seo

Posted by MarkTraphagen

On June 25, 2014, Google’s John Mueller made a shocking announcement: Google would be removing all author photos from Google search results. According to the MozCast Feature Graph, that task was fully accomplished by June 29.

In this post I will:

• Give a brief overview of how Google Authorship got to where it is today.
• Cover how Google Authorship now works and appears in search.
• Offer my take on why Author photos were removed
• Investigate the oft-repeated claims of higher CTR from author photos
• Suggest why Google Authorship is still important, and speculate on the future of author authority in Google Search.

A Brief History of Google Authorship

The Google Authorship program has been my wheelhouse (some might say “obsession”) since Google first announced support for Authorship markup in June of 2011. Since I am both an SEO and a content creator, Google certainly got my attention in that announcement when they said, “…we�re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.”

Of course, in the three years since that blog post, many search-aware marketers and content creators also jumped on the Google Authorship bandwagon. Occasional comments from prominent Google staffers that they might someday use author data as a search ranking factor, along with Bill Slawski’s lucid explanations of the Google Agent Rank patent, fueled the fire of what most came to call “author rank.”

Below is a video from 2011 with Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson explaining the possible significance of Authorship markup for Google at that time:

During the three years since Google announced support for rel=author markup, there have been many changes in how Authorship appeared in search results, but each change only seemed to buttress Google’s continued support for and improvement of the program.

In the early days of Google Authorship, almost anyone could get the coveted face photo in search by correctly setting up Authorship markup on their content and linking to that content from their Google+ profile. As time went on, Google became pickier about showing the rich snippet, and some sort of quality criteria seemed to come into play. Still, it was not too difficult to earn the author snippet.

Then at Pubcon New Orleans in October 2013, Matt Cutts announced that in the near future, Google would start cutting back on the amount of Authorship rich snippets shown in search. He said that in tests they found when they cut out 10% to 15% of the author snippets shown, “overall quality went up.” In December of that year we saw the promise fulfilled as the percentage of queries showing author photos dropped, and many individual authors either started seeing a byline-only snippet for much or all of their content, or losing Authorship snippets completely.

It was clear by then that Authorship as a search feature was a privilege, not a right, and that as much as Google seemed to want people to adopt Authorship markup, they were determined to police the quality of what was shown in search associated with that markup. But none of that prepared us for what has happened now: the complete removal of author photos from global search.

Google Authorship without Photos in Search

Here are the fundamental facts about how Authorship is used in search as of this writing:

1. The only Authorship rich snippet result now available in global search is an author byline. Google has dropped author photos entirely (except for some unique exceptions in personalized search; see below). Also, Google dropped the “in xx Google+ circles” link that showed in some cases and led to the author’s Google+ profile.

2. Author bylines now link to Google+ profiles. Previously, at least in the US, author bylines in search results linked to a unique Google search page that would show just content from that author. This feature is no longer available.

3. Qualification for an Authorship byline now is simply having correct markup. This was a bit of a surprise given Google’s move last December to differentiate and highlight authors with better quality content who publish on trusted sites. But in a Google Webmaster Central Hangout on June 25, 2014, John Mueller indicated that now as long as the two-way verification (rel=author markup on the content site linked to author’s Google+ profile, and a link back to the content site in the author’s Google+ Contributor To links) could be correctly read by Google, a byline would likely be shown.

You can check for correct Authorship verification for any web page by entering its URL in Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. If Authorship is correctly connected for the page, you should see a result similar to this:

However, it is well known that this tool isn’t perfect. For example, even though it shows Eric Enge‘s post on Copyblogger as being verified, Google has never shown an Authorship snippet for any of Eric’s posts there, and even now does not show a byline for that content. Eric is a very well-known and trusted author who gets a rich snippet for all his other content on the web, and Copyblogger is certainly a reputable site. Why his content there has never displayed an Authorship snippet remains a mystery.

In the Hangout, John Mueller went on to say that in the future they may have to reevaluate showing bylines for everyone who has correct markup, once they get more experience with the byline only results. He promised that there will be continued experimentation. If they see that people are using the bylines as a gauge of how great or trustworthy an author is, that might be impetus enough to try to re-implement some kind of quality factor into whether or not one gets a byline.

So are there actually more Authorship results in search now? If Mueller is correct that Authorship snippets are now based merely on a technically-correct connection, and there is no longer any quality factor, then wouldn’t we expect now to see more Authorship in search, even if only bylines? Not necessarily.

Moz’s Dr. Pete Meyers shared the following with me:

So, in my data set, Authorship [measured the old way – by thumbnail photos] peaked on June 23rd at 21.2% of SERPs (in our 10K data set). Measured the new way [bylines only], Authorship is showing up around 24.0% of SERPs. That could mean that, in absence of the photos, Google has allowed it to appear more often, or it could mean that there were a handful of SERPs with byline-only Authorship before. I suspect it’s the latter, but I have no data to support that.

I agree with Pete’s latter guess. The fact is that from the December 2013 “purging” of Authorship in search until the recent change, there have been two kinds of Authorship results: Those with a photo and byline, and those with byline only. I called the latter “second class Authorship,” and it looked like when Google ran its quality filter through the Authorship results, most lower-quality authors dropped to second class, byline-only results rather than being dropped altogether from Authorship results.

So it appears that the net result is no overall change in the amount of Authorship in search, just an elimination of a “first class” status for some authors.

4. Author photos may still be shown in personalized search for selected Google+ content. This was an unannounced change in Google search that showed up at the same time author photos were being eliminated from global (logged-out-of-Google) search. Now Google+ posts by people you follow on Google+ may sometimes show an author photo when you search while logged in to your Google+ account (personalized search).

The example below is an actual screen capture from my own logged-in search for “Google Plus for Business.” Joshua Berg is in my Google+ circles, and Google shows his relevant Google+ post both elevated in the results (higher than it would occur in my logged-out results) and with his profile photo.

In my testing of this, I have seen that these personalized author photos for Google+ posts are most likely to show if the author is high in the “relevancy” sort in your Google+ circles, and is someone with whom you have engaged fairly frequently.

While not Authorship related, it is interesting to note that Google+ brand pages that you circle and have engaged with may now show a brand logo snippet in personalized search for their Google+ posts. While some other parts of the world have had these branded results for a while, this is entirely new for US Google searches.

I’ll have more below on what I see as the significance of these new results and what they may say about the future of Authorship and author authority in Google.

So Why Were Author Photos Removed?

So if Google was committed to continued improvement of the Authorship program, why did they drop photo snippets entirely? Was this a complete reversal, a “beginning of the end for Authorship” as some thought? Or were author photos in search simply not producing the results Google was looking for?

Before I give my take on those questions, I highly recommend Cyrus Shepard’s post ” Google Announced the End of Author Photos in Search: What You Should Know.” I agree completely with Cyrus’s take there, and won’t duplicate what he covered. Rather in the rest of this post I will try to bring some added insights and informed speculations based on my intensive observation of Google’s Authorship program over the past three years.

Let’s start with the explanation given by John Mueller in his announcement post, linked at the beginning of this article. John said:

We’ve been doing lots of work to clean up the visual design of our search results, in particular creating a better mobile experience and a more consistent design across devices. As a part of this, we’re simplifying the way Authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results, removing the profile photo and circle count. (Our experiments indicate that click-through behavior on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.)

It sounds like Mueller is linking this change to Google’s “mobile first” initiative. Mobile first seeks to unify, as much as possible, the user experience between desktop and mobile. It is a response to the rapid increase of mobile usage worldwide. In fact, at SMX West earlier this year Google’s Matt Cutts said that he expects Google searches on mobile to exceed desktop searches before the end of 2014.

In subsequent comments on his Google+ post and elsewhere, Mueller elaborated that images in search results take up lots of bandwidth in mobile search, slowing down delivery of results on many devices. They also take up considerable screen real estate on the smaller screens of mobile devices.

But were UX and mobile concerns the only reasons for removing author photos? I seriously doubt that. If author photos were providing a significant benefit to searchers, according to Google’s data, then it is likely they would have worked on some compromise that would have made them more compatible with mobile first.

Furthermore, John Mueller himself, in the aforementioned Hangout, hinted that there were other considerations involved. For example, he commented that there may have been too many author photos for some search results, and that too much of any one feature in search is not a good user experience.

My Personal Speculation. I don’t doubt Mueller that demands by Google’s search user experience efforts may have been the main driving force behind the removal of author photos, but as I said above, I do not think it was the only reason.

I believe that after much testing and evaluation Google may have decided that author photos for now send a disproportionate signal to searchers. That is, the photos may have been indicating an implied endorsement of result quality that Google is not yet prepared to back up.

Remember that in December we saw Google reduce the number of author photos shown in search as an attempt, according to Matt Cutts, to increase the quality of those results. However, when questioned about the concept of “author rank” (Google using author trust data to influence search results), Cutts consistently speaks about the great difficulty of evaluating such quality or trust. He elaborates that finding a way to do that remains a strong goal at Google, but he doesn’t expect to see it for years to come. (For example, see my remarks on his comments at SMX Advanced last month.)

Given all that, it may be that Google, realizing that they still have a lot of work to do toward evaluating author trust and quality to a degree where they would allow those factors to influence actual search rankings, decided that even though Authorship does not currently affect rankings, the photos still might imply to searchers a trust and authority for the author of which Google could not be fully confident.

In addition, I believe that three years into the Authorship program, Google realized that they were never going to get the vast majority of authors and sites to implement Authorship markup. If author authority is to succeed as a contributor to better search results in the future, Google has to find ways to identify and verify authors and their connected content that are not tied to either markup or Google+. That also will be a long-term project.

So this may actually be merely a temporary retrenchment as Google knuckles down to the hard work of figuring out how to make author authority something truly worthwhile in search.

What About Ad Competition? When the dropping of author photos was announced, there was immediate speculation by many, including Moz’s own Rand Fishkin on Twitter, that the author photos were seen as too competitive with the AdWords ads displayed in search.

It’s impossible to either prove or disprove such speculation, as only Google holds the data. I personally find it a little hard to believe that it came down to a zero sum game between author photos and ads. In other words, is it reasonable to think that was either/or; that author photos were so attractive and got clicked so much that when they appeared too many people totally ignored the ads?

Also, that speculation is based on the assumption that author photos were, in recent history, huge CTR magnets. In the next section I’ll examine those CTR claims.

What About Author Photo CTR?

One of the most oft-repeated alleged benefits of author photos in search was that they dramatically increased click-through rates (CTR), as people were drawn to those results even if they were lower on the page.

I was as guilty as anyone else in confidently proclaiming in my online articles and conference presentations that “studies have shown” this increase in CTR for Authorship results. So it shocked me as much as anyone when John Mueller in his announcement post said, “Our experiments indicate that click-through behavior on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one .”

First, we should note some ambiguities in Mueller’s statement:

• He does not actually say “click-through rate,” though that’s what most readers assumed he was talking about. He called it “click-through behavior,” which could refer to other things, such as how quickly people bounced back to the search results after clicking an author photo result. In that case, higher CTR would not be a good thing from a search quality viewpoint.
• He does not explicitly say that the click-through behavior was for the author photo results exclusively. It could be an evaluation of overall click behavior on search pages that included author photos.
• This could be a reference to click behavior aggregated across all queries showing author photos. If so, then it may be that while CTR was higher for photo results in some queries, overall the effect may have been a wash.

But were we ever really sure there was as huge a CTR increase for author photo results as was frequently claimed? After investigating those claims, I’m not so sure.

• Google themselves never made a positive claim of increased CTR for author photos. A much-cited paper by Google researchers on social annotations such as face photos in search was based only on eye-tracking studies and user interviews, not actual click behavior. It actually found that image-based social annotations were not necessarily as attractive to searchers as believed, and only were attractive under certain circumstances.
• I found hundreds of blog posts proclaiming “30-150% increase in CTR!” for Authorship. Those all seemed to trace back to one article two years ago that cited a 30% increase of CTR for rich snippet results in general. That post did not talk about Authorship specifically, nor was it made clear exactly how they determined the 30% raise.
• Most of the other articles or “studies” purporting to show increased CTR from Authorship are based on one-off, anecdotal evidence. In other words, the authors implemented Authorship, and then saw more organic traffic to their sites. While interesting, such correlative claims at best may demonstrate a one-off accomplishment for that particular author for particular queries, but they do not prove that there was a general, or even universal, CTR boost.
• Testing for actual CTR boost is probably impossible outside of access to Google’s own data. That’s because CTR is highly volatile by ranking position, and it is impossible to know if you’re comparing apples to apples. For a truly conclusive test, one would have to be able to randomly show the same result for the same query in an A/B split with half the results showing an author photo and half not. I don’t see any way for us to set up such a test.
• In the Webmaster Central Hangout mentioned previously, John Mueller hinted strongly that whatever CTR boost there may have been, Google has seen it wear away over the past couple years. He mused that it is likely people became more used to seeing author photos in search over time, and so they had less impact and drawing power. If Google sees a feature not having much effect, it is natural that they would remove it.
• Unfortunately, the Author Stats feature in Google Webmaster Tools is no help in evaluating CTR of author photo results vs. post-author photo results. Before June 28, for me it showed hundreds of pieces of content showing in search as Authorship snippets. Since June 28, only one result shows, and that is for a Search Engine Land article I wrote that made it into Google News results, where author photos can still show. Apparently the Author Stats tool was measuring only results with author photos.

All that is not to say there was never any rise in CTR for any Authorship posts. But it is to say that we never really knew for sure, and we never knew how much. Most importantly, there was never any proof that any CTR boost was universal. That is, there was no reason to assume that just because your results got an author photo, they were automatically getting a CTR boost.

So Does Google Authorship Still Matter?

In a word, yes. If Google had actually lost its enthusiasm for and commitment to author identity as a future, important aspect of search, then this would have been the time to pull the band aid all the way off, rather than just removing photos. But, in fact, Authorship still works in search.

Let me conclude with some reasons why I think Authorship still has value, and that author authority is still a major priority for Google search.

1. Authors still matter. The bylines are an indication that Google still cares who created a piece of content, and thinks that is significant and useful information for searchers. Every pixel of a search result is very valuable real estate. Google realizes that, and is still willing to give up some of that territory to an author’s name.

2. Bylines are not invisible. Sure no one believes that a byline might capture the eye of someone viewing a search page to the same degree that a face photo probably did, but it does not follow that bylines are without value. More and more SEOs are advising their clients to optimize the meta descriptions for their pages. Why? Not because they are a ranking factor (they are not), but because they can have a significant effect on “selling” the searcher on clicking that result.

We’re used to hearing that the number one result for a given query usually gets the most clicks by far. But it doesn’t get all the clicks, and on some queries the top result may not be as attractive as on others. If we all believed the top result was always the best, wouldn’t we just click that “Feeling lucky?” button on Google’s home page?

The truth is that when the title of the top result doesn’t immediately grab the searcher as a sure thing to fulfill her search need, she will begin looking for other clues in the other results. Among those will be the descriptive text under the results. When an author’s name appears there, it may move the searcher to think the result is more reliable (written by a “real person”). And if that person is someone already known to and trusted by the searcher, the value goes up significantly.

3. Author and brand images now in personalized search. While limited in appearance, the fact that Google now will sometimes show an author photo or a brand image for Google+ content in personalized search indicates that they have not at all abandoned the idea that such image results can have value. It may be that they see that such highly-personalized recommendations have real value to searchers. It makes sense that if I regularly engage with Rand Fishkin on Google+, I will be more likely to value his content when I do a logged-in search with a relevant query.

This may have implications for the future of author authority in search in general. It is conceivable that even if Google does implement it and expand it for content beyond Google+ posts, that it will remain highly personalized. In other words, Google may decide that it is most reliable to boost authors with whom you already have some affinity.

4. Authorship still builds your author rank database with Google. Using Authorship markup on your best content is still the clearest way to let Google see what you create and how people respond to it. You can be sure that Google has been tracking such data all along, and will continue to do so. Even if author authority is still not a ranking factor (outside of personalized search, and some search features such as In-Depth Articles), it likely will be someday. When that day comes, if Google has a clear history of your growth as a trusted author in your field, you may have a competitive advantage.

5. Google remains committed to author authority as a search factor. As recently as SMX Advanced in May, just a few weeks before the announcement of the end of author photos, Google’s Matt Cutts reiterated his enthusiasm for author authority, while noting that it was a difficult and long-term project. For a transcript of his remarks, see my post here. Google understands that people are wired to trust other people long before they trust “brands” or websites.

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Posted by Casey_Meraz

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Did you know that having consistent and correct citations is mandatory for any successful local SEO Campaign? If you’ve read the 2013 Moz Local Ranking Factors survey or you’ve been in the local SEO game for a while, it’s no secret how important citations are to ranking locally in Google. In fact, citations and external location signals are the 3rd most important ranking factor according to the Moz local search ranking factors survey. This is why it’s essential that you have your correct NAP listed across the major citation sources.

So what is the NAP format? NAP stands for Business Name, Address, and Phone Number. Having this information listed on another website such as Yelp, Citysearch, or Yellowpages acts like a positive vote for your local listings. While many people know they need to build citations to help increase their local rankings, surprisingly many people overlook having duplicate listings and incorrect listings.

Some people think they only need to update their Google My Business listing which is incorrect. In fact, according to David Mihm from Moz “If all you’re doing is updating your Google+ Local Page, you’re going to continue to see problems because “new” erroneous data will constantly feed into Google from all of its other sources.” This has been known to create bigger problems down the road. So what is the downside if you have inconsistent citations, duplicate citations, or citations that are just plain wrong?

In a nutshell you’re missing out on getting credit for that citation, it’s hurting your local rankings in Google, and its potentially creating longer term issues when the incorrect data is scraped. Unfortunately while there are some resources you can use to simplify this process, it’s not as easy as waving a magic wand or blinking while wearing your Google Glass.

Let’s Start With The Basics: What is an Incorrect NAP?

So what is an incorrect NAP? The long and the short of it is that Google and other search engines want to give you credit for having your business name, address, and phone number listed on other reputable websites. It acts as a vote of confidence for you similar to a link in organic SEO.

You should make sure that your Google My Business Listing has your correct NAP format the way you want it displayed across the web. If any of this information is not the same as it is listed in Google My Business then you may not be getting credit for it. Additionally if you have a duplicate listing it could be hurting you as well. Just because you didn’t create or publish the incorrect information doesn’t mean it’s not polluting the local ecosystem. There are plenty of ways this can happen as I discuss a little later in this article. But first, let’s take a look of some good and bad examples of correct and incorrect NAP.

How Exact Do These Citations Need to Be?

As you can see from the examples above, I was very clear with the items I changed from the correct example. Although Google has gotten good at detecting minor differences, you should always aim to be the least imperfect. The whole reason we are fixing these in the first place is to make it easier for Google to associate the proper listings together for your business. Minor differences such as Street and St. should not be an issue. However, incorrect, duplicate, or false information is a big no no.

The long and the short of it is that the Business Name, Address, and Phone Number you want to use should be 100% correct in your Google My Business Dashboard (formerly Google Places, Plus Local, etc.). From here, you can copy this exact format on every source you wish to get a citation from.

Overall, there are three types of citations we’re trying to fix during this process. These include:

• Duplicates -Duplicate listings on the same directory
• Mismatches – Listings for your business that have the wrong Business Name, Physical Address, or Phone Number (or just the 800 number and no local number). This can get especially complicated for doctors and lawyers, as I will discuss later in this article.
• Incomplete Citations – It’s important that you fill out the profiles to completion once you’ve claimed them. This includes adding photo and filling out every field there is an option for.

How Does This Happen & What Causes These? 

Just because you don’t remember creating an incorrect listing doesn’t mean there is no bad data in the local ecosystem. In fact, here are just some of the common reasons you have incorrect NAP across the web:

• Your business moved physical locations
• You used tracking phone numbers at one point
• You hired an SEO to create citations or get listed on online directories
• The data aggregators have incorrect information
• You inherited a dirty phone number
• You changed your local phone number
• You used tracking phone numbers
• You used an 800 number and not a local number
• You have different trade name or business name variations
• Your listing was incorrectly submitted and scraped to other sites
• Someone in your organization setup the listings without knowledge of NAP consistency (this is pretty common)

While there is a major possible ranking benefit of cleaning up this data, there is another reason it should be on your radar too. If you’re a fan of brand consistency like me, then you want to be the least imperfect and ensure all information about your company is accurate across all mediums you control.

The example below shows just how confusing this data can be and the issues that can be caused by incorrect citations on one of these sites. (Graphic from David Mihm’s Local Search Ecosystem)

Before We Start: Here are Some Important Things to Know 

• If you’re paralyzed just thinking about the hundreds you need to fix, don’t sweat it. While a good long term-goal would be to clean up a lot of the data, the reality is that your first focus should be on the top citations for your industry and city. Also check out Phil Rozek’s list here and the Top 50 Citation Sources that Whitespark mentions on this page. Focus your efforts on the primary citation sources for your niche and area. Once these are fixed up you can move on. Just spend 15 minutes a day cleaning this up. 
• Keep good records using this spreadsheet. You will need to follow up with these directories again and again in some cases. Don’t worry, I made a spreadsheet below that you can use for this. 
• Make sure to update the old incorrect citation instead of just adding new ones!
• This work can be tedious, but accuracy is essential. Don’t try to use shortcuts. 
• Read Moz’s case study from David Mihm regarding cleaning up citations

Let’s Start By Identifying Possible NAP Variations & Recording Them In the Spreadsheet

The first step in the citation cleanup process is to find out exactly what information is actually out there about your business. I put together an awesome spreadsheet you can use here. The first tab has a place to post the duplicate information. I like to color code it for simplicity as you can see in the example below:

In the example above, I have the correct business information at the top of the spreadsheet in green for easy reference and the incorrect variations in red. You will want to record every variation you find here to make our job a little bit easier moving forward. But how do you find the incorrect variations for your client or business?

I prefer to start at the source by talking to the business owners and marketing managers. After you have collected their proper NAP info, ask these questions to see if you can get any details:

1. Have you ever moved physical locations?
2. Is this the address you have listed on your legal business paperwork with the State and Federal government?
3. Have you ever used tracking phone numbers?
4. Have you ever hired an SEO company or someone to manage your online presence. Do you have a list of logins or websites they submitted you to?
5. Do you use any lead generation services? (Sometimes they use tracking phone numbers)
6. Does your business go by any trade or fictions business names?

Typically asking these simple questions up front can save a lot of time in the long run. If you don’t get any good info from them or they just don’t know there are several ways you can look for this information online first to make your life easier. 

After You Have Asked the Questions, It’s Time to Do Your Own Investigative Work

While the questions above are helpful, it’s important to dive a little deeper and see what you can find. These are the steps I typically take:

1. Check the secretary of state’s filing for the business. Most have an online search platform where you can see who registered the business. If it has a different Name, Mailing Address, or Phone number go ahead and add these to the spreadsheet. We will want to check these out when searching for duplicates. (BONUS TIP: Search their filed business documents online and see if they had previously filed for a fictitious business name or DBA.)
2. Review the company BBB listing. Check out Phil Rozek’s article on his BBB Hack for finding possible conflicting information. The long and the short of it is that the BBB.org business listings show additional reported phone numbers, business names, and addresses as shown in the example below from his website.
   
   
3. Check Google Map Maker. By viewing the classic Google Map Maker, you can see the edit history of a business. This will tell you if a phone number or business name has been changed. To get this data simply pull up the Classic Map Maker, search for a business and then select the history tab. Once you’re on the history click “Show All Changes” in the upper right corner of the listing as shown below:
   
   
   Once you have clicked on this, it will show the entire edit history. Look for edits to the NAP over the time the listing has been live. In the example below, you can see how the business name was actually changed at one point. This is the business name I will want to record in my spreadsheet (the old one).
   
   

   

Once you feel like you have a good handle on this, you can start by moving on and searching for these culprits hiding across the web. Now it’s time to get fixing! 

Here is a Quick Way to See What NAP Variations Google Already Associates with Your Business

If your business is recognized by Google and has reviews on other websites the new Google My Business dashboard tries to condense that information in one place. It provides examples of listings it has associated with your listing already. I recommend checking this to see what differences it recognizes for your business and mainly used for reference. If Google detects an inaccurate citation, don’t assume that it will find others. Remember, always aim to be the least imperfect.

To access this simply follow the steps below:

1. Login to your dashboard at www.google.com/mybusiness
   
2. Open up one of your locations and scroll down to the reviews section.
3. Click the blue “Manage Reviews” button
   
4. Then scroll down and check under the “Reviews from around the web” heading and see what pops up.
5. You should see the listings here of other detected reviews.
6. You can click the “View full review on….” link and view the full review there.
   
   
7. Check the NAP for that citation and see how or if it varies from your correct NAP. Record the differences as we can use them later in this guide. 

Start With the Data Aggregators Before Your Manual Efforts

Tools are great and help make tedious jobs like this easier. While there are some tools I advocate for this job, the reality is that most of them don’t cover the niche specific directories and others you may be listed on. That being said there are some great tools you can use to help save time and money and are recommended in my overall procedure below.

1. Start with Moz Local. Moz Local provides a Check My Listing score which will scan your listings just by entering your Business Name and Zip Code. This will give you a score that includes the citations that are Complete, Incomplete, Inconsistent, and Duplicates from the Top 15 citation sources and data aggregators. If you’re not starting here, you might be shooting yourself in the foot. Signing up for this service which is $50 a year will help fix this data at some of the sources that distribute their data to many other providers across the web. You can also use this service to find other possible NAP variants. 
2. Consider additional tools to see if they will help you. My manual methods are below but if you want to pull other data, you can also check out Brightlocal‘s Local SEO Checkup product which will show you NAP variants and the accuracy of major listings. You can also check out Whitespark‘s citation finder to start with a list of sites it detects you being listed on. They both offer great citation finding resources which will make this a bit easier. Also, Yext just recently introduced a product for fixing duplicates. While I have not had a chance to review this yet I believe it’s only for their network and it is a paid service.
3. Once you’re ready, it’s time to move on to the manual side of NAP Cleanup using my method below. 
   

The Manual Cleanup Process

When dealing with citation cleanup, efficiency and accuracy is the name of the game. I have developed a process that I find works best for me when it comes to being productive in fixing citations and removing duplicates. This is what I’m going to explain below in more details, but basically it boils down to four steps.

On the second tab of this spreadsheet that I created for you, you will see the sheet has several columns. They are identified and explained below:

Website	Put the domain of the citation source. This will help you sort it later for easy tracking.
Business Name	Copy and paste the business name from the citation you want to keep here. If the one you want to keep is wrong, paste it here anyhow. We will correct it later.
Address	Copy and paste the address including suite # from the citation you want to keep here. If the one you want to keep is wrong paste it here anyhow. We will correct it later.
City State Zip	Copy and paste the City, State, and Zip Code from the listing here.
Phone	Copy and paste the Phone Number from the listing here.
Links To	Put the URL that the citation is linking to if applicable.
Issues	Put the main issue here. Mention all issues if possible. If the citation is a Duplicate and has an incorrect name I would put “Duplicate | Incorrect Business Name”
URL Of Live Listing	Copy and paste the URL of the citation source so we can refer to it later if needed.
Duplicate 1	Copy and paste the URL of any duplicates here
Duplicate 2	Copy and paste any duplicates here
Status	I added a status column to check and update the status. Sometimes when you contact them they may not be prompt.
Green	If you highlight the row in this color, you have confirmed there are no issues with this citation and no duplicates.
Yellow	There is an issue with this listing like the company name is missing “The” in front of the name or the suite number is not perfect. Basically this is for minor secondary issues that don’t need fixing, but you could fix them if you wanted to.
Red	If there is a major issue with the NAP such as wrong Name, Address, Phone Number or a Duplicate you can mark it as red. This will help us to prioritize our work later.

Below are two screenshots of how the spreadsheet looks when you pull it up. 

Once you start finding the citations, you will want to color-code each row after evaluating the citation. This will help you prioritize your work later once your’re ready to start fixing these up. 

The Process

1. Audit Your Citations – Using my spreadsheet and the methods listed below you can start by auditing every citation source you find for your business.
2. Record the Data – Record the NAP information in the spreadsheet provided and don’t be shy with the details. After you have identified a problem make sure to color code the row. Red is a very important fix, Yellow is something you can fix but can wait, and Green is good meaning there are no problems and no duplicates.
3. Outreach & Fix – Once you have a list of your action items, you can sort the list by RED or priority items. You can then outreach to these sites and record it in the notes with the date.
4. Follow Up, Record, & Repeat – You can’t just send an email or contact form and call it good. You have to follow up. Don’t change the color of the row until the live listings are fixed. This will allow you to check and re-check until these issues are cleaned up. The reality is that some of these listings will require multiple contacts to get fixed (just like link removals). 

Finding Your Incorrect Citations

Finding these citation sources can be a difficult task. However, if you already have a list of primary citations you want to tackle you’re in a good spot. Remember that focusing your efforts on the primary sources will provide the most ROI. 

Remember that when you’re searching for citations using these methods you will want to search for each of the ones you identified to ensure complete accuracy. In other words, don’t just search a directory by the proper business name or phone number. Also, search it with the WRONG information you identified to see if any wrong sources come up. 

Method 1: Search Specific Directories & Websites

If you only have one business location this task gets a bit easier as there a search string you can use to narrow down your results. However if you’re a multi-location business it may not work as well (depending on how many locations you have). This search string is going to use three commands. The first command site: searches only within the website immediately following the colon. If I just wanted to search Yellowpages.com I could type site:yellowpages.com. Now putting information after the site command will help narrow down your search. Let’s say that I wanted to search only YellowPages.com for my exact company name, but only for listings that DO NOT contain my primary phone number that is associated with my NAP. In this case I could put in this search:

site:yellowpages.com “The Reeves Law Group” -714-550-6000

• The site: command tells Google to search only the website (in this case YellowPages.com)
• The Quoted “The Reeves Law Group” tells Google to only return results that include the company name in that exact phrase order
• The -714-550-6000 tells Google to not include any results that use this phone number. The minus allows you to exclude information you don’t want to appear in the results. 

If you have a list of citation sources you want to check such as the Moz Top 10 by City or Industry, you could then use these search strings, identify duplicates and problems on the primary sites. 

Most reputable websites also have an internal search function as well. It’s important to check this too as the Google Site: command only searches for indexed citations. It’s possible that the incorrect one may not be indexed yet, but could cause problems in the future. 

Method 2: Searching Google’s Index Citations

While you can search specific directories for incorrect citations if you already know the websites you want to check, what if you don’t have that list? Another easy way is to pull the incorrect results direct from Google. To do this we will use the MozBar and modify our search settings which allow us to scrape 100 results at a time. Simply follow the example below. 

Before using this method, you need to change your search settings in Google
Start by pulling up Google.com and clicking on the gear icon in the upper right hand corner of a search page. You will want to navigate to search settings where you will check the button “Never Show Instant Results” and then change the Results Per Page slider to 100. This will allow you to search 100 entries as a time. You can see the settings we changed in the picture below:

You will also need the MozBar for this. If you don’t have the extension you can download the Chrome version here and the Firefox version here. Once you have the MozBar installed you will be ready to start scraping these results! 

When the MozBar is on and you do a search in Google you will now be able to see 100 results and easily export them by clicking the export button in the top left corner of the MozBar as shown in the example below. Once you have these results you can copy and paste them in my trusty spreadsheet for evaluation. Of course if you’re doing a lot of searches I recommend conducting the searches first, combining the results, and then removing duplicates in Excel. This will save you a ton of time! 

So Which Search Operators Should You Use?

Using the proper search operators and getting a bit creative will save you a substantial amount of time. Don’t think that you’re stuck with the ones I have provided below. Get creative and think outside of the box based on your situations. Below are some examples you can use along with an explanation of them. They are sorted by categories below.  

Casey’s OCD Pro Tip: Using Google can produce different results depending on how the data is entered on the actual citation site. For example it’s a good idea to search different Phone number variations. Some variants include: 111111111111, 111-111-1111, (111) 111-1111

Take note that when you do a search with quote around the keyword (e.g: “Keyword One”), it will search for the words in that order exactly as they appear. If you want to learn more about creative boolean search terms check out this resource. 

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How to Find Listings With Incorrect Phone Numbers

What you should search: 800 Number -Local Number

Example: 800-644-8000 -714-550-6000          This search when preformed in Google is telling it to search for the main company’s 800 number (800-644-8000), but exclude the local phone number of the main office (which is why I used the – sign before 714-550-6000). If you have one location that uses or used an 800 number at some point this will be your primary go to search. If you have multiple locations though it will likely just return results from the other locations. You could of course add – to additional offices and search this way as well. 

What you should search: 800 Number -Local Number +Company Name

Example: 800-644-800 -714-550-6000 +Reeves Law Group         At first glance this search operator probably looks like the one above with the simple addition of +reeves. However take a closer look and notice how I took out one “0” from the 800 number. What I am doing here is looking for a possible wrong entry but also making sure that part of the company name (in this case The Reeves Law Group) is shown in the string.  

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How To Find Incorrect Business Names That Have The Proper Phone

What you should search: 555-555-555 -“Company Name” 
Searching for the office locations phone number and then excluding the company’s name using the -“company name” command will show all results for that phone number that do not mention the proper company name. This is an easy way to find variants of the business name across the internet. 

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Other Searches You Can Try

What you should search : “Business Name”+”Address”         With quotes this will search for all instances of the exact business name and exact address you put in. The more specific you get the narrower the search results will be. 

What you should search : “Business Name”+”Zip code”              Doing this will give you another list of  options that could include listings without the proper business phone number.

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Finding Which Citations are Correct

What you should search (Without quotes): “City Name”+”Zip Code”+”Company Name”+”Phone Number”
Thankfully, you can also use these tricks to see which citations you have that are correct. If you’re scanning for citations this way make sure you also check each of these sites for possible duplicates as you could have one correct listing and one or more bad ones too. 

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Once you have your list of sources you can us the Mozbar export option outlined above and sort through these on the spreadsheet. 

Once You Have Them Documented You Can Prioritize and Outreach

Once all of these are all properly documented comes the painstaking task of fixing them. Some of these websites will allow you to claim listings and directly edit them which is nice. Some you will have to hunt for the contact information and if you can’t find it I recommend checking their WHOIS information to get the data of the domain owner. Most reputable sites though will have some way of contacting them. 

Usually when you encounter duplicate listings, you will have to contact the website to get them removed. Be patient. Remember that in most of these cases you’re not paying to be listed on their website so their response can take some time. Be sure to document your contact dates in the spreadsheet as well so you can easily follow up. 

Here are a few tips for the outreach methods:

• Make sure all email contacts come from an email address on your websites domain such as Webmaster@YourDomain.com. This may help the back and forth verification process where possible.
• Some listings will require you to claim and verify them and may call the business with an automated system. Be prepared to take a few calls.
• Always be very clear with your request but also be concise. They don’t typically spend a lot of time on these requests so making it as easy as possible with the links is recommended. 
• Make sure to read the websites FAQ’s for removing duplicates or updating listings. It will save you a lot of time and they may already have a process in place for this.
• If you can’t find the procedure try the contact form on the website first, then email if you don’t hear back in a reasonable amount of time. 

Contacting Websites to Fix Listings via Email

Below is a very quick and easy sample outreach email I use for some of these contacts. This example can be used if you have two listings at YellowPages.com that are on the following URLs: 

1) http://www.YellowPages.com/Listing1  
2) http://www.YellowPages.com/Listing2

Sample Contact Email:

Hello,

I recently discovered that your website has two listings for my business, “Business Name” located at “Address”. I was hoping you could help me delete the duplicate listing.

The correct listing is: 1) http://www.YellowPages.com/Listing1

The listing I need deleted is: 2) http://www.YellowPages.com/Listing2

Could you please notify me once you have had the chance to fix this?

Thanks!
– Business Owner 

How This Helps
By sending out clear and concise emails you may eliminate the back and forth emails and get them done quicker. Over time you may notice that some of these websites don’t reply. The reality is that some of them won’t reply or will charge a fee to be fixed. You can make the decision on a case by case basis whether these are important enough to worry about. 

Conclusion

I hope you found this guide useful and hope it’s something tactical that you can put to use right away. Using this method you will be off to a good start at fixing up your citations. Like everything else in local search this will take time to cleanup and time to process. Let Google find and index these naturally over time and watch your local rankings soar. If you have any other tips for citation cleanup please post them in the comments below. Additionally if you have any specific questions please feel free to contact me directly anytime. Just take it one step at a time and you’ll be done in no time!

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Posted by Dr-Pete

Having built an online business during the dot-com boom and bust, I’ve always been a bit skeptical about the mobile revolution. Every year since the late 90s, we’ve heard that this would be “The Year” for mobile. In the past year, though, my skepticism has been challenged by a wide range of data, and I no longer believe that the mobile web is simply a miniature desktop. This post is an in-depth analysis of why I think online marketers need to start paying attention to mobile now.

Google’s “Mobile First” Shift

It’s no mystery that I follow Google’s actions pretty closely. When Google launched a significant redesign back in March, Jon Wiley – Lead Designer for Google Search – posted this on Google+:

For a long time, we’ve assumed that mobile would naturally follow desktop, and trends like the slow death of WML (Wireless Markup Language) seemed to support that assumption. In the past two years, though, Google has repeatedly designed and launched new features on mobile first, including the most recent ad format and the latest version of Google Maps.

So, it begs the question – what does Google know that the rest of us don’t?

Google’s Greatest Fear

In July of 2013, Google migrated AdWords advertisers to what it calls “enhanced” campaigns. Many in the industry viewed this as a euphemism for preventing advertisers from bidding separately on mobile and tablet vs. desktop. Google had been experiencing long-term CPC losses, and most analysts blamed those losses on advertisers’ unwillingness to pay the same rates for mobile/tablet clicks as they did for desktop.

Google has strongly resisted splitting out mobile vs. desktop performance, going as far as to tell the SEC that “…disclosing or quantifying the impact of only one factor, such as platform mix, could be misleading and confusing to investors.” This has nothing to do with usability or confusion – Google is afraid of mobile and its impact on their $60B bottom line, the vast majority of which depends on advertising. Mobile-first design is about survival, plain and simple.

Google’s Multi-Screen World

Back in 2012, Google released a fascinating study about the multi-screen world. It paints a complex picture of how we use multiple screens to navigate the web, and often perform activities across mobile, tablet, and desktop. Google ended that report with eight conclusions, and this was the final one:

What led them to this conclusion? A couple of data points give a very interesting view of the impact of mobile on search. First, Google reported (see slide #20) that a full 65% of searches begin on mobile phones. Second, they found – which seems obvious in retrospect – that we reach for the “screen” that’s closest (slide #34). So, if you see something on TV, hear about it on XM Radio in the car, or read about it in the doctor’s waiting room, you’re going to reach for your mobile phone.

More Mobile Trends (2014)

Recently, Mary Meeker’s closely-watched annual state of the internet report was released, and it contains a great deal of data about where mobile is headed. Smartphone adoption is climbing and tablet sales are skyrocketing, but I’d like to focus on one graph that sums up the trend pretty well (from slide #9):

Globally, the percentage of page views coming from mobile devices has jumped substantially in the past year, and accounts for almost one-fifth of North American page views. Critics will argue that desktop usage has not substantially decreased, and that’s true, but the problem is this – as mobile gets to be a larger piece of the picture, we’re seeing less and less of that picture by excluding mobile data.

Look at it this way – let’s say we had a sample of 1M page views, and all of them came from desktop visitors. That would give us the pie on the left. Now, let’s say desktop holds steady at 1M page views, but mobile is now 19% of total views. This is what that reality would look like:

If we only look at those 1M page views, then it seems like nothing has changed, but the reality is that the desktop piece of the pie has shrunk. If we ignore mobile in this case, we’re missing out on 234,568 page views, and our picture is incomplete.

Why This Matters for Search

So what if someone starts a search on mobile – why should that matter to us as search marketers? The problem is simple: while Google desktop search design is being inspired by mobile design, the reality of a small screen means that mobile SERPs can look very different. Just as Google found with ad CTRs, this can lead to very different user behavior.

So, how different are mobile SERPs? I’d like to look at a few notable examples of desktop vs. mobile SERPs, starting from most similar to least similar. For all of these examples, the desktop SERP was captured on a Windows 7 PC using Chrome, at 1280×1024, and the mobile screen was captured on an iPhone 5S using Safari.

Here’s a fairly basic SERP (a search for “plumbers”) with ads and some local features. The desktop version is on the left, and the mobile version is on the right. I apologize for the reduced size, but I felt that a side-by-side version would be the most useful:

The impact of the smaller screen here is readily apparent – even though the desktop SERP shows eight full ads above the fold and the mobile SERP shows only two, the desktop screen still has room for three organic results, a map, and a couple of local pack results. Meanwhile, the one organic result that does pop up on the mobile screen has the advantage of being the only organic element on the “page”.

Unfortunately, we have very little data on relative CTR for either ads or organic results, and Google is tweaking both designs all of the time. I think the core point is that these user experiences, even for a relatively straightforward SERP, are clearly different.

Let’s look at another SERP (“army birthday”) where the major elements are similar, but the screen space creates a different experience. In this case, we get one of the new answer boxes:

An answer box is disruptive on any screen, but on the mobile screen it occupies almost the entire SERP above the fold. Of course, scrolling is easier and more natural on mobile, so I don’t want to pretend this is a true apples-to-apples comparison, but if the answer meets the user’s needs, they’re unlikely to keep looking.

Let’s look at a standard Knowledge Graph box, in this case one for a local entity (“woodfield mall”). Here, while the styles of the Knowledge Graph boxes are similar, the SERPs are radically different:

While the desktop SERP has a rich Knowledge Graph entry, we also see a substantial amount of organic real estate. On the mobile SERP, a condensed Knowledge Graph box dominates. That box also contains mobile-specific features, like click-to-call and directions, which could easily divert the searchers and keep them from scrolling down to organic results.

Finally, let’s consider a SERP where the presentation and structure are completely different between desktop and mobile. This is a search for “pizza” (from the Chicago suburbs, where I’m located), which triggers a local carousel:

Carousels – whether they’re local, Knowledge Graph, or the newer song and episode lists – are a great example of mobile-first design. While the desktop carousel seems out of place in Google’s design history and requires awkward horizontal scrolling, the mobile carousel is built for a finger-swipe interface. What’s more, the horizontal swipe may derail vertical scrolling to some degree. So, again, a single element dominates the mobile SERP in this example.

The Mobile Feature Graph

These differences naturally lead to a follow-up question – do mobile SERPs just look different, or are they fundamentally showing different rankings and features than desktop SERPs? You may be familiar with the MozCast Feature Graph, which tracks the presence of specific SERP features (such as ads, verticals, and Knowledge Graph) across 10K searches. I decided to run the same analysis across mobile results and compare the two.

The table below shows the presence of features across both desktop and mobile SERPs. Data was recorded on June 5th. Both data sets were depersonalized and half of the queries (5K) were localized, to five different cities.

For the most part, SERP features were consistent across the two devices. While it’s very difficult to compare two sets of rankings (even when they differ only by a few hours), the similar number of sitelinks suggests a similar make-up of 10-result vs. 7-result SERPs. A cursory glance at the data suggests that page-1 rankings were not dramatically different.

The big feature difference (which is entirely driven by layout considerations) was in the presence and structure of AdWords blocks. Mobile SERPs only allow top and bottom ad blocks, since there’s no right-hand column. While bottom-of-page ads are the rarest block on desktop SERPs, they’re fairly common on mobile SERPs. The overall presence of ads in any single position was lower on mobile than desktop (at least for this data set). All of this has CTR implications, but we as an industry don’t have adequate data on that subject at present.

The local data is somewhat surprising – I would have predicted a noticeably higher presence of local pack results in mobile SERPs. Google has implied that as many as half of mobile searches have local intent, with desktop trailing substantially. Unfortunately, collecting comparable data required matching the local methodology across both sets of SERPs, so my methodology here is unreliable for determining local intent. This data only suggests that, if local intent is the same, local results will probably appear consistently across desktop and mobile.

The Google Glass Feint

Beyond our current smartphone and tablet world is the next generation of wearable technology, which promises even more constrained displays. Right now, we tend to think of Google Glass when we hear “wearables,” and it’s easy to dismiss Glass as an early-adopter fad. When we dismiss Glass, though, I think we’re missing a much bigger picture. Let’s say our timeline looks something like this, with us in the present and Glass in the future…

In other words, I think it was fair to say that Glass, whether you love or hate it, was clearly a future-looking move and is pushing our comfort zones. It was ahead of what we were ready for, and so Google pulled us ahead…

Let’s say we’re not quite halfway-ready for Glass. Stay with me – there’s a point to my crude line art. What about the wearables that aren’t quite as futuristic, including the wide array of fitness band options and the coming storm of smartwatches? Our perception now looks something like this…

Before Glass, we were just warming up to fitness bands, and smartwatches still sounded a bit too much like science fiction. After Glass, challenged with that more radical view of the future, fitness bands almost seem passé, and smartwatches are looking viable. I’m not sure if any of this was intentional on Google’s part, but I strongly believe that they’ve moved the market and pushed ahead our timeline for adopting wearables.

This isn’t just idle speculation paired with pseudo-scientific visuals (it is that, but it’s not just that) – Samsung sold half a million Galaxy Gear smartwatches in Q1 of 2014. Google has recently announced Android Wear, and the first devices built on it have hit the market. More Android-based devices are likely to explode onto the market in the second half of 2014. Rumors of an Apple smartwatch are probably only months away from becoming reality.

I expect solid smartwatch adoption over the next 3-5 years, and with it a new form of browsing and a new style of SERPs. If the smartphone is our closest device and first stop today, the smartwatch will become the next first stop. Put simply, it’s easier to look at our wrists than reach for our pockets. The natural interplay of smartwatches and smartphones (Android Wear already connects smartwatches to Android-powered phones, as does Google Glass) will make the mobile scene even more rich and complex.

What It Means for You

My goal is to put the data out there as matter-of-factly as possible, but I personally believe that the long-awaited mobile disruption is upon us. Google is designing a SERP that’s not only “mobile first”, but can be broken into fragments (like answer boxes and Google Now “cards”) that can be mixed-and-matched across any device or screen-size. Search volume across non-desktop devices will increase, and mobile in all its forms may become the first stop for the majority of consumer searches.

For now, the most important thing we can do is be aware. I’ve always encouraged browsing your “money” terms – what does your URL really look like on a SERP, and how does the feature set impact it? I’d strongly encourage the same for mobile – open a phone browser and really try to see what the consumer is experiencing. If your business is primarily local or an impulse buy driven by TV and other advertising, the time to consider mobile is already behind you. For the rest of us, the mobile future is unfolding now.

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Posted by bridget.randolph

In recent years there has been a necessary shift in the way businesses advertise themselves to consumers, thanks to the increasingly common information overload experienced by the average person.

In 1945, just after WWII, the annual total ad spend in the United States was about $2.8 billion (that’s around $36.8 billion after adjusting for inflation). In 2013, it was around $140 billion.

Don’t forget that this is just paid media advertising; it doesn’t include the many types of earned coverage like search, social, email, supermarket displays, direct mail and so on. Alongside the growth in media spends is a growth in the sheer volume of products available, which is made possible by increasingly sophisticated technologies for sales, inventory, delivery and so on.

What does this mean? Well, simply that the strategy of ‘just buy some ads and sell the benefits’ isn’t enough anymore: you’ll be lost in the noise. How can a brand retain customers and create loyalty in an atmosphere where everyone else has a better offer? Through tapping into the psychology of social relationships.

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Imagine that you are at home for Thanksgiving, and your mother has pulled out all the stops to lovingly craft the most delicious, intricate dinner ever known to man. You and your family have enjoyed a wonderful afternoon of socializing and snacking on leftovers and watching football, and now it’s time to leave. As you hug your parents goodbye, you take out your wallet. “How much do I owe you for all the love and time you put into this wonderful afternoon?” you ask. “$100 for the food? here, have $50 more as a thank you for the great hospitality!” How would your mother respond to such an offer? I don’t know about your mother, but my mom would be deeply offended.

New scenario: You’ve gone to a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s the most delicious dinner you’ve ever had, the atmosphere is great with the football playing in the background, and best of all, your server is attentive, warm, and maternal. You feel right at home. At the end of the meal, you give her a hug and thank her for the delicious meal before leaving. She calls the cops and has you arrested for a dine-and-dash.

And herein lies the difference between social norms and market norms.

Social norms vs. market norms

The Thanksgiving dinner example is one which I’ve borrowed from a book by Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. Ariely discusses two ways in which humans interact: social norms and market norms.

Social norms, as Ariely explains, “are wrapped up in our social nature and our need for community. They are usually warm and fuzzy. Instant paybacks are not required.” Examples would be: helping a friend move house, babysitting your grandchild, having your parents over for dinner. There is an implied reciprocity on some level but it is not instantaneous nor is it expected that the action will be repaid on a financial level. These are the sort of relationships and interactions we expect to have with friends and family.

Market norms, on the other hand, are about the exchange of resources and in particular, money. Examples of this type of interaction would be any type of business transaction where goods or services are exchanged for money: wages, prices, rents, interest, and cost-and-benefit. These are the sort of relationships and interactions we expect to have with businesses.

Market norms come into play any time money enters into the equation, sometimes counter-intuitively! Ariely gives the example of a group of lawyers who were approached by the AARP and asked whether they would provide legal services to needy retirees at a drastically discounted rate of $30/hour. The lawyers said no. From a market norms perspective, the exchange didn’t make sense. Later the same lawyers were asked whether they would consider donating their time free of charge to needy retirees. The vast majority of the lawyers said yes. The difference is that, when no money changes hands, the exchange shifts from a poor-value market exchange to an altruistic and therefore high-value social exchange. It is a strange psychological quirk that ‘once market norms enter our considerations, the social norms depart.’

Mixed signals: when social and market norms collide

In a book called Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout (originally published in 1981), the authors describe the 1950s as the ‘product era’ of advertising, when ‘advertising people focused their attention on product features and customer benefits.’ It was all about the unique selling proposition (USP).

In this case, the USP is mildness: “not one single case of throat irritation!” (image source)

However, as the sheer volume of products on the market increased, it became more difficult to sell a product simply by pointing out the benefits. As Ries and Trout put it, ‘Your “better mousetrap” was quickly followed by two more just like it. Both claiming to be better than the first one.’

They describe the next phase of advertising (which hit its peak in the 1960s and 70s and which we can probably all relate to if we watch Mad Men) as the ‘image era’, pioneered by David Ogilvy. In this period, successful campaigns sold the reputation, or ‘image’ of a brand and a product rather than its features. Ries and Trout quote Ogilvy as saying that ‘Every advertisement is a long-term investment in the image of a brand’. Examples include Hathaway shirts and Rolls-Royce.

Rather than the product benefits, this ad focuses on the ‘image’ of the man who smokes Viceroys: “Viceroy has a thinking man’s filter and a smoking man’s taste. (image source)

But yet again, as more and more brands imitate the strategy of these successful campaigns, the space gets more crowded and the consumer becomes more jaded and these techniques become less effective.

According to Ries and Trout, this brought the world of advertising into the ‘positioning era’ of the 80s, which is where they positioned (hehe) themselves. As they described this, “To succeed in our overcommunicated society, a company must create a position in the prospect’s mind, a position that takes into consideration not only a company’s own strengths and weaknesses, but those of its competitors as well.”

This one’s all about positioning Winston’s in opposition to competitors: as the brand with real taste, as opposed to other brands which ‘promise taste’ but fail to deliver. (image source)

And yet, despite this evolution of advertising strategy over the course of the 20th century, all of these different approaches are ultimately based on market norms. The ‘product era’ sells you features and benefits in exchange for money; the ‘image era’ sells you on an image and a lifestyle in exchange for money, and the ‘positioning era’ sells you on why a particular company is the right one to supply your needs in exchange for money.

Social norms and loyalty

When does cheap not win? When it comes to social norms. Social norms are about relationships, community and loyalty. If your sister is getting married, you don’t do a cost benefit analysis to decide whether or not you should go to her wedding or whether the food will be better and the travel cheaper if you go to your next door neighbor’s BBQ instead. If anything, it’s the opposite: some people take it to such an extreme that they will go into massive debt to attend friends’ weddings and bring lavish gifts. That is certainly not a decision based on monetary considerations.

Therefore, if the average brand wants to get out of the vicious cycle of undercutting competitors in order to gain business, they need to start focusing on relationships and community building instead of ‘SUPER CHEAP BEST LOW LOW PRICES!!®’ and sneaky upsells at the point of sale. This is something my colleague Tim Allen spoke about in a presentation called “Make Me Love Your Brand, Not Just Tolerate It”. And this is what a large number of recent ‘advertising success stories’ are based on and it’s the whole premise behind many of the more recent trends in marketing: email marketing, personalization, SMS marketing, good social media marketing, and so on.

Some of the most popular brands are the ones which are able to find the perfect balance between:

• a friendly, warm relationship with customers and potential customers, which also often includes a fun, personal tone of voice (the ‘brand personality’) – in these interactions there is often an offering of something to the customer without an expectation of instant payback, and

• a strong product which they offer at a good price with good ‘market’ benefits like free returns and so on.

One example of this is John Lewis, who have good customer service policies around returns etc but also offer free perks to their shoppers, like the maternity room where breastfeeding mothers can relax. One of my colleagues mentioned that, as a new mother, his girlfriend always prefers to shop at John Lewis over other competitor stores for that very reason. Now if this is purely a convenience factor for her, and after her child is older she stops shopping at John Lewis in favor of a cheaper option, you could argue that this is less of a social interaction and more market influenced (in some sense it serves as a service differentiator between JL and their customers). However, if after she no longer requires the service, she continues to shop there because she wants to reciprocate their past support of her as a breastfeeding mother, that pushes it more firmly into the realm of the social.

Another thing John Lewis do for their fans is the annual Christmas ad, which (much like the  Coca-Cola Santa truck in the UK) has become something which people look forward to each year because it’s a heartwarming little story more than just an ad for a home and garden store. Their 2012 ad was my favorite (and a lot of other people’s too, with over 4.5 million Youtube views).

But usually anytime a brand ‘do something nice’ for no immediate monetary benefit, it counts as a ‘social’ interaction – a classic example is Sainsbury’s response to the little girl who wrote to them about ‘tiger bread’.

Some of my other favorite examples of social norm interactions by brands are:

• Red Bull Wings, which is an initiative from Red Bull where they monitor Twitter for mentions of things like #allnighter and #midterms and then send the tweeters a care package with free Red Bull to help get them through the night
• The #MININotNormal campaign, in particular this ‘MINI Salutes You’ video 
• JetBlue delivering a Starbucks coffee to a blogger on the plane
• WestJet creating this magical Christmas surprise for their passengers

The catch is, you have to be careful and keep the ‘mix’ of social and market norms consistent.

Ariely uses the example of a bank when describing the danger of bringing social norms into a business relationship:

“What happens if a customer’s check bounces? If the relationship is based on market norms, the bank charges a fee, and the customer shakes it off. Business is business. While the fee is annoying, it’s nonetheless acceptable. In a social relationship, however, a hefty late fee–rather than a friendly call from the manager or an automatic fee waiver–is not only a relationship-killer; it’s a stab in the back. Consumers will take personal offense. They’ll leave the bank angry and spend hours complaining to their friends about this awful bank.”

Richard Fergie also summed this issue up nicely in this G+ post about the recent outrage over Facebook manipulating users’ emotions; in this case, the back-stab effect was due to the fact that the implicit agreement between the users and the company about what was being ‘sold’ and therefore ‘valued’ in the exchange changed without warning.

The basic rule of thumb is that whether you choose to emphasize market norms or social norms, you can’t arbitrarily change the rules.

A side note about social media and brands: Act like a normal person

In a time when the average American aged 18-64 spends 2-3 hours a day on social media, it is only logical that we would start to see brands and the advertising industry follow suit. But if this is your only strategy for building relationships and interacting with your customers socially, it’s not good enough. Instead, in this new ‘relationship era’ of advertising (as I’ve just pretentiously dubbed it, in true Ries-and-Trout fashion), the brands who will successfully merge market and social norms in their advertising will be the brands which are able to develop the sort of reciprocal relationships that we see with our friends and family. I wrote a post over on the Distilled blog about what social media marketers can learn from weddings. That was just one example, but the TL;DR is: as a brand, you still need to use social media the way that normal people do. Otherwise you risk becoming a Condescending Corporate Brand on Facebook. On Twitter too.

Social norms and authenticity: Why you actually do need to care

Another way in which brands tap into social norms are through their brand values. My colleague Hannah Smith talked about this in her post on The Future of Marketing. Moz themselves are a great example of a brand with strong values: for them it’s TAGFEE. Hannah also gives the examples of Innocent Drinks (sustainability), Patagonia (environmentalism) and Nike (whose strapline ‘Find Your Greatness’ is about their brand values of everyone being able to ‘achieve their own defining moment of greatness’).

Havas Media have been doing some interesting work around trying to ‘measure’ brand sentiment with something call the ‘Meaningful Brands Index’ (MBi), based on how much a brand is perceived as making a meaningful difference in people’s lives, both for personal wellbeing and collective wellbeing. Whether or not you like their approach, they have some interesting stats: apparently only 20% of brands worldwide are seen to ‘meaningfully positively impact peoples’ lives’, but the brands that rank high on the MBi also tend to outperform other brands significantly (120%).

Now there may be a ‘correlation vs causation’ argument here, and I don’t have space to explore it. But regardless of whether you like the MBi as a metric or not, countless case studies demonstrate that it’s valuable for a brand to have strong brand values.

There are two basic rules of thumb when it comes to choosing brand values:

1) I t has to be relevant to what you do. If a bingo site is running an environmentalism campaign, it might seem a bit weird and it won’t resonate well with your audience. You also need to watch out for accidental irony. For example, McDonalds and Coca-Cola came in for some flak when they sponsored the Olympics, due to their reputation as purveyors of unhealthy food/drink products.

Nike’s #FindYourGreatness campaign, on the other hand, is a great example of how to tie in your values with your product. Another example is one of our clients at Distilled, SimplyBusiness, a business insurance company whose brand values include being ‘the small business champion’. This has informed their content strategy, leading them to develop in-depth resources for small businesses, and it has served them very well.

2) I t can’t be so closely connected to what you do that it comes across as self-serving. For example, NatWest’s NatYes campaign claims to be about enabling people to become homeowners, but ultimately (in no small part thanks to the scary legal compliance small print about foreclosure) the authenticity of the message is undermined.

The most important thing when it comes to brand values: it’s very easy for people to be cynical about brands and whether they ‘care’. Havas did a survey that found that only 32% of people feel that brands communicate honestly about commitments and promises. So choose values that you do feel strongly about and follow through even if it means potentially alienating some people. The recent OKCupid vs Mozilla Firefox episode is an illustration of standing up for brand values (regardless of where you stand on this particular example, it got them a lot of positive publicity).

Key takeaways

So what can we take away from these basic principles of social norms and market norms? If you want to build a brand based on social relationships, here’s 3 things to remember.

1) Your brand needs to provide something besides just a low price. In order to have a social relationship with your customers, your brand needs a personality, a tone of voice, and you need to do nice things for your customers without the expectation of immediate payback.

2) You need to keep your mix of social and market norms consistent at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Don’t pull the rug out from under your loyal fans by hitting them with surprise costs after they checkout or other tricks. And don’t give new customers significantly better benefits. What you gain in the short term you will lose in the long term resentment they will feel about having been fooled. Instead, treat them with transparency and fairness and be responsive to customer service issues.

3) You need brand values that make sense for your brand and that you (personally and as a company) really believe in. Don’t have values that don’t relate to your core business. Don’t have values which are obviously self-serving. Don’t be accidentally ironic like McDonalds.

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Have you seen examples of brands building customer relationships based on social norms? Did it work? Do you do this type of relationship-building for your brand?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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