the same as everyone else but different from everyone else out there, is really important.

So as we brainstorm different ways that we might address the core of this user’s problem, we might say, “All right, movie ratings, could we do a round-up?”

Well, that already exists at places like Metacritic. They sort of aggregate everything and then put it all together and tell us what critics versus audiences think across many, many different websites. So that’s already been done.

Awards versus popularity, again, it’s already been done in a number of places that do comparisons of here’s the ones that had the highest box office versus here’s the ones that won certain types of awards. Well, okay, so that’s not particularly unique.

What about critics versus audiences? Again, this is done basically on every different website. Everyone shows me user ratings versus critic ratings.

What about by availability? Well, there’s actually a bunch of sites that do this now where they show you this is on Netflix, this is on Hulu, this is on Amazon, this you can watch on Comcast or on demand, this you can see on YouTube. All right, so that’s not unique either.

What about which ratings can I trust? Hang on a tick. That might not exist yet. That’s a great, unique insight into this problem, because one of the challenges that I have when I want to say, “What should I decide to watch,” is who should I trust and who should I believe. Can I go to Fandango or Amazon or Metacritic or Netflix? Whose ratings are actually trustworthy?

Well, now we’ve got something unique, and now we’ve got that core insight, that unique angle on it.

Step 3 – Uncover powerful methods to provide an answer.

Now we want to uncover a powerful, hard-to-replicate, high-quality method to provide an answer to that question.

In this case, that could be, “Well, you know what? We can do a statistical analysis.” We get a sample set big enough, enough films, maybe 150 movies or so from the last year. We take a look at the ratings that each service provides, and we see if we can find patterns, patterns like: Who’s high and low? Do some have different genre preferences? Which one is trustworthy? Does one correlate with awards and critics? Which ones are outliers? All of these are actually trying to get to the “which one can I trust” question.

I think we can answer that if we do this statistical analysis. It’s a pain in the butt.

We have to go to all these sites. We have to collect all the data. We have to put it into a statistical model. We then have to run our model. We have to make sure that we have a big enough sample set. We’ve got to see what our correlations are. We have to check for outliers and distributions and all this kind of stuff. But once we do that and once we show our methodology, now all we have to do is…

Step 4 – Find a unique, powerful, exceptional way to present this content.

In fact, FiveThirtyEight.com did exactly this.

They took this statistical analysis. They looked at all of these different sites, Fandango and IMDB users versus critics versus Metacritic versus Rotten Tomatoes and a number of other sites. Then they had this one graph that shows essentially the star rating averages across I think it was 146 different films, which was the sample set that they determined was accurate enough.

Now they’ve created this piece of 10x content, and they’ve answered this unique take on the question, “Which rating service can I trust?” The answer is, “Don’t trust Fandango,” basically. But you can see more in there. Metacritic is pretty good. A couple of the other ones are decent.

Step 5 – Expect that you’re going to do this 5 to 10 times before you have one hit.

The only way to get good at this, the only way to get good is experimentation and practice. You do this over and over again, and you start to develop a sixth sense for how you can uncover that unique element, how you can present it in a unique fashion, and how you can make it sing on the Web.

All right, everyone, I look forward to hearing your thoughts on 10x content. If you have any examples you’d like to share with us, please feel free to do so in the comments. No problem linking out. That’s just fine. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by amandamilligan

As you might imagine, it’s not easy to get your brand name mentioned in top media outlets.

But if you put in the work to engage in content marketing + digital PR, the benefits are massive:

• High-quality backlinks to your site
• A significant boost in brand awareness
• An increase in your brand’s authority
• Improved relationships with writers who loved your content

I’ll explain how you can earn this type of coverage and its corresponding benefits for your brand.

Step 1: Create newsworthy content

You probably have an instinctual sense of what qualifies as news, but some of the key newsworthy elements are timeliness, proximity, and significance.

Timeliness is tough. Hard news is usually covered by media outlets automatically anyway. However, there’s a way to create news — and it’s through data journalism.

By doing your own research, conducting your own studies, running your own surveys, and performing your own analyses, you’re effectively creating news by offering brand new stories.

For example, for our client Porch, we used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American FactFinder, Yelp, and Zillow to determine which cities are the best for young families.

This project is inherently location-based, which adds the proximity element as well. But even if your content isn’t location-based, explore whether you can take your data and localize it so that you cover multiple geographic areas. (Then, you can pitch local news in addition to national news!)

Significance is also an excellent element to keep in mind, especially during the ideation stage. It basically means: How many people are impacted by this news, and to what degree?

This is especially important if you’re aiming for national news publications, as they tend to have a wide audience. In this case, there are plenty of young families across the country, and CNBC saw that it could connect with this demographic.

When you combine all of these newsworthy elements, you can increase your chances of getting respectable news publications interested.

Step 2: Design and package the content for clarity

You need to present your data in a clear and compelling way. Easier said than done, though, right?

Here are common design pitfalls to watch out for:

• Over-designing. Instead, experiment with simplistic styles that match your branding and take more creative liberties with headers and where the data naturally lends itself to imagery.
• Over-branding. If you have your logo on all of the images, it might be a bit too much branding for some publishers. However, if you have a really authoritative brand, it can add authority to the content, too. Test both versions to see what works best for you.
• Over-labeling. Include all of the text and labels you need to make things clear, but don’t have too much repetition. The more there is to read, the more time it’ll take to understand what’s happening on the graph.

Finally, don’t be afraid to add the most interesting insights or context as callouts to the images. That way people can identify the most pertinent information immediately while still having more to explore if they want the full story.

Take, for example, one of the graphics we created for BestVPN for a project that got coverage on The Motley Fool, USA Today, Nasdaq and more. We don’t assume people will read text in an article to get relevant information, so we put it right on the image.

Here’s another example of a project image we created for Influence.co.

We included the callout at the bottom of the image and featured it in our pitch emails (more on that later) because we knew it was a compelling data point. Lo and behold, it became the headline for the Bustle coverage we secured.

Note: It’s entirely possible a news publication won’t run your images. That’s totally fine! Creating the images is still worth it, because they help everyone grasp your project more quickly (including writers), and when well done, they convey a sense of authority.

When you have all of your data visualized, we recommended creating a write-up that goes along with it. One objective of the article is to explain why you executed the project in the first place. What were you trying to discover? How is this information useful to your audience?

The other objective is to provide more color to the data. What are the implications of your findings? What could it mean to readers, and how can they apply the new knowledge to their lives, if applicable?

Include quotes from experts when appropriate, as this will be useful to publication writers as well.

Step 3: Write personalized pitches

I could create an entirely separate article about how to properly pitch top-tier publishers. But for our purposes, I do want to address two of the most important elements:

Treat writers like people

“You did something PR people never do — but should. Looked at my Twitter feed and made it personal. Nicely done!” — CNBC writer

Building real connections with people takes time and effort. If you’re going to pitch a writer, you need to do the following:

• Read their past work and fully understand their beat
• Understand how your work matches their beat
• Check out their social profiles to learn more about them as people

Some still swear by the templated approach. While it might work sometimes, we’ve found that because writers’ inboxes continue to be inundated with pitches, reaching out to them in a more personalized manner can not only increase our chances of getting emails opened, but also getting a genuinely appreciative response.

So, start your email with a personal connection. Reach out about something you have in common or something about them you admire. It will go a long way!

Include a list of the most relevant insights

“Wow these findings are super interesting and surprising. I will for sure include if I go ahead with this piece.” — The Wall Street Journal writer

Never assume a writer is going to click through to your project and read the entire thing before deciding if they want to cover it. In the pitch email, you need to spell out exactly what you think is the most interesting part about the project for their readers.

The key word being their readers. Sure, overall you probably have a few main takeaways in mind that are compelling, but there’s often nuance in which specific takeaways will be the most relevant to particular publishers.

We’ve seen this so many times, and it’s reflected in the resulting headlines. For example, for a project we created called Generational Knowledge Gaps, we surveyed nearly 1,000 people about their proficiency in hands-on tasks. Look at the news headlines on REALTOR Magazine and ZDNet, respectively:

While REALTOR Magazine went with a headline that captures the general spirit of the project, ZDNet’s is more honed in on what matters for their readers: the tech side of things. If we’d pitched to them the same way we’d pitched to REALTOR, they might not have covered the project at all.

So, after a personalization, include bullet points that say what the key data points are for their particular audience, wrap up the email with a question of whether they’re interested, and send it off.

Conclusion

It’s not an easy process to get the attention of top writers. You have to take time to develop high-quality content — it takes us at least a month — and then strategically promote it, which can also take at least another month to get as much coverage as you can. However, this investment can have major payoff, as you’ll be earning unparalleled brand awareness and high-value backlinks.

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Posted by rjonesx.

Hey folks,

I’m Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist with Moz, and I’m proud to announce that this month we’ll be releasing a terrific update to our metric, Page Authority (PA).

Although Page Authority hasn’t attracted the same attention as its sibling metric Domain Authority, PA has always correlated with SERPs much better than DA, serving as a strong predictor of ranking. While PA has always fluctuated with changes in the link graph, we’re introducing a whole new method of deriving the score.

Learn More About Page Authority 2.0

What’s changing

Long gone are the days of just counting backlinks a couple of ways and hoping they correlate well with SERPs. As Moz tends to do, we’re pioneering a new manner of calculating Page Authority to produce superior results. Here are some of the ways we’re changing things up:

The training set

In the past, we used SERPs alone to train the Page Authority model. While this method was simple and direct, it left much to be desired. Our first step in addressing the new Page Authority is redefining the training set altogether.

Instead of modeling Page Authority based on one page’s ability to outrank another page, we now train based on the cumulative value of a page based on a number of metrics including search traffic and CPC. While this is a bit of an oversimplification of what’s going on, this methodology allows us to better compare pages that don’t appear in the SERPs together.

For example, imagine Page A is on one topic and Page B is on another topic. Historically, our model wouldn’t get to compare these two pages because they never appear on the same SERP. This new methodology provides an abstract value to each page, such that they can be compared with any other page by the machine-learned model.

The re-training set

One of the biggest problems in building metrics is not what the models see, but what the models don’t see.

Think about this for a minute: what types of URLs don’t show up in the SERPs that the model will use to produce Page Authority? Well, for starters, there won’t be many images or other binary files. There also won’t be penalized pages. In order to address this problem, we now use a common solution of running the model, identifying outliers (high PA URLs which do not in fact have any search value), and then feeding those URLs back into the training set. We can then re-run the model such that it learns from its own mistakes. This can be repeated as many times as is necessary to reduce the number of outliers.

Ripping off the Band-Aid

Moz is always cognizant of the impact the changes to our metrics might have on our customers. There is a trade-off between continuity and accuracy. With Page Authority, we’re focusing on accuracy. This may cause larger-than-normal shifts in your Page Authority, so it’s more important than ever to think about Page Authority with respect to your competitors, not as a standalone number.

What actions should we take?

Communicate with stakeholders, team members, and clients about the update

Just like our upgrade to Domain Authority, some users will likely be surprised by changes in their PA. Make sure they understand that the new PA will be more accurate (and more useful!) and that the most important measurement is relative to their competitors. We won’t release a Page Authority which isn’t better than the previous version, so even if the results are disappointing, understand that you now have better insight than ever before into the performance of your pages in the SERPs.

Use PA as a relative metric, like DA

Page Authority is intrinsically comparative. A PA of 70 means nothing unless you know the PA of your competitors. It could be high enough to allow you to rank for every keyword you like, or it could be terribly low because your competitors are Wikipedia and Quora. The first thing you should do when analyzing the Page Authority of any URL is set it in the proper context of its competitor’s URLs.

Expect PA to keep pace with Google

Just as we announced with Domain Authority, we’re not going to launch the new PA and just let it go. Our intent is to continue to improve upon the model as we discover new and better features and models. This volatility will mostly affect pages with unnatural link profiles, but we would rather stay up-to-date with Google’s algorithms even if it means a bit of a bumpy ride.

When is it launching?

We’ll be rolling out the new Page Authority on September 30, 2020. Between now and then, we encourage you to explore our resources to help you prepare and facilitate conversations with clients and team members. Following the launch of the new PA, I’ll also be hosting a webinar on October 15 to discuss how to leverage the metric. We’re so excited about the new and improved PA and hope you’re looking forward to this update too.

If you have any questions, please comment below, reach out to me on Twitter @rjonesx, or email me at russ@moz.com.

To get prepared and learn more about the upcoming change to Page Authority, be sure to dig into our helpful resources:

Visit the PA Resource Center

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Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

If your websites are like most, they include a fair amount of extra “stuff” in the title tags: things like your brand name or repeating boilerplate text that appears across multiple pages.

Should you include these elements in your titles automatically?

To be fair, most sites do.

Alternatively, could it help your SEO to actually include less information in your titles? (Or at least in specific circumstances?)

We know from a handful of studies that titles of a certain length tend to perform better. A now-famous study from the engineers at Etsy showed how shorter titles performed better than longer ones. SEOs speculate that this could be because shorter titles can have more focused relevancy (by focusing on core keywords), might earn higher click-through rates, or some other reason we can’t imagine.

When choosing which part of a title to shorten, brand names and boilerplate text are obvious choices. But how do you determine if this is something you should consider for your own SEO?

Here’s an example of a brand’s site name at the end of every title:

We’ve all seen sites like this. Heck, most of us do this on our own sites. The question is, does having our brand/site name at the end of every title actually help, or hurt?

But first, we also have to consider other types of boilerplate.

What is boilerplate? Boilerplate simply means standardized, non-unique pieces of text that are used over and over again. This often includes things like categories, product categories, author tags, and taglines.

In this example below, the boilerplate text on every title includes “Tomatoes – Vegetable Seeds – Shop.”

Sometimes boilerplate material can become quite long. The comic book review site Major Spoilers (awesome name!) often includes the same 65-character boilerplate on many pages:

“Major Spoilers – Comic Book Reviews, News, Previews, and Podcasts”

Of course, at this length, it’s so long that Google truncates every single title:

The problems that boilerplate can cause your SEO are threefold:

1. Relevancy: Unnecessary words can make your title less relevant, both to search engines and users. For search engines, this could mean lower rankings. For users, this could result in fewer clicks.
2. Uniqueness: Titles that share the same repeating text, and only vary from one another by a word or two, aren’t very unique. While this isn’t necessarily a problem, it goes against most SEO best practices, where uniqueness is key.
3. Length: Boilerplate means you have less room to display other words in your title, and Google will often cut these off if they go beyond a certain length.

Experiment #1: Remove category from title

We decided to run a couple of boilerplate experiments here at Moz, to see if we could increase our rankings and traffic by removing some of the repeating parts of our titles.

We started with our Whiteboard Friday blog posts. Every time Moz publishes a new Whiteboard Friday, we traditionally include “Whiteboard Friday” in the title.

What would happen if we removed this from the titles?

Using an A/B split test methodology — where we rolled the test out on 50% of the titles and used the other 50% as a control — we saw an amazing 20% uplift from this experiment.

This chart represents the cumulative impact of the test on organic traffic. The central blue line is the best estimate of how the variant pages, with the change applied, performed compared to how we would have expected without any changes applied. The blue shaded region represents our 95% confidence interval: there is a 95% probability that the actual outcome is somewhere in this region. If this region is wholly above or below the horizontal axis, that represents a statistically significant test.

Honestly, the results surprised us. Whiteboard Friday is a popular brand (so we thought) but removing this boilerplate from our titles produced a significant uplift in traffic to those pages.

At this point, we got cocky…

Experiment #2: Remove brand from title

If removing the category name from Whiteboard Friday posts produced such a significant uplift, what if we removed our brand name from all titles?

For this A/B experiment, we did exactly that—removing the word “Moz” from 50% of our titles and measuring the results.

Crazy, right? If it worked by removing “Whiteboard Friday” would we see the same uplift by removing “Moz?”

Sadly, Google had other plans:

While this A/B test never reached full statistical significance, we actually saw a 4% decline in traffic by removing our brand from our title tags.

Boo!

So why did this test not produce the same gains? To be honest, I’ve removed the brand name from other site’s titles and seen as much as a 20% uplift.

It turns out that whether or not removing brand/boilerplate will be beneficial to your SEO depends on a few key factors, which you can gauge in advance.

How to know if removing boilerplate may succeed

Over 10 years of experience and literally millions of title tags, I’ve found that there are basically four factors that influence whether or not removing boilerplate from your titles might be beneficial:

1. Brand Strength: Popular brand names in titles almost always perform better than unknown brands, even when people aren’t searching for your brand specifically. Amazon’s brand recognition, for example, likely gives a significant boost to including “Amazon” in every title, even when people aren’t specifically searching Amazon. Less recognizable brands, however, don’t always get the same boost, and can actually lead to fewer visits based on relevancy, length, and clickability (described next.)
2. Relevancy: Are your boilerplate/brand keywords relevant to what your users search for? For example, if you’re site is about television repair, then boilerplate titles that say “Brad’s TV Repair” are going to be much more relevant than boilerplate that simply say “Brads.” (We’ll explore a way to determine your boilerplate’s brand strength and relevancy in the next section.)
3. Length: In general, long boilerplate has the potential to do more harm than short boilerplate/brand words. Long boilerplate can dilute the relevance of your titles. So if you include “Buy Brad’s TVs, Television Repair, High Definition Servicing, Audio and Visual Equipment for Sale in Houston Texas and Surrounding Areas” – you may want to rethink your boilerplate.
4. Clickability: Sometimes, boilerplate can make your titles more clickable, even if they aren’t terribly relevant. Words like “Sale”, “Solved”, “Free”, “2020”, “New”, and many others can lead to an increase in click-through rates (CTR.) Sometimes you can’t tell until you test, but in many cases even adding clickable elements to your boilerplate can lead to significant gains.

Simple technique for determining your brand strength and boilerplate relevancy

This simple technique will also show why removing “Whiteboard Friday” led to an increase in traffic while removing “Moz” from titles did not.

Here’s what you want to do: for each piece of boilerplate, determine the number of URLs on your site that rank/receive traffic for those keywords.

For this, we’ll use Google Search Console.

Simply enter your boilerplate/brand as a query filter (you may need to break it into chunks for longer boilerplate) and see how many URLs receive traffic for queries that include that keyword.

When we filter for keywords that contain our “moz” brand name, we find thousands of ranking URLs.

People are searching for things like:

• Moz DA Checker
• Moz Pro
• Moz SEO
• Moz Blog
• Etc., etc.

As our brand name is part of so many queries and leads to visits across thousands of pages, this tells us that “Moz” is a very strong brand, and we’d likely be smart to include it as part of our title tags.

“Moz” is also very short at only 3 characters, which doesn’t hurt either.

So what happens when we try this same technique with “Whiteboard Friday” — the boilerplate that led to a 20% uplift when we removed it? We see a very different result:

In this case, almost all the traffic for “Whiteboard Friday” search terms goes to only one or two pages.

For most Whiteboard Friday posts, the term is simply irrelevant. It’s not what people are searching for, and the brand isn’t strong enough to produce additional uplift.

Also, at 17 characters long, this boilerplate added significant length to each of our titles, in addition to possibly diluting the relevancy for what the posts were ranking for.

Final thoughts + bonus free title tag webinar

These tips can’t tell you definitively whether you should or shouldn’t include boilerplate or brand in your title tags, but they should give you a pretty good idea of when you should test things out.

Remember: Always test and evaluate before making any SEO change permanent. At least know the impact of the change you are making.

Also, please don’t be under the impression that you should always remove boilerplate from your titles. In some instances, actually adding boilerplate can produce an uplift, particularly when the boilerplate is:

1. Recognizable: For example a strong brand
2. Relevant: The right keywords
3. Clickable: Encourages a high CTR
4. Succinct: Not overly long

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If you found value in the tips, and want to learn even more ways to optimize your title tags, we’ve made available a free webinar for you: SEO Master Class: Advanced Title Tag Optimization (For Any Site).

If you’ve got 40 minutes, it’s definitely worth a watch.

Watch Free Webinar

Best of luck with your SEO!

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Posted by DiTomaso

Contrary to popular belief, SEO and PPC aren’t at opposite ends of the spectrum. There are plenty of ways the two search disciplines can work together for benefits all around, especially when it comes to optimizing your Google Ads. In this informative Whiteboard Friday episode from last Spring, MozCon speaker and Kick Point President Dana DiTomaso explains how you can harness the power of both SEO and PPC for a better Google experience overall.

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

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz readers. My name is Dana DiTomaso, and I’m President and partner at Kick Point. We’re a digital marketing agency way up in the frozen wilds of Edmonton, Alberta. Today I’m going be talking to you about PPC, and I know you’re thinking, “This is an SEO blog. What are you doing here talking about PPC?”

But one of my resolutions for 2019 is to bring together SEO and PPC people, because SEO can learn a lot from PPC, and yes, PPC, you also can learn a lot from SEO. I know PPC people are like, “We just do paid. It’s so great.” But trust me, both can work together. In our agency, we do both SEO and PPC, and we work with a lot of companies who have one person, sometimes two and they’re doing everything.

One of the things we try to do is help them run better Ads campaigns. Here I have tips on things that we see all the time, when we start working with a new Ads account, that we end up fixing, and hopefully I can pass this on to you so you can fix it before you have to call an agency to come and fix it for you. One of the things is this is actually a much longer piece than what I can present on this whiteboard. There’s only so much room.

There is actually a blog post on our website, which you can find here. Please check that out and that will have the full nine tips. But I’m just going to break it down to a few today.

1. Too many keywords

First thing, too many keywords. We see this a lot where people, in Google it says make sure to put together keywords that have the same sort of theme.

But your theme can be really specific, or it can be kind of vague. This is an example, a real example that we got, where the keyword examples were all lawyer themes, so “defense lawyer,” “criminal lawyer,””dui lawyer,” “assault lawyer,” “sexual assault lawyer.” Technically, they all have the same theme of “lawyer,”but that’s way too vague for it to be all in one single ad group, because what kind of ad are you going to show?

“We are lawyers. Call us.” It’s not specific enough. Take for example “dui lawyer,”which I know is a really very competitive niche, and then you can do [dui lawyer], [dui lawyer seattle], and then “dui lawyer” and +dui+lawyer+seattle spelled out a little bit differently. I’ll talk about that in a second. By taking this one thing and then breaking it down into a much more specific ad group, you can really have much more control.

This is a consistent theme in all the tips I talk about is much more control over where you’re spending your money, what keywords you’re spending it on, what your ads are, having a much better landing page to ad match, which is also really important. It just makes your ad life so much easier when you’ve got it in all of those ad groups. I know it might seem intimidating. It’s like, “Well, I have three ad groups now.If I follow your tips, I’m going to have 40.”

But at the same time, it’s way easier to manage 40 well organized groups than it is to manage 3 really badly organized groups. Keep that in mind.

2. Picking the right match type

The next thing is picking the right match type. You can see here I’ve got this bracket stuff and this phrase stuff and these plus signs. There are really four match types.

Broad match

There’s broad match, which is terrible and don’t ever use it. Broad match is just you writing out the keyword, and then Google just displays it for whatever it feels like is relevant to that particular search. For example, we’ve seen examples where it’s like a catering company and they’ll have “catering” as a keyword, and they’re showing up for all sorts of phrases in catering where they can’t provide catering, so searching for a venue that only does in-house catering. Or they’re spending money on a catering conference or just totally irrelevant stuff. Do not use broad match.

Broad match modifier (BMM)

The upgrade from that is what’s called broad match modifier or BMM, and that’s where these plus signs come in. This is really the words dui, lawyer, and seattle in any order, but they all have to exist and other things can exist around that. It could be, “I need a DUI lawyer in Seattle.” “I live in Seattle. I need a DUI lawyer.” That would also work for that particular keyword.

Phrase match

The next type is phrase, and that’s in the quotes. This “dui lawyer” is the example here, and then you can have anything before it or you can have anything after it, but you can’t have something in between it. It couldn’t be “dui who is really great at being a lawyer” for example. Weak example, but you get the idea. You can’t just shove stuff in the middle of a phrase match.

Exact match

Then exact match is what’s in the brackets here, and that is just those words and nothing else. If I have [dui lawyer], this keyword, if I didn’t have [dui lawyer seattle], this keyword would not trigger if somebody searches [dui lawyer seattle]. That’s as specific as possible. You really want to try that for your most competitive keywords.

This is the really expensive stuff, because you do not want to waste one single penny on anything that is irrelevant to that particular search. This is your head on, it’s really expensive every click. I’ve got to make sure I’m getting the most money possible for those clicks. That’s where you really want to use exact match.

3. Only one ad per group

Next, tips. The next thing is what we see is a lot of people who have only one ad per group.

Have at least 3 ads per group

This is not a tip. This is a criticism up here. The thing is that maybe, again, you think it’s easy for management, but it’s really hard to see what’s going to work, because if you’re not always testing, how are you going to know if you could do better? Make sure to have at least three ads per group.

Add emotional triggers into your ad copy

Then look at your ad copy. We see a lot of just generic like, “We are the best lawyers. Call us.” There’s nothing there that says I need to call these people. Really think about how you can add those emotional triggers into your copy. Talk to your client or your team, if you work in-house, and find out what are the things that people say when they call. What are the things where they say, “Wow, you really helped me with this” or, “I was feeling like this and then you came in and I just felt so much better.”

That can really help to spice up your ads. We don’t want to get too fancy with this, but we certainly want to make something that’s going to help you stand out. Really add those emotional triggers into your ad copy.

Make sure to have a call to action

Then the next thing is making sure to have a call to action, which seems basic because you think it’s an ad. If you click it, that’s the call to action. But sometimes people on the Internet, they’re not necessarily thinking. You just want to say, “You know what? Just call me or email me or we’re open 24 hours.”

Just be really specific on what you want the person to do when they look at the ad. Just spell it out for them. I know it seems silly. Just tell them. Just tell them what you want them to do. That’s all you need to do.

Use extensions!

Then make sure you add in all of the extensions. In Google Ads, if you’re not super familiar with the platform, there’s a section called Extensions. These are things like when the address shows up under an ad, or you’ve got those little links that come up, or you’ve got somebody saying we’re open 24 hours, for example. There are all sorts of different extensions that you can use. Just put in all the extensions that you possibly can for every single one of your groups.

Then they won’t all trigger all at the same time, but at least they’re there and it’s possible that they could trigger. If they do, that’s give your ad more real estate versus your competition, which is really great on mobile because ads take up a lot of space at the top of a mobile search. You want to make sure to shove your competition as far as you possibly can down that search so you own as much of that property as you possibly can. One thing that I do see people doing incorrectly with extensions, though, is setting extensions at say the campaign level, and then you have different ad groups that cover different themes.

Going back to this example over here, with the different types of lawyers, let’s say you had an extension that talks specifically about DUI law, but then it was triggering on say sexual assault law. You don’t want that to happen. Make sure you have really fine-tuned control over your different extensions so you’re showing the right extension with the right type of keyword and the right type of ad. The other thing that we see a lot is where people have location extensions and they’re showing all the location extensions where they should not be showing all the location extensions.

You’ve got an ad group for, say, Seattle, and it’s talking about this new home development that you have, and because you just loaded in all of your location extensions, suddenly you’re showing extensions for something in say San Francisco. It’s just because you haven’t filtered properly. Really double-check to make sure that you’ve got your filter set up properly for your location extensions and that you’re showing the right location extension for the right ad.

I know that Google says, “We’ll pick the locations closest to the client.” But you don’t know where that person is searching right there. They could be in San Francisco at that moment and searching for new home builds in Seattle, because maybe they’re thinking about moving from San Francisco to Seattle. You don’t want them to see the stuff that’s there. You want them to see the stuff that’s at the place where they’re intending to be. Really make sure you control that.

4. Keep display and search separate

Last, but not least, keep display and search separate.

By default, Google so helpfully says, “We’ll just show your ads everywhere. It’s totally cool. This is what we want everyone to do.” Don’t do that. This is what makes Google money. It does not make you money. The reason why is because display network, which is where you’re going to a website and then you see an ad, and search network, when you type in the stuff and you see an ad, are two totally different beasts.

Avoid showing text ads on the display network for greater campaign control

It’s really a different type of experience. To be honest, if you take your search campaigns, which are text-based ads, and now you’re showing them on websites, you’re showing a boring text ad on a website that already has like 50 blinky things and click here. They’re probably not seeing us and maybe they have an ad blocker installed. But if they are, certainly your text ad, which is kind of boring and not intended for that medium, is not going to be the thing that stands out.

Really you’re just wasting your money because you’ll end up with lower relevancy, less clicks, and then Google thinks that your group is bad. Then you’ll end up paying more because Google thinks your group is bad. It really gives you that extra control by saying, “This is the search campaign. It’s only on search. This is the display campaign. It’s only on display.” Keep the two of them totally separate. Then you have lots of control over the search ads being for search and the display ads being for display.

Don’t mix those two up. Make sure to uncheck that by default. Definitely there are more tips on our blog here. But I hope that this will help you get started. SEOs, if you’ve never done a PPC campaign in your life, I recommend just setting one up. Put 50 bucks behind that thing. Just try it out, because I think what will really help you is understanding more of how people search, because as we get less and less keyword data from the different tools that we use to figure out what the heck are people googling when they try to search for our business, ads give you some of that data back.

That’s where ads can be a really great ally in trying to get better SEO results. I hope you found this enjoyable. Thanks so much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by ipfister

Since Moz released the new Google Data Studio Connectors for STAT, you might be wondering how to best implement them for your reporting strategy. My colleagues at Path Interactive and I absolutely love how granular you can get with your reports in STAT, and finally having the ability to cleanly and effectively pull those reports into Data Studio (the tool we use for our own reporting) is a godsend.

While the Historical Keyword Rankings connector reports on rank over time, it may not be as obvious how to report on rank change over time. In this post, I’ll give you step-by-step guidance on how to report on rank change — as well as a couple other filtering and reporting tips — while using the connectors within Google Data Studio.

If you aren’t a STAT user yet but you want to know how it might fit into your SEO toolkit, you can take a tour of the product. Click on the button below to set one up!

Learn More About STAT

Connecting your data source

Before you begin, you need to identify a few things to set up the connector: your STAT Keyword API Key, the Project ID, and your Site ID. If you don’t already know how to identify these via the STAT API, you can head over to STAT’s documentation here to learn more. After you’ve identified these, it’s time to connect your data source. 

We’re going to be doing something a little out of the ordinary here, but stay with me — you’ll see why in just a second!

For this step, we’ll be connecting two instances of the same source. Because our goal is to compare rank change over time, we’ll use the same source twice to identify those deltas.

When setting up your connector, be sure to name the source something that you’ll easily recognize:

In my case, I usually go with something simple such as “[client name] STAT Keyword Connector.” When this is complete, repeat the step above, but name it something different, e.g. “[client name] STAT Keyword Connector 2.”

Finally, make sure the metrics you plan on comparing have unique names for each connector. To do so, go into your data source. Click on the metric’s name so that you can rename it, and then rename it something unique. For this case we’ll be doing it for “Google Base Rank,” since we’re comparing ranks, but it can also be done for “Google Rank,” if we wanted to compare that. Again, I like to just keep it simple: for the first data source call it “Google Base Rank 1,” and then for the second data source call it “Google Base Rank 2.” When all is said and done, it should look something like this:

Building your table and blending data

Now we’ll start to get a bit more technical. Blending the data of the two connectors lets you compare two instances of rankings against each other. Your final result will produce a table showing the ranks of two given dates, as well as their rank change. The five-step process will look like this:

1. Blend data of keyword connectors one and two
2. Add in your common metrics for the two sources (keyword at the minimum, but you can also add in location, device, market, and search volume)
3. Add in the metric you’d like reported (Google base rank and/or Google rank)
4. Set date range
5. Apply “No Null” filter

1. Blend data of keyword connectors one and two

The first step here is to blend the two connectors so that you can compare two instances of ranks against each other. 

First, you need to create a new report, or go into a report that’s already set up. Next, select your data source. Here you’ll select the first instance of the source that you set up earlier (if you’re starting on a fresh report, it’ll ask you to add a data source immediately). Once selected, click on “Blend Data” underneath the data source on the right hand side of Google Data Studio, seen here:

This will bring you to the Blend Data source tool. From here you select to add another data source, being your second instance of the connector.

2. Add in your common metrics

Once you’ve chosen to blend both connectors, you need to set your metrics. Towards the top, you’ll see “Join keys.” This is in reference to what’s going to be the same for both instances, so here at the minimum, you want to include “keyword.” Feel free to play around here with adding different metrics.

Note: We’ll go over this later, but if you plan on having different graphs filtered by a certain tag or location, make sure to add these in here.

3. Add in the type of rank you want reported

After setting your metrics under “Join keys,” now select the metrics that will be unique for each date. Depending on what you want to compare, under “Metrics” you’ll pick “Google Base Rank,” “Google Rank,” or both. You may also include “Date” here too if you’d like. Once done, click on “SUM” next to the metric name, and change this to “MIN.” You’ll see why in just a moment.

At this point, your blended data should look something like this:

4. Set date range

Now you need to set the two date ranges you’re comparing to each other. 

To do this, under the first connection, set your first date: Under “Date Range,” click on “Custom,” then click on the field to select your date. Here you might see that there’s an option for two dates, but for this solution, we’re using the same date for each connector.

In the end, it’ll be something like “Connector 1” selected for the “start date” and “end date” as the first of the month, and for “Connector 2,” the “start date” and “end date” will be the last of the month. This is essentially pulling in the rank for the first instance as well as the second instance, so you can compare the two.

5. Set “No Null” filter

The last step in setting up your blended data is creating a “No Null” filter. When the keyword connector reports on ranks that your site is not ranking for, it will return as “null.” To avoid flooding your data with fluff, you need to create a filter removing instances of “null.”

First, click on “Add A Filter” below where you selected the date range. Next, towards the bottom, click on “Create A Filter.” Set the parameters of the filter as “Exclude” > “Google Base Rank 1 (2)” > “Is Null.” Be sure to name the filter something identifiable such as “No Null.” It should look like this:

Applying rank change to your report

Now you can create a new field that will report on the rank change by making a calculated field to find the difference of the two ranks. 

Under dimensions, select “Add Dimension,” and click on “Create Field.” You can name it “Rank Change,” but to create the field, start typing “Google Base Rank,” and you’ll see your instances from each connector come up. To make the calculated field, select your “Google Base Rank 1” and subtract it from “Google Base Rank 2,” so it should look something like this:

Hit apply, and now your rank change should be calculated!

There is also an additional way to get the same result, but with a few drawbacks, such as not being able to name the header, as well as not being able to filter or sort your rank change. The benefit to this approach is that it’s easier to set up initially, as you don’t actually need to blend the data. However, not setting up the blended data will also forfeit having the initial rank visible. When in your edit view, set a custom date range that you’re reporting on under “Default date range.” Here, you can then set a comparison date: if looking back a month, you can set this to the first. If you go with this option, it should look like this:

Head into the “Style” tab, where you can change the comparison to “Show Absolute Change” under “Metrics.” You can also change the colors of your positive and negative arrows to more accurately represent the movement (you can see from above that the “negative” change is a green arrow, this defaults to red).

Using filters

Applying filters to your data set can be extremely beneficial to making sense of your data! Using filters with the connector can help you segment out rankings for a particular location, or create charts that show rankings for a specific keyword group that you’ve set up using keyword tags. 

Take a look at this report I set up as an example. Within STAT, I created keyword tags to target locations determined by what zip code they were. Then, I was able to create a filter for each chart targeting that keyword tag:

Setting filters up is extremely simple. First, go into edit mode. Next, scroll down the side until you find “Filter.” Then under Filter > Table Filter, click on “Add a Filter.” This will bring you to the filter picker. Toward the bottom, click on “Create a Filter.” Here you can set the parameters for the filter you’d like to show.

Some of my other favorites include filtering to only show the top few pages (filters out non-relevant and high ranks), using the keyword tag filter like I showed before, and also filtering by location. But you don’t have to stop there! Adding in the additional dimensions available to you in the connector, you can use the filter to show things such as desktop vs. mobile or how your keyword ranking performance does in different markets.

Blending your Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and STAT data

One of my favorite uses for the connectors is the ability to blend the data with your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data. By blending this data together, you’re able to directly tie keyword rankings with different metrics, such as clicks or goal completions.

You’re probably a pro at blended data at this point, but just for reference, the data blended should look like this:

A few things to note: it’s important what order you put the connectors in. I’ve found that adding the STAT connector first works best (i.e. if you put Google Analytics first, you’ll get a report with the infamous “not found” keyword). Additionally, to pull in Search Console data in order to match with your other connectors, using “Query” will have the same effect as “Keyword.”

The result would look something like this, but feel free to edit the design how you wish!

Now you can go even further with this and match up URLs, but this will require some RegEx. 

You’ll rename the “Google URL” field in STAT and “Landing Page” field in Google Search Console in order to match the URL structure convection within Google Analytics by taking out the domain portion of the URL. To do this, go into your data source for each STAT connector and Google Search Console, and click “Add A Field” in the top right.

Next, enter to following RegEx for the STAT connector:

REGEXP_REPLACE(Google URL, “.*[\\.]com”, “”)

And for Google Search console:

REGEXP_REPLACE(Landing Page, “.*[\\.]com”, “”)

Remember to name them something to differentiate from the default field. I use “Landing Page (no domain).”

When building a report, use these new fields for consistency across the URL structure so that, when you select them when blending data, they’ll match. 

Use this method in the same way as above to get the desired results of pulling in data from across all three connectors to match up with each other! In the end you should be able to find what keyword ranks for what URL, as well as have many sessions or clicks that are brought in as well as goal completions, or any other combination.

Well there you have it! Hope this was helpful to you. If you have any other questions you can comment below or find me on Twitter @ianpfister. Happy reporting!

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