Posted by JoyHawkins

Recently, I’ve had a lot of people ask me how to deal with duplicate listings in Google My Business now that MapMaker is dead. Having written detailed instructions outlining different scenarios for the advanced local SEO training manual I started selling over at LocalU, I thought it’d be great to give Moz readers a sample of 5 pages from the manual outlining some best practices.

What you need to know about duplicate GMB listings

Before you start, you need to find out if the listing is verified. If the listing has an “own this business” or “claim this business” option, it is not currently verified. If missing that label, it means it is verified — there is nothing you can do until you get ownership or have it unverified (if you’re the one who owns it in GMB). This should be your first step before you proceed with anything below.

Storefronts

• Do the addresses on the two listings match? If the unverified duplicate has the same address as the verified listing, you should contact Google My Business support and ask them to merge the two listings.
• If the addresses do not match, find out if the business used to be at that address at some point in time.
  • If the business has never existed there:
    • Pull up the listing on Maps
    • Press “Suggest an edit”
    • Switch the toggle beside “Place is permanently closed” to Yes
    • Select “Never existed” as the reason and press submit. *Note: If there are reviews on the listing, you should get them transferred before doing this.

• If the duplicate lists an address that is an old address (they were there at some point but have moved), you will want to have the duplicate marked as moved.

Service area businesses

• Is the duplicate listing verified? If it is, you will first have to get it unverified or gain access to it. Once you’ve done that, contact Google My Business and ask them to merge the two listings.
• If the duplicate is not verified, you can have it removed from Maps since service area businesses are not permitted on Google Maps. Google My Business allows them, but any unverified listing would follow Google Maps rules, not Google My Business. To remove it:
  • Pull up the listing on Maps
  • Press “Suggest an edit”
  • Switch the toggle beside “Place is permanently closed” to Yes
  • Select “Private” as the reason and press submit. *Note: If there are reviews on the listing, you should get them transferred before doing this.

Practitioner listings

Public-facing professionals (doctors, lawyers, dentists, realtors, etc.) are allowed their own listings separate from the office they work for, unless they’re the only public-facing professional at that office. In that case, they are considered a solo practitioner and there should only be one listing, formatted as “Business Name: Professional Name.”

Solo practitioner with two listings

This is probably one of the easiest scenarios to fix because solo practitioners are only supposed to have one listing. If you have a scenario where there’s a listing for both the practice and the practitioner, you can ask Google My Business to merge the two and it will combine the ranking strength of both. It will also give you one listing with more reviews (if each individual listing had reviews on it). The only scenario where I don’t advise combining the two is if your two listings both rank together and are monopolizing two of the three spots in the 3-pack. This is extremely rare.

Multi-practitioner listings

If the business has multiple practitioners, you are not able to get these listings removed or merged provided the practitioner still works there. While I don’t generally suggest creating listings for practitioners, they often exist already, leaving people to wonder what to do with them to keep them from competing with the listing for the practice.

A good strategy is to work on having multiple listings rank if you have practitioners that specialize in different things. Let’s say you have a chiropractor who also has a massage therapist at his office. The massage therapist’s listing could link to a page on the site that ranks highly for “massage therapy” and the chiropractor could link to the page that ranks highest organically for chiropractic terms. This is a great way to make the pages more visible instead of competing.

Another example would be a law firm. You could have the main listing for the law firm optimized for things like “law firm,” then have one lawyer who specializes in personal injury law and another lawyer who specializes in criminal law. This would allow you to take advantage of the organic ranking for several different keywords.

Keep in mind that if your goal is to have three of your listings all rank for the exact same keyword on Google, thus monopolizing the entire 3-pack, this is an unrealistic strategy. Google has filters that keep the same website from appearing too many times in the results and unless you’re in a really niche industry or market, it’s almost impossible to accomplish this.

Practitioners who no longer work there

It’s common to find listings for practitioners who no longer work for your business but did at some point. If you run across a listing for a former practitioner, you’ll want to contact Google My Business and ask them to mark the listing as moved to your practice listing. It’s extremely important that you get them to move it to your office listing, not the business the practitioner now works for (if they have been employed elsewhere). Here is a good case study that shows you why.

If the practitioner listing is verified, things can get tricky since Google My Business won’t be able to move it until it’s unverified. If the listing is verified by the practitioner and they refuse to give you access or remove it, the second-best thing would be to get them to update the listing to have their current employer’s information on it. This isn’t ideal and should be a last resort.

Listings for employees (not public-facing)

If you find a listing for a non-public-facing employee, it shouldn’t exist on Maps. For example: an office manager of a law firm, a paralegal, a hygienist, or a nurse. You can get the listing removed:

• Pull up the listing on Maps
• Press “Suggest an edit”
• Switch the toggle beside “Place is permanently closed..” to Yes
• Select “Never existed” as the reason and press submit.

Listings for deceased practitioners

This is always a terrible scenario to have to deal with, but I’ve run into lots of cases where people don’t know how to get rid of listings for deceased practitioners. The solution is similar to what you would do for someone who has left the practice, except you want to add an additional step. Since the listings are often verified and people usually don’t have access to the deceased person’s Google account, you want to make sure you tell Google My Business support that the person is deceased and include a link to their obituary online so the support worker can confirm you’re telling the truth. I strongly recommend using either Facebook or Twitter to do this, since you can easily include the link (it’s much harder to do on a phone call).

Creating practitioner listings

If you’re creating a practitioner listing from scratch, you might run into issues if you’re trying to do it from the Google My Business dashboard and you already have a verified listing for the practice. The error you would get is shown below.

There are two ways around this:

1. Create the listing via Google Maps. Do this by searching the address and then clicking “Add a missing place.” Do not include the firm/practice name in the title of the listing or your edit most likely won’t go through, since it will be too similar to the listing that already exists for the practice. Once you get an email from Google Maps stating the listing has been successfully added, you will be able to claim it via GMB.
   
2. Contact GMB support and ask them for help.

We hope you enjoyed this excerpt from the Expert’s Guide to Local SEO! The full 160+-page guide is available for purchase and download via LocalU below.

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Posted by BenjaminEstes

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is an easy-to-use tool that tests whether a web page might be slower than it needs to be. It gives a score to quantify page performance. Because this score is concrete, the PageSpeed Insights score is often used as a measure of site performance. Similarly to PageRank years back, folks want to optimize this number just because it exists. In fact, Moz has a popular article on this subject: How to Achieve 100/100 with the Google Page Speed Test Tool.

For small sites on common CMSes (think Wordpress), this can be accomplished. If that’s you, PageSpeed Insights is a great place to start. For most sites, a perfect score isn’t realistic. So where do we start?

That’s what this post is about. I want to make three points:

• Latency can hurt load times more than bandwidth
• PageSpeed Insights scores shouldn’t be taken at face value
• Improvement starts with measurement, goal setting, and prioritization

I’m writing with SEO practitioners in mind. I’ll skip over some of the more technical bits. You should walk away with enough perspective to start asking the right questions. And you may make better recommendations as a result.

Latency can hurt load times more than bandwidth

A first look at PageSpeed Insights’ rules could make you think it’s all about serving fewer bytes to the user. Minify, optimize, compress. Size is only half the story. It also takes take time for your request simply to reach a server. And then it takes time for the server to respond to you!

What happens when you make a request?

If a user types a URL into a browser address bar and hits enter, a request is made. Lots of things happen when that request is made. The very last part of that is transferring the requested content. It’s only this last bit that is affected by bandwidth and the size of the content.

Fulfilling a request requires (more or less) these steps:

1. Find the server
2. Connect to the server
3. Wait for a response
4. Receive response

Each of these steps takes time, not just the last. The first three are independent of file size; they are effectively constant costs. These costs are incurred with each request regardless of whether the payload is a tiny, minified CSS file or a huge uncompressed image.

Why does it take time to get a response?

The factor we can’t avoid is that network signals can’t travel faster than the speed of light. That’s a theoretical maximum; in reality, it will take longer than that for data to transfer. For instance, it takes light about 40ms for a round trip between Paris and New York. If it takes twice that time for data to actually cross the Atlantic, then the minimum time it will take to get a response from a server is 80ms.

This is why CDNs are commonly used. CDNs put servers physically closer to users, which is the only way to reduce the time it takes to reach the server.

How much does this matter?

Check out this chart (from Chrome’s DevTools):

The life of a request, measured by Chrome Dev Tools.

All of the values in the red box are what I’m considering “latency.” They total about 220ms. The actual transfer of content took 0.7ms. No compression or reduction of filesize could help this; the only way to reduce the time taken by the request is to reduce latency.

Don’t we need to make a lot of requests to load a page?

It’ll take more than one request to load all of the content necessary to render a page. If that URL corresponded to a webpage, the browser will usually discover that it needs to load more resources to render the page. These could be CSS, JavaScript, or font files. It must recursively go through the same steps listed above to load each of these files.

Fortunately, once a server has been found (“DNS Lookup” in the image above), the browser won’t need to look it up again. It will still have to connect, and we’ll have to wait for a response.

A skeptical read of PageSpeed Insights tests

All of the PageSpeed Insights evaluations cover things that can impact site speed. For large sites, some of them aren’t so easy to implement. And depending on how your site is designed, some may be more impactful than others. That’s not to say you have an excuse not to do these things — they’re all best-practice, and they all help. But they don’t represent the whole site speed picture.

With that in mind, here’s a “skeptical reading” of each of the PageSpeed Insights rules.

Tests focusing on reducing bandwidth use

Tests focusing on reducing latency

Don’t treat these as the final word on site performance! Independent of these tests, here are some things to think about. Some aren’t covered at all by PageSpeed Insights, and some are only covered halfway:

• Caching content you control.
• Reducing the amount of content you’re loading from 3rd-party domains.
• Reducing server response time beyond the minimum required to pass PageSpeed Insights’ test.
• Moving the server closer to the end user. Basically, use a CDN.
• Reducing blocking requests. Ensuring you’re using HTTP2 will help here.

How to start improving

Measurement

The screenshots in this post are created with Chrome DevTools. It’s built into the browser and allows you to inspect exactly what happens when a page loads.

Instead of trusting the Pagespeed Insights tool, go ahead and load your page in Chrome. Check out how it performs. Look at what requests actually seem to take more time. Often the answer will be obvious: too much time will be spent loading ads, for instance.

Goal setting

If a perfect PageSpeed Insights score isn’t your goal, you need to know what your goal will be. This is important, because it allows you to compare current performance to that goal. You can see whether reducing bandwidth requirements will actually meet your goal, or whether you also need to do something to reduce latency (use a CDN, handle fewer requests, load high-priority content first).

Prioritizing

Prioritizing page speed “fixes” is important — that’s not the only type of prioritization. There’s also the question of what actually needs to be loaded. PageSpeed Insights does try to figure out whether you’re prioritizing above-the-fold content. This is a great target. It’s also not a perfect assessment; it might be easier to split content into “critical” and “non-critical” paths, regardless of what is ostensibly above the fold.

For instance: If your site relies on ad revenue, you might load all content on the page and only then begin to load ads. Figuring out how to serve less is a challenge best tackled by you and your team. After all, PageSpeed Insights is a one-size-fits-all solution.

Conclusion

The story so far has been that PageSpeed Insights can be useful, but there are smarter ways to assess and improve site speed. A perfect score doesn’t guarantee a fast site.

If you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend checking out Ilya Grigorik’s site and specifically this old-but-good introduction deck. Grigorik is a web performance engineer at Google and a very good communicator about site speed issues.

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Posted by ronell-smith

Whew!

That’s the collective expression shared by the committee who perused this year’s community speaker pitches for MozCon 2017, which will be held July 17–19 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, WA.

Let’s just say, the entire group brought it.

There were more than 120 people vying for six speaking slots.

We’ve written in the past about how the committee whittles the submissions down, and then, before making the final selections from a group of about 20 people, we watch videos, peruse decks on SlideShare, and try to determine if a potential speaker would be successful on the stage. (Speaking in front of 1,500 people can be unnerving, even for the most accomplished speaker.)

After all, we want everyone to walk away from MozCon feeling as though the event was a benefit.

In general, during the final stages of the process, we’re looking for/at three elements with regards to the submission alone:

• Strength of the pitch (e.g., value, relevance to the audience, etc.),
• Whether or not the info can reasonably be delivered in the time allotted, and
• Does it fit with overall programming (i.e., assuming it clears the two other hurdles, does it address a need for the event?)

The winning pitches nailed each of the elements above; we’re confident the talks will be well-received by the audience.

Without further adieu, let’s take a closer look at this spectacular group.

[Eds. note: Pitches were were edited for length and to help speakers retain an element of surprise.]

Daniel Russell

@dnlrussell

Daniel Russell is a director at Go Fish Digital.

Part of the winning pitch:

“It almost seems too good to be true — online forums where people automatically segment themselves into different markets and demographics and then vote on what content they like best. These forums, including Reddit, are treasure troves of content ideas. I’ll share actionable insights from three case studies that demonstrate how your marketing can benefit from content on Reddit.”

Jayna Grassel

@jaynagrassel

Jayna is the SEO manager at Dick’s Sporting Goods and is the unofficial world’s second-fastest crocheter.

Part of the winning pitch:

“Site. Migration. No two words elicit more fear, joy or excitement to a digital marketer. When the idea was shared three years ago, the company was excited. They dreamed of new features and efficiency. But as SEOs, we knew better. We knew there would be midnight strategy sessions with IT. More UAT environments than we could track. Deadlines, requirements and compromises forged through hallway chats. … The result was a stable transition with minimal dips in traffic. What we didn’t know, however, was the amount of cross-functional coordination that was required to pull it off.”

Joel Klettke

@joelklettke

Joel is freelance conversion copywriter and strategist for Business Casual Copywriting. He also owns and runs Case Study Buddy, a done-for-you case studies service.

Part of the winning pitch:

“If you want to write copy that converts, you need to get into your customers’ heads. But how do you do that? How do you know which pain points you need to address, features customers care about, or benefits your audience needs to hear? Marketers are sick and tired of hearing ‘it depends.’ I’ll give the audience a practical framework for writing customer-driven copy that any business can apply.”

Kane Jamison

@kanejamison

Kane is the founder of Content Harmony, a content marketing agency based in Seattle.

Part of the winning pitch:

“The 8 Paid Promotion Tactics That Will Get You To Quit Organic Traffic: Digital marketers are ignoring huge opportunities to promote their content through paid channels, and I want to give them the tools to get started. How many brands out there are spending $500+ on a blog post, and then moving on to the next one before that post has been seen by 500 people, or even 50? For some reason, everyone thinks about Outbrain and native ads when we talk about paid content distribution, but the real opportunity is in *highly-targeted* paid social.”

Kathryn Cunningham

@kac4509

Kathryn is an SEO consultant for Adept Marketing, although to many of her office mates she is known as the “Excel nerd.”

Part of the winning pitch:

“How to build an SEO-intent based framework for any business: Everyone knows intent behind the search matters. In e-commerce, intent is somewhat easy to see. B2B, or better yet healthcare, isn’t quite as easy. Matching persona intent to keywords requires a bit more thought. I will cover how to find intent modifiers during keyword research, how to organize those modifiers into the search funnel, and how to quickly find unique universal results at different levels of the search funnel to utilize.”

Matthew Edgar

@MatthewEdgarCO

Matthew is a web analytics and technical marketing consultant at Elementive.

Part of the winning pitch:

“3 Event Tracking Tricks and Tips For Monitoring UX Details: Great SEO is increasingly dependent on having a website with a great user experience. To make your user experience great requires carefully tracking what people do so that you always know where to improve. But what do you track? In this 15-minute talk, I’ll cover three effective and advanced ways to use event tracking in Google Analytics to understand a website’s user experience.”

Curiosity piqued? You could be in one of those seats yourself, watching them live:

Grab your ticket now!

Feel free to drop me a note in the comments below. I’m starting to get excited about MozCon 2017. I hope to see you there.

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Posted by ronell-smith

Off-page SEO is the act of optimizing your brand’s online and offline footprint through the use of content, relationships, and links to create an optimal experience for prospects and search engine crawl bots. It typically leads to gradual increases in positive brand mentions, search rankings, traffic to your site, and conversions.

Sounds fairly straightforward, right?

Well, for the attorney seated in front of me in my kid’s elementary school lunchroom, I might as well have just told him the earth is flat.

“That makes no sense to me,” he said, pushing his chin forward and tilting his head, as if waiting for me to admit that I was pulling his leg. “You mean, there’s all this stuff [an SEO] does on my site? And there is stuff that we — me, my team and [the SEO] — should be doing off our site as well? That’s like telling me, ‘It’s not enough that you live and pay for a nice house in a gated community. You also need to guard the gate to the community and pick up trash along the road leading up to your driveway.'”

His example could not have been more apt.

“Not caring about off-site SEO is like having that great house in the gated community, but none of your friends want to visit because they’ve heard from others that it smells like vomit on the inside, and no one they talk to can either confirm or deny it.”

By imagining your website as a home you’d like people to visit, it’s easier to see the value of off-site SEO.

I continued: “It’s not enough to only care about your website/brand or your house/neighborhood; you must always be working to enhance its reputation to ensure others will desire to visit/learn more about it.”

He saw the light.

“So basically we do off-site SEO to ensure the work we do onsite and as a brand are most effective?” he asked.

Exactly!

What off-page SEO is and why your brand cannot afford to ignore it

In the SEO world, we don’t need to be convinced of the value of off-page SEO.

We know that well before people seek our brands out, they have formed an opinion of it based on reviews, comments from friends, family members, or online acquaintances, and whatever information we can glean online or offline (apart from your website).

Therefore, we’d be fools to disavow making off-page SEO a priority, given how important it is.

However, the more common mistake — among SEOs at least — is to see off-page SEO through only the prism of link building, which, while important, is not the be-all and end-all of off-page SEO.

That is, in working to build your brand’s off-page SEO prowess, links are certainly a benefit, not the goal.

Think of it this way:

• Goal of off-page SEO: To accumulate positive signals and interactions for your brand, with the hope of those factors being a net positive.
• Benefit(s) of off-page SEO: Brand mentions, positive reviews, links, etc.

So while it’s important to think of links when making off-page SEO a priority, it’s also vital that you (a) view them in context (important but not singularly so) and (b) give priority to the host of factors that lead to off-page SEO providing a boost for your brand.

Those factors include, but are not limited to, creating an excellent, worthwhile product or service; guest posting on popular, relevant blogs; building relationships with influencers; earning positive press; capturing positive reviews and responding to negative reviews; and monitoring mentions of your brand, to name a few.

Because our goal is to create a post that’s accessible, interesting and immediately useful, we’ll break down what we think are 8 key areas worth focusing on for off-page SEO under three umbrellas:

• Brand
• Audience
• Content

The intention is to provide a prism through which you can more easily categorize your efforts and a framework by which you can make those efforts a reality.

Brand

“No amount of SEO in the world can help a crappy product or service (at least not for long).” This is a sentence I frequently utter to folks who refuse to prioritize what they offer in favor of trying to put lipstick on a pig.

#1: Create a 10X product or service

When your product or service is recognized as the best in its class, your job as SEO becomes much, much easier.

That’s because both online and offline, people are likely saying great things about the product and brand, which leads to visits to your website, positive reviews on third-party sites, and increased sales of the product.

This only occurs, however, if you focus first and foremost on creating the best product you can.

Easier said than done, I know.

Here’s a great place to start, depending upon where your product/service is in the evolution cycle:

• Existing product: Deliver the goods on features customers would most benefit from based on requests and complaints online regarding competing products.
• New product: Focus on the most essential benefits your new product can provide to the prospective audience. When you do this, you remove objections and features present themselves.

#2: Customer service

No one who’s watched the United Airlines meltdown needs to be sold on the value of customer service as an effective asset for off-site SEO. The brand will be paying for that epic disaster for years as millions of folks continue to share the video and images of the event.

It’s not hard to imagine how poor customer service has made the brand’s SEO and PR teams’ reputation management efforts a nightmare.

For your brand, focus on a singular goal: Leaving everyone your brand/brand spokespeople comes into contact with — online or offline — feeling as though the interaction could not have been more positive.

For example, at in-person events, make sure staffers wear a smile, empathetically interact with everyone they meet, and go out of their way to answer questions or provide general help. It also means ensuring any content you create leaves people feeling good about your brand.

It’s unlikely this billboard was much of an off-page SEO benefit to SouthBendOn.com.

# 3: Focus on web searchers’ intent

Turns out the old cliche that “you attract more flies with honey than vinegar” is very relevant to SEO. People are typically more willing to buy and use your products and services if they can first find them.

A lot of times, our products and services fail to live up to their full potential because we aren’t matching our offering to the needs of our prospective audiences.

A great example of this is creating and sharing content without keywords the audience might be using to look for a similar product.

In addition to matching titles, descriptions, and keyword phrases to searcher’s intent, make sure you focus on where the content is shared and discussed.

It also starts with putting the needs of the audience first.

“For uncovering searcher intent…[s]earch, refine, broaden queries, talk to people, read discussion threads, have empathy,” wrote Rand Fishkin in a recent tweet.

Use Google Autosuggest, Keywordtool.io, and Answerthepublic.com to get in front of what it is people are looking for online relative to your product or service.

Audience

The better you know your audience, the more easily you can interact with, share with, and learn from them.

What does this have to do with off-page SEO? Everything.

Next to no one wakes up and decides to interact with your brand.

#4: Have a responsive social media presence

A typical search comes about because a person has an unmet need (e.g., “where is the nearest pizza joint?”) or has a question they’d like answered (e.g., “how tall is the biggest building in Tokyo?”).

After using Google Autosuggest to find the answer, they’re likely to visit social media to learn more, ask questions, and interact with their friends, family members, and acquaintances.

You see where we’re going here, right?

Social media must be an invaluable component of your off-page SEO strategy.

It’s much easier than most brands think, too:

• Be there: If you have a social media account, make sure someone is monitoring it and can answer questions and respond to comments in a timely fashion.
• Be human: People online expect genuine interaction, not robotic responses or constant brand promotion.
• Be proactive: One of the best things you can do to help your brand is to use social media to be seen as a resource for the online community in the vertical you serve. Even if someone asks a question about a product or service you don’t offer or that is offered by a competitor, don’t be afraid to chime in and offer praise when due.

As you can see, the price of unresponsiveness on social media negatively impacts far more than SEO:

Source

#5: Build connections with social media/online influencers

When people say “Social media does nothing for my brand,” most SEOs must think, “Oh, but how wrong you are.”

Whether it’s the largely unmeasurable dark traffic social sends to your site or the connections with a base of people who could be customers or supporters at some point, social media can be an asset for any brand, if used wisely.

For off-page SEO, one of the biggest benefits of social is the ability to create and nurture lasting relationships with influencers, those people with huge reach in the way of name recognition, myriad followers and fans, and connections with numerous high-ranking websites.

They’re also typically very much connected with other influencers.

As we see in the image below, even if Google isn’t using social signals to help determine rankings, the interplay of influencers and the sites they represent, like, and visit makes being on their radar a positive.

Image source

An effective strategy for enlisting the help of influencers to boost your off-page SEO is to get to know them in person, at events, and online via group chats/tweets and such, which puts you on their radar without much heavy lifting on your part.

Then, in the future, when you do create and share content, they’re more likely to recognize you and your brand and might share the content themselves.

Even better, later on, after you’ve developed a stronger relationship, you might even collaborate on a piece of content — for their site, your site, or a publisher such as an online magazine.

#6: Recommit to frequenting forums and discussion boards, and comment blogging

Want to get noticed by your desired audience and the influencers they follow?

Visit the most popular blogs in your vertical, and leave comments. In recent years, comment blogging has fallen off in popularity, in large part because comment spam led to most blogs no-following their links.

For the purpose of off-page SEO, links are less of a priority.

Your goal is simply to be where the action is and to leave a thoughtful comment that might catch the eye of the blogger, the platform’s editor, and any influencers who might be reading the content.

The same applies for sites like Reddit and Quora, where you can follow topics specifics to your brand or vertical and quickly get noticed for being knowledgeable, thoughtful, and empathetic in answering others’ questions or helping to drive discussion.

The SEO subreddit is very popular, frequented by many of the big names in SEO.

The relationships formed on these platforms have a way of paying huge dividends and can be invaluable for off-page SEO and reputation management.

Often someone notices your comments on one of these platforms, starts following you there, and then later does a Google or LinkedIn search to learn about you or your brand, which ultimately leads them to your website, where they might sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your blog.

#7: Quit guest blogging for links

You read that right.

Instead of guest blogging solely for links, use this tactic to help you build a rapport with some of the top publishers, editors, influencers, and brands online.

If done correctly, the links do come. But as long as you make links the priority, whereby it’s obvious that you’re looking for a transactional relationship as opposed to one that is mutually beneficial, the tougher it’ll be for you to use guest blogging effectively for off-page SEO.

Read, leave comments on their blogs, and connect with the top publishers in your vertical — or publishers that cover your vertical. Once you have developed a rapport and, hopefully, have a reputation for creating quality content, inquire about creating a guest post for the platform, assuming that option is available.

Even if that door doesn’t open, you’ll be able to hone your pitch and eventually get a foot in the door with other publishers.

Remember, too, that your website is but one tiny fish in a vast ocean of options. You need to connect with others in many places off-site to build the reach and influence that’ll drive attention and visits to your site, which is where guest blogging can big a huge asset.

Your brand’s success depends upon a lot of factors outside your website. Image source

“Should you do guest posting for SEO? As a primary objective, I’d say no. But… reality is that the indirect impact remains very powerful,” wrote Stone Temple Consulting’s Eric Enge. “There is nothing like building your reputation and visibility to cause people to want more of your content. You get to build up your own audience, and ultimately some of these people will find their way to your site, find great content there, and link to it.”

Content

When most people say, think, or write “content,” they most often think of text, images, videos, and information shared via social media.

In reality, content represents the entirety of the experience your brand designs, creates, and shares online and offline, from logos and tag lines to personnel, phone calls, signage, blog text, images, videos, etc.

If a prospect or customer can interacts with it, you’d better believe it’s content.

And before you offer up, “Well, Ronell, what if one of my staffers has mustard on her shirt in a video we post online?” (Trust me, someone would ask that.) “Is that content, too?” Yes, that faux pas is part of the content experience a prospect or customer could have with your brand.

In fact, it’s the sort of thing that can lead to someone seeing your company as not having all of its ducks in a row, injuring your reputation in the process.

#8: Experiment with content types

But don’t fret. When it comes to off-site SEO, the main thing I want you to focus on with regard to content is to see beyond text.

I’m a writer. I love words.

As a newspaper reporter, I always argued with my editor when he said “Words without images lead to words getting ignored. Images sell.”

The same for video. People eat it up.

You’ve no doubt heard that mobile is gobbling up the world as I write this. Well, guess what those untold millions are doing on their mobile devices?

Largely consuming videos, which are expected to account for 85% of the content being shared online by 2019. Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook Live, anyone?

Image source

Videos and images can be a huge boon to your brand’s off-page SEO, largely because they can both be a low-investment/high potential vehicle used to drive awareness and traffic back to your site, enhancing your off-page reputation in the process.

A few low-cost, low-effort ways to use video and images include:

• Post how-to videos on YouTube, which is the second-most visited website in the world and the #2 search engine behind parent company Google. What’s more, popular videos can and do rank in the SERPs.
• Share daily musings or recaps of distillations of recent events via Facebook Live
• Snap meeting or office funnies via Snapchat
• Compose image albums on Imgur, Flickr, and other popular photo-sharing sites
• Tweet videos of interesting things you notice throughout the day

Video and images are great way to show some personality and make your brand feel human, real, and alive to people who might not have heard of your company, or who’ve only recently discovered it.

They can also work wonders for your off-site SEO.

For example, say your brand has found that customers who visit your white papers have an increased likelihood of becoming customers. You might shoot video interviews of the subjects or clients featured in the most popular websites, then post the videos to YouTube, in addition to sharing them with the clients to post on their site and disseminate via social media.

This increases the likelihood of even more people seeing the videos and wanting to learn more about your brand.

It’s time to think holistically

The complete list of off-site SEO tactics that can bring your brand success contains far more than eight elements.

Our goal with this post is to spur you to think beyond what’s comfortable or convenient, and instead consider what’s (a) doable in a reasonable amount of time and a reasonable degree of effort, and that (b) has the potential to yield a significant amount of success.

We’re convinced that a brand who works diligently to deploy the tactics listed above will be better able to thrive.

Recommended resources:

Brand

• Why You Must Become a 10x Brand
• The Brand Halo Effect: Does Brand Awareness Impact Organic Search Rankings?
• Why is Building Your Brand an SEO Strategy?

Audience

• Do Social Signals Drive SEO?
• Tips and Tactics for Amplifying Your Content
• How to Earn the Amplification of Influencers
• How to Hack the Amplification Process
• Discovering Which Sites Your Target Audience Visits

Content

• YouTube SEO: The Ultimate Guide
• The 100 Best Infographics
• Content, Shares, and Links: Insights from Analyzing 1 Million Articles

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Posted by sam.nemzer

While working at Distilled, I often come across issues with implementing technical SEO changes to websites. This can be for a variety of reasons: some sites have rigid CMSs that don’t allow for customization, while others have development queues of many months (or years, in some cases!).

In these cases, it doesn’t matter how good a job we do identifying the changes that need to be made in order to improve a site’s performance — if nothing can be implemented, our advice is worthless. Something we like to say at Distilled is that “it’s not our job to deliver reports, it’s our job to effect change.” In order to make this a reality for clients with the types of issues I mention above, it’s necessary to explore alternative ways of getting changes made.

One option for this is to implement some sort of “meta-CMS.” This is a system that sits on top of an existing CMS, and allows you to make specific changes to pages on a site, bypassing the technical and/or technical constraints that a CMS may entail. <plug> While also having the ability to split-test SEO changes across groups of pages on a website, our own DistilledODN tool can be (and is being) used for this purpose. </plug>

For sites for which a meta-CMS is not an option, a third solution is to use a tag management system (when one is installed and configured). In this article I’ll be referencing Google Tag Manager (GTM), which is the most widely used tag manager (accounting for 72.6% of the tag management market, according to BuiltWith.com). Tag managers use a single JavaScript container tag to inject various different tags (e.g. tracking, remarketing, and CRO tags) into webpages. The benefit of this is that in order to add or amend tags, it’s not necessary for a developer to make any changes to the page; changes can be made to the tags within a container and these tags will be implemented on the page.

Tag managers are mostly used to implement off-the-shelf tags, like Google Analytics or Facebook tracking. A lesser-known functionality is to implement custom HTML snippets (which can include JavaScript code). This allows you to make any arbitrary changes you like to the HTML of a page (or set of pages) based on rules you define. A benefit of using tag managers is that you can apply changes to pages at scale across a site with a single tag.

This allows us to bypass CMS restrictions and development queues, directly applying changes to things like page titles, canonical tags, and on-page content.

Because tag managers use JavaScript to implement tags, in the past it hasn’t been seen as a reliable way to make SEO changes. The traditional thinking has been that, in terms of making SEO changes, Google (and other search engines) can’t reliably execute JavaScript, so any changes made with JavaScript would likely be ignored. However, recently, we are seeing evidence that changes are being picked up by Google, including implementation through tag managers. This article will show a few examples of this in action, and how to implement these sorts of changes on your site.

How to make any HTML change using GTM

The sorts of changes we’re interested in involve either adding in new elements to a page, amending the content or attributes of elements, or removing elements from a page. For each of these, you’ll potentially need knowledge around:

1. CSS selectors and HTML, in order to know which elements on the page to change/pull data from
2. JavaScript (especially jQuery*), in order to inject elements into the page

For example, there are simple elements you can add into a page that don’t require anything to be extracted from the page (other than the page URL, which is an inbuilt variable in GTM). On the other hand, there are more complex changes, such as adding in product structured data on e-commerce sites, that require you to extract data from the page (e.g. product names, prices, etc).

If you’re not technical and just want to be able to implement changes in GTM, I’ll include an off-the-shelf GTM container at the end of this post, with instructions on how to use it.

*If your site has jQuery loaded, it will be much easier to extract and write elements to a page. In order to check this, you can open the Console while viewing the page in Chrome or Firefox and type “jQuery” (case-sensitive). If jQuery is not loaded, you will see an error message.

Inserting an element

In order to insert an element into an HTML page, you can use a custom HTML tag in GTM. Below is an example of a custom HTML tag that inserts a meta robots noindex tag to the page. This below example uses jQuery, but you can do the same thing without jQuery if need be.

<script>
// Removes any existing meta robots tag
jQuery('meta[name="robots"]').remove();
// Create an empty meta element, called 'meta'
var meta = document.createElement('meta');
// Add a name attribute to the meta, with the value 'robots'
meta.name = 'robots';
// Add a content attribute to the meta element, with the value 'noindex, follow'
meta.content = 'noindex, follow';
// Insert this meta element into the head of the page, using jQuery
jQuery('head').append(meta);
</script>

This snippet will add a meta robots noindex, follow element, after deleting any existing meta robots elements, to every page to which it applies. In GTM, every tag is associated with at least one trigger, which tells the container when the tag should be applied. For any changes we want Google to take note of, we want the tags to trigger as soon as the page loads. We can decide which pages the tag should load on using any variable we like to specify pages.

The above HTML tag can be amended to create other types of elements. These are explored in the example section below.

Extracting data from the page

There are two approaches to extracting data from a page. You can either use GTM’s inbuilt variables, which allow you to extract the text or an attribute of an element based on CSS selectors, or do the same with JavaScript and/or jQuery within the custom HTML tag.

In the context of SEO changes, the most common place where you’ll want to extract data from the page would be to construct structured data markup using JSON-LD. In order to demonstrate the different methods, I’ll show a way of constructing product markup by extracting items both in GTM variables and within a custom HTML tag.

For this example, we can imagine a site with product pages that have data about their products each given unique IDs within the HTML of the page. In reality, you’ll need to find CSS selectors that give you the exact elements you’re looking for. A great tool for this is the Selector Gadget Chrome extension that allows you to find a unique CSS selector for any element on a page.

For our example, let’s imagine the following IDs:

Using GTM variables

If you’re using GTM variables to pull the data out of the page, you’ll need to set up a variable for each of the above elements. You can do this by going to the Variables menu and clicking “NEW” under “User-Defined Variables.”

For each of the above elements, define a new “DOM Element”-type variable, using an ID or CSS selector appropriate to each item. For all of the above, you’ll want to leave the “Attribute Name” field blank except for the image, where you’ll want to extract the src attribute.

In order to pull these variables into some JSON-LD markup, we’ll need to set up a custom HTML tag that references them.

Note that, in order to reference a GTM variable, you need to wrap them in double curly brackets. Also note that we’ve referenced “Page URL,” which is a default built-in variable in GTM. The last four lines of this script are turning the jsonData element into part of a script element, with type “application/ld+json,” to be injected into the head of the page.

Using jQuery

We can do the same thing as the above without touching GTM variables, instead using a single HTML tag. In this case, we need to use jQuery to do the same job that the GTM variables are doing.

This HTMl tag is very similar to the one using variables, except in place of each variable, it uses jQuery to extract data from the page. Obviously this is only possible for pages that have jQuery loaded, but equivalent expressions are possible in JS without jQuery.

The advantage of this method is that you don’t need to set up individual variables for each element — all of the information is contained in this one tag. On the other hand, if you have variables being referenced by many different tags and/or triggers, it makes sense to use variables, as if and when you need to change the definition of the variable, it will apply to all tags and triggers without the need to change each individual one.

Does it work?

This is all very well and good, as long as Google actually sees and indexes the changes that are being made via GTM. As mentioned above, there is uncertainty as to whether Google can index (and even then, whether it respects) markup and content implemented through JavaScript. I have three examples from the last couple of months of changes being made through GTM, and immediately respected by Google.

1. JSON-LD structured data markup

With the above example, using both the jQuery and variable methods, we can see rich snippets in search results, where there is no structured data at all on the page before GTM applies it. The below snippet is from a dummy page where a product snippet has been applied.

2. Canonical tags

We have also seen evidence of Google paying attention to canonical tags implemented through GTM. The below chart (taken from STAT) shows the number of keywords for which a page ranked, before and after a canonical tag was implemented using GTM. After the implementation, the page stopped ranking for any keywords, and the destination of the canonical tag started ranking in its place.

3. Mobile switchboard tags

In this example, a site had separate desktop and mobile versions on different subdomains. Mobile switchboard tags were implemented on the desktop site using GTM, and immediately pages on the mobile subdomain began being indexed.

Some examples of tags

All of the below tags can be found in this dummy GTM container. They are applicable only for sites that have jQuery loaded. In order to implement the tags, take the following steps:

1. Download the container from Google Drive.
2. Within the “Admin” menu of the GTM container you want to import into, select “Import Container”:
3. Select the container file from its download location, and select “Merge” and “Rename conflicting tags…” in order to not overwrite any tags that are already set up.
4. Click “Confirm.”
5. Once the container is loaded in, make necessary edits to tags so that they are suitable for your site, and assign triggers to apply only to pages that are relevant.

Tag to insert mobile switchboard tags

If you have a separate mobile site with the same page and URL structure, this tag can add in switch tags, replacing “www” with “m” in domain names. It will also add a canonical tag to mobile pages that don’t already have one, pointing to their direct desktop equivalents. You can customize this tag to have whatever subdomain your mobile site is on by changing the domains on lines 3, 8, 12, and 16.

Tag to add noindex tag

This is identical to the tag mentioned above. Take care with the trigger if you use this — you don’t want to accidentally noindex every page on your site! This tag will remove any existing meta robots tag, and write a “noindex follow” meta robots tag.

A potential use case for this would be to noindex any product pages for out-of-stock products. You could use a trigger that detects an “out of stock” in a particular element on the page, and automatically adds in a noindex tag when that is the case.

Tag to add self-referential canonical

This will add a canonical tag to pages, pointing to themselves — or, if the page has URL parameters, pointing to a parameterless version of the page. Take care when implementing this on pages that are intended to canonical to other pages (including on separate mobile sites), as it will overwrite any existing canonical tags. Also make sure that you do not implement it on a page that has parameters, and is not intended to canonicalize to the version of the page without parameters (e.g. paginated versions of pages).

Tag to insert breadcrumb structured data

This tag cycles through any breadcrumb elements that share a CSS selector on a page, and writes them into JSON-LD. It then takes either the canonical URL of the current page, or the current URL if no canonical exists, and writes that as the final breadcrumb element.

This tag is named “Insert Breadcrumb Markup to Any Page.” Within the tag, you should rename the “selector_for_breadcrumb_link” on lines 8 and 29 of the tag to be a CSS selector of the breadcrumb links on the page.

Tag to insert product structured data

This is the jQuery example discussed above. Replace the IDs within the selectors of the specific elements you wish to include in the structured data. If there are no aggregate ratings, remove lines 16–21.

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