Posted by dohertyjf

[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]

As a startup founder myself, it feels weird to talk about startups through the lens of backlinks. After all, there are so many other things to worry about — how’s my cash flow? Are my employees getting paid? How does the deal flow look? Are we going to hit our targets for this month/quarter? Why is the website/app so slow? Did that vendor pay us that huge amount they owe?

What if I told you that I’ve seen (and helped) companies land funding off the back of solid SEO practices, including link acquisition and content creation? By integrating SEO into PR, outreach, and content initiatives, one specific startup has gone on to do great things.

Startups need to care about marketing

Startups should care about marketing, too. While the SF Bay Area, where I live, is all aflutter over “growth hacking” and some well-known investors are telling startups to not focus on marketing, I tend to disagree with them. (Of course, I’m a marketer!)

Whether or not startups should be doing PR and paid acquisition (I’d argue they should be doing a bit of both), SEO is beautiful in that it sits across or is in constant discussion with a lot of the “marketing” activities — PR, content, email, paid. Want to grow your company and get feedback on your new product faster? You need to be thinking about SEO.

A holistic marketing process

But as we all know, the different marketing channels all work together to help with SEO. Gone are the days of putting content online and predicting where it will rank and for which keywords. Your PR efforts can be very effective in building links for SEO as well as driving referral traffic back to your site, increasing those ever-important signups or purchases. As a startup, showing traction can help you get more mentions from sites that help with VC deal intelligence — sites like Mattermark, Tracxn.com, and Pitchbook. And getting mentioned on these sites can drive more mentions, which build links and drive referral traffic. It’s a virtuous cycle!

Because I’m very interested in how startups get traction and build their companies, I wanted to look at where the top 100 startups, according to Pitchbook’s valuation metric (thanks to Rob Toledo for the data), get links from.

My hope for this post is twofold. First, to educate you about how startups build links these days, and second, to show startups where they should be looking to get links. Of course, I’d be remiss to not also point out that you don’t just want to copy what your competitors are doing. Think about the mentions that will actually get you in front of your target audience. We all want to be written up in Techcrunch, but unless your true customers are VCs or other startups, you likely won’t see a bump from this (though you should retarget all of these visitors and try to get their emails so you can qualify them through your marketing funnel).

Ok, with all of that out of the way, let’s begin!

Who are the top startups?

It’s not necessary to list all of the startups I pulled the linking domains for, simply because the list would be long and that’s not what this post is about. The criteria that we used to pull the startups was fairly simple. I didn’t want the huge ones that everyone’s heard of (e.g. Uber), but I wanted startups that have shown some traction and were able to close a round of funding. The criteria were:

• The top 100 Angel–Series B companies…
• Sorted by valuation…
• That have raised financing from January 1st 2014–present.

This way, we get current companies that are assumedly still alive and building. This includes companies like Porch.com, Tilt.com, ZipRecruiter, Tune, and Mapbox.

Enough already. Give me the links!

Patience, my friend! Here are the top 55 domains that appear most often within the backlink reports (pulled from Open Site Explorer, of course) of the top 100 startups:

You’ve probably heard of many of these sites, as they tend to be the ones that a lot of us in the technology world read (for better or for worse).

I was then curious about the type of links these are. So, I went through and categorized them accordingly. Remember, there are 55 unique domains here so this isn’t quite representative of all of their links, but if you’re looking to build a bed of links for your company this should give you an idea of the channels that work:

As you can tell, by far the most common are from PR, then placed by the startup themselves on their profiles around the web (think Crunchbase), then links that are editorially given. Interestingly, we also see that email providers that by default make the emails sent public (like MailChimp) get crawled and the links counted.

How “normal” are their backlink profiles?

The next question I asked myself was how natural-looking their backlink profiles are. To do this, I graphed the Domain Authorities of all the domains pulled from OSE as linking to these sites. To make it as accurate as possible, I de-duplicated the domains before making this graph.

For many of us who have been in the SEO world for years, this graph should look pretty familiar. Years ago, we would often talk about natural link profiles and point out how many sites who hadn’t engaged in active link building, targeting sites with high Domain Authority, would often see a left-leaning bell curve. This is exactly what we see above. Basically, the reason we expect to see this is that Domain Authority works on an exponential scale. It’s quite easy to go from 0 to 20, but then becomes progressively harder to move that needle. It works a lot like PageRank in that way. So, there are a lot of sites online with a DA under 30–35 and not as many above.

I’ll be honest though when I say that it’s been quite a while since I looked at the link graphs of many sites. So let’s compare the above to a few other sites that have some links. Remember, we’re just looking for directional patterns, not prescriptions.

My personal site, johnfdoherty.com

Uber’s corporate site, uber.com

Techcrunch.com

As you can see, the overall link spread of the top 100 startups is pretty in line with what one could consider “normal.” I’m sure you can find anomalies at an individual site level, but at a 10,000-foot view, they’re natural. This is important because it means that at least most of these startups are not actively manipulating the link graph in a way that could hurt them in the future. Basically, don’t pull a Thumbtack.

Do links vary by stage of company?

The final question I had was how each startup’s site varies with domain authority and number of linking root domains by stage of company (seed, Series A, Series B). Intuition tells me that the further along the company is, the more links it will have and the stronger their site will be. But is this what the data tell us?

To get this data, I used the Moz API to pull the metrics via a Google doc cobbled together from many places. The final working one was sent to me by Tim Allen at Distilled London. Thanks man. I pulled the Series level (Angel, Series A, Series B) from Mattermark’s company profile pages. I had to remove two companies, one Series A and one Funding Unknown, because OSE had no link metrics.

Here are the average number of links (not linking root domains) by Funding Series.

This chart is a bit misleading, however, because one Series A company (Crowdrise) and one Series B company (Porch) have exponentially more links than the other sites in the dataset. Porch has, according to Moz, 142k external links, while Crowdrise has 40k. The next highest is Canva at 18.5k, and the average across all the rest after Porch and Crowdrise is 1,695.

When we remove Porch and Crowdrise from the dataset as outliers, we get a much clearer view of the landscape. Series A companies still have more links on average than Series B or C, which may be explained by the increasing proliferation of tech blogs and the recent funding boom that that occurred in 2013–2015 (which now seems to be cooling). Here’s the look:

Takeaways

So what can we take away from all of this? First of all, let’s all remember that links are a lagging indicator of success, but they can also to some degree tell us who’s popular. And of course, the more quality and high-authority links you have, the better you will rank.

Second, remember the first graph. The ways that the top startups build links are via:

1. PR
2. Placed links (profiles, etc.)
3. Editorial
4. Blogs

It seems that social bookmarking is dead as a linkbuilding tactic for startups. I’m heartened by this, as it seems that startups focus (as they should) on links from places that will also drive them traffic. If you’re looking for inspiration and more tactics around how to build links, I definitely recommend checking out the Link Building category of the Moz blog.

What takeaways or further questions do you have?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by dohertyjf

[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]

As a startup founder myself, it feels weird to talk about startups through the lens of backlinks. After all, there are so many other things to worry about — how’s my cash flow? Are my employees getting paid? How does the deal flow look? Are we going to hit our targets for this month/quarter? Why is the website/app so slow? Did that vendor pay us that huge amount they owe?

What if I told you that I’ve seen (and helped) companies land funding off the back of solid SEO practices, including link acquisition and content creation? By integrating SEO into PR, outreach, and content initiatives, one specific startup has gone on to do great things.

Startups need to care about marketing

Startups should care about marketing, too. While the SF Bay Area, where I live, is all aflutter over “growth hacking” and some well-known investors are telling startups to not focus on marketing, I tend to disagree with them. (Of course, I’m a marketer!)

Whether or not startups should be doing PR and paid acquisition (I’d argue they should be doing a bit of both), SEO is beautiful in that it sits across or is in constant discussion with a lot of the “marketing” activities — PR, content, email, paid. Want to grow your company and get feedback on your new product faster? You need to be thinking about SEO.

A holistic marketing process

But as we all know, the different marketing channels all work together to help with SEO. Gone are the days of putting content online and predicting where it will rank and for which keywords. Your PR efforts can be very effective in building links for SEO as well as driving referral traffic back to your site, increasing those ever-important signups or purchases. As a startup, showing traction can help you get more mentions from sites that help with VC deal intelligence — sites like Mattermark, Tracxn.com, and Pitchbook. And getting mentioned on these sites can drive more mentions, which build links and drive referral traffic. It’s a virtuous cycle!

Because I’m very interested in how startups get traction and build their companies, I wanted to look at where the top 100 startups, according to Pitchbook’s valuation metric (thanks to Rob Toledo for the data), get links from.

My hope for this post is twofold. First, to educate you about how startups build links these days, and second, to show startups where they should be looking to get links. Of course, I’d be remiss to not also point out that you don’t just want to copy what your competitors are doing. Think about the mentions that will actually get you in front of your target audience. We all want to be written up in Techcrunch, but unless your true customers are VCs or other startups, you likely won’t see a bump from this (though you should retarget all of these visitors and try to get their emails so you can qualify them through your marketing funnel).

Ok, with all of that out of the way, let’s begin!

Who are the top startups?

It’s not necessary to list all of the startups I pulled the linking domains for, simply because the list would be long and that’s not what this post is about. The criteria that we used to pull the startups was fairly simple. I didn’t want the huge ones that everyone’s heard of (e.g. Uber), but I wanted startups that have shown some traction and were able to close a round of funding. The criteria were:

• The top 100 Angel–Series B companies…
• Sorted by valuation…
• That have raised financing from January 1st 2014–present.

This way, we get current companies that are assumedly still alive and building. This includes companies like Porch.com, Tilt.com, ZipRecruiter, Tune, and Mapbox.

Enough already. Give me the links!

Patience, my friend! Here are the top 55 domains that appear most often within the backlink reports (pulled from Open Site Explorer, of course) of the top 100 startups:

You’ve probably heard of many of these sites, as they tend to be the ones that a lot of us in the technology world read (for better or for worse).

I was then curious about the type of links these are. So, I went through and categorized them accordingly. Remember, there are 55 unique domains here so this isn’t quite representative of all of their links, but if you’re looking to build a bed of links for your company this should give you an idea of the channels that work:

As you can tell, by far the most common are from PR, then placed by the startup themselves on their profiles around the web (think Crunchbase), then links that are editorially given. Interestingly, we also see that email providers that by default make the emails sent public (like MailChimp) get crawled and the links counted.

How “normal” are their backlink profiles?

The next question I asked myself was how natural-looking their backlink profiles are. To do this, I graphed the Domain Authorities of all the domains pulled from OSE as linking to these sites. To make it as accurate as possible, I de-duplicated the domains before making this graph.

For many of us who have been in the SEO world for years, this graph should look pretty familiar. Years ago, we would often talk about natural link profiles and point out how many sites who hadn’t engaged in active link building, targeting sites with high Domain Authority, would often see a left-leaning bell curve. This is exactly what we see above. Basically, the reason we expect to see this is that Domain Authority works on an exponential scale. It’s quite easy to go from 0 to 20, but then becomes progressively harder to move that needle. It works a lot like PageRank in that way. So, there are a lot of sites online with a DA under 30–35 and not as many above.

I’ll be honest though when I say that it’s been quite a while since I looked at the link graphs of many sites. So let’s compare the above to a few other sites that have some links. Remember, we’re just looking for directional patterns, not prescriptions.

My personal site, johnfdoherty.com

Uber’s corporate site, uber.com

Techcrunch.com

As you can see, the overall link spread of the top 100 startups is pretty in line with what one could consider “normal.” I’m sure you can find anomalies at an individual site level, but at a 10,000-foot view, they’re natural. This is important because it means that at least most of these startups are not actively manipulating the link graph in a way that could hurt them in the future. Basically, don’t pull a Thumbtack.

Do links vary by stage of company?

The final question I had was how each startup’s site varies with domain authority and number of linking root domains by stage of company (seed, Series A, Series B). Intuition tells me that the further along the company is, the more links it will have and the stronger their site will be. But is this what the data tell us?

To get this data, I used the Moz API to pull the metrics via a Google doc cobbled together from many places. The final working one was sent to me by Tim Allen at Distilled London. Thanks man. I pulled the Series level (Angel, Series A, Series B) from Mattermark’s company profile pages. I had to remove two companies, one Series A and one Funding Unknown, because OSE had no link metrics.

Here are the average number of links (not linking root domains) by Funding Series.

This chart is a bit misleading, however, because one Series A company (Crowdrise) and one Series B company (Porch) have exponentially more links than the other sites in the dataset. Porch has, according to Moz, 142k external links, while Crowdrise has 40k. The next highest is Canva at 18.5k, and the average across all the rest after Porch and Crowdrise is 1,695.

When we remove Porch and Crowdrise from the dataset as outliers, we get a much clearer view of the landscape. Series A companies still have more links on average than Series B or C, which may be explained by the increasing proliferation of tech blogs and the recent funding boom that that occurred in 2013–2015 (which now seems to be cooling). Here’s the look:

Takeaways

So what can we take away from all of this? First of all, let’s all remember that links are a lagging indicator of success, but they can also to some degree tell us who’s popular. And of course, the more quality and high-authority links you have, the better you will rank.

Second, remember the first graph. The ways that the top startups build links are via:

1. PR
2. Placed links (profiles, etc.)
3. Editorial
4. Blogs

It seems that social bookmarking is dead as a linkbuilding tactic for startups. I’m heartened by this, as it seems that startups focus (as they should) on links from places that will also drive them traffic. If you’re looking for inspiration and more tactics around how to build links, I definitely recommend checking out the Link Building category of the Moz blog.

What takeaways or further questions do you have?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by MiriamEllis

[Estimated read time: 13 minutes]

Is your brand visible to potential customers? If you’re a local business and you haven’t nailed down your local SEO, you’re missing the opportunity to be seen when that customer searches on desktop or on mobile.

But local SEO isn’t some mysterious entity. It’s a series of concerted steps. And we can help you tailor those local SEO efforts to your business model. Simply find your business type on the following illustration and follow the steps that are specific to your needs.

Local SEO for all business types

But wait! You aren’t done yet. There are some local SEO steps that work for businesses of all kinds. Use the checklist below to make sure you’re ticking all the boxes to get seen in the SERPs. To jump ahead to a section, use these links:

• Technical website criteria
• Getting local content right
• Citations
• Duplicate listing cleanup
• Earning reviews
• Social media for local business
• Out there in the real world

If you’re a paper and pen type (or just want to save your checklist for later), download your very own copy of the Local SEO Checklist here:

Download checklist as a PDF

Technical website criteria

Everything that applies to traditional SEO also applies to local SEO.

Regardless of business model, every local business website needs to be indexable, error-free, multi-device-compliant, well-structured, and properly optimized. See the complete technical checklist.

In addition to the above, local website optimization requires that you:

Getting local content right

Content is an important part of any SEO effort, so make sure you’re not tripping yourself up with thin or duplicate content. Here’s a list of common content mistakes followed by a checklist of ways to increase the local SEO impact of your content.

Content mistakes to avoid

1. Don’t scrape content from other websites, even from the websites of manufacturers or authorities, unless you are publishing an attributed quote within your own, unique content.
2. If you offer the same services or products in multiple cities, think carefully about attempting to create a unique page for every possible city/keyword combination. Only embark on this plan if you know you have sufficient resources of time, money, and talent to create truly high-quality pages for each combination. Avoid publishing thin or useless pages. If you know you don’t have the resources, it’s better to go with just a strong page for each city and a strong page for each service, rather than creating lots of thin or duplicate city/keyword combo pages.
3. Think long and hard before deciding to take a multi-website approach, even if your company offers multiple services or has multiple offices. Numerous experts agree that it is almost always better to build a single, powerhouse website that promotes your brand and all of its services and branches rather than dividing up time, funding and talent between multiple websites. For more on this, see this community discussion.

Ways to create unique, user-, and search-friendly content

Citations

Citations are complete or partial references to your name, address, phone number or website (NAP+W) anywhere on the web. Learn more.

Citation basics

Automated or manual citation building: your choice

Building manual citations

You can choose to build all citations manually, keeping track of their existence, status, and progress in a spreadsheet. The main benefit of this path is more direct control over your listings; the main drawback is the considerable amount of time manual creation and management involves, including time involved to update all citations if a business re-brands or moves. If you’d like to try manual management, these resources will acquaint you with top citations you will want to build:

• Where to get citations
• The best citation sources by US city
• The best local citations by category
• Top 100 international citation sites
• Finding where your customers are

Automated citation building

You can choose to pay for either manual or automated citation building instead of doing the work yourself. The main benefit of this path is a savings in time and ease of making updates across multiple citations at once if a business moves or re-brands; the main drawback is that not all services are of equal quality and some may cause problems rather than resolving them.

With most citation services you will have somewhat less direct control over your local business listings, but if the product is good, this is not normally a major problem. The main thing is to be sure that any service you consider is building important citations rather than selling fluff and that there are not known problems being alleged regarding the way the service is sold or managed.

If you are considering purchasing a citation building service, read this comparison guide.

Even if you do pay to have citations built for you, in some cases, you may want to augment this by building some citations manually on specific niche sites that aren’t offered in agency packages.

Duplicate listing clean-up

Duplicates sap your listing strength so detecting and resolving them is key. Use these tools and tips to get those duplicates cleaned up:

Earning reviews

Given their power as a ranking and conversion factor, reviews are must-haves for every local business. Follow these steps to earn reviews:

Social media for local businesses

Avoid wasting effort and money by identifying the right social platforms for your business’s clientele. Maximize the return on your investment:

Out there in the real world

All online local efforts are but a reflection of offline realities and goals. Be sure you’re getting it right where it counts most by remembering:

Summing up

There are many theories about “effective frequency” — the number of times a person needs to be exposed to advertising before making a response to it. Some say the golden number is seven, but not everyone agrees.

What you can feel confident about is that all of the above steps represent efforts you are making to put your brand out there for the consideration of your potential customers, and the golden opportunity for local businesses is that their competition is limited by specific geography.

You don’t have to compete against the whole world, but rather be a consistent, reliable resource for your own neighbors. Be in the right places at the right times, pair that with great service, and your local business has every chance of succeeding.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by randfish

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

Identifying your target market is only one-fifth of the battle. If you want to win the proverbial war, you have to know your audience inside and out. Discovering the sites they visit and using that knowledge to your advantage is key, but the best practices to do so can feel unclear. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines a five-step process to more effectively reach and market to your target community.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about finding sites that your audience visits so that you can better market to them.

Now, this is an awesome tactic to use for link building. It’s great for advertising. It’s great for reaching your community wherever they may go on the Web, but it’s not always obvious how to go about this, and that’s exactly what I want to talk you through.

Step 1 – Identify people who are part of our target audience.

So whoever it is that we are trying to reach, that we’re trying to sell to, that we’re trying to market to, these are people that we know perform certain kinds of searches, they visit places on the Web, they download and install apps. Whatever it is that they’re doing in the digital world, we want to uncover those things, and to do so we need to start with a sample set, a small but substantive sample set of say 5 to 10 people who really match our audience’s attributes. Then essentially we’re just going to clone them. We’re going to replicate those folks.

So assuming we start here with a little group, I’ve got my six fellows over here. I’m going to take out one of them and I’m going to essentially look at the attributes and characteristics of this person who’s in my audience.

This is Mortimer. He’s a freelance writer for the example that we’ll be using this Whiteboard Friday. I’m going to assume that I’m creating a product for writers specifically. I know that Mortimer is a contributor to several different publications.

Now that I know his name and a little bit about him and what he does, title, maybe the company where he works, etc., I can look at: What are the social networks that Mortimer uses? I’m going to do a search essentially just in Google, and I’m going to look for: Where are all the places that Mortimer has profiles on the Web? From where does he share content? If he’s using Twitter, by the way, this is super easy with Followerwonk, because I can go to the Followerwonk Analyze page and I can actually tap right in to see all of the content, well, the list of domains that Morty shares from most often. That’s pretty cool. If he’s not using Twitter, it’s fine. We can do this manually, and we can just start to look at: All right, where is he sharing content from? What’s he talking about, etc.? Where does he already have a profile? What networks is he using?

Next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to use data that I already know about keyword research. So I take my keyword research, which I’ve already performed, that I know this group of people is searching for in general. I can be a little bit broader than I normally would be around very sales or conversion-focused types of keyword research. I can essentially say, “What do I know these people look for when they’re looking to further their careers or their writing or their work in my area?” It doesn’t have to be conversion-focused. It can be very broad.

Step 2 – Collect search results.

So I can essentially collect those search results, and then I want to find the domains that are ranking well consistently numerous times for numerous different keywords.

So I might use words like “podcast for writers,” and then I’m also going to grab the related searches like “best literary podcast,” “good podcast for writers” — the “I Should Be Writing podcast” is actually a related search here — or “podcast books.”

Then I’m going to take those searches, line them up here as my keywords right here in the columns, and then for my rows, well, these are the domains that I found ranking consistently for these. It was MakeUseOf.com, TheWriteLife, and WritingExcuses.com. These all ranked somewhere for some of these queries, so I’m going to make a list like that.

This can actually be done pretty easily with tools. You could use your Moz exports if you’re using Moz’s ranking tools. You could use the same thing just to export all your ranking URLs from Searchmetrics or from GetSTAT if you’re using STAT, or you could use SEMrush. Whatever ranking software you’re using you can get an export. You can even do this manually. It just takes a little more time.

Step 3 – Broaden the lists.

Next up, I’m going to use some tools and some search queries to broaden these lists. So if I find that a lot of people and a lot of writers do visit Goodreads.com for obvious reasons, I can then plug that into SEMrush. From SEMrush, I can see all the keywords that they rank for and the domains that most often also rank for those keywords.

I can use SimilarWeb to essentially see similar websites. People also visit these sites. That’s inside SimilarWeb Pro. I can use Google.

What I want to do is add queries like “verse,” “verses,” “alternatives,” “sites like,” “similar sites” onto the end of Goodreads or whatever the domains are that come from my lists over here. Then I will get a bunch more domains that I can plug in.

Step 4 – Survey your target audience.

The last thing I want to do to broaden this list just one more time, and to validate and verify that I’ve captured all the right stuff, is I might try and send out a survey to my target audience. So if I’m connected to these 6 people and hopefully 10 to 20 more at least like them, and I’m actually going to survey them and say — I really like using Typeform, I’ve used it a few times. If you follow me on Twitter, I’ve been sending some Typeform surveys lately. Looks great on mobile. I get high completion rates. So I love that software.

I might ask them, “What are your three favorite websites for freelance writing resources?” And then boom, one, two, three. Submit. Sweet.

Now, what would be even greater here is if I captured an email address because then I can reach out to those folks and say, “Hey, here are the most popular websites.” Or I put up a blog post that shows what they are. Now I can go and reach out to the websites that most frequently appeared here and say, “Hey, guess what? You showed up most often in my survey, and I wrote about it.” Great for networking and building a relationship and furthering a relationship.

Step 5 – Identify sites that have marketing opportunities to reach your audience.

The last step is actually the work that goes into identifying the marketing opportunity. So I know all these sites. I’ve got a huge list that I’ve now expanded and expanded again. Now I can go and look for things like an ad opportunity. On Goodreads they have an advertising platform that I can specifically use.

I can look for community discussion or commenting features. BookLikes has a system where I can set up a profile and then start commenting and contributing to their forum and their Q&A.

Bookish has a cast of characters.

This is on their About page. I can find the people behind the site, and then I can connect with them. If they all have Twitter accounts, I can follow them on Twitter. I can connect with them via LinkedIn. I could pitch them on email if I have something specific that I’d like to contribute to this site or if I’m not seeing an advertising opportunity or something else.

LitReactor had a great place where I could actually create an account and then start submitting my content just like YouMoz does for Moz.com. So those guest submission opportunities.

Basically I’m looking for anything like this, types of opportunities where I can get involved in these sites and be visible to their audiences so that I can start creating a relationship with those audiences and then hopefully earn their interest, earn their attention, earn their trust, and have them go check out whatever it is that I’m doing on my own website.

All right everyone. I look forward to your suggestions and ideas, as well as any cool tools or processes you use, and we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by rMaynes1

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

In 2014, Mediative released an eye-tracking study that looked at how Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) has changed over the last decade, and how searcher behavior has adapted as a result. We learned that:

1. Top organic results are no longer always in the top-left corner, so users look elsewhere to find them.
2. Mobile devices have habitually conditioned searchers to scan vertically more than horizontally. Searchers are looking for the fastest path to the desired content.
3. People are viewing more search results listings during a single session and spending less time viewing each one.
4. Businesses that are positioned lower on the SERP (especially positions 2–4) see more click activity than they did several years ago, making this real estate much more valuable.
5. The #1 organic listing still captures the most click activity (32.8%), regardless of what new elements are presented.

On a desktop, the #1 organic listing is shifting further down the page, opening up the top of the page with more potential areas for businesses to achieve visibility.

The way website listings are presented on a mobile search engine results page is significantly different from how they’re presented on a desktop. The decrease in available screen size means there are a limited number of listings immediately visible to searchers, and competition for the top spots can be fierce.

The 2016 eye-tracking study

In this latest eye-tracking study, Mediative took 49 participants of mixed age and gender, asking them to complete 41 search tasks on an iPhone 5 using Google. We used the X2-60 Tobii mobile device eye tracker to track where they looked on the screen, measuring time to first look, how many participants looked, and how many participants clicked on each listing.

The Tobii X2-60

An example of one of the tasks we asked? “You’re interested in taking a vacation to New Orleans. Use Google to find cheap flights from Toronto to New Orleans.” Participants were shown the mobile SERP below:

The area highlighted in the image above shows what’s viewable on the mobile screen, before scrolling is necessary.

Ultimately, we wanted to know:

1. Where on the mobile SERP do searchers look and click the most? How does this differ from desktop searchers?

2. How important is the location of a listing on the SERP to win views and clicks from searchers?

3. Does the need for scrolling negatively or positively impact the views and clicks that listings further down the page receive?

4. What can advertisers do to ensure their Google listings are seen and clicked on a mobile SERP?

Key findings:

1. The #1 organic listing still captures the most click activity; it just takes 87% longer for it to be first seen on a mobile compared to a desktop.

In cases such as the one shown below, the knowledge panel that appears to the right of the results on a desktop (left image) becomes a key feature at the top of the mobile SERP (right image). Searchers have to scroll in order to see the organic listings that can be seen without scrolling on a desktop. This didn’t deter searchers from seeking out the top organic listing, however — it just took longer.

Takeaway:

The relevancy of your listing to the searcher’s intent becomes more important than ever as it’s taking longer for people to first lay eyes on the organic listing. This provides more of an opportunity for them to be distracted by other brands and features on the SERP that appear before the organic listings.

2. Only 7.4% of clicks were below the 4th organic listing versus 16% on a desktop, and only 62.9% of tasks resulted in a scroll-down.

Takeaway:

Being above the 4th organic listing — whether in an organic, local, knowledge graph, paid position, etc — is critical. Fewer and fewer clicks are going to listings below the top 4 organic listings, leaving less opportunity for advertisers to drive traffic to their sites.

Mobile SEO needs to be taken extremely seriously. However, many businesses don’t realize the importance of optimizing their sites specifically for mobile, resulting in ranking lower on a mobile than on a desktop.

• Invest in putting as much relevant content into your SERP listing and use available tools such as Schema to ensure that your listing stands out on the screen, increasing the likelihood of capturing clicks.
• Take advantage of the fact that other elements are presented above the organic listings, where over 35% of the page clicks on mobile were won.
• Track mobile rankings separately so as to optimize specifically for mobile, depending on the results that are seen.

3. 11% more clicks went to the knowledge graph on a mobile phone compared to a desktop, and almost 22% less clicks went to the top #1 organic listing on a mobile compared to a desktop.

A heat map showing the views captured by a knowledge graph result on a mobile phone. The displayed knowledge graph is shown to the right.

The introduction of more elements at the top of the page requires significant scrolling before the lower organic listings are reached, and these additional elements took a portion of clicks away from the top organic listings in that time.

When we studied mobile SERPS that only included organic listings, we found that:

• 99% of people looked at the top organic listing vs. 83% on a desktop
• 40% of page clicks were to the top organic listing vs. 34% on a desktop
• 75% of page clicks were to the top 4 organic listings vs. 60% on a desktop

When we studied mobile SERPS that also included paid listings, local listings, a knowledge graph, etc, we found that:

• 78.5% of people looked at the top organic listing vs. 99% on organic-only pages
• 33.2% of page clicks were to the top organic listing vs. 40% on organic-only pages
• 57% of page clicks were to the top 4 organic listings vs. 75% on organic-only pages

Takeaway:

Features on the mobile SERP such as the knowledge graph results have the potential to capture a significant amount of attention away from the organic listings. The major difference between a knowledge graph on a desktop versus a mobile phone is that scrolling is required on a phone to see organic listings. Once again, the importance of a strong mobile SEO strategy cannot be understated. If you find your organic listing is losing too many clicks to the knowledge graph, find other keywords that don’t produce the knowledge graph and include them in your optimization strategy.

4. The top sponsored ad is seen by 91% of searchers.

Takeaway:

Mobile screen real estate is extremely valuable. You have two ways to try and earn as much of that real estate as you can: paid search and mobile SEO. Although paid search can’t guarantee that you’ll always appear at the top of the results, a good paid search campaign can definitely help capture more clicks.

Consider paid text ads if you’re looking to improve website traffic, or optimize for local searches if appropriate, rather than focusing all efforts on ranking #1 in the organic listings. As three paid ads on mobile become more common, brands must be prepared to see a drop in traffic from organic listings, and perhaps consider increasing their investments in paid search.

5. 19.2% of page clicks on average went to the top 2 sponsored text ads, compared to 14.5% on a desktop.

Takeaway:

Paid search represents a bigger opportunity for traffic to your site on a mobile compared to desktop, especially if ad extensions are present.

6. 47% more clicks went to the map and local listings when they were above the organic listings.

Takeaway:

The positioning of the local listings, whether below or above the organic listings, can have a significant impact on the views and clicks captured by each of the local listings or the organic listings. With only three local listings appearing on mobile, it’s important for your business to be there, especially if your website is struggling to rank in the top 4 organic listings.

Measure more than just clicks. Clicks to a local listing from a mobile device can result in a reduction in traffic to the brand’s website, as the local listings link to the Local Finder. It’s therefore important to measure impression data from local listings as well as traffic to business Google+ pages, as this can contribute to driving traffic to local stores and businesses.

To conclude

There’s no doubt about it: being listed at the top of the SERP is critical on a mobile device. People may scroll up and down, but ultimately, with over 92% of clicks going to an area above the 4th organic listing, if your business listing is below that, you’re almost invisible on a mobile search. Mobile must be taken seriously, but there are still far too many businesses that don’t see that importance and are still focusing all their efforts on desktop.

To discover out more takeaways and tips, plus average click-through rates per SERP element, download the full study on our site!

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