Is TikTok Going to Replace Google?

TikTok has absolutely taken the world by storm since 2020. And it’s not just for the kids — with over 1 billion users, it’s popular across all demographics.

User behavior on TikTok has been evolving as its popularity grows. We’ve seen the app go from dancing teenagers to influencing shopping behavior across the world.

Now the next step for TikTok seems to be turning into the next big search engine.

Is TikTok the new Google?

Short answer: no.

TikTok is an internal search engine for TikTok content. It’s dedicated to a particular area of focus and a particular format: video.

There are a few different factors at play in how we choose the search engine to solve our need in the moment, but at the end of the day, TikTok and Google satisfy very different search intents.

Why do users search on TikTok?

We’re seeing TikTok take market share from Google in verticals such as food, gardening, and travel. These are low stakes searches where the outcome is unlikely to cause you harm. Since you don’t need a perfect or factual answer, you can use TikTok to find it.

TikTok’s video format makes a lot more sense if you’re looking for answers where the visual matters. Date spots in your city or a gardening tutorial are perfect searches for the platform.

Another reason users choose TikTok is that the answer will always be provided by a subject matter expert, not a niche blogger. Social proof abounds, as you can assess the expertise of your source by looking at the comments and number of views, likes, and followers.

A few concerns have been raised about the spread of misinformation on TikTok, as they have in most other content platforms. However, these are slightly more worrying on TikTok because it has an unprecedented potential for virality, and a large, young user base, who are more easily influenced during content discovery than during active search.

Users are even searching for TikTok content on Google, with queries such as “TikTok pasta”, amassing 1,778 searches per month in the US:

Branded queries on Google for TikTok content have a combined monthly search volume of 30.1 million in the US alone. But in the spirit of transparency, I’ll share that most of those are not PG (or even PG-13).

Active search vs. content discovery

There are two key behaviors on TikTok we must differentiate: active search and content discovery.

Content discovery

Content discovery is the main behavior on TikTok and it’s the one we’re most familiar with. It’s when the user is scrolling through the app, passively hoping to find entertainment, financial advice, recipe ideas, or a new favorite beauty product.

Users have been enjoying a positive content discovery experience on TikTok for years. They have found new restaurants or a selfie angle that makes them look like Kylie Jenner.

This is the key to understanding TikTok’s rise as a search engine: This positive content discovery experience has earned the users’ trust. They know that the content they want to consume is on TikTok. So when the need arises, they turn to the video platform first.

Active search

This leads us into active search. Active search is when a user types a specific question into TikTok’s search box.

On TikTok, users can seamlessly scroll through all of the content that answers their query, without having to open multiple tabs on their browser. This improves user satisfaction, reduces friction and, most importantly, teaches TikTok the best answer. More on that later.

Let’s talk about psychology

Persuasion resistance is a natural psychological defense when we feel like someone is trying to manipulate us into buying, doing, or thinking something. We perceive persuasion as a threat and we try to move away from it or oppose it.

Over a decade ago, the online advertising industry started to worry about a decrease in the CTR of their display ads. Pop-ups got dismissed, banners went ignored. Users had caught onto advertisers: we were trying to sell them something.

This triggered a phenomenon known to psychologists as persuasion resistance. Advertisers called this response “banner blindness”. As an industry, we developed four different strategies to counter this resistance to persuasion.

1. First, we started making our ads look like they were part of the content. We called these “native ads”.

2. Then, we started placing the ads in unexpected places, where users were less likely to be bracing themselves to be sold to.

3. We started making ads a little bit more relevant to the context, so that they felt less intrusive.

4. Finally, we moved into social proof, and we started leveraging the power of trust. Thus influencer marketing was born.

TikTok leverages these four strategies to counter resistance to persuasion by design. How do they do it?

• Creators are paid for their content through the Creator Fund, based on how many views or engagement their videos get. They are incentivized to make quality, engaging content that users will enjoy, not just by making deals with brands.

• They regularly showcase their beauty routines, fashion, or home products, with or without a brand sponsorship. This makes affiliate or sponsored content look just like regular content.

• Their ads are served in exactly the same format as their regular content, with a small tag letting you know that it’s promoted content.

• All the videos have an identified creator, visible like and view counts, and open comments. Social proof abounds!

But SEO is not paid social or influencer marketing. So why should we care?

SEO is now omnichannel

Putting the right content in front of users at the right time is at the core of what we do. If we want to keep achieving this goal, we must provide content where the user is looking for it.

As technology integrates further into our lives, we’ve seen the rise of multisearch. Google created the term as a way to integrate their Google Lens functionality into the way we speak about search and SEO.

We now search by asking our home assistant devices questions or taking a picture of a tree we don’t recognize. We search on Google Maps, on Youtube, on Instagram and even on Amazon.

The days when SEO was about responding to a query in a search box are long gone.

By putting our content out on TikTok and optimizing it for search, we are helping users find our content when they need it, where they want it, and in the format they chose to consume it.

TikTok on the SERPs

An omnichannel SEO strategy will let you interact with your users beyond your own domain, and it can help your brand take up more real estate in the SERPs.

Google is trying to diversify the domains they show on search, so if you want to feature in the SERPs multiple times, you’ll have to distribute your brand’s content across different domains.

TikTok’s website has over 31 million pages built programmatically around topics, hashtags, and sounds:

Topic pages make up the most of their URLs and traffic, and seem to be built based on hashtags used, along with some form of machine learning consolidation of their variations. These include related videos, topics, users, hashtags, and sounds.

Based on the data available on different tools, we know that this section on TikTok’s website has about 157 million monthly organic clicks.

Based on the numbers alone, the benefit of having your content feature in these pages is obvious.

Industries that should be on TikTok

TikTok serves you content based on what the algorithm has determined you’ll enjoy, not based on who you follow. So users constantly discover new creators.

The TikTok algorithm does a genuinely good job at finding your interests or helping you discover stuff that you like. These topics of interest become small niches with their own name.

Much like a subreddit, TikTok has unofficial “toks”. You can find niches such as book-tok, finance-tok, food-tok, and many others.

Based on the data, case studies, and some expert opinions, there are industries that can truly benefit from being on the platform and surfacing content tagged for these various “toks”:

• Sports teams

• Streaming services and entertainers

• Fashion and beauty brands

• Restaurants and food bloggers

• Travel brands and influencers

• Home and DIY content creators and brands

If you think this list reminds you of the top industries on Pinterest, you are right.

TikTok and Pinterest have a lot in common. Both platforms prioritize content discovery based on your interests and serve mainly visual content.

When looking at suggested searches, the value becomes clear when I start typing keywords typically associated with an informational or commercial intent:

While these are personalized for each user, you can see that others are searching for content that brands or publishers have typically kept on their blogs and find valuable for their businesses.

Brands looking to increase their brand awareness can benefit from being on TikTok regardless of their industry. After all, nobody expected the success Duolingo has had on the platform.

@duolingo this dumpy is literally a single mom who works 2 jobs #Duolingo#fgoogletranslate#DuaLipa#Dulapeep#Dualingo#comedy#trend#twerkit_twerkit♬ Brujeria – ✿

https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js

Conclusion

Is TikTok threatening Google? No. Is it worth the attention of SEOs? Yes.

Over the next few months, keep an eye out for more pieces on how to make the most of this upstart and unlikely content discovery search engine. I will be writing about the TikTok algorithm, what the search experience looks like on TikTok, and how to make sure your videos rank.

Why It’s Getting Harder to Rank for Some Commercial Keywords (+ What You Can Do About It)

Our inbound lead generation is highly dependent upon SEO — it’s how we get more than 70% of our leads. So, naturally, we got a tad nervous when we saw some of our top commercial landing pages dipping out of top-five positions for their targeted search terms.

When we took to the SERPs to investigate who was unseating us, we discovered something equal parts unsettling and interesting: Our high-value, commercial-intent landing pages weren’t being displaced by competitors. They were being ousted by business directories and “listicles” that rank or compare multiple companies.

In fact, an evaluation of seven of our most important commercial keywords demonstrates a 50% increase in the number of lists and directories in top-five organic SERP real estate year-over-year (excluding SERP features such as People Also Ask).

Here’s an example for the keyword “SEO content writing services.” The image on the left is the SERP in 2022, and the one on the right is the SERP in 2021:

Notice the difference? The Featured Snippet, which we owned in 2021, is gone, we’ve dropped to position 5, and there are now three lists in the top-5 organic results where there used to be none.

We saw this again and again, and it left us with three questions:

1. Is there, in fact, an intent shift happening here, where Google is favoring lists, directories, and company rankings (consciously or unconsciously) over traditional commercial landing pages?

2. If so, what can be done about it?

3. What does this mean for the future of SEO?

Let’s tackle them one at a time.

Part 1: Are there more lists in 2022 than in years prior?

The answer: Based on a random sampling of commercial-intent keywords, yes. To what extent and who is most affected are the key questions, though.

Let’s look at how we figured this out, and evaluate the evidence

First things first: What do we mean by “lists” in SERPs?

For our purposes, we’ll define a “list” as any Google search result that compares, ranks, or evaluates multiple businesses. An example is something like, “8 best coffee grinders of 2022.” A Clutch directory listing for “Top Content Marketing Agencies” would also apply.

These could be off-site content from a third party writing about other companies, or an on-site list in which the publisher shrewdly ranks multiple companies, including their own. Here is NP Digital doing that very thing:

These different formats of “lists” are unified by a comparison-type commercial intent.

Second: How do we see a SERP change over time?

If we want to see how SERPs have changed from one year to the next, we need to be able to see what today’s SERP for a certain keyword looked like a year ago.

Here’s what the SERP for “mesh wifi router” looked like in 2021, based on Ahrefs data:

Third: How exactly should you compare one year’s SERP to another?

For it to be a fair assessment, I’d have to select keywords completely at random and then see how their SERPS differ from 2021 to 2022. The problem with Ahrefs’ historical SERP data, however, is that it plays poorly with local search intent.

For instance, I noticed that the search for “Landscaping services” was showing me results from Los Angeles.

I conducted most of this study from the literal opposite side of the country (Portland, ME), and I most certainly never see Los Angeles-specific results when I search for services here.

I noticed this with several other local-intent terms, like roofing for instance. Why does it happen? I suspect it has something to do with how they scrape or archive data to give their best estimate of what a SERP looked like at a point in time. Regardless, this means that my selection of commercial keywords had to be limited to terms that don’t have a strong local leaning.

Here is what that random selection of 25 keywords ended up looking like:

1. Content marketing agency
2. Moving services
3. HR Services
4. Website hosting services
5. Graphic design services
6. Email marketing services
7. Shipping service
8. Cloud migration service
9. Data center services
10. Staffing agency
11. Supply chain software
12. Keyword research tool
13. EHR system
14. Architecture firm
15. Cloud hosting service
16. IT consulting company
17. Accounts payable software
18. Marketing consultancy
19. Small business loan
20. Affordable laptops
21. Mesh wifi router
22. Water pick
23. Small coffee grinder
24. Budget printer
25. B2B lead generation service

So what did I do with these keywords?

1. Determined whether more lists are showing up in 2022, 2021, or 2020 SERPs. I simply counted the number of “lists” in the SERP in 2022 and compared it to the years prior.

2. Determined whether more lists are ranking in the top five organic listings in 2022, 2021, or 2020. I did this, again, by counting the number of lists for each year that appear in the top five. The point here is to see not just if there are more lists in SERPs, but whether more of them are ranking higher in 2022.

Note that I did not count SERP features, as I was primarily concerned with the actual listings.

Disclaimer: This is by no means an exhaustive or completely conclusive study. It’s really more of a random sampling, or a “head count.”

Finally: What did the results say?

Let’s look at the numbers. Below is the total lists from the 25 SERPs I looked at:

Overall, there was an 8.5% increase in the number of lists between 2021 and 2022 (and the difference between 2020 and 2021 is nominal).

That might not seem groundbreaking, but the sample size is not insignificant: I looked at approximately 200 total listings (using 25 keywords, most of the SERPs had nine or 10 listings).

So that 8.5% increase carries some weight.

Things get more compelling when we look at the top five results:

The number of lists in the top five positions increased by 35.5% from 2021 to 2022. In this case, our sample size is a hard 125 listings, since we counted the first five organic results for every single one of our 25 keywords.

Again, not a nail in the coffin, but it is meaningful.

In summary

Here’s what we know:

• 2022 had more lists than 2021 and 2020.

• 2022 had double-digit percentage gains in terms of lists in the top-five results over both 2021 and 2022.

• But, 2021 actually has slightly fewer lists than 2020.

• And 2021 saw a decline in lists in top-five results of nearly 12% from 2020.

Here’s what it likely means:

• Overall, the number of total lists and top-five lists has trended upward since 2020, with the latter trending upward much more significantly.

• Pulling from this data pool, there is sufficient evidence showing that lists are more dominant in the top five positions on SERPs for commercial keywords in 2022 than either of the preceding years.

Here’s what it does not mean:

• That this trend is universal. After all, we left out local intent, which is a big deal for some companies. The data seems solid for non-location searches, but we can’t evaluate what we can’t reliably see (local-intent commercial searches).

This is what it all looks like visually:

So why the slight dip from 2020 to 2021? It reads like a blip in what is otherwise an upward trend, but we can only speculate. Three years of data, while not bad, isn’t enough to conclusively signify a long-term trend.

However, it’s more than enough of a change to affect any company that relied heavily on those top-five positions in 2021. If you’ve seen this change (like we have), you know how much it can hurt.

Which brings us to:

Part 2: What can be done about it?

The answer: Get listed in relevant directories, make your own lists, and infiltrate others’ lists.

Again, we’ll go one by one.

1. Get listed in relevant directories

If a directory is outranking your landing page for an important commercial term, you want to be on that directory, and as high up in it as possible. Invest time and energy into sourcing the reviews needed to improve your rank.

For several years, we more or less owned the number one spot for “content marketing agency.” Today, we’re ranking third, and we are only one of two commercial LPs on the entire SERP.

The number one spot is now held by Clutch. When we saw Clutch coming for us in 2020, we ramped up our efforts to acquire more reviews on the platform. This got us ranking highly in their directory.

The result: It’s one of our top sources of referral traffic and the top source of conversions from referral traffic.

Before pursuing paid options with business directories, I’d recommend doing everything possible to bring your organic ranking up, as many directories use organic rank as a tie-breaker in their “bidding.” I’ll add one extremely important note here: You never know which directory will be the next big winner in the SERPs. Sure, target most of your reviews for the ones that sustain a strong presence, but also scour the web for directories that list your competitors, but not you.

Link intersect tools from the likes of Moz can help you do this, and it’s so worth the time. Another way is to just explore SERPs of some of the relevant keywords in your industry.

In mid-2021, our link building specialist spent literally five minutes getting us listed in a directory called Growth Marketing Pro. As a result of those five minutes, we’ve since earned over 1,500 users, and 46 conversions.

Just look at all the keywords that directory is on page one for — not to mention some of that keyword volume:

It’s just such an easy win.

2. Make your own lists

We’ve only recently begun exploring this option, and as you can see, position 14 is nothing to really brag about.

But we’re playing a long game. Our post about content marketing platforms went live a few months ago. It hasn’t landed on page one yet, but our hope is that we’ve created something that will build backlinks over time, and that we can update and re-promote year after year. And each time we update it, we’ll optimize the on-page copy to make sure it’s strongly positioned to succeed in search.

As with most of the strategies referenced in this section, it’s still too soon to attribute success to this, but it’s something to think about. If other sites can create comprehensive lists that feature their own product, you can, too. It’s just a matter of creating said list strategically, and then promoting it and monitoring performance over time.

3. Infiltrate others’ lists

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Or at least try by brokering your media strengths in exchange for a spot on their page one listing.

We’ve had mixed success here. In some cases, the promise of a link exchange, a guest blog post, or a guest appearance on our podcast were enough to get us included on a strategic list.

Appearing on those lists is great, as it gives us more visibility on SERPs for high-value keywords. But much to our existential chagrin, publishers have (on more than one occasion) flat-out told us we need to pay to be listed on their site. I’ll save the far-reaching, philosophical implications of this for Part 3 of this post.

For now, my advice is to add what we’ll call “referral SEO” to your existing backlink efforts. Think of it as targeted brand mentions. Your targets are based on what list is ranking for a keyword that is highly important to you. Once you’ve earned your placement, keep an eye on your referral traffic from that source.

Part 3: What does this mean for the future of SEO?

Answer: It’s complicated — and a potentially explosive subject.

Off the cuff, there’s a few big questions to unpack:

1. As directories and lists capture more page one SERP territory, they’re looking to cash in. One publisher literally told us they’d consider putting us on one of their lists if we paid them $3,500. Does Google care about that? Worse, at what point does commercial SEO become a pay-to-play situation, whereby if you want your company on a SERP, you have to pay your way onto someone else’s page?

2. When should you stop investing in certain commercial landing pages? Like I said, commercial pages are going extinct on the SERP for one of our most important keywords, “content marketing agency.” For now, we’re in position three. But we’ve seen all but one of our competitors get knocked onto page two. What happens then?

I can’t answer these questions confidently, but here goes:

I like to think the answer to the first question is that Google will catch on to what’s happening here, and start penalizing lists and directories that are presenting results based on who’s paying them, as opposed to what might actually be the best, most meaningful result for that query. But I have no idea if or how Google will do that.

For the second question, we’d have to shift our keyword target. At some point, we may need to bow out and understand where we can’t compete with these directories head-on, and assess whether there’s another keyword of equal value that we should target instead.

My first answer is hopeful and tenuous, and my second opens the floodgates to a whole lot of future work. But unfortunately, that’s the best we can do right now.

The final takeaways

Yes, there is some evidence that lists are now more prominent on page one for commercial keywords.

Yes, there is something you can and should do about it — and as always with organic SEO, you have to keep playing the game and run alongside the SERPs. Improve your rankings in directories. Get listed in new directories. Make some lists. Trade some backlinks. Get wily and start infiltrating some SERPs.

And no, we don’t quite know what this means for the future of SEO.

All you can really do is stay informed, stay data-driven, and keep updating your strategies to have a fighting chance of maintaining some sort of presence on page one for your most important commercial keywords.

How to Find Your Real SEO Competitors — Whiteboard Friday

Competitive research and analysis is a critical component of your SEO strategy. You may have an idea of who your busines competitors are, but your real SEO competitors are the ones who target the same keywords, speak to the same audience, and solve for the same consumer needs. 

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Lidia Infante walks you through two approaches to find out who those competitors are.

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 Fridays. My name is Lidia Infante, and I’m the Senior SEO Manager at Sanity.io. Today, we’re going to be talking about how to find your real SEO competitors.

Competitor identification and competitor research is absolutely key to a good SEO strategy. And in order to nail it, you need to figure out who your competitors really are. So how do we know that someone is a competitor in search?

Essentially, they need to meet three criteria. They’re targeting the same keywords as you, they’re speaking to the same audience, and they solve for the same consumer need as you. That is, if your target audience goes with them, they have no more need for you.

There are essentially two approaches to identifying your competitors. You’ve got a top-down approach and you’ve got a bottom-up approach. 

Top-down approach to competitive research

So let’s begin with this one. The very first thing you are going to do is contact other departments. Depending on where you are and the type of vertical that you’re working in, you’re going to want to talk to sales, you’re going to want to talk to support, to customer success, to other areas of marketing, and even engineering, and ask them to provide a list of their perceived competitors. 

The next thing you’re going to do is check an audience research tool. I recommend, for example, True Competitor by Moz, obviously. 

And then you’re going to want to find the overlap between the two lists, right? So out of the list that your department and your colleagues say that are your competitors and the list that your tool says those are your competitors, you’re going to want to find the overlap.

The advantages of this method is that it helps you get buy-in because other departments are going to recognize parts of their work into the output that you’re going to present and build better connections with them. And it’s really fast. You can get this done in a day, even less, depends on how long you’re going to have to wait for that information from other departments. 

There are other aspects of it that are not as good. So, for example, it’s not going to be the most accurate competitor research that you’ve ever had, and you’re not going to be able to drill into competitors by topic.

However, this is best for performing sites. So if your site has been online for a while and you’re ranking for a few of your target keywords, this is going to work really well for you. And going for the bottom-up framework might be overkill.

Bottom-up approach to competitive research

But then if you’re starting a new site, or if you really, really want to dig into who your competitors are, you’re going to want to do the bottom-up way. 

So the very first thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to identify what your target keywords are, and then we’re going to cluster them into little topics. 

For each of those keywords, we’re going to download the SERP results, the top 10, the first page. And we’re going to analyze the competitor presence for each of your topics.

So if, let’s say, Amazon shows up in 100% of your keywords for X topic, you know that this is very key for you. And then what you can do is drill down even further and identify the SERP features that are present in each topic.

You’ve already done the download. You already have the data. Just dig in a little deeper and you’ll find out if you are best to attack these results with infographics, articles, video, any other format.

This is very accurate, but it can be really slow. The bottom-up framework is really good if you’re starting a new site, or if you’re not sure that the approach that you’ve had before is working. Since it’s a little tricky, I have provided a free template that you can find linked in the text below. And you can find me on socials at @lidiainfante or my website, lidiainfante.com.

But before you go, to point two, I was using Moz’s True Competitor tool, and it blew my mind. I recently joined a new company, Sanity.io, and I really wanted to figure out who my competitors are. I’m not an expert in headless CMSs and the structure content space, so I’ve been working on it for literal weeks. Just now, I was hanging out with the Moz team. They showed me the tool, and they immediately nailed my top five competitors on a click. What is that? Amazing.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

A Guide to Franchise SEO

As franchises can have a large number of locations by nature, search marketers are faced with the ever present hurdle of scale. More locations means more content and landing pages to manage, and a much bigger chance of running into technical SEO issues. These challenges can be even more daunting when combined with an older CMS, franchisee-generated content, and tracking issues.

At Go Fish Digital, we’ve been able to work with quite a few franchise businesses and advise on their SEO strategies. Over time, we’ve been able to identify common problems with these campaigns, and ways to solve these issues, the framework for which I’ll cover in this piece.

What is franchise SEO?

Franchise SEO is a set of initiatives to improve the search engine visibility of franchise websites, which are websites that promote an overall brand while at the same time offering localized pages for multiple locations of that brand. Strategies include scaling keyword research, creating localized landing pages, and removing duplicate content.

Broadly, franchise SEOs need to always be thinking about scalable approaches, local page quality, and technical issues that are common on these types of sites. Below I’ll cover some of our favorite approaches when handling a franchise site.

Franchise SEO best practices

Scaling keyword research

To start your franchise SEO campaign, you’ll want to identify and track the keywords that are most valuable to your business. Tracking your core keywords will allow you to monitor a couple of things:

1. Visibility changes for individual keywords

2. Aggregate rankings to see the overall SEO health of your website

The issue that most franchises face is that they offer a wide variety of service offerings across a large number of geographic areas. For instance, a national plumber may provide 20 different types of services (water leaks, sump pumps, etc.) across 50 high priority markets. This can make keyword research extremely difficult, as you’ll want to be sure you’re tracking your site’s visibility across all of these different service/geographic combinations.

For this type of analysis, we love using the tool MergeWords. Once you identify the combinations of services and locations, you can easily plug this information into the tool to ensure that you’re creating queries for every combination.

This process allows you to more easily scale the keyword research process to ensure that there are no gaps in your rank tracking data.

Localize and segment your keyword tracking

With franchises, there is no such thing as a “national” ranking. Even queries with geographic modifiers such as “commercial cleaning” will have inherent local intent. A search for a query like this will bring up results that are specific to your area without you having to specify that information to Google. Tracking your keywords at a “national” level won’t provide you much insight as to how visible you are when real users perform a search.

Most rank tracking solutions will come with some type of location feature that will allow you to monitor a particular keyword in a specific geographic area. Many tools will allow you to get as granular as defining the exact ZIP code of the area that you want to track. We enjoy using tools such as STAT (pictured here) for this type of rank tracking.

This can still be useful even if you’re a business that has customers in a wide geographic area, but don’t have a physical location in each one. For example, a cleaning business might only have a few locations, but serve an entire state. In these situations, it can be beneficial to identify your highest priority/highest populated areas and set up localized keyword tracking for each one.

If you wanted to track all across the state of North Carolina, you could track keywords in geographic areas such as:

1. Charlotte

2. Raleigh

3. Durham

4. Chapel Hill

5. Winston-Salem

Once tracking your geo-specific keywords, you can then utilize keyword segments to monitor how you perform in a specific location. Keyword segments will allow you to drill down to analyze aggregate local rankings. You can do this by creating a segment for all of the queries you’re monitoring for a particular location.

For example, here you can see how a particular site ranks on the first page in Chapel Hill, NC:

Review high priority geographic areas

Now with segmented rank tracking set up, you’ll be in a great position to benchmark where you stand across your different locations. Doing this can help you better analyze the highest priority geographical areas. This can help you better focus your strategy, even if you’re managing a large number of locations.

For example, in our location in Chapel Hill, NC, we can see that 67% of our tracked keywords are ranking on the first page:

However, when we look at visibility in Fairfax, VA, we can see that only 36% of our tracked queries rank in the same positions.

This data allows us to see that we don’t rank as well in Fairfax when compared to Chapel Hill. If Fairfax is a high priority area for us, we might want to focus our efforts specifically on reviews for this market. Maybe our content isn’t as strong here or maybe that landscape is much more competitive. Whatever the case is, keyword segmentation has given us the knowledge of where we need to focus our efforts moving forward.

Create location-based pages

Another critical element of a franchise SEO campaign is to ensure that you have built out location pages for every area that you serve. This will give your site the opportunity to appear for geo-specific queries for your core keywords. As previously mentioned, Google naturally localizes the results in many industries, which means these pages could also appear for general keywords that don’t utilize geographic modifiers (“lawn care services”).

Unfortunately, most franchises heavily underinvest in this area. The vast majority of local landing pages contain fairly generic content that doesn’t add much value for users. Oftentimes, this involves general descriptions of a particular area. Even worse, these pages are notorious for having the same templates with just the location name replaced.

Ideally, your location pages would contain the following elements:

1. Optimized title tags and content for that specific location

2. Customized on-page content for that area

3. The address, phone number, and contact information (if a physical address exists)

4. Structured data markup from the most specific category in the schema.org library

5. Reviews specific to that individual area

6. External links to relevant local resources

For example, the Lawn Love franchise does a really good job of creating local landing pages for each area that they’re active in.

As a result, they rank well for “lawn care service” queries in a large spread of markets such as Philadelphia, Raleigh, and Pittsburgh.

What if you don’t have physical locations in the area you serve?

Even if your brand doesn’t have physical locations in the geographic area you’re targeting, it’s still definitely encouraged to create localized landing pages, as long as you provide services to that specific area. This can be a really useful strategy, especially if you only have a small number of locations but serve a much larger geographic area such as an entire state.

Below you can see the “Locations” page of a social security lawyer based in Pittsburgh, PA. While they only have a single physical location in the city of Pittsburgh, their business is regional and extends beyond the city into other parts of western Pennsylvania and even Ohio.

To improve the reach of their business, they’ve created location-based pages for all of the most popular cities and towns that they serve in these areas.

This gives their SEO the ability to cover a much wider geographic area than they normally would be able to with just a single location.

When performing any multi-location SEO campaign, we recommend one of the first things you do is assess all the major geographic markets that you serve. Next, you should audit your existing landing pages assets to ensure that you have a location page mapped to any high priority area. You can use tools such as CRM data or conversions in Google Analytics to determine what your most important locations are.

However, if you don’t have this information, another way to do it would be by evaluating populations. If we were working with a business in Texas, we could utilize municipality population data in order to determine which landing pages need to be created first based on where the majority of people are located. This provides a data-based way of informing where to focus your content generation strategies.

Create and optimize Google Business Profiles

For any locations where you have a physical address, you’ll want to be sure that you’ve created and claimed a Google Business Profile (GBP). These profiles integrate directly with Google Maps and Google’s local 3-pack results. This means that in order to be eligible to rank in Google’s map packs, you’ll need to have an active GBP that’s been properly verified:

Across all of your physical locations, you’ll want to audit your GBPs to ensure that the following information is accurate:

1. Primary category (most important)

2. Secondary categories (filled out as completely as possible)

3. Name

4. Address

5. Phone number

6. Hours of operation

The most crucial part of this step is ensuring that your primary and secondary categories for each location are filled out as completely as possible. If your business isn’t categorized properly, you could potentially be missing out on local pack visibility for relevant search queries for your franchise. To get a better understanding of how to categorize your GBPs, you can read Miriam Ellis’s excellent guide.

Ensure NAP consistency

Another great step to optimize your local pack rankings is to ensure there’s NAP (name, address, phone number) consistency across all of your physical locations. The more consistent this information is across the web, the more likely you are to appear in the map pack results. Since franchises face the challenge of scale, doing this manually is out of the question. Tools like Moz Local can help automate this process by improving each location’s NAP consistency in the most prominent data aggregators.

E-A-T optimizations

If you’ve already set up location pages but are looking to take their on-page optimizations to the next level, you can look for ways to improve the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) of their content.

Google has a responsibility to try to improve the visibility of sites that they feel will provide accurate information to users. For this reason, it needs to factor in how trustworthy a particular source is. While optimizations for E-A-T will be most relevant to sites in the health and finance verticals, multi-location sites can also leverage these concepts to improve their on-page content.

Here are some of our favorite content elements to utilize E-A-T concepts on your franchise location pages:

1. Information about laws and government regulations

2. External links to helpful local resources

3. Facts about a particular geographic area

4. Data points relevant to the local area

5. Profiles and information about specific employees at that location

Going back to the Lawn Love example, on their location pages, they provide users with specific data points about a particular area such as mowing costs, average yard sizes, and how frequently lawns are mowed.

Looking at another industry, the chiropractor franchise The Joint provides biographies of each doctor for each individual location, as well as information such as how many years of experience they have:

On-page optimizations like this may help improve the trustworthiness of your content to both users and search engines. Utilizing original data, linking to trusted government sites, and providing information about your specific location are all potential ways of sending additional trust signals. This type of content helps demonstrate your business’s knowledge of the local market and differentiate your website from competitors that will likely have generic information.

Structured data

You’ll want to be sure that you’re marking up your location based landing pages with structured data. Structured data is simply code that you place on a website to give search engines a better understanding about the context or the intent of that page.

Generally, structured data will be placed on a particular page template, such as your location pages. This makes schema markup a great way to improve the optimization of a website at scale.

One of the best things about schema markup is that, depending on your business, there might already be a schema type that closely describes what your business does. The vast majority of franchises will use some subtype of LocalBusiness structured data to markup individual location pages. While there are too many to list, below you can see some of the most common types of schema for franchise businesses:

• Attorney

• AutoDealer

• AutoRepair

• DryCleaningOrLaundry

• Electrician

• FinancialService

• GeneralContractor

• MedicalBusiness

• MovingCompany

• Plumber

• ProfessionalService

You can see that Two Men and a Truck have marked up all of their “Moving” location pages with the MovingCompany structured data type that highlights information such as the name, address, phone number, hours, and reviews.

Which schema you choose will vary greatly depending on the overall topic of your business. Your franchise should definitely be reviewing the schema.org library to see what the most specific type of structured data is for your location pages.

Review duplicate content issues

One of the biggest technical issues with large franchise sites is duplicate content. This is more likely to happen when steps have been taken in order to scale localized content initiatives. If not done properly, this can lead to pages that are too thin to be indexed or that Google has identified as duplicate.

As an example, here you can see a franchise that’s using templated content across a variety of pages:

As a result, Google may choose to ignore these pages and exclude them from the index entirely. If your pages are based on a template with little variation in content, this review is absolutely critical. To find pages this might be impacting, you can perform the following steps:

1. Navigate to Google Search Console

2. Go to the “Coverage” report

3. Select the “Excluded” tab

4. Review both the “Crawled – currently not indexed” and “Discovered – currently not indexed” reports

If you see pages that are built from a template getting flagged in these reports, there is a good chance that it’s due to a duplicate or thin content issue. These can be great pages to prioritize new content creation on as these changes could result in high converting pages getting indexed by Google.

Another method is to use a tool like Siteliner to identify duplicate content at scale. Siteliner crawls through your site and flags any duplicate/similar content that it finds. Pages with high match percentages can be audited and potentially adjusted to be more unique.

Create content that solves user problems

A great long term approach to franchise SEO campaigns is to connect with your customers before they’re ready to make a purchase. An effective way to do this is to identify queries that users would be searching before engaging with your franchise, and then create a content strategy around targeting those topics.

For example, a common reason to go to an auto repair franchise would be when you see the ominous check engine light appear on your car. In this situation, it’s likely that the user would seek to learn more about the issue and even try to fix it themselves before enlisting the help of a service.

The company AutoZone wisely understands this trend, and has created a page that provides information about reasons why the check engine light may appear. As a result, they rank on the first page for the query “check engine light”:

When analyzing the data more closely, AutoZone has clearly been investing in this type of content in recent years. As a result, it’s estimated that they’re generating over 580,000 organic sessions a month to these types of pages:

A particular type of content that I believe franchise owners should be paying attention to is video. This is especially true if your franchise provides some type of service that would be considered DIY. More and more we’re seeing SERPs around DIY queries where the bulk of the first page results are YouTube videos.

If you’re a franchise with existing video assets, it’s worth ensuring that any content you’ve uploaded to YouTube is optimized for relevant keywords. Doing this could provide more visibility through both YouTube and the Google search results, as they’re becoming more and more integrated.

A brand that positioned themselves very well for this trend is Ace Hardware. They’ve built up an extensive catalog of videos that directly integrate their products and teach users how to accomplish different projects. As a result, they often receive an embedded result directly on the SERPs for queries around their core products.

A brief franchise SEO case study

Applying these frameworks can be extremely powerful for franchise businesses, and we’ve seen some strong results when doing so.

For one environmental services client, we were able to identify that they didn’t have localized landing page content that targeted many of their core geographic areas. As a result, they were extremely limited in the number of markets their content was able to appear in.

By reviewing old versions of the site, we were able to create a plan to recreate many localized landing pages that had once existed, and utilize local content best practices. Doing this allowed them to experience a +270% improvement in the number of tracked queries that were ranking on the first page in the span of two years. 

Conclusion

When working on franchise SEO, marketers need to be aware of the contextual and technical considerations that apply most to these sites. Franchises need to be aware of the technical issues that come along with multiple locations such as duplicate content, indexation consistency, structured data, and more.

Google is placing a greater emphasis on quality localized content and more brands are starting to invest in these initiatives. By following the steps above, hopefully you’re able to think about your franchise’s search initiatives in a different way, and strengthen the quality of your site.

Post-Pandemic Travel Marketing: What Now?

As borders reopen and travel resumes, the stakes to make up for the time and revenue lost in 2020 and 2021 have never been higher. For many travel and hospitality organizations, there’s no question about it – the 2022-23 season must be a success.

The good news is that hope is firmly on the horizon. US Travel’s latest data shows that, for the first time since the pandemic began, travel spending was above 2019 levels by 3%. While nearly 60% of US travelers note that rising gas prices will impact their upcoming travel decisions, more than a quarter plan to spend more money on vacations this summer than in 2019.

We still live in uncertain times, especially with increasing costs in almost every industry a big concern for consumers. But for travel and tourism brands, now is the time to push forward with recovery and work with customers who, after two long years, are looking to finally take a trip away from home.

Following many near-complete strategy and product pivots of 2020, there’s plenty that travel and tourism brands can be doing with their marketing to support their own long-term success.

Anticipating consumer needs and concerns

One of the biggest changes that many travel and tourism brands have seen over the past year is a longer consumer buying cycle. Where customers may have been ready to book a flight, hotel, or tour experience with very little research before 2020, that’s no longer the case.

Instead, customers are taking their time deciding whether or not travel is safe, affordable, and accessible for them and their families. This has ultimately led to lengthier waits for travel companies as customers move down the sales funnel.

But as a travel business, part of your role has always been to reassure customers that their experience will be what they’re looking for. The biggest difference now is in anticipating and responding to new fears that have arisen in the past two years around travel safety.

Educational tour company Context Travel has seen this attitude change firsthand, and found success through adjusting their marketing strategy accordingly.

“We’re getting in front of travelers much higher up the funnel to gain trust by creating and sharing compelling content for people who are just dipping their toes back into travel”, says Director of Marketing, Ali Murphy. “This is a big shift from pre-pandemic, when we focused our marketing efforts on capturing people who were ready to buy a tour.”

Acknowledging the fear

You’ve likely spent the majority of the past two years continually adjusting your marketing strategy — and now isn’t the time to stop. While there may be some trepidation from consumers around travel picking back up, tourism and hospitality brands must acknowledge and accept these fears rather than turning a blind eye to them. This is where you need to think like your customers and alter your search marketing approach.

What is the data telling you? Instead of looking for large group tours, are your customers more likely to be interested in smaller, private tours with just their family group? Or are outdoor-based activities becoming the most-viewed pages on your site?

These are also the pages on your site that you might want to consider prioritizing in an SEO refresh. Consider whether the consumer landscape matches existing messaging and keyword strategy. If not, now might be the right time to find some copy and content resources to give those pages a re-write more consistent with current strategy and offerings.

There’s a good chance that your customers will be prioritizing different aspects of their experience for the foreseeable future, so it’s up to you to meet those needs. Instead of backing away from marketing your products and services, promote private accommodation, outdoor adventures, and a more people-concious travel experience.

Embracing new opportunities in search

Going after a whole new set of experiences in your search strategy is one thing, but travel brands should also be keeping tabs on what new features in search itself can be leveraged for their benefit. Mobile-first marketing is on the rise and your travel brand needs to be front and center.

You may not immediately think of TikTok as part of your search marketing plan, but we’ve all seen YouTube videos and tweets appearing in search results over the years, and TikTok content is finally making its way into SERPs as well.

While social content should still be focused on your primary channel audiences (aka the people that are actually seeing the content on its intended platform), there are plenty of benefits to be gained if your content can rank in traditional search results. When you’re working on your social strategy and planning for new content creation, keep this in mind as you optimize your videos later on (or loop in your brand team to tackle this across silos!)

This is just as applicable for in-destination brands offering consumers dinner, a night out, or an activity, as it is the destination marketing organization (DMO) marketing the destination itself. Social-as-search allows brands and organizations to actually influence the discovery phase, not just the decision-making phase of the consumer buying journey.

According to a recent study from TikTok, 49% of its users use the platform for discovering something new, and are 1.5 times more likely to immediately go out and purchase what they have discovered compared to other platforms. The opportunity to rank for high intent keywords, especially driven around experiential and food/beverage activities, with consumer proof in places like TikTok is a virtually untapped opportunity for brands across the board.

For many tourism brands, these opportunities simply didn’t exist in a pre-pandemic world. Yet many of the biggest companies are still refraining from embracing them. To stay competitive and attract both US-based and overseas customers, now is the time to jump on these opportunities before everyone else.

Leveraging existing marketing channels for conversion

At this point, we should all know that marketing channels work best when we think of them as complementary, rather than silos. “Always-on” marketing means that customers have access to brands 24/7, every day of the year. Because of that, they’re interacting with brand content across multiple platforms — from ads, to social media, to search results, to emails.

Travel consumers have always been a multi-platform, multi-stage audience. But the lengthening of the sales process means that securing a conversion after several touch points has become even more difficult for this industry. If your travel or tourism brand wasn’t already working to leverage different channels at once, now is the time.

Search is certainly still a long game when it comes to digital marketing, but it’s also one of the most trusted avenues out there. When you’re working on new content that can benefit you in six to 12 months, go back to thinking about your customers’ fears and needs first. How can you answer those questions and concerns better than your competitors?

From there, echo that content across other platforms. While you wait for the SERPs to catch up, get in front of your audience with additional messaging, proof points, and content that amplifies why to buy, why to visit, and why to trust your brand (user generated content is a great avenue for this). Search is undoubtedly important, but it is not the only channel that your consumer base is going to interact with on their path to purchase. Think about each channel as a unique opportunity to engage your audience and where they might be in the buying and consideration cycle when they encounter it.

For example, if a consumer is searching for content related to “best things to do in Costa Rica”, and your brand is well-positioned to answer that question through search, it might also be worth trying to get that user to sign up for your newsletter with Costa Rica travel tips, follow you on social media for local restaurant recommendations, and retarget with ads to re-engage them later in the buying cycle. Treat search as an entry point — not the only point — of opportunity and build your other channels as amplifiers.

This concept of social-as-search is also a great way to familiarize your brand to consumers. Almost no space on TikTok is as saturated as travel, and yet one airline manages to stand out for terms like “rating airlines” and “european travel”: Air Baltic.

@airbaltic it do be like that 🥲 #airline#cabincrew#airBaltic#okayletsgo♬ Okaaay lets go – Sarah Vilard

https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js

It’s not hard to see why. Their personality-driven content is relatable, humor-forward, and draws in viewers while educating consumers in the crowded low cost carrier space about their crew, destinations, and air frames.

https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js

Accepting changes within the travel industry as a whole

Instead of burying your head in the sand and thinking about the negative impacts, make travel industry changes part of your marketing campaigns. For instance, with non-refundable travel becoming a thing of the past, being more flexible with customers after they book isn’t going to land you more business. Letting them know their options ahead of time, though, can make you stand out.

Hotels.com is a great example of this. Their 2021 “revenge travel” campaign perfectly highlighted their understanding of customer concerns around making reservations: that may need to be changed or canceled last-minute. Instead of assuming that they could return to a point of non-refundable travel, their marketing fully acknowledged these customer pain points and made their position clear (with obvious dramatic humor), and favorable, for consumers looking to travel with flexibility.

Customers are ready for travel, and brands that embrace this “moment” and make it memorable are prepared to win. Brands that are prepared to go the extra distance will win favor with eager consumers, and brands that are simply meeting expectations will be seen as doing the bare minimum. The opportunity is in the “memorable”.

“Experiences sell way more than [traditional] products. Even more so in the hospitality industry. There are hundreds of hotels selling the same plans and accommodations as we are. So what makes us so special? Added value. Feeling. Belonging. Unique experiences. The most loyal clients buy that ‘special something’ that a product makes them feel rather than the product itself,” saya Ella Bencosme, Sales & Marketing Coordinator for the Holiday Inn Resort Aruba.

This is also a good time to make your reviews work for you as a marketing tactic. Many of your prospective customers will be looking for reviews that call out some of these widespread industry changes, like flexible change policies, hygiene standards, general safety, linens and laundering, contact with other guests, and the ability to “go private”.

Whether you like it or not, how you respond matters and your audience is watching. Customer reviews have always been a fundamental part of the travel and hospitality industry, and this has only become of increased importance in recent years. Stay on top of reading and responding to your reviews, particularly from those who may not have had a good experience. If you need just one more reason to put stock in the user experience, think of the visibility that Google reviews, and OTAs like Expedia and Trip Advisor, have in the SERP.

Brand guarantees are not enough to satisfy consumers. Instead, hearing and reading recent first-hand accounts of travel experiences from customers just like themselves will continue to be a significant deciding factor for many people.

In conclusion

Tourism and hospitality have changed — probably forever. Travel expectations that the pandemic introduced will not be easily walked back. In a post-pandemic world, travel brands must adjust their marketing strategies to align with new consumer needs, expectations, and fears. Embracing and leveraging new forms of search marketing, while continuing to build a reputable and consistent brand in the eyes of travel-cautious consumers is the only way to succeed.

Where Can You Go to Learn Local SEO?

Image credit: Fattoria la Maliosa

In 2023, I’ll have been studying local SEO for 20 years, and I definitely still won’t know it all.

If you’re just entering this fine and spacious field of local search marketing, welcome to what will be a habit of lifelong scholarship. In the next 20 years, you’ll see as many (or more) changes than we’ve witnessed in the nascent decades of this discipline. You’ll study how to lay a feast of options before the local businesses you market, regularly setting out new dishes as new promotional opportunities arise. Your education is what will keep this buffet fresh and hot while keeping you enthusiastic about your work.

Here’s the view from my side of the table of what’s happened culturally over the past two decades in the industry: we started out from a real place – marketing quite actual local businesses – and have come to prize their qualities of realness more with each passing year as we’ve learned to prioritize owner expertise, their earned authority, trustworthiness, community involvement, economic essentialness, and basic human-ness! It’s been good growth that has handily paralleled Google’s own messaging about what they want and it’s been a steady evolution, set amid an otherwise-hectic rate of technological change.

It’s this combination of how to consistently think local like a philosopher coupled with how to selectively act local like a chef in a stocked pantry that you’ll be pursuing as a career scholar in local SEO. Today, I’d like to set my table for you with high quality paid and free local SEO educational resources and tools to keep you thinking and acting successfully in the years ahead.

Resources for formal local SEO training

Image Credit: Andrea Alba

You can’t major in local SEO in college, but being able to access organized training will be a faster path to education than trying to cobble information together from a bunch of random sources. If you’re hoping to get a job in local SEO, are already working for a local business that needs to market itself, or have decided to expand your marketing agency’s service menu, dedicated programs like these will help you absorb a lot of knowledge in a logical order:

Moz Academy’s Local SEO Certification (Paid – $395, 5 hours and 45 minutes)

Invest in this paid on-demand video course and you’ll access nearly six hours of formal but fun training in how to do local SEO. Take an exam at the end and receive a certification badge as proof of your proficiency and accomplishment. I contributed course materials for this program which is led and presented by Moz’s Senior Learning and Development Specialist, Meghan Pahinui, and I don’t know of another learning opportunity quite like it anywhere else on the web in terms of its completeness, quality, and value.

BrightLocal’s Local SEO On Demand Course (Paid – £300, 3 hours)

I haven’t personally taken this three-hour paid course, but I have been a longtime viewer of the instructor, Greg Gifford, whom I consider to be a master at video-based teaching. BrightLocal’s track record of publishing excellent local SEO materials gives me the confidence to include this resource in my formal training list as doubtless being of high quality.

Sterling Sky/LocalU’s Agency Training (Paid – $1500 per session with volume discounts)

Pay for live, modular teaching from some of the best in the business. While I haven’t personally taken these classes, I can vouch for Joy Hawkins’ world-class SEO skills and am confident that any program developed by her organization would be of excellent quality for agencies ready to make a substantial business investment in one-on-one training.

Pigzilla’s Private Local SEO Training Community (Paid – $5-$49 per month)

This is a subscription-based community run by Dani Owens in which you pay monthly for access to ongoing local SEO mentorship and materials. I’m not a member, but respected local SEO, Claire Carlile, gives it her endorsement and this could be a good fit for new marketers in search of supportive guidance. A seven-day free trial will help you decide if it’s a good match for your style and needs.

The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide (Free)

Prefer to teach yourself from great materials? Look no further than this comprehensive 9-chapter, totally free guide from Moz. I’m the chief contributor to this resource that will walk you through conceptualizing and marketing local businesses from the ground up. If your company is onboarding new local SEOs, give them this guide as a training manual.

If none of these training resources are exactly what you were looking for, an alternative tip would be to contact an experienced local SEO whom you really admire and ask if there is room on their calendar to coach you at an hourly rate. Some may be too busy, but others may welcome the opportunity to mentor you.

Resources for thinking local

Image credit: Taymaz Valley

Once you’ve accomplished a basic level of training in local SEO, cultivating your ability to think of everything from a local perspective will be an ongoing practice that sets you apart professionally and helps you bring value to any relevant organization. Get into the best possible local mindset with these resources:

Near Media (Free)

Respected industry figures Mike Blumenthal, Greg Sterling, and David Mihm publish this podcast, newsletter, and blog which has become the best place I know of to view commerce, search, and social through a local lens. Industry developments are assessed with practicality and an eye keenly focused on benefitting real local businesses. I’ve contributed to the blog at Near Media, and am a weekly reader and viewer of everything published by this organization because, for me, it defines thought leadership in the local space. Become a local SEO who thinks as logically as these gentlemen do and you will be a major asset to any business or agency.

Moz Blog’s Local Column (Free)

In company with some outstanding industry guest contributors, the local column of the Moz blog is my home base, and I’m including it in the “think local” section of this guide because my own interest in local search has always had a philosophical root. I truly see local as a tool for prioritizing people and planet over mere profit and I hope readers are taking my work and using it to develop more inclusive, diverse, and sustainable local communities. Applause for you if you are thinking deeply about what strategic local SEO tactics can do to build a better world for all of us.

The Institute for Local Self Reliance(Free)

Start reading ILSR’s remarkable series of reports and you’ll quickly come to see the links between local businesses and larger concepts like politics, human rights, energy, and society. Keep a close eye on this organization for original data and statistics you can use to tell persuasive local business stories and get buy-in from colleagues and bosses on initiatives.

The American Independent Business Alliance (Free/Paid)

With a membership of more than 50,000 local businesses and organizations, AMIBA is a need-to-know resource for US local SEOs whose clients should be part of the Buy Local movement. AMIBA helps communities develop IBAs, and has both paid memberships and free learning resources to enable independently-owned companies become part of larger local initiatives. Truly a great org.

MozCon (Paid)

You’ll find outstanding local SEO takeaways from the live and livestreamed popular annual conference that is MozCon. MozCon is a general SEO and marketing conference with some presentations being local-specific and nearly all speakers sharing trends in thought and tactics that are applicable to most business types. Missed the most recent event? Check out the video bundles.

Local University (Free/Paid)

Free weekly video round-ups of local search news and a celebrated paid traveling conference series have made LocalU an industry favorite for many years. Some of the best minds in the local search community are involved in this organization, many of whom I’ve learned so much from outside the formal conference circuit. Great news is that LocalU has a virtual event planned for late 2022, so you can attend the conference from any location.

Street Fight (Free)

If the local businesses you market tend to fall into more highly-funded categories, Street Fight’s publication keeps a running tab on new local tech and bigger brand developments, acquisitions, and news. Awareness of what’s going on at the cutting edge of commerce can often provide inspiration for smaller-scale implementation for SMBs. All Local SEOs can benefit from learning how big businesses think and selectively draw lessons from this about how they want to operate and differentiate.

Pro tip for a never-ending stream of localistic thoughts enriching your mind: find your favorite local SEOs on Twitter and look at their profiles to follow whomever they follow. Their chosen sources will sometimes surprise you and can be real gems.

Resources for acting local

Now things are getting exciting. Once you know local search fundamentals and are working to develop your own business philosophy, you’ll want to be able to take bold action on up-to-the minute developments and use good tools effectively. Learn, test, and iterate with help from these resources:

Search Engine Roundtable (Free)

The local category of Barry Schwartz’s famed publication reports new local developments faster than any other site on the web. If you want to be the first (or the second) to know when Google rolls out a new feature or experiences a new large-scale problem, be a regular Roundtable reader.

Sterling Sky’s blog and forum (Free)

For some of the best actionable local SEO advice anywhere, tune into the ongoing small-scale studies Joy Hawkins’ agency conducts. Data-based tactics are best! Meanwhile, if you run into a problem while doing local SEO, head to her forum for good, free advice from the community.

Moz’s Competitive Local Business Audit Spreadsheet (Free)

Make a copy of the spreadsheet and start documenting client vs. competitor wins and losses to help you create an informed local search marketing strategy. This work deserves to be foundational and primary to most campaigns, and a ready-made spreadsheet makes it easier.

Whitespark’s Local Search Ranking Factors Survey (Free)

The tactics you prioritize for each unique local business you market should be customized to their potential and goals, but it’s great to know which factors a large pool of local SEOs feel are currently having the most observable impact on Google’s local and organic rankings. This annual survey has become an industry institution.

Whitespark’s Local Rank Tracker (Paid)

This paid tool is a step ahead of many others because it allows you to emulate rankings from local packs and Google Maps, which are typically different. There are also Google organic and Bing options as well, to give you a very big picture of online performance.

MobileMoxie’s SERPerator (Free/Paid)

Emulate mobile local ranking for free three times a month, and upgrade to a paid account if you love this.

Whitespark’s Review Link Generator (Free)

So quick, easy, and doesn’t cost a penny. Make it a cinch to request reviews from customers with this link-generating widget from the good folks at Whitespark.

GMBSpy Chrome Extension (Free)

For another vital action, get this great Chrome extension to reveal all the Google Business Profile categories being used in your market and industry.

GMB Everywhere (Free)

This extension also surfaces categories, but does even more in terms of auditing competitors’ posting strategy and contents.

Moz’s Check Presence Tool (Free)

Get an at-a-glance sense of the health of any local business’ citations by simply entering the company name and address.

Moz Local (Paid)

Build out and maintain a high-quality set of local business listings and manage your reviews with this trusted software. The tool also offers basic review sentiment analysis, which is one of the most important tasks of local campaigns.

Moz Link Intersect tool (Paid)

If you are a Moz Pro subscriber, don’t overlook the highly useful Link Intersect feature of Link Explorer which lets you discover local competitors’ linked unstructured citations, enabling you to see where you could earn linktations for the businesses you market.

Notify (Free)

Get slack or email notifications any time this tool finds social mentions of your business. Being where your customers are talking about you is a fundamental local search marketing practice.

Buzzsumo’s Content Analyzer (Free)

Get publication inspiration by entering a topic, keyword, or domain name into this widget to see how many social shares are occurring around that theme.

Aircam.ai (Paid)

This newcomer service is at the cutting edge of both the image and visual search trend we are watching take over the local space. This service generates local business photography that is geared at improving conversions.

Riverside.fm (Paid)

Working with a local business owner who is an expert at what they do, but doesn’t excel at writing? Film them talking with this up-and-coming tool and use a single session to spark multiple types of content.

Postamatic (Free)

If you can use a spreadsheet, you can use Noah Learner’s cool application for publishing Google posts to multiple Google Business Profiles.

Microdata Generator (Free)

Generate local business schema with this simple widget from Steven Ferrino.

This list could go on forever, but I’ll cut it off here and hope you’ll add some of these actionable resources to your kit.

Why should you learn local SEO?

Image credit: Jaime Walker

I’m not saying you should! Local may not be your dream career, but here’s something to consider: Google has been ruling the SEO world for as long as I’ve been working online, and local is the ace up their sleeve. They are deeply staked to it. It’s what they have that Amazon doesn’t, and, for that matter, local is the thing Amazon keeps trying to experiment with by opening and shuttering a series of physical stores of their own. Virtual e-commerce may have spiked over the past few years, but it’s downtrending again. And, to put it bluntly, saving the planet means breaking our overdependent long-distance shipping habit in favor of local fulfillment because of the problem of fossil fuels.

As we covered here in a recent column, working with independent local businesses can align well with personal convictions about healthy societies, but if that’s not a deciding factor for you, it could just be that local businesses are as old as dust and have great sticking power. You can choose to make career gambles on affiliate marketing, or crypto, or whatever the next thrilling surge may be. Many people thrive on the excitement and some get rich. But if you’d prefer a safer bet, look around your own town and see how many people are on their way right now to the grocery store, bank, diner, and doctor. They’ll keep in those well-worn grooves for the foreseeable future, and you can create a good niche for yourself in teaching established models the newest tactics for promoting themselves to a society in love with tech.

For me, local offers all the excitement I can handle, and if you value a working environment in which constant learning is part and parcel of the job, you may have just discovered the “you are here” on the big map of your career options.

Moneyball is the Future of SEO — Whiteboard Friday

Welcome back to Whiteboard Friday! First up in our fall season, Will Critchlow shows you how, much like the NBA, SEO is undergoing an analytic revolution — and how you can make the most of it.

To hear more on this topic, and from our other amazing MozCon 2022 speakers, be sure to pre-order the video bundle! 

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

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. Will Critchlow here, CEO at SearchPilot. I want to start today by talking about the NBA in 2001. This is what the shot chart looked like. So these are the 200 most commonly shot from locations in the NBA in 2001.

So in professional basketball, you can see that they took a load of shots around the rim. These are the dunks and layups. They took a load of shots from outside the three-point line, and they took a lot of these mid-range shots, which are all the jump shots in between. 

NBA analytic revolution

Something happened in the subsequent 20 years, because today the shot chart looks more like this. It’s pretty mind blowing. You can see there’s still a ton of dunks and layups, still a ton of three-point shots, but the mid-range has all but disappeared. Why is that? Well, what happened was they installed advanced camera systems in every NBA stadium and every NBA arena and applied a whole load of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence to track all of the players and the ball throughout every single game.

And using that advanced statistics, they could track all kinds of things that they didn’t have before, like how closely guarded the player was when they were shooting, whether they dribbled left, whether they dribbled right, all those kind of little details. And out of that data, they discovered that these mid-range shots, that had been part of the game forever, were less effective than everyone had assumed.

It turned out that they were almost as hard to score as the three-point shots, but, of course, worth far less. The dunks and layups worth only two points, but easy enough to be worth shooting. The three-point shots worth half as much again, worth shooting, but the mid-range less so. But it took the advanced statistics to be able to figure that out.

SEO analytic revolution

I’m going to argue that we’re undergoing a similar analytic revolution in SEO. The equivalent of the cameras in every stadium is not cameras watching us type. It’s SEO A/B testing, where you can take a hypothesis. So you can take the particular onsite change that you’re thinking of making, that you think is going to bring a big benefit to your organic search performance, and you can test it in a scientific way and get the expected impact as well as the confidence interval on that impact.

I’m not going to get into detail today about how to run those tests. We’ve talked about that before, and we’ll link in the show notes to more detail on how you can run those tests. But the point being this kind of testing is available now. 

And what it’s doing is it’s bringing a similar kind of realization to especially enterprise SEO, very large website SEO that happened in the professional basketball game. And the equivalent, I’m going to argue, is that the mid-range is all of those untested changes to your website, all the little things that maybe you do because it’s best practice, or you heard something from a Googler, or you heard something from an expert, maybe even someone like me, and they said, “Hey, you should do this thing,” and you roll it out on your website.

But actually, they’re way lower percentage than we’d always assumed, just like the mid-range shot is in the professional basketball game. And you have all of those cases where you get excited. The equivalent of your crossover is you find maybe an insight from some keyword research, and you have some new thought about how searchers might be looking for your website.

And you pull up for that mid-range jump shot, where you make the change. So you start modifying your titles and meta information, for example, on a whole bunch of pages based off these insights. But too often that’s a massive air ball. We’ve seen so many cases where we have rolled out changes that are based on that kind of insight and huge negative impact, -20%, -27% organic search performance as a result of some of those untested changes.

Moneyball is the future of SEO

And so my argument that moneyball is the future of SEO, the strategies that I think those large websites are going to be building upon in the future is a combination of winning tests. Those are our dunks and layups, the things that we’re very sure to make those shots.

The three-point shot: new content

And the equivalent of the three-point shot, I’m claiming that this is new content, so new pages, new site sections, super valuable. If you don’t build out new content, you’re going to struggle over time. But super hard as well, just like the three-point shots are in the game. They’re harder, but they’re worth more. 

So you build the strategy of building out new content and rolling out winning tests, which are your dunks. And you cut out the mid-range, which are all those little tweaks, all those untested onsite changes.

And then the final piece of the strategic puzzle here is that you drive your test cadence up. So the basketball equivalent, again, is that over this same time period possessions per game are up almost 10% over that time. And the reason for that is that if you have an edge, if you have an advantage over your opponents, which is exactly what this kind of advanced insight gives you, you want more goes.

You want more repetitions, and that’s just like you walk into a casino and you play roulette once, maybe you win. You play roulette a thousand times, the casino is definitely winning and that’s because they have the edge. So if we have the edge because we’re running these tests, we want to drive the number of tests up and test cadence. And so the very highest performing teams that I see doing this kind of moneyball SEO approach, they are building their strategy off this kind of thing, new content and winning tests.

And then they’re setting KPIs around test cadence and making sure that they run more of those tests, they run them more quickly, and that they’re driving performance that way. So I hope you’ve enjoyed this little ramble through NBA basketball into SEO testing. I’m Will Critchlow, CEO of SearchPilot. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

How to Use Chrome to View a Website as Googlebot

Introduction to Googlebot spoofing

In this article, I’ll describe how and why to use Google Chrome (or Chrome Canary) to view a website as Googlebot.

We’ll set up a web browser specifically for Googlebot browsing. Using a user-agent browser extension is often close enough for SEO audits, but extra steps are needed to get as close as possible to emulating Googlebot.

Skip to “How to set up your Googlebot browser”.

Why should I view a website as Googlebot?

For many years, us technical SEOs had it easy when auditing websites, with HTML and CSS being web design’s cornerstone languages. JavaScript was generally used for embellishments (such as small animations on a webpage).

Increasingly, though, whole websites are being built with JavaScript.

Originally, web servers sent complete websites (fully rendered HTML) to web browsers. These days, many websites are rendered client-side (in the web browser itself) – whether that’s Chrome, Safari, or whatever browser a search bot uses – meaning the user’s browser and device must do the work to render a webpage.

SEO-wise, some search bots don’t render JavaScript, so won’t see webpages built using it. Especially when compared to HTML and CSS, JavaScript is very expensive to render. It uses much more of a device’s processing power — wasting the device’s battery life— and much more of Google’s, Bing’s, or any search engine’s server resource.

Even Googlebot has difficulties rendering JavaScript and delays rendering of JavaScript beyond its initial URL discovery – sometimes for days or weeks, depending on the website. When I see “Discovered – currently not indexed” for several URLs in Google Search Console’s Coverage (or Pages) section, the website is more often than not JavaScript-rendered.

Attempting to get around potential SEO issues, some websites use dynamic rendering, so each page has two versions:

• A server-side render for bots (such as Googlebot and bingbot).

• A client-side render for people using the website.

Generally, I find that this setup overcomplicates websites and creates more technical SEO issues than a server-side rendered or traditional HTML website. A mini rant here: there are exceptions, but generally, I think client-side rendered websites are a bad idea. Websites should be designed to work on the lowest common denominator of a device, with progressive enhancement (through JavaScript) used to improve the experience for people, using devices that can handle extras. This is something I will investigate further, but my anecdotal evidence suggests client-side rendered websites are generally more difficult to use for people who rely on accessibility devices such as a screen reader. There are instances where technical SEO and usability crossover.

Technical SEO is about making websites as easy as possible for search engines to crawl, render, and index (for the most relevant keywords and topics). Like it or lump it, the future of technical SEO, at least for now, includes lots of JavaScript and different webpage renders for bots and users.

Viewing a website as Googlebot means we can see discrepancies between what a person sees and what a search bot sees. What Googlebot sees doesn’t need to be identical to what a person using a browser sees, but main navigation and the content you want the page to rank for should be the same.

That’s where this article comes in. For a proper technical SEO audit, we need to see what the most common search engine sees. In most English language-speaking countries, at least, that’s Google.

Why use Chrome (or Chrome Canary) to view websites as Googlebot?

Can we see exactly what Googlebot sees?

No.

Googlebot itself uses a (headless) version of the Chrome browser to render webpages. Even with the settings suggested in this article, we can never be exactly sure of what Googlebot sees. For example, no settings allow for how Googlebot processes JavaScript websites. Sometimes JavaScript breaks, so Googlebot might see something different than what was intended.

The aim is to emulate Googlebot’s mobile-first indexing as closely as possible.

When auditing, I use my Googlebot browser alongside Screaming Frog SEO Spider’s Googlebot spoofing and rendering, and Google’s own tools such as URL Inspection in Search Console (which can be automated using SEO Spider), and the render screenshot and code from the Mobile Friendly Test.

Even Google’s own publicly available tools aren’t 100% accurate in showing what Googlebot sees. But along with the Googlebot browser and SEO Spider, they can point towards issues and help with troubleshooting.

Why use a separate browser to view websites as Googlebot?

1. Convenience

Having a dedicated browser saves time. Without relying on or waiting for other tools, I get an idea of how Googlebot sees a website in seconds.

While auditing a website that served different content to browsers and Googlebot, and where issues included inconsistent server responses, I needed to switch between the default browser user-agent and Googlebot more often than usual. But constant user-agent switching using a Chrome browser extension was inefficient.

Some Googlebot-specific Chrome settings don’t save or transport between browser tabs or sessions. Some settings affect all open browser tabs. E.g., disabling JavaScript may stop websites in background tabs that rely on JavaScript from working (such as task management, social media, or email applications).

Aside from having a coder who can code a headless Chrome solution, the “Googlebot browser” setup is an easy way to spoof Googlebot.

2. Improved accuracy

Browser extensions can impact how websites look and perform. This approach keeps the number of extensions in the Googlebot browser to a minimum.

3. Forgetfulness

It’s easy to forget to switch Googlebot spoofing off between browsing sessions, which can lead to websites not working as expected. I’ve even been blocked from websites for spoofing Googlebot, and had to email them with my IP to remove the block.

For which SEO audits are a Googlebot browser useful?

The most common use-case for SEO audits is likely websites using client-side rendering or dynamic rendering. You can easily compare what Googlebot sees to what a general website visitor sees.

Even with websites that don’t use dynamic rendering, you never know what you might find by spoofing Googlebot. After over eight years auditing e-commerce websites, I’m still surprised by issues I haven’t come across before.

Example Googlebot comparisons for technical SEO and content audits:

• Is the main navigation different?

• Is Googlebot seeing the content you want indexed?

• If a website relies on JavaScript rendering, will new content be indexed promptly, or so late that its impact is reduced (e.g. for forthcoming events or new product listings)?

• Do URLs return different server responses? For example, incorrect URLs can return 200 OK for Googlebot but 404 Not Found for general website visitors.

• Is the page layout different to what the general website visitor sees? For example, I often see links as blue text on a black background when spoofing Googlebot. While machines can read such text, we want to present something that looks user-friendly to Googlebot. If it can’t render your client-side website, how will it know? (Note: a website might display as expected in Google’s cache, but that isn’t the same as what Googlebot sees.)

• Do websites redirect based on location? Googlebot mostly crawls from US-based IPs.

It depends how in-depth you want to go, but Chrome itself has many useful features for technical SEO audits. I sometimes compare its Console and Network tab data for a general visitor vs. a Googlebot visit (e.g. Googlebot might be blocked from files that are essential for page layout or are required to display certain content).

How to set up your Googlebot browser

Once set up (which takes about a half hour), the Googlebot browser solution makes it easy to quickly view webpages as Googlebot.

Step 1: Download and install Chrome or Canary

If Chromeisn’t your default browser, use it as your Googlebot browser.

If Chrome is your default browser, download and install Chrome Canary. Canary is a development version of Chrome where Google tests new features, and it can be installed and run separately to Chrome’s default version.

Named after the yellow canaries used to detect poisonous gases in mines, with its yellow icon, Canary is easy to spot in the Windows Taskbar:

As Canary is a development version of Chrome, Google warns that Canary “can be unstable.” But I’m yet to have issues using it as my Googlebot browser.

Step 2: Install browser extensions

I installed five browser extensions and a bookmarklet on my Googlebot browser. I’ll list the extensions, then advise on settings and why I use them.

For emulating Googlebot (the links are the same whether you use Chrome or Canary):

• User-Agent Switcher

• Web Developer

• Windscribe (or your choice of VPN to simulate Googlebot’s location)

Not required to emulate Googlebot, but my other favorites for technical SEO auditing of JavaScript websites:

• Link Redirect Trace

• View Rendered Source

• NoJS Side-by-Side bookmarklet

User-Agent Switcher extension

User-Agent Switcher does what it says on the tin: switches the browser’s user-agent. Chrome and Canary have a user-agent setting, but it only applies to the tab you’re using and resets if you close the browser.

I take the Googlebot user-agent string from Chrome’s browser settings, which at the time of writing will be the latest version of Chrome (note that below, I’m taking the user-agent from Chrome and not Canary).

To get the user-agent, access Chrome DevTools (by pressing F12 or using the hamburger menu to the top-right of the browser window, then navigating to More tools > Developer tools). See the screenshot below or follow these steps:

1. Go to the Network tab

2. From the top-right Network hamburger menu: More tools > Network conditions

3. Click the Network conditions tab that appears lower down the window

4. Untick “Use browser default”

5. Select “Googlebot Smartphone” from the list, then copy and paste the user-agent from the field below the list into the User-Agent Switcher extension list (another screenshot below). Don’t forget to switch Chrome back to its default user-agent if it’s your main browser.

   • At this stage, if you’re using Chrome (and not Canary) as your Googlebot browser, you may as well tick “Disable cache” (more on that later).

To access User-Agent Switcher’s list, right-click its icon in the browser toolbar and click Options (see screenshot below). “Indicator Flag” is text that appears in the browser toolbar to show which user-agent has been selected — I chose GS to mean “Googlebot Smartphone:”

I added Googlebot Desktop and the bingbots to my list, too.

Why spoof Googlebot’s user agent?

Web servers detect what is browsing a website from a user-agent string. For example, the user-agent for a Windows 10 device using the Chrome browser at the time of writing is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/102.0.5005.115 Safari/537.36

If you’re interested in why other browsers seem to be named in the Chrome user-agent string, read History of the user-agent string.

Web Developer extension

Web Developer is a must-have browser extension for technical SEOs. In my Googlebot browser, I switch between disabling and enabling JavaScript to see what Googlebot might see with and without JavaScript.

Why disable JavaScript?

Short answer: Googlebot doesn’t execute any/all JavaScript when it first crawls a URL. We want to see a webpage before any JavaScript is executed.

Long answer: that would be a whole other article.

Windscribe (or another VPN)

Windscribe (or your choice of VPN) is used to spoof Googlebot’s US location. I use a pro Windscribe account, but the free account allows up to 2GB data transfer a month and includes US locations.

I don’t think the specific US location matters, but I pretend Gotham is a real place (in a time when Batman and co. have eliminated all villains):

Ensure settings that may impact how webpages display are disabled — Windscribe’s extension blocks ads by default. The two icons to the top-right should show a zero.

For the Googlebot browser scenario, I prefer a VPN browser extension to an application, because the extension is specific to my Googlebot browser.

Why spoof Googlebot’s location?

Googlebot mostly crawls websites from US IPs, and there are many reasons for spoofing Googlebot’s primary location.

Some websites block or show different content based on geolocation. If a website blocks US IPs, for example, Googlebot may never see the website and therefore cannot index it.

Another example: some websites redirect to different websites or URLs based on location. If a company had a website for customers in Asia and a website for customers in America, and redirected all US IPs to the US website, Googlebot would never see the Asian version of the website.

Other Chrome extensions useful for auditing JavaScript websites

With Link Redirect Trace, I see at a glance what server response a URL returns.

The View Rendered Source extension enables easy comparison of raw HTML (what the web server delivers to the browser) and rendered HTML (the code rendered on the client-side browser).

I also added the NoJS Side-by-Side bookmarklet to my Googlebot browser. It compares a webpage with and without JavaScript enabled, within the same browser window.

Step 3: Configure browser settings to emulate Googlebot

Next, we’ll configure the Googlebot browser settings in line with what Googlebot doesn’t support when crawling a website.

What doesn’t Googlebot crawling support?

• Service workers (because people clicking to a page from search results may never have visited before, so it doesn’t make sense to cache data for later visits).

• Permission requests (e.g. push notifications, webcam, geolocation). If content relies on any of these, Googlebot will not see that content.

• Googlebot is stateless so doesn’t support cookies, session storage, local storage, or IndexedDB. Data can be stored in these mechanisms but will be cleared before Googlebot crawls the next URL on a website.

These bullet points are summarized from an interview by Eric Enge with Google’s Martin Splitt:

Step 3a: DevTools settings

To open Developer Tools in Chrome or Canary, press F12, or using the hamburger menu to the top-right, navigate to More tools > Developer tools:

The Developer Tools window is generally docked within the browser window, but I sometimes prefer it in a separate window. For that, change the “Dock side” in the second hamburger menu:

Disable cache

If using normal Chrome as your Googlebot browser, you may have done this already.

Otherwise, via the DevTools hamburger menu, click to More tools > Network conditions and tick the “Disable cache” option:

Block service workers

To block service workers, go to the Application tab > Service Workers > tick “Bypass for network”:

Step 3b: General browser settings

In your Googlebot browser, navigate to Settings > Privacy and security > Cookies (or visit chrome://settings/cookies directly) and choose the “Block all cookies (not recommended)” option (isn’t it fun to do something “not recommended?”):

Also in the “Privacy and security” section, choose “Site settings” (or visit chrome://settings/content) and individually block Location, Camera, Microphone, Notifications, and Background sync (and likely anything that appears there in future versions of Chrome):

Step 4: Emulate a mobile device

Finally, as our aim is to emulate Googlebot’s mobile-first crawling, emulate a mobile device within your Googlebot browser.

Towards the top-left of DevTools, click the device toolbar toggle, then choose a device to emulate in the browser (you can add other devices too):

Whatever device you choose, Googlebot doesn’t scroll on webpages, and instead renders using a window with a long vertical height.

I recommend testing websites in desktop view, too, and on actual mobile devices if you have access to them.

How about viewing a website as bingbot?

To create a bingbot browser, use a recent version of Microsoft Edge with the bingbot user agent.

Bingbot is similar to Googlebot in terms of what it does and doesn’t support.

Yahoo! Search, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and other search engines are either powered by or based on Bing search, so Bing is responsible for a higher percentage of search than many people realize.

Summary and closing notes

So, there you have your very own Googlebot emulator.

Using an existing browser to emulate Googlebot is the easiest method to quickly view webpages as Googlebot. It’s also free, assuming you already use a desktop device that can install Chrome and/or Canary.

Other tools exist to help “see” what Google sees. I enjoy testing Google’s Vision API (for images) and their Natural Language API.

Auditing JavaScript websites — especially when they’re dynamically rendered — can be complex, and a Googlebot browser is one way of making the process simpler. If you’d like to learn more about auditing JavaScript websites and the differences between standard HTML and JavaScript-rendered websites, I recommend looking up articles and presentations from Jamie Indigo, Joe Hall and Jess Peck. Two of them contribute in the below video. It’s a good introduction to JavaScript SEO and touches on points I mentioned above:

Questions? Something I missed? Tweet me @AlexHarfordSEO. Thanks for reading!

Underused Tactics and Overlooked Metrics in E-Commerce

There are plenty of impressive tactics or metrics that aren’t often discussed, not necessarily because they aren’t important, but because it’s easy to get locked into the rhythm of simply reporting on traffic and sales.

To change things up, let’s look into some other areas we can optimize to improve the organic performance of e-commerce websites, and some underrated but useful metrics that can help you report on that performance.

Tactics to optimize and measure your e-commerce website performance

Data scraping for SEO and analytics

Data scraping is very useful when you want to retrieve, or scrape, elements from a page for further analysis or optimization.

Most people know that you can scrape common webpage elements such as publication date, author name, or price, but what about more specific aspects of e-commerce websites, and what can we use them for? Product pages have unique attributes that you can scrape, such as “add to basket” type buttons or even product schema; below, I’ll talk about how you can scrape breadcrumb data.

Scraping the breadcrumbs

In short, breadcrumbs are a trail that shows users where they are in the structure of a website, and they are especially useful for navigation and internal linking.

By using crawling tools to scrape data from the breadcrumbs, you can have a more complete view of the site as a whole, and it allows you to identify any trends.

Below, you can see that it’s possible to extract breadcrumb data as a series of values by using XPath, and setting this up as a custom field. This allows you to see the data as a separate field once a crawl is finished.

Evaluating your page templates

The typical page templates that you’d expect to see on an e-commerce site include:

• Homepage

• Information pages (e.g. about us, delivery information, terms and conditions)

• Product pages

• Category pages

• Navigational landing pages

• Blogs / guides

• Payment / cart pages

• Help/support area

A large e-commerce website may have a significant number of product and category pages. These are the pages that generate the most conversions and transactions, so it is tremendously helpful to know how you can break these down into more manageable chunks.

For a website with millions of pages, it is practically impossible to crawl the whole site; your crawler will run out of memory and space, or it could take weeks to finish, and that’s just not feasible for most of us. This is where segmentation comes in. Segmenting your website also allows you to focus on one area of the site before moving on to another. 

A common tactic for websites the size of Target or Tesco is to focus on one category per quarter, and then move on to another area of the site. It’s through segmentation that they’re able to do this.

Segmenting product pages

There are many different ways you can segment a website, and focusing on your products can help you start seeing improvements in revenue sooner than if you were to focus on other areas of the site. 

With product pages, a good tactic is to look for URL patterns, such as those that end in .html or contain /product/.

It’s also possible to get additional dimensions from your product pages by segmenting your products by their stock status. Separating pages by whether or not a product item is in stock or not can help you determine:

• How much traffic is going to out-of-stock products.

• Whether availability and out-of-stock products are affecting product conversion rates.

• Get a granular view of what page engagement metrics are affected by stock availability.

When scraping this data, you can look for specific on-page elements such as missing prices or an Unavailable / Out of Stock message on your pages.

One method of doing this would be to extract the product availability property from a site’s schema markup. If you’re using Screaming Frog, you can access the Custom Extraction feature in the Configuration dropdown under Custom > Extraction,and then set up your extraction rules.

Segmenting category pages

Segmenting category pages allows you to find any categories that have hundreds of products and could benefit from being split into subcategories.

Category pages don’t always have specific URL patterns, and they differ from one CMS to another, but you can look out for those that contain /category/ or /shop/. Another good option is to look for unique attributes, such as those with text showing X of Y results or pages with options for sorting product results.

Structured data markup

We saw earlier that you could scrape pages for instances of product data to identify product pages. But before we move on, we need to ensure we understand what structured data or schema markup is and how it can benefit e-commerce websites.

Product markup

Product markup provides more information about your products directly in the SERPs when your audience searches for them. Product markup can also mean your products are more eligible for rich results, such as carousels, images, and other non-textual elements.

The product schema might look something like this:

Once added, product schema allows your audience to see valuable information about your products before they even land on your page, improving your CTR! We can see Walmart has added product schema to their products in the two examples below:

Star ratings in search results

The more positive reviews your products have, the more likely customers will be to visit your website and buy your products, especially when compared to your competitors.

Star ratings can be pulled in from your product markup through third-party tools such as Trustpilot or Reevoo, or from on-page customer reviews.

We see this when looking at these searches for Dell laptops. Realistically, which links are you more likely to click on as a customer: those with high star ratings or those with seemingly no rating at all?

Optimizing crawl budget for e-commerce

There will likely be pages on your website that are useful to existing customers, such as thank you pages after placing an order, logged-in account pages, etc. However, these pages won’t be the most important for new users looking to find you or your products on search.

It costs Google time and money to crawl our sites, so they need to budget accordingly. By managing this crawl budget, we guide search engines toward our most valuable and essential pages.

Noindexing

We don’t need to index every page on our websites.

It’s entirely acceptable to meta-noindex or disallow certain pages in the robots.txt file — in fact, it’s expected. This is because indexing everything could mean that Google might not crawl all of our pages, so they might not index all of our content. This would be a problem, as it could mean some of our high-value, top-converting pages might not rank organically.

That said, we shouldn’t be noindexing vast chunks of an e-commerce website without proper research. By noindexing huge chunks, we’re missing out on the ranking potential for key search behavior, e.g. locations, product sizing, etc.

Use of URL parameters

As users or owners of e-commerce websites, we’re likely familiar with URL parameters. Common areas that we see these parameters include:

• Faceted navigation

• Product sorting

Faceted navigation pages and product sorting options are typically blocked in robots.txt files, but it’s a good idea to find out how many of those pages Google is still serving to searchers. We can do this in our chosen crawling tool by selecting the option to ignore robots.txt rules. Alternatively, you can segment landing page session data in Google Analytics by URLs with parameters to see how many of those parameter pages are being served to users. Then, the session data will be used to show how many visits those pages are getting.

It may seem counterintuitive to do this, but these pages tend not to have unique on-page content, as they will have duplicated titles, headings, or body content, which means you could be missing out on other, more essential pages ranking for relevant keywords.

Measuring site speed across templates

With large e-commerce websites, it doesn’t make sense to simply test one or two pages and take that as a site speed reading across the entire website. Each page template is built differently. One type of page can load faster than another — even if all other test parameters are the same.

Testing site speed across multiple page templates

As discussed earlier, there are many different template types that can make up a successful website. Testing a selection of pages from each of these templates is recommended to get the best picture of the load time performance of your site.

An excellent way to do this is through using the PageSpeed Insights API and connecting it to Screaming Frog or using cloud tools such as OnCrawl or Site Bulb, which will test the speed of each page on your website as it crawls.

To do this in Screaming Frog, go to “Configuration”. In “API Access”, select “PageSpeed Insights”, and there you will see fields to include the API key.

Once done, in the “Metrics” section, you can select both the device that you want to track and the reports, metrics, etc., that you are interested in extracting page speed information. In the example below, we have selected Crux Data and TTFB (Time to First Byte) and LCP and FCP data. Although the crawl may take longer to complete, this information should now appear alongside the URLs in the final crawl.

Choosing your testing location

There are various tools you can use to test your site speed, such as PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest, and GTmetrix, and most of these do allow you to set your testing location.

It’s important to test your e-commerce site from a location close to where your data centre is located (where your website is hosted), as well as one that is further away. Doing this lets you get an idea of how your real customers are experiencing your store.

If you have a CDN installed, such as Cloudflare, this is also useful, as it allows you to see how much of an impact the CDN is having on your website and how it helps your site load more quickly.

Wherever you decide to test from, remember to keep these locations the same each time you test so you can get accurate results.

Understanding caching and how it influences site speed

If your e-commerce website has caching installed, it’s even more important to test your pages more than once. This is because, on the first test, your page may not have loaded over the cache yet. Once it does, your results will likely be much faster than what you saw on your first test.

With or without caching installed, I would recommend testing each page template around three times for both mobile and desktop devices to get a good measurement and then calculate the average..

Common e-commerce website mistakes

Understanding the common problems that e-commerce websites make is valuable for learning how to avoid them on your own website, as the reasons some tactics remain underused come down to these errors.

Faceted navigation for e-commerce

Whatever your e-commerce site sells, it should be easy to navigate, with sensible menus and navigation options that clearly tell visitors what they will see when they click.

You can see this on the Boohoo website, a prominent fashion retailer in the UK. This image shows the women’s dresses navigation, but you can see how it is broken down by type of dresses, dresses by occasion, colour, how they fit, and even by current fashion trends. Users are able to navigate directly to the subcategories they need.

Good website architecture matters

The importance of good architecture cannot be underestimated and should be centered around the core actions you want people to complete. Ideally, it would be best if you attempted to set up a site with the homepage, followed by the subsequent categories, subcategories, and then the products underneath.

Boohoo has followed this same ideology with their architecture — as trends change and new lines of dresses are added, they can quickly expand and edit the architecture as needed.

Keeping it simple and scalable is the key to setting up good architecture. As your store grows, you will likely add more categories and products, so you need to be able to do this efficiently. You should attempt to keep important pages less than three clicks from the homepage and implement keyword research processes to create highly relevant page URLs and subdirectories.

You want people to buy your products, so don’t make it difficult for them. You can then have other areas on the site for content silos and blogs that link to the various categories and products around the site.

Creating effective product pages

The product page design shouldn’t detract from the shopping experience, and the product information should be as “friendly” and accessible as possible.

Try to use the product information you have available in your Product Information Management (PIM) system. Ensure that your sizes, measurements, colors, prices, and other details are easy to find, read, and understand. These details are even more vital if you happen to sell products that others also offer. If you’re not including any sizes, but your competitors are, you’re increasing your chances that potential customers can choose to buy from them instead. If you’re targeting multiple countries, consider whether you need to include your measurements in imperial, metric, or both. Information should be localized where relevant.

Some top ways to ensure you always include enough information and avoid thin content on your product pages are to:

1. Start with a 50-100 word introduction: Think about what the product does and who needs it? One way to do this can be seen in the example from Apple below.

2. List the critical features and technical specifications in bullet format.

3. Include a “deep dive” section: Write a detailed product description with use cases, relevant awards the product may have won, benefits of the product, images of the product in use, and any FAQs.

4. Make use of user-generated content such as customer photos and reviews.

5. End with a 50-100 word conclusion: Summarize the product and use a call to action to encourage your customers to make the purchase.

Including enough information can be the difference between whether or not you make the sale or whether a customer purchases from a competitor.

Utilizing FAQ content to sell more products

People undoubtedly have questions about your products. If customers can’t find the answers they need on your website, they’ll search elsewhere. They’re likely to buy from that website when they find the answers.

You can rectify this by having a general FAQ section on your website. This is where you would answer questions about website security, shipping and return policies, etc. When it comes to product-specific questions, these should be answered on the product pages themselves.

The need to monitor out-of-stock products

There can be many reasons why a product is out of stock, yet the page is still live on an e-commerce site, including:

• Seasonality

• Limited product releases

• The store is waiting on more inventory

Ultimately, out-of-stock products can lead to customer frustration. Unsatisfied customers and a poor user experience — on top of the SEO implications of so many unuseful pages — result in fewer purchases and, ultimately, a poor-performing e-commerce store.

In summary

There are many ways that the performance of an e-commerce website can be optimized and analyzed, and these are just a few. While they may be less common, they can allow you to get additional data, which, once acted upon accordingly, can help you to outperform others in your market.

Announcing the Local SEO Certification from Moz Academy

43% of people tasked with marketing local businesses say there just aren’t enough resources available to teach them local SEO. Today, Moz is debuting our Local SEO Certification program to fulfill this need. With this well-organized, engaging video course, you can learn at your own pace, take an exam, and earn a certificate and LinkedIn badge as proof of your achievement.

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What will you learn?

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In Part 2, you’ll learn all about the concept of local search marketing, which segues into a method for creating a list of target keywords for your business. You’ll perform a preliminary location data audit for your business, and compare it to your competitors to get a better idea of how you stack up.

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By the end of this course, you will be well-prepared to begin analyzing local businesses and marketing them online. Once you’ve completed your 5 hours and 45 minutes of training, you will have the opportunity to take an exam to earn your certificate and LinkedIn badge to display your accomplishment to professional peers, employers, and potential clients.

Why take this course?

If you’re wondering how learning about local SEO will benefit you, consider that over the past two decades, Google has increasingly hitched its star to the local component of its offerings. Their local business listing index is unparalleled, their review corpus has surpassed Yelp’s, and they are steadily weaving local businesses into their powerful visual and shopping interfaces.

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