Identifying and Filling Your SEO Skill Gaps — Whiteboard Friday

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Helen shows you how to find and address gaps in your SEO skills so you can continue evolving and developing your best SEO self.

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Video Transcription

Hi, I’m Helen, Head of SEO at Car & Classic, and I am here today to share some top tips on how to identify your SEO skills gaps and how to fill them. 

Now that sounds a bit rude, doesn’t it, suggesting you have skills gaps? I don’t know you. You might be an excellent SEO, and we’re sure you are. But you know that thing that we tell our clients and our bosses that SEO is really difficult and it’s always changing, and the algorithms, oh, no, they’ve developed again. Turns out that stuff that we tell our bosses and our clients to keep our jobs, it’s actually true, and because of that, we have to keep our skill set evolving and developing to keep up with all the stuff that’s changing in our industry and to make sure that we are our SEO best selves.

But SEO is kind of a broad subject, isn’t it? I mean, we often loosely classify it into on-page SEO, digital PR, and technical SEO. But can you be an expert at all three, given that they’ve got such a wide and varied skill set? Is that not a bit reductionist anyway because what about local SEO or enterprise SEO or edge SEO?

Take technical SEO. Where do technical SEO skills end and developer skills, engineering skills begin? I’m going to take a step back from that heavy pile of confusion that I’ve just landed you with and talk about types of skills, namely hard skills and soft skills. Now, I’m loosely classifying hard skills as those kind of SEO skills you need specifically for SEO jobs, things like being able to do keyword analysis or a technical audit, those kind of things that you can learn, you tend to learn on the job, and you can develop and grow at over time.

Then there’s also soft skills, but those are the kind of skills that are a bit more transferable, the kind of skills that would put you in a good stead no matter what kind of job you get, things like communication skills or stakeholder management. Those are really important to keep in mind because you’re going to need a mix of hard skills and soft skills in different ways depending on which SEO job you’re in.

So let’s take a think then. Given that SEO is such a broad subject, how do you know which skills you need to be good at? For example, if you’re a really good technical SEO, do you need to know lots about local SEO? Do you need to be really good at enterprise SEO? Do you actually need to know what edge SEO is, or can you just keep pretending?

1. What skills do I need? 

So step one really is identifying what skills you need for your role and your future career. So I would always start at looking at your current job. So what is it that you do on the day-to-day? I’d have a look over the course of a week, perhaps, and at the end of each day, just jot down the kinds of activities that you are doing.

So, for instance, you might have done a bit of a technical audit, or you might have had some meetings. Of course, you’ve had meetings. We all spend our lives in meetings. But jot them down and start to break them down into the skill sets that you need to be good at each of those activities. So let’s take meetings, for example. You might have had a client pitch meeting. What are the kind of skills that you need to be really, really successful at client pitch meetings?

If you could max out, if you could turn your skill level up to 10, what would those skills be for you to be really successful in a pitch meeting? But then perhaps in the afternoon, you did some training for the developers in your team. That’s still a meeting. There’s a whole different set of skills. There’s training. There’s communication. It’s a different skill set needed.

So just spend some time looking over the course of the week, breaking down all of the different activities you do in your current job, and try to analyze what sort of skills you need to do really well at those activities. But that’s your job now. What about your future career? What kind of skills do you need for that? So now I would start looking at some job ads. So maybe fire up LinkedIn, ignore those 20 messages trying to sell you guest post opportunities, and have a look at some of the job ads that are there.

But don’t look at the job ads that you could get at the moment. Look at the job ads that are a bit more aspirational. So if you’re a technical SEO, look at senior technical SEO ads or head of technical SEO. Start looking at those job ads for jobs that are a couple of stages above where you are right now and look at the kind of skills that they are asking for, the ones that they think are absolutely essential and those that they think are a bit desirable, because that will give you an indication as to what skills you might need in your future career if you’re going in the direction that you hope to go in.

And then, of course, you need to start breaking down some of those complex skills. I’m talking the kind of generic, nebulous kind of skills that we always seem to list on our job ads, things like stakeholder management. What does that actually mean in SEO? I mean, really, it means that you get your way, right, that that amazing SEO strategy that you’ve spent ages coming up with is bought in by the stakeholders that need to say yes to it.

That’s kind of what stakeholder management is. But if you break it down into its component skills, it’s about being able to communicate effectively and persuasively. It’s about understanding business needs and blockers. It’s about being able to understand development cycles and how your requests might fit into those. So stakeholder management, quite a broad skill, but start identifying what the component skills are of those complex ones.

And then finally, speak to your manager. Get them to give you a progression plan, set some goals for you. Help them to identify what skills you need for your current role, what they’re expecting you to excel at, and that will help you to come up with a total list of all the skills that you might need in your current and future roles. Great.

2. What do I need to improve?

So you know what you need to know, but how do you know whether you’re already really good at those skills or you need to improve at them? Well, I would suggest you start off by asking your colleagues. Ask them to tell you what you need to improve at. But you’re going to need to be specific because if you just ask them what they think of your current skills, they’ll say something like, “You’re really nice and you bake great cakes for the office, and you’re really friendly,” and it’s really edifying, but it’s not particularly helpful in this context.

So perhaps put together a bit of a survey for them because everyone loves impromptu surveys when they’re really busy at work. But ask them anonymously to feedback on the skills that you know you need to have for your role and ask them to mark you out of, say, 5 or 10 on how competent they think you are. Also do it yourself. This is your skills matrix. This is how you identify where you think you are in your competencies at these particular skills.

But I’d suggest you break it down further. So if you’re looking at, say, website migrations, rank yourself in terms of your theoretical knowledge of website migrations, but also your practical experience of them, because it might be that you have read every single blog on the Moz blog about website migrations, but you’ve never actually carried one out. So your theoretical knowledge might be really high.

You might have a great understanding of what goes into a website migration, but practically you don’t really have much experience of it. So you might give yourself a five for knowledge and a zero for practical experience. Get your colleagues to do that, do it yourself, and then you’ve got a really good idea of where you currently are in terms of your skill set. Also, ask your manager during your performance reviews to start ranking you themselves.

They might be a bit more objective. They might be able to give you an idea of the sorts of skills that they do think you need to develop in, that you’ve perhaps not identified yourself. They should really be able to help you measure that against the performance plans that they’ve put in place for you. And finally, go to conferences, read blogs, scroll through Twitter. Where do you feel out of your depth in those kind of conversations? Where is it that you think, “I have no idea what they’re talking about. They’re going on about edge SEO again.”

3. How do I improve?

Where is it that you think you actually need to improve your knowledge and understanding and perhaps practical application? Okay, so you know what you need to know. You know what you’re not so hot at. But how do you improve? Well, that’s step three, and I would suggest you start by surrounding yourself with thought leaders. So go to Twitter, or Mastodon, or wherever else it is that you cool kids hang out these days and find yourself some thought leaders to follow.

Now, these might not be people in the SEO industry, but they might be experts in other fields. But try to find people who really excel at the kind of skills that you want to develop. So if you want to get better at persuasive communication, follow some politicians. If you want to get better at understanding how development cycles work and how you can get buy-in from engineers, follow some engineering managers.

But start to understand from the people who really excel at those kind of skills that you’re looking to improve how they do things and how they develop and practice their skills. You can also find yourself a mentor. Now, this is great because you could have someone who really understands who you are and your direction of travel in your career. They can help you to identify where you’re currently a little bit weak and also help you to see where you’re improving.

Now, mentors can be quite expensive, or they can be entirely free. There are mentoring schemes out there, like the wonderful Women in Tech SEO one, and there’s others that you might be able to take advantage of. But find yourself someone, and it might be a former colleague or a former boss, or it might be someone that you currently work with. But find someone who you know is a step or two ahead of you in terms of their career and the sorts of skills that you want to develop and ask them to help you.

Training, we’ve all been promised these amazing training budgets when we’ve sat in job interviews. Let’s actually use them. So find yourself some training courses that are really specific to the skills that you’re looking to develop. Don’t just go on sort of generic SEO ones. But if it’s stakeholder management, find a course that covers that, or if it’s public speaking, find a course that covers that. Get feedback from your mentor, from your colleagues, from your boss.

Ask people to let you know whether they think you’re developing those skills or not. Have a look at your skills matrix. Make sure that you’re just not leaving it on your desktop to gather metaphorical dust, but actually brush it off and have a review. How have you developed over time against those skills that you listed out a while ago? If there’s any skills that you’re really, really hoping to get better at, you’ve got to try them out.

So whether that’s a public speaking skill that you want to develop, and you’ve just got to make that leap to asking whether you can lead a client meeting or whether you can lead a training session or even applying to talk on stage, you’ve got to try it out. And, of course, it doesn’t end there. It’s a continual process. You’ve got to go back to stage one. I would suggest that you maybe set yourself a reminder once a year to have a look back over this, make sure you’re still on track for the career that you want and you’re still improving those skills that you want to improve.

Thanks very much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Google Bard vs. the New Bing

This week I’ve been fortunate enough to get access to both Google Bard and the New Bing, so a day later, I’m here to share my first impressions.

What is the new Bing?

“The new Bing” is the product of Microsoft’s unholy alliance with OpenAI, makers of the now infamous ChatGPT. This development promises to have seismic effects on the search ecosystem, with Microsoft’s CEO saying they’re happy to accept “demonetization” of search in their pursuit of market share, and Google extremely concerned about the threat ChatGPT technology poses as an alternative to their core search business.

Of course, by now we’ve all also seen various viral posts and tweets showing just how dangerous it can be to use chat AI as a search engine, but that’s a topic for another day. For now, the point is that Bing is making moves.

When I perform a search on “old bing” now, I can see this box inviting me to try the new one. You’ll notice a key detail here: it’s only available in Microsoft Edge. Yikes. Big Microsoft Energy. Fortunately for you, the reader, I have dusted off everyone’s fourth-favorite browser so you don’t have to.

Performing the same search in the new Bing, I can see identical organic results, but rather different features:

The “mustelid masters” box above the organic results is new, and contains AI-generated text with a voice-to-speech capability. It’s a six-part story, with sometimes surprising accompanying imagery:

You can see here that a picture of wrestling has been sourced to accompany the text about badgers wrestling. These AI-generated boxes don’t appear for most queries — only clear and uncontroversial informational intents.

The phrase “Mustelid masters” itself seems to be original to this box.

Lastly, one of the tabs in the story cites the Wisconsin Badgers, and a page which is entirely unrelated to the content at hand, so perhaps Bing is also citing its sources for disambiguation here?

You’ll notice the addition of an “Open Website” button next to the top result on the SERP — perhaps a way of compensating a little for loss of organic click through rate?

The “chat” tab is also present on old Bing, but just shows you a message telling you to go to Microsoft Edge.

The phrase “conversational search” here is interesting, given this was a phrase Google introduced in 2013.

If we do use Microsoft Edge, we see a chatbot interface in this tab, but with some nice additions. Switching over to this from a regular search result pre-loads my previous query from organic search:

There’s a bunch of different modes available at the top, and also citations in the search results — both welcome improvements over the likes of ChatGPT.

Now, how about Bard?

What is Google Bard?

Well, not very self-confident, for one. But that’s probably a good thing.

Bard is also, right now, not anywhere near as integrated with search. In their announcement on February 6th, Google teased Bard in a way that made it look very much like a SERP feature, similar to Bing:

However, the version we have to play with now is more of a dedicated chatbot interface.

It was probably already the case that Google was pushed to move far sooner than they hoped with this technology, and of course they have much more to lose from messing with organic search than Bing does. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise to see the slower and more cautious approach.

Now, it probably should be noted that chatbots are not really designed for me to just enter a one word keyword like “badgers”, like I might do in organic search. But, like Bing’s chat tab, I get something resembling an informational result. So, let’s compare side by side.

Bard vs. new Bing, side-by-side

Click here to see the full side-by-side comparison.

The most obvious difference, at least to an SEO’s eye, is the presence of citations in the Bing result. Not knowing where source information comes from is one of the biggest challenges for users when dealing with this kind of technology, so that’s a huge differentiator.

Bard does claim to include citations. My colleague Mike was able to trigger them, and captured it in this clip. It’s definitely far, far less ubiquitous than on Bing.

That said, I like that the framing of Google’s solution — with multiple draft answers presented and “enter a prompt here” — which makes it clearer I’m dealing with something that is not a source of unassailable truth.

I was also intrigued by the localization of Bing’s result. It mentions the UK in its response, which is where I’m searching from, and shows UK websites in the citations. So I asked them both a follow-up question about my location:

Bing repeats itself, but Bard just seems to assume I’m in the US. Unfortunate.

Slightly commercial query

Many SEOs will be more interested in how technology like this might fit into their marketing funnel. Let’s try a classic top-of-funnel query:

Click here to see the full side-by-side comparison.

There isn’t really an objective answer here, but both results are broadly sensible. That said, the Bing answer is both a narrower list and far richer.

Interestingly, neither result seems deterministic.

Click here to see the full side-by-side comparison.

Bing can produce different answers to the same question in different windows, and so can Google.

Click here to see the full side-by-side comparison.

This may be a contentious point when SEOs start optimizing for these answers, and want to measure their results. Of course, regular organic rankings can vary massively between locales and even days of the week, but generally speaking, if you search twice from the same computer (in private browsing windows etc) you’ll get the same results. Not so here.

Conspiracy theories

Click here to see the full side-by-side comparison. 

Neither solution fell for some obvious conspiracy theory bait, which is encouraging to see. I actually don’t mind at all Google’s more cautious “I can’t assist with that” here. I wasn’t able to provoke a similar reaction out of Bing for any query, but I also wasn’t able to provoke it to say anything abhorrent – I’m sure others will, though.

What next for SEOs?

For both platforms there are major questions before SEOs can really engage and consider them an important part of their work.

For Bing, will this have adoption? Most SEOs have not made the habit of optimizing for Bing in recent years, but there is already talk of increased Bing market share.

For Bard, how, if at all, will this be integrated in search? The current platform is clearly marked as an experiment, and is more like ChatGPT than it is like the mock ups Google showed us in February. Or will users be encouraged to use it as its own thing?

For both platforms, there are big questions about how SEOs might go about optimizing to get their clients mentioned, and indeed favorably mentioned in results – there are lots of nefarious possibilities here, and Wikipedia is probably the most obvious. Once mentioned, how does one measure this? When I clicked through to my own site from Bing’s chat tab, it just appeared like any other Bing organic traffic. Rank tracking is an interesting problem too, and you can be sure that Moz and STAT will be posting in future about how we’re handling these features — watch this space!

13 Local Search Developments You Need to Know About from Q1 2023

Can you believe we’ve already sped through the first quarter of the new year? So much has happened, and on the strength of the warm reception this nascent local search quarterly review received in 2022, I’m going to continue the series this year. Thank you for being a reader. Let’s dive right into the most interesting new things we’ve seen in the first three months of 2023!

A new local search ranking factor!

Joy Hawkins and her Sterling Sky squad discovered something truly new this February: selecting pre-defined Google Business Profiles services from the list that Google offers some categories of business can have a tremendous positive impact on local pack rankings. Joy’s dream team is working to see whether custom-written services have a similar effect. For now, if Google shows you a choice of ready-made services (not to be confused with service areas) in your NMX interface and they relate to your business, definitely add them! By my count this brings us up to 5 GBP factors we strongly believe directly impact rank: title, URL, categories, reviews, and now, pre-defined services.

The ABCs of…ABC

In crunchy spherical fruit news, Apple launched Apple Business Connect to make it easier for local businesses to get on the map, because, of course, you want to reach those 137k iPhone users. Mike Blumenthal has the best write-up on the new ABC features, and Moz Local customers get a collective pat on the back because their info is already being distributed to Apple Maps hassle-free. I hope to have a column coming out soon on Apple’s launch, but in the meantime, local SEOs are seeing this as one more signal (amid all the AI chat buzz) that there could be a few cracks of competitive opportunity in the Google local monolith. It can be worth major money to win even a point away from Google’s market share, and this is an interesting time in search.

BBB as trusted source in troubleshooting

In other acronymic headlines, Stefan Somborac and Ben Fisher spotted Google requesting a link to your BBB listing in one of their assistive help forms. You may encounter this when reporting problems with your listings and need to go find yourself on the Better Business Bureau site. The Better Business Bureau has not always earned good press in local search circles, but this move from Google signals that they clearly trust the longstanding organization. Might be a good time to look at how you’re rated there.

GBP products in Google Shopping results

At first, there was uncertainty as to whether this was a new feature when Colan Nielsen spotted it, but on the strength of the “wows” from the local SEO community, Barry Schwartz did a write-up on this phenomenon of products that were manually added to Google Business Profiles showing up within the search engine’s large shopping interface. In the past, I had only seen products added via the Merchant Center appear this way. Communication of local inventory remains a major hurdle for independent businesses, and this change from Google is a good incentive to be sure you’re adding products to your Google Business Profiles with help, if you need it, from my handy tutorial.

Shelfies spotted in NYC

This March, when I wrote about the nifty idea of shelfies (photos of store shelves you upload to GBP to display the breadth of your inventory), I had yet to see Google altering 3-pack visuals to feature them based on my search language. Kudos to Mike Blumenthal for capturing a live instance of this behavior for “backpacks nyc” and note that the local pack images show many products instead of a single item. I’m still not seeing this in my west coast environs, but am even more convinced now that local businesses should be taking shelfies.

NMX Profile Strength leaves us feeling a bit weak

Darren Shaw’s tweet captures the real-time letdown of finding a novel New Merchant Experience feature…only to discover it seems like a sales tool for Google Ads. Apparently, in order to get a good Profile Strength score, you need to pay. Colan Nielsen perfectly summarizes the awkwardness that is happening for agencies as a result of this debut:

Google’s rollout of the NMX was not popular, and I don’t know how it is affecting local business owner engagement with the local product, but if this metric is meant to inspire more commitment from users to completing their free profiles, it’s odd to mix it up with a paid product. A red herring, a primrose path, a bait-and-switch, gammon and spinach? Hardly a brilliant success if agencies are telling their clients to ignore this “feature”. And speaking of things that were once free…

Local Service Ads: A whole lot going on

Matt Casady wrote an excellent article over at LocalU about dentists becoming eligible to “pay to play” via LSA. If you’re marketing a new practice or helping one compete in a dense market, you can purchase the visibility you need to fill the patient roster. This sounds like good news, at a glance, but it’s also part of the ongoing saga of local business visibility becoming less “free” at Google’s house. At last count, 70 categories have become eligible for LSA and Google just keeps adding to the list.

LSA isn’t just a budgetary woe for underfunded SMBs, but a hotbed of very concerning spam. As my friends at NearMedia point out in the foregoing article, LSA’s review requirements are a temptation to engage in review spam, and both fake businesses and fake review content are ending up getting recommended by Google in this program. If you’re thinking of paying Google for leads, please read Ben Fisher’s alarming piece on LSA arbitrage and spam, complete with real-world examples of some very deceptive ads. At this point, I don’t trust Google’s “guarantee” any more than I do the local packs…I’ve just seen too much fraud to pretend that such content is uniformly trustworthy. Not to say that Google isn’t making some efforts, including:

Emergency brakes during spam attacks

Another doff of the cap to Colan Nielsen for sharing a new Google doc explaining why and how they may suspend user generated content (UGC) including reviews, images, and videos during upticks in prohibited behavior. For example, if a business becomes major controversial news and begins to receive a large number of reviews from non-customers, Google can pull the emergency brake for a period of time to defend the brand (and the quality of the index).

This capability is not new, but the documentation of the practice is noteworthy. The problem is, it’s no guarantee that Google will protect you from a spam attack. Remember that review spam may not always consist of a bunch of obviously negative reviews. There’s the erosion tactic of leaving a lot of 4-star reviews to downgrade the 5-star rating of a business, and another trick I only recently encountered of spammers initially leaving a high-star review and then sneakily changing it to a low-star one. All good reasons to continuously monitor your reviews, using software if you find this task too time-consuming. And be prepared to act quickly with this step-by-step Mike Blumenthal tutorial if your business is sabotaged

Two scoops of juicy justifications

Damian Rollison brings us some better news about UGC this quarter, in the form of double local business justifications (some of which stem from reviews) appearing on listings. Justifications are textual snippets embellishing local business listings, like the, “My whole family uses them for car repairs,” shown above.

In my 2021 column, Local Justifications are a Big Deal and You Can Influence Them, I documented the different types of justifications I saw, including reviews, websites, posts, services, menus, in-stock, and sold here. At that time, however, all justifications I encountered in my study were single. Damian’s find is exciting because of the large amount of screen space being given to a double justification, with its dual conversion pitches. Have you written a Google post lately (actually, they are confusingly called “updates” now, so have you updated your GBP with an update, lately?). Double justifications would be well worth the effort, if you’re lucky enough to get them.

Immersive views for big buildings

When I was a child, my family had a coffee table book called Above London which showcased aerial photography of the capitol. Now, everyone and their cousin can buy a drone to get these kinds of shots, but lovers of new things will appreciate this tweet from Punit of the 360 Map View that Google then talked about as “immersive view” at their memorable Paris announcement. Looking up the Getty Museum in LA on Google Maps showed me that many big buildings in the area have this treatment. If your local business is contained within a landmark edifice, you could get this eagle’s eye view of where you work.

In non-Google news

Yelp has really struggled of late to compete with Google for local mindshare, but the fellows at Near Media drew my attention to a new report from the National Bureau of Economic research finding that restaurants which get listed on Yelp see a 5% increase in sales. In fact, even if your first reviews aren’t great, you still get a bump in diners. The restaurant business is HARD and that 5% could mean a great deal.

Actually, success is always the great challenge for nearly any local business, and that brings me to my last tidbit: the new, must-read report from the Institute of Local Self Reliance on the impact of dollar stores in the US. I have read countless articles over the past few years from towns and cities where dollar stores replaced all local variety and residents are stuck with little fresh food, dismal wages, and a loss of community identity. In 2022, nearly half of the businesses that opened in the US were some type of dollar store – an unprecedented figure, and these exemplars of the race to the bottom are the exact opposite of what independent businesses are working so hard to build.

I said this was non-Google news, but I’ve come to see Google Business Profiles as some of the best armor an SMB owner can don in the fight against lowered standards of living across the country. Use your profiles, and your website, and your social media to get the word out that your business is unique, local, ethical, green, family-owned, and a key contributor to the economic localism that makes the difference between a good place to live and a difficult place to be. Keep going, and I’ll be rooting for you in Q2!

Identify Featured Snippet Opportunities – Next Level

Featured snippets offer a fantastic opportunity for increased traffic and visibility for your site. There is a lot to say about this SERP feature and a lot that has already been said:

• Crystal Carter covered how to optimize existing content for featured snippets in an episode of Whiteboard Friday (complete with a handy dandy flow chart!) which is incredibly informative. Seriously, check it out.

• Additionally, Britney Muller has done multiple episodes on what featured snippets are, how to target them, and more.

So what can I possibly add to the conversation? Well, let’s take a look at how Moz Pro can help with identifying opportunities to gain (or steal) featured snippets within your existing toolkit. Then you can take the infinite wisdom of folks like Crystal and Britney to elevate your content to new heights (and SERP features).

A Refresher on Featured Snippets

Before we dig in, let’s take a brief moment to talk about what featured snippets are, just to refresh our memories. Featured snippets are a type of SERP feature which seek to answer a query using a snippet from a webpage. When a searcher makes a query, Google may attempt to answer that query by pulling out a portion of a site’s content to display directly in the results.

Sometimes, as seen in the example above, Google will even highlight the most relevant part of the blurb they’ve extracted.

Featured snippets can come in a variety of formats including paragraphs, numerical lists, bulleted lists, and more and can be identified by the inclusion of a source link at the bottom of the feature. These features are not to be confused with answer features which do not include a source link and typically have a slightly different format.

Now that we’ve refreshed our memories on what featured snippets are, let’s dive into how we can use Moz Pro to identify opportunities to snag them.

Moz Pro Campaigns

Moz Pro Campaigns offer a variety of data views and tools you can use to scope out featured snippet opportunities. To start, we’re going to take a look at the Rankings Overview section.

Rankings

Within the main Rankings tab, you can see and monitor your tracked site’s rankings for all your tracked keywords. Anywhere your site has acquired a featured snippet will be noted as a rank of #1, with a featured snippet icon beside it which looks like a pair of scissors.

Pro tip: In the above screenshot I’ve opted to label these keywords as “featured snippet” so I can keep an eye on them and identify if I lose a featured snippet due to a competitor overtaking me or by Google changing the SERP for those keywords to no longer include a snippet.

If we hop over to the Competition tab of our rankings section, we can start to spot opportunities to steal some of this prime real estate in the SERP. Just as we saw in the Rankings tab, any keyword where the #1 has earned a featured snippet will be indicated by that scissors icon. This means we can sort our tracked keywords by our tracked competitor’s rankings to identify where they are earning those SERP features and where I’m ranking in comparison. This can help me spot featured snippets within striking distance by showing me a side by side comparison.

Any keyword where we’re already ranking on the first page and there is a featured snippet present could be an opportunity for me to reformat and fine tune our content to scoop up that feature.

SERP Features

Now that we’ve identified opportunities related specifically to your competitors, let’s broaden our scope a bit. The SERP Features section of your Campaign can offer additional insight into opportunities for featured snippets outside of competitor rankings.

Within this section of your Campaign, the tool will note how many of your tracked keywords include a featured snippet in the SERP as well as how many of those your site has earned.

This can offer a great opportunity to investigate and identify featured snippet opportunities outside of your competitor rankings. We can filter by featured snippet to see which keywords include this SERP feature and then identify keywords where our site is not currently featured. This is indicated by a grey featured snippet icon. For keywords where our site is currently ranking but not included in the featured snippet, we may see an option to expand the Insights column.

By expanding this drawer we can see what site the current featured snippet is being pulled from along with the exact URL. We can then use this information to identify areas of opportunity for our own content. Can we possibly provide a better answer to the query? What kind of markup and formatting is the current snippet’s post using? What can we do to elevate my own content?

Pro tip: The SERP features section of your Campaign can be exported to CSV, as well. Within the export, any time a SERP feature is present but your site is not included, this will be indicated by TRUE. If your site is included in the SERP feature, it will be noted as Included.

Keyword Explorer

Now that we’ve taken a look at how we can use Moz Pro Campaigns to identify and monitor featured snippet opportunities, let’s look at a few ways we can use Keyword Explorer to supplement that information. Whether you’re doing keyword research for a new client, looking to identify featured snippet opportunities for your site, or you’re needing content ideas to build from, the Keyword Explorer tool is an invaluable addition to your tool kit.

First, let’s walk through a workflow to help identify existing opportunities for featured snippets. Britney Muller also touched on this workflow in her Whiteboard Friday episode “Featured Snippets: What to Know & How to Target.

1. In Keyword Explorer, enter your URL into Explore by Site

From within the Keyword Explorer > Explore by Site you have the option to enter a root domain, subdomain, subfolder, or exact page to see keywords you are already ranking for. The subdomain and subfolder options can be particularly helpful if you are doing research for a specific vertical of your business or section of your site. For example, you may be looking to capture featured snippets for your blog’s subfolder.

2. Filter your results by rank

After entering in your URL and clicking Analyze, you’ll have the option to view the Ranking Keywords. From this list, filter by Ranking to see only the keywords for which you’re ranking on the first page (positions 1-10).

3. Add keywords to a Keyword List

Now we have a list of keywords that could have the potential for a featured snippet opportunity. Let’s dig a little deeper. While it can be incredibly helpful to know what keywords you’re ranking #1 for (and it may be worth adding those to a Campaign to track and monitor over time) these may not present many new opportunities for your site. Google’s deduplication of featured snippet results in the SERP – meaning that if a site has earned the featured snippet, that same URL will not be listed in the remaining SERP results – means that if your site is included in the featured snippet, it is identified as position #1 in the SERP. So let’s find and select the keywords for which our site is ranking 2 to 10 and add them to a Keyword List in Keyword Explorer.

Pro tip: If your site is ranking for a large number of keywords it can be helpful to export your Ranking Keywords to CSV. You can then filter and sort by rank and search volume to identify your strongest opportunities and add them to a Keyword List via copy & paste.

4. Find keywords with Featured Snippet opportunities

Now that we have a list of potential keywords, let’s narrow it down further. Within our Keyword List, we can filter by SERP Feature to see only the keywords which have a featured snippet in the SERP.

We can then take these keywords and add them to a Campaign, do further research on them, or see what content is currently featured in the SERP and identify ways to improve our own content.

Pro tip: You can use the Rank Check feature to see what page on your site is currently ranking on the first page of the SERP for these keywords and export that data to CSV.

Explore by Keyword

Up next is a workflow to help us identify new opportunities and possible content ideas for featured snippet inclusion. We’ll be using Keyword Explorer again but we’ll be switching to the Explore by Keyword section.

1. In Keyword Explorer, enter your seed keyword into Explore by Keyword

Within Keyword Explorer > Explore by Keyword we have the ability to enter in a seed keyword or term and explore the SERP, keyword metrics, and Keyword Suggestions. In this example we’ll be scouting content ideas and featured snippets for a blog post all about homemade ice cream.

2. Click on Keyword suggestions

After entering “homemade ice cream” into the tool and clicking Analyze, we can click into Keyword Suggestions to see additional keyword ideas along with their relevancy and monthly volume.

3. Filter to see keyword suggestions that “are questions”

Considering that featured snippets are typically added to SERPs when Google is attempting to directly answer a query means that when writing a blog about homemade ice cream, we will want to know what people are asking about homemade ice cream. Within Keyword Suggestions, we can filter to display keyword suggestions which are specifically questions.

Filtering this way will allow us to see what people are asking, and how often they are asking it, in an attempt to nail down content ideas.

4. Select keywords and add to a Keyword List

Once we’ve identified some topics and questions that may be relevant to our new blog, we can select them using the checkboxes on the left and add them to a Keyword List for further analysis.

5. Find keywords with Featured Snippet opportunities

Finally, we’re going to revisit the last step from our previous workflow and filter our Keyword List by SERP Feature to see only the keywords which have a featured snippet in the SERP.

We now have a list of topic ideas and questions to consider answering in our new post all about homemade ice cream. This can help to inform our content along with the structure and markup for our posts. For example, we may decide to write a step-by-step process for how to make ice cream at home. Or we may publish a recipe for vanilla ice cream. Or we could even write a post all about the best ingredients to use when making an ice cream case to elevate our flavors. Regardless of what we decide to publish, we can now apply the tactics and strategies outlined by Crystal Carter and Britney Muller for featured snippet optimization to our shiny new list of topics.

Conclusion

Featured snippets aren’t going anywhere anytime soon — if anything, we seem to be seeing more and more varieties of them as time goes on. Identifying opportunities to optimize existing content or create new content for inclusion in them can lead to increased visibility (and possibly traffic) for your site. I hope you now feel prepared to go use the Moz Tools to scope out those prospects. With these actionable workflows in your toolkit, you’ll be able to rise to the top!

The ROI of Digital Accessibility

In a recent AudioEye survey of 500 business leaders and web professionals, 70% said that “cost” was their main concern when it came to digital accessibility. Many of the respondents also thought they would have to rebuild their website from the ground up in order to deliver an accessible browsing experience.

This perception of digital accessibility as a cost center without an easy remedy is one of the reasons that just 3% of the internet is accessible to people with disabilities, despite the 1.3 billion people globally who live with a disability.

In this post, I discuss three benefits of digital accessibility — and hopefully, make a case for why inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do, but a huge business opportunity.

Three reasons to prioritize digital accessibility

Many business leaders are aware of the risk of non-compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other accessibility legislation. Over the last few years, there has been a record number of digital accessibility lawsuits. More companies are receiving demand letters or being taken to court over alleged violations under the ADA. And when that happens, other business leaders pay attention.

What business leaders don’t always consider is the opportunity that digital accessibility represents, whether it’s reaching more potential customers, building a more inclusive organization, or improving the browsing experience for all users — not to mention search engines and voice assistants.

1. Digital accessibility is not an edge case

One of the biggest misconceptions about digital accessibility is that it’s some sort of edge case. In fact, people with disabilities are the largest minority in the United States.

In the United States, one in four adults lives with some type of disability. That number goes even higher when you include temporary disabilities, like broken limbs or short-term impairments following surgery or medical treatments.

According to the Global Economics of Disability 2020 report, people with disabilities control $1.9 trillion in disposable income, globally. That number reaches over $10 trillion when their friends and family are included.

By designing for accessibility, you can make your website and digital experiences work better for everyone.

2. Accessible design is good for everyone

At its core, digital accessibility is all about eliminating barriers that can prevent people from browsing your website.

By following the best practices of accessible design, you can help ensure that everyone can interact with your digital content — regardless of age, disability, or any other factor.

For example, the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Supplemental Guidance to WCAG 2 includes best practices for clear and understandable content, such as:

• Avoiding double negatives, such as “Time is not unlimited.”

• Using short sentences with one point per sentence.

• Putting the key takeaway or objective at the start of a paragraph.

• When possible, using bulleted or numbered lists.

The goal of these recommendations is to remove confusion for people with dyslexia and other learning disabilities. But it could just as easily be a general writing best practice.

Every user can benefit from simple, direct language that removes friction and gives them a clear next step. It’s the foundation of any conversion-optimized website — and it just happens to overlap with the best practices of accessible design.

3. Digital accessibility supports discoverability

There’s also a clear overlap between accessibility and discoverability. For example, sites with clear, descriptive headings — the same kinds of headings that make navigation and comprehension easier for people with disabilities — are also easier for search engines like Google to crawl.

Because of this, there’s strong evidence that Google rewards accessibility when ranking websites. In fact, its Webmaster Guidelines — which outline the best practices that help Google to find, index, and rank your site — read like accessibility guidelines — and often correlate directly with WCAG.

Accessible websites are also beneficial to users who access websites with voice search. According to the Google Mobile Voice Study, 41% of US adults and 55% of teens use voice search daily. Businesses with websites that are optimized for voice search, have a better chance of being discovered and used by potential customers.

Making the business case for digital accessibility

The first goal of any digital accessibility initiative should be to deliver an inclusive experience to everyone who visits your website. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it can help you reach a market that’s traditionally been underserved.

However, it’s important to note the other benefit of building an accessible website: greater conformance with accessibility standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which are used to assess a site’s compliance with the ADA.

Based on recent guidance from the Department of Justice, it’s clear that businesses of all sizes are expected to meet accessibility standards like WCAG in order to comply with the ADA.

When you calculate the ROI of digital accessibility, you should factor in that the cost of defending a digital accessibility lawsuit — or even settling a demand letter — can often surpass the cost of making your website accessible.

By taking a more proactive approach to digital accessibility, you can comply with the law while also turning a requirement into an opportunity to grow your business and deliver an inclusive experience to every customer.

As you invest in digital accessibility, it’s worth measuring your progress over time. To get started, you can use a free accessibility checker to assess your website’s accessibility — and then see how it improves as you implement accessibility best practices.

How to Avoid Duplicate Conversions and Recreating the Conversion Funnel for GA4

As you’re probably all too aware at this point, GA4 is coming. Old versions of Google Analytics will be switched off for pretty much everyone come June 2023.

While GA4 is improving all the time, there are quite a few things that people are used to seeing in old versions of Analytics which, at the very least, take a bit of creativity in the new world.

One example is how conversions are handled. In the old versions of Google Analytics, a conversion could only fire once per session. In GA4 conversions are just another kind of event, so it’s possible for a conversion to fire multiple times in one session.

Problem is, you might be very interested if someone signs up via your contact-us form once. But that person might reload the thank-you page, or sign up for something else via a different form on the site. That doesn’t mean you necessarily want to track two conversions.

Speaking of signing up via different forms, on some websites, users may wind up on the same thank-you page having taken very different routes to get there. If we don’t have that much control, and we’re having to rely on thank-you page views to track conversions, it can be hard for us to separate out different kinds of conversions.

In old versions of GA you could use funnels with a “required” step. You might have one goal with a funnel requiring your event page, another goal with a funnel requiring a different page, and rely on them to give you different conversions. There also isn’t an obvious way to do this in GA4.

In this post, I’m going to take you through how to:

• Avoid double counting in GA4.

• Automatically ignore suspicious conversions (like people landing direct on the conversion page).

• Recreate the kind of funnels we expected in Universal Analytics (in fact we’ll make them better).

I’ll take you through a few bits in GA4 and others using Google Tag Manager. The GA4 approach is more straightforward, but the Tag Manager is more robust and can help you make sure that all of your conversion pixels are showing roughly the same information (because we’re long past the point where GA is the only place we’re recording conversions).

Managing conversions in GA4

This section is about changes we can make purely through the GA4 interface. As long as you’re sending your page views conversion events to GA4 you should be able to use these tactics without any code changes.

However: There are some limitations of doing things through GA4, for example it can mean that your GA data doesn’t line up with conversions recorded via other platforms.

Avoiding double-counting

Julius Fedorovicius (of Analytics Mania fame) has produced a fantastic guide to making sure that conversions are only recorded once per session.

You should have a read but broadly:

• You create a custom audience based on a sequence that begins with “session_start”

• You fire an event when someone enters that audience

• You use that event as your conversion.

No surprise that Julius has come up with a really smart way to handle the problem of double-counting:

If you’ve created Segments in Universal Analytics Audience sequences in GA4 look very like the sequences we used to create for Segments. However, the old Segments were just a way of visualizing data, whereas Audiences in GA4 are a way of grouping data. We can use Audiences to create something new.

That distinction is important because we can do cool things like fire custom events when someone enters an audience (which Julius makes use of in this solution).

Universal Analytics Segment sequence creator

GA4 Audience sequence creator

The limitations of using Google Analytics audiences

This isn’t really a limitation as far as GA goes but it’s a consideration nonetheless. Julius’ solution is great for making sure we’re not double-counting conversions in GA, but GA probably isn’t the only way we’re recording conversions.

The average site probably has a bunch of separate conversion tracking pixels and those could end up double-counting conversions.

For example: Facebook and Google both describe how they avoid double-counting conversions, but their solutions largely rely on exactly matching transaction IDs, and even if they’re handling it okay, there’s a bunch of smaller fish out there that are also offering conversion tracking and can need a bit more hand-holding.

If we want to make sure that we’re only recording one conversion per session, it’s useful to make sure all of our conversion tracking is working in a similar way. Tag Manager is a great solution for that (I describe a solution in the Tag Manager section below).

You can also run into problems if, for example, your confirmation page is somehow indexed or bookmarked by users — people landing directly on it can lead to weird unexpected conversions. We can also use Tag Manager to guard against that a little bit.

Recreating the conversion funnel

Sticking with the GA4 interface for now, we can also adapt the AnalyticsMania approach to create our funnel-based conversions too by adding additional steps to the sequence.

For what it’s worth, conversion funnels are not the ideal way to categorize conversions. If you can use anything more direct (like the id of the form they’ve filled out, a separate thank-you page) then that’s a much more reliable way to categorize conversions. That said, we don’t live in a perfect world, and sometimes there isn’t the option to completely rebuild your conversion process.

In Fedorovicius’ example we just have two steps in our audience sequence:

1. Session_start
   Indirectly followed by

2. Conversion

Which basically means “someone lands on the site and then at any point during their session, they convert”.

To recreate the goal funnels you might be using in Universal Analytics – we can just add another step to the sequence. For instance:

1. Session_start
   Indirectly followed by

2. Visiting our event_page
   Indirectly followed by

3. Landing on our thank you page/converting

That should mean we can create one conversion which is: Users who went through our event page and then converted.

And another conversion which is: Users who went through our sponsorship page and then converted.

There are some limitations here though, for example, what if someone:

1. Landed on the site

2. Visited our event page

3. Then visited our sponsorship page

4. Converted using the form on either.

They would fulfill the criteria for our event conversion and the criteria for our sponsorship conversion. We’d record a conversion for each and we’d end up double-counting after all.

This is also a limitation of the old Universal Analytics funnels: Just because a step in the funnel was required doesn’t mean the user can’t wander off around the site between that step and their final conversion. So, if it’s any consolation, this isn’t any worse than old Universal Analytics funnels (but we can still do better).

The problem with using “directly followed by”

You might say “well that’s easily solved — at the moment the sequence says is indirectly followed by and we can just change that to is directly followed by”.

Surely that would mean that someone is on the sponsorship page and goes directly from the sponsorship page to the thank you page, right?

Unfortunately that’s usually not what “directly followed by” means because there’s all kinds of things that can get recorded in analytics which aren’t page views.

For example if someone lands on the sponsorship page, and then scrolls down and lands on the thank you page, the thank you page view doesn’t directly follow the sponsorship page view. It goes:

• Page view: sponsorship

• Scroll

• Page view: thank you

So “directly followed by” isn’t an easy solution.

How about “within x minutes”?

GA4 has a really cool feature in the sequence builder where we can set a timer in-between steps. Even outside of tracking conversions within a session we can use it to keep track of cool things like people who came to our site, didn’t convert that time, but came back and converted within the next couple days.

Jill Quick has been talking a bunch about how powerful these options are.

We could use this to say something like: person landed on our event page and then landed on our thank you page within 10 minutes.

But as I’m sure you’ve guessed, that ends up being a kind of arbitrary cut off, maybe someone spends some time thinking about how to fill out our form, or maybe someone really quickly goes to one of our other pages and converts there. This could be better than the basic funnel, but we could also end up ignoring completely legitimate conversions.

So what do we do?

Using GA4 sequences for this is kind of fine, as I say above it’s certainly not worse than Universal Analytics, but we could do better with Google Tag Manager.

Managing conversions in Google Tag Manager

These approaches require you to run all your tracking via Tag Manager. Though even aside

from this, if you’re not already using Tag Manager, I’d advise you to look into it!

Since we need to keep track of what’s happened to a user across multiple pages, these solutions are also going to make use of cookies. In case that fills you with dread, don’t worry:

• I’m going to walk you through how to create and delete these cookies (it takes a little Javascript but it’s copy-paste and easier than you think!)

• These aren’t the kinds of cookies designed to give away people’s information to other services.

To reiterate what I say above: While this approach takes a bit more effort than just doing things through Google Analytics it allows us to do two things:

1. Make sure all of our various tracking tags are firing in the same way

2. Have more fine grained control, particularly if we’re trying to categorise different paths to conversion.

Avoiding double-counting

To recap what we want to do here, we want to make sure that if someone visits our site and converts we fire a conversion. However, if they revisit a thank you page, or go through a different conversion, we don’t fire a second conversion that session.

To do that, we’re going to:

• Set a cookie when a user converts.

• Make sure that the cookie automatically disappears after 30 minutes of inactivity (this is the default timeout for GA4 sessions but if you think that’s too short you can set it to whatever you want).

• Every time we go to fire a conversion, check if that cookie is present and, if it is, don’t fire the conversion.

That should mean that if someone comes to our site and converts, we’ll set the cookie, and that will stop us from firing any more conversions (GA4 or otherwise) until the user has taken a little time away from the site.

Setting a cookie in JavaScript

The first thing you need to know is that we can use Tag Manager to run any JavaScript we want. The second thing to know is that we can use JavaScript to set cookies.

So first: Go to Google Tag Manager, create a new Tag and select the Custom HTML type

Give the tag the name “[Tag] setCookieConverted” and in the html content paste:

<script>

// Get time 30 minutes from now (this is because the default GA session time out

// is half an hour and we want our cookie timeout to match)

var minutesToAdd = 30

var currentTime = new Date(); // Get current time

var newDateObj = new Date(currentTime.getTime() + minutesToAdd*60000); // Add our minutes on

// Set the domain your’re working on, this is because we want our cookies to be

// accessible in subdomains (like test.example.com) if needed

var yourDomain = “example.com”

// Set a cookie called ‘converted’ with the value being ‘true’ which expires in 30 minutes

document.cookie = “converted=true; path=/; domain=”+yourDomain+”; expires=”+newDateObj+”;”

</script>

It should look like this:

The custom HTML tag will add the content there to the page, and as soon as the page detects a new script (the one we’ve written) it’ll run that script.

What our script does is:

• It finds the current time, and what time it’ll be in half an hour.

• It uses that, and your domain, to set a cookie called “converted” which can be read by any page on your website.

When you go to save your tag it’ll probably say “No Triggers Selected”.

For now we’re going to click “Add trigger” and choose the “All Pages” trigger.

This is purely so that while we’re putting this together we can easily test it..

Reading our cookie value

Tag Manager has a built-in way to read cookie values using variables. So go to the variables section, create a new variable called “convertedCookie” and set the Cookie Name as “converted”.

Now, if you click the “Preview” button and open up your site we can start to look at what value the convertedCookie variable pulls through for you.

Click into the “Variables” tab and you should see convertedCookie somewhere in the list. Here’s an example with other cookies blocked out so you know what to look for.

So now we can use the value of that variable in Tag Manager as part of our logic.

Using conversion cookie in our conversion logic

Everyone’s conversion setup will be the different so this might not match what you’re doing exactly but if you’re considering using GTM I’m assuming you are firing conversions something like this:

1. You have a trigger based on some condition (probably either a custom event or a pageview)

2. You have a tag (or multiple tags) that send your conversion information whenever that trigger is activated.

What we’re going to do is tweak your trigger to add another condition.

Imagine that your trigger was previously firing on every thank-you page visit:

What we’re going to do is add a second condition to the trigger:

convertedCookie does not contain true

While this example uses the thank you page path, it doesn’t have to, it can be anything.

Once you make this change, you can go and test your conversion. Because you have another tag adding the converted cookie on each page view, your conversion shouldn’t fire when it normally would.

Now we just need to change our converted cookie so that it only appears after someone has converted.

At the moment we’re setting the “converted” cookie on every page view, so we’ll never get any conversions.

We need to update that so:

• We set a cookie when someone converts.

• Every time we load a page, if the person is marked as “converted” we reset the cookie (I‘ll explain).

Setting a cookie only when someone has converted

First: we need to remove the trigger from [Tag] setCookieConverted so it doesn’t fire at all.

Then we go to whatever tag we’re using to send our conversion, open up “Advanced Settings”, click “Tag Sequencing” and select “Fire a tag after”.

Then we select our setCookieConverted tag and check “Don’t fire if conversion tag fails”.

This should mean that whenever we send our conversion, we’ll automatically then activate our cookie tag and mark the user as converted.

So now our logic is:

• If someone converts, we check if there is a cookie saying they recently converted already.

• If they don’t have that cookie we send a conversion.

• Then we automatically set that cookie.

To test this, you can either clear the cookie or wait for it to expire. Here are instructions for how to clear cookies in Google Chrome (which you’re probably using if you’re working with tag manager).

Now, if you got into GTM preview and click around you should be able to look at your variables and see that convertedCookie is back to being ‘undefined’.

If you convert, you should see that both tags fire — your conversion tag and your setCookieConverted tag.

But if you convert again (reload the page, re-fill the form, whatever you’ve got to do) you should see that neither tag fires.

Congratulations! You’re filtering your conversions to avoid recording a conversion more than once for someone in a 30 minute window.

We just want to make one last tweak now.

Refreshing the cookie if it has been set

Our cookie has a 30 minute expiration. That means it’ll stick around for 30 minutes and then automatically be deleted from the browser. But what if someone hangs around on our website for more than half an hour, reading a blog post or something, and converts again?

To help deal with that, we’re going to add another trigger which checks if the user has recently converted, and if they have, refreshes the cookie with each new page load.

Head back to [Tag] setCookieConverted

At this point it should have no firing triggers. We’re going to add one back in.

Click the blue plus sign in this screen, and again in the next screen that comes up, we’re going to create a new trigger.

In the new trigger, we set it to fire only on page views where convertedCookie contains true.

So this gets a little bit circular, but basically:

• When someone converts we set a “converted” cookie for the next half hour.

• Every time someone loads a page, if they have a “converted” cookie we reset that cookie for another 30 minutes.

• If at any point the user doesn’t load a new page for 30 minutes, the cookie will expire, which means our refresh won’t be triggered.

You can test this by clicking around your site with the GTM preview. Once you’ve converted, the [Tag] setCookieConverted should fire on every new page load.

Wrapping up

All you need to do now is make sure that all of your conversion tags use that same trigger (the one that has the condition that convertedCookie isn’t “true”). Once that’s set up, they should all behave the same — only recording one conversion per session unless someone clears their cookies or just hangs around on one page for a very long time.

What if we find we’re getting weird conversions where users haven’t visited any other pages on the site?

I have worked with sites in the past where:

• There’s useful information on the thank-you page and users have been keeping it open/coming back to it.

• Confirmation pages have been indexed in Google or people are finding their way to the conversion page some other way.

That can lead to weird tracked conversions that don’t correspond to actual conversions. While these problems should be solved at source, we can also clear up our analytics using the steps in “Creating a conversion funnel” below.

Creating a conversion funnel

This builds on the cookie meddling we’ve done in the last section, so if you haven’t read that bit, it’s worth taking a look!

If you’re here not because you want a specific funnel but because you want to deal with weird conversions where users just land straight on the conversion page – don’t worry you follow these instructions exactly the same, you just set the trigger for every page except your conversion page (I’ll take you through that).

Setting a “path” cookie

Just like the “converted” cookie before, we’re going to create a new cookie that records the location of the current page.

Create a new Tag called [Tag] setCookiePath, choose “Custom HTML” and add the following JavaScript

<script>

// Get time 30 minutes from now (this is because the default GA session time out

// is half an hour and we want our cookie timeout to match)

var minutesToAdd = 30

var currentTime = new Date(); // Get current time

var newDateObj = new Date(currentTime.getTime() + minutesToAdd*60000); // Add our minutes on

// Set the domain your’re working on, this is because we want our cookies to be

// accessible in subdomains (like test.example.com) if needed

var yourDomain = “therobinlord.com”

var pagePathName = window.location.pathname // Get location of current page

// Set a cookie called ‘converted’ with the value being ‘true’ which expires in 30 minutes

document.cookie = “conversionPath=”+location+”; path=/; domain=”+yourDomain+”; expires=”+newDateObj+”;”

</script>

It should look like this:

This will save a cookie that records the location of the page. The first time it’s loaded it will create a new cookie with that information, every time after it’ll replace the value.

We’ll use this to make sure that whichever funnel page our user interacted with last is the one we record.

Triggering on your funnel pages

In creating our “funnel” we’re assuming that there are certain pages a user passes through in order to convert. So we’re going to set this to trigger only when one of those funnel pages is involved.

In your [Tag] setCookiePath tag – click to add a new trigger and create a new trigger.

We’re going to configure our tag to activate on every user click. This means that if a user is hopping between different funnel pages, each one will overwrite the cookie as they click around but only the one they interacted with last will be the one that sticks around in the cookie value.

Getting our funnelCookie

As in the double-counting instructions, create a new variable. But this time, call it funnelCookie and set the “Cookie Name” to conversionPath.

Once you’ve done that you should be able to test by using preview, going to any old page of your site (as long as it’s not one of your funnel pages) and checking funnelCookie in the Variables (it should be undefined).

Then go to one of your funnel pages, you should be able to see the cookie change.

As you visit other pages on the site, funnelCookie should stay the same, unless you visit another funnel page.

Changing our conversions based on the funnelCookie

Now, there are smart things you could do here with extracting the value of funnelCookie and putting that into a variable in your conversion tag but the setup for every tag will be different and I want to give you an option for if you’re not able to do that.

This will create a little bit more mess in your Tag Manager account because you’ll be duplicating some of your trigger and conversion tags.

First, let’s go back to the conversion trigger we were working on before. It looked like this when we left it:

We’re going to add in another condition:

funnelCookie contains event-page

This means now that this conversion will only fire if the last funnel page our user passed through was the event-page.

After this we can duplicate this trigger, our conversion tags, and, for our other set of conversions, change the funnelCookie value for the trigger.

Maybe instead we make it:

funnelCookiecontains form-page

Now you have two sets of conversions, each of which will fire based on which funnel page the user passed through. From there you can edit the values sent.

A couple caveats

Instead of duplicating our conversion tags it would be much better to pull in the value of the funnelCookie variable and use that to just dynamically change some of the values we’re sending as part of the conversion.

With this approach, you also run the risk of not recording any conversions at all if a user hasn’t passed through one of your funnel pages. That might be what you want, but it’s worth bearing that risk in mind in case you think people might take legitimate-but-unusual routes to conversion.

While I can’t take you through the process of updating all of your conversion tags, one option to make this information more ready for filling out conversion tags (and to optionally set a fallback in case you want to avoid losing conversions) is to use a lookup table like this, where you take the funnelCookie value and categorise the values.

Then instead of adding the funnelCookie value in your trigger, you keep the trigger the same and pull in the lookup table value.

Triggering on any page except your conversion page

If you’re not concerned about constructing page funnels but you want to make sure that users have visited at least one page before converting. There are a couple changes:

• You trigger [Tag] setCookiePath based on any Page View that isn’t your confirmation page

• You don’t bother creating different conversion flows, you just have one flow, but you still add a funnelCookie requirement which says that your funnelCookie has to be some page rather than undefined

Conclusion

Hopefully this has helped you get an idea of how to get more control of the conversions being recorded on your site, whether that’s entirely through GA4 or using the power of Tag Manager.

Happy tracking!

You’re Measuring Your Branded SERP Wrong – Whiteboard Friday

Controlling the consumer experience of your brand is key to how people see it and how they interact with it. For SEOs, the part of brand experience that we control the most is the SERP, yet traditional ways of measuring brand reach on the SERP often fall short.

Today, Dominic talks through an example of how they fall short, and how we can do better.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. I’m Dominic. I am the founder of Piped Out, and I’m here to talk to you about measuring your brand. If you have a product, controlling the consumer experience of that brand is very, very important. How do they see it and how do they interact with it?

As SEOs, the bit of that brand experience that we control the most are the SERPs, but traditional ways of measuring that often fall short. We’re going to talk through an example of how they fall short and how we can do better. So I’m going to use the example up here of cyberpunk.net. There was a video game that came out a little while ago called Cyberpunk 2077. I’m just picking this as an example of a product that had some real brand reputation problems.

It did not have a good launch. So if you were an SEO working for them, how might you’ve gone about controlling and measuring how well you were controlling their brand experience? Over here we’ve got our SERP. Our SERP is we’ve got some fairly standard blue link results where we’ve got a title and a meta description. We’ve got some other richer elements, things like a video block down here anda People Also Ask block. We’ve got a knowledge block over to the side. If we’re looking at this in a rank tracker, we’d go, okay, so for cyberpunk.net, the primary domain that we control, here’s our rank, and over time we’ve moved from five to four, fantastic.

Outside of brand, this is not a terrible way to do it. This is, of course, for a single keyword because we can see the sort of fluctuations there. If we have multiple keywords, we’ll have an aggregate so that it will become an average. It’s probably going to look a bit smoother. Maybe we’ve got something like bucket ranks sitting behind here, so the number of keywords that rank position one, number of keywords that rank position two, and we’ve got that to give us a bit of a richness over time.

But fundamentally, this is still a very simple picture for a branded SERP because, firstly, what we need to think about is how people have looked at SERPs has changed a bit over time. As SERPs have gotten richer, people like Nielsen have seen how we no longer just read straight down. We now ping pong around a bit more. We’re willing to interact with more of the SERP. On a branded SERP, this assumption here, Google has domain crowding, so ideally they’re trying not to show too many of each domain on each particular SERP.

But on a branded SERP, your goal is not to rank with one URL. Your goal is to rank with many URLs, and you have the ability to rank with many URLs unlike normal. For a branded term, like, for this example, it could be “Cyberpunk 2077.” It could be something slightly more loaded, like “is cyberpunk good.” It could be something slightly less loaded, like “is cyberpunk out.” All of these are branded terms, where I think the publisher has a really good chance of appearing for multiple places.

So the green one, right at position four or five, is our cyberpunk.net. But actually we also own position three. That’s our publisher domain, the people who published the game. So you’ve got the game website and the publisher thing. We also might want to count this as a win for us. We’ve got a journalist who’s a really good, basically, champion for our brand. They really like the game, and they’ve written a really positive article that’s down here.

There’s one up here in red. This is a negative article. This is someone who is not having such a good time with it. We might have our Twitter account and any other number of things, the YouTube accounts, all of these other bits that we could be getting onto our branded SERP. If we’re just measuring by rank, we’re only ever going to get one single number to sum up all of this richness. It’s just not good enough for brand. So how can we do better?

How do we take this? So firstly, what we need is a rich SERP data model. You can get this from anywhere. In practice, what we do at Piped Out is we use a service called DataForSEO, which is an API that gives a very rich SERP data model. We’d highly recommend. But there are plenty of services that offer this, and it really doesn’t matter which one you pick. What’s important is that you have a rich enough SERP data model to get all the ins and outs of each of these little SERP features.

So I don’t just have the People Also Ask box as a single block. I have each individual question in the People Also Ask box with the title that ranks and then the URL that is below that. Same thing for the video. I need a rich enough SERP data source that for the video element, I don’t just have the URL, I also get the source for a video block. Google has a little source there, and that’s actually the name of the account.

When you go and get all that rich data, you can then define what is yours or what you want to be yours. We don’t technically own this positive article, but we might count it as ours. So you can go and build up this definition of like all of the different things that you think are valuable. You then take this SERP data model and you say, okay, and you calculate the size for each of these things.

So how much is this size in pixels? This is an ordinary SERP block, so it’s probably about 180 pixels tall. So you calculate the height of all of these different elements that you own, and you can turn that, and you could do area as well, but height for a more basic version, and you could turn that into this, the percentage of owned SERP measured by pixels. What percentage of this SERP do you own?

Again, our definition of ownership is whatever we want it to be. This is enabled by having a very rich SERP data source. Now, we are getting a little bit of something here, which is that with rank, we obviously know five is better than four. We lose a little bit of that context when we come with something like this, which is that obviously ranking down here is not as good as ranking up here. But when we’re measuring size and all of these different elements, again, we can’t literally have all of them there.

So we have to have some sort of compromise for how do we measure importance without going just back to rank. I think an excellent compromise is to measure above the fold and first page, so the percentage of the pixels of the SERP that you own above the fold on desktop and mobile and on the first page by desktop and by mobile. So the idea is that you have a graph that looks something like this, where we can say, “Okay, for our site, for cyberpunk, for the set of keywords that we’re looking at, we own a growing percentage of the mobile pixels above the fold. Great, we’re controlling our brand experience.”

That gives us essentially a good idea of how what we’re doing as SEOs is controlling that branded SERP. Then when you’re doing brand projects and you’re trying to enrich and fill on this domain, you’re getting your results. You’re correctly measuring your results rather than having a very simplified picture where you can’t do this. Technically, like I said, this practically looks like finding a rich SERP data source.

In our case, at Piped Out, we take DataForSEO and we pump it into BigQuery. But again, it could be anything. Lots of great SERP API data sources do this. STAT might also do this. Don’t know. Go ask STAT because it’s a Moz product and this is a Moz blog. That’s pretty much it.

Go get that data source, use it to build these sort of dashboards, and you can get better insight into how well you’re controlling your brand. Thanks and we’ll see you next time.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Three Irish Small Business Ideas that Could Be US Hits

“Knitting the Islands”, by Miriam Ellis

A happy and lucky St. Patrick’s day to all my readers! I’ve seen it again and again that small and local businesses became successful due to a great inspiration and some little happenstance bit of luck that got them noticed. Today, I’d like to celebrate with you by offering a shamrock of three ideas I’ve seen taking off in my mother country of Ireland. You may not replicate the exact business model, but do take away the underlying concepts which I strongly believe could succeed in the US. I’ll also point out how you can help luck along with a little creative marketing. Share this article with your team for brainstorming new campaigns, or with anyone in your life who wishes they could start a small business

Finding the “grá”

Ever wondered how to say “I love you” in Irish? One way is “tá grá agam duit” (taw graw ah-gum duts/ditch). It’s not uncommon to hear Irish folk saying they have a “grá” for something when speaking English, and to me, the word not only conveys love but a kind of longing. When people have a “grá” for some really good bread, or a trip to the seaside, or a warm coat they saw in a shop window, it’s what we might call “consumer demand” in American marketing lingo. Pay attention right now, and you may be starting to notice people in the US and elsewhere expressing a special kind of “grá“ for a different life. Recently, such a thread stood out to me on Twitter, started by author and founder Dave Gerhardt.

Software, of course, isn’t going anywhere any time soon, and the more we see of the current state of AI chat, the less many analysts are convinced that it’s going to be a major disruptor at present, but what I observe in this tweet and the replies to it is that people are starting to get tired of the one-dimensional confines of too much screen time. Wanting a satisfying local life and community “IRL” is a great “grá“ statement. Americans are deeply attached to our tech, but more and more, I’m running across peers talking about having an “analog life”, wishing their kids would become “luddites”, or wondering how an off-grid life would feel for their families. More simply put, many people would like to experience more satisfaction in what is right around them.

This dynamic is, in fact, tailor-made for small business entrepreneurs, so let’s look at these three aspirational concepts to see if you or your clients have got a “grá” tugging at you for any of them.

1. Be about life

Within living memory, it was the mark of respectability to have your little weedless patch of green lawn. You constantly cut the grass to keep it under tight control. You yanked out every dandelion – or worse – poisoned your own nest with herbicides. Think things never change for the better? I hear you, but check out TheIrishGardener because now, instead of rolling out bundles of monocrop sod, the Irish are carpeting the outdoors with native wildflower matts. One dimension isn’t enough anymore – folk want flowers and bees and moths and butterflies and bugs and more of everything alive. Yard by yard, they are reinvigorating essential ecosystems. Clever wildflower seed sellers are now marketing their products like seed matts and seed bombs not just to homeowners but as wedding favors, holiday gifts, classroom projects, and more.

There’s been such a base trend in US marketing in which we try to sell things to our neighbors by scaring them. Our ads are full of guns, screaming, threats, panic, anxiety, and danger and it’s very weird contrasting this with the ads I listen to on Irish media which seem to be largely focused on green energy, eating nice things, and enjoying the arts.

Could your great small business reject fear-and-shock-based marketing and instead hinge on beauty and satisfaction in life? We do have that old adage of drawing more flies with honey than vinegar, and if you can align your business with the very strong yearning for life to be abundant, varied, diverse, interesting, healthy, and fun, I think you’re moving away from the old lifeless lawns to the new thriving garden.

2. Be about locality

There’s only one place you can get real Irish seaweed – from the coasts of the country, of course! WildIrishSeaWeeds.com is one of those rare businesses that has seen the potential in a gift of nature that many might pass by without noticing. Seaweed is practically a miracle – you can eat it, bathe in it, and use it as a very carbon-friendly fertilizer that elders have always sworn by. What was once mainly a snack remembered fondly by children is now becoming a serious green industry in Ireland, and not far from where I live, I see a Californian company testing whether they can latch onto a similar demand in the US.

What is overlooked where you live? Is it something that can only be gotten in your local area? Something people used to love but are forgetting about now? Maybe it’s a local food source that’s starting to disappear because no one is using it anymore, or maybe its a skilled craft like basketmaking in a local style, baking or brewing a regional speciality, knitting or sewing a heritage garment, compounding an old-time remedy. Maybe it’s reviving a tradition that used to anchor your community. Could your great small business idea simply be about reconnecting neighbors with what’s special about where you live…a place that may have started to have vanished in our collective consciousness because the screens are blocking the view?

3. Be about people’s simplest pleasures

Our SEO lives may be consumed with ChatGPT right now, or GA4, or what will happen next on or to Twitter, but Padraic Óg Gallagher is up on the balcony of his restaurant, growing real Irish potatoes for his Boxty House in Dublin. If you’ve never had the luck to eat boxty, it’s a delicious potato cake, beloved enough in Ireland to be the inspiration behind a restaurant that’s seen such success, it was able to open a second location. Boxty is not fancy. It’s something your mother would make you from leftovers, something treasured from childhood, the memory of which warms your very soul.

If we look again at Dave Gerhardt’s Twitter thread, he’s not longing for a yacht, nor a manion, nor a pot of gold. He just wants the simple pleasure you get from “building in your community.” Most of us can be plenty happy with just enough, and rather than creating a business idea around elite luxury, consider what you might offer that actually delivers human contentment to the most people. A basic kitchen good that isn’t made well any more? A handcrafted walking stick? A cozy bookshop, a guided tour for visitors, your grandmother’s pecan pie, a wooden toy, a cloth doll, a sturdy garden implement, a bayberry candle, a regional herbal tea?

The simpler and better quality your idea, the more of a welcome change it could be for customers increasingly expressing fatigue from low-quality, mass-produced, and very limited options. America’s Vermont Country Store has been outstandingly successful in helping people relocate fundamental merchandise they can’t find anymore. Study their approach.

Creative marketing of your small business idea

What can you do to catch the eye of your audience? You’ve probably guessed that I’m going to say that, no matter how small your local business, you’ve got to have a website and local business listings. 30 years ago, I would have said this about the telephone book, and however much we may long for more off-screen time, we’ve got to concede that the web makes it so easy to be found! So yes, publish the best website you can budget for, build out your Google Business Profile and other listings, and invest all you can in learning about digital reputation management. It will help you achieve your goals.

That being said, the room there is beyond the web for creative marketing could fill all the pages of the Book of Kells. If you’re starting out quite small, try these low-tech approaches to getting the word out about your new business idea in your community:

• Ask an established business owner to host you as a pop-up shop inside their store, perhaps for tourist season or the holidays.

• If you produce enough volume, meet with local shop owners to discover whether your product could win a permanent place on their shelves.

• Approach local reporters with the most succinct, newsworthy angle of your business to seek press.

• Real-world community message boards still exist in some towns. Use them.

• Put a sign outside your house or in the window of your apartment. No room? Ask local officials for permission to put a sign in a vacant lot or on a street corner where you’ve seen other signage posted. Be ready to sell them on how your idea benefits the community.

• Research local regulations regarding hanging fliers around town.

• Research whether there is an opportunity for you to be included in existing print catalogs. 90 million Americans purchase something from a catalog annually, and even as the Internet has become so established in our lives, catalog shopping has continued to trend upwards.

• Found or join a local business organization for brainstorming, networking and cross-selling.

• Coordinate with other micro-business entrepreneurs to host a shared party in a local park, acquainting your community with your presence and offerings.

• Sponsor local teams, events, and people and be cited for it both on and offline.

• If your community still has a local radio station, try to get on it, either with an ad or as a guest, to reach 82.5% of US adults.

• If you live in an area favored by tourists, contact the local visitors’ center to see how to get listed in their publications.

• Advertise in the mailers and bulletins of local houses of worship and schools.

• If what you produce relates to any type of food, music, art, cultural, or local festival, participate in it.

“Little as a wren needs, it must gather it.”

I’m closing today with this famous Irish proverb, because it seems right for this moment in America, where the myth of endless growth and the dangers of an unchecked appetite for luxury have done no favors to the economy or environment our whole people must live in. The Irish phrase, “Cé gur beag díol, caithfidh sé a sholáthar,” has traditionally been used to remind us that even the small wren has to work hard to provide for itself – a scenario every small business owner and local business marketer will easily relate to.

But I’m starting to see a double-meaning in this phrase, and new business trends in Ireland are helping me to see it: a more sustainable way to found a venture may be in asking not how much you want, but how little you actually need to be satisfied. SEOs everywhere already know it’s a best practice to get clients to define what success looks like before a project begins so that all parties can see when a goal has been attained. For most small business owners not seeking to become big business owners, achievement will simply mean something along the lines of being able to pay themselves and their staff enough to have a modest, good life. To me, this recognition matters right now, because most customers are in search of the same thing – having just enough.

Whether it’s through thrifting in Ireland or thrifting in America, re-storing in Drogheda or re-storing in Simi Valley, eating local and organic at Moyleabbey Farm in Kildare or at Waxwing Farm in Washington, or preserving traditional crafts that last on that side of the water or on this, tandem trends are indicative of a search for a simpler, better life. 57% of Americans say they shop small to keep money local, and there is no overstating how much both nearby economics and the global climate benefit from this approach. If you’ve decided 2023 is the year to lean into the new/old ways by starting or marketing small businesses, I’d say the luck may be on your side!

Daily SEO Fix: Exploring Subfolder Search with Moz Pro

A subfolder, also known as a subdirectory, is a way of organizing the pages on your website. They can be thought of as a way to divide up information or products, depending on your business. Within a subfolder, there can be more subfolders stacked within, like nesting dolls! Subfolders can be great for your website and for SEO. Having clear landing pages for your subfolders is important to both the searcher and the crawler. They are also another way to earn more backlinks, contributing to a greater Domain Authority. A subfolder could be a blog, a product category, an Etsy store, and more!

You may not have thought of conducting keyword research or competitive research for your subfolder, but now may just be the time to look into it. Here’s the good news — you can conduct subfolder research with Moz Pro! Follow the videos below to understand how to get the most out of researching your subfolder with Moz Pro tools.

Why You Should Do Subfolder Research

There are several different ways subfolders can be used on your website. Learn all about why subfolder research is important for your business.

Subfolder Search with Keyword Explorer

Explore keyword opportunities with Moz’s ‘Explore by Site’ tool. Search by subfolder using this tool to discover the number of keywords that you rank for, and the top keywords you rank for, along with keyword metrics that help you understand which keywords you should be focusing your efforts on.

Subfolder Search with True Competitor

You can use the ‘True Competitor’ tool in Moz Pro’s Competitive Research suite to figure out who your competitors are for your subfolder. See who your top 25 competitors are, some you may already know about, and some may not. Explore more metrics to understand which competitors you should pay closer attention to.

Subfolder Search with Keyword Gap

Dig a little deeper with the Moz ‘Keyword Gap’ tool. Input your own subfolder, and your previously discovered competitors to explore the keywords that you share with them. You’ll be able to look for certain keywords that you should workto improve your ranking for, and discover top competing content to give you further content ideas for your subfolder research.

The Fundamentals of Crawling for SEO – Whiteboard Friday

In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, host Jes Scholz digs into the foundations of search engine crawling. She’ll show you why no indexing issues doesn’t necessarily mean no issues at all, and how — when it comes to crawling — quality is more important than quantity.

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

Video Transcription

Good day, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Jes Scholz, and today we’re going to be talking about all things crawling. What’s important to understand is that crawling is essential for every single website, because if your content is not being crawled, then you have no chance to get any real visibility within Google Search.

So when you really think about it, crawling is fundamental, and it’s all based on Googlebot’s somewhat fickle attentions. A lot of the time people say it’s really easy to understand if you have a crawling issue. You log in to Google Search Console, you go to the Exclusions Report, and you see do you have the status discovered, currently not indexed.

If you do, you have a crawling problem, and if you don’t, you don’t. To some extent, this is true, but it’s not quite that simple because what that’s telling you is if you have a crawling issue with your new content. But it’s not only about having your new content crawled. You also want to ensure that your content is crawled as it is significantly updated, and this is not something that you’re ever going to see within Google Search Console.

But say that you have refreshed an article or you’ve done a significant technical SEO update, you are only going to see the benefits of those optimizations after Google has crawled and processed the page. Or on the flip side, if you’ve done a big technical optimization and then it’s not been crawled and you’ve actually harmed your site, you’re not going to see the harm until Google crawls your site.

So, essentially, you can’t fail fast if Googlebot is crawling slow. So now we need to talk about measuring crawling in a really meaningful manner because, again, when you’re logging in to Google Search Console, you now go into the Crawl Stats Report. You see the total number of crawls.

I take big issue with anybody that says you need to maximize the amount of crawling, because the total number of crawls is absolutely nothing but a vanity metric. If I have 10 times the amount of crawling, that does not necessarily mean that I have 10 times more indexing of content that I care about.

All it correlates with is more weight on my server and that costs you more money. So it’s not about the amount of crawling. It’s about the quality of crawling. This is how we need to start measuring crawling because what we need to do is look at the time between when a piece of content is created or updated and how long it takes for Googlebot to go and crawl that piece of content.

The time difference between the creation or the update and that first Googlebot crawl, I call this the crawl efficacy. So measuring crawling efficacy should be relatively simple. You go to your database and you export the created at time or the updated time, and then you go into your log files and you get the next Googlebot crawl, and you calculate the time differential.

But let’s be real. Getting access to log files and databases is not really the easiest thing for a lot of us to do. So you can have a proxy. What you can do is you can go and look at the last modified date time from your XML sitemaps for the URLs that you care about from an SEO perspective, which is the only ones that should be in your XML sitemaps, and you can go and look at the last crawl time from the URL inspection API.

What I really like about the URL inspection API is if for the URLs that you’re actively querying, you can also then get the indexing status when it changes. So with that information, you can actually start calculating an indexing efficacy score as well.

So looking at when you’ve done that republishing or when you’ve done the first publication, how long does it take until Google then indexes that page? Because, really, crawling without corresponding indexing is not really valuable. So when we start looking at this and we’ve calculated real times, you might see it’s within minutes, it might be hours, it might be days, it might be weeks from when you create or update a URL to when Googlebot is crawling it.

If this is a long time period, what can we actually do about it? Well, search engines and their partners have been talking a lot in the last few years about how they’re helping us as SEOs to crawl the web more efficiently. After all, this is in their best interests. From a search engine point of view, when they crawl us more effectively, they get our valuable content faster and they’re able to show that to their audiences, the searchers.

It’s also something where they can have a nice story because crawling puts a lot of weight on us and our environment. It causes a lot of greenhouse gases. So by making more efficient crawling, they’re also actually helping the planet. This is another motivation why you should care about this as well. So they’ve spent a lot of effort in releasing APIs.

We’ve got two APIs. We’ve got the Google Indexing API and IndexNow. The Google Indexing API, Google said multiple times, “You can actually only use this if you have job posting or broadcast structured data on your website.” Many, many people have tested this, and many, many people have proved that to be false.

You can use the Google Indexing API to crawl any type of content. But this is where this idea of crawl budget and maximizing the amount of crawling proves itself to be problematic because although you can get these URLs crawled with the Google Indexing API, if they do not have that structured data on the pages, it has no impact on indexing.

So all of that crawling weight that you’re putting on the server and all of that time you invested to integrate with the Google Indexing API is wasted. That is SEO effort you could have put somewhere else. So long story short, Google Indexing API, job postings, live videos, very good.

Everything else, not worth your time. Good. Let’s move on to IndexNow. The biggest challenge with IndexNow is that Google doesn’t use this API. Obviously, they’ve got their own. So that doesn’t mean disregard it though.

Bing uses it, Yandex uses it, and a whole lot of SEO tools and CRMs and CDNs also utilize it. So, generally, if you’re in one of these platforms and you see, oh, there’s an indexing API, chances are that is going to be powered and going into IndexNow. The good thing about all of these integrations is it can be as simple as just toggling on a switch and you’re integrated.

This might seem very tempting, very exciting, nice, easy SEO win, but caution, for three reasons. The first reason is your target audience. If you just toggle on that switch, you’re going to be telling a search engine like Yandex, big Russian search engine, about all of your URLs.

Now, if your site is based in Russia, excellent thing to do. If your site is based somewhere else, maybe not a very good thing to do. You’re going to be paying for all of that Yandex bot crawling on your server and not really reaching your target audience. Our job as SEOs is not to maximize the amount of crawling and weight on the server.

Our job is to reach, engage, and convert our target audiences. So if your target audiences aren’t using Bing, they aren’t using Yandex, really consider if this is something that’s a good fit for your business. The second reason is implementation, particularly if you’re using a tool. You’re relying on that tool to have done a correct implementation with the indexing API.

So, for example, one of the CDNs that has done this integration does not send events when something has been created or updated or deleted. They rather send events every single time a URL is requested. What this means is that they’re pinging to the IndexNow API a whole lot of URLs which are specifically blocked by robots.txt.

Or maybe they’re pinging to the indexing API a whole bunch of URLs that are not SEO relevant, that you don’t want search engines to know about, and they can’t find through crawling links on your website, but all of a sudden, because you’ve just toggled it on, they now know these URLs exist, they’re going to go and index them, and that can start impacting things like your Domain Authority.

That’s going to be putting that unnecessary weight on your server. The last reason is does it actually improve efficacy, and this is something you must test for your own website if you feel that this is a good fit for your target audience. But from my own testing on my websites, what I learned is that when I toggle this on and when I measure the impact with KPIs that matter, crawl efficacy, indexing efficacy, it didn’t actually help me to crawl URLs which would not have been crawled and indexed naturally.

So while it does trigger crawling, that crawling would have happened at the same rate whether IndexNow triggered it or not. So all of that effort that goes into integrating that API or testing if it’s actually working the way that you want it to work with those tools, again, was a wasted opportunity cost. The last area where search engines will actually support us with crawling is in Google Search Console with manual submission.

This is actually one tool that is truly useful. It will trigger crawl generally within around an hour, and that crawl does positively impact influencing in most cases, not all, but most. But of course, there is a challenge, and the challenge when it comes to manual submission is you’re limited to 10 URLs within 24 hours.

Now, don’t disregard it just because of that reason. If you’ve got 10 very highly valuable URLs and you’re struggling to get those crawled, it’s definitely worthwhile going in and doing that submission. You can also write a simple script where you can just click one button and it’ll go and submit 10 URLs in that search console every single day for you.

But it does have its limitations. So, really, search engines are trying their best, but they’re not going to solve this issue for us. So we really have to help ourselves. What are three things that you can do which will truly have a meaningful impact on your crawl efficacy and your indexing efficacy?

The first area where you should be focusing your attention is on XML sitemaps, making sure they’re optimized. When I talk about optimized XML sitemaps, I’m talking about sitemaps which have a last modified date time, which updates as close as possible to the create or update time in the database. What a lot of your development teams will do naturally, because it makes sense for them, is to run this with a cron job, and they’ll run that cron once a day.

So maybe you republish your article at 8:00 a.m. and they run the cron job at 11:00 p.m., and so you’ve got all of that time in between where Google or other search engine bots don’t actually know you’ve updated that content because you haven’t told them with the XML sitemap. So getting that actual event and the reported event in the XML sitemaps close together is really, really important.

The second thing you can do is your internal links. So here I’m talking about all of your SEO-relevant internal links. Review your sitewide links. Have breadcrumbs on your mobile devices. It’s not just for desktop. Make sure your SEO-relevant filters are crawlable. Make sure you’ve got related content links to be building up those silos.

This is something that you have to go into your phone, turn your JavaScript off, and then make sure that you can actually navigate those links without that JavaScript, because if you can’t, Googlebot can’t on the first wave of indexing, and if Googlebot can’t on the first wave of indexing, that will negatively impact your indexing efficacy scores.

Then the last thing you want to do is reduce the number of parameters, particularly tracking parameters. Now, I very much understand that you need something like UTM tag parameters so you can see where your email traffic is coming from, you can see where your social traffic is coming from, you can see where your push notification traffic is coming from, but there is no reason that those tracking URLs need to be crawlable by Googlebot.

They’re actually going to harm you if Googlebot does crawl them, especially if you don’t have the right indexing directives on them. So the first thing you can do is just make them not crawlable. Instead of using a question mark to start your string of UTM parameters, use a hash. It still tracks perfectly in Google Analytics, but it’s not crawlable for Google or any other search engine.

If you want to geek out and keep learning more about crawling, please hit me up on Twitter. My handle is @jes_scholz. And I wish you a lovely rest of your day.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com