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SEO Has a Younger Sibling: It’s On-Site Search, and It Deserves Attention

On-site search, also known as internal search, is a critical yet undervalued and underrepresented tactic in the search industry. In 2014,eConsultancy released a report that showed that 15% of companies dedicate resources to optimizing the on-site search experience, 42% fold on-site search into other online measurement responsibilities, and 42% of companies ignore on-site search. This report was released more than two years ago and after some extensive Googling, some Duck Duck Go-ing, and some slight Bing-ing, I couldn’t find any reputable site releasing similar, more recent, reports.

Wait a minute… Nearly 84% of companies don’t actively optimize or measure their on-site search?

Consider the following benefits of active on-site search optimization:

On average, 30% of visitors will perform an on-site search
When comparing revenue gained from people who performed an on-site search vs. people who did not perform an on-site search, the people who performed an on-site search generated more revenue than those who did not.
Performing an on-site search is a strong behavioral predictor of intent to convert:
- People who perform a site-search are twice as likely to convert.
- People who perform an on-site search are more likely to return to the site with an intent to purchase.
- In the research, companies had an average overall ecommerce conversion rate of 2.77%. However, the conversion rate nearly doubled to 4.63% from people who used on-site search and found what they were looking for.

Data sources: eConsultancy, ConversionXL

It’s honestly surprising that, in an industry that focuses so intently on data-driven marketing and conversion optimization, we don’t put more effort into on-site search, harnessing users who are engaged and interested in our content and serves. My point is that for a tactic that can become an incredible force multiplier, there’s so little information on it.

Okay, okay, you’re kinda starting to rant. What are my first steps to understanding on-site search?

The first thing you need to understand before starting to optimize your on-site search is what data is being collected by analytics from your on-site search platform. For this exercise, it’s irrelevant whether you’re using Solr, the Google Search Appliance, or a baked-in search platform that came with your content management system.

Ultimately, the goal is to understand “Search Quality” by quantifying it:

When discussing quantifying on-site search, I tend to use the metaphor of resolution. I started playing video games as a kid and that’s continued to today. So, seeing little blocky characters evolve into something incredibly complex is a part of my experience. Clever designers were able to create experiences using only 8-bit resolution. As hardware grew more capable, 16-, 32-, and 64-bit consoles became more mainstream. Each generation of hardware supported greater resolution and the amount of visual information become more complex, more immersive, and more descriptive.

This is how I view measuring and quantifying on-site search. Start by understanding the basic metrics. Start with 8-bit resolution. This is where you’ll start seeing patterns emerge and behaviors evolve. As your experience grows, add more complexity to your metrics, look at the interplays between different types of content, look at how your on-site search results change as your content changes, look at the time it takes for people to find what they’re looking for. It won’t take too long to where you’re looking at your on-site search data at 64-bit resolution.

Image source

As your measurement resolution improves, you can understand the story deeper and with more clarity, and can use that understanding to impact greater change.

Search behavior

Search behavior is the measure of the quantitative actions a user takes on your website. This includes keywords, clicks, and calculated measurements like CTR. Measuring search behavior allows the search professional to see if any changes to the way on-site search works results in a net benefit to on-site search.

How to quanitify search behavior

The simplest metric to use to examine user behavior is CTR.

First of all, there’s an implicit assumption that clicks signal that the user has found something useful and the click is a signal of that found value. Not all clicks are indicators of search success, and there are users that click multiple links on a SERP as a way to refine their search. For now, in our 8-bit world, we need to understand that assumption, yet it’s important to measure overall CTR as a signal of search quality.

When you first start looking at SERP CTR, it’s likely yours will be low. When I first started measuring on-site search, we used the Google Search Appliance and never surpassed a 24% SERP CTR. The first question I was asked was “What’s a good on-site search CTR?” I was able to answer this by examining our different content types (blogs, videos, articles, etc). What I found through customer surveys was that a higher CTR generally correlated with a higher satisfaction with the search experience. The surprising part? Fewer people than expected had a “neutral” experience. This showed me that when it comes to on-site search, people are happy (and remember) a good search experience and people are frustrated (and remember) a poor search experience. The room for a neutral feeling has a very small window. If we had a greater than 65% CTR on our search results, we would be able to show a positive search experience and a greater chance for conversion, assuming that a good search experience meant that the user was able to find what they were looking for.

Higher-resolution metrics on CTR can include different elements of the SERP:

Filter Section CTR
Promoted Section CTR
Category Result CTR
Sponsored Result CTR
Natural Search CTR

SERP Source

Understanding how all of these SERP elements influence clicks can identify opportunities for CTR optimization with either better results or a better UI. This is probably the most superficial metric to measure behavior — I haven’t even mentioned keyword refinements, revenue per search, revenue per keyword, or conversions gained through search. All are very important to measure the overall success of on-site search, but probably deserve their own article.

Search findability

Findability is the measurement of how a user finds the content they’re looking for. Findability is directly tied to the content’s rank for particular keywords. When the on-site SERP shows the results, knowing which piece of content the user clicks on, combined with the average rank of that content, can reveal if good content is being clicked, thus making it “findable.”

How to quantify findability

I take a fairly simple approach to measuring findability. I take a look at it from a content-level perspective. For each piece of content, I measure the SERP impressions, the amount of times a piece of content shows up in the top ten results. I look at the average rank, then measure the CTR of the piece of content. Using this information I can identify pieces of content that show up a lot in the SERP and have a low CTR. Looking at the average rank tells me if, on average, the content is seen. If it has an average rank of less than 10 (such as “content 2” in the table below) there’s a reason why it shows up frequently but rarely gets clicked on, despite being in a good ranking position. Conversely, when I look at “content 5,” I see that it has high impressions, low clicks, high rank, and a low CTR. I then take a look at this piece of content to see if I can make it rank a bit higher in our on-site search. If I see the CTR improve, then I’ve increased its findability as well as its value.

A higher-resolution version of findability would include the number of keywords that trigger an impression and a visibility scoring model that would describe how “visible” a piece of content is. Factoring in clicks and CTR into the visibility model would give you an overall findability score that could quickly identify valuable content that is not found and non-valuable content that is frequently found.

Result set quality

Determining result set quality is answering the question, “How good are the results for given keywords?” For example, if a common search term on your site is “shoes” and your top result is the page where the user can filter down to the right kind of shoe, and that page is in the pathway to a good conversion rate, then that’s a good result for the keyword. However, if the results for “shoes” are more general — “athletic shoes,” “red shoes,” “ballet shoes” — and the results for this keyword have a poor conversion rate, then the result set quality can be improved.

I use a fairly simple method to make sure that my results are performing according to the best interests of the company. I look at the number of times a SERP appeared and then measure the number of times that SERP resulted in a conversion or a consumption (a user reading a page that doesn’t have a call-to-action on it). Then, looking at the successful events that occur after a SERP occurs, I have a metric that I can track, trend, and show the value of on-site search.

Which metrics are core to measuring on-site search?

At the most basic level, these are the metrics we’ll need to start measuring on-site search. Many of the nuances we’re measuring in SEO applies to onsite-search as well. While most of these metrics we likely already know, I want to describe them in the context of on-site search.

Query
- A query is a package of information that is sent to the search platform. While “query” and “keyword” can generally be interchanged, keywords and keyword phrases have meaning because they’re a part of language. A query is a packet of information because it is the “thing” that is sent to the search engine to be parsed, recognized, and compared against a body of documents.
Keyword
- A keyword or keyword phrase is the representation of user intent, expressed in words. A query is an abstraction of the keyword phrase. Keywords and phrases are essentially bags of words to be compared against other, larger bags of words.
Instance/Impression
- An instance (also impression) is the number of times or the frequency that a keyword or keyword phrase is entered into the search bar and sent to the search engine.
Click
- In the context of on-site search, a click occurs when a piece of content returned by the search engine is clicked.
CTR
- The click-through rate of on-site search is measured by clicks/instances. CTR is a calculated metric, but critical to understand the success of individual keywords as well as the overall health of the search engine.
Rank
- Rank is a measurement of the position of content in the SERP. Rank can be expressed in two different ways. Rank for keyword is the number where a piece of content sits for a given keyword. Average Rank measures the average of where a particular piece of content ranks over a set of keywords.
- Examples:
  - For keyword “x,” document “y” is at rank 4
  - For document “y,” the average rank is 2.3 for keywords “a, b, c, d, & e”
Conversion
- For content found through on-site search, a conversion is the number of times the user completed an action such as a purchase, lead gen, or consumption.
- Conversion is a quantitative metric that is binary. The user either converted or they didn’t.
Consumption
- Consumption is a qualitative measurement for content that doesn’t have a clear conversion point. For sites or pages that are information-oriented (rather than conversion-oriented), it’s generally described as “it is likely that the user consumed this document.”
- Examples:
  - A user scrolled to the bottom of the content and spent more than “x” time on page
  - A user shared the document via social media
  - A user commented on the document
  - A user viewed this page after search and before conversion.
Search with No Results/SNR
- A search with no results is a search that didn’t match any documents, resolving in 0 results on the SERP.

Unicorn Searches
- A keyword query that has an instance of 1 for a given time range.

That’s a long list of ways to measure on-site search. How can I apply these to understanding it?

While measuring the “On-Site Search Pillars” of search behavior, search findability, & result set quality is the ultimate goal to truly understanding on-site search, the most basic pillar and arguably the most important one is search behavior. Understanding customer behavior as they interact with on-site search is likely the very first thing we’d want to start measuring to get actionable information.

Here are five ways to start understanding and optimizing your on-site search.

1: Keymatch critical keywords

Keymatching is a system that’s available in most enterprise search platforms that generally puts up to three recommended results at the very top of the SERP, right above the natural results. Keymatching is non-algorithmic and often includes a way (like Google AdWords) to match keywords to content. Usually there’s a visual element to separate it from the natural results, such as “recommended results.” Think of keymatching as Adwords for your own site. You can promote new products or increase the visibility of highly converting products. See the keymatch for “heartbleed” on Red Hat’s Customer Portal SERP. Right below the recommended results (keymatch) are the natural results:

For example, when the heartbleed vulnerability was identified, I created a keymatch for specific terms that, when searched, would trigger our keymatch system to display our Heartbleed Detector app. Based upon our search volume, we knew that people would want to check to see if they were vulnerable first, then look for a solution. We used our keymatch system to make the top of the funnel very clear.

Another strategy that’s more focused on ecommerce is to keymatch terms that match to promotions or sales you’re having. For a site that’s selling apparel where all their socks are on sale, keymatching will give the user the information that all socks are discounted.

2: Get a good overview of the health of your on-site search.

To do this, look at the overall on-site search CTR. Don’t worry about what it is at the moment; this is about understanding how well things are performing in the real world. Use this metric to get a strategic view of how search is performing. If you see that your on-site search CTR is lower than you want it to be, look at the top keywords searched, then repeat the searches on your on-site search.

It’s very likely that your top searches are “high volume but low intent” keywords. You might be looking at top-of-funnel keywords like “shoes,” “insurance plans,” or “sci-fi movies.” Is there a good landing page on your site so that the user can funnel down to what they’re looking for? Generally, these low-intent keywords are from people who may not know what they’re looking for, but will know it when they see it.

Use either a keymatch system or a boosting system to push top-of-funnel pages to the top of the search results. If you don’t have these types of pages, you’ll know that you’re going to need them. What’s a boosting system, you ask? Boosting is a term that adds relevancy to a piece of content or even content types to rank higher in the natural SERP.

For example, imagine that the term “red shoes” resulted in on-site natural results for different types of red shoes. However, data shows that people looking for “red shoes” convert at a much higher rate for the imaginary “Red” brand that has a shoe line. One way we can improve the natural search results for this scenario is to boost the brand “Red” for queries including “red shoes.” While you can force content to the very top, keep in mind that boosting is a broadsword solution that may cause collateral search damage and unintended consequences to your search results. However, if the data supports such a broad change, using a boost in your on-site search platform is a good tool to use smartly.

3: Look at individual pieces of content in the context of on-site search performance.

From the perspective of an individual piece of content, it will likely show up for a variety of keywords. Looking at the data from on-site search at the content level will reveal what keywords trigger that piece of content to show up in the top 10 results.

The first step is to look at how much traffic that piece of content gets from on-site search. Secondly, look at the clicks and CTR. Notice that in the following example, most keywords deliver a decent CTR except one. This piece of content delivers no clicks, no revenue, and ultimately no value to the user. This is a powerful signal to the business to look at why this piece of content ranks for that keyword. Sometimes, on-site search can deliver poor or irrelevant results. The solution here is to either fix the content so it delivers value or use your ability to de-boost that piece of content for that keyword.

Clearly, this content works with other keywords, so the problem may not be the content, but the fact that it ranks for a keyword that has no relevance to the content. To understand on-site search’s weight in generating revenue, compare the revenue and conversion rates with other marketing channels such as SEO, email, direct, or social.

4: Use searches with no results to enhance content

If you have people searching for things that deliver no results and the frequency is significant, this is a great way to give your content team information on what to write about next. For example, the site ThinkGeek had an April Fool’s joke about a Tauntaun sleeping bag. I talked to someone at ThinkGeek and they mentioned that even though the product wasn’t real, they started seeing several hundreds of searches for that product on their site. What was surprising to them was that the searches not only increased, but continued well after the April Fool’s joke. As a result, they actually made that sleeping bag and it became a customer hit. While it wasn’t only found via on-site search, the consistency of mentions in social media, on-site search, and customer service convinced them to actually make it.

5: When it comes to UI/UX, test snippet UI, test SERP UI, test everything

Don’t accept the out-of-the-box search UI. Test putting images or embedded videos into the snippet. Test putting linkable “top level” breadcrumb navigation into the snippet. Create good A/B tests to see what will increase clicks and conversions. Talk to internal stakeholders, talk to your users, and find out how they use search. Once you know what your critical business goals are around on-site search, testing the UI can significantly increase CTR and conversions.

Great, thanks… Now I want to do all the things. Where do I start?

I know that I’ve covered a lot of topics that really require a lot of nuance, a lot of industry-specific idiosyncrasies, and other considerations to on-site search. Because there’s not a lot of current information or even communities that surround on the non-development side of on-site search, I can understand that there might be questions about how do I start using this information.

My advice: start by understanding what your search platform is. Do you use IBM Websphere for your ecommerce platform? Do you use Apache Solr? Google Search Appliance? Elasticsearch? Look deeply to what the features of your ecommerce or search platform has. If you haven’t already, hook up your analytics platform to your on-site search and start collecting data. I’ve found that many times, when companies have set up their analytics, they don’t apply basic metrics to their on-site search. Look at the data you have and start setting up experiments. Try to make a piece of content rank higher in your on-site search. Experiment with meta-keyword tags (yes… Google and other search engines ignore it, but generally, on-site search engines still love meta keywords). Start small experiments to prove that you can increase revenue by making small changes. Once you understand your search platform, once you’re seeing small changes you’ve made that have positive results, dig deeper. Share your experiences (I’d love to hear them) and find people to collaborate with. I cannot claim that I know everything, but what I hope to have done is created a small group of enthusiastic people who can work together to create even more information on this oft-ignored, but oh-so-useful subject.

Some acknowledgements:

Red Hat isn’t just about open source technology, it’s about being an open organization. With that open and collaborative mindset, I want to share my thanks and deep appreciation to some people who helped me with this article. Linda Caplinger, Jairus Mitchell, & Thomas Stokes are brilliant people who provided feedback, suggestions, and welcome critiques.

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How to Kickstart an SEO Audit for Your Startup – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Launching a startup is a huge task all on its own. While it can be a challenge to factor SEO into the mix, it’s an incredibly important consideration. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares a comprehensive plan to kick off your new SEO audit and grab a piece of that organic search pie from the get-go.

Pro tip: For easy listening, this video is broken up into 9 chapters that correspond with the transcript below.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, everyone down at StartCon. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Rand Fishkin. I’m the co-founder of Moz, and today I’m going to be talking to all of you and to Whiteboard Friday fans everywhere about how to kick-start an SEO audit for your startup.

So what I’ve done here is I’ve taken our classic SEO pyramid, sort of you’ve got to start with a strong base and work your way up. Well, I flipped it, because, in an audit scenario, we’re actually going to start from the bottom and work our way to the top. So I’ve inverted our pyramid. We’re going to start with crawling and accessibility, and we’re going to work all the way up to conversion.

Now, SEO in a startup setting can be challenging. I’m going to assume that your startup has already launched your website or your web content, your application, and that now you’ve just realized, “Wait, maybe we should do some of that SEO stuff.” And yes, you should. Let me make three big reasons, three big cases why you should.

Search traffic is among the highest percentage of all referral traffic on the web. So whereas social traffic sends approximately 5% to 6% of all the web’s referral traffic, search engines send about 28% or 29% of all the web’s referring traffic. This is data according to SimilarWeb who has a large clickstream panel that they look at.
Organic search traffic is more than 90% of all the clicks that go to search results. So 90% of the clicks are going to organic, 10% or actually less than 10% are going to the paid results. Companies around the world are spending $40, $50, $60 billion a year or more on Google’s paid search results alone. That organic stuff is a competitive advantage because it means low cost of customer acquisition. It tends to mean higher retention. It tends to mean higher conversion rates. Very, very attractive traffic.
Searches are a specific request from a user that says, “I want this thing and I want it right now.” That’s some of the most powerful traffic you can possibly be in front of on the web, and, as a result, the startups that can get their product, their service, their company, their brand in front of those searchers can have an outsized impact.

Now, we need to kick off this audit.

Crawling, indexing, and website structure

What I’ve essentially done here is taken sort of the top three things to be thinking about for each of these and detailed them for you. So when it comes to crawling and web structure, we want:

1. Everything on one sub and root domain.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen startups use blog.startup.com, or use startupblog.com. Or they blog only on Medium.com instead of blogging on their own site and using Medium as an additional network to amplify that content. Or they put everything on their app and their app is one page, and so Google can’t index anything except that one page. Generally, all of these are terrible ideas. If you can, keep everything in subfolders, or if you call them subdirectories, of your website. Don’t separate out your content on to multiple sites, and don’t build anything on somebody else’s site unless you’re also using it on your site and just referring back. You want to use Medium, that’s great. You want to use Facebook, great. You want to use LinkedIn Publishing, fantastic. Always have the “Here’s the link to the original” and point it to your website.

2. You can sign up for Google Search Console (it is free).

That will help you identify a lot of crawl errors and issues. If you work with a professional SEO, chances are they’re going to use a tool like OnPage.org or Screaming Frog or Moz’s Crawl. Those are all good too. They can provide a little bit more extra detail.

3. Eliminate duplicates, search URLs, and thin pages

One of the things that you will want to do, when you’re looking at your site, is eliminate duplicates, search URLs, meaning pages on your site that are essentially just search results — Google does not like your search results in their search results — and thin pages, pages that have very little content. You might think, “Oh, but they target some extra keywords for me.” Yeah, but Google considers your site as a whole. If you have thousands of pages with very thin content, they’re going to rank your other content lower, and that is not a good thing. You do not want that.

Keyword research & targeting

1. Make a big, broad list.

You could do this in Excel. You could do it in a Google Spreadsheet. You could do it in a tool like Keyword Explorer. I want you to use a bunch of different sources. I want you to look at keywords that your competitors are ranking for. You can find that from lots of different tools. You could use something like Keyword Explorer. You could use SEMrush. You could use KeyCompete. You could use SpyFu. There are lots and lots of tools that allow you to do this.I want you to also use the related and suggested search terms that come up when you search for the key terms and phrases you’re already targeting in Google. I want you to use semantically-connected terms and terms that are in the format of questions. A lot of folks like Answer The Public. Moz also has the filter in Keyword Explorer for queries that are in the form of questions. These will give you a big, big, broad list.

2. From there, you’re going to need some metrics:

You want volume, you can get that from Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool. You will have to either start an account and pay some money for some paid search ads. Otherwise, Google only shows you these terrible things. Or you’re going to have to use a third-party tool like a SEMrush or a Keyword Explorer.
You want difficulty, so you want to know how hard it will be to rank. That is not the same as the Competition Score that you get from AdWords. Competition in AdWords is just the competition in the paid search results. Not the same thing as how difficult it will be to rank in the organic search results.
You want to know click-through rate opportunity. If there are lots of ads above the fold, if there’s a knowledge graph, if there’s an answer box up top there, that’s going to drive clicks away from the organic results, and you need to know that before you choose to target a keyword.

3. Prioritize by the importance to you and to your company.

You’re going to use these metrics and you’re going to prioritize by the importance to you, to your company. You’re going to prioritize by the ease, the difficulty, and by the traffic, which is some function of the click-through rate opportunity and the volume, in order to choose right keywords for you. You’re going to prioritize that big list that you’ve got, and then you’re going to start targeting. We are going to create content that targets those searchers and serves them well.

Accessible content that delights searchers

Why do I say delight searchers here in this third section? Well, because content that merely serves your purposes, that ranks and maybe gets one or two percent of people to convert on your site, give you their email address or sign up for whatever it is you have to sign up for, a free trial, or a subscription to your software, that’s fine. But you’re probably going to be outranked by someone who does a fantastic job of serving searchers before putting their own interests into the mix. If you put your interest ahead of searcher’s interest, over time, someone else is going to take that traffic away from you and Google’s going to rank them first.

1. Don’t just serve your own interest, your own funnel.

Satisfy those searchers.

2. You can use low engagement metrics to identify poorly performing URLs.

So if you filter in your Google Analytics, your Omniture, whatever you’ve got, by pages that receive traffic from Google referrals and then you look at bounce rate, you look at time on site, you look at pages per visit, and you see pages that are very low on those metrics, well, that is going to tell you, you are not doing a great job of serving those searchers. Google will probably, over time, push you down, push your competitors up. That’s a bad thing.

We want content that is doing a great job of delighting searchers. It has to serve both their implicit and explicit query. The explicit part of the query, that’s usually obvious. The implicit part can be a, “What do they really want to do after that, once they have that answer?”

Keyword use & on-page optimization

Next, we’re going to take that content and we are going to optimize it for search engines and searchers. That means using keywords intelligently and doing some smart on-page optimization.

Now, classic SEO kinds of things, some of them no longer apply. The meta keywords tag, for example, that’s gone. We don’t need to do the same sort of every little variation of a keyword demands a different page that we used to do in the past. But things like…

1. Keyword use in the title, the URL, the meta description, the headline, and inside the content still matter.

What we should be doing nowadays, though, is taking all the keywords that share the same searcher intent, where the searcher is trying to essentially accomplish the same thing. Let’s say I’m a mobile phone directory and I have a bunch of reviews of mobile phone devices. “Best mobile phones, best cell phones, best smartphones, best smartphones 2016,” guess what? They all share the same searcher intent. I should have one page targeting all those keywords, not a separate one for each one.

2. All the keywords that share the same intent get one URL.

Snippet, markup, & schema

This is essentially where I’m trying to stand out from the pack in Google search results. If you’ve performed a search in the last five years, you know that it doesn’t just look like 10 blue links anymore. There are a lot more rich options for how your snippet, the search engine result position that you appear in, can look to searchers, and that can drive a lot more traffic.

1. Check out Schema.org.

So check out Schema.org and check out the types of results in your specific field or industry or that go with your content that could be met by schema that Google supports right now.

2. Look at your keyword research for the types of results that already appear in your SERPs.

You should be taking a look in your keyword research at the types of results that already appear in your search engine result pages. So if you check out your keywords, you’re using a tool like Keyword Explorer, you can see here’s a distribution of search results that contain images, ones that contain news results, ones that contain recipe-rich snippets, ones that contain video, whatever it is, and then you can choose to do those.

3. Identify “answer box” opportunities.

15%, just about 15% of all search queries in Google today have an answer box of some kind. An answer box, meaning that featured snippet up at what we call result number 0, before the top 10, usually right after the ads. That can drive a tremendous amount more traffic. If you have answer box opportunities, you can take those from your competitors, or you can have your snippet appear in there. There’s a great presentation from Doctor Pete that you can check out on Moz or a Whiteboard Friday on that same topic as well.

Alternative formats & engines

Next, we want to think about non-Google sources of traffic or non-google.com web search sources of traffic. For example:

1. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, ahead of even Baidu, ahead of Bing, ahead of Yahoo. If you are doing video content, you should be thinking about YouTube. Even if you’re not doing video content, you should be checking YouTube’s search volume to see if lots of people are searching on YouTube for answers to the questions that your business could answer with video.

2. Consider alternative search formats like images, news, and apps.

You also want to consider alternative search formats, like images, news, and apps in lots of spaces. For example, in home decor and home repair, image search is very, very popular. Obviously, in spheres like politics and technology, news is very popular. For lots of kinds of queries, apps are very popular, particularly those ones that happen on mobile and have a clear app use or need around them.

3. Check out Google Maps if you’re in local.

If you are in the local space, you’re going to want to check out Google Maps, which can send a tremendous amount of traffic. Through there, you can use a tool like Moz Local or Yext for that.

4. Ecommerce should pay attention to engines like Amazon or Etsy.

If you’re in ecommerce and you’re selling a physical product, there might be engines like Amazon or Etsy, where you could and should be putting your product.

Links and amplification

Yes, links still matter. Yes, they are still critical for rankings. You will need a lot of links from good places that are editorially pointing to your content, to your website, in order to rank well.

You also want to earn other forms of amplification that will then lead to links. Social sharing is one of the big ones. Word of mouth is obviously a big one. Lots of forms of advertising can eventually lead to links through awareness and those sorts of things.

1. Before you ever create content, ask the question: Who will help amplify this and why?

If you don’t have a great answer to that question, and I mean a specific list of people or a specific list of outlets, you shouldn’t hit Publish. Go and do that work first and every piece of content that you create will have more success in terms of amplification and reach and link potential and the potential to earn an audience. And why are you creating content if no one’s going to see it? This isn’t a forest. You don’t need no trees falling.

2. You want to choose a link flywheel that’s going to earn you links over time.

There are a few different structures.

News and press tends to be a good structure that earn links over time in a flywheel sort of format.
Content marketing tends to be one.
Partnerships tend to be one.
Embedded content tends to be one.

These flywheels tend to encounter friction, and that’s where you use these smart hacks, like submissions to certain kinds of directories that are editorial and high-quality, or outreach on a one-to-one basis. But you don’t want to be doing these one-to-one kinds of hacky link building unless it’s in the service of a flywheel that’s going to move faster over time and grow your link profile while you’re asleep.

Conversion and funnel optimization

So you’ve done all this stuff to serve searchers well, to earn their trust and their traffic, and now we have to realize two things.

1. Conversion takes time and it takes a lot of visits.

In fact, WordStream, Larry Kim, did some great research showing that, over time, on a second or third or fourth visit, conversion rates move up by hundreds of percents versus that first visit.

Don’t expect that you’re going to rank for a keyword, drive someone to your site for the first time and convert them instantly. That rarely happens. Sometimes, but rarely. What’s generally going to happen is that you’re going to earn that click first, and then, over time, you’re going to earn them back again, maybe through social channels, maybe through amplification, through word of mouth, through type-in traffic, through a branded search, through another completely unrelated search. Then eventually, they’ll find their way back to you, and on the third or fourth or fifth visit, they will convert.

So we have to be thinking about: How can I delight people? How can I brand them? Then, eventually, I want to draw them back to my website and close the deal through my funnel. That’s what conversion optimization is when it works in the organic world.

FAQ

Okay. We’re through this very, very basic audit process. A few frequently asked questions that I always get from startups:

A. “Should I get a consultant, an agency, or should I do it in-house?”

If you know that SEO is going to be a long-term, competitive advantage that you continue to invest in and it’s going to be something you need to do for the life of your company, you should go in-house as soon as possible.
If, however, it’s (SEO) more like a nice-to-have and it’s a helpful marketing channel, but it’s not a core competency and you’re not going to build the company’s marketing strategy around it, consultant or agency can work just fine. And there are some great ones, by the way.

B. PPC versus SEO.

Paid search is easy to invest in. It is high-cost, but it’s fast to get started. For this reason, it’s incredibly competitive, and it tends to be the case that people are bidding at or very close to their maximum ROI to spend ratio, meaning, unless, you have an incredible business model that’s way better than all your competitors, there’s not usually a lot of competitive advantages to be earned in return on investment or in cost of customer acquisition to lifetime value ratio in PPC.
SEO, on the other hand, takes a long time. It’s a lot of investment. This is often a six-month or a year process before you start earning big returns, and, therefore, very few people invest in it strategically. It is a much bigger competitive advantage.

C. I get this from a lot of folks, especially in the technical world. “Can’t Google just figure this all out?”

No, they absolutely cannot. If you ignore these things and choose not to invest strategically and specifically in SEO, Google will not just figure it out. That has never happened to anyone who has made SEO a true competitive advantage in their startup, in their company’s marketing channels. It’s just not how it works.

D. “Does social media impact SEO?”

The answer is yes, but indirectly. When you do good things on social, they can lead to good links. They can lead to good engagement on your site, which is certainly a positive signal for Google, and they can lead to word of mouth, which can result in branded searches and more clickstream traffic to your site, and all these sorts of things that Google can see. But if you think that buying a bunch of likes or a bunch of tweets on Fiverr is going to help your page rank higher, yeah, you’re in for, well, five dollars of pain. Fiverr is quite cheap.

All right, everyone. Thank you so much for having me on StartCon. Thanks for watching me on Whiteboard Friday. And I hope to see you around Moz and maybe down in Australia sometime in the near future. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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27 Big Updates & A Peek at the Future: Moz Pro’s 2016 Retrospective

Posted by adamf

Another year has slipped by, and while we had our ups and downs, returning to our SEO roots has given us greater focus and renewed purpose. We’ve redoubled our efforts with the goal of building the best SEO product in the industry. We know it’s a lofty goal with so many great competitors out there, but this is the target that served as our north star in 2016 and continues to get us out of bed each morning.

Our increased focus on SEO translated to a big increase in the number of new features and improvements we were able to add to Moz Pro in 2016. In fact, we shipped more significant updates in 2016 than 2014 and 2015 combined, and we already have a lot in the works for 2017.

We also collected and surfaced a huge amount of data in 2016. A few notable examples:

Customers created 141,000 new campaigns for their websites
4.6 million tracked keywords were added to campaigns
1.8 million keyword queries were run in Keyword Explorer
25 million URLs were researched in Open Site Explorer

Such ever-increasing demand keeps us on our toes and we continue to invest in scaling our infrastructure to keep the data flowing smoothly.

Without further ado, here’s a rundown of some of the noteworthy updates you may have missed in 2016 and a sneak peek at some exciting updates coming in 2017.

Keyword Explorer: Redefining keyword research

Okay, I’m sure you’ve heard us mention Keyword Explorer once or twice. More than twice? Alright, we do like to talk about it. Building Keyword Explorer was a huge effort and our biggest release of the year. Keyword Explorer was a passion project for Moz’s co-founder, Rand, and it shows in the quality of the data and thoughtful workflow. If you do keyword research for SEO or content creation, check out this tool.

1. We launched Keyword Explorer with a rich set of capabilities

Keyword Explorer launched during the first half of the year, and offered some cool benefits right out of the gate:

Keyword Explorer takes you all the way through the keyword research process. Save time and simplify your keyword research process, from discovering keyword ideas to getting metrics to building a list. Once you’ve built a list, filter and prioritize which keywords to target based on the numbers that matter.
Keyword Explorer features metrics essential to the SEO process: two you’re familiar with — Volume and Difficulty — and three that are less familiar: Opportunity, Importance, and Potential. Use these comprehensive metrics to prioritize more effectively and focus your time on the best opportunities.
We built a keyword volume score that goes beyond what AdWords reports with ~95% accuracy. Accurate, trustworthy keyword volume data is getting harder to obtain, but we’re here for you.
Keyword Explorer gathers keyword suggestions from a broad variety of sources, so you can gather a greater variety of keyword ideas from one source.
We invested in strong import and export capabilities, so it’s easy to incorporate Keyword Explorer into your existing keyword research process.

Rand even created a quick demo video to introduce the new capabilities:

And we didn’t stop there. We collected a whole bunch of feedback after launch and built in a ton of new features to make the tool even better:

2. Automatically group Related Keywords

Rather than wading through large volumes of similar keywords and adding each variation to a list, we’ve added auto-grouping as atop any list of keyword suggestions. This is helpful for discovering and focusing on themes, and adding a whole group of related keywords to your own research lists.

3. Check page-one rankings in Keyword Explorer research lists

See if you already rank on page one for they keywords in your lists. This is a hugely valuable data point for prioritizing which keywords to target.

4. Add keywords from your list to a campaign for rank tracking

This was at the top of the list of feature requests at launch. Now you can take the keywords in your carefully cultivated list and add them directly to a campaign for ongoing rank tracking.

5. View improved and expanded keyword volume data

Clickstream-based search behavior, plus data from other sources, combined with our modeling against AdWords’ impression counts on real campaigns, has given us higher accuracy, more coverage, and faster recognition of volume trends than ever before. It also allowed us to calculate search volume data for more countries, with significant coverage for the UK, Canada, and Australia, more moderate data for other Western languages and countries, and a small amount in regions and languages beyond those.

6. Find questions people are asking in search engines

This is great for content ideas, refining existing content, and finding featured snippets you might want to try and win.

*Further reading: Get even more out of your keyword research

Whether you’re using Keyword Explorer or just doing keyword research in general, we’ve posted a few articles this year that can help you improve your research, especially as Google gets more sophisticated:

Try Keyword Explorer free now

Huge improvements to Rankings: SERP Features, historical timeframes, algo updates, and more!

7. Discover and track SERP features

Dr. Pete has been pushing the industry (and us internally) to think beyond 10 blue links. While organic rankings remain a core SEO focus, Google has been adding more and more SERP features to a large proportion of search queries, and as an SEO, you just can’t ignore them anymore. To help provide more visibility to the SERP features and related opportunities, we’ve integrated in-depth SERP feature analysis into the rankings section of your campaigns. Highlights include:

Track the 16 highest-impact desktop SERP features for each keyword ranking you track in a campaign.

View which SERP features show up for the keywords you track, and whether you or your competitors show up in them.

See how different SERP features have trended for the keywords you track. You may find that a certain type of search feature is trending up and is worth attention.

Discover when we think you have an opportunity to show up in a SERP feature and how best to approach it.

8. Get alerted to featured snippet opportunities

Featured snippets appear above organic position #1 and can improve click-through rates for keywords you already rank in the top 10 for. Find the most lucrative opportunities for them in your Campaign Insights list.

*Further reading: Win those featured snippets

If you are interested in featured snippets, I’d recommend a couple of great posts from Dr. Pete:

And SERP Features is just the tip of the iceberg. Almost everything else you see in campaign rankings is new or overhauled.

9. See all of your historical rankings data

We started the year with a significant architectural overhaul of our rankings system. Aside from a faster and more streamlined interface, this also allowed us to support one of our biggest customer requests, and present all historical rankings data. Choose any timeframe to see and report on how your rankings have changed within that period.

10. Overlay Google algo updates on your rankings graphs

See a dramatic change in your rankings overnight? We now leverage the great data from MozCast to show any Google algorithm changes that might be affecting your search presence. Just hover over the little Google “G” to see major and minor update details.

11. Get more from your data with advanced filtering and improved sorting

Easily filter down your long list of rankings by keyword, label, location, or brandedness, and sort them accordingly to get a handle on your data.

12. See search volume data alongside your rankings

This had been a frequent request. We baked in the same powerful search volume data from Keyword Explorer alongside your rankings.

13. View detailed keyword analyses in your campaigns

Our keyword analysis page was completely rebuilt, with some great new additions:

Flexible timeframes, including the ability to view a keyword’s performance at any time in the history of your campaign
Volume and Difficulty scores, powered by Keyword Explorer’s data
Four beautiful graphs: Search Visibility, Highest Ranking Position, Keyword Performance, and SERP Features
An easy-to-read SERP report with callouts for pages on your domain, and those on your competitors’ domains
Faster page loads and improved performance

Intrigued? Take a trial of Moz Pro, free for 30 days

Page Optimization improved again

We made some big upgrades to this section late in 2015, but we weren’t quite done.

14. Discover topics related to your page content

This new tab shown with Page Optimization reports lets you see the topics that your SERP competition is writing about. This can help you understand what kinds of keywords signal topical relevance to Google and provide good ideas for how you can make your content more robust and relevant to searchers. I’m not going to go too deep here, but check out Jon White’s fantastic post for some great tips and examples to get the most from this feature. Rand also shares some great tips in this Whiteboard Friday, Using Related Topics and Semantically Connected Keywords in Your SEO.

15. Dive right into on-page optimization from your rankings

Quickly run page optimization reports and view page optimization scores right from your rankings.

We’ve made Insights better

Our Insights dashboard also underwent some solid improvements in 2016. We continue to surface new insights in this section as we add more capabilities across Moz Pro. Our aim is to make this a powerful section that surfaces new problems and opportunities that we discover as we collect and analyze your data every week.

16. Mark completed insights as “Done”

We heard feedback that many of you were attempting to use Insights as a to-do list, but we didn’t make that very easy. Now you can check off insights from your list once you’ve read or acted upon them. They will then be moved to your Done list, where you can track your completed work.

17. Add tasks to Trello

If you need a more robust workflow, we’ve added a way to quickly add insight tiles to Trello. Trello is a power task management solution, which also happens to be free. I’ve used it quite a bit myself, and happily recommend it.

18. Enjoy a better summary of your weekly rankings

We updated the rankings summary tile to give you a clearer look at your most important ranking changes from week to week.

Reporting got some needed attention

Outside of the more obvious features I’ve shared, we’ve also been working quietly behind the scenes to make our reporting and exports better.

19. Generate “real” PDF reports

Our old PDF export solution was functional, but clunky. It converted page modules into images and then encapsulated them in a PDF. We rebuilt our PDF engine so that PDFs created in Moz Pro include text as text and images as images, offering better editing, copying, and image quality.

20. Customize your rankings CSV exports

We launched updated CSVs for campaign rankings that respect filters as well as time frames. Now you can export just the data you need rather than poring through a massive historical rankings export.

21. Build custom reports more easily with a revamped interface

Adding and managing custom reports is easier to use and easier on the eyes.

22. Get regular insights directly in your inbox

We revamped our weekly email updates, making them cleaner and more informative. They now include both ranking updates and important insights that we discover for you each week. We plan to add more timely information to these as we continue to improve our datasets and refine the logic behind Insights.

The Mozbar got some love

If you can believe it, the Mozbar recently surpassed 400,000 installs. It was due a little bit of attention.

23. Breath easier, we’ve improved Mozbar stability and reliability

Unfortunately, our most beloved tool ran into some stability and login challenges when some unfriendly folks started abusing the service behind it. We invested some quality time to fix up the authentication issues and data inconsistency that were becoming a real frustration for customers.

24. Get On-Page Content Suggestions for any page on the web (brand new!)

We haven’t officially announced this one yet, but if you are a Pro customer and using the Mozbar, you can click on the little analysis icon:

When you enter a keyword, you will now see content suggestions just to the right of the on-page analysis. You can dig in just like in the page analysis section of your Moz Pro campaigns. Use this to beef up your relevance or find new topics to write about.

Start using MozBar for Chrome free today

Even Fresh Web Explorer got an update

Fresh Web Explorer continues to collect syndicated content from across the Web, making it easy to see where and when fresh content has mentioned a specified brand or linked to a domain. On top of that, Fresh Web Explorer’s alerts serve as a great alternative to Google Alerts, sending you an email anytime we see your target brands or keywords mentioned.

25. Show only Google Verified News Sources to reduce noise in your results

Filter your searches and/or alerts to show only those sources/domains we’ve observed in Google News. E.g. here’s a search for Amazon.com with news filtering on (3,067 results in the last 4 weeks) vs. the same search with news filtering off (28,798 results). This can save a lot of time when you’re looking for the most important results.

Beyond these features, there was a lot more going on behind the scenes

26. We made significant performance improvements

Our hard-working engineering team rebuilt a lot of the scaffolding behind campaigns, making them much snappier to load. This work continues into 2017. They also squashed dozens of bugs and made myriad small improvements across out tools and campaigns. If you are interested in keeping tabs on new features, fixes, or updates, you can find them all on our Moz Pro Updates page.

27. We now offer free product demos to customers and trialers

The friendly faces now helping you navigate Moz Pro

Another important addition we’ve made to our product isn’t in the product at all. We’ve quietly built out a Customer Success team. This cadre of product experts provide custom demos for new customers that are looking for an overview of Moz Pro, as well as long-time customers that are interested in learning more about new features. If you are interested in a refresher or a full walkthrough, schedule one here!

Also, if you’re looking to level up your SEO skills or get some deeper support in using Moz tools to tackle your SEO strategy, we’re actively working on more paid training options. Stay tuned!

So, what’s up next?

I hope you’re still with me, because I’ve got a bit more to share. Here are some of the big things to expect in 2017.

A rebuilt and re-imagined Custom Crawl

One of the big projects that our team has been busy with in 2016 is a total rewrite of our custom crawler. This is already being looked at by a few customers in a very limited alpha release. We still have a lot to add to it before it’s ready to go, but here are some of the benefits that we’ve already baked in:

A much faster and more resilient crawler. Whether your site is hundreds or millions of pages, expect your crawls much more quickly and reliably.
The ability to compare one crawl to the next and see what new issues have cropped up and which were confirmed as fixed.
A much simpler interface to access your data quickly and easily.
A bunch of other features are in the works to support deeper analysis and customization. More to come soon!

“Keyword Universe”

Cool code name, but what the heck is it?

Do you ever wonder which keywords you already rank for? Which ones your competitors rank for? Who are your SEO competitors? Answer these questions and more with this new data set, which we plan to expose in a number of different ways throughout Moz Pro and in our data products. If you’re curious about accessing this sort of data, please let us know!

What about links?

We’ve got some improvements in the works here too, but we’re keeping this under our hats for now.

And much more…

Beyond these large efforts, we will continue to make updates and improvements large and small throughout the year.

Please let us know what you need most!

We are constantly collecting feedback and looking to solve the most challenging problems that our customers face. Please let us know what’s working for you, what isn’t, and what you need most to be successful with your SEO efforts. You can add your thoughts in the comments here, or message me directly. While we can’t get to everything right away, we are always listening and prioritizing what to work on next.

Thanks for reading. I hope you all have a fantastic 2017!

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Why All 4 of Google’s Micro-Moments Are Actually Local

Posted by MiriamEllis

When America’s first star TV chef, Julia Child, demonstrated the use of a wire whisk on her 1960’s cooking show, the city of Pittsburgh sold out of them. Pennsylvanians may well have owned a few of these implements prior to the show’s air date, but probably didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about them. After the show, however, wire whisks were on everyone’s mind and they simply had to have one. Call it a retro micro-moment, and imagine consumers jamming the lines of rotary phones or hoofing it around town in quest of this gleaming gadget … then zoom up to the present and see us all on our mobile devices.

I like this anecdote from the pages of culinary history because it encapsulates all four of Google’s stated core micro-moments:

I want to know – Consumers were watching a local broadcast of this show in Pittsburgh because they wanted to know how to make an omelet.

I want to go – Consumers then scoured the city in search of the proper whisk.

I want to buy – Consumers then purchased the implement at a chosen retailer.

I want to do – And finally, consumers either referred to the notes they had taken during the show (no DVRs back then) or might have turned to Julia Child’s cookbook to actually beat up their first-ever omelet.

Not only does the wire whisk story foreshadow the modern micro-moment, it also provides a roadmap for tying each of the 4 stages to local SEO via current technology. I’ve seen other bloggers pointing to the ‘I want to go’ phase as inherently local, but in this post, I want to demonstrate how your local business can decisively claim all four of these micro-moments as your own, and claim the desirable transactions resulting thereby!

Understanding Google’s definition of micro-moments

Google whisked up some excitement of their own with the publication of Micro-Moments: Your Guide to Winning the Shift to Mobile. Some of the statistics in the piece are stunning:

65% of smartphone users look for the most relevant information on their devices regardless of what company provides that information,
90% of them aren’t certain what brand they want to purchase when they begin their Internet search,
82% consult their smartphones even after they are inside a chosen store,
and ‘how-to’ searches on YouTube are growing 70% year-over-year.

Google defines micro-moments as “critical touch points within today’s consumer journey, and when added together, they ultimately determine how that journey ends,” and goes on to identify mobile as the great facilitator of all this activity. It’s simple to think of micro-moments as a series of points in time that culminate in a consumer arriving at a transactional decision. For local business owners and their marketers, the goal is to ‘be there’ for the consumer at each of these critical points with the resources you have developed on the web.

Let’s reverse-engineer the famous tale of the wire whisk and put it into a modern technological context, demonstrating how a hypothetical cooking supply store in Pittsburgh, PA could become a major micro-moments winner in 2017.

A variable recipe for local micro-moments success

I want to be sure to preface this with one very important proviso about the order in which micro-moments happen: it varies.

For example, a consumer might decide she wants to patch cracks in her ceiling so she watches a video on YouTube demoing this >>> looks up the name of the putty the YouTube personality was using >>> looks up where to buy that putty locally >>> buys it. Or, the consumer could already be inside a home improvement store, see putty, realize she’d like to patch cracks, then look up reviews of various putty brands, look at a video to see how difficult the task is, and finally, purchase.

There is no set order in which micro-moments occur, and though there may be patterns specific to auto body shops or insurance firms, the idea is to be present at every possible moment in time so that the consumer is assisted, regardless of the order in which they discover and act. What I’m presenting here is just one possible path.

In quest of the fluffier omelet

Our consumer is a 30-year-old man named Walter who loves the fluffy omelets served at a fancy bistro in Pittsburgh. One morning while at the restaurant, Walter asks himself,

“I wonder why I can’t make omelets as fluffy as these at home. I’m not a bad cook. There must be some secret to it. Hey — I challenge myself to find out what that secret is!”

I want to know

While walking back to his car, Walter pulls out his smartphone and begins his micro-moment journey with his I-want-to-know query: how to make a fluffier omelet.

Across town, Patricia, the owner of a franchise location of Soup’s On Cooking Supply has anticipated Walter’s defining moment because she has been studying her website analytics, studying question research tools like Answer The Public, watching Google Trends, and looking at Q&A sites like this one where people are already searching for answers to the secret of fluffy omelets. She also has her staff actively cataloging common in-store questions. The data gathered has convinced her to make these efforts:

Film a non-salesy 1.16-minute video in the store’s test kitchen demonstrating the use of a quality wire whisk and a quality pan (both of which her store carries) for ideal omelet results.
Write an article/blog post on the website with great photos, a recipe, and instructions revealing the secrets of fluffy omelets.
Include the video in the article. Share both the article and video socially, including publishing the video on the company’s YouTube channel (*interesting fact, it might one day show up inside the company’s Google Knowledge Panel).
Answer some questions (electric vs. balloon whisk, cast iron vs. non-stick pan for omelet success) that are coming up for this query on popular Q&A-style sites.
Try to capture a Google Answer Box or two.

Walking down the street, Walter discovers and watches the video on YouTube. He notices the Soup’s On Cooking Supply branding on the video, even though there was no hard-sell in its content — just really good tips for omelet fluffiness.

I want to go

“Soup’s On near me,” Walter asks his mobile phone, not 100% sure this chain has an outlet in Pittsburgh. He’s having his I-Want-To-Go moment.

Again, Patricia has anticipated this need and prevented customer loss by:

Ensuring the company website clearly lists out the name, address, and phone number of her franchise location.
Providing excellent driving directions for getting there from all points of origin.
Either using a free tool like Moz Check Listing to get a health check on the accuracy of her citations on the most important local business listing platforms, or complying with the top-down directive for all 550 of the brand’s locations to be actively managed via a paid service like Moz Local.

Walter keys the ignition.

I want to buy

Walter arrives safely at the retail location. You’d think he might put his phone away, but being like 87% of millennials, he keeps it at his side day and night and, like 91% of his compadres, he turns it on mid-task. The store clerk has shown him where the wire whisks and pans are stocked, but Walter is not convinced that he can trust what the video claimed about their quality. He’d like to see a comparison.

Fortunately, Patricia is a Moz Whiteboard Friday fan and took Rand’s advice about comprehensive content and 10x content to heart. Her website’s product comparison charts go to great lengths, weighing USA-made kitchen products against German ones, Lodgeware vs. Le Creuset, in terms of price, performance for specific cooking tasks, and quality. They’re ranking very well.

Walter is feeling more informed now, while being kept inside of the company’s own website, but the I-Want-To-Buy micro-moment is cemented when he sees:

A unique page on the site for each product sold
Consumer reviews on each of these pages, providing unbiased opinion
Clearly delineated purchasing and payment options, including support of digital wallets, Bitcoin, and any available alternatives like home delivery or curbside pickup. Walter may be in the store right now, but he’s glad to learn that, should he branch out into soup kettles in future, he has a variety of ways to purchase and receive merchandise.

I want to do

The next day, Walter is ready to make his first fluffier omelet. Because he’s already been exposed to Patricia’s article on the Soup’s On Cooking Supply website, he can easily return to it now to re-watch the video and follow the recipe provided. Even in the I-want-to-do phase, Walter is being assisted by the brand, and this multi-part experience he’s now had with the company should go far towards cementing it in his memory as a go-to resource for all of his future culinary needs.

It would be excellent if the website’s page on fluffy omelets also challenged Walter to use his new whisk for creating other dishes — perhaps soufflés (for which he’ll need a ceramic ramekin) or chantilly cream (a nice glass bowl set over ice water helps). Walter may find himself wanting to do all kinds of new things, and he now knows exactly where he can find helpful tutorials and purchase the necessary equipment.

More micro-moment variables

As we’ve seen, it’s completely possible for a local business to own all four of Google’s attested micro-moments. What I can’t cover with a single scenario is all of the variables that might apply to a given geography or industry, but I do want to at least make mention of these three points that should be applicable to most local businesses:

1. Understanding how Micro-Moments Begin

The origins of both I-want-to-do and I-want-to-know moments are incredibly varied. A consumer need can arise from something really practical, as in, it’s winter again and I need to buy snow tires. Or, there can be public/cultural happenings (like Julia Child’s cooking program) to which consumers’ ultimate transactions can be directly traced. To discover the sparks that ignite your specific customers’ micro-moments fires, I recommend delving further into the topic of barnacle local SEO — the process of latching onto existing influences in your community in order to speak to existing wishes and needs.

2. Investing in mobile UX

Google states that 29% of smartphone users will immediately navigate away from any website or app that doesn’t satisfy them. 70% of these cite slow loading and 67% cite too many steps to reach information or purchase as reasons for dissatisfaction. On November 4, 2016, Google announced its major shift toward mobile-first indexing, signaling to all website publishers that Google sees mobile, rather than desktop, as the primary platform now.

Google’s statistics and policies make it irrefutable that every competitive local business which hasn’t yet done so must now devote appropriate funds to creating the best possible mobile user experience. Failure to do so risks reputation, rankings, and revenue.

3. Investing in in-store UX

Though my story of Walter touches briefly on the resources Patricia had built for his in-store experience, I didn’t delve into the skyrocketing technology constantly being pioneered around this micro-moment phase. This would include beacons, though they have so far failed to live up to earlier hype in some ways. It could involve the development of in-store apps. And, at the highest echelons of commerce, it could include kiosks, augmented, and virtual reality.

From shoestring to big-time, micro-moments aren’t so new

KFC may strive to master I-want-to-buy moments with chicken-serving robots, Amazon Go may see micro-moments in checkout-free shopping, and Google Home’s giant, listening ear may be turning whole lives into a series of documented micro-moments, but what makes sense for your local business?

The answer to this is going to be dictated by the competitiveness of your industry and the needs of your consumer base. Does a rural, independently owned hardware store really need a 6-foot-high in-store touch screen enabling customers to virtually paint their houses? Probably not, but a well-written comparison of non-toxic paint brands the shop carries and why they’re desirable for health reasons could transform a small town’s decorating habits. Meanwhile, in more competitive markets, each local brand would be wise to invest in new technology only where it really makes proven sense, and not just because it’s the next big thing.

Our industry loves new technology to a degree that can verge on the overwhelming for striving local business owners, and while it can genuinely be a bit daunting to sink your teeth into all of the variables of winning the micro-moment journey, take heart. Julia Child sold Pittsburgh out of wire whisks with a shoestring, black-and-white PBS program on which she frequently dropped implements on the floor and sent egg beaters flying across rooms.

With our modern capabilities of surveying and mining consumers needs and presenting useful solutions via the instant medium of the web, what can’t you do? The steps in the micro-moments funnel are as old as commerce itself. Simply seize the current available technology … and get cooking!

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How to Delegate SEO Work Effectively

Posted by zeehj

Whether you’re the only SEO at your company, work within a larger team, or even manage others, you still have to stay on top of your projects. Project management skills aren’t and shouldn’t be exclusive to someone (or some tool) with the title “project manager.” I believe that having good project manager skills is essential to getting work done at all, let alone delivering high-quality work in a timely and efficient way.

In defense of management

Freakonomics Radio released this podcast episode in October called In Praise of Maintenance. The TL;DR (or TL;DL, rather) is that our society rewards innovators, but rarely (if ever) celebrates the maintainers: the people who get sh*t done, and do it reliably, often without anyone’s noticing. This podcast episode confirmed what I’d been feeling for a long time: We don’t award enough praise to the good project managers out there who keep engagements moving forward. And that’s largely because it’s not a sexy job: it’s not exciting to report to stakeholders that necessary services that have been reliable for so long are, as always, continuing to be reliable.

It’s only when things aren’t running smoothly does it seem project managers get recognition. A lack of a rewards system means that we’re not teaching PMs, Consultants, Account Managers, and more that their excellent organizational skills are their most valuable asset. Instead, the message being communicated is that innovation is the only praise-worthy result, which oftentimes may not be essential to getting your work done. The irony here is that innovation is the by-product of an excellent project management framework. The situational awareness of knowing how to delegate work to your colleagues and a repertoire of effective organizational habits is vital if you ever want to free up your attention to allow for the headspace and concentration ingenuity requires.

Sound familiar? Lately I’ve been focused on the idea of a cluttered headspace, where it feels like everything on your to-do list is floating ephemerally around in your head, and you can’t seem to pin down what needs to be done. Of course, this isn’t specific to just professional life (or consulting work): it can happen with personal tasks, which can present their own set of organizational challenges. Regardless of your professional role, crunch time is exactly when you need to put on your project manager hat and get yourself organized. Read on to find out the tools and tricks I use to stay on top of my work, and how I delegate work when needed without losing a personal touch on projects.

Manage projects with tools that work for you

What do you do to make that process easier? One Slack conversation that seems to always come up is which project management tools do we use (and which is best). I take the annoying middle-ground stance of “whatever tool you use is best” and I stand by it (don’t worry, I’ll get to the actual list in a minute): a tool is only useful if it’s actually used.

So how do you get started? It’s always important to have preferred methods for project tracking, note keeping, and reminders. Depending on your role and learning style, you may find that some tools work better than others for you. For instance, while I have a few tools I work with to stay on top of client work, I also have a clear plastic desk cover that I can jot down notes and reminders on. Here’s a breakdown of the tools I use to manage projects, and the needs they meet.

Inbox by Gmail. Yes, it’s different from classic Gmail. The two greatest aspects of Inbox, in my opinion, is the ability to snooze emails until a specific day and time, and save reminders for yourself (e.g. “Check in on Ty’s progress for the page speed audit,” or “Watch the video in this link after work”).

Why are these my favorite Inbox features? Both functions serve similar purposes: they tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it. The ability to snooze emails and save reminders for yourself is invaluable when we’re talking about headspace: this way, you can use your email as your to-do list for any given day. If you know you don’t have to respond to someone until X date, there’s no reason their previous email should sit in your Inbox taking up space. As a result, I use Inbox as my personal assistant to remind me when I need to jump back to a deliverable or respond to a client. It’s possible to reach Inbox zero on a given day, even if you have an email awaiting your response. Just snooze it and attend to it when you really need to.
Google Drive. Sure, not a sexy or new tool, but it’s my home for everything. Not only does GDrive cover all the file types that I need (Documents, Sheets, and Presentations), it also allows for easy, real-time collaboration on files with your colleagues and clients. If you like to nudge people to do things, too, you can assign contacts work to do from your GDocs (just highlight text, click the comment icon to the right, and insert the @ symbol with their name). If you’re crafting a presentation with a colleague, for instance, you can assign slides with questions for them. I recommend tagging them with your question and including a due date for when you need their answer.
Tools my colleagues love:
- Trello. It’s not my personal favorite, but a lot of my teammates love using Trello as their to-do lists, or even for tracking web dev or SEO projects. If you prefer text over visuals, you can also try Basecamp (which I tend to prefer).
- Asana. Another great project management tool — I tend to use it on a project basis rather than a to-do list. If you’re a developer, you may prefer JIRA.

Of course, it’s possible to manage and delegate work without these, but I’m of the mind that pen, paper, and email can only get you so far, especially if you want your delegation process to be somewhat automated (think tagging colleagues in comments within documents, or assigning projects to them within standard project management tools like Asana).

How to delegate effectively

Tools can only get you so far: any good delegation process starts with a conversation (no more than five or 10 minutes) about the work you need and a great brief. The conversation establishes whether your colleague actually has the bandwidth to take your work on, and the brief goes into greater detail of what you actually need done. The brief format I follow works for a large number of different deliverables — I’ve used this same layout to delegate page speed, technical and backlink audits, and content briefs to colleagues. Below are the fields I always include, and the type of information always provided:

Subject: [BRIEF] Work I Need Done

Deadline: The precise date and time you need it, with enough time for you to review the work before delivering it to your stakeholders or your client. If it’s something like a page speed audit, I would allow up to a full week to review it and ensure that it’s in the best format and all the information is correct. Of course, it also depends on how familiar the delegate is with projects like these — if they’ve done a number of audits for you in the past, they may know your style and you may not need as much time to edit their final work.

Output/Deliverable: The format in which you need this work delivered to you. Maybe it’s a Google Doc or an Excel Spreadsheet. This brief format can work for any output you need, including more creative pieces (do you need a video edited to :30 seconds in a .mov format? A photo edited to certain specs and saved as a PNG or IDD?).

Expected hours: This may be the most challenging element of the entire brief. How long do you anticipate this work to take, start to finish? Keep in mind the experience level of the person to whom you’re delegating. Is this their first SEO technical audit, or their 30th? You will almost definitely need to check in with your delegate a few times (more on that later), so how long do you anticipate these meetings to take? Just like the deadline timing estimate, use your best judgment based on work you’ve done with this person in the past, and the type of work you’re assigning.

Relevant materials: This is where you can provide additional articles or tools that should help your colleague do the work you’ve assigned to them. Some good examples are 101 articles (like ones on the Moz blog!), or a tool you know you always use in projects like the one you’re delegating (think SEMRush, new photo editing software, or Google’s Keyword Planner).

Check in with your delegate along the way

Once you’ve delivered your brief, the next step is to make sure you check in with your delegate along the way. Even the most experienced person can benefit from added context, so whether it’s an in-person meeting or a five-minute call, touching base shortly after delivering a brief is necessary to ensure you’re on the same page. Beyond kicking off a project, it’s important to have check-ins along the way to stay on track.

At Distilled, we like to follow a check-in model at the following completion points:

1% (kickoff conversation);
5% (validation of process);
30% (ensure you’re on the right track before you invest too much time into the project);
and 90% (final editing and proofing).

Not only is this good to keep everyone on the right track, it’s even more valuable both to the person delegating and the delegate to know how much work should be completed at which points, and how much detail is required as you give feedback.

In many ways, great project management and delegation skills are really future-proofing skills. They allow you to be on top of your work regardless of what work (or life) throws at you. You can be the best SEO in the world, but if you can’t manage your projects effectively, you’ll either fail or not see the greatest impact you otherwise could achieve. It’s time to ditch praising the model of a lone innovator who somehow “does it all,” and instead truly celebrate the maintainers and managers who ensure things remain operational and steady. Often, our biggest problems aren’t best solved with a complex solution, but rather a clear mind and supportive team.

A large part of turning projects around comes down to improving the project management process, and being organized allows you to juggle multiple clients and acknowledge when you’re at capacity. Without a solid foundation of project management skills, there is no groundwork for successful innovations and client projects. The next time you’re looking to bolster your skill set, do an audit of how you manage your own work, and identify all of the things that prevent you from delivering the best work on time.

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