Satisfying your searchers is a big part of what it means to be successful in modern SEO. And optimal searcher satisfaction means gaining a deep understanding of them and the queries they use to search. In this section of the One-Hour Guide to SEO, Rand covers everything you need to know about how to satisfy searchers, including the top four priorities you need to have and tips on how to avoid pogo-sticking in the SERPs.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to our special edition One-Hour Guide to SEO Part III on searcher satisfaction. So historically, if we were doing a guide to SEO in the long-ago past, we probably wouldn’t even be talking about searcher satisfaction.
What do searchers want from Google’s results?
But Google has made such a significant number of advances in the last 5 to 10 years that searcher satisfaction is now a huge part of how you can be successful in SEO. I’ll explain what I mean here. Let’s say our friend Arlen here is thinking about going on vacation to Italy.
So she goes to Google. She types in “best places to visit in Italy,” and she gets a list of results. Now Google sorts those results in a number of ways. They sort them by the most authoritative, the most comprehensive. They use links and link data in a lot of different ways to try and get at that. They use content data, what’s on the page, and keyword data.
They use historical performance data about which sites have done well for searchers in the past. All of these things sort of feed into searcher satisfaction. So when Arlen performs this query, she has a bunch of questions in her head, things like I want a list of popular Italian vacation destinations, and I want some comparison of those locations.
Maybe I want the ability to sort and filter based on my personal preferences. I want to know the best times of year to go. I want to know the weather forecast and what to see and do and hotel and lodging info and transportation and accessibility information and cultural tips and probably dozens more questions that I can’t even list out here. But when you, as a content creator and as a search engine optimization professional, are creating and crafting content and trying to optimize that content so that it performs well in Google’s results, you need to be considering what are all of these questions.
How to craft content that satisfies your searchers
This is why searcher empathy, customer empathy, being able to get inside Arlen’s head or your customer’s head and say, “What does she want? What is she looking for?” is one of the most powerful ways to craft content that performs better than your competition in search engines, because it turns out a lot of people don’t do this.
Priority 1: Answer the searcher’s questions comprehensively and with authority
So if I’m planning my page, what is the best page I could possibly craft to try and rank for “best places to visit in Italy,” which is a very popular search term, extremely competitive? I would think about obviously there’s all sorts of keyword stuff and on-page optimization stuff, which we will talk about in Part IV, but my priorities are answer the searcher’s primary questions comprehensively and authoritatively. If I can do that, I am in good shape. I’m ahead of a lot of the pack.
Priority 2: Provide an easy-to-use, fast-loading, well-designed interface that’s a pleasure to interact with
Second, I want to provide a great user experience. That means easy to use, fast-loading, well-designed, that’s a pleasure to interact with. I want the experience of a visitor, a searcher who lands on this page to be, “Wow, this is much better than the typical experience that I get when I land on a lot of other sites.”
Priority 3: Solve the searcher’s next tasks and questions with content, tools, or links
Priority three, I want to solve the searcher’s next tasks and questions with either content on my own site or tools and resources or links or the ability to do them right here so that they don’t have to go back to Google and do other things or visit other websites to try and accomplish the tasks, like figuring out a good hotel or figuring out the weather forecast. A lot of sites don’t do this comprehensively today, which is why it’s an advantage if you do.
Priority 4: Consider creative elements that may give you a long-term competitive advantage
Priority four is consider some creative elements, maybe interactive tools or an interactive map or sorting and filtering options that could give you a long-term, competitive advantage, something that’s difficult for other people who want to rank for this search term to build.
Maybe that’s the data that you get. Maybe it’s the editorial content. Maybe it’s your photographs. Maybe it’s your tools and interactive elements. Whatever the case.
Do NOT give searchers a reason to click that back button!
One of the biggest goals of searcher satisfaction is to make sure that this scenario does not happen to you. You do not want to give searchers a reason to click that back button and choose someone else.
The search engine literature calls this “pogo sticking.” Basically, if I do a search for “best places to visit in Italy”and I click on, let’s say, US News & World Reports and I find that that page does not do a great job answering my query, or it does a fine job, but it’s got a bunch of annoying popovers and it’s slow loading and it has all these things that it’s trying to sell me, and so I click the back button and I choose a different result from Touropia or Earth Trackers.
Over time, Google will figure out that US News & World Reports is not doing a good job of answering the searcher’s query, of providing a satisfactory experience, and they will push them down in the results and they will push these other ones, that are doing a good job, up in the results. You want to be the result that satisfies a searcher, that gets into their head and answers their questions and helps them solve their task, and that will give you an advantage over time in Google’s rankings.
All right, we’ll see you next time for Part IV on on-page optimization. Take care.
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Use this guide to create an SEO skills test and hire the most qualified SEO Manager for your team!
I was a new team lead. I knew the ins and outs of being a good SEO and a good content creator, but within my first month as a manager I faced a challenge I had never had to tackle before…
Someone left and I had to find a backfill.
I started desperately Googling things like “interview questions” and “what to look for in a new employee” but quickly realized that was too generic for what I needed. There was really no guidance available on what makes a good SEO manager. I had to wing it.
What I wish I would have thought of back then was creating an SEO assessment. My organization had test projects for content developers based on writing prompts, but there was really nothing comparable to gauge a prospective SEO’s skillset.
An assessment like this might be good for a second stage interview after your candidate has passed a basic round one interview. If you already know you like this person, the next step is to make sure they can walk the talk.
What to cover in an SEO skills test
There are so many things you could cover in an SEO quiz for your prospective new hire.
Generally though, there are three main pillars that I think represent SEO well on the whole: technical (the foundation), content (the house), and links (authority — yeah, yeah… I couldn’t keep up with the house analogy).
A good test of your prospective SEO manager’s skills should hit somewhere in the middle.
Just keep in mind that, while I think this is a good representation of SEO on the whole, it’s not comprehensive. For example, local SEO isn’t addressed here, so if you run a local SEO agency then you could choose to focus on GMB optimization, NAP, etc. Cater your assessment to your unique needs.
How to structure your SEO skills test
There are three main types of SEO assessments that I’ve seen:
The multiple choice test: These are the types of tests that ask things like “what’s a robots.txt file”? These tests gauge someone’s head knowledge (or their Googling prowess), but don’t gauge their practical, rubber-meets-the-road skills.
The checklist: These types of tests give someone a list of tasks to see how well they’re able to perform them. For example, “change this title tag.” These tests stop short of gauging someone’s problem-solving abilities.
The ambiguous audit: This might involve handing someone a website and saying “see what you can find.” These can be highly subjective: your candidate might focus on the “wrong” things (things you don’t care about your new hire knowing), and the candidate could just end up relying on tools to do a lot of the work for them.
While all have their merits, none of them felt 100% appropriate for gauging a potential new hire’s SEO chops. That’s why I landed on a hybrid.
You’re not just handing your prospect a website and saying “see what you find,” but you’re not just having them color-by-number either. What you’re doing is asking them guiding questions about a specific website, such as “what’s wrong with this?” “Why?” and “How would you fix it?”
Setting them up for the test
There are a few considerations you need to make before handing them the test and wishing them good luck. For example:
How much time do they have? Decide whether you want to bring your candidate in for a 3-hour window (good if you’re watching out for the Costanzas of the bunch) or whether they can take the assessment home and email it back by a certain date.
What website will they be evaluating? You’ll have to decide whether you’ll be giving them a website you control or picking a random website. If it’s a website you control, try not to choose an immaculate website — give them something to find.
What tools can they use? You might want to let them use their preferred auditing tools or you can suggest they use your team’s preferred tools (if you have any).
Will you pay them for their time? There are differing opinions on this, but if you’re giving them a project that you know will take more than a few hours (especially if you might end up using their findings to improve the website) I would consider paying them for their time.
Content: Can your candidate discern high quality?
This section will focus on gauging how well your candidate understands what type of content it takes to perform well in the search engines for particular queries.
Here’s what I might suggest asking:
Find the low-quality content on example.com and list some examples here. Why are they low quality?
How would you recommend fixing the low-quality content? Why would that method work?
This will show you if they have a good grasp of what search engines like Google consider low quality content, and what viable courses of action exist for remedying it.
For example, you might expect to get back something like this:
Example.com/page-two/ is low quality because it is a near-duplicate of example.com/page-one/. It’s also getting little-to-no organic traffic. If it’s necessary to keep /page-two/ on the website, you could add a rel=canonical to indicate which version of the pages is the primary/original. If /page-two/ needs to remain in the index, consider modifying the content so it’s unique. If it’s not necessary to keep /page-two/ on the website, consider 301 redirecting it to /page-one/.
Again, you’re just looking for whether they understand what low-quality content is, how to find it, and how to address it.
Other content-related questions you might want to consider asking:
What topical gaps (if any) exist in this website’s content?
What are some reasons their competitor’s content might be performing better?
Links: Does your candidate know how to build authority & avoid penalties?
This section would focus on gauging how well your prospective SEO Manager understands inbound links (backlinks) and their effect on a domain/page’s performance in search results. Again, without giving too much away, I would instruct them to:
Find any inbound links that might be harming example.com’s performance. Why are they harmful?
What action would you recommend taking to address the harmful inbound links? Why?
For these types of questions, you might expect to get something back like this:
Example.com has a number of inbound links utilizing exact-match anchor text that are not nofollow and appear to match Google’s definition of a link scheme, specifically “low-quality directory or bookmark site links.” They do not appear to be harming the site’s performance in search results, but you could add these links to their disavow file preemptively.
Other link-related questions you could consider asking:
What’s one strategy you would recommend using to help this site get more links? Why?
Benchmark this site’s links against its competitors and list out any key insights you find.
Technical: Does your candidate know what makes a strong website foundation?
“Technical” is broad and not everyone agrees where the lines are drawn between technical and non-technical activities, but here, I’m using “technical” to refer to uncovering your prospective SEO Manager’s competence at diagnosing and fixing any barriers to crawling, issues with the indexing of a site’s content, areas for improving how a search engine understands the website, and areas for improving the user experience.
Are there any crawl inefficiencies/problems with this website? If so, please describe what they are and how you would fix them.
Are there any issues with how the pages appear in the index? If so, please describe what they are and how you would fix them.
In response, you might expect to get an answer such as:
As is common with many e-commerce websites, this one uses a faceted navigation. However, because these filters are open to crawlers, crawl budget is being wasted on non-unique, thin pages. Disallow crawlers from crawling non-valuable facets in robots.txt to save crawl budget.
Other questions you might consider asking to gauge their technical chops:
How does this site utilize (or fail to utilize) structured data? Why is that significant?
What (if anything) is harming visitor experience on this website? How would you fix?
The work doesn’t stop there…
I hope these tips on developing an SEO assessment help not only make the hiring process easier, but help you get the best SEO talent you can — your team deserves it!
But we also know that adding a new member to your SEO team involves so much more than this. You’ll need to work with your organization’s hiring manager to put together the job posting and you’ll also need to invest in training this new employee so they can hit the ground running quickly to start making an impact for your team.
We hear ya — that’s why we also put together “The Agency’s Guide to Finding & Onboarding New SEO Managers” white paper.
If you’ve ever been tasked with finding, assessing, hiring, and training a new SEO manager, we’d love to hear from you! What methods have been successful for you in the past? What mistakes can you help others avoid? Share them in the comments.
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We’ve got three months and some change before MozCon 2019 splashes onto the scene (can you believe it?!) Today, we’re excited to give you a sneak preview of the first batch of 19 incredible speakers to take the stage this year.
With a healthy mix of fresh faces joining us for the first time and fan favorites making a return appearance, our speaker lineup this year is bound to make waves. While a few details are still being pulled together, topics range from technical SEO, content marketing, and local search to link building, machine learning, and way more — all with an emphasis on practitioners sharing tactical advice and real-world stories of how they’ve moved the needle (and how you can, too.)
Still need to snag your ticket for this sea of actionable talks? We’ve got you covered:
Welcome to MozCon 2019 + the State of the Industry
Our vivacious CEO will be kicking things off early on the first day of MozCon with a warm welcome, laying out all the pertinent details of the conference, and getting us in the right mindset for three days of learning with a dive into the State of the Industry.
We know that only 20% of people remember what they read, but 80% remember what they saw. How do you create something people actually remember? You have to think beyond words and consider factors like images, colors, movement, location, and more. In this talk, Casie will dissect what brands are currently doing to capture attention and how everyone, regardless of budget or resources, can create the kind of content their audience will actually remember.
Human > Machine > Human: Understanding Human-Readable Quality Signals and Their Machine-Readable Equivalents
The push and pull of making decisions for searchers versus search engines is an ever-present SEO conundrum. How do you tackle industry changes through the lens of whether something is good for humans or for machines? Ruth will take us through human-readable quality signals and their machine-readable equivalents and how to make SEO decisions accordingly, as well as how to communicate change to clients and bosses.
Improved Reporting & Analytics within Google Tools
Covering the intersections between some of our favorite free tools — Google Data Studio, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager— Dana will be deep-diving into how to improve your reporting and analytics, even providing downloadable Data Studio templates along the way.
Paul Shapiro
Senior Partner, Head of SEO — Catalyst, a GroupM and WPP Agency
Redefining Technical SEO
It’s time to throw the traditional definition of technical SEO out the window. Why? Because technical SEO is much, much bigger than just crawling, indexing, and rendering. Technical SEO is applicable to all areas of SEO, including content development and other creative functions. In this session, you’ll learn how to integrate technical SEO into all aspects of your SEO program.
How to Supercharge Link Building with a Digital PR Newsroom
Everyone who’s ever tried their hand at link building knows how much effort it demands. If only there was a way to keep a steady stream of quality links coming in the door for clients, right? In this talk, Shannon will share how to set up a “digital PR newsroom” in-house or agency-side that supports and grows your link building efforts. Get your note-taking hand ready, because she’s going to outline her process and provide a replicable tutorial for how to make it happen.
Russ is planning to wow us with a talk he’s been waiting years to give — we’re still hashing out the details and can’t wait to share what you can expect!
Traditional keyword research is poorly suited to Google’s quest for answers. One question might represent thousands of keyword variants, so how do we find the best questions, craft content around them, and evaluate success? Dr. Pete dives into three case studies to answer these questions.
Fraggles, Mobile-First Indexing, & the SERP of the Future
Before you ask: no, this isn’t Fraggle Rock, MozCon edition! Cindy will cover the myriad ways mobile-first indexing is changing the SERPs, including progressive web apps, entity-first indexing, and how “fraggles” are indexed in the Knowledge Graph and what it all means for the future of mobile SERPs.
Keyword’s Aren’t Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing
Many marketers focus solely on keyword research when crafting their content, but it just isn’t enough these days if you want to gain a competitive edge. Ross will share a framework for uncovering content ideas leveraged from forums, communities, niche sites, good old-fashioned SERP analysis, and more, tools and techniques to help along the way, and exclusive research surrounding the data that backs this up.
Last year, Britney rocked our socks off with her presentation on machine learning and SEO. We’re still ironing out the specifics of her 2019 talk, but suffice to say it might be smart to double-up on socks.
Brand Is King: How to Rule in the New Era of Local Search
Get ready for a healthy dose of all things local with this talk! Mary will deep-dive into how the Google Local algorithm has matured in 2019 and how marketers need to mature with it; how the major elements of the algo (relevance, prominence, and proximity) influence local rankings and how they affect each other; how local results are query dependent; how to feed business info into the Knowledge Graph; and how brand is now “king” in Local Search.
From zero web presence to ranking hyper-locally, Darren will take us along on the 8-month-long journey of a business growing its digital footprint and analyzing what worked (and didn’t) along the way. How well will they rank from a GMB listing alone? What about when citations were added, and later indexed? Did having a keyword in the business name help or harm, and what changes when they earn a few good links? Buckle up for this wild ride as we discover exactly what impact different strategies have on local rankings.
Andy Crestodina
Co-Founder / Chief Marketing Officer — Orbit Media
What’s the Most Effective Content Strategy?
There’s so much advice out there on how to craft a content strategy that it can feel scattered and overwhelming. In his talk, Andy will cover exactly which tactics are the most effective and pull together a cohesive story on just what details make for an effective and truly great content strategy.
CRO, UX, and an SEO crawler? You read that right! Luke will share actionable tips on how to identify revenue wins and impactful low-hanging fruit to increase conversions and improve UX with the help of a site crawler typically used for SEO, as well as a generous helping of data points from case studies and real-world examples.
Factors that Affect the Local Algorithm that Don’t Impact Organic
Google’s local algorithm is a horse of a different color when compared with the organic algo most SEOs are familiar with. Joy will share results from a SterlingSky study on how proximity varies greatly when comparing local and organic results, how reviews impact ranking (complete with data points from testing), how spam is running wild (and how it negatively impacts real businesses), and more.
Doing branded search right is complicated. “Branded search” isn’t just when people search for your client’s brand name — instead, think brand, category, people, conversation around the brand, PR narrative, brand entities/assets, and so on. Heather will bring the unique twists and perspectives that come from her enterprise and agency experience working on some of the biggest brands in the world, providing different avenues to go down when it comes to keyword research and optimization.
See you at MozCon?
We hope you’re as jazzed as we are for July 15th–17th to hurry up and get here. And again, if you haven’t grabbed your ticket yet, we’ve got your back:
Has speaking at MozCon been on your SEO conference bucket list? If so, stay tuned — we’ll be starting our community speaker pitch process soon, so keep an eye on the blog in the coming weeks!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
One of the biggest challenges in SEO is measuring impact — we know what matters (or doesn’t matter) until the rules of the game have changed. And when they do, we’re all scrambling to find a baseline again.
I decided to put together a list of what I consider to be steadfast SEO recommendations. This list has yielded wins for a number of my clients — they had an impact that we were able to identify and quantify — and might be useful to you and your clients. While not all of them may be applicable (they should ultimately be tailored to your site’s specific needs) I will provide further details and examples of what I mean within each.
Here are the five SEO recommendations that I’ve consistently seen make a positive impact in SEO’s ever-changing world.
1. Structured data matters
The short explanation of why structured data is helpful is that it tells crawlers what there is within your page. If you are not familiar with this you can follow this helpful Structured Data guide to get you quickly up and running.
This is a clear example of tailoring the advice to your site’s needs and industry — I have consistently seen structured data making a positive impact for clients in different industries, but different structured data will be required for different sites and pages within the site.
Below, I show the increase in impressions that occurred after we updated the information included on structured data of product pages. In this case, the correct type of structured data was already selected, but the information given to it was incomplete or inconsistent with what was on page:
Above is an anonymized graph of a client’s impression performance during a month after the structured data update.
Here are the industries where I’ve seen structured data being useful:
Jobs/recruiting
Events
Beauty services
Structured data makes it faster and easier for crawlers to understand the information within the page, making it a powerful (but often misused) tool. If applied correctly, it will make quite a positive impact on your pages.
Here are a few additional steps to help you get started:
Your page’s freshness is determined by multiple factors, but simply having a date on a page is one of the easiest ways to indicate to Google how fresh your page is. This applies to blogs and news, but it’s also relevant for product pages related to dates, such as event sites.
If you think about page freshness from a user perspective, it’s easier to understand why it matters so much. When you obtain search results that have an old date, such as articles, depending on the subject, you might consider them less relevant than if they had a recent date. Crawlers know this too and have the ability to differentiate between fresh and old content whether it has a date or not.
For one of our clients in the event industry, an old date took a toll on their rankings. After updating their page’s content to ensure it was search relevant, we went through and made sure no content within the page (i.e. page copy or text at the bottom of the page) was referring to older dates. We also updated the date on structured data to match the new date.
After the update, we observed improved ranking on SERP results, which doubled impressions and CTR.
Page freshness matters for any industry, and while dates are helpful, your content freshness should always reflect and target what users are searching. Here are a few other things to consider if you think you may need to refresh your pages:
How often have you conducted keyword research in the last 18 months and updated your page’s content based on keywords results?
Are you featured on SERP results with dates and if so how old are these dates?
3. Internal linking (still matters)
The right balance of internal linking is never a straightforward answer, so I am not here to advise you on the absolute right way to do it. However, I am here to tell you that not having too many links on one page can make a positive impact.
For example, linking to all categories from your homepage could be the best user experience or the fastest way for crawlers to discover your pages but it will also impact the amount of equity the page is sending to all the pages it links to.
If all of your category pages are crawled and indexed, as was the case for my client, you can decide to link from the homepage only to specific categories or services. There are many factors to consider when changing how you internally link from the homepage, some of which are:
Likelihood of these pages to better compete
Revenue that comes from these pages
When we recommended a change in internal linking to one of our clients in the personal beauty service industry, we saw an overall 21 percent increase in sessions from the previous month for the site as a whole. About half of these came from the category pages we kept a link to, which offset any loss in session from the category pages we excluded.
Balancing internal linking is definitely an important ranking factor because it will dictate how users and crawlers discover your pages. If you are revisiting your site’s internal linking, or think that your client should, my colleague Shannon wrote this helpful guide on the subject that covers all the various aspects of balancing internal linking for SEO.
4. Title tags
Changing your title tags and finding out if they made a positive impact can be quite difficult to prove. At Distilled, our ODN clients can easily test and measure how a different title made a positive or negative impact. I’ve tested this many times for clients in different industries, and changing a title has always changed (positively or negatively) the amount of session variant pages were getting.
How you change your title will depend on your page type, so there is no absolute rule on what to change a title to. In my client’s case, we’ve positively tested the following changes:
Include the year in the title, which also signals freshness.
Here is an example I made up:
Original title: “Book a Trip to Hawaii Now | [brand name]”
Changed title: “Hawaii Trips 2019/2010 | Book Now | [brand name]”
Include the lowest product price of the page, for example:
Original title: “Cheap Flights to Hawaii – [brand name]”
Changed title: “Cheap Flight to Hawaii from $400 – [brand name]”
We also tested these following changes, which had a negative result in terms of the number of sessions:
Adding the number of products for sale on the page to the title tag
Adding emojis to the title tag
The successful tests were measured in the travel industry particularly, while the negative tests occurred in the fast fashion industry. Specifically, through the ODN platform, we measured a 7 percent increase in sessions for pages with a year or price in the title.
What you change your title to will depend on many factors, so a year or price might not help in your case. However, if some of your category pages have seasonal products or your industry competes heavily on prices, adding the year — or date, if applicable — or a price in the title could be quite beneficial.
5. Obtain backlinks
One thing that consistently helped my clients to obtain external links is creative pages — not shocking, I know. These are usually interesting articles or campaigns related to the business, not commercial pages (pages that are just trying to sell something), and they end up obtaining quite a lot of coverage from different sources and, subsequently, external links.
Building successful creative pages are not easy and won’t guarantee that an increase in any specific amount of backlinks, but it’s one of the safest ways to obtain organic backlinks. The process can also be quite expensive for big pieces but we’ve also experienced a positive impact with more lightweight pieces on a smaller budget.
If your budget or your client’s budget is on the modest side, you can still create a great piece. Here are a few tips to achieve that:
Think about the data you have collected and what insights it might have for users who do not have access to it: can you spot trends and patterns that could be interesting for a wider audience?
Surveys: you can certainly reach an audience to ask questions on a topic you want to create a piece of content for. If you can’t reach an audience for free, you can do this cheaply through paid surveys and collect your data this way.
Hire freelancers: there is a lot of great talent you can scout on sites like Upwork to help you create a visually enticing piece
One of the best examples I have is a Distilled client who increased traffic by 70 percent (yes — really!) thanks to creative content. While this client’s budget was not small, the traffic obtained paid off the initial investment. My colleague, Leonie, who led and worked on the project, does a great job detailing what they achieved after publishing creative content for this client. I would summarize the main takeaways of her post with these reminders:
Know your primary campaign goal
Do not expect short term — focus on the long term strategy
Measure results with multiple tools
Wrapping it up
Measuring the impact of SEO changes is a consistent challenge and not every SEO technique you throw at content will work. My hope is that this short list can provide you with some ideas and directions on things to consider when helping your site or your clients. As I mentioned above, these are not hard written rules, but they are the ones worth their weight and are certainly worth analyzing for the sites you are working on.
If you’ve you been able to measure an impactful SEO change that consistently helped your clients, please share your experience in a comment below.
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Ever get that spooky feeling that Google somehow knows exactly what you mean, even when you put a barely-coherent set of words in the search box? You’re not alone. The search giant has an uncanny ability to un-focus on the keywords in the search query and apply behavioral, content, context, and temporal/historical signals to give you exactly the answer you want.
For marketers and SEOs, this poses a frustrating challenge. Do we still optimize for keywords? The answer is “sort of.” But I think I can show you how to best think about this in a few quick visuals, using a single search query.
First… A short story.
I sent a tweet
over the weekend about an old Whiteboard Friday video. Emily Grossman,
longtime friend, all-around marketing genius, and
official-introducer-of-millenial-speak-to-GenXers-like-me replied.
Ha ha Emily. I already made fun of my own mustache so…
Anywho, I searched Google for “soz.” Not because I didn’t know what it means. I can read between lines. I’m hip. But, you know, sometimes a Gen-Xer wants to make sure.
The results confirm my guess, but they also helped illustrate a point of frequent frustration I have when trying to explain modern vs. classic SEO. I threw together these seven visuals to illustrate.
There you have it friends. Classic SEO ranking inputs still matter. They can still help. They’re often the difference between making it to the top 10 vs. having no shot. But too many SEOs get locked into the idea that rankings are made up of a combination of the “Old School Five”:
Keyword use
Links to the page
Domain authority
Anchor text
Freshness
Don’t get me wrong — sometimes, these signals in a powerful enough combination can overwhelm Google’s other inputs. But those examples are getting harder to find.
The three big takeaways for every marketer should be:
Google is working hard to keep searchers on Google. If you help them do that, they’ll often help you rank (whether this is a worthwhile endeavor or a Prisoner’s Dilemma is another matter)
When trying to reverse why something ranks in Google, add the element of “how well does this solve the searcher’s query”
If you’re trying to outrank a competitor, how you align your title, meta description, first few sentences of text, and content around what the searcher truly wants can make the difference… even if you don’t win on links 😉
Related: if you want to see how hard Google’s working to keep searchers on their site vs. clicking results, I’ve got some research on SparkToro showing precisely that.
P.S. I don’t actually believe in arbitrary birth year ranges for segmenting cohorts of people. The differences between two individuals born in 1981 can be vastly wider than for two people born in 1979 and 1985. Boomer vs. Gen X vs. Millenial vs. Gen Z is crappy pseudoscience rooted in our unhealthy desire to categorize and pigeonhole others. Reject that ish.
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Before doing any SEO work, it’s important to get a handle on your keyword research. Aside from helping to inform your strategy and structure your content, you’ll get to know the needs of your searchers, the search demand landscape of the SERPs, and what kind of competition you’re up against.
In the second part of the One-Hour Guide to SEO, the inimitable Rand Fishkin covers what you need to know about the keyword research process, from understanding its goals to building your own keyword universe map. Enjoy!
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another portion of our special edition of Whiteboard Friday, the One-Hour Guide to SEO. This is Part II – Keyword Research. Hopefully you’ve already seen our SEO strategy session from last week. What we want to do in keyword research is talk about why keyword research is required. Why do I have to do this task prior to doing any SEO work?
The answer is fairly simple. If you don’t know which words and phrases people type into Google or YouTube or Amazon or Bing, whatever search engine you’re optimizing for, you’re not going to be able to know how to structure your content. You won’t be able to get into the searcher’s brain, into their head to imagine and empathize with them what they actually want from your content. You probably won’t do correct targeting, which will mean your competitors, who are doing keyword research, are choosing wise search phrases, wise words and terms and phrases that searchers are actually looking for, and you might be unfortunately optimizing for words and phrases that no one is actually looking for or not as many people are looking for or that are much more difficult than what you can actually rank for.
The goals of keyword research
So let’s talk about some of the big-picture goals of keyword research.
Understand the search demand landscape so you can craft more optimal SEO strategies
First off, we are trying to understand the search demand landscape so we can craft better SEO strategies. Let me just paint a picture for you.
I was helping a startup here in Seattle, Washington, a number of years ago — this was probably a couple of years ago — called Crowd Cow. Crowd Cow is an awesome company. They basically will deliver beef from small ranchers and small farms straight to your doorstep. I personally am a big fan of steak, and I don’t really love the quality of the stuff that I can get from the store. I don’t love the mass-produced sort of industry around beef. I think there are a lot of Americans who feel that way. So working with small ranchers directly, where they’re sending it straight from their farms, is kind of an awesome thing.
But when we looked at the SEO picture for Crowd Cow, for this company, what we saw was that there was more search demand for competitors of theirs, people like Omaha Steaks, which you might have heard of. There was more search demand for them than there was for “buy steak online,” “buy beef online,” and “buy rib eye online.” Even things like just “shop for steak” or “steak online,” these broad keyword phrases, the branded terms of their competition had more search demand than all of the specific keywords, the unbranded generic keywords put together.
That is a very different picture from a world like “soccer jerseys,” where I spent a little bit of keyword research time today looking, and basically the brand names in that field do not have nearly as much search volume as the generic terms for soccer jerseys and custom soccer jerseys and football clubs’ particular jerseys. Those generic terms have much more volume, which is a totally different kind of SEO that you’re doing. One is very, “Oh, we need to build our brand. We need to go out into this marketplace and create demand.” The other one is, “Hey, we need to serve existing demand already.”
So you’ve got to understand your search demand landscape so that you can present to your executive team and your marketing team or your client or whoever it is, hey, this is what the search demand landscape looks like, and here’s what we can actually do for you. Here’s how much demand there is. Here’s what we can serve today versus we need to grow our brand.
Create a list of terms and phrases that match your marketing goals and are achievable in rankings
The next goal of keyword research, we want to create a list of terms and phrases that we can then use to match our marketing goals and achieve rankings. We want to make sure that the rankings that we promise, the keywords that we say we’re going to try and rank for actually have real demand and we can actually optimize for them and potentially rank for them. Or in the case where that’s not true, they’re too difficult or they’re too hard to rank for. Or organic results don’t really show up in those types of searches, and we should go after paid or maps or images or videos or some other type of search result.
Prioritize keyword investments so you do the most important, high-ROI work first
We also want to prioritize those keyword investments so we’re doing the most important work, the highest ROI work in our SEO universe first. There’s no point spending hours and months going after a bunch of keywords that if we had just chosen these other ones, we could have achieved much better results in a shorter period of time.
Match keywords to pages on your site to find the gaps
Finally, we want to take all the keywords that matter to us and match them to the pages on our site. If we don’t have matches, we need to create that content. If we do have matches but they are suboptimal, not doing a great job of answering that searcher’s query, well, we need to do that work as well. If we have a page that matches but we haven’t done our keyword optimization, which we’ll talk a little bit more about in a future video, we’ve got to do that too.
Understand the different varieties of search results
So an important part of understanding how search engines work — we’re going to start down here and then we’ll come back up — is to have this understanding that when you perform a query on a mobile device or a desktop device, Google shows you a vast variety of results. Ten or fifteen years ago this was not the case. We searched 15 years ago for “soccer jerseys,” what did we get? Ten blue links. I think, unfortunately, in the minds of many search marketers and many people who are unfamiliar with SEO, they still think of it that way. How do I rank number one? The answer is, well, there are a lot of things “number one” can mean today, and we need to be careful about what we’re optimizing for.
So if I search for “soccer jersey,” I get these shopping results from Macy’s and soccer.com and all these other places. Google sort has this sliding box of sponsored shopping results. Then they’ve got advertisements below that, notated with this tiny green ad box. Then below that, there are couple of organic results, what we would call classic SEO, 10 blue links-style organic results. There are two of those. Then there’s a box of maps results that show me local soccer stores in my region, which is a totally different kind of optimization, local SEO. So you need to make sure that you understand and that you can convey that understanding to everyone on your team that these different kinds of results mean different types of SEO.
Now I’ve done some work recently over the last few years with a company called Jumpshot. They collect clickstream data from millions of browsers around the world and millions of browsers here in the United States. So they are able to provide some broad overview numbers collectively across the billions of searches that are performed on Google every day in the United States.
Click-through rates differ between mobile and desktop
The click-through rates look something like this. For mobile devices, on average, paid results get 8.7% of all clicks, organic results get about 40%, a little under 40% of all clicks, and zero-click searches, where a searcher performs a query but doesn’t click anything, Google essentially either answers the results in there or the searcher is so unhappy with the potential results that they don’t bother taking anything, that is 62%. So the vast majority of searches on mobile are no-click searches.
On desktop, it’s a very different story. It’s sort of inverted. So paid is 5.6%. I think people are a little savvier about which result they should be clicking on desktop. Organic is 65%, so much, much higher than mobile. Zero-click searches is 34%, so considerably lower.
There are a lot more clicks happening on a desktop device. That being said, right now we think it’s around 60–40, meaning 60% of queries on Google, at least, happen on mobile and 40% happen on desktop, somewhere in those ranges. It might be a little higher or a little lower.
The search demand curve
Another important and critical thing to understand about the keyword research universe and how we do keyword research is that there’s a sort of search demand curve. So for any given universe of keywords, there is essentially a small number, maybe a few to a few dozen keywords that have millions or hundreds of thousands of searches every month. Something like “soccer” or “Seattle Sounders,” those have tens or hundreds of thousands, even millions of searches every month in the United States.
But people searching for “Sounders FC away jersey customizable,” there are very, very few searches per month, but there are millions, even billions of keywords like this.
The long-tail: millions of keyword terms and phrases, low number of monthly searches
When Sundar Pichai, Google’s current CEO, was testifying before Congress just a few months ago, he told Congress that around 20% of all searches that Google receives each day they have never seen before. No one has ever performed them in the history of the search engines. I think maybe that number is closer to 18%. But that is just a remarkable sum, and it tells you about what we call the long tail of search demand, essentially tons and tons of keywords, millions or billions of keywords that are only searched for 1 time per month, 5 times per month, 10 times per month.
The chunky middle: thousands or tens of thousands of keywords with ~50–100 searches per month
If you want to get into this next layer, what we call the chunky middle in the SEO world, this is where there are thousands or tens of thousands of keywords potentially in your universe, but they only have between say 50 and a few hundred searches per month.
The fat head: a very few keywords with hundreds of thousands or millions of searches
Then this fat head has only a few keywords. There’s only one keyword like “soccer” or “soccer jersey,” which is actually probably more like the chunky middle, but it has hundreds of thousands or millions of searches. The fat head is higher competition and broader intent.
Searcher intent and keyword competition
What do I mean by broader intent? That means when someone performs a search for “soccer,” you don’t know what they’re looking for. The likelihood that they want a customizable soccer jersey right that moment is very, very small. They’re probably looking for something much broader, and it’s hard to know exactly their intent.
However, as you drift down into the chunky middle and into the long tail, where there are more keywords but fewer searches for each keyword, your competition gets much lower. There are fewer people trying to compete and rank for those, because they don’t know to optimize for them, and there’s more specific intent. “Customizable Sounders FC away jersey” is very clear. I know exactly what I want. I want to order a customizable jersey from the Seattle Sounders away, the particular colors that the away jersey has, and I want to be able to put my logo on there or my name on the back of it, what have you. So super specific intent.
Build a map of your own keyword universe
As a result, you need to figure out what the map of your universe looks like so that you can present that, and you need to be able to build a list that looks something like this. You should at the end of the keyword research process — we featured a screenshot from Moz’s Keyword Explorer, which is a tool that I really like to use and I find super helpful whenever I’m helping companies, even now that I have left Moz and been gone for a year, I still sort of use Keyword Explorer because the volume data is so good and it puts all the stuff together. However, there are two or three other tools that a lot of people like, one from Ahrefs, which I think also has the name Keyword Explorer, and one from SEMrush, which I like although some of the volume numbers, at least in the United States, are not as good as what I might hope for. There are a number of other tools that you could check out as well. A lot of people like Google Trends, which is totally free and interesting for some of that broad volume data.
So I might have terms like “soccer jersey,” “Sounders FC jersey”, and “custom soccer jersey Seattle Sounders.” Then I’ll have these columns:
Volume, because I want to know how many people search for it;
Difficulty, how hard will it be to rank. If it’s super difficult to rank and I have a brand-new website and I don’t have a lot of authority, well, maybe I should target some of these other ones first that are lower difficulty.
Organic Click-through Rate, just like we talked about back here, there are different levels of click-through rate, and the tools, at least Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool uses Jumpshot data on a per keyword basis to estimate what percent of people are going to click the organic results. Should you optimize for it? Well, if the click-through rate is only 60%, pretend that instead of 100 searches, this only has 60 or 60 available searches for your organic clicks. Ninety-five percent, though, great, awesome. All four of those monthly searches are available to you.
Business Value, how useful is this to your business?
Then set some type of priority to determine. So I might look at this list and say, “Hey, for my new soccer jersey website, this is the most important keyword. I want to go after “custom soccer jersey” for each team in the U.S., and then I’ll go after team jersey, and then I’ll go after “customizable away jerseys.” Then maybe I’ll go after “soccer jerseys,” because it’s just so competitive and so difficult to rank for. There’s a lot of volume, but the search intent is not as great. The business value to me is not as good, all those kinds of things.
Last, but not least, I want to know the types of searches that appear — organic, paid. Do images show up? Does shopping show up? Does video show up? Do maps results show up? If those other types of search results, like we talked about here, show up in there, I can do SEO to appear in those places too. That could yield, in certain keyword universes, a strategy that is very image centric or very video centric, which means I’ve got to do a lot of work on YouTube, or very map centric, which means I’ve got to do a lot of local SEO, or other kinds like this.
Once you build a keyword research list like this, you can begin the prioritization process and the true work of creating pages, mapping the pages you already have to the keywords that you’ve got, and optimizing in order to rank. We’ll talk about that in Part III next week. Take care.
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“Prove it” is pretty much the name of the game at this point.
As SEOs, we invest so much effort into finding opportunities for our clients, executing strategies, and on the best days, getting the results we set out to achieve.
That’s why it feels so deflating (not to mention mind-boggling) when, after all those increases in rankings, traffic, and conversions our work produced, our clients still aren’t satisfied.
Where’s the disconnect?
The value of SEO in today’s search landscape
You don’t have to convince SEOs that their work is valuable. We know full well how our work benefits our clients’ websites.
Our attention on crawling and indexing ensures that search engine bots crawl all our clients’ important pages, that they’re not wasting time on any unimportant pages, and that only the important, valuable pages are in the index.
Because we understand how Googlebot and other crawlers work, we’re cognizant of how to ensure that search engines understand our pages as they’re intended to be understood, as well as able to eliminate any barriers to that understanding (ex: adding appropriate structured data, diagnosing JavaScript issues, etc.)
We spend our time improving speed, ensuring appropriate language targeting, looking into UX issues, ensuring accessibility, and more because we know the high price that Google places on the searcher experience.
We research the words and phrases that our clients’ ideal customers use to search for solutions to their problems and help create content that satisfies those needs. In turn, Google rewards our clients with high rankings that capture clicks. Over time, this can lower our clients’ customer acquisition costs.
Time spent on earning links for our clients earns them the authority needed to earn trust and perform well in search results.
There are so many other SEO activities that drive real, measurable impact for our clients, even in a search landscape that is more crowded and getting less clicks than ever before. Despite those results, we’ll still fall short if we fail to connect the dots for our clients.
Rankings, traffic, conversions… what’s missing?
What’s a keyword ranking worth without clicks?
What’s organic traffic worth without conversions?
What are conversions worth without booking/signing the lead?
Rankings, traffic, and conversions are all critical SEO metrics to track if you want to prove the success of your efforts, but they are all means to an end.
At the end of the day, what your client truly cares about is their return on investment (ROI). In other words, if they can’t mentally make the connection between your SEO results and their revenue, then the client might not keep you around for long.
From searcher to customer: I made this diagram for a past client to help demonstrate how they get revenue from SEO.
But how can you do that?
10 tips for attaching value to organic success
If you want to help your clients get a clearer picture of the real value of your efforts, try some of the following methods.
1. Know what constitutes a conversion
What’s the main action your client wants people to take on their website? This is usually something like a form fill, a phone call, or an on-site purchase (e-commerce). Knowing how your client uses their website to make money is key.
2. Ask your clients what their highest value jobs are
Know what types of jobs/purchases your client is prioritizing so you can prioritize them too. It’s common for clients to want to balance their “cash flow” jobs (usually lower value but higher volume) with their “big time” jobs (higher value but lower volume). You can pay special attention to performance and conversions on these pages.
3. Know your client’s close rate
How many of the leads your campaigns generate end up becoming customers? This will help you assign values to goals (tip #6).
4. Know your client’s average customer value
This can get tricky if your client offers different services that all have different values, but you can combine average customer value with close rate to come up with a monetary value to attach to goals (tip #6).
5. Set up goals in Google Analytics
Once you know what constitutes a conversion on your client’s website (tip #1), you can set up a goal in Google Analytics. If you’re not sure how to do this, read up on Google’s documentation.
6. Assign goal values
Knowing that the organic channel led to a conversion is great, but knowing the estimated value of that conversion is even better! For example, if you know that your client closes 10% of the leads that come through contact forms, and the average value of their customers is $500, you could assign a value of $50 per goal completion.
7. Consider having an Organic-only view in Google Analytics
For the purpose of clarity, it could be valuable to set up an additional Google Analytics view just for your client’s organic traffic. That way, when you’re looking at your goal report, you know you’re checking organic conversions and value only.
8. Calculate how much you would have had to pay for that traffic in Google Ads
I like to use the Keywords Everywhere plugin when viewing Google Search Console performance reports because it adds a cost per click (CPC) column next to your clicks column. This screenshot is from a personal blog website that I admittedly don’t do much with, hence the scant metrics, but you can see how easy this makes it to calculate how much you would have had to pay for the clicks you got your client for “free” (organically).
9. Use Multi-Channel Funnels
Organic has value beyond last-click! Even when it’s not the channel your client’s customer came through, organic may have assisted in that conversion. Go to Google Analytics > Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels.
10. Bring all your data together
How you communicate all this data is just as important as the data itself. Use smart visualizations and helpful explanations to drive home the impact your work had on your client’s bottom line.
As many possibilities as we have for proving our value, doing so can be difficult and time-consuming. Additional factors can even complicate this further, such as:
Client is using multiple methods for customer acquisition, each with its own platform, metrics, and reporting
Client is somewhat disorganized and doesn’t have a good grasp of things like average customer value or close rate
The challenges can seem endless, but there are ways to make this easier. I’ll be co-hosting a webinar on March 28th that focuses on this very topic. If you’re looking for ways to not only add value as an SEO but also prove it, check it out:
And let’s not forget, we’re in this together! If you have any tips for showing your value to your SEO clients, share them in the comments below.
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If you’re a digital agency, chances are you have your sights set on a huge variety of clients — from entertainment and automotive, to travel and finance — all with their own unique SEO needs.
So how do you attract these companies and provide them with next-level SEO? By using a flexible tracking solution that delivers a veritable smorgasbord of SERP data every single day. Here are just four ways you can leverage STAT to lock down new business.
1. Arm yourself with intel before you pitch
The best way to win over a potential client is to walk into a pitch already aware of the challenges and opportunities in their online space. In other words: come armed with intel.
To get a lay of their search landscape, research which keywords are applicable to your prospect, load those puppies into STAT, and let them run for a few days (you can turn tracking on and off for however many keywords you like, whenever you like).
This way, when it comes time to make your case, you can hit them with hard data on their search visibility and tailored strategies to help them improve.
Walking into a pitch with deep insights in just a few days will make you look like an SEO wizard — and soon-to-be-new clients will know that you can handle any dark magic unleashed on the SERPs by a Google update or new competitors jumping into the mix.
2. Look at your data from every possible angle
As an SEO for an agency, you’re vying to manage the visibility of several clients at any given time, and all of them have multiple websites, operate in different industries and verticals worldwide, and target an ever-growing list of topics and products.
So, when prospective clients expect individualized SEO recommendations, how can you possibly deliver without developing a permanent eye twitch? The answer lies in the ability to track and segment tons of keywords.
Get your mittens on more SERPs
To start, you’ll need to research and compile a complete list of keywords for every prospective client. When one keyword only returns one SERP, and people’s searches are as unique as they are, the longer the list, the greater the scope of insight. It’s the difference between a peek and peruse — getting a snapshot or the whole picture.
For example, let’s say your would-be client is a clothing chain with an online store and a brick-and-mortar in every major Canadian city. You’ll want to know how each of their products appears to the majority of searchers — does [men’s jeans] (and every iteration thereof) return a different SERP than [jeans for men]?
Next, it’s time to play international SEO spy and factor in the languages, locations, and devices of target audiences. By tracking pin-point locations in influential global markets, you can keep apprised of how businesses in your industry are performing in different cities all over the world.
For our example client, this is where the two keywords above are joined by [jeans pour hommes], [jeans for men in Montreal], and [jeans pour hommes dans Montreal], and are tracked in the Montreal postal code where their bricks-and-mortar sit, on desktop and mobile devices — giving you with 10 SERPs-worth of insight. Swap in “in Quebec City,” track in a postal code there, and gain another 10 SERPs lickety-split.
Unlock multiple layers of insights
While a passel of keywords is essential, it’s impossible to make sense of what they’re telling you when they’re all lumped together. This is why segmentation is a must. By slicing and dicing your keywords into different segments, called “tags” in STAT, you produce manageable data views with deep, targeted insight.
You can divvy up and tag your keywords however you like: by device, search intent, location, and more. Still running with our earlier example, by comparing a tag that tracks jeans keywords in Montreal against jeans keywords in Vancouver, you can inform your prospect of which city is bringing up the rear on the SERPs, and how they can better target that location.
STAT also lets you to segment any SERP feature you’re interested in — like snippets, videos, and knowledge graphs — allowing you to identify exactly where opportunities (and threats) lie on the SERP.
So, if your tag is tracking the all-important local places pack and your prospect’s brick-and-mortar store isn’t appearing in them, you can avoid the general “we’ll improve your rankings” approach, and focus your pitch around ways to get them listed. And once you’ve been hired to do the job, you’ll be able to prove your local pack success.
Monitoring a client’s site is one thing, but keeping an eagle-eye on their competition at the same time will give you a serious leg up on other agencies.
With an automated site syncing option, STAT lets you track every known competitor site your prospect has, without any additional keyword management on your part.
All you need to do is plunk in competitor URLs and watch them track against your prospect’s keywords. And because you’ve already segmented the bejesus out of those keywords, you can tell exactly how they stack up in each segment.
To make sure that you’re tracking true search competitors, as well as emerging and dwindling threats, you should be all over STAT’s organic share of voice. By taking the rank and search volume of a given keyword, STAT calculates the percentage of eyeballs that players on the SERPs actually earn.
When you know the ins and outs of everyone in the industry — like who consistently ranks in the top 10 of your SERPs — you can give clients a more comprehensive understanding of where they fit into the big picture and uncover new market opportunities for them to break into. They’ll be thanking their lucky stars they chose you over the other guys.
4. Think big while respecting client budgets
As an enterprise SEO, having economies of scale is a critical factor in beating out other agencies for new business. In order to achieve this, you’ll want to collect and crunch data at an affordable rate.
STAT’s highly competitive per-keyword pricing is designed for scale, which is precisely why STAT and agencies are a match made in heaven. Thinking big won’t break anyone’s bank.
Plus, STAT’s billing is as flexible as the tracking. So, if you only need a few days’ worth of data, whether for a pitch or a project, you can jump into STAT and toggle tracking on or off for any number of keywords, and your billing will follow suit. In simpler terms: you’re only billed for the days you track.
And with no limits on users and no per-seat charges, you’re welcome to invite anyone on your team — even clients or vendors — to see your projects, allowing you to deliver transparency in conjunction with your SEO awesomeness.
If you’d like to do any or all of these things and are looking for the perfect SERP data tool to get the job done, say hello and request a demo!
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Your agency recommends all kinds of useful tactics to help improve the local SEO for your local business clients, but how many of those techniques are leveraging Google Business Profile (GBP) to attract as many walk-ins as possible?
Today, I’m sharing five GBP tweaks worthy of implementation to help turn digital traffic into foot traffic. I’ve ordered them from easiest to hardest, but as you’ll see, even the more difficult ones aren’t actually very daunting — all the more reason to try them out!
1) Answer Google Q&A quickly (they might be leads)
It looks like Coast Nissan has a customer who is ready to walk through the door if they receive an answer. But as you can see, the question has gone unanswered. Note, too, that four people have thumbed the question up, which signifies a shared interest in a potential answer, but it’s still not making it onto the radar of this particular dealership.
Nearly all verticals could have overlooked leads sitting in their GBPs — from questions about dietary options at a restaurant, to whether a retailer stocks a product, to queries about ADA compliance or available parking. Every ask represents a possible lead, and in a competitive retail landscape, who can afford to ignore such an opportunity?
The easiest way for Google My Business (GMB) listing owners and managers to get notified of new questions is via the Google Maps App, as notifications are not yet part of the main GMB dashboard. This will help you catch questions as they arise. The faster your client responds to incoming queries, the better their chances of winning the foot traffic.
2) Post about your proximity to nearby major attractions
Difficulty level: Easy
Imagine someone has just spent the morning at a museum, a landmark, park, or theatre. After exploring, perhaps they want to go to lunch, go apparel shopping, find a gas station, or a bookstore near them. A well-positioned Google Post, like the one below, can guide them right to your client’s door:
This could become an especially strong draw for foot traffic if Google expands its experiment of showing Posts’ snippets not just in the Business Profile and Local Finder, but within local packs:
With a little help from SWIS and Pointy, your retail clients’ GBPs can become the storefront window that beckons in highly-converting foot traffic. Your client’s “See What’s In Store inventory” appears within the Business Profile, letting customers know the business has the exact merchandise they’re looking for:
Pointy is Google’s launch partner for this game-changing GBP feature. I recently interviewed CEO Mark Cummins regarding the ultra-simple Pointy device which makes it a snap for nearly all retailers to instantly bring their inventory online — without the fuss of traditional e-commerce systems and at a truly nominal cost.
I’ll reiterate my prediction that SWIS is “next big thing” in local, and when last I spoke with Mark, one percent of all US retailers had already adopted his product. Encourage your retail clients to sign up and give them an amazing competitive edge on driving foot traffic!
4) Make your profile pic a selfie hotspot
Difficulty level: Medium (feasible for many storefronts)
When a client has a physical premise (and community ordinances permit it), an exterior mural can turn through traffic into foot traffic — it also helps to convert Instagram selfie-takers into customers. As I mentioned in a recent blog post, a modest investment in this strategy could appeal to the 43–58 percent of survey respondents who are swayed to shop in locations that are visually appealing.
If a large outdoor mural isn’t possible, there’s plenty of inspiration for smaller indoor murals, here.
Once the client has made the investment in providing a cultural experience for the community, they can try experimenting with getting the artwork placed as the cover photo on their GBP — anyone looking at a set of competitors in a given area will see this appealing, extra reason to choose their business over others.
Mark my words, local search marketers: We are on the verge of seeing Americans reject the constricted label of “consumer” in a quest for a more holistic view of themselves as whole persons. Local businesses that integrate art, culture, and community life into their business models will be well-placed to answer what, in my view, is a growing desire for authentic human experiences. As a local search marketer, myself, this is a topic I plan to explore further this year.
5) Putting time on your side
Difficulty level: Medium (feasible for willing clients)
Here’s a pet peeve of mine: businesses that serve working people but are only open 9–5. How can your client’s foot traffic achieve optimum levels if their doors are only open when everybody is at work?
So, here’s the task: Do a quick audit of the hours posted on the GBPs of your client’s direct competitors. For example, I found three craft shops in one small city with these hours:
Guess which competitor is getting all of the business after 6 PM every day of the week, when most people are off work and able to shop?
Now, it may well be that some of your smaller clients are already working as many hours as they can, but have they explored whether their hours are actually ideal for their customers’ needs and whether any time slots aren’t being filled in the community by their competitors? What if, instead of operating under the traditional 9–5, your client switched to 11–7, since no other competitor in town is open after 5 PM? It’s the same number of hours and your client would benefit from getting all the foot traffic of the 9–5-ers.
Alternatively, instead of closing on Saturdays, the business closed on Mondays — perhaps this is the slowest of their weekdays? Being open on the weekend could mean that the average worker can now access said business and become a customer.
It will take some openness to change, but if a business agrees to implementation, don’t forget to update the GMB hours and push out the new hours to the major citation platforms via service like Moz Local.
Your turn to add your best GMB moves
I hope you’ll take some of these simple GBP tips to an upcoming client meeting. And if they decide to forge ahead with your tips, be sure to monitor the outcomes! How great if a simple audit of hours turned into a foot traffic win for your client?
In the meantime, if you have any favorite techniques, hacks, or easy GMB wins to share with our community, I’d love to read your comments!
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Can you learn SEO in an hour? Surprisingly, the answer is yes, at least when it comes to the fundamentals!
With this edition of Whiteboard Friday, we’re kicking off something special: a six-part series of roughly ten-minute-long videos designed to deliver core SEO concepts efficiently and effectively. It’s our hope that this will serve as a helpful resource for a wide range of people:
Beginner SEOs looking to get acquainted with the field concisely & comprehensively
Clients, bosses, and stakeholders who would benefit from an enhanced understanding of your work
New team members who need quick and easy onboarding
Colleagues with SEO-adjacent roles, such as web developers and software engineers
Today we’ll be covering Part 1: SEO Strategy with the man who wrote the original guide on SEO, our friend Rand. Settle in, and stay tuned next Friday for our second video covering keyword research!
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a special edition of the Whiteboard Friday series. I’m Rand Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of Moz, and I’m here with you today because I’m going to deliver a one-hour guide to SEO, front and back, so that you can learn in just an hour the fundamentals of the practice and be smarter at choosing a great SEO firm to work with, hiring SEO people.
A handy SEO resource for your clients, team, and colleagues
If you are already in SEO, you might pick up some tips and tactics that you didn’t otherwise know or hadn’t previously considered. I want to ask those of you who are sort of intermediate level and advanced level SEOs — and I know there are many of you who have historically watched me on Whiteboard Friday and I really appreciate that — to give this video a chance even though it is at the beginner level, because my hope is that it will be valuable to you to send to your clients, your potential customers, people who join your team and work with you, developers or software engineers or web devs who you are working with and whose help you need but you want them to understand the fundamentals of SEO.
If those are the people that you’re talking to, excellent. This series is for you. We’re going to begin with SEO strategy. That is our first part. Then we’ll get into things like keyword research and technical SEO and link building and all of that good stuff as well.
The essentials: What is SEO, and what does it do?
So first off, SEO is search engine optimization. It is essentially the practice of influencing or being able to control some of the results that Google shows when someone types in or speaks a query to their system.
I say Google. You can influence other search engines, like Bing and DuckDuckGo and Yahoo and Seznam if you’re in the Czech Republic or Baidu. But we are primarily focused on Google because Google has more than a 90% market share in the United States and, in fact, in North America and South America, in most of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East with a few exceptions.
Start with business goals
So SEO is a tactic. It’s a way to control things. It is not a business goal. No one forms a new company or sits down with their division and says, “Okay, we need to rank for all of these keywords.” Instead what you should be saying, what hopefully is happening in your teams is, “We have these business goals.”
Example: “Grow our online soccer jersey sales to a web-savvy, custom heavy audience.”
Let’s say we’re an online e-commerce shop and we sell customized soccer jerseys, well, football for those of you outside of the United States. So we want to grow our online soccer jersey sales. Great, that is a true business goal. We’re trying to build a bigger audience. We want to sell more of these jerseys. In order to do that, we have marketing goals that we want to achieve, things like we want to build brand awareness.
Next, marketing goals
Build brand awareness
We want more people to know who we are, to have heard of our particular brand, because people who have heard of us are going to be more likely to buy from us. The first time you hear about someone, very unlikely to buy. The seventh time you’ve heard about someone, much more likely to buy from them. So that is a good marketing goal, and SEO can help with that. We’ll talk about that in a sec.
Grow top-of-funnel traffic
You might want to grow top-of-funnel traffic. We want more people coming to the site overall so that we can do a better job of figuring out who is the right audience for us and converting some of those people, retargeting some of those people, capturing emails from some of those people, all those good things.
Attract ready-to-buy fans
We want to attract ready-to-buy fans, people who are chomping at the bit to buy our soccer jerseys, customize them and get them shipped.
SEO, as a strategy, is essentially a set of tactics, things that you will do in the SEO world to rank for different keywords in the search engines or control and influence what already ranks in there so that you can achieve your marketing goals so that you can achieve your business goals.
Don’t get this backwards. Don’t start from a place of SEO. Especially if you are an SEO specialist or a practitioner or you’re joining a consulting firm, you should always have an excellent idea of what these are and why the SEO tactics that you are undertaking fit into them. If you don’t, you should be asking those questions before you begin any SEO work.
Otherwise you’re going to accomplish things and do things that don’t have the impact or don’t tie directly to the impact that the business owners care about, and that’s going to mean probably you won’t get picked up for another contract or you won’t accomplish the goals that mean you’re valuable to the team or you do things that people don’t necessarily need and want in the business and therefore you are seen as a less valuable part of it.
Finally, move into SEO strategy
But if you’re accomplishing things that can clearly tie to these, the opposite. People will really value what you do.
Rank for low-demand, high-conversion keywords
So SEO can do things like rank for low demand, things that don’t have a lot of searches per month but they are high conversion likely keywords, keywords like “I am looking for a customized Seattle Sounders soccer jersey that’s in the away colors.” Well, there’s not a lot of search demand for that exact phrase. But if you’re searching for it, you’re very likely to convert.
Earn traffic from high-demand, low-competition, less commerce-focused keywords
You could try and earn traffic from high-demand, low competition keywords that are less focused directly on e-commerce. So it could be things like “Seattle Sounders news” or “Seattle Sounders stats” or a comparison of “Portland Timbers versus Seattle Sounders.” These are two soccer or football clubs in the Pacific Northwest.
Build content that attracts links and influencer engagement
Or you might be trying to do things like building content that attracts links and influencer engagement so that in the future you can rank for more competitive keywords. We’ll talk about that in a sec. SEO can do some amazing things, but there are also things that it cannot do.
What SEO can do:
If you put things in here, if you as an SEO pitch to your marketing team or your business owners that SEO can do things that it can’t, you’re going to be in trouble. So when we compose an SEO strategy, a set of tactics that tries to accomplish marketing goals that tie to business goals, SEO can do things like:
Attract searchers that are seeking your content.
Control how your brand is seen in search results when someone searches for your particular name.
Nudge searchers toward queries by influencing what gets suggested in the auto suggest or by suggesting related searches or people also ask boxes.
Anything that shows up in the search results, nearly anything can be influenced by what we as SEOs can do.
What SEO cannot do:
Grow or create search demand on its own
But SEO cannot grow or create search demand by itself. So if someone says, “Hey, I want us to get more traffic for this specific keyword,” if you’re already ranking number one and you have some videos showing in the results and you’re also in the image results and you’ve got maybe a secondary page that links off to you from the results, you might say, “Hey, there’s just not more demand,” and SEO by itself can’t create that additional demand.
Build brand (by itself)
SEO also can’t build brand, at least not by itself. It can certainly be a helpful part of that structure. But if someone says, “Hey, I want us to be better known among this audience,”you can say, “Well, SEO can help a little, but it can’t build a brand on its own, and it certainly can’t build brand perception on its own.” People are going to go and visit your website. They’re going to go and experience, have an interaction with what you’ve created on the web. That is going to be far more of a brand builder, a brand indicator than just what appears in the search results. So SEO can’t do that alone.
Directly convert customers
It also can’t directly convert customers. A lot of the time what we find is that someone will do a great job of ranking, but when you actually reach the website, when visitors reach the website, they are unsatisfied by the search, which by the way is one of the reasons why this one-hour guide is going to include a section on searcher satisfaction.
When Google sees over time that searchers are unsatisfied by a result, they will push that result down in the rankings and find someone who does a great job of satisfying searchers, and they will rank them instead. So the website has to do this. It is part of SEO. It’s certainly part of the equation, but SEO can’t influence it or control it on its own.
WORK OVERNIGHT!
Finally, last but not least, SEO cannot work overnight. It just won’t happen. SEO is a long-term investment. It is very different from paid search ads, PPC, also called SEM sometimes, buying from Google ads or from Bing ads and appearing in the sponsored results. That is a tactic where you can pour money in and optimize and get results out in 24 hours. SEO is more like a 24-month long process.
The SEO Growth Path
I’ve tried to show that here. The fundamental concept is when you have a new website, you need to earn these things — links and engagement and historical performance in the rankings.
As you earn those things, other people are linking to you from around the web, people are talking about you, people are engaging with your pages and your brand, people start searching for your brand specifically, people are clicking you more in the search results and then having good experiences on your website, as all those great things happen, you will grow your historical engagement and links and ranking factors, all these things that we sort of put into the bucket of the authority and influence of a website.
3–6 months: Begin to rank for things in the long tail of search demand
As that grows, you will be able to first, over time, this might be three to six months down here, you might be able to rank for a few keywords in the long tail of search demand.
6–9 months: Begin to rank for more and more competitive keywords
After six to nine months, if you’re very good at this, you may be able to rank for more and more competitive keywords.
12–18 months: Compete for tougher keywords
As you truly grow a brand that is well-known and well thought of on the internet and by search engines, 12 to 18 months in, maybe longer, you may be able to compete for tougher and tougher keywords. When I started the Moz website, back in the early days of Google, it took me years, literally two or three years before I was ranking for anything in Google, anything in the search engines, and that is because I had to first earn that brand equity, that trust, that relationship with the search engines, those links and that engagement.
Today this is more true than ever because Google is so good at estimating these things. All right. I look forward to hearing all about the amazing strategies and structures that you’ve got probably in the comments down below. I’m sure it will be a great thread. We’ll move on to the second part of our one-hour guide next time — keyword research. Take care.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
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