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Moz’s very warmest thanks to the 1,453 respondents who volunteered time to contribute to this second installation of our industry survey. It’s rewarding to have such a large survey group; as this report details in high relief, the work of marketing a single business location can pass through a dozen hands.
Owners, staff, in-house SEOs, agencies, creative directors, webmasters, project managers, and consultants may all be contributing to promoting just one local company. By capturing their hands-on experience, we get the big picture of local SEO as an effort not confined to experts, but rather, requiring all hands on deck.
In this report, you’ll find insights to share with coworkers and clients on:
The data in our survey depicts the local SEO industry both before and during the public health emergency. As such, it’s an eagle’s eye view of both the status of marketing priorities up to the present and a gauge of preparedness for change. Change has always been the only constant in local SEO — our industry is accustomed to an environment that can turn on a dime, literally overnight. This challenging setting toughens businesses for tough times.
No one knows yet how COVID-19 may ultimately alter consumer behavior, but in the short term, one good sign which has emerged from the State of the Local SEO industry report is that local businesses were strongly embracing organic assets prior to the pandemic. Not long ago, you might have encountered narratives about websites being “dead” due to the dominance of local packs, zero click SERPs, and other Google features. Fortunately, our report indicates that many marketers have wisely ignored such schools of thought and have continued to promote the vital role local business websites play in connecting with communities.
For now, if connection is curbside or delivery instead of foot traffic, local businesses which have been thoughtfully maintaining their websites own a strong platform for next moves — perhaps implementing local e-commerce, or taking orders via form submissions, or hosting gated video consultations.
Access to the State of the Local SEO Industry’s data will enable you to do your own analysis of the sum total of marketing knowledge up to the present with an eye to future strategy. Here’s a preview of 3 emergent narratives that particularly caught my eye.
Proximity falls to third as a local ranking factor
Our 2019 report cited user-to-business proximity as the dominant influence on Google’s local pack rankings. So has every Local Search Ranking Factors survey since 2017. This is a surprising departure. Download the report for further analysis and view the numbers in the light of how Google might adjust proximity based on new factors like curbside pickup and local delivery.
YOY, 19% more respondents are involved with offline marketing
94% (up from 75%) of our survey group are consulting with clients at least some of the time on topics like real-world customer service and consumer policies.This statistic professionally delights me, because of my years of advocacy here on the Moz blog for local search marketers to care deeply about what happens in real time between consumers and brands. Some enterprising agency should consider doing a webinar or eBook on the history of brick-and-mortar marketing so our industry can engage in deeper levels of learning and make informed decisions about future offline marketing strategy.
COVID-era customer fulfillment strategies are here to stay
51% of respondents intend to permanently offer amenities like home delivery, curbside pickup, and video conferencing. Now is the time for innovative marketing agencies to put in the work researching the best possible solutions for clients for the long haul. Will it be in-house delivery fleets, or outsourcing to third parties like Instacart and Doordash? Which e-commerce platform is the best, not just for UX but for SEO? Many brands swiftly cobbled together new services to meet the state of emergency, but as time goes by, consumer feedback and marketing analysis will point the way to thoughtfully choosing the best transactional methodologies and platforms. All of these technologies predate the pandemic, but the year ahead is going to see them much more fully tested.
Please accept our invitation to download the free State of the Local SEO Industry Report 2020, with 30+ timely questions on topics that impact how you work, what to offer, and how to improve your strategy for the year ahead whether you own a local business or are in the business of marketing local brands!
This blog was written by Tim Mehta, a former Conversion Rate Optimization Strategist with Portent, Inc.
Running A/B/n experiments (aka “Split Tests”) to improve your search engine rankings has been in the SEO toolkit for longer than many would think. Moz actually published an article back in 2015 broaching the subject, which is a great summary of how you can run these tests.
What I want to cover here is understanding the right times to run an SEO split-test, and not how you should be running them.
I run a CRO program at an agency that’s well-known for SEO. The SEO team brings me in when they are preparing to run an SEO split-test to ensure we are following best practices when it comes to experimentation. This has given me the chance to see how SEOs are currently approaching split-testing, and where we can improve upon the process.
One of my biggest observations when working on these projects has been the most pressing and often overlooked question: “Should we test that?”
Risks of running unnecessary SEO split-tests
Below you will find a few potential risks of running an SEO split-test. You might be willing to take some of these risks, while there are others you will most definitely want to avoid.
Wasted resources
With on-page split-tests (not SEO split-tests), you can be much more agile and launch multiple tests per month without expending significant resources. Plus, the pre-test and post-test analyses are much easier to perform with the calculators and formulas readily available through our tools.
With SEO split-testing, there’s a heavy amount of lifting that goes into planning a test out, actually setting it up, and then executing it.
What you’re essentially doing is taking an existing template of similar pages on your site and splitting it up into two (or more) separate templates. This requires significant development resources and poses more risk, as you can’t simply “turn the test off” if things aren’t going well. As you probably know, once you’ve made a change to hurt your rankings, it’s a lengthy uphill battle to get them back.
The pre-test analysis to anticipate how long you need to run the test to reach statistical significance is more complex and takes up a lot of time with SEO split-testing. It’s not as simple as, “Which one gets more organic traffic?” because each variation you test has unique attributes to it. For example, if you choose to split-test the product page template of half of your products versus the other half of them, the actual products in each variation can play a part in its performance.
Therefore, you have to create a projection of organic traffic for each variation based on the pages that exist within it, and then compare the actual data to your projections. Inherently, using your projection as your main indicator of failure or success is dangerous, because a projection is just an educated guess and not necessarily what reality reflects.
For the post-test analysis, since you’re measuring organic traffic versus a hypothesized projection, you have to look at other data points to determine success. Evan Hall, Senior SEO Strategist at Portent, explains:
“Always use corroborating data. Look at relevant keyword rankings, keyword clicks, and CTR (if you trust Google Search Console). You can safely rely on GSC data if you’ve found it matches your Google Analytics numbers pretty well.”
The time to plan a test, develop it on your live site, “end” the test (if needed), and analyze the test after the fact are all demanding tasks.
Because of this, you need to make sure you’re running experiments with a strong hypothesis and enough differences in the variation versus the original that you will see a significant difference in performance from them. You also need to corroborate the data that would point to success, as the organic traffic versus your projection alone isn’t reliable enough to be confident in your results.
Unable to scale the results
There are many factors that go into your search engine rankings that are out of your hands. These lead to a robust number of outside variables that can impact your test results and lead to false positives, or false negatives.
This hurts your ability to learn from the test: was it our variation’s template or another outside factor that led to the results? Unfortunately, with Google and other search engines, there’s never a definitive way to answer that question.
Without validation and understanding that it was the exact changes you made that led to the results, you won’t be able to scale the winning concept to other channels or parts of the site. Although, if you are focused more on individual outcomes and not learnings, then this might not be as much of a risk for you.
When to run an SEO split-test
Uncertainty around keyword or query performance
If your series of pages for a particular category have a wide variety of keywords/queries that users search for when looking for that topic, you can safely engage in a meta title or meta description SEO split-test.
From a conversion rate perspective, having a more relevant keyword in relation to a user’s intent will generally lead to higher engagement. Although, as mentioned, most of your tests won’t be winners.
For example, we have a client in the tire retail industry who shows up in the SERPs for all kinds of “tire” queries. This includes things like winter tires, seasonal tires, performance tires, etc. We hypothesized that including the more specific phrase “winter” tires instead of “tires” in our meta titles during the winter months would lead to a higher CTR and more organic traffic from the SERPs. While our results ended up being inconclusive, we learned that changing this meta title did not hurt organic traffic or CTR, which gives us a prime opportunity for a follow-up test.
You can also utilize this tactic to test out a higher-volume keyword in your metadata. But this approach is also never a sure thing, and is worth testing first. As highlighted in this Whiteboard Friday from Moz, they saw “up to 20-plus-percent drops in organic traffic after updating meta information in titles and so forth to target the more commonly-searched-for variant.”
In other words, targeting higher-volume keywords seems like a no-brainer, but it’s always worth testing first.
Proof of concept and risk mitigation for large-scale sites
This is the most common call for running an SEO split-test. Therefore, we reached out to some experts to get their take on when this scenario turns into a prime opportunity for testing.
Jenny Halasz, President at JLH Marketing, talks about using SEO split-tests to prove out concepts or ideas that haven’t gotten buy-in:
“What I have found many times is that suggesting to a client they try something on a smaller subset of pages or categories as a ‘proof of concept’ is extremely effective. By keeping a control and focusing on trends rather than whole numbers, I can often show a client how changing a template has a positive impact on search and/or conversions.”
She goes on to reference an existing example that emphasizes an alternate testing tactic other than manipulating templates:
“I’m in the middle of a test right now with a client to see if some smart internal linking within a subset of products (using InLinks and OnCrawl’s InRank) will work for them. This test is really fun to watch because the change is not really a template change, but a navigation change within a category. If it works as I expect it to, it could mean a whole redesign for this client.”
Ian Laurie emphasizes the use of SEO split-testing as a risk mitigation tool. He explains:
“For me, it’s about scale. If you’re going to implement a change impacting tens or hundreds of thousands of pages, it pays to run a split test. Google’s unpredictable, and changing that many pages can have a big up- or downside. By testing, you can manage risk and get client (external or internal) buy-in on enterprise sites.”
If you’re responsible for a large site that is heavily dependent on non-branded organic searches, it pays to test before releasing any changes to your templates, regardless of the size of the change. In this case, you aren’t necessarily hoping for a “winner.” Your desire should be “does not break anything.”
Evan Hall emphasizes that you can utilize split-testing as a tool for justifying smaller changes that you’re having trouble getting buy-in for:
“Budget justification is for testing changes that require a lot of developer hours or writing. Some e-commerce sites may want to put a blurb of text on every PLP, but that might require a lot of writing for something not guaranteed to work. If the test suggests that content will provide 1.5% more organic traffic, then the effort of writing all that text is justifiable.”
Making big changes to your templates
In experimentation, there’s a metric called a “Minimum Detectable Effect” (MDE). This metric represents the percentage difference in performance you expect the variation to have versus the original. The more changes and more differences between your original and your variation, the higher your MDE should be.
The graph below emphasizes that the lower your MDE (lift), the more traffic you will need to reach a statistically significant result. In turn, the higher the MDE (lift), the less sample size you will need.
For example, If you are redesigning the site architecture of your product page templates, you should consider making it noticeably different from both a visual and back-end (code structure) perspective. While user research or on-page A/B testing may have led to the new architecture or design, it’s still unclear whether the proposed changes will impact rankings.
This should be the most common reason that you run an SEO split test. Given all of the subjectivity of the pre-test and post-test analysis, you want to make sure your variation yields a different enough result to be confident that the variation did in fact have a significant impact. Of course, with bigger changes, comes bigger risks.
While larger sites have the luxury of testing smaller things, they are still at the mercy of their own guesswork. For less robust sites, if you are going to run an SEO split test on a template, it needs to be different enough not only for users to behave differently but for Google to evaluate and rank your page differently as well.
Communicating experimentation for SEO split-tests
Regardless of your SEO expertise, communicating with stakeholders about experimentation requires a skill set of its own.
The expectations with testing are highly volatile. Some people expect every test to be a winner. Some expect you to give them definitive answers on what will work better. Unfortunately, these are false expectations. To avoid them, you need to establish realistic expectations early on for your manager, client, or whoever you are running a split test for.
Expectation 1: Most of your tests will fail
This understanding is a pillar of all successful experimentation programs. For people not close to the subject, it’s also the hardest pill to swallow. You have to get them to accept the fact that the time and effort that goes into the first iteration of a test will most likely lead to an inconclusive or losing test.
The most valuable aspect of experimentation and split-testing is the iterative process each test undergoes. The true outcome of successful experimentation, regardless if it’s SEO split-testing or other types, is the culmination of multiple tests that lead to gradual increases in major KPIs.
Expectation 2: You are working with probabilities, not sure things
This expectation applies especially to SEO split-testing, as you are utilizing a variety of metrics as indirect signals of success. This helps people understand that, even if you reach 99% significance, there are no guarantees of the results once the winning variation is implemented.
This principle also gives you wiggle-room for pre-test and post-test analysis. That doesn’t mean you can manipulate the data in your favor, but does mean you don’t need to spend hours and hours coming up with an empirically data-driven projection. It also allows you to utilize your subjective expert opinion based on all the metrics you are analyzing to determine success.
Expectation 3: You need a large enough sample size
Without a large enough sample size, you shouldn’t even entertain the idea of running an SEO split test unless your stakeholders are patient enough to wait several months for results.
“Over the course of our experience with SEO split testing, we’ve generated a rule of thumb: if a site section of similar pages doesn’t receive at least 1,000 organic sessions per day in total, it’s going to be very hard to measure any uplift from your split test.”
Therefore, if your site doesn’t have the right traffic, you may want to default to low-risk implementations or competitive research to validate your ideas.
Expectation 4: The goal of experimentation is to mitigate risk with the potential of performance improvement
The key term here is “potential” performance improvement. If your test yields a winning variation, and you implement it across your site, don’t expect the same results to happen as you saw during the test. The true goal for all testing is to introduce new ideas to your site with very low risk and potential for improved metrics.
For example, if you are updating the architecture or code of a PDP template to accommodate a Google algorithm change, the goal isn’t necessarily to increase organic traffic. The goal is to reduce the negative impact you may see from the algorithm change.
Let your stakeholders know that you can also utilize split-testing to improve business value or internal efficiencies. This includes things like releasing code updates that users never see, or a URL/CMS update for groups of pages or several microsites at a time.
Summary
While it’s tempting to run an SEO split test, it’s vital that you understand the inherent risks of it to ensure that you’re getting the true value you need out of it. This will help inform you on when the scenario calls for a split test or an alternative approach. You also need to be communicating experimentation with realistic expectations from the get-go.
There are major inherent risks of engaging with SEO split-testing that you don’t see with on-page tests that CRO usually runs, including wasted resources and non scalable results.
Some of the scenarios where you should feel confident in engaging with an SEO split test include where you’re uncertain of keyword and query performance, proof-of-concept and risk mitigation for larger-scale websites, justification for ideas that require robust resources, and when you’re considering making big changes to your templates.
And remember, one of the biggest challenges of experimentation is properly communicating it to others. Everyone has different expectations for testing, so you need to get ahead of it and address those expectations right away.
If there are other scenarios for or risks associated with SEO split-testing that you’ve seen in your own work, please share in the comments below.
This blog was written by Tim Mehta, a former Conversion Rate Optimization Strategist with Portent, Inc.
Running A/B/n experiments (aka “Split Tests”) to improve your search engine rankings has been in the SEO toolkit for longer than many would think. Moz actually published an article back in 2015 broaching the subject, which is a great summary of how you can run these tests.
What I want to cover here is understanding the right times to run an SEO split-test, and not how you should be running them.
I run a CRO program at an agency that’s well-known for SEO. The SEO team brings me in when they are preparing to run an SEO split-test to ensure we are following best practices when it comes to experimentation. This has given me the chance to see how SEOs are currently approaching split-testing, and where we can improve upon the process.
One of my biggest observations when working on these projects has been the most pressing and often overlooked question: “Should we test that?”
Risks of running unnecessary SEO split-tests
Below you will find a few potential risks of running an SEO split-test. You might be willing to take some of these risks, while there are others you will most definitely want to avoid.
Wasted resources
With on-page split-tests (not SEO split-tests), you can be much more agile and launch multiple tests per month without expending significant resources. Plus, the pre-test and post-test analyses are much easier to perform with the calculators and formulas readily available through our tools.
With SEO split-testing, there’s a heavy amount of lifting that goes into planning a test out, actually setting it up, and then executing it.
What you’re essentially doing is taking an existing template of similar pages on your site and splitting it up into two (or more) separate templates. This requires significant development resources and poses more risk, as you can’t simply “turn the test off” if things aren’t going well. As you probably know, once you’ve made a change to hurt your rankings, it’s a lengthy uphill battle to get them back.
The pre-test analysis to anticipate how long you need to run the test to reach statistical significance is more complex and takes up a lot of time with SEO split-testing. It’s not as simple as, “Which one gets more organic traffic?” because each variation you test has unique attributes to it. For example, if you choose to split-test the product page template of half of your products versus the other half of them, the actual products in each variation can play a part in its performance.
Therefore, you have to create a projection of organic traffic for each variation based on the pages that exist within it, and then compare the actual data to your projections. Inherently, using your projection as your main indicator of failure or success is dangerous, because a projection is just an educated guess and not necessarily what reality reflects.
For the post-test analysis, since you’re measuring organic traffic versus a hypothesized projection, you have to look at other data points to determine success. Evan Hall, Senior SEO Strategist at Portent, explains:
“Always use corroborating data. Look at relevant keyword rankings, keyword clicks, and CTR (if you trust Google Search Console). You can safely rely on GSC data if you’ve found it matches your Google Analytics numbers pretty well.”
The time to plan a test, develop it on your live site, “end” the test (if needed), and analyze the test after the fact are all demanding tasks.
Because of this, you need to make sure you’re running experiments with a strong hypothesis and enough differences in the variation versus the original that you will see a significant difference in performance from them. You also need to corroborate the data that would point to success, as the organic traffic versus your projection alone isn’t reliable enough to be confident in your results.
Unable to scale the results
There are many factors that go into your search engine rankings that are out of your hands. These lead to a robust number of outside variables that can impact your test results and lead to false positives, or false negatives.
This hurts your ability to learn from the test: was it our variation’s template or another outside factor that led to the results? Unfortunately, with Google and other search engines, there’s never a definitive way to answer that question.
Without validation and understanding that it was the exact changes you made that led to the results, you won’t be able to scale the winning concept to other channels or parts of the site. Although, if you are focused more on individual outcomes and not learnings, then this might not be as much of a risk for you.
When to run an SEO split-test
Uncertainty around keyword or query performance
If your series of pages for a particular category have a wide variety of keywords/queries that users search for when looking for that topic, you can safely engage in a meta title or meta description SEO split-test.
From a conversion rate perspective, having a more relevant keyword in relation to a user’s intent will generally lead to higher engagement. Although, as mentioned, most of your tests won’t be winners.
For example, we have a client in the tire retail industry who shows up in the SERPs for all kinds of “tire” queries. This includes things like winter tires, seasonal tires, performance tires, etc. We hypothesized that including the more specific phrase “winter” tires instead of “tires” in our meta titles during the winter months would lead to a higher CTR and more organic traffic from the SERPs. While our results ended up being inconclusive, we learned that changing this meta title did not hurt organic traffic or CTR, which gives us a prime opportunity for a follow-up test.
You can also utilize this tactic to test out a higher-volume keyword in your metadata. But this approach is also never a sure thing, and is worth testing first. As highlighted in this Whiteboard Friday from Moz, they saw “up to 20-plus-percent drops in organic traffic after updating meta information in titles and so forth to target the more commonly-searched-for variant.”
In other words, targeting higher-volume keywords seems like a no-brainer, but it’s always worth testing first.
Proof of concept and risk mitigation for large-scale sites
This is the most common call for running an SEO split-test. Therefore, we reached out to some experts to get their take on when this scenario turns into a prime opportunity for testing.
Jenny Halasz, President at JLH Marketing, talks about using SEO split-tests to prove out concepts or ideas that haven’t gotten buy-in:
“What I have found many times is that suggesting to a client they try something on a smaller subset of pages or categories as a ‘proof of concept’ is extremely effective. By keeping a control and focusing on trends rather than whole numbers, I can often show a client how changing a template has a positive impact on search and/or conversions.”
She goes on to reference an existing example that emphasizes an alternate testing tactic other than manipulating templates:
“I’m in the middle of a test right now with a client to see if some smart internal linking within a subset of products (using InLinks and OnCrawl’s InRank) will work for them. This test is really fun to watch because the change is not really a template change, but a navigation change within a category. If it works as I expect it to, it could mean a whole redesign for this client.”
Ian Laurie emphasizes the use of SEO split-testing as a risk mitigation tool. He explains:
“For me, it’s about scale. If you’re going to implement a change impacting tens or hundreds of thousands of pages, it pays to run a split test. Google’s unpredictable, and changing that many pages can have a big up- or downside. By testing, you can manage risk and get client (external or internal) buy-in on enterprise sites.”
If you’re responsible for a large site that is heavily dependent on non-branded organic searches, it pays to test before releasing any changes to your templates, regardless of the size of the change. In this case, you aren’t necessarily hoping for a “winner.” Your desire should be “does not break anything.”
Evan Hall emphasizes that you can utilize split-testing as a tool for justifying smaller changes that you’re having trouble getting buy-in for:
“Budget justification is for testing changes that require a lot of developer hours or writing. Some e-commerce sites may want to put a blurb of text on every PLP, but that might require a lot of writing for something not guaranteed to work. If the test suggests that content will provide 1.5% more organic traffic, then the effort of writing all that text is justifiable.”
Making big changes to your templates
In experimentation, there’s a metric called a “Minimum Detectable Effect” (MDE). This metric represents the percentage difference in performance you expect the variation to have versus the original. The more changes and more differences between your original and your variation, the higher your MDE should be.
The graph below emphasizes that the lower your MDE (lift), the more traffic you will need to reach a statistically significant result. In turn, the higher the MDE (lift), the less sample size you will need.
For example, If you are redesigning the site architecture of your product page templates, you should consider making it noticeably different from both a visual and back-end (code structure) perspective. While user research or on-page A/B testing may have led to the new architecture or design, it’s still unclear whether the proposed changes will impact rankings.
This should be the most common reason that you run an SEO split test. Given all of the subjectivity of the pre-test and post-test analysis, you want to make sure your variation yields a different enough result to be confident that the variation did in fact have a significant impact. Of course, with bigger changes, comes bigger risks.
While larger sites have the luxury of testing smaller things, they are still at the mercy of their own guesswork. For less robust sites, if you are going to run an SEO split test on a template, it needs to be different enough not only for users to behave differently but for Google to evaluate and rank your page differently as well.
Communicating experimentation for SEO split-tests
Regardless of your SEO expertise, communicating with stakeholders about experimentation requires a skill set of its own.
The expectations with testing are highly volatile. Some people expect every test to be a winner. Some expect you to give them definitive answers on what will work better. Unfortunately, these are false expectations. To avoid them, you need to establish realistic expectations early on for your manager, client, or whoever you are running a split test for.
Expectation 1: Most of your tests will fail
This understanding is a pillar of all successful experimentation programs. For people not close to the subject, it’s also the hardest pill to swallow. You have to get them to accept the fact that the time and effort that goes into the first iteration of a test will most likely lead to an inconclusive or losing test.
The most valuable aspect of experimentation and split-testing is the iterative process each test undergoes. The true outcome of successful experimentation, regardless if it’s SEO split-testing or other types, is the culmination of multiple tests that lead to gradual increases in major KPIs.
Expectation 2: You are working with probabilities, not sure things
This expectation applies especially to SEO split-testing, as you are utilizing a variety of metrics as indirect signals of success. This helps people understand that, even if you reach 99% significance, there are no guarantees of the results once the winning variation is implemented.
This principle also gives you wiggle-room for pre-test and post-test analysis. That doesn’t mean you can manipulate the data in your favor, but does mean you don’t need to spend hours and hours coming up with an empirically data-driven projection. It also allows you to utilize your subjective expert opinion based on all the metrics you are analyzing to determine success.
Expectation 3: You need a large enough sample size
Without a large enough sample size, you shouldn’t even entertain the idea of running an SEO split test unless your stakeholders are patient enough to wait several months for results.
“Over the course of our experience with SEO split testing, we’ve generated a rule of thumb: if a site section of similar pages doesn’t receive at least 1,000 organic sessions per day in total, it’s going to be very hard to measure any uplift from your split test.”
Therefore, if your site doesn’t have the right traffic, you may want to default to low-risk implementations or competitive research to validate your ideas.
Expectation 4: The goal of experimentation is to mitigate risk with the potential of performance improvement
The key term here is “potential” performance improvement. If your test yields a winning variation, and you implement it across your site, don’t expect the same results to happen as you saw during the test. The true goal for all testing is to introduce new ideas to your site with very low risk and potential for improved metrics.
For example, if you are updating the architecture or code of a PDP template to accommodate a Google algorithm change, the goal isn’t necessarily to increase organic traffic. The goal is to reduce the negative impact you may see from the algorithm change.
Let your stakeholders know that you can also utilize split-testing to improve business value or internal efficiencies. This includes things like releasing code updates that users never see, or a URL/CMS update for groups of pages or several microsites at a time.
Summary
While it’s tempting to run an SEO split test, it’s vital that you understand the inherent risks of it to ensure that you’re getting the true value you need out of it. This will help inform you on when the scenario calls for a split test or an alternative approach. You also need to be communicating experimentation with realistic expectations from the get-go.
There are major inherent risks of engaging with SEO split-testing that you don’t see with on-page tests that CRO usually runs, including wasted resources and non scalable results.
Some of the scenarios where you should feel confident in engaging with an SEO split test include where you’re uncertain of keyword and query performance, proof-of-concept and risk mitigation for larger-scale websites, justification for ideas that require robust resources, and when you’re considering making big changes to your templates.
And remember, one of the biggest challenges of experimentation is properly communicating it to others. Everyone has different expectations for testing, so you need to get ahead of it and address those expectations right away.
If there are other scenarios for or risks associated with SEO split-testing that you’ve seen in your own work, please share in the comments below.
With marketing budgets taking a hit under the economic strain of COVID-19, advocating for the value SEO can bring to a struggling business is a new take on an old battle. This popular Whiteboard Friday episode by Kameron Jenkins covers five common objections you’ll hear to SEO and how to counter them with smart, researched, fact-based responses — an important skill to brush up on now more than ever.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week’s edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and today we’re going to be going through five common objections to SEO and how to respond. Now I know, if you’re watching this and you’re an SEO, you have faced some of these very objections before and probably a lot of others.
This is not an exhaustive list. I’m sure you’ve faced a ton of other objections, whether you’re talking to a potential client, maybe you’re talking to your friend or your family member. A lot of people have misunderstandings about SEO and that causes them to object to wanting to invest in it. So I thought I’d go through some of the ones that I hear the most and how I tend to respond in those situations. Hopefully, you’ll find that helpful.
1. “[Other channel] drives more traffic/conversions, so it’s better.”
Let’s dive in. The number one objection I hear a lot of the time is this other channel, whether that be PPC, social, whatever, drives more traffic or conversions, therefore it’s better than SEO. I want to respond a few different ways depending.
Success follows investment
So the number one thing I would usually say is that don’t forget that success follows investment.
So if you are investing a lot of time and money and talent into your PPC or social and you’re not really doing much with organic, you’re kind of just letting it go, usually that means, yeah, that other channel is going to be a lot more successful. So just keep that in mind. It’s not inherently successful or not. It kind of reflects the effort you’re putting into it.
Every channel serves a different purpose
Number two, I would say that every channel serves a different purpose. You’re not going to expect social media to drive conversions a lot of the time, because a lot of the time social is for engagement. It’s for more top of the funnel. It’s for more audience development. SEO, a lot of the time that lives at your top and mid-funnel efforts. It can convert, but not always.
So just keep that in mind. Every channel serves a different purpose.
Assists vs last click only
The last thing I would say, kind of dovetailing off of that, is that assists versus last click only I know is a debate when it comes to attribution. But just keep in mind that when SEO and organic search doesn’t convert as the last click before conversion, it still usually assists in the process. So look at your assisted conversions and see how SEO is contributing.
2. “SEO is dead because the SERPs are full of ads.”
The number two objection I usually hear is SEO is dead because the SERPs are full of ads. To that, I would respond with a question.
What SERPs are you looking at?
It really depends on what you’re querying. If you’re only looking at those bottom funnel, high cost per click, your money keywords, absolutely those are monetized.
Those are going to be heavily monetized, because those are at the bottom of the funnel. So if you’re only ever looking at that, you might be pessimistic when it comes to your SEO. You might not be thinking that SEO has any kind of value, because organic search, those organic results are pushed down really low when you’re looking at those bottom funnel terms. So I think these two pieces of research are really interesting to look at in tandem when it comes to a response to this question.
I think this was put out sometime last year by Varn Research, and it said that 60% of people, when they see ads on the search results, they don’t even recognize that they’re ads. That’s actually probably higher now that Google changed it from green to black and it kind of blends in a little bit better with the rest of it. But then this data from Jumpshot says that only about 2% to 3% of all search clicks go to PPC.
So how can these things coexist? Well, they can coexist because the vast majority of searches don’t trigger ads. A lot more searches are informational and navigational more so than commercial.
People research before buying
So just keep in mind that people are doing a lot of research before buying.
A lot of times they’re looking to learn more information. They’re looking to compare. Keep in mind your buyer’s entire journey, their entire funnel and focus on that. Don’t just focus on the bottom of the funnel, because you will get discouraged when it comes to SEO if you’re only looking there.
Better together
Also, they’re just better together. There are a lot of studies that show that PPC and SEO are more effective when they’re both shown on the search results together for a single company.
I’m thinking of one by Seer, they did right now, that showed the CTR is higher for both when they’re on the page together. So just keep that in mind.
3. “Organic drives traffic, just not the right kind.”
The number three objection I hear a lot is that organic drives traffic, just not the right kind of traffic. People usually mean a few different things when they say that.
Branded vs non-branded
Number one, they could mean that organic drives traffic, but it’s usually just branded traffic anyway.
It’s just people who know about us already, and they’re searching our business name and they’re finding us. That could be true. But again, that’s probably because you’re not investing in SEO, not because SEO is not valuable. I would also say that a lot of times this is pretty easily debunked. A lot of times inadvertently people are ranking for non-branded terms that they didn’t even know they were ranking for.
So go into Google Search Console, look at their non-branded queries and see what’s driving impressions and clicks to the website.
Assists are important too
Number two, again, just to say this one more time, assists are important too. They play a part in the eventual conversion or purchase. So even if organic drives traffic that doesn’t convert as the last click before conversion, it still usually plays a role.
It can be highly qualified
Number three, it can be highly qualified. Again, this is that following the investment thing. If you are actually paying attention to your audience, you know the ways they search, how they search, what terms they search for, what’s important to your brand, then you can bring in really highly qualified traffic that’s more inclined to convert if you’re paying attention and being strategic with your SEO.
4. “SEO takes too long”
Moving on to number four, that objection I hear is SEO takes too long. That’s honestly one of the most common objections you hear about SEO.
SEO is not a growth hack
In response to that, I would say it’s not a growth hack. A lot of people who are really antsy about SEO and like “why isn’t it working right now” are really looking for those instant results.
They want a tactic they can sprinkle on their website for instant whatever they want. Usually it’s conversions and revenue and growth. I would say it’s not a growth hack. If you’re looking at it that way, it’s going to disappoint you.
Methodology + time = growth
But I will say that SEO is more methodology than tactic. It’s something that should be ingrained and embedded into everything you do so that over time, when it’s baked into everything you’re doing, you’re going to achieve sustained growth.
So that’s how I respond to that one.
5. “You can’t measure the ROI.”
Number five, the last one and probably one of the most frustrating, I’m sure this is not exclusive to SEO. I know social hears it a lot. You can’t measure the ROI, therefore I don’t want to invest in it, because I don’t have proof that I’m getting a return on this investment. So people kind of tend to mean, I think, two things when they say this.
A) Predicting ROI
Number one, they really want to be able to predict ROI before they even dive in. They want assurances that if I invest in this, I’m going to get X in return, which there are a lot of, I think, problems with that inherently, but there are some ways you can get close to gauging what you’re going to get for your efforts. So what I would do in this situation is use your own website’s data to build yourself a click-through rate curve so that you know the click-through rate at your various rank positions.
By knowing that and combining that with the search volume of a keyword or a phrase that you want to go after, you can multiply the two and just say, “Hey, here’s the expected traffic we will get if you will let me work on improving our rank position from 9 to 2 or 1” or whatever that is. So there are ways to estimate and get close.
A lot of times, when you do improve, you’re focusing on improving one term, you’re likely going to get a lot more traffic than what you’re estimating because you tend to end up ranking for so many more longer tail keywords that bring in a lot of additional search volume. So you’re probably going to even underestimate when you do this. But that’s one way you can predict ROI.
B) Measuring ROI
Number two here, measuring ROI is a lot of times what people want to be doing.
They want to be able to prove that what they’re doing is beneficial in terms of revenue. So one way to do this is to get the lifetime value of the customer, multiply that by the close rate so that you can have a goal value. Now if you turn on your conversions and set up your goals in Google Analytics, which you I think should be doing, this assumes that you’re not an e-commerce site.
There’s different tracking for that, but a similar type of methodology applies. If you apply these things, you can have a goal value. So that way, when people convert on your site, you start to rack up the actual dollar value, the estimated dollar value that whatever channel is producing. So you can go to your source/medium report and see Google organic and see how many conversions it’s producing and how much value.
This same thing applies if you go to your assisted conversions report. You can see how much value is in there as well. I think that’s really beneficial just to be able to show people like, “Look, it is generating revenue.My SEO that’s getting you organic search traffic is generating value and real dollars and cents for you.” So those are some of the most common objections that I hear.
I want to know what are some of the ones that you hear too. So pop those in the comments. Let me know the objections you hear a lot of the time and include how you’re either struggling to respond or find the right response to people or something that you found works as a response. Share that with us. We’d all love to know. Let’s make SEO better and something that people understand a lot better. So that’s it for this week’s Whiteboard Friday.
Currently, many businesses face challenging times and are moving their SEO budget to disciplines which offer quicker wins.
But you can also create instant results with SEO, and it can be done on a small budget even when you are up against bigger players in your industry.
In this blog post I will show you my framework to do SEO sprints. I will show you how you can use Google’s ability to index and rank faster to your advantage. Later, you will be presented with a case study, where we used SEO sprints for a chain of opticians. The result: an increase in bookings of vision tests of 73%.
But first, let’s have a look at the layout on page one of Google (for most queries).
Today, the four Google Ads at the top of the SERP cover most of the pixels above the fold. In many cases, your screen can also be covered with a Google Shopping ad. Apart from the ads, Google fills up the space on page one with SERP features such as featured snippets or their own platforms such as Youtube or Google Maps.
In some industries, Google will even place their booking search engine at the top. Examples are Google Flights or Google Hotels.
During the last few months we have seen more desktop traffic, but in general users are moving to mobile. An iPhone’s screen of 758 pixels makes it nearly impossible to rank above the fold for an organic result.
We, as SEOs, have to rethink our way of doing SEO.
The Google challenge
Do you know your numbers?
For a particular query, how high is the expected click-through-rate if you rank number one? Is it 20%? Twenty-five? These are the typical estimations coming from CTR benchmark studies. But in reality, for competitive queries, the right CTR will be much lower, which means that you could be basing your business case on the wrong numbers.
As an example: In the retail industry I have a client ranking consistently at number one for a broad generic term with a monthly search volume of 2.8K. How high do you think their CTR is?
3.8%!
They are not the only ones with a meager CTR. Doing some research, I discovered that positions three and four for this query had CTRs of 1.1% and 2.4%, respectively.
When CTRs used to be higher, I went after the big keywords. At the peak of my “Big Keywords” career, I reached the number one ranking in Google (Denmark) for the biggest keyword in the banking industry: “Lån” (loan). It took one and a half years to go from the bottom of page three to number one in Google, and the investment paid off handsomely for the client.
The strategy was straightforward, with a focus on technical SEO, on-page, and off-page factors. In other words, SEO as we have always approached it. However, working with SEO in a silo frustrated me, because I felt that we could get better and faster results by working together across disciplines and across departments.
In October 2018, a new insight gave me the chance to rewire my SEO thought process. This led me to develop a new framework aligning SEO with other marketing activities.
The big insight: Google indexes and ranks faster
Back in the year 2000, Google updated their index every five to eight weeks. This gave SEO a reputation as a discipline where patience was key, and where results were a long-term project. This understanding is still common inside the industry, and many SEOs will still tell their clients to be patient and expect the results to come inside one or two years.
However, if you do it right, this is not the case anymore.
Let’s fast-forward to 2018: I discovered that Google had changed gears.
My client was planning to run a marketing campaign starting in October. My SEO team was invited late to the party, as I only met with the client two weeks before the campaign launch.
I was not too optimistic about the time frame to get them results, but we gave it a shot.
The results surprised me.
Inside 20 days, they went from not being indexed to ranking in the top three for their main keyword.
I was baffled. This was not the Google I knew.
This insight was huge, because it meant that SEO could break free of the classic silo and be part of other marketing activities.
The idea of the SEO sprint was born.
What is an SEO sprint?
Let’s stop and think for a minute.
How often do marketing campaigns ignore SEO? SEO data can actually be a central element in marketing, because the data reveals the inner feelings of users when they search on Google. This is data which would be very hard to get from qualitative interviews.
Have you tried to convert mentions to links months after a PR campaign ran?
Ever worked on an SEO project where you never talked to the PPC team (even though they have valuable information, like which keywords convert, that you can use for your SEO work)?
Have you delivered a tech audit with a long list of to-dos without really knowing what the business strategy was, hence the priorities of the SEO tasks?
These are examples of SEO working in a silo. Silos waste knowledge and they miss the big picture. Instead, SEO activities should be aligned with the marketing plan.
When you rank at the top of Google for the keywords and user intentions which support your business strategy, it is due to teamwork across your marketing department.
This is what SEO sprints are all about: Based on the company’s business strategy, SEO sprints are an integrated part of your marketing mix. They are SEO activities which support a marketing campaign, where the objective is to be present at the most important touch points in Google for particular customer journeys.
An SEO sprint consists of five steps:
Strategy
Data
Insights
Execution
Measurement
I’ll dig into each of these steps in the case study below.
The secret behind a successful SEO sprint
In late 2018, I performed other SEO sprints, which proved to me that there was an opportunity to work differently within SEO. For example: a New Year’s campaign where the client’s main keyword went from out-of-index to the bottom of page one within 10 days. While they didn’t make the top three, they still obtained a 6% CTR from a ready-to-buy audience.
So, how can you use a sprint to rank faster in Google? Do sprints focus on links, content, or page speed?
Those factors are only partly important. The main ranking factor is the competition. Let’s face it: You rank number one at the mercy of your competition. It matters a lot for your ranking if competitors don’t focus their SEO efforts in the same direction as you.
In my experience, when broad media sites and forums rank, it’s a good sign that competition is not so strong. The ideal scenario is when competition is manageable and Google results have low volatility, meaning the results don’t fluctuate much. This is a signal to me that I can rank quickly and remain at the top of Google for a longer period.
While you should try to rank for all your keywords, the key is to identify and prioritize important, low-competition keywords to get results quickly. When you have established yourself, then you can start to build out your topical authority and aim for the keywords with tougher competition.
The DriveSafe case study
Let’s put the SEO sprint framework into practice. Nyt Syn is a Danish chain of 57 opticians. They have a 6% market share in a market dominated by three bigger players. During 2018 and 2019, I ran two successful SEO sprints for their DriveSafe campaign.
DriveSafe glasses are glasses produced by ZEISS. You can use them as normal eye glasses, but they are particularly useful to avoid being blinded by the headlights of oncoming cars at night. They retail at $500 (USD), so it is not a low-priced item, but they are the safest solution in the market.
The target group of the DriveSafe campaign is primarily 35-year-old women and above. They are not worse off than men when it comes to seeing badly at night, but our research showed that they are more ready to do something about it. Our main objective was to have them book an eyesight test at their local Nyt Syn optician.
The results
After running the first DriveSafe campaign in Q4 2018, which was fairly successful, we managed to triple the organic traffic during the second SEO sprint a year later.
During the period, 23.7% of the organic traffic to nytsyn.dk went to the DriveSafe pages. More importantly, Nyt Syn increased their bookings by 73% for the second campaign when compared to the first.
How we did it
1. Strategy
Before we started our SEO tasks, we needed to understand the objective of the DriveSafe campaign and how SEO would support the business goals.
In order to translate the marketing strategy into SEO activities, I use customer journeys to map out the customer needs and define the content touchpoints on Google.
This was our SEO mission statement:
“We are present in Google when users make queries related to night vision with the intent to solve a user challenge leading to the booking of an eyesight test.”
2. Data
You need to understand user behavior before you can execute your strategy. Fortunately, it has never been easier to get access to data. While many still stick to one tool (e.g. Google Keyword Planner or Moz), I have come to realize that the more tools you add, the more you will identify your user’s intentions. I use Google’s own tools (Google Search Console, Google Analytics) and different Clickstream tools (e.g. Moz Keyword Explorer). Each tool will bring something new to the table.
To this stack I also add the company’s own data sources, like live chat. It’snot only a tool to communicate with your customers! No one ever contacts a company simply to engage in small talk. The data from the chat history is a gold mine of user questions. Zendesk and Internal Site Search are two other underestimated resources, where small observations can turn into big insights.
In the end we managed to identify hundreds of keywords within the range from general symptom searches to specific product requests.
3. Insights
Insights depend on the strength of your data. If you don’t dive deep enough during data retrieval, you won’t get a full understanding of user behavior, thus missing out on important user intentions. By looking at the keyword list, we identified various user intentions. With them in hand we created customer journeys to map out which content to build or repurpose.
Here are the user intentions mapped out in different stages of the customer journey for this campaign:
Awareness: What is night blindness?
Consideration: Do I have a bad night vision? Can I use glasses with yellow tint?
Decision: DriveSafe glasses from ZEISS
We discovered four interesting insights from the data:
1. Early funnel content is notoriously underestimated. We identified the bridge between the symptom searches for “night blindness” in the early stage of the customer journey and the need to drive safely at night. By creating the page “What is night blindness?”, we answered the users’ symptom questions and moved them on in the funnel towards our solution.
2. The keyword data revealed a need from users to test their eye sight online. We converted a general eye vision test into a night vision test. The test took off. More than 180,000 users ended up completing the test via different channels.
To boost the general authority of the DriveSafe pages and this particular online test, we also acquired links. Apart from the extra authority, the referral traffic was decent.
3. We could see that users went for a premature choice when looking for a solution. If you are a mountain bike rider, you probably use cheap plastic glasses with yellow tint. These are not good for driving at night, but this was the best guess for many users.
An interview with a professor from the School of Optometry in Denmark revealed that glasses with yellow tint let in too much blue light. This is the light which our eyes are exposed to at night. Instead of ignoring users searching for yellow tinted glasses, we decided to warn them instead. The page “Don’t use glasses with yellow tint!” attracted a lot of traffic. It also showed that you can rank number one for keywords which counter the primary user intention on page one of Google.
4. The optometry industry jargon is different than the terms that users search for. Company policy can sometimes prevent you from optimizing your site for the user terms, but Nyt Syn embraced the opportunity.
There are 800 monthly searches for the query “natbriller” (night glasses). This is not an industry term, but we decided to create a page with it anyway It paid off. Nyt Syn has now ranked consistently number one and two on Google for this important keyword for more than a year, bringing in lots of profitable traffic.
The search terms mentioned in the last two insights. are low competition, low volatility keywords, which made us rank quickly. An instant result motivates the team, and it builds authority in the eyes of Google. Subsequently, this enabled us to rank for more difficult search terms. Today we rank in the top three for over 100 non-branded keywords, and every tenth search results in a click on a DriveSafe page.
4. Execution
From these insights, the Nyt Syn content team went to work on the pages we needed to be present at every important touch point in Google.
The team is small with only one content writer. However, this case shows that you don’t need to be a big team to beat your competitors as long as you know where to focus. In total, five pages were created and a couple of existing pages were repurposed.
You need some time at this step, since it takes time to write great content. At this point we also prepared a link building strategy based on advertorials, which we rolled out during the campaign.
We were ready to launch.
5. Measurement
We use a dashboard to constantly measure the performance and gain new insights. This enabled us to change course midway if necessary.
Here are two good examples:
1. One month after the launch of the second SEO sprint, Nyt Syn decided to run two Facebook campaigns based on the SEO data. The first campaign aimed at getting users to take the online night vision test. The second campaign told users to avoid glasses with yellow tint for night driving.
The two campaigns worked great and increased the number of bookings significantly. This was a perfect example of using SEO data across channels.
2. During the campaign we obtained some nice customer testimonials. With the customers’ permission, we placed them on the DriveSafe pages. This enabled us to display the five star ratings in the Google SERPs, which lifted the general CTR overnight by 2-5%.
Learning and adjusting is central to SEO sprints. With Google’s ever-changing landscape, we need to be agile and ready to adapt. We learn from each SEO sprint and use what worked for the next sprint to constantly improve the results.
The third SEO sprint for DriveSafe is set for September. What can we do to build upon our past achievements?
Let me leave you with some insights gained, which you can hopefully use for your own campaigns:
1. GSC data tells us when users will start searching for night vision search terms. This means that we know when to launch our campaign next time. For SEO sprint one, we had a blank page. We could only use Google Trends data, so it started in October. Now we run it from mid-September because the data tells us that users are asking Google earlier.
2. GSC data will reveal new user intentions because we are building up more data. This data, coupled with customer feedback, creates a base to produce even more relevant content and thereby a better chance to own the most important touch points on Google.
3. From our PPC data, we now have more data to know which keywords generate orders and vice versa. We will have more GSC data to add new keywords to our Google Ads.
4. By A/B testing the communication on Google Ads and Facebook, we know which words and which USPs work. We can use these insights to update titles and meta descriptions to communicate more directly on Google.
5. We know that SEO insights can be used to create successful Facebook campaigns. We will double down on Facebook and test other channels such as Instagram.
6. We know which links brought us referral traffic, so we will focus on similar links for the third sprint. While it is only correlated data, we can compare the ranking history with the publication of advertorials to look for keyword jumps. Some advertorials are duds. Some are gold. It does help us to pick the better link opportunities.
7. We got the star ratings for the DriveSafe pages. By studying the Google landscape, we can see which other Schema markups we should add.
Summary
Companies are currently looking for instant results, which make them put SEO on hold. However, with SEO sprints you have an agile framework to get quick results — when done right.
You can use Google’s speed in indexing and ranking results to your advantage. It will enable your organization to integrate SEO as part of the marketing mix. While you can now rank inside a few days or weeks, fast rankings will depend on the level of competition on page one in Google. When you have low competition and low volatility for keywords with strategic importance, then you have found your sweet spot for quicker results and stable traffic long-term.
SEO sprints consist of five steps, and they can be performed on a small budget inside a short period. The learnings from one SEO sprint are passed on to the next one, so you can reuse what worked efficiently.
Smart keyword research forms the basis of all successful SEO. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard shares the basics of a winning keyword research process that you can learn and master in a short amount of time.
You’ll walk through his keyword research process start-to-finish with real keywords, topics, and websites to create a complete keyword research strategy. It’s a great follow-up to this Whiteboard Friday!
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to a very special edition of Whiteboard Friday, talking about keyword research today. Now keyword research, you know how important it is, and it forms the basis of all successful SEO. People who are good at keyword research and having a good research strategy, that often makes the difference between winning and having an SEO campaign that just goes nowhere.
I love keyword research because we all have an idea of what we think we want to rank for, right, but when you use keyword research, you can use data to find opportunities and surprises that you didn’t even know existed. So I want to dispel a myth about keyword research. A lot of people think it’s about finding the right tool, and you enter the keyword into a tool and you get a list.
Technically, that is keyword research, and that’s a fine starting point. But it’s not so much about the tool. It’s about a process. It’s about a process of creating a strategy for your entire website and finding those winning keywords that you can rank for and getting traffic from that are relevant to your business. So it’s more than just a tool.
It’s a process. There are entire guides and webinars about this. But I think we can simplify it. In the next few minutes, I want to show you the basics of a winning keyword research process that I think you can start to master in just a few minutes and get the fundamentals. In fact, I did write a guide about this. We’ll talk about it at the end of the video. It’s completely available.
But I want to go over the basics so you can start to get an understanding of the process that will help you win with keyword research.
1. Seed keywords
So first of all, a concept that you are probably familiar with is the idea of seed keywords. We call them seeds because they help grow your keyword list and expand it. Seed keywords are more important than people think, and I’ll tell you why you in just a second.
So many tools will give you seed keywords. But I want to dismiss the idea of thinking in terms of tools for just a second. When researching seed keywords, I propose that you think of it in terms of questions, questions that you want to ask yourself.
a. What do I want to rank for?
The first is simply, “What do I want to rank for?” In this hypothetical example, our client sells calligraphy pens.
They’re like, “Cyrus, I want to rank for calligraphy pens.” That’s great. That will be your starting point, your first seed keyword.
b. What do I already rank for?
So a second question you can ask is, “What do I already rank for?” Well, let’s say the client has an existing website. They sell some pens. Maybe they do well, maybe they don’t.
So we want to dig into the data of what is already sending them traffic, and we can do this with a lot of keyword research tools — Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush. I prefer Moz, 500 million keywords, it’s a great set. But you can use whatever you want. So you want to search keywords by site or keywords by URL. We can enter our client’s site and see that, oh, they rank for “pen starter kit.”
Their rank is number one. It only receives 10 visits a month, so maybe that’s not such a good seed keyword. But “best calligraphy pen,” they rank number 8, 500 visits a month. “Calligraphy supplies,” 14th, 750 visits a month. Those are excellent seed keywords. So we’re going to make note of those and use them a little later in the process.
You can also get this data from Google Search Console, rank and volume. Wherever you get it from, these are what you want to search for great keywords that you already rank for, but maybe not number one, with good search volume.
c. What do my competitors rank for?
Finally, let’s say you don’t have an existing website, or you’re starting a new project from scratch.
You don’t have a lot of existing data. You want to ask, “What do my competitors rank for or the top ranking sites?” So I might Google “calligraphy pens” and see who ranks number one. Pop it into Keyword Explorer and see all their ranking keywords here and start to find the good seed keywords. So I can see that they rank for “calligraphy kit” — that sounds pretty relevant — 750 visits a month.
“Pen starter,” not so much. I’d probably throw that one out. “Learn calligraphy,” that’s a great seed keyword. I’m going to make note of that, 1,200 visits a month. You can get seed keywords from literally any keyword tool. Some of our favorites, beyond Keyword Explorer:
Anywhere you want to get your seed keywords, that’s where you form the basis of your list.
2. List building
So next we’re going to start building our list. Seed keywords move into list building. So this is where we want to use a robust keyword research tool, such as Moz, Ahrefs, or whatever you want. We’re entering our seed keywords “calligraphy pens.”
We’re going to get a list of keywords, sorted by relevance and volume. Now there are many metrics in keyword research, such as keyword difficulty, click-through rate, importance, things like that. For right now, we only want to be concerned with two metrics — relevance and volume.
You can concern yourself with the other metrics a little later when we’re sorting and filtering. But right now, we want to find more seed keywords. That’s the key difference here in this process. We’re not just finding related keywords. We’re finding more seed keywords. We’re reiterating. So “calligraphy pen set,” highly relevant.
Five means highly relevant. Volume of 100. All right, we’re going to mark that. That becomes a new seed. “Calligraphy Amazon,” okay, that only has a three relevance score. Unless you’re Amazon, that’s probably not the most relevant keyword. We’re going to cross it off the list.
“Calligraphy fonts.” “Calligraphy pens price,” well, that’s great. “Calligraphy ink,” great with high volume. So what we have done now is we have collected more seeds, and we’re going to throw those seeds back in and discover even more related keywords, more seeds. In other words, we’re going to start building out our list.
That’s the process. Not just get a list of related keywords, but you’re finding more seeds. When you find more seeds, continually do this, these become new pages of your site or a new entire content section. So we could have a section on calligraphy ink. We could have a page on price. We’re going to group these in our spreadsheets together, and every time we find a new seed, it can become a new topic, a new page, a new idea.
The idea is you want to find as many seeds as possible.
3. Competitor analysis
So when we get these seeds, we’re going to reinsert them back, but we’re also going to do one final step that a lot of people forget or just don’t realize, and that is the competitive analysis. The keyword tool is going to find a lot. Moz Keyword Explorer does a particularly excellent, excellent job of this.
But if you’re not using Keyword Explorer, one thing I like to do is I’ll take my seed keyword, “calligraphy ink,” and I’ll put it into Google and I’ll see who’s ranking in the top 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 positions. I’ll look specifically for sites that specialize in this. I might throw out Amazon or things like that.
But Ink Warehouse, Shop Calligraphy Inks, I’ll take this page and I’ll put it in Keyword Explorer, keywords by site or URL, and I’ll get all the other keywords that this page or site ranks for, because they’ve undoubtedly tried a lot of content. They know what works, what doesn’t work.
I’ll find new seeds that way. So I can see that Ink Warehouse ranks for “best calligraphy ink,” and that’s a good one. “Calligraphy ink set,” great new seed keyword. “Calligraphy ink bottle,” another great seed keyword. So then, we have new seeds, new pages, new topics. We can take these and start the process again, and we do this over and over and over again until we have a complete set of keywords for every page, every conceivable ranking position, and we can start to build a strategy out from that.
After this, we can start to sort and filter by keyword volume and difficulty and things like that. But that’s a process for another time. So I’ve documented this strategy and so much more in a brand-new keyword research guide, “The Master Guide to Keyword Research.” We just released it. It’s available free. It covers this topic in depth, and we try to make these concepts as easy as possible to help you win SEO. We’re going to link to it below. You can download it and let me know what you think.
So I hope you learned something today. If you liked this video, please share it with anybody that you can. It would be a great favor to me. Okay. Until next time, thanks, everybody.
Note: This post was co-authored by Cyrus Shepard and Rida Abidi.
Everyone wants to win Google featured snippets. Right?
At least, it used to be that way. Winning the featured snippet typically meant extra traffic, in part because Google showed your URL twice: once in the featured snippet and again in regular search results. For publishers, this was known as “double-dipping.”
All that changed in January when Google announced they would de-duplicate search results to show the featured snippet URL only once on the first page of results. No more double-dips.
Publishers worried because older studies suggested winning featured snippets drove less actual traffic than the “natural” top ranking result. With the new change, winning the featured snippet might actually now lead to less traffic, not more.
This led many SEOs to speculate: should you opt-out of featured snippets altogether? Are featured snippets causing publishers to lose more traffic than they potentially gain?
Here’s how we found the answer.
The experiment
Working with the team at SearchPilot, we devised an A/B split test experiment to remove Moz Blog posts from Google featured snippets, and measure the impact on traffic.
Using Google’s data-nosnippet tag, we identified blog pages with winning featured snippets and applied the tag to the main content of the page.
Our working hypothesis was that these pages would lose their featured snippets and return to the “regular” search results below. A majority of us also expected to see a negative impact on traffic, but wanted to measure exactly how much, and identify whether the featured snippets would return after we removed the tag.
In this example, Moz lost the featured snippet almost immediately. The snippet was instead awarded to Content King and Moz returned to the top “natural” position.
Here is another example of what happened in search results. After launching the test, the featured snippet was awarded to Backlinko and we returned to the top of the natural results.
One important thing to keep in mind is that, while these keywords triggered a featured snippet, pages can rank for hundreds or thousands of different keywords in different positions. So the impact of losing a single featured snippet can be somewhat softened when your URL ranks for many different keywords — some which earn featured snippets and some which don’t.
The results
After adding the data-nosnippet tag, our variant URLs quickly lost their featured snippets.
How did this impact traffic? Instead of gaining traffic by opting-out of featured snippets, we found we actually lost a significant amount of traffic quite quickly.
Overall, we measured an estimated 12% drop in traffic for all affected pages after losing featured snippets (95% confidence level).
This chart represents the cumulative impact of the test on organic traffic. The central blue line is the best estimate of how the variant pages, with the change applied, performed compared to how we would have expected without any changes applied. The blue shaded region represents our 95% confidence interval: there is a 95% probability that the actual outcome is somewhere in this region. If this region is wholly above or below the horizontal axis, that represents a statistically significant test.
What did we learn?
With the addition of the “data-nosnippet” attribute, the test had a significantly negative impact on organic traffic. In this experiment, owning the featured snippet and not ranking in the top results provides more value to these pages in terms of clicks than not owning the featured snippet and ranking in the top results.
Adding in the “data-nosnippet” attribute, not only were we able to stop Google from pulling data in that section of the HTML page to use as a snippet, but we were also able to confirm that we would rank again in the SERP, whether that is ranking in position one or lower.
As an additional tool, we were also tracking keywords using STAT Search Analytics. We were able to monitor changes in ranking for pages that had featured snippets, and noticed that it took about seven days or more from the time of launching the test for Google to cache the changes we made and for the featured snippets to be overtaken by another ranking page, if another page was awarded a featured snippet spot at all. The turnaround was quicker after we ended the test, though, as some of these featured snippets returned as quickly as the next day.
However, a negative aspect of running this test was that, although some pages were crawled and indexed with the most recent changes, the featured snippet did not return and has now either been officially given to competing pages or never returned at all.
To summarize the significant findings of this test:
Google’s nosnippet tags can effectively opt-out publishers from featured snippets.
In this test, we measured an estimated 12% drop in traffic for all affected pages after losing featured snippets.
After ending the test, we failed to win back a portion of the featured snippets we previously ranked for.
For the vast majority of publishers winning the featured snippet likely remains the smart strategy. There are undoubtedly exceptions but as a general “best practice” if a keyword triggers a featured snippet, it’s typically in your best interest to rank for it.
What are your experiences with winning featured snippets? Let us know in the comments below.
Join Moz SEO Scientist, Dr. Pete Meyers, Wednesdays in April at 1:30 p.m. PT on Twitter and ask your most pressing questions about how to navigate SEO changes and challenges in a COVID-19 world. Tweet your questions all week long to @Moz using the hashtag #AskMoz.
This week, we’re revisiting an important topic for SEOs everywhere: how to show your value. In the wake of everything that’s happened recently with COVID-19, being able to describe your worth to potential clients or stakeholders is an integral skill. In this favorite episode of Whiteboard Friday, Kameron Jenkins shares how to effectively and succinctly build an SEO elevator pitch that highlights the value you bring to a business and three warnings on what not to do.
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Video Transcription
Hey guys, welcome to this week’s edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins. Today we’re going to be talking about creating an SEO elevator pitch, what is it, why we need one, and what kind of prompted this whole idea for an SEO elevator pitch.
So essentially, I was on Twitter and I saw John Mueller. He tweeted, “Hey, I meet with a lot of developers, and a lot of times they don’t really know what SEOs do.” He was genuinely asking. He was asking, “Hey, SEO community, how do you describe what you do?” I’m scrolling through, and I’m seeing a lot of different answers, and all of them I’m resonating with.
They’re all things that I would probably say myself. But it’s just interesting how many different answers there were to the question, “What do SEOs do and what value do they provide?” So I kind of thought to myself, “Why is that? Why do we have so many different explanations for what SEO is and what we do?” So I thought about it, and I thought that it might be a good idea for myself and maybe other SEOs if you don’t already have an elevator pitch ready.
What is an SEO elevator pitch?
Now, if you’re not familiar with the concept of an elevator pitch, it’s basically — I have a definition here — a succinct and persuasive speech that communicates your unique value as an SEO. It’s called an elevator pitch essentially because it should take about the length of time it takes to ride the elevator with someone. So you want to be able to quickly and concisely answer someone’s question when they ask you, “Oh, SEO, what is that?I think I’ve heard of that before. What do you do?”
Why is this so hard?
So let’s dive right in. So I mentioned, in the beginning, how there are so many different answers to this “what do you say you do here” type question. I think it’s hard to kind of come up with a concise explanation for a few different reasons. So I wanted to dive into that a little bit first.
1. Lots of specialties within SEO
So number one, there are lots of specialties within SEO.
As the industry has advanced over the last two plus decades, it has become very diverse, and there are lots of different facets in SEO. I found myself on quite a rabbit trail. I was on LinkedIn and I was kind of browsing SEO job descriptions. I wanted to see basically: What is it that people are looking for in an SEO?
How do they describe it? What are the characteristics? So basically, I found a lot of different things, but I found a few themes that emerged. So there are your content-focused SEOs, and those are people that are your keyword research aficionados. There are the people that write search engine optimized content to drive traffic to your website. You have your link builders, people that focus almost exclusively on that.
You have your local SEOs, and you have your analysts. You have your tech SEOs, people that either work on a dev team or closely with a dev team. So I think that’s okay though. There are lots of different facets within SEO, and I think that’s awesome. That’s, to me, a sign of maturity in our industry. So when there are a lot of different specialties within SEO, I think it’s right and good for all of our elevator pitches to differ.
So if you have a specialty within SEO, it can be different. It should kind of cater toward the unique brand of SEO that you do, and that’s okay.
2. Different audiences
Number two, there are different audiences. We’re not always going to be talking to the same kind of person. So maybe you’re talking to your boss or a client. To me, those are more revenue-focused conversations.
They want to know: What’s the value of what you do? How does it affect my bottom line? How does it help me run my business and stay afloat and stay profitable? If you’re talking to a developer, that’s going to be a slightly different conversation. So I think it’s okay if we kind of tweak our elevator pitch to make it a little bit more palatable for the people that we’re talking to.
3. Algorithm maturity
Three, why this is hard is there’s been, obviously, a lot of changes all the time in the algorithm, and as it matures, it’s going to look like the SEO’s job is completely different than last year just because the algorithm keeps maturing and it looks like our jobs are changing all the time. So I think that’s a reality that we have to live with, but I still think it’s important, even though things are changing all the time, to have a baseline kind of pitch that we give people when they ask us what it is we do.
So that’s why it’s hard. That’s what your elevator pitch is.
My elevator pitch: SEO is marketing, with search engines
Then, by way of example, I thought I’d just give you my SEO elevator pitch. Maybe it will spark your creativity. Maybe it will give you some ideas. Maybe you already have one, and that’s okay. But the point is not to use mine.
The point is essentially to kind of take you through what mine looks like, hopefully get your creative juices flowing, and you can create your own. So let’s dive right into my pitch.
So my pitch is SEO is marketing, just with search engines. So we have the funnel here — awareness, consideration, and decision.
Awareness: Rank and attract clicks for informational queries.
First of all, I think it’s important to note that SEO can help you rank and attract clicks for informational queries.
Consideration: Rank and attract clicks for evaluation queries.
So when your audience is searching for information, they want to solve their pain points, they’re not ready to buy, they’re just searching, we’re meeting them there with content that brings them to the site, informs them, and now they’re familiar with our brand. Those are great assisted conversions. Rank and attract clicks for evaluation queries. When your audience is starting to compare their options, you want to be there. You want to meet them there, and we can do that with SEO.
Decision: Rank, attract clicks, and promote conversion for bottom-funnel queries
At the decision phase, you can rank and attract clicks and kind of promote conversions for bottom of funnel queries. When people are in their “I want to buy” stage, SEO can meet them there. So I think it’s important to realize that SEO isn’t kind of like a cost center and not a profit center. It’s not like a bottom of funnel thing. I’ve heard that in a lot of places, and I think it’s just important to kind of draw attention to the fact that SEO is integrated throughout your marketing funnel. It’s not relegated to one stage or another.
But how?
We talked about rank and attract clicks and promote conversions. But how do we do that? That’s the what it does.
But how do we do it? So this is how I explain it. I think really, for me, there are two sides to the SEO’s coin. We have driving, and we have supporting.
1. Driving
So on the driving side, I would say something like this. When someone searches a phrase or a keyword in Google, I make sure the business’ website shows up in the non-ad results. That’s important because a lot of people are like, “Oh, do you bid on keywords?”
We’re like, “No, no, that’s PPC.” So I always just throw in “non-ad” because people understand that. So I do that through content that answers people’s questions, links that help search engines find my content and show signs of authority and popularity of my content, and accessibility. So that’s kind of your technical foundation.
You’re making sure that your website is crawlable and it that it’s index the way that you want it to be indexed. When people get there, it works. It works on mobile and on desktop. It’s fast. So I think these are really the three big pillars of driving SEO — content, links, and making sure your website is technically sound. So that’s how I describe the driving, the proactive side of SEO.
2. Supporting
Then two, we have supporting, and I think this is kind of an underrated or maybe it’s often seen as kind of an interruption to our jobs.
But I think it’s important to actually call it what it is. It’s a big part of what we do. So I think we should embrace it as SEOs.
A. Be the Google Magic 8-ball
For one, we can serve as the Google Magic 8-Ball. When people come to us in our organization and they say, “Hey, I’m going to make this change, or I’m thinking about making this change.Is this going to be good or bad for SEO?”
I think it’s great that people are asking that question. Always be available and always make yourself ready to answer those types of questions for people. So I think on the reactionary side we can be that kind of person that helps guide people and understand what is going to affect your organic search presence.
B. Assist marketing
Two, we can assist marketing. So on this side of the coin, we’re driving.
We can drive our own marketing strategies. As SEOs, we can see how SEO can drive all phases of the funnel. But I think it’s important to note that we’re not the only people in our organization. Often SEOs maybe they don’t even live in the marketing department. Maybe they do and they report to a marketing lead. There are other initiatives that your marketing lead could be investigating.
Maybe they say, “Hey, we’ve just done some market research, and here’s this plan.” It could be our job as SEOs to take that plan, take that strategy and translate it into something digital. I think that’s a really important value that SEOs can add. We can actually assist marketing as well as drive our own efforts.
C. Fix mistakes
Then number three here, I know this is another one that kind of makes people cringe, but we are here to fix mistakes when they happen and train people so that they don’t happen again. So maybe we come in on a Monday morning and we’re ready to face the week, and we see that traffic has taken a nosedive or something. We go, “Oh, no,” and we dive in.
We try to see what happened. But I think that’s really important. It’s our job or it’s part of our job to kind of dive in, diagnose what happened, and not only that but support and be there to help fix it or guide the fixes, and then train and educate and make sure that people know what it is that happened and how it shouldn’t happen again.
You’re there to help train them and guide them. I think that’s another really important way that we can support as SEOs. So that’s essentially how I describe it.
3 tips for coming up with your own pitch
Before I go, I just wanted to mention some tips when you’re coming up with your own SEO elevator pitch. I think it’s really important to just kind of stay away from certain language when you’re crafting your own “this is what I do” speech.
So the three tips I have are:
1. Stay away from jargon.
If you’re giving an SEO elevator pitch, it’s to people that don’t know what SEO is. So try to avoid jargon. I know it’s really easy as SEOs. I find myself doing it all the time. There are things that I don’t think are jargon.
But then I take a couple steps back and I realize, oh yeah, that’s not layman’s terms. So stay away from jargon if at all possible. You’re not going to benefit anyone by confusing them.
2. Avoid policing.
It can be easy as SEOs I’ve found and I’ve found myself in this trap a couple of times where we kind of act as these traffic cops that are waiting around the corner, and when people make a mistake, we’re there to wag our finger at them.
So avoid any language that makes it sound like the SEOs are just the police waiting to kind of punish people for wrongdoing. We are there to help fix mistakes, but it’s in a guiding and educating and supporting, kind of collaborative manner and not like a policing type of manner. Number three, I would say is kind of similar, but a little different.
3. Avoid Supermanning.
I call this Supermanning because it’s the type of language that makes it sound like SEOs are here to swoop in and save the day when something goes wrong. We do. We’re superheroes a lot of times. There are things that happen and thank goodness there was an SEO there to help diagnose and fix that.
But I would avoid any kind of pitch that makes it sound like your entire job is just to kind of save people. There are other people in your organization that are super smart and talented at what they do. They probably wouldn’t like it if you made it sound like you were there to help them all the time. So I just think that’s important to keep in mind. Don’t make it seem like you’re the police waiting to wag your finger at them or you’re the superhero that needs to save everyone from their mistakes.
So yeah, that’s my SEO elevator pitch. That’s why I think it’s important to have one. If you’ve kind of crafted your own SEO elevator pitch, I would love to hear it, and I’m sure it would be great for other SEOs to hear it as well. It’s great to information share. So drop that in the comments if you feel comfortable doing that. If you don’t have one, hopefully this helps. So yeah, that’s it for this week’s Whiteboard Friday, and come back again next week for another one.
Negative SEO can hurt your website and your work in search, even when your rankings are unaffected by it. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, search expert Russ Jones dives into what negative SEO is, what it can affect beyond rankings, and tips on how to fight it.
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Video Transcription
All right, folks. Russ Jones here and I am so excited just to have the opportunity to do any kind of presentation with the title “Defense Against the Dark Arts.” I’m not going to pretend like I’m a huge Harry Potter fan, but anyway, this is just going to be fun.
But what I want to talk about today is actually pretty bad. It’s the reality that negative SEO, even if it is completely ineffective at doing its primary goal, which is to knock your website out of the rankings, will still play havoc on your website and the likelihood that you or your customers will be able to make correct decisions in the future and improve your rankings.
Today I’m going to talk about why negative SEO still matters even if your rankings are unaffected, and then I’m going to talk about a couple of techniques that you can use that will help abate some of the negative SEO techniques and also potentially make it so that whoever is attacking you gets hurt a little bit in the process, maybe. Let’s talk a little bit about negative SEO.
What is negative SEO?
The most common form of negative SEO is someone who would go out and purchase tens of thousands of spammy links or hundreds of thousands even, using all sorts of different software, and point them to your site with the hope of what we used to call “Google bowling,” which is to knock you out of the search results the same way you would knock down a pin with a bowling ball.
The hope is that it’s sort of like a false flag campaign, that Google thinks that you went out and got all of those spammy links to try to improve your rankings, and now Google has caught you and so you’re penalized. But in reality, it was someone else who acquired those links. Now to their credit, Google actually has done a pretty good job of ignoring those types of links.
It’s been my experience that, in most cases, negative SEO campaigns don’t really affect rankings the way they’re intended to in most cases, and I give a lot of caveats there because I’ve seen it be effective certainly. But in the majority of cases all of those spammy links are just ignored by Google. But that’s not it. That’s not the complete story.
Problem #1: Corrupt data
You see, the first problem is that if you get 100,000 links pointing to your site, what’s really going on in the background is that there’s this corruption of data that’s important to making decisions about search results.
Pushes you over data limits in GSC
For example, if you get 100,000 links pointing to your site, it is going to push you over the limit of the number of links that Google Search Console will give back to you in the various reports about links.
Pushes out the good links
This means that in the second case there are probably links, that you should know about or care about, that don’t show up in the report simply because Google cuts off at 100,000 total links in the export.
Well, that’s a big deal, because if you’re trying to make decisions about how to improve your rankings and you can’t get to the link data you need because it’s been replaced with hundreds of thousands of spammy links, then you’re not going to be able to make the right decision.
Increased cost to see all your data
The other big issue here is that there are ways around it.
You can get the data for more than 100,000 links pointing to your site. You’re just going to have to pay for it. You could come to Moz and use our Link Explorer tool for example. But you’ll have to increase the amount of money that you’re spending in order to get access to the accounts that will actually deliver all of that data.
The one big issue sitting behind all of this is that even though we know Google is ignoring most of these links, they don’t label that for us in any kind of useful fashion. Even after we can get access to all of that link data, all of those hundreds of thousands of spammy links, we still can’t be certain which ones matter and which ones don’t.
Problem #2: Copied content
That’s not the only type of negative SEO that there is out there. It’s the most common by far, but there are other types. Another common type is to take the content that you have and distribute it across the web in the way that article syndication used to work. So if you’re fairly new to SEO, one of the old methodologies of improving rankings was to write an article on your site, but then syndicate that article to a number of article websites and these sites would then post your article and that article would link back to you.
Now the reason why these sites would do this is because they would hope that, in some cases, they would outrank your website and in doing so they would get some traffic and maybe earn some AdSense money. But for the most part, that kind of industry has died down because it hasn’t been effective in quite some time. But once again, that’s not the whole picture.
No attribution
If all of your content is being distributed to all of these other sites, even if it doesn’t affect your rankings, it still means there’s the possibility that somebody is getting access to your quality content without any kind of attribution whatsoever.
If they’ve stripped out all of the links and stripped out all of the names and all of the bylines, then your hard earned work is actually getting taken advantage of, even if Google isn’t really the arbiter anymore of whether or not traffic gets to that article.
Internal links become syndicated links
Then on the flip side of it, if they don’t remove the attribution, all the various internal links that you had in that article in the first place that point to other pages on your site, those now become syndicated links, which are part of the link schemes that Google has historically gone after.
In the same sort of situation, it’s not really just about the intent behind the type of negative SEO campaign. It’s the impact that it has on your data, because if somebody syndicates an article of yours that has let’s say eight links to other internal pages and they syndicate it to 10,000 websites, well, then you’ve just got 80,000 new what should have been internal links, now external links pointing to your site.
We actually do know just a couple of years back several pretty strong brands got in trouble for syndicating their news content to other news websites. Now I’m not saying that negative SEO would necessarily trigger that same sort of penalty, but there’s the possibility. Even if it doesn’t trigger that penalty, chances are it’s going to sully the waters in terms of your link data.
Problem #3: Nofollowed malware links & hacked content
There are a couple of other miscellaneous types of negative SEO that don’t get really talked about a lot.
Nofollowed malware links in UGC
For example, if you have any kind of user-generated content on your site, like let’s say you have comments for example, even if you nofollow those comments, the links that are included in there might point to things like malware.
We know that Google will ultimately identify your site as not being safe if it finds these types of links.
Hacked content
Unfortunately, in some cases, there are ways to make it look like there are links on your site that aren’t really under your control through things like HTML injection. For example, you can actually do this to Google right now.
You can inject HTML onto the page of part of their website that makes it look like they’re linking to someone else. If Google actually crawled itself, which luckily they don’t in this case, if they crawled that page and found that malware link, the whole domain in the Google search results would likely start to show that this site might not be safe.
Of course, there’s always the issue with hacked content, which is becoming more and more popular.
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt
All of this really boils down to this concept of FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt. You see it’s not so much about bowling you out of the search engines. It’s about making it so that SEO just isn’t workable anymore.
1. Lose access to critical data
Now it’s been at least a decade since everybody started saying that they used data-driven SEO tactics, data-driven SEO strategies. Well, if your data is corrupted, if you lose access to critical data, you will not be able to make smart decisions. How will you know whether or not the reason your page has lost rankings to another has anything to do with links if you can’t get to the link data that you need because it’s been filled with 100,000 spammy links?
2. Impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost
This leads to number two. It’s impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost. It could be duplicate content. It could be an issue with these hundreds of thousands of links. It could be something completely different. But because the waters have been muddied so much, it makes it very difficult to determine exactly what’s going on, and this of course then makes SEO less certain.
3. Makes SEO uncertain
The less certain it becomes, the more other advertising channels become valuable. Paid search becomes more valuable. Social media becomes more valuable. That’s a problem if you’re a search engine optimization agency or a consultant, because you have the real likelihood of losing clients because you can’t make smart decisions for them anymore because their data has been damaged by negative SEO.
It would be really wonderful if Google would actually show us in Google Search Console what links they’re ignoring and then would allow us to export only the ones they care about. But something tells me that that’s probably beyond what Google is willing to share. So do we have any kind of way to fight back? There are a couple.
How do you fight back against negative SEO?
1. Canonical burn pages
Chances are if you’ve seen some of my other Whiteboard Fridays, you’ve heard me talk about canonical burn pages. Real simply, when you have an important page on your site that you intend to rank, you should create another version of it that is identical and that has a canonical link pointing back to the original. Any kind of link building that you do, you should point to that canonical page.
The reason is simple. If somebody does negative SEO, they’re going to have two choices. They’re either going to do it to the page that’s getting linked to, or they’re going to do it to the page that’s getting ranked. Normally, they’ll do it to the one that’s getting ranked. Well, if they do, then you can get rid of that page and just hold on to the canonical burn page because it doesn’t have any of these negative links.
Or if they choose the canonical burn page, you can get rid of that one and just keep your original page. Yes, it means you sacrifice the hard earned links that you acquired in the first place, but it’s better than losing the possibility in the future altogether.
2. Embedded styled attribution
Another opportunity here, which I think is kind of sneaky and fun, is what I call embedded styled attribution.
You can imagine that my content might say “Russ Jones says so and so and so and so.” Well, imagine surrounding “Russ Jones” by H1 tags and then surrounding that by a span tag with a class that makes it so that the H1 tag that’s under it is the normal-sized text.
Well, chances are if they’re using one of these copied content techniques, they’re not copying your CSS style sheet as well. When that gets published to all of these other sites, in giant, big letters it has your name or any other phrase that you really want. Now this isn’t actually going to solve your problem, other than just really frustrate the hell out of whoever is trying to screw with you.
But sometimes that’s enough to get them to stop.
3. Link Lists
The third one, the one that I really recommend is Link Lists. This is a feature inside of Moz’s Link Explorer, which allows you to track the links that are pointing to your site. As you get links, real links, good links, add them to a Link List, and that way you will always have a list of links that you know are good, that you can compare against the list of links that might be sullied by a negative SEO campaign.
By using the Link lists, you can discern the difference between what’s actually being ignored by Google, at least to some degree, and what actually matters. I hope this is helpful to some degree. But unfortunately, I’ve got to say, at the end of the day, a sufficiently well-run negative SEO campaign can make the difference in whether or not you use SEO in the future at all.
It might not knock you out of Google, but it might make it so that other types of marketing are just better choices. So hopefully this has been some help. I’d love to talk you in the comments about different ways of dealing with negative SEO, like how to track down who is responsible. So just go ahead and fill those comments up with any questions or ideas.
I would love to hear them. Thanks again and I look forward to talking to you in another Whiteboard Friday.
As a local business consultant, I know that deeper marketing insights can be discovered when you set aside formality and share experiences: a moment, a laugh, a common bond.
When I’m looking for ways to make life easier for a client, I sometimes reflect on ancient practices like yoga, tai chi, and mindful breathing, which are increasingly understood as beneficial to human health. For a space in time, they reduce the complex world we live in to a simpler one where being, breath, movement, and focus bring the practitioner to a more intuitive state.
Local marketing agencies can empathize with the complex world their clients inhabit. Local business owners must manage everything from rent and employee benefits to customer service, business reviews, web content, and online listings. When you take on a new client, you expect them to onboard a ton of information about marketing their brand online. Sometimes, the most basic motivations go unaddressed and get lost in assumptions and jargon — instead of decreasing client stress for your least technical clients, you can accidentally increase it.
Today, I’ll help you newly create an intuitive space by sharing five simple meditation exercises you can use with your agency’s clients. Instead of signaling via SEO, CTR, USPs, and GMB, let’s relax with clients by relating successful local search marketing practices to experiences people at any level of technical proficiency already understand.
Heart
To show their heart is in the right place, the Vermont Country Store publishes a customer bill of rights.
For a local business owner, there is no more important quality than having their heart in the right place when it comes to their motivation for running a company.
Yes, all of us work to earn money, but it’s the dedication to serving others that is felt by customers in every interaction with them. When customers feel that a business is there for them, it establishes the loyalty and reputation that secure local search marketing success.
Heart meditation
Close your eyes for a few seconds and think of a time in your life when you most needed help from a business. Maybe you needed a tow truck, a veterinarian, a dentist, or a plumber. You really needed them to understand your plight, deliver the right help, and treat you as an important person who is worthy of respect. Whether you received what you required or not, remember the feeling of need.
Now, extend that recognition beyond your own heart to the heart of every customer who feels a need for something your client can offer them.
A business owner with their heart in the right place can powerfully contribute to local search marketing by:
Running a customer-centric business.
Creating customer guarantees that are fair.
Creating an employee culture of respect and empowerment that extends to customers.
Creating a location that is clean, functional, and pleasant for all.
Honestly representing their products, services, location, and reputation.
Refraining from practices that negatively impact their customers and reputation.
Participating positively in the life of the community they serve.
A good local search marketing agency will help the business owner translate these basics into online content that meets customer needs, local business listings that accurately and richly represent the business, and genuine reviews that serve as a healthy and vital ongoing conversation between the brand and its customers. A trustworthy agency will ensure avoidance of any tactics that pollute the Internet with spam listings, spam reviews, negative attacks on competitors, and negative impacts on the service community. An excellent agency will also assist in finding and promoting community engagement opportunities, helping to win desirable online publicity from offline efforts.
Ear
Keter Salon of Berkeley, Calif. really listens to customers and it shows in its reviews.
Local business success is so linked to the art of listening, I sometimes think Google should replace their teardrop map markers with little ears. In the local SEO world, there are few things sadder than seeing local business profiles filled with disregarded reviews, questions, and negative photos. (Someone cue “The Sound of Silence”.)
From a business perspective, the sound of branded silence is also the sound of customers and profits trickling away. Why does it work this way? Because only 4% of your unhappy customers may actually make the effort to speak up, and if a business owner is not even hearing them, they’ve lost the ability to hear consumer demand. Let’s make sure this doesn’t happen.
Ear meditation
Close your eyes for a few seconds and listen closely to every noise within the range of your hearing. Ask yourself, “Where am I?”
The sound of typing, phone calls, and co-workers chatting might place you in an office. Sliding doors, footsteps on linoleum, and floor staff speaking might mean you’re at your client’s brick-and-mortar location. Maybe it’s birdsong outside and the baby in their crib that tell you you’re working from home today. Listen to every sound that tells you exactly where you are right now.
Now, commit to listening with this level of attention and intention to the signals of customer voices, telling you exactly where a local brand is right now in terms of faults and successes.
A business owner who keeps their ears open can actively gauge how their business is really doing with its customers by:
Having one-on-one conversations with customers.
Recording and analyzing phone conversations with customers.
Reading reviews on platforms like Google My Business, Yelp, Facebook and sites that are specific to their industry (like Avvo for lawyers or Healthgrades for physicians).
Reading the Q&A questions of customers on their Google Business Profile.
Reading mentions of their brand on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Reading the responses to surveys they conduct.
Reading the emails and form submissions the company receives.
A good local search marketing agency will help their client amass, organize, and analyze all of this sentiment to discover the current reputation of the business. From this information, you and your client can chart a course for improvement. Consider that, in this study, a 1.5 star improvement in online reputation increased consumer activity by 10%-12% and generated 13,000 more leads for the brands included. The first step to a better reputation is simply listening.
When your clients choose their business locations, they weigh several factors. They compare how the mantra of “location, location, location” matches their budget, and whether a certain part of town is lacking something their business could provide. They also look at the local competitors to see if the competition would be hard to beat, or if they could do the job better. Success lies in truly seeing the lay of the land.
Local search mirrors the real world. The market on the Internet is made up of the physical locations of your clients’ customers at the time they search for what your client has to offer.
Eye meditation
You already know most of the businesses on your street, and many of them in your neighborhood. Now, with eyes wide open, start searching Google for the things your listening work has told you customers need. Where appropriate, include attributes you’ve noticed them using like “best tacos near me”, “cheapest gym in North Beach”, or “shipping store downtown.”
See how your client is ranking when a person does these type of searches while at their location. Now, walk or drive a few blocks away and try again. Go to the city perimeter and try again. Where are they ranking, and who is outranking them as you move about their geographic market?
A local business keeping its eyes open never makes assumptions about who its true competitors are or how its customers search. Instead, it:
Regularly assesses the competition in its market, taking into account the distance from which customers are likely to come for goods and services.
Regularly reviews materials assembled in the listening phase to see how customers word their requests and sentiments.
Makes use of tools to analyze both markets and keyword searches.
A good local search marketing agency will help with the tools needed for market and search language analysis. These findings can inform everything from what a client names their business, to how they categorize it on their Google My Business listing, to what they write about to draw in customers from all geographic points in their market. Clear vision simultaneously enables you to analyze competitors who are outranking your client and assess why they’re doing so. It can empower your client to report spammers who are outranking them via forbidden tactics. An excellent agency will help their client see their competitive landscape with eyes on the prize.
Mind
When an independent Arizona appliance chain surprised three shoppers with $10,000, it made headlines.
With hearts ready for service, ears set on listening, and eyes determined to see, you and your client have now taken in useful information about their brand and the customers who make up their local market. You know now whether they’re doing a poor, moderate, or exceptional job of fulfilling needs, and are working with them to strategize next steps. But what are those next steps?
Mind meditation
Sit back comfortably and think of a time a business completely surprised you, or a time when an owner or employee did something so unexpectedly great, it convinced you that you were in good hands. Maybe they comped your meal when it wasn’t prepared properly, or special-ordered an item just for you, or showed you how to do something you’d never thought of before.
Recall that lightbulb moment of delight. Ask yourself how your client’s brand could surprise customers in memorable ways they would love. Create a list of those ideas.
A creative local business gives full play to the awesome imaginative powers of the brain. It gives all staff permission to daydream and brainstorm questions like:
What is something unexpected the business could do that would come as a delightful surprise to customers?
What is the most impactful thing the business could do that would be felt as a positive force in the lives of its customers?
What risks can the business take for the sake of benevolence, social good, beauty, renown, or joy?
A good local search marketing agency will help sort through ideas that could truly differentiate their clients from the competition and bring them closer to making the kinds of impressions that turn local brands into household names. An excellent agency will bring ideas of their own. Study “surprise and delight marketing” as it’s done on the large, corporate scale, and get it going at a local level like this small coffee roaster in Alexandria, Va. selling ethical java while doubling as funding for LGBTQ+ organizations.
Mouth
Put your best stories everywhere, like in this social media example. Moz Local can help with publishing those stories.
“Think before you speak” is an old adage that serves well as a marketing guideline. Another way we might say it is “research before you publish”. With heart, ear, eye, and mind, you and your client have committed, collected, analyzed, and ideated their brand to a point where it’s ready to address the public from a firm foundation.
Mouth meditation
Open your favorite word processor on your computer and type a few bars of the lyrics to your favorite song. Next, type the first three brand slogans that come to your mind. Next, type a memorable line from a movie or book. Finally, type out the the words of the nicest compliment or best advice someone ever gave you.
Sit back and look at your screen. Look at how those words have stuck in your mind — you remember them all! The people who wrote and spoke those words have indelibly direct-messaged you.
How will you message the public in a way that’s unforgettable?
A well-spoken local business masters the art of face-to-face customer conversation. In-store signage and offline media require great words, too, but local search marketing will take spoken skills onto the web, where they’ll be communicated via:
Every page of the website
Every article or blog post
Social media content
Review responses
Answers to questions like Google Business Profile Q&A
Images on the website, business listings, and third-party platforms like Google Images and Pinterest
Videos on the website, YouTube, and other platforms
A good local search marketing agency will help their client find the best words, images, and videos based on all the research done together. An excellent agency will help a local business move beyond simply being discovered online to being remembered as a household name each time customer needs arise. An agency should help their clients earn links, unstructured citations, and other forms of publicity from those research efforts.
Determine to help your client be the “snap, crackle, pop”, “un-Cola”, “last honest pizza” with everything you publish for their local market, and to build an Internet presence that speaks well of their business 24-hours a day.
Closing pose
One of the most encouraging aspects of running and marketing a local business is that it’s based on things you already have some life experience doing: caring, listening, observing, imagining, and communicating.
I personally should be better at technical tasks like diagnosing errors in Schema, configuring Google Search Console for local purposes, or troubleshooting bulk GMB uploads. I can work at improving in those areas, but I can also work at growing my heart, ear, eye, mind, and mouth to master serving clients and customers.
Business is technical. Business is transactional. But good business is also deeply human, with real rewards for well-rounded growth.
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