Posted by David-Mihm

When we launched Moz Local, I said at the time that one of the primary goals of our product team was to “help business owners and marketers trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of change in local search.” Today we take a major step forward towards that goal with the beta release of Moz Local Search Insights, the foundation for a holistic understanding of your local search presence.

As we move into an app-centric world that’s even more dependent on structured, accurate location data than the mobile web, it’s getting harder to keep up with the disparate sources where this data appears — and where customers are finding your business. Enter Moz Local Insights — the hub for analyzing your location-centric digital activity.

What’s included in this beta release?

We’ve heard our customers loud and clear — especially those at agencies and enterprise brands — that while enhanced reporting was a major improvement, they needed a more comprehensive way to prove the value of their efforts to clients and company locations.

We start with daily-updated reporting in three key areas with this release: Location page performance, SERP rankings, and reputation. All of these are available not only within a single location view, but aggregated across all locations in your account, or by locations you’ve tagged with our custom labels.

Location page performance

The goal of our new Performance section is to distill the online traffic metrics that matter most to brick-and-mortar businesses into a single digestible screen. After a simple two-click authentication of your Google Analytics account, you’ll see a breakdown of your traffic sources by percentage:

Clicking into each of the traffic sources on the righthand side will show you the breakdown of traffic from those sources by device type.

There’s also an ordered list of all prominent local directories that are sending potential customers to your website. While we haven’t yet integrated impression data from these directories, this should give you a relative indicator of customer engagement on each.

We’re hoping to add even more performance metrics, including Google My Business and other primary consumer destinations, as they become available.

Visibility

The Visibility section houses your location-focused ranking reports, with a breakdown of how well you’re performing, both in local packs and in organic results. Similar to the visibility score in Moz Analytics, we’ve combined your rankings across both types of results into a single metric that’s designed to reflect the likelihood that a searcher will click on a result for your business when searching a given keyword.

The Visibility section also lets you see how you stack up against your competitors — up to three at a time. But rather than preselecting a particular competitor, you can choose any competitor you’d like to compare yourself to on the fly.

And, of course, we give you the metrics in full table view below (CSV export coming soon) if you prefer to get a little more granular with your visibility analysis by keyword.

We’ve got a number of other innovative features planned for release later in the beta period, including taking barnacle positions into account (originally heard through Will Scott) when calculating your visibility score, and tracking additional knowledge panel and universal search entries that are appearing for your keywords.

Reputation

The Reputation section is probably the most straightforward of the bunch — a simple display of how your review acquisition efforts are progressing, both in terms of volume and the ratings that people are leaving for your business.

There’s also a distribution of where people are leaving reviews, so you have a sense of what sites your customers are leaving reviews on, and which ones might need a little extra TLC.

Over time, we’ll be expanding this section to include many more review sources, sentiment analysis, and the ability to receive notifications and summaries of new reviews.

Check out Moz Local Insights!

What’s next?

You tell us! This is a true beta, and we’ll be paying close attention to your feedback over the next couple of months.

Search Insights is already enabled for all Moz Local customers by default. Just log in to your dashboard and let us know what you think. And if you’re not yet a Moz Local customer, sign up today to take Search Insights for a free spin during our beta period.

There’s a lot of underlying infrastructure beneath the surface of this release that will allow us to add new features on a modular basis moving forward, and we’re already working on improvements, such as custom date range selection, CSV exporting, emailed reports, and notifications. But your feedback will help us prioritize and add new features to the roadmap.

Before I sign off, I want to give a huge thank you to our engineering, design and UX, marketing, and community teams for their hard work, assistance, and patience as we worked to release Moz Local Search Insights into the wild. And most importantly, thank you to you guys — our customers — whose feedback has already proven invaluable and will be even more so as we enter the newest phase of Moz Local!

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Posted by MiriamEllis

Earlier this month, I was standing on an 8,000’ pinnacle of the Sierra mountain range at the precise moment when winter arrived.

A few miles and minutes back down the highway, it had been golden fall with aspens, oaks, and big leaf maples in peak color. Then the sky darkened, showering hail. Right before my eyes, hail turned to snow, wildly whirling, salting the evergreens into obscurity.

Winter had come.

It’s a rare, exhilarating thing to witness patient Nature change in the blink of an eye, but returning to work from my time in the mountains, I met with another sudden change – one that took me by surprise, even if it shouldn’t have: the Google Places API had stopped delivering Google+ Local page URLs and was rendering Maps-based URLs, instead.

If, like me, you’re a Local SEO, you’ve learned what Google is like this in the space we call our work. Overnight, familiar packs change, crazy carousels appear, branding upends, functions disappear.

And you’re the one who has to explain all these shifts to your clients and co-workers.

I’m hoping this article will make it a bit easier for you to do so. With Google+ Local pages all but invisible to the public now, here’s how to describe the features you work with and the value of the work you do.

What’s the Google Places API? What happened to it?

Google describes this API as drawing from the same database as Google Maps and Google+, and it’s part of what powers tools like Moz Local and Michael Cottams’ Google+ My Business Page Finder. Plug in a query and the Places API previously returned direct links to the Google+ Local pages of millions of businesses. These URLs looked like:

https://plus.google.com/102761177822287678547/about

Now, the same queries return a Maps-based result instead, the URL of which looks like this:

https://www.google.com/maps?cid=7676087051067575200

While this in no way detracts from the usefulness of a tool like Moz Local, it does prove that Google is definitely, absolutely parting Plus from Maps and it means we Local SEOs have to walk a new talk. It just doesn’t work anymore to tell clients that they need a “Google+ Local page.”

This comes as no surprise if you’ve been following the ongoing industry discussion of the gradual removal of visible Google+ links from nearly every Google interface. Likely you’ve already started trying to use new terminology in talking to customers, but if you haven’t, the sudden sea change of the Places API URLs is a clear signal that it’s time to do so.

What do these changes look like?

In the recent past, you ­­were telling your clients that they needed a Google+ Local page, powered by their Google My Business dashboard, and looking something like this:

Because SERPs and tools are no longer returning Google+ Local pages, like the above, clients and users are unlikely to ever see these anymore and may not even know what they are. Instead, right now, they’ll mainly be seeing one of two different interfaces when searching for a local business.

Interface 1: The Local Finder Knowledge Panel

A typical local search — like “sporting goods store Denver” — will bring up a 3-pack like this, with a link at the bottom to click for more places:

If you click that link, you’ll be taken to what is commonly being termed the “Local Finder” view, with a list of businesses on the left and a map on the right. Click on one of the businesses in the list and you’ll get a Local Finder Knowledge Panel result on the right, like this:

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=sporting+goods+stores&rflfq=1&rlha=0&tbm=lcl&rlfi=hd

Interface 2: The Maps Knowledge Panel

Instead of going through the 3-pack, this is the interface I now see being reached via both branded searches and tools that use the Places API. It’s also the interface you’ll reach if your search starts in Google Maps instead of in the main search display. Let’s look up “Dick’s Sporting Goods Denver” (or set your location to Denver, provided that’s still working for you):

This brings up a branded result with a clickable teardrop icon (note, no link to Google+) on the left and a SERPs-based knowledge panel on the right. Click on the teardrop and you’ll get to the Maps-based knowledge panel:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dick’s+Sporting+Goods/@39.593903,-104.9672887,17z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x6a86f080d7dbcba0

This interface contains the business name on a blue background, the rest of the NAP below, as well as additional information.

So, in sum, in addition to the now-familiar in-SERPs knowledge panel you get for many branded searches, you now have the Local Finder Knowledge Panel and the Maps-Based Knowledge Panel – at least, this is what I’m calling them, but you might think of something better! And, of course, the panels and packs may have special features for restaurants, hotels, car dealerships, and the like.

Making it as simple as possible for clients

The main thing to convey to clients is that all of these different displays have the majority of their origins in just one place: the Google My Business dashboard. That’s where they need to get their NAP right, add their photos, set themselves as SABs or brick-and-mortars, and all of that other stuff you’ve been doing for years. If the client can get it right there, this data will feed all of the various interfaces.

Signals of claiming?

It used to be easy to tell, at a glance, whether a business listing was claimed or not. The checkmark shield would appear next to the business name on the Google+ Local page. Unless I’m somehow missing it, I am not seeing a checkmark shield on any of the newer interfaces. However, I did come across something in the Maps-Based Knowledge Panel that may be of assistance. There appears to be a “Claim this business” link on some of the panels I’ve seen in the past couple of weeks, and my guess is that this is now our indication that the business hasn’t yet been claimed.

Still want to see a Google+ Local page?

Okay, even if no one else is still seeing these, maybe you’re feeling a bit nostalgic and just want to take a look at a good ‘ol Google+ Local page. Here’s how to do it:

1. Sign into your Google account.

2. Perform a main engine search structured with quotes like this:

“site:plus.google.com” “dicks sporting goods store” “denver” “about”

That will get you to this:

https://plus.google.com/102761177822287678547/about

There could be reasons you’d want to do this. Those of you who specialize in duplicate listing detection may already be figuring out how to use these commands to be able to continue surfacing those pesky duplicates — but let’s keep that for another post, written by someone more wizardly than me in that department.

Head hurting over all these changes?

Yeah, I know. I find it helps to take a short hike – maybe up in the mountains nearest you. In the meantime, it can help to remember that, as the Local SEO in your agency, you bring your greatest gifts to both team and clients in being the one who’s on top of all of these shifts. Mike Blumenthal puts it this way:

“Google’s rate of change is so many times greater than the rate of adoption that no SMB has a clue what they should [be doing] with Google these days.”

Whether this bodes well for Google’s ultimate future, I won’t comment, but I do know it ensures that Local SEOs will have a vital seat at any marketing agency table for some time to come. So, put on those snow chains and keep churning up this road. Your dedication to research and study will continue to fuel your greatest value.

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Posted by Casey_Meraz

“Local SEO is just too hard.”

Those were the first words of a conversation I had earlier this week coming from a potential client we’ll call “Luke.” Luke had been working on building his own local SEO presence internally for his dental office for over a year and had not seen the results he expected in a popular top 100 US city. We talked about citations, his trouble getting reviews, and how hard it was for him to get links. He told me he had followed the best practices but had not seen the kind of #1 ranking results he was looking for. Luke was a bit defeated, so I dove a little deeper and asked him more specifically what he’d done. He told me that he had done the following:

• Optimized his Google My Business profile
• Gotten a handful of reviews
• Built the basic citations
• Removed the citation issues I found
• Gotten a few links
• Posted new localized content from time to time

So I prodded a bit further and tried to get some details about his competition. I asked Luke what his competitors had done. He told me that they had done the exact same things he had done. He told me that he watched them and tried to just “replicate” on his own site what he saw from the top performers. This perked my interest and caused me to ask him a real-world question.

“Luke, if you’re doing the same things as everyone else, why do you deserve to be rewarded or ranked higher than them? What makes you better?” – Casey Meraz

This basic question had major implications and he finally understood why I’d started asking about the rest of his website’s health. As an SEO, it’s easy to make assumptions as to what’s causing ranking gains, but keep in mind you can never really know the whole picture. We don’t know what links they disavowed, and we sure don’t know which links Google sees but that other link detection tools are not picking up.

It’s time to break free from local SEO tunnel vision.

In this article, I’m going to talk about some tactical things you can do to market your business and increase your local SEO presence. To do so, we have to break free from our tunnel vision a bit and bring in new strategies on a constant basis. But why should we do this?

With the recent local pack shake up and 2016 around the corner, I think it’s time that SEOs and marketing managers start to look to the future.

What do I mean? Almost any post you read online pertaining to local SEO is quick to point out that you need the basics, such as a strong citation profile with no duplicates, quality links, and some local on-page optimization. But does it really stop there? Should it stop there? Or should we be looking at the signs Google’s been giving us? It’s no secret that Google has been moving towards taking on more organic signals. What does the future really hold for us and how should we be advising our clients?

What I’m going to be covering can be broken down into three main sections:

1. Don’t ignore the basics.
   While I am telling you to think outside of the box, I’m not saying you should ignore the basics. Having a strong basic foundation to local SEO is key to your long-term and short-term SEO success.
2. Think more about traditional organic ranking factors.
   We are going to do a deep dive here where we’ll talk about the reasons and implications of having a solid website with more of an organic SEO mindset.
3. Don’t stop believing in citations and links.
   We know that links are important both for local and organic SEO. Why stop with the basics? As long as they’re healthy, keep trucking along.

1. Don’t ignore the basics in local SEO.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time covering this, but it’s important to reiterate it. Local SEO is built on a strong foundation of best practices. These include everything from having consistent and non-duplicated citations — which consist of your NAP (Business Name, Address, and Phone Number) on the top directories and data aggregators — to ensuring your landing pages are properly optimized.

Worry about the basics first, then move onto step 2 — traditional organic ranking factors.

To get an idea of what I mean when talking about “the basics,” read these cool resources:

– How to Perform the Ultimate Local SEO Audit

– Website Optimization Basics for Local SEO

– Local Search Ranking Factors for 2015

2. Think more about traditional organic ranking factors.

Google really loves their traditional organic ranking factors. How do I know this? Well, whether it was Pigeon, Mobilegeddon, or other updates, you can see that Google is trying to provide users with the best online experience. They don’t want to show non-mobile-friendly results when a user is searching on their phone.

It’s no secret that Google’s algorithm is getting more sophisticated every year. As they do this, it becomes clear that they want to provide a great search experience, as well as a great user experience.

This is why we need to take a step back, shake our heads, and start looking around. If you want to be competitive for your clients in the long-term, it would be wise to start taking steps toward the future now.

Below are a list of some of the most common issues I see. For a full list of items to audit, check out Steve Webb’s SEO audit here.

Common on-page errors that hurt or hinder local SEO efforts

1. Not having a mobile-friendly website
   Ok, seriously. You’ve heard of Mobilegeddon (which was a bit over-exaggerated). But if you’re taking your time and still haven’t built a mobile site, you need to fix that ASAP. With so many searches being mobile now and with Google caring more and more about organic ranking signals, don’t be surprised if you’re not rewarded in mobile search results if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website.
   
2. Using a bulky and non-SEO-friendly theme
   The problem with buying a website theme without testing it for speed considerations first? Page load time. We’ll talk more about that in just a minute, but it’s a real problem. The reason that websites range from as low as free to thousands of dollars is typically because great websites require a great deal of work. Minifying the code and ensuring that every element loads quickly and properly on browsers is essential. Check out this handy web developers cheat sheet to get a better grasp on the factors that are most important.
   
3. Having slow site speed
   Recently I was consulting for a client in the dental field who had atrocious site load times. Google cares about the user experience — if your site takes forever to load, you can bet that will have a negative impact on you. Not to mention, this might mean the Google crawlers will spend less time checking out your website.
   
4. Having a lot of 404 errors
   Log in to the Google Search Console and run a site crawl with Screaming Frog to figure out where 404s exist on your website. If you have a bunch of broken pages, you’re both missing out on their link juice and you’re showing that you’re not taking good care of your website. Show that you care about your site and clean these babies up.
   
5. Using 302 redirects
   302 redirects from the outside in aren’t passing that valuable link juice you need. Since we know link equity is a ranking factor, we need to keep as much of it as we can. Do not use 302 redirects for permanent changes. Fix these and update them to 301 redirects.
   
6. Using 301 redirects internally
   If you update a link on your website and it creates a broken link, don’t take the easy way out and just create an internal 301 direct. I see a lot of issues with these where, over time, webmasters will lose sight of them and multiple redirect levels will take place. Use a tool (like Screaming Frog) to identify these errors and their source. Make sure to clean them up to prevent issues. Remember, if your links are taking multiple hops, you’re diminishing their link value.
   
7. Missing title tags
   If you’re using Wordpress, you can easily add title tags in a number of ways. I prefer the Yoast SEO Plugin. It’s solid, it’s regularly updated, and it works to easily update title tags on your pages. Make sure all of the pages on your site are taking advantage of title tags and localized title tags.
   
8. Missing H1 heading tags. Seriously, check this.
   Not having local-centric H1 tags is a common problem I see with local pages. One of the problems is that you might think you have H1 tags on your Wordpress theme, but in reality they’re not coded that way. Sometimes there are disconnects between developers and SEOs, and this sort of thing occurs frequently. Use a tool like the MozBar browser plugin and page analysis tool to quickly point out if your web page is using an H1 tag. Make sure they’re localized, too. 🙂
   
9. Not having enough hyper-local text content
   Remember that Google is very granular on location detection now. If you list that you serve or do work in surrounding local neighborhoods, you’re going to get some benefit out of creating content around these areas. It really proves that you know the community and you’re a part of it, as well.
   
10. Not taking advantage of hyper-local images and videos
    Hyper-local content is not just text on a page. It can be a localized video or photo, as well. If you’re serving a specific geographic area and creating content around it, you can tie local visitors into the content and get them to engage further if you’re using photos of places they recognize. Localized photos are a great way to create unique content that’s relevant to your local audience.
    

Common off-page errors that hurt or hinder local SEO efforts

1. Citations using 301 redirects to other 301 redirects to…
   I feel like this is a pro tip, but it really isn’t. This is an interesting one that I actually find is commonly overlooked. Let’s look at a common scenario for this one:
   
   A common issue is when your citation or link sources were set up years ago, yet you’ve changed your website landing pages at some point since then. In this case, you probably would have created a 301 redirect so links from your citation sources redirect and pass link juice to the appropriate page. However, what if you’ve done this several times? What if you built strong links to these old URLs and then redirected them multiple times? It’s a link value loss and it needs to be rectified.
   
   The solution is to update your links and citations to point to the proper landing page URL when possible.
   
   
2. Stop adding new citations due to their citation value alone
   Everyone is quick to tell you that the top citations carry the most weight. I don’t disagree with that. But I also think there’s not a hard-and-fast decision that says you need to stop building citations. Most citations also have a link source to add a link. Nofollow links seem to help local SEO. Why ignore them? If you find quality directories, localized websites, or other places that you can get listed on, be sure to take advantage of them.
   
   
3. Not getting enough reviews
   It’s cool to rank in the top three results, but our click test studies have shown that many users will bypass the first or second result and click on the third if the number of positive reviews is greater. You need to have a solid review strategy in place in 2015. If you’re running a great business and don’t have a program for online reviews, then you need to get your act together.
   
   If you need a review solution, check out Get Five Stars — it’s a review platform that allows you to easily acquire customer feedback and encourage online reviews.
   
4. Your competition is spamming you in Map Maker
   In this post, Linda Buquet over at the Local Search Forum pointed out one way that businesses were scoring a Google One Box by cheating. Basically, either intentionally or through a data update, businesses were taking advantage of the Google Map Maker Alternate Names tab and keyword stuffing them with localized keywords, as you can see in the example below. If you see this, be sure to report it and get them addressed. You can search for these in Google.com/MapMaker by viewing the alternate names.
   
   

Something you need to overcome

Keyword-rich domains
They can be “exact match domains,” “similar match domains,” “keyword-rich domains,” or whatever you want to call them. The reality is that if your competition is beating you because of this little trick, you need to step up your game. There is no denying their benefit in local organic SEO; you need to create enough signals to overcome them. Below, I’ll discuss how you can do this. With some hard work and elbow grease, you can beat out your competition in this area.

3. Don’t stop building citations and links.

So you’ve taken care of all the SEO best practices and you’re still not winning? Where’s your elbow grease? Do you think your competition stopped? Do you think they stopped because you’re winning? If so, you’ll be up for a rude awakening when they surpass you. It’s far easier to maintain superiority than to fight to get it back after you’ve lost it.

This is one of the most common SEO mistakes I see resulting from tunnel vision. As a marketer, when you start thinking, “Well, I’ve done everything I need to and it’s working, so I’ll just sit back and relax,” all I can say is no, no, no. This is a detrimental mindset to both you and your clients’ success. Always keep building the exposure and the brand. Never stop. Please don’t stop believing, and please don’t ask me to sing that at karaoke… because I will.

Now, let’s get tactical with some things you should be doing outside of the usual.

1. Don’t forget video creation & its benefits
   Did you create a video or two and lose steam? Did you forget how powerful videos can be and how easy they are to make? You can get a legitimately good video made on Fiverr for $50 that will blow your clients’ minds. The key to this is doing your due diligence and not taking shortcuts. Create the outline, write the text, and order a well-made video. Whether you have a news announcement or want to just repurpose content on your website, video is a great medium. Good video will help your site flourish; don’t produce crappy video.
   
   So, what can you do with a video? You can upload it to a number of sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion, earning a cool-looking citation and links to your local landing page.
   
2. Don’t stop with competitive citation analysis
   Competition analysis is easier than it ever has been. We have tools like Whitespark, Brightlocal, the N.A.P. HUNTER Extension, and Places Scout to easily identify competitors’ citations. There is no reason not to keep a running list of these and a small commitment of, say, 10 new additions per month based on your top ten competitors in a space.
   
   If you don’t have access to the tools listed above, you can also just do a Google search and see what listings come up for the competition that you don’t have.
   
   
3. Start getting new links & don’t stop
   Luke mentioned during our conversation that “getting links was too hard.” Let’s think about that statement for a moment. If links were easy to get, wouldn’t everyone go for them? Or perhaps they already earned the easy links. Of course, you can always gain links the traditional way by seeking them, for which I’ll show you a couple of good resources below. However, some of the best companies are always newsworthy.
   
   The attorneys Sutliff & Stout ran a drunk driving campaign for the holidays. It got them on local news stations complete with real interviews, great links, and a very positive impact on their local visibility. These were real business actions they were taking that resulted in media attention.
   If you need ideas, here are some you can take home with you right now. I suggest reading these posts and making a schedule or a goal. Go after a couple a week. But don’t just stick to one link building idea. Diversify, and be careful with your anchor text.
   
   – 11 Ways for Local Businesses to Get Links – Written by yours truly on the Moz Blog
   
   – 35 Sites Which Increase Your Domain’s Trust – Shared with me by Adam Steele
   
   – 52 Link Building Ideas from Point Blank SEO
   
   – Building Links with local events from Kane Jamison
   
   – 8 Local Link Building Tactics Beyond Business Listings – Whitespark
   
   – Get Five New Links a Week (Lawyer-centric) – Juris Digital Blog


4. Integrate your offline marketing and your online marketing
   How many times have you participated in an offline initiative, but didn’t coordinate it with your online efforts? Real companies tend to be active in the community or have a presence. Whether that means they sponsor a Little League (link opportunity), they host an annual event (event link building), or they get local TV station interviews, these efforts and signals should be coordinated to have the maximum SEO benefit.
   

And finally… Set realistic goals for your efforts

If you’re quick to promise results, make sure you can deliver on your timelines. I work mostly in the legal field with personal injury attorneys. In this field, you’re competing with some of the best SEOs, people who have been doing this a lot longer than many of the “fly-by-night” guys. This means that, even though we’re doing the right things and following best practices, we still need to be promoting the business everyday. Even taking this approach, the results will take time. It’s a long-term investment and you have to stick with it. Set realistic goals up front with your clients and make sure they understand the competition.

With this knowledge, time, and power, you should have the resources you need to think outside of the box and dominate local SEO.

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

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Posted by BenjaminEstes

SEO is not something that is done. SEO is a way of doing things that encompasses many teams and initiatives. This is especially true for large organizations with well-established and potentially siloed teams.

Most marketing disciplines have concrete inputs and outputs. Consider the following examples, which may seem trite at first:

• PPC results in visibility in search results.
• Email marketing results in visibility in the inbox of folks on your mailing list.
• Content strategy results in marketing content on your site.

But this isn’t really the case for SEO. Can we say:

• SEO results in visibility in organic search results?

It’s not quite the same thing, is it?

“Doing SEO” does not directly result in visibility in search results, or traffic. SEO might lead to better indexation of pages on your site, or improved targeting. But these are only stepping stones to increasing search traffic. They are inputs that ranking algorithms will use, not the output of better rankings.

No SEO work can guarantee organic search visibility in the same way paid search guarantees paid placements.

In this way, SEO has more in common with business operations than it does with other marketing channels. It’s about getting the most possible benefit, through organic search, from the marketing assets that you have. It’s the responsibility of the digital marketing manager to make sure that the organization understands this, and that SEO requirements are baked into whatever processes they need to be.

In order to say that SEO is being properly managed, 3 teams and their processes need to be considered. These core practices touch the leadership team, the dev team, and content strategy teams. This post explores why search marketing is important at all, and why doing it right involves each of these 3 groups.

1. Commitment: Your leadership team

Before you can really invest in search marketing, your leadership team must be bought into doing search for the right reasons. If the marketing team is pulling in a direction that the company’s culture doesn’t support, there’s no chance things will end well.

Let’s make the risk of this concrete. You may have heard of penalties like Panda and Penguin. Certainly at Distilled we get a lot of inquiries from companies who are trying to recover from (or get in front of) these problems. But these prospects see them as “SEO” problems that have an “SEO” solution. It’s more accurate — or at least more helpful — to see them as symptoms of bigger organizational issues.

Here’s what I mean: Maybe your organization has decided that increasing rankings and traffic from search is a priority. In fact, it’s such a priority that you should buy links to accomplish it, because everyone knows links lead to better rankings. That’s a plan that is doomed to failure, perhaps ending with a manual action that is hugely detrimental to your site. No SEO practitioner would recommend buying links. The directive comes from somewhere else, and that needs to be dealt with before the organization can make the right choices for the right reasons.

That’s why it’s crucial to get everyone on the same page; if you don’t, SEO can be undermined even from outside the marketing team. Let’s summarize the benefits of getting the whole team on board, and the potential consequences of failure:

Success	Failure
Aligned communication across team. Effective investment of time and resources. Appropriate reporting and expectation-setting.	Panda, Penguin, manual penalties. Ineffective investments of time and resources. Unrealistic expectations and meaningless reporting.

2. Platform: Your web dev team

Next up is the team responsible for your website and the platforms that support it. For smaller organizations, it can be easy to identify a change that will help SEO, and to make that change quickly. For larger organizations, actually making the change can prove quite challenging.

In order to improve SEO for the organization, making those changes has to become easier. Specifically, we might push for new platforms or updates that:

• Generate a site that is crawlable
• Make it easy to manipulate indexation directives and robots.txt files
• Make it as easy as possible for content producers to publish their content

None of these things can be done by an SEO practitioner alone. They are unlikely to have the experience necessary to make the technical changes required. Even if they did, organizational boundaries will impede them from making the changes. As in the case with getting commitment across the organization, an individual practitioner cannot be responsible for changing everything that needs to be changed here — rather, the expectation should be set that whenever someone makes a change to the organization’s web platform, SEO must be taken into consideration.

So what does successfully integrating SEO into your web development processes look like? What does it look like when you fail to do so? Here’s a summary:

Success	Failure
A platform that enables the publishing of new content. Quick indexation of new content.	Slowed rate of publication. Indexation problems. Undesired content ranking in SERPs.

3. Content creation: Your content strategy team

The third piece of the core SEO puzzle is the ability of the company to create content in a timely manner.

To make sure requirements for SEO are considered, the content production process must be designed with SEO in mind. Are posts (or product listings or category pages) being optimized appropriately? Does the content that we are creating actually help the user fulfill their objectives?

For instance, if you have individual location pages for offices or stores, you might want listings for those locations to show up in local search. Maybe such pages would have relevant store hours, events, or offers. These pages would clearly benefit SEO. But unless they are prioritized over other content, they won’t be created. SEO must be baked into the content strategy so that the team knows the importance of developing content that’s relevant for SEO.

Without quality, targeted content, there really can’t be any winning in SEO. The consequences of succeeding or failing to produce such content can be summarized as follows:

Success	Failure
Relevant content produced. Audience need satisfied insofar as they are known. Content appears in SERPs.	Unsatisfied audience. Poor conversion. Negative feedback loop in SERP interactions. Undesired content ranking in SERPs.

What you should do about it

As a digital marketing manager, you must do more than hire someone to “do SEO” or even “manage SEO” in your organization.

Whether it’s lead by one person or many, you must establish the idea of the SEO function in your company — the idea that search marketing is something that must be considered by many people and processes within your company. At the very least, the 3 teams above must be looped in.

It is the responsibility of the SEO function to:

• Set appropriate expectations in your organization
• Hire someone (or partner with an agency) that has enough experience to manage
• Enable the type of work that needs to get done

That may mean that if you are hiring one person, it’s not good enough for that person to have a couple years of SEO experience and be able to rattle off the major factors contributing to organic search performance.

SEO is an exciting, rapidly changing field — and it’s crucial to the bottom line of many enterprise organizations. To take full advantage of the opportunities it offers, though, you need to get these 3 teams working in concert.

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Posted by randfish

It’s no secret that Google keeps a lot of secrets. From keyword data to link data to traffic data (and surely more), there’s a lot that we could benefit from — if they’d only share it! Since that’s not likely to happen anytime soon, Rand takes us through various ways to access that all-important data in this week’s Whiteboard Friday.

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

Video Transcription

Hello. My name is Ranigo Montoya. You killed my SEO data. Prepare to die.

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we are celebrating Halloween six days late. Hopefully, that’s all right with all of you. For those of you outside the U.S., Halloween is this holiday where we dress up in costumes. We’ve done it a few times here on Whiteboard Friday, but it’s been a couple of years, so I’m thrilled to be able to bring this back.

I thought in keeping with the theme of Inigo Montoya, one of my favorite characters from “The Princess Bride,” we would talk about recovering some of the data that Google either hides or has taken away from us over the years. It’s actually kind of cool, because there are a number of tools and processes that we have not had access to three years ago, four years ago, some of them even two years ago, that today enable us to do things that are really remarkable.

Let’s start with keyword data.

We need keyword data about traffic, which keywords send traffic to our website, which keywords send traffic to other people’s websites, which traffic comes from ads, which traffic comes from organic, where it goes, and what it does. This is critical because we want to see which terms are actually sending the traffic so we can know which ones to concentrate on.

We want to know which ones convert, because if a keyword converts well that probably means we should be focusing more energy on it. We should be trying to rank higher for it. Maybe we should be bidding on it. Perhaps we should be thinking about expanding the universe of terms and phrases around that term that could send us traffic. We should know which ones to target with paid and which ones deserve some organic rank boosting efforts.

How do we do this? Google now sends all traffic with keyword not provided. What’s our process here? Well, for a while we’ve had some estimation tools. Moz has one in Moz Analytics. I think Conductor‘s got one in their platform. A number of other platforms that rank, track, and then connect to your analytics try and predict which keywords are sending traffic. We can do even better today, and that’s thanks to a couple of tools.

One of them is SimilarWeb. SimilarWeb has a panel of users, essentially people who’ve installed software and toolbars and all sorts of other things that track their browser activity. They’ve opted in to this. This is not without their knowledge. They know. They’ve consented. This panel actually includes millions and millions of users. Thus we can get a real sample set of web users, especially in countries like the United States and in Europe where SimilarWeb’s panel is relatively large and Israel as well. We can see that data at the clickstream level. Unfortunately, I can’t see through this wig.

Because they can see it at the clickstream level, Google is not hiding that. They see this person perform this search. They visited this page, then they visited this page, and then they went over here. That tracking means that if you go into SimilarWeb today, SimilarWeb Pro at least, and you plug in a domain, your domain or other people’s domains, you’ll actually be able to see a list of the keywords that sent them the most traffic and where that traffic went to.

That is killer. You can export this. You can put it into CSV. You can then compare it up to the pages that get traffic. Really, really cool.

SEMrush is another one. SEMrush monitors tens of millions of keywords. I think it’s something in excess of 50 million keywords in the United States and many more millions outside the U.S. as well. They can show who ranks for what today as well as historically, so you can see over time the trend there, and you can see who’s advertising. If you say, “Hey I know that this competitor is targeting the same market space as us,” I can now go to SEMrush. I can plug them in. I can see all the keywords that they’re getting organic traffic from and paid traffic from. Then, I can start to say, “All right. Maybe I should add this to my keyword research list. Maybe I should target these, etc.”

Again, you can match it up with that visit data to say we know that this is the URL that ranked and we know the keyword, so since we know the page that ranked, we can see in our own visit data, from landing page reports, which ones got the traffic and which ones didn’t. That’s pretty darn cool as well. It maybe even gets us to a place of implied click-through rate, which is great.

One thing to be aware of is you have to do a lot of this manually. Today there’s no tool that really connects up like the SEMrush and SimilarWeb data along with a landing report. That’s a little frustrating. Hopefully, we’ll get there soon.

Link data

Link data is one of those things that Google took away many, many years ago. They still provide some link data in Webmaster Tools, now called Search Console, but it is not fantastic. It’s not comprehensive. It’s a little bit of a pain to get through. It cuts off at certain limits, etc. We want to know why because we want to know who’s linking to us and to our competitors. We want to watch for spam. We want to be able to compare our links versus the competition, understand ranking influence from those links potentially, and find new link opportunities. That’s especially true for competitive link analysis.

How? Well, we’ve got the traditional three tools — Majestic, Ahrefs and Moz. There have been a bunch of analyses recently. The way that I think of them is Majestic has the largest index by a long shot. I think they’re two or three times larger than Ahrefs. Ahrefs is anywhere between about 100% this size, so same size as Moz, and 200% depending on how Moz’s indices are doing, which hopefully they’ll be doing a little better soon. Moz is the smallest of these three, which I’m embarrassed to say.

What Moz is really good at is metrics. It’s actually metrics that mean that Moz is so small, because it’s hard to process all those things like page authority and domain authority and spam score, etc.

Ahrefs is terrific for identifying fresh links and high value links. They also have a number of great features inside that tool, that I really like and many SEOs really like, around sorting, filtering, exporting, and visualization.

Majestic has got that huge index. They also have some really great features. They’re getting a little more sophisticated with their metrics. I think their metrics are doing nicely compared to Ahrefs.

Each of these are crawling the web and then building indices that are searchable by all of us, which is great. This means that a lot of this data is recovered.

Let’s be clear. None of those sources — Majestic, Moz, Ahrefs — none of them are the same size as Google. None of them are crawling exactly what Google is crawling. At least here at Moz, and I assume Majestic and Ahrefs do this as well, we try and model the web as best we can around what’s in Google.

When we look at large sets of search results, which we compare to our indices each time, we’re between 75% and 80% of what’s in Google’s results that are in our index. That’s good. I think it’s not great, but it gives you a sense for how these folks are crawling. It’s really about the estimation. Many, many SEOs are combining these sources along with Webmaster Tools in order to find all the links that they possibly can.

Traffic data

You have your own traffic data. But competitive traffic data has always been a pain in the butt. We want that for competitive comparison. We want it to identify missed opportunities like missed channels or links that maybe we were thinking, hey, I’m not sure if I should get a link there, but it looks like that’s very valuable. It’s sending a lot of traffic, or a relationship with a partner, or an API, or a data source, or even an advertising partnership or relationship.

How can we do that?

Well, there are a few tools. I mentioned SimilarWeb before. They’re an excellent choice for this.

There’s also a tool out there called Jumpshot. If you use the virus checker AVG, which is relatively popular, Jumpshot is basically owned by them. Anyone with that virus checker has their browser activity monitored and then sent back to Jumpshot. It’s all anonymized, and yes it’s with consent. You agree to it in the Terms of Use when you download that.

I also think it’s fine to use Quantcast, but only when the site has been quantified, meaning they’ve opted in to Quantcast program and they’ve put Quantcast pixel tracking on their site. Otherwise, Quantcast in our view — and I did an analysis of this just about six months ago — is very, very inaccurate.

That’s true for Quantcast. It’s true for Alexa, comScore, and Compete. I would not recommend any of those other ones.

I haven’t tried Jumpshot personally. I’ve seen some folks say that they’re good but not as good as SimilarWeb. You can check out both of those and see what you think.

What’s really nice about this is being able to look at where my competitors are getting traffic, and how is that increasing or decreasing over time? What are they doing that I’m not doing? What are they doing that I should potentially investigate? It’s a lot like competitive link intelligence except on the traffic side. I think for a broadly-focused web marketer, it’s critical.

Finally, growth or shrinkage of search visibility

This is frustrating. I really wish Google provided this better, but thankfully there are some very good tools out there. What we want to be able to do is track our competitors’ successes in search, watch for potential penalties, and explain why traffic has gone up or down.

Explaining why traffic has gone up or down drives SEOs nuts. I’m sure most of you are sitting there going, “Yeah, that’s just the worst.” How we can do this is SEMrush with rankings, SimilarWeb with competitive traffic, and our own analytics to show us data. By combining these, we can essentially say, “Hey, I saw my search traffic go up. Is that because I now rank for more stuff?”

If you’re rank tracking with Moz Analytics or any of the many ranking solutions out there, you can of course go and look at the tracking that you’ve got there. If you’re not finding the solution in the keywords that you are tracking, you might check out SEMrush, because they might show you data about, hey, here are keywords you haven’t been tracking that they’ve been tracking that are showing why that traffic delta’s happening.

Same thing is true for SimilarWeb’s traffic. You can go and look at the people who are ranking alongside you and say, “Hey, are they still getting the same amount of search traffic that we are? Because if they’ve gone down or they’ve gone up, that suggests that more search volume is to blame, not a rankings change.

Now we can start to sort through these things. We can really figure out who’s rising in the rankings, who’s falling, and why is their traffic going up or down if it is.

With this, we can recover a ton of the data that we’ve lost. None of these are super easy. They’re not completely plug and play. But many of them are friendly, usable, and really useful for when you have these problems.

All right, everyone, look forward to the comments. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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