Posted by randfish
There are some basic questions about SEO that come up really frequently, and it’s often easy to assume an answer that isn’t exactly right. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand tackles three of them:Should I put subsections of my site … Continue reading →
Posted by David-Mihm
As we approach Moz Local’s first birthday—just over six weeks away—I’m excited to share with you our second major feature release since launch!
For those of you who are already managing your local search listings through Moz Local, this feature is available as of today for all accounts. For those of you who aren’t yet customers, we hope this release provides a few more reasons to sign up (if you’re curious to see what it looks like, you can check your local listing for free).
Read on for more detailed information about what we’re releasing and why we’re so excited about these new features.
Obviously local search is an incredibly complex discipline, and one of the hardest things for non-experts to understand (most of your clients and bosses, I’m guessing?) is the dramatic impact that the primary aggregators can have on the health and visibility of your listings. We hope that this metric helps explain the value of the data aggregators via Moz Local.
Listing Reach is our indirect representation of how far the data aggregators have spread your listings across the local ecosystem, based on the number of results returned for exact-match searches of your NAP. For more information about this metric, head on over to our Help Hub.
While these metrics have always been available at the individual location level (and will continue to be), you can now view them right from your dashboard, and <spoiler alert> across multiple locations at a time.
Percentage accuracy is not the only metric that’s available across multiple listings; average score and aggregate listing reach are also enabled by default for whatever locations are in view on your dashboard.
If you’re managing multiple clients, or work at a large brand with multiple locations, though, you probably want to pick and choose the ones whose metrics you want to roll-up. You can now add labels to each listing that you manage, for easy slicing and dicing.
Our labels work similarly to Gmail, which we hope will make them intuitive to use. Once you add one or more labels, they’ll start to appear as presets within your sidebar. Naming conventions are totally flexible, so you can segment your locations however you’d like.
You’re just one click away from a roll-up report for all locations with a given label.
To make the job of labeling locations easier for you, we’ve also added some additional search operators to make your lives easier. The full list of supported operators is below:
You can use these operators to pull up instantly any location you’re managing (and of course, view metrics for that specific listing).
Two metrics are also now visible over time: average score and aggregate listing reach. One of the primary requests we’ve heard from agency owners and practitioners over the last several months is the need to demonstrate the value of your efforts to your clients, and we hope that graphs like the one below will help you do just that.
In September 2014, you may notice a stairstep in the shaded area at the bottom of the report, and a corresponding dip in the line graph above.
The shaded area represents total locations under management in a given month. Our goal in showing your metrics over time in the context of the number of managed locations is to explain anomalies in the graph like the dip above. In my specific case, I added a mortgage broker friend’s location in September who was just getting started with his Local SEO campaign—meaning his Listing Score was literally 0 prior to starting with Moz Local.
Those of you who phase in clients over time will likely see similar anomalies in your line graphs, so we hope that this representation helps prevent unnecessary panicking :).
Later this spring, we’ll be rolling out the ability to export metrics from your dashboard for use in your own Excel reports, a PDF report generation feature, and a more streamlined Foursquare validation process, among other improvements. We’re growing our engineering team rapidly and will release these as soon as we can!
As I said in the intro, this feature is available for all existing customers today, so just head on over to your dashboard. And if you’re not yet a customer, we hope you soon will be.
Along with yours truly, fellow Mozzers from our product, engineering and account teams will be available for demos throughout the day on Saturday at #LocalUp, so don’t be a stranger. We’re looking forward to speaking with many of you in Seattle!
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Posted by andrewmeyer
This post was co-written by: @AndrewMeyer8 & @AudreyBloemer at Seer Interactive.
Back in 2013, Seer began testing the use of content distribution networks to help promote assets and valuable content across the web. Our goal was to test a variety of distribution networks to determine the best ways to pay for promotion on client content and assets. Overall, we wanted to test the impact paid content promotion had on assets that we had previously launched and to measure the impact of this traffic on the high-level goals of each client.
For those of you unfamiliar with this form of content marketing, content distribution networks are quickly becoming powerful tools for engaging new audiences and expanding the reach of creative content. This method for online advertising provides content within the context of a user’s experience, making the native advertising feel less intrusive and more like part of a discovery process, all while increasing the odds that users will click-through.
The native ads appear at the bottom of well-known content sources like Time, CNN, USA Today, ESPN & the Huffington Post, and are served to users based on a variety of algorithms. This reduces the feeling of actually seeing an ad, as users are captured when they finish digesting other content and feel they have discovered the promoted content naturally.
What started out as a $10k intern-led test for Seer has expanded into a full-blown service offering for current clients that we’re working hard to improve every day. Wil Reynolds also presented on this during SearchLove London. With a growing amount of data across multiple networks, we’d like to:
Below are the metrics we have across multiple clients and niches for networks with significant data to report on. This includes a mix of mobile, tablet and desktop advertising, but we’ve also broken it out individually. Since conversions vary across all our clients, we’ll report on specific conversion metrics in a later section. Across almost 1 billion impressions, here are the metrics we’ve seen.
* Seer used nRelate throughout 2014 to promote content that was niche-specific to tech, computers/gaming, and gadgets. In December 2014, nRelate announced they would be shutting down after five years in the industry.
While we did use separate platforms for different verticals, clients and niches, visitors coming from Outbrain tended to be more engaged. Typically these visitors from Outbrain were also more familiar with those brands and were not new visitors. We typically used Taboola to promote newer clients with less marketing reach and therefore the higher new visitor percentage and bounce rates are to be expected.
We’ve seen higher engagement rates for lower costs on mobile devices across both networks. When a client has a responsive, mobile-friendly site and a positive user experience on mobile we always recommend testing mobile campaigns.
We usually start by separating the audiences into two campaigns, one targeting mobile/tablet users and one targeting desktop users so we can monitor performance, CPCs and spend on an individual level. This allows us to get the best bang for our buck.
Goal Set: Promote one landing page for a large client in the B2B product industry targeted at small business owners using a holistic campaign across native advertising, Google Display Network (GDN), Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and outreach. The goal was to help generate 10 total conversions, with a goal CPA of $1,200 or less.
Results & ROI: Below is a breakdown of our results from this campaign, outlined by source, total percent of our spend, the sessions this spend drove and the percent of conversions for our campaign. Overall, we were able to reduce our CPA to $64.22 from the paid promotion efforts.
We spent the most with Taboola and it also drove the highest number of sessions. While Twitter spend was lower than three of the other channels, we were able to achieve a 10.53% conversion rate for the users we were able to drive to the site.
Despite Taboola having the lowest conversion rate, it was able to generate the largest percentage of conversions because of its ability to drive large quantities of traffic.
Improvements for Next Time: Next time, we’d like to better optimize our titles from paid distribution to target the demographics of our audience. We were looking for brand awareness and exposure, but could have altered our titles sooner to better target the niche market we were targeting which was small business owners.
Goal Set: Use Taboola to promote six content blogs from a recognized food brand to generate 5,000 visits for brand awareness & get 10 sites to link back to our content.
Results & ROI:
We ended up spending about $2,000 including setup time & spend, and drove over 11,000 clicks at a CTR of 0.055% to these posts. Over 6 posts, we saw an additional 1,000+ social shares and 82 new referring domains, or about $24.39/link. We also saw 31% higher pages/visit and a 28% lower bounce rate than our average campaign metrics.
Since the blog posts were all new and no outreach had begun, we were able to attribute the linking domains to paid distribution. Combined with the social shares, blog post comments and other goal completions throughout the site, we were very happy with the ROI for this campaign.
Important Note: Directly correlating links to content distribution networks can be difficult, so we recommend testing this with brand new blog posts, prior to any outreach, and using tracked URLs to differentiate traffic/conversions from the distribution networks. This also works best when you’re promoting relevant and sharable assets in the right industries.
Improvements for Next Time: If we had redone this campaign, we would have made the embed links and social sharing buttons on the landing page more accessible and easier to use. The content we were promoting was timely, so the pickup was much better than if had we promoted during a down time.
Goal Set: Promote asset from a prominent B2B company to increase lead generation.
Results & ROI:
Through Taboola, we were able to promote the content on high quality sites like Entrepreneur and CNN Money. In less than one month, we drove 8,348 new visits at an average CPC of $0.32 and saw a 2.31% conversion rate, leading to 205 overall goal completions.
Improvements for Next Time: In the future, we’d recommend tracking additional assisted conversion goals to more accurately report ROI to the client. The page we promoted only had one clear CTA, so we also recommended including more prominent secondary CTAs such as social shares and PDF downloads to further increase the ROI and get visitors to complete additional actions on the page.
Seer POV: Overall, we’ve found that this platform is highly scalable as you can send a higher quantity of traffic more quickly than others at a lower cost. In terms of quality of traffic, bounce rates compared to Outbrain are slightly higher and on average users spend less time on site than Outbrain visitors. However, depending on niche, Taboola can outperform Outbrain.
Pros: Generally less-expensive CPCs than other platforms, easier to upload content, images and titles, well-respected news and content publishers.
Cons: Can’t edit multiple campaigns or multiple titles/images at once, somewhat outdated admin/backend platform, and inability to pull native ad examples appearing in the wild.
Seer POV: Along with Taboola, this is one of Seer’s favorite distribution networks. One intriguing development for Outbrain is they recently became the sole provider of content distribution for Time.com, which makes their platform more appealing to advertisers like ourselves in 2015.
In terms of quality of traffic, Outbrain generally sends fewer visitors to the site for the same cost as Taboola, but users are more engaged and tend to have a higher conversion rate.
Pros: Better post-click results in our tested campaigns and easy uploading system.
Cons: The self-service admin is also a little difficult to use. Can’t pull large data sets from the admin, so when comparing to a Twitter or Pinterest Analytics dashboard, there is definitely room for improvement!
Seer POV: Gravity once had a substantial monthly minimum, which caused us to initially forgo testing in 2014. Now that the threshold has been lowered, we’ve started planning initial campaigns for Q1 of 2015. Some of their larger network sites include Wordpress, AOL, Forbes & exclusivity with the Huffington Post. Gravity also has some niche specific sites that might work well for auto, beauty and sports content. We’ll follow up once we have statistics to share.
Seer POV: ZergNet operates differently than the other distribution networks, as it is not yet monetized. It’s free to work with ZergNet, but you’re required to have a widget placed on your site to promote your article (along with others), that sends traffic to the ZergNet homepage. The problem with this model is that it’s a 1:1 relationship and you must push traffic from your site to Zergnet in order to capitalize. If you are looking for a CPC mode,l you will not find it here. While a CPC model is not yet available, there are plans to potentially expand to this in 2015.
Seer POV: Initially, there were high monthly minimums for spend, however if you upload funds via a credit card, then there are no monthly minimums. The biggest advantages we see is here is the ability to target based on interests (other content networks use an algorithm that advertisers can’t control) and implement retargeting for ads. Publishers include Forbes, VentureBeat, Parade, Bloomberg, Answers.com and more.
Seer POV: Zemanta has moved away from their old platform to promote content at scale across multiple content networks. They’ll aggregate your content into multiple ad formats, then use platforms like Outbrain, Adblade, Gravity, and Disqus to promote them at scale. We prefer to work directly with each platform for more transparency and control over campaign optimizations.
Others we’ve reviewed, but not yet tested:
2015 is going to be another big year for content marketing, especially as digital continues to grow into a more holistic marketing channel. As we shown above, we’ve spent a lot of time testing out various networks and strategies in 2014 and are excited to continue the push in 2015, specifically on paid social promotion combined with content distribution.
Content promotion is more than just building links; it’s about doing #RCS and running integrated campaigns to drive engagement and interest in your business. During the course of the year we worked closely with one of our largest ecommerce clients to support several marketing campaigns.
The goal was to drive engagement with the assets created and ultimately to drive users to complete the desired conversion action, which was a combination of signups and downloads. The results of this campaign led us to put more emphasis on this holistic approach.
While not all social networks have the scale of the content distribution networks, their targeting abilities more than make up for it. You can see that overall conversion rates are much higher with relatively comparable CPCs. While, setting up multiple, A/B tested social campaigns is a more tedious process and slightly more costly compared to content networks, the results we’ve seen when compared 1:1 to content distribution are promising.
Lastly, since Pinterest just opened up their ad platform to businesses in January, we’d like to start combining content distribution with concurrent Pinterest promotion to determine how Pinterest ads stack up against the variety of other distribution platforms. We’re already seeing quite a significant ROI in our initial test, with CPCs ranging from $0.20 – 0.25 and CTRs around 0.15% – 0.20%.
Do you have any data to share on other content distribution networks? Are there any other networks we should be testing in 2015? We’d love to hear your comments below or feel free to reach out via Twitter – @AndrewMeyer8 & @AudreyBloemer!
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Posted by ronell smith
“Man, I’m sorry. You guys weren’t ready to adopt the brands as publisher mindset. I suspected you’d never be ready to do it successfully. I knew it; I could sense you knew it. I wish I’d spoken up when I saw the intra-departmental debates waging. That’s on me. My bad.”
Those were my words to the executive of a midsize lifestyle brand I worked with in 2014. It took me months to get up the nerve to reach out and make it right, even though I’d done nothing wrong.
He seemed to understand. But he did have a question that stopped me in tracks and continues to haunt me.
“If we couldn’t get it right, with all of our resources, what does it say about the feasibility of becoming a brand publisher?” he inquired. “Does that make content marketing [in and of itself] a bad idea?”
A fair question, to be sure, and one I did not have a sufficient answer for. But in looking back, I realized this exec, like so many others before him, made the mistake of thinking he could do quickly what he had not yet learned to do well. Content marketing wasn’t the missile that sank his boat. The decision to do content marketing at warp speed and with little direction was his brands’ albatross.
Any one of these could have led to failure. Facing them all at once is akin to content marketing suicide. I see these same four elements dooming content marketers so frequently that I’ve resorted to naming them the four horsemen of content marketing failure.
For the purposes of this post, I want to illuminate how attempting to be a brand publisher is a lofty, needless goal for all but a handful of brands. Then I will highlight how to make steps 2, 3, and 4 work for your brand, not against it.
Before I begin, however, I want to make one thing abundantly clear: The ideas shared in this post have been formed through working with hundreds of brands over more than a decade, either as a writer, business strategist, content strategist, product marketing consultant or in a PR/media relations capacity.
I’m under no illusion that each (or any of them) will apply to everyone, but experience has shown me that these elements play an invaluable role in the success (or failure) of most brands embarking on the content marketing journey.
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source)
The web is rife with examples of marketers sharing the “wisdom” of brands becoming publishers, and no less common are the examples of brands who’ve done just that, adding content publisher to the laundry list of services they already provide. Here’s the problem with that logic: You’re not a publisher, and attempting to become one is fraught with risks that more often than not lead to failure.
Brand publishing refers to brands attempting to behave as media companies, specifically with regard to content breadth and frequency. Also, and most important, it requires a mindset wholly different from that of a typical content marketer: These brands view publishing as part of their business model.
That’s where the confusion comes in. A lot of very knowledgeable people say any brand that publishes blog posts or adds updates on social media is a brand publisher. But that’s akin to saying anyone who runs is a marathoner. It’s about scale. While content marketing’s goal is to attract and retain customers through the creation and distribution of content, being a brand publisher means you have layers of staff, strategic insight, vision, resources to build platforms for sharing new content and, most important, the ability to produce content at a rate that rivals, well, publishers.
If content marketing is a single-family dwelling, brand publishing is a city of one-million-plus.
It’s not that being a brand publisher is a bad idea all by itself. It’s that too many companies, who are barely ready to do content well, now think being a publisher is a sound idea.
As brands continue to bite off more than they can chew, the realities are tough to stomach, and have led to some interesting conclusions:
After months spent developing content strategies for clients looking for content marketing help, I decided that, in good conscience, I would never again insist that brands become publishers.
Instead, I adopted a strategy that’s as far away from one-size-fits-all as possible.
First, I refrained from using the term brand publisher. Next, I became a vocal proponent of the good-for-business-doesn’t-mean-good-for-your-business philosophy, which meant that in meetings with managers, directors and C-Suite execs, I had the courage of my convictions in sharing that while content marketing is a sound practice, becoming a full-fledged publisher is something that requires a minimum of three things to be successful:
If your company is ready to shoulder such a commitment, then by all means dive right in. If not, there’s a better way to do content marketing, one that is no less effective but does not require you to mortgage your future in the process.
Instead of attempting to become a publisher, or even a content marketer, focus your efforts on becoming a brand that consistently creates content that puts the needs of prospects and customers first, while simultaneously providing meaningful solutions to their problems.
I’ve been a very vocal haranguer of content marketing, though not because of its inefficacy.
I’m simply not a proponent of brands thinking of themselves as anything other than what they are in the minds of their prospects and clients.
Hopefully, at the core of your business is a product or service customers clamor for, not a content engine.
That’s why becoming a customer-first brand that has meaningful content as part of its DNA is the safest, surest, easiest-to-adopt model for brands with the desire to do content marketing right but who aren’t willing to re-org the business to get it underway.
In this way, you keep the main thing the main thing. That main thing in this case is serving your core audience.
At this point, I’m hoping you see the light, realizing that becoming a brand publisher isn’t necessary for your company to be successful at content marketing.
If you’re ready to chart a solid, more reliable path to success, it begins with turning away the four horsemen of content marketing failure.
We’ve banished the first horsemen. Let’s do the same with the other three.
Whenever I sit down with a prospect to discuss their business, I open up my notebook and write down the following three phrases, including a checkbox next to each, on a sheet of paper:
Then I ask “What are your goals for the business?” all the while knowing full well the answer will be one of the three things I’ve written down.
The followup question, too, is canned: “What are you doing to get there?” That answer, too, is typically never a surprise: “That’s what you’re here for, right?”
Wrong!
After I’ve apprised them that the shortest path to failure is not having a clear view of their goals, I have their attention and they are ready to begin the goal-setting process.
Here’s the catch: Only you and your team can decide what those goals are/should be. It’s important that the goals take into account the entirety of the business, not just SEO, content, social media, etc.
Also, I’ve found it helps if the metrics assigned to measure a business’s success toward their goals are meaningful (e.g., a sincere help to the overall business) and clearly communicated (e.g., everyone involved is aware of what they’re working for and being judged against).
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No matter what specific goals you decide on, applying the principle of “HAS,” as in holistic, adherable (er, sticky) and sustainable, can be a huge help:
I’ve found that keeping these principles top of mind helps to order a brand’s steps, ensuring that everyone is aware of the goals and of their role in working toward them.
As an example, let’s say you’re a small business ready to jump into the murky waters of content marketing, but you don’t yet have a website.
The right goal would be to launch a new website. To make the goal as HAS-friendly as possible, you could assign a timeframe—say, 90 days—then break out the associated tasks by order of importance (see image below).
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I’d even suggest keeping a checklist in a Google Doc where team members can stay abreast of what’s going on, in addition to seeing who’s responsible for what and having a better understanding of where the team is in terms of completing each task related to their goals.
If I had to single out the No. 1 reason content marketers I’ve worked with have failed it would be that they based their goals on what the competition was doing instead of what’s best for their own business.
Seeing a competitor rank higher for their main keywords; having thousands of web pages indexed by Google; spending mad cash on paid media; and having brand pages on Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, these businesses attempt to do the same.
Sounds comical, right, until you realize it happens all the time and to businesses of all sizes.
So we just had a new client shut down our social strategy to instead “copy anything and everything their competitors are doing” #brilliant
— Greg Gifford (@GregGifford) January 26, 2015
Problem is, no two businesses are entirely alike and, well, “You aren’t them,” as the saying goes.
Aside from having little idea of how much real success the competition is enjoying from their search, social and content efforts, these brands are taking their eyes off the main prize: their own business.
An approach that works well and is easy to carry out entails taking an inventory or where you are in relation to where you want to be while keeping a keen eye on the competition.
With your goals solidly in hand, begin by sketching out a plan based not on where you are, or on what the competition is doing, but on those actions that would likely lead to success for you.
(image created by author)
In the graph above, created in Google Docs, you can see that I mainly focused on the content-related activities that would have the biggest impact over the next 90 days. (Caveat: This is simply a high-level overview of one area of the business, but it’s plenty thorough enough for a team to begin working from.)
The key is to take the time to get to know (a) what success looks like for your business, then (b) focus on specific, actionable elements that can be done in the allotted timeframe.
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“Why do you hate content marketing?” I get asked these words at least once a month. The answer is always the same. I don’t hate content marketing. I hate most brands’ approach to content marketing.
There is so much more to making it a success than we’re typically led to believe there is.
The focus is always on produce, produce, produce. Outreach, outreach, outreach. Produce more. Outreach evan more. Rinse and repeat.
As marketers, we’ve seemingly trained a generation of brands that the focus should be on doing fast (and often) what they barely know how to do at all. We never learn to do well.
Yeah, I know it works…for some. But is it scalable over the long-term? Better yet, will it remain scalable into the future?
If you want to position your brand for success in content marketing, make sweating the small but oh-so-important steps a priority.
This process starts with clarity.
Simple. Brilliant. What I loved about this slide and the line of thinking is it helps brands (and the staff who work for those brands) stay the course, focused on their already-defined objectives. For example, once you know who you are and who you are in the minds of your core prospects and customers, any actions you take should be done with this information in mind.
Therefore, if the team begins to get distracted by shiny-things syndrome, anyone has the right to ask “Why are we doing this?” or “Why does this…make sense?”
Nothing like forcing someone to defend a bad idea to provoke clarity.
I can’t say for certain that, if you refrain from attempting to be a brand publisher, you’ll be a successful content marketer. I also cannot promise that going all-in with the three points outlined above ensures your success.
What, however, I can say is the vast majority of brands would do better if they banished “I want to be a brand publisher” from their lexicon and decided to focus on the right goals, executed a sensible plan and made the small things part of the main things.
What about you? Are you ready to do content marketing wisely? Dive into the discussion in the comments below.
(main image: licensed by the author )
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Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
Several months ago, Google announced a new sitelinks search box. Almost immediately, the sitelinks search box markup became one of the fastest growing Schema implementations on the web.
According to the folks at SimilarTech (part of the SimilarWeb family) the SearchAction markup now dominates all other Schema types on the top 1 million sites that they monitor.
Moving beyond the top million sites to the entire Internet, the SearchAction Schema is the 12th most popular Schema out of the 49 types that SimilarTech measures.
Despite such strong adoption, until now we have had very little evidence to understand the effects of the sitelinks search box. After Google dropped support for authorship photos in search results, many webmasters are weary of investing in each new initiative Google announces.
The box appears in Google’s search results for certain branded and navigation queries such as:
The box all allows users to refine searches to within a particular site, as in this example below when a user searches for “Moz” and refines their search to “keyword research”.
By default, searches performed in the sitelinks box sends users to a second set of Google results, refined to include to results from the target website (using Google’s site: operator.) The second page also typically includes additional Google ads, giving the searcher a chance to click on an ad instead of visiting your website.
At the same time, Google also gives webmasters a chance to bypass this second page of results and send searchers directly to their own internal search results if they implemented special Schema code on their homepage.
Not every site qualifies. Typically, Google reserves sitelinks search box for those sites with a high volume of branded queries. To see if your site is eligible, check Google Webmaster Tools. Google typically sends messages to eligible site owners.
If you qualify, and Google finds the correct code on your homepage, Google directs visitors to your website’s internal search results.
The advantage is obvious: by directing visitors to your own search results instead of another Google page filled with ads from third party websites, you potentially gain more clicks and visits and better control the visitor experience.
Compared to other types of markup, implementing the sitelinks code is easy and straightforward.
This question is actually harder to answer than it appears. Not every site qualifies for the sitelinks search box, and Google isn’t overly transparent about the requirements.
If you can answer “yes” to any of these questions, it’s quite possible your site qualifies.
Keep in mind that if you don’t qualify, it’s not necessary a negative. If you do qualify, continue with the steps below.
Most internal search engines work perfectly fine, including the default WordPress search function. If your website doesn’t have internal search, it’s easy to get started with a free Google Custom Search engine.
Place the following snippet in the source code of your homepage, editing the “url” and “target” fields to match your website information.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "WebSite",
"url": "https://www.example-petstore.com/",
"potentialAction": {
"@type": "SearchAction",
"target": "https://query.example-petstore.com/search?q={search_term_string}",
"query-input": "required name=search_term_string"
}
}
</script>
Source: Google Developers.
Google doesn’t advertise it well, but there is a way for you to prevent Google from displaying the sitelinks search box altogether if you’d like to opt out. Menashe Avramov first noticed an additional Google meta tag that prevents the search box from displaying.
<meta name="google" content="nositelinkssearchbox" />
Can you guess which major publisher opts out of Google’s Sitelinks Search Box? Amazon.
Interestingly, Google displays no sitelinks search box for the most popular website on the planet, Facebook, even though no such meta tag is apparent on Facebook’s site.
Below are landing page visits to Moz’s search results page before and after adding the sitelinks markup.
While it looks like a significant jump, the increase only equaled 150 visits per week. This represents just 0.05% of all organic search sessions Moz sees on a weekly basis (around 300,000 sessions).
Several SEOs who manage large sites reported similar results when we spoke with them. Although the search results page sees a small rise in sessions, it’s always nearly impossible to identify a statistically significant increase in overall search traffic.
I’m glad we implemented this because I think it provides a better user experience, but I would not say that it has sent much traffic our way.– Rob Leslie, Website Usability & SEO Administrator at George Fox University
In other words, implementing the SearchAction Schema is “optimized” and may result in a small boost in traffic and an improved experience for users. Based on the evidence, most publishers shouldn’t expect big traffic gains.
Our best advice is to add the SearchAction Schema if it is easy to implement, but keep your expectations in check.
As for opting out, like Amazon, it’s likely
best to experiment on your own site before committing to a course of action. Keep in mind that many SERP features such as review stars and breadcrumbs have been associated with higher click-through rates, and having a giant search box next to your result may help you stand out.
Have you implemented the code for Google’s sitelinks search box? Share your experience in the comments below.
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