seo

Posted by George-Freitag

Now that location-based searches are growing about 50% faster than any other type of search on mobile, what are you going to do to make sure you’re working on the front lines of this new, local-focused world? Well, you can start by joining us in Seattle for MozCon Local 2017 on February 27–28 for a day full of in-depth workshops from LocalU followed by an all-day conference from the top local speakers and brands.

You’ll come away with another level of understanding related to local strategy, citations, reviews, SEO local link building, content creation, and more, along with some incredible, tactical advice to get you improving your local game the second you get home (or at least your first day back in the office). Plus, you’ll be able to interact directly with speakers both during Q&A sessions and around the conference, and spend time getting to know your fellow local marketers.

So whether you’re a marketer with a portfolio chock-full of local accounts or a brand with hundreds or thousands of locations, MozCon Local 2017 is where you need to be.

Buy your MozCon Local 2016 ticket!

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Some of our great speakers (lots more coming!)

	Darren Shaw Whitespark Darren Shaw is the president and founder of Whitespark, a company that builds software and provides services to help businesses with local search. He’s widely regarded in the local SEO community as an innovator, one whose years of experience working with massive local data sets have given him uncommon insights into the inner workings of the world of citation-building and local search marketing. Darren has been working on the web for over 16 years and loves everything about local SEO.
	Mike Blumenthal GetFiveStars Mike grew up sweeping floors in his family retail business at age 7 and saw the challenges of local marketing up close from an early age. Before co-founding GetFiveStars.com and LocalU.org he had been doing what we now know as Local SEO since 2005 and writing at his blog Understanding Google Local since 2006. He loves researching and understanding the issues that confront bricks and mortar storefronts and helping owners, agencies, and franchises tackle the challenges of the ever changing local marketing world.
	Heather Physioc VML Heather Physioc is Assoc. Director of Organic Search at global digital ad agency VML, performing search engine optimization services for multinational brands like Electrolux/Frigidaire, Colgate-Palmolive, Hill’s Pet Nutrition, Bridgestone, Wendy’s and Bayer Animal Health. She has worked in digital marketing for 10 years. Physioc earned her Bachelor’s of Journalism in Strategic Communication (Advertising) from the University of Missouri, and is currently pursuing an Executive Master’s of Business Administration from Rockhurst University. She has spoken at AACS, WordCamp, KCSEMA, SEMPO Cities, PRSA Mid-Missouri and Omaha, TEDxKCWomen and more.
	Willys DeVoll Google Willys Devoll is a content strategist for Google My Business and a member of the AdWords Content Strategy and Development team. He has also worked as a technical writer and content developer on Google for Work. In the past, DeVoll worked for Major League Baseball Advanced Media in communications, and at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, where he contributed to research in the Literary Lab.
	Rand Fishkin Moz Rand Fishkin uses the ludicrous title, Wizard of Moz. He’s founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org.

MozCon Local 2017 takes place at the Hyatt in downtown Seattle. In addition to coming home with a ton of knowledge, you’ll also be coming home with some great swag to show off! Monday’s workshops will have a snack break and networking time, and for Tuesday’s conference your ticket includes breakfast, lunch, and two snack breaks. FINALLY, on the last night we’ll have a networking party so you meet speakers, thought leaders, Mozzers, and other attendees. Networking without the ‘net!

We’re expecting around 200 people to join us, including speakers, Mozzers, and Local U staff. MozCon Local sold out last year, and we expect this year to sell out, as well, so you’ll want to buy your ticket now!

Purchase your ticket now!

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Our best early-bird prices:

Local U Workshop + MozCon Local Conference – Monday & Tuesday, February 27–28, 2017

$1,048 $748 for Early Bird Moz Subscriber & Local U Forum Members

$1,498 $1,148 for Early Bird General Admission

MozCon Local Conference – Tuesday, February 28, 2017

$599 $399 for Early Bird Moz Subscribers & Local U Forum Members

$899 $699 for Early Bird General Admission

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Posted by Tom.Capper

When we think of local SEO, we think of local packs, Google My Business listings, and local citations. While these things certainly are local SEO, they aren’t the whole picture. Local SEO can be split into three categories:

• Local pack results for organizations with local premises
• Organic results for organizations with local premises
• Organic results for organizations without local premises

It’s the third category that I want to cover here today. This often-neglected and little-discussed area plays host to some of the biggest and most lucrative spaces in organic search. Think about searches like:

• Chemical engineering jobs in London
• Flats to rent in London
• Used Ford Focus for sale in London

These terms are local in nature, and local businesses might compete for them — whether they be recruitment agencies, letting agents, or car dealerships. However, businesses without any local premises might also compete for them — whether they be online-only job boards, property listings sites, or eBay and Craigslist.

Let’s take recruiters as an example. A search for “recruiters near me” from Distilled HQ in London produces this result:

If we search for something more specific:

Firstly, this is a “near me” search with no local pack. The second very noticeable thing is that after the four PPC ads, Totaljobs.com are ranking both first and second(!!!). Neither they nor Indeed.co.uk have any physical premises, and the second result ranking isn’t even location-specific. In case you’re curious, Indeed gets the double-rank if I swap out “near me” for “in London”:

The points I want to make are that:

• It’s totally legitimate for Indeed and Totaljobs to try to rank for these queries
• This is local SEO, but there are no local packs, and these are not local sites

There are a whole range of niche concerns around this sort of situation, which I’ll cover in turn:

• Whether this applies to you: Should you be competing for local queries at all?
• Granularity: Which local queries should you be competing for?
• Optimizing pages to compete in these spaces.

A quick side note: It is possible to generate Google My Business listings for locations where you can get someone to sort your verification, but you yourself have no real premises. This is either spam or misleading marketing depending on how you look at it. Like many other spam techniques, some sites are having success with it, but it’s not something I would endorse or recommend, and I won’t be covering it any further here.

Should you be competing for local queries at all?

The example search queries I used above all had something in common — they were different offerings based on the location a user was interested in, so having location pages made absolute sense for the users, for the sites, and for Google.

This isn’t always true. Take this example from Serenata Flowers:

Award-winning florist in West Wellow.

For context, there are no florists in or even particularly near West Wellow, which is a tiny place on the edge of the New Forest National Park in Southern England:

Furthermore, the offerings on this page are identical to those that Serenata appears to offer on every other location page. This page exists purely for SEO benefit — it’s to target local search volume, with no benefit to users other than their ability to find it through that search volume. There’s nothing you can do on this page that you can’t do from any other non-location-specific page on the site.

This isn’t unusual in this vertical, or in several others. In fact, this is one of the last big areas where doing something just for the SEO benefit not only makes sense, but seems sustainable and fairly white-hat.

One might tenuously argue that users want reassurance that their flowers will be cut close to their intended delivery destination, or that Serenata offers delivery in this area. However, in this case it would make far more sense for Serenata to have landing pages for the locations where the flowers are cut, or for logical delivery areas rather than individual villages; nobody would think that a florist in nearby Romsey offering delivery would for some reason refuse to deliver to West Wellow.

The best litmus test for whether you should be pursuing this type of landing page strategy is whether you can actually think of a useful way to differentiate these pages for users (as opposed to for Google). A flower delivery site probably can — by showing local stock and delivery times and distances — but small villages are too fine a granularity for this.

I imagine Serenata drive considerable revenue through some of their location pages for higher volume locations — despite not differentiating these pages in this way — but it’s the fact that users would look for a locally differentiated page in the first place that makes this strategy viable.

Granularity: Which local queries should you be competing for?

When deciding how to target your location pages, there will be a wide range of options, for example:

• State
• County
• City
• Town
• Zip/Postal Code
• Street
• All of the above

Which of these options makes sense for you comes down to two main factors:

1. At what level of granularity are your potential customers searching?
2. What level of indexation can your site support?

The first question initially looks like a simple keyword research problem, but it’s harder than that. We’re getting into the seriously long-tail with some of these groupings, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t volume. Search volume tools like Google Keyword Planner and Moz’s own Keyword Explorer start to struggle to tell the difference between “zero” and “low” when we get into this sort of territory, so you’re probably going to have to do something better than that. Some ideas worth considering:

• Test for volume and interest with paid search
• If you already have a variety of pages, find out which ones receive zero or nearly zero organic traffic and conversions
• Test opening up deeper locations for a small number of areas (small enough that you’re confident the strain on indexation and spreading of equity won’t impact your site as a whole!)
• Search for the smaller locations you’re considering. Does your higher-level page already rank well?
• Look at data from your internal site search
• See what your competitors are doing. They might not be getting it right, but it could be a useful source of ideas to validate

The second question is more complex. Adding thousands or even millions of extra pages to any website is a dangerous game. You should be concerned as to whether Google will allocate enough crawl budget, or whether you’ll damage the strength of existing pages.

Here are some ideas to consider:

• Test opening up extra locations for half of areas. Monitor the performance of the unaffected half of the site vs. a counterfactual, as well as the affected half of the site vs. the unaffected half.
  • If the affected side underperforms, you’re spreading yourself too thin.
  • If the unaffected side underperforms but the affected side does not, work out whether the aggregate effect was positive or negative.
• Make sure you’re being clever with your information architecture.
  • Minimize the number of extra URLs Google has to crawl.
  • Consider using HTML sitemap (“browse all areas”) pages that are linked to internally, but “NOINDEX, FOLLOW” to distribute equity without crowding user-facing pages with links.
  • Test using nofollow attributes on individual facet links to control any potential spider traps.
  • Use breadcrumbs (marked up in structured data) to make the structure of the site and location hierarchy as clear as possible to search engines.
  • Monitor server logs to discover any crawling problems.

(How not to) Optimize pages for local search

Here’s what Serenata have done to optimize for local search in the example I used above:

This is sitting at the bottom of the category page and contains such stunners as “Our florists in West Wellow have the experience and the passion to create beautiful bouquets for any occasion.” I’m sure they would, if they existed.

Clearly this is keyword stuffing at its finest. In or out of local search, this kind of category/listing page SEO drivel feels like it shouldn’t work anymore, but in fact your mileage may vary, and again, if you already have this, you should test:

• Removing it entirely
• Turning down the keyword density

I’ve seen numerous examples in the last year of sites benefitting from improving or getting rid of this kind of useless content.

So what to do instead? Above, I said:

• “The best litmus test for whether you should be pursuing this type of landing page strategy is whether you can actually think of a useful way to differentiate these pages for users.”

This means that you should have something genuinely useful that you can put on these pages. Some recommendations:

• Proprietary data – e.g. what the most popular flowers are in this location.
• Local differentiation – e.g. are some of the products delivered to this location sourced locally?
• Genuine local expertise – could any employees or subcontractors in this area contribute?
• Reviews for this location
• Reassurance – e.g. if you think a user is looking for a local florist because of delivery concerns, say how long the flowers will be traveling for

Looking forward

As location targeting without physical premises is an area that still feels a little old-fashioned in its SEO trends, it’ll be interesting to see how it develops in the next few years. Personal assistants could have a particularly large impact here, for example. I’d love to hear your thoughts and predictions in the comments below.

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Posted by samanthanoble

If you’re not using your paid media in more creative ways than simply targeting customers at the buying stage, you’ve got a world of opportunity awaiting you. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, we’re delighted to have guest presenter Samantha Noble divulge 10 strategies for using your paid media to get your customers talking about you more and recommending you often.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, my name’s Samantha Noble, and I’m the Director of Strategy over at Koozai in the UK. We’re a digital marketing agency specializing in paid media, SEO, and content marketing, and I’m really, really excited to be here today to share with you some tips on how we can use paid media to basically drive loyal customers and get those loyal customers recommending us to others.

I think what I’ve seen over the years, when it comes to paid media, is people tend to focus on the buying stage. They think that they’re going to put money into a paid media channel and they’re going to get return out of it, which is essentially true. But, when it comes to using paid media for loyalty and advocacy, it’s something that I don’t tend to see very often, and there’s lots of stuff that we can do.

So over the next sort of 8 minutes or so, we’re going to look at 10 different strategies. So it’s five for loyalty and five for advocacy. And I’m hoping to be able to share with you some ideas and some inspiration that you can take away and use with the new paid media campaigns. So let’s get started.

Loyalty

To start with, let’s look at loyalty, and the first thing that we’re going to look at is…

1. Use remarketing lists for search ads (RLSAs) to bid on competitor names

So let’s say we’ve got a customer that has been with you time and time again or even they might have just bought from you once. If they then go back to Google and search for a competitor, you can then start displaying ads to that particular customer, at that moment in time, to try and encourage them to remain a loyal customer of yours by including a unique discount in the advert. So this really works well if the competitor names that you’re using aren’t trademarked. Otherwise, you will come up with a few sticky situations there that may not work. So it’s worth looking to see whether you can try it or not. But it’s a great way of trying to capture people at the stage when they may potentially be looking to go off and buy from a competitor.

2. Unique discounts within your search ads

So in the same way that we were talking about remarketing lists for search before, you can do this by either uploading a list of email addresses, so your CRM database of customers, or as a remarketing list for search ads, so your remarketing list of your existing customers. Now, when they go and search, again, for any of your other products or services that you could do, you can start to show them unique offers within the ads to say, “Hey, as a loyal customer, you get an extra 10% off if you buy a second purchase from us.” So again, this can work really, really well to drive loyalty.

3. Dedicated landing pages

If you’ve got a customer that comes into a store that you know they come to you every single week and they buy from you time and time again, you’re not going to greet them necessarily in the same way as what you would a first-time customer that you’re not aware of. And this should be the same when it comes to search advertising. So, if you’ve got a unique customer that’s bought from you time and time again, why not show them a landing page, when they land on the site, that is targeted to them, that’s talking in a language that shows that you’re talking to them as a loyal customer rather than as a first-time buyer? So again, you can do this with customer match lists or with remarketing lists for search.

4. Countdown ads with time-sensitive deals

So countdown ads are the ads where you see time is ticking down if there’s a unique offer that’s going to expire in, say, a weeks’ time. If you’ve got a customer that’s bought from you once and you want to try and encourage a repeat purchase, why not show them a limited-time offer, so that it’s saying, “Look, if you buy from us a second time within the next week, month, two months…” whatever it is that you want to put in there, and show the offer is ticking down, this can create a real sense of urgency and drive people to buy from you and make a second purchase.

5. Remarketing to cross-sell or upsell to customers

This works really well if you’ve got a product or a service that people can buy from you again, or it might be that you’ve got a product — so let’s say a mobile phone provider as an example. Somebody might have bought a mobile phone. The next logical purchase for that particular customer could be that they’re looking to get a cover or a case for that phone. If you know that somebody’s bought a particular model or make of a phone, why not start following them around with remarketing ads, highlighting the fact that you also sell covers and cases? This can be a really good way of driving extra loyalty from people that have just bought from you.

The reason that I think it’s important to consider loyalty, when it comes to paid, is there was a study done via Access Development, that basically shows that 80% of customers would actually consider switching brands or stores if they were offered the right compelling discount. So I think that’s just really, really important to remember that even though you’ve worked hard to gain a customer, they can still leave you and go to a competitor.

Advocacy

So, moving on from here, let’s look at some ways that we can use advocacy, and what I mean by advocacy is you’ve got a loyal customer base. You’ve spent all this money and time and resource growing that audience. What we want to do now is help them to market you, help them to do that word-of-mouth marketing and actually recommend you to others. And there are five ways that we’re going to look through in terms of how we can drive advocacy using paid media.

1. Gmail ads

Gmail ads are really good if you are using them and targeting them at the right people. And I’ve seen this work really well if you’re trying to promote like forward to a friend discounts. So if you’ve got a list of all your customers, whether it’s again a remarketing list or a customer matched list of email addresses, upload those. When those particular customers are looking at their emails on Gmail and they’re not using a business Gmail account, and they’re in the Promotions tab, they can see various ads at the top. So you’re typically seeing two ads at the moment at the top of Gmail.

And in here, what we can do is we can show an advert that’s saying, “Hey, as a loyal customer of ours, why not recommend us to others?” You can show them and you can give them a unique discount code to pass on to their friends or family. So you can do this and try and encourage people, when they’re opening up that ad, you can make it look like a nice HTML advert, a nice HTML page, and try and drive them to say, “Hey, forward this discount on to a friend, and your friends or family can benefit from this unique offer,” that we’re offering to them.

2. Remarketing for reviews

So similar to what we were talking about before, in terms of using remarketing to generate upsells and cross-sells, you can also do remarketing to try and encourage your existing audience base to go and leave a review of your product or service. And whether that’s on your own website or whether you’re using a third-party review site, if you are using a third-party review site, I’d recommend that you make sure that it’s a site that Google can aggregate that data from, because that’s going to come on to the seller ratings that we’re going to look at next. But you can follow people around saying, “Hey, how did you find your experience with us? What was your product like? What was the service like?” And try and encourage them to go and leave you a review so that other people can then experience what your existing customer base had kind of experienced from their product or service they’ve purchased from you.

3. Seller ratings

So seller ratings are the ads where you see the stars in the listings, and these can be really, really good especially if your competitors aren’t doing this. There is a stipulation. I think it’s 120 reviews you need in the past 12 months, so you need to make sure that you’re getting reviews frequently enough. But Google will then aggregate that data and pool that within your search ads. And as I say, if your competitors aren’t doing it and you are, and you’re seeing that you’ve got a four or a five-star rating, that really entices people to click through and it gives that sense of, “Yeah, they’re a good company to buy from, so I’m going to go and investigate them more.”

4. Gmails ads – cashback sites – referral scheme

If you’ve got a recommend-a-friend scheme or refer-a-friend scheme that you’re wanting to try and promote, people that are signed up to recommend-a-friend-type schemes are kind of looking to get something in exchange for what they’re doing. So the idea here is what you can do is you can upload a load of cashback site domains. So it could be all of the different cashback sites in a particular niche or just the cashback sites that you want to go after. Upload all of those as keywords, and if somebody is receiving an email from a cashback site, your ad can say at the top, “Hey, we’ve got this great refer-a-friend scheme. You can earn money for doing X, Y, and Z with us.” So it’s a way of tapping in to not necessarily your existing customer base, but trying to tap in to a new audience and get them referring you to others as well, and this can work really, really well.

5. Reviews + testimonials on landing pages

Final idea that we’ve got here is making sure that the same, what we were talking about before, about using dedicated landing pages for our loyal customers, what we also want to do on the landing pages for new customers that are coming into a site, is make sure that we’re talking about testimonials from our existing customer base, making sure that we put the reviews on there. People buy from people. I’m hearing the term “human-to-human” bandied around a lot recently. So rather than B2C, B2B, it’s H2H. And this is really, really important because people do buy from people, and people like to feel that the product or service that they’re buying has helped somebody else or somebody else has enjoyed that particular product. So making sure that you’re using reviews and testimonials on landing pages can really help boost your conversion rate.

Now the reason that advocacy is really important, again, another study that was done via Bright Local, this basically shows that 92% of people that they surveyed said that they regularly read online reviews. So it’s really important, in this day and age, that we focus on driving reviews and getting our existing customers to recommend us to others.

So, as I said, there’s lots of other ways that we can use paid media to target loyalty and advocacy, and I’d love to hear what you guys are doing, what other ideas have worked for you, what strategies have worked well for you. If you can leave those in the comments below, that will be fantastic. If you’ve got any questions or you want to run anything past me, then you can get me on my Twitter handle, which is @samjanenoble, and thank you very, very much for having me on Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by dudleycarr

Today we’re excited to share our latest updates to Moz Local. Moz Local is unique in that it serves a large number of small business, enterprise, and agency customers. Today’s release has something for all of our customers, and we believe it’s an important step to providing the best value to everyone, independent of their size and shape.

What are we announcing today?

We’re announcing an exciting set of new functionality and integrations for local marketers to help them be more productive and more effective, and a collection of new product packages. All of this is designed to help you — local businesses, enterprises and agencies — make Local your advantage.

Try the new Moz Local today!

Google My Business Sync

Google My Business (GMB) is Google’s tool used by businesses to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. Now Moz Local automatically associates your GMB listing(s) with your Moz Local listings, enabling you to push updates to, and continuously sync any changes with GMB. Ensuring that your data is accurate on Google is essential to appearing and ranking higher in local pack search results. With this major new feature life just got easier — you no longer have to manage in both Moz Local and Google My Business. You can now manage all your local data from a single dashboard without ever going into GMB again.

Connecting your Google My Business account to Moz Local is a snap.

Your Google My Business listings are automatically associated with your Moz Local listings and any changes in either Moz Local or Google My Business automatically sync between the two systems.

New listing services

Continuing our focus on automating distribution to the services in the local search ecosystem that most impact local search results, we’ve added active management of listings on 5 new services.

	Hotfrog: One of the most prominent directories for years, Hotfrog is a mainstay of the Local Search Ecosystem and we’re proud to add them to our direct network.
	Apple Maps: Our new partnership with NavAds now gives us direct control over 4 other data sources — the first being Apple Maps. Now you have direct control over your listing information on the second-most popular navigation platform out there.
	Here: Next we have Here, which powers the mapping platform for Facebook as well as many other navigation networks worldwide.
	TomTom: One of the most popular GPS systems for cars in the country makes TomTom another vital addition.
	Navmii: Rounding out our complete mapping coverage is a Navmii, another growing mapping and navigation platform.

Listing Alerts

The best approach to local marketing is one that’s proactive. One of the most frequent complaints from businesses everywhere, regardless of size, is that Google can sometimes change your business information without warning. Though active location data management can help mitigate this, elements like “store hours” can still change, which can be detrimental to your business. Listing Alerts returns your control, notifying you immediately in our new Activity feed whenever your listing information is changed. This means you can proactively correct the problem, preventing potential complaints from customers, your organization, or your client if you’re an agency. This feature is especially powerful for enterprises and agencies who manage listings at scale.

Listing Alerts in our new Activity Feed help you prevent potential customer complaints by bringing listing issues to your attention, helping you proactively correct any problems

Improved reviews

Consumer reviews are becoming more important to local search ranking. In this update we’ve added Google reviews to our list of the most popular review sites that you can monitor from your Moz Local dashboard, also including Citysearch, Foursquare, Superpages, YP, and Yelp. Now you can get Google reviews from Google My Business and reply directly to them from your dashboard. And for other review sites, our workflow provides direct links to the specific reviews on those platforms for fast action. Additionally, review notifications ensure that you never miss a review by showing you when you’ve received new ones.

Now you can get Google reviews right in your Moz Local dashboard — along with reviews from CitySearch, Foursquare, Superpages, YP, and Yelp.

Now you can respond to Google reviews directly from your Moz Local dashboard. And for other review sites, our workflow provides direct links to the specific reviews on those platforms for fast action.

What are the new product packages?

Our core principle is providing the industry’s most effective local marketing solution with great overall value. As local marketing continues to rapidly evolve, customer needs are expanding. To continue delivering on our core principle it became apparent that we needed to restructure our packages to offer greater and more targeted business value to local businesses, enterprises and agencies. Starting today, Moz Local will be available in 3 different product packages:

Moz Local Essential

Moz Local Essential is our new entry-level solution, designed to enable local businesses with one or dozens of locations to easily capitalize on best practices and the latest trends in local SEO. This package offers our industry-leading Active Location Data Management, including Google My Business Sync. In addition, Reputation Monitoring and Management is integral in this package since reviews are becoming more important in local search ranking. At $99/location per year, it’s packed with functionality — while remaining priced less than 50% of the leading competition.

Moz Local Professional

For Enterprise brands and agencies that need an enterprise-class solution to manage their location data at scale (hundreds to thousands of business locations), Moz Local Professional includes everything in the Essential package — PLUS:

• New Listing Alerts that notify you immediately in the new Activity feed whenever your listing information is changed
• Local SEO Analytics that enable marketers to analyze results and make informed decisions that improve local marketing performance
• Our Success Assurance Program, with an assigned Customer Success Manager to oversee your account, perform a listing health audit and competitive ranking analysis to establish your baseline, assist with FastStart onboarding, and provide local SEO insights to help you achieve your search performance goals.

Moz Local Professional is available at $179/location per year.

Moz Local Premium

For Enterprise brands and agencies that have a higher level of business need or unique integration requirements, Moz Local Premium includes everything in the Professional package — PLUS:

• All of the advantages that Moz Local has to offer made available via Moz Local API
• With a minimum of 100 listings, the full suite of organic SEO tools from Moz so that no part of your SEO strategy remains unmanaged. With Moz Pro, Keyword Explorer, Open Site Explorer and more, you can make sure the rest of your site is performing well to complement your local listings.

Moz Local Premium is available at $249/location per year.

Learn more

Learn about all of the features in our new product packages by checking our new features page.

See the new Moz Local in action by registering for one of our free webinars.

Local is the new front door

Local search is exploding: According to Google, there are now more searches on mobile than on desktop, and 30% of all mobile searches are related to location. 76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day, and 28% of those searches for something nearby result in a purchase. To borrow a phrase: Local has become the new front door. With this level of consumer behavior and these new product offerings, there’s never been a better time to give Moz Local a try. We look forward to helping you make Local your advantage!

More coming soon!

Today’s just the beginning for the new Moz Local. As the global leader in SEO software, we’re continuing to invest in advancing local marketing with the industry’s most effective location data management solution. By the end of January — and a bunch more pizzas and, okay, some salads from now — we’ll be delivering another update with additional new functionality, including our new Customer-Actions metric, more enhancements to Google My Business Sync, and additional distribution enhancements. We might even have some exciting news to share along the way…

Questions about our new features, product packages or pricing? Leave a comment or contact us at help@moz.com.

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Posted by EarnedMarketing

If you’ve been to any SEO conferences over the past few years, you’ve likely heard something along the lines of this:

“Links are still really important for organic search rankings. But the way we go about getting those links has changed… it’s now all about content marketing.”

The general premise is that great, “rank-worthy” content gets links, which in turn builds up your site’s authority, which subsequently gives a boost to the search rankings of both that specific content piece and the domain as a whole. And following the same logic, content that does spectacularly well in earning links ought to have spectacular and lasting SEO results.

Sounds great on paper, and it even makes sense when you think about it logically. You build better content that readers enjoy, so the quality of your site goes up, and Google rewards your ever-improving site with better rankings.

Except that’s not what I’m seeing. Not by a long way.

Today I’m going to put across the hypothesis that viral content, at least in certain scenarios, has little to no benefit for domain-wide search engine rankings. Specifically, we’ll be taking a look at some websites that have absolutely smashed it with viral content, including:

• Amplifon
• Simply Business
• Concert Hotels
• JustPark

Amplifon: What do links from 222 websites do for SEO?

Our first case study is from a hearing aid manufacturer called Amplifon. Back in August 2014, working with the renowned digital marketing agency Epiphany, they created an interactive piece called Sounds of Streetview. Originally hosted on the amplifon.co.uk domain (which has since been redirected over to amplifon.com), this rather nifty piece of content marketing was meant to bring an explorative 3D sound experience to Google Streetview — and the Internet loved it.

According to Majestic, this piece secured 685 backlinks from 222 referring domains. And the results for their organic search rankings? Let’s take a look…

At first glance, there does indeed seem to be a sharp jump in Amplifon’s overall search visibility after the release of the “Sounds of Streetview” on both SearchMetrics and SEMRush. However, upon deeper inspection of SearchMetrics’ keyword-level data (available here), we can see that almost all of this jump has come from new keywords directly related to the “Sounds of Streetview” content piece. Ranking increases and extra traffic from keywords like “street view” and “make your own google” are hardly the kinds of outcomes that businesses yearn for when signing off on large content marketing projects.

Looking at “Money Making” keywords alone, we only see around a 10% jump in SearchMetrics’ Traffic Index for Amplifon SERPs. Moreover, all of that jump comes from a single, very popular keyword (“hearing aids”) which moved up by one position. The Traffic Index for all of Amplifon’s other “Money Making” keywords has actually gone down by -76 between July 31 2014 and August 28 2014.

SearchMetrics Organic Visibility Graph for Amplifon.co.uk

SearchMetrics Traffic Index by keyword type for Amplifon.co.uk

SEMRush Organic Traffic Graph for Amplifon.co.uk

SEMRush Number of Ranking Keywords Graph for Amplifon.co.uk.*

*SEMRush expanded their tracked keyword set for UK in February 2016, but this jump in keywords does not relate to improved real-life traffic for the website.

Simply Business: The perennial content marketing case study

Let’s take a look at the second case study examining Simply Business, a large business insurance broker here in the UK. They’ve been included in almost every conference speech and blog post covering content marketing in the last year. So much so, in fact, that a search on Google for “Simply Business” + “link building” returns 168,000 results.

Released in February 2014, their viral content success came in the shape of Hungry Tech Giants, an interactive guide on how the “big five” tech giants have acquired smaller companies over the past 15 years. According to Majestic, this piece obtained 588 links from 167 linking root domains.

Simply Business has also produced a very successful (in link acquisition terms) suite of business tech guides. Out of a grand total of 20 guides, the two stand-out performers were Wordpress for Small Businesses — released in August 2012, which attracted 1,897 links from 169 linking root domains — and The Small Business Guide to Google Analytics, published in January 2013 and which garnered 3,463 links from 243 sites.

That’s a lot of links!

SearchMetrics Organic Visibility Graph for SimplyBusiness.co.uk

SearchMetrics hasn’t picked up any spikes in boosts in Simply Business’ visibility within a reasonable timeframe after the launch of these three pieces.

SEMRush Organic Traffic Graph for SimplyBusiness.co.uk

SEMRush Number of Ranking Keywords Graph for SimplyBusiness.co.uk.*

SEMRush has observed a rankings increase of 10% to 15% around January 2013, but no associated change to the organic traffic. Other than that, no clear signs of growth are coming from the content marketing successes.

There haven’t been any new guides added to Simply Business’ guides section since August 2015.

Concert Hotels: But what if you “make it” really big, thrice?

Our final case study is Concert Hotels, a hotel booking website. Back in November 2013 they released the first of their mega-successful content pieces: 100 Years of Rock. This piece brought in a hugely impressive 8,358 links from 521 linking root domains (Majestic).

In May 2014 they released the second big hitter: Vocal Ranges of the World’s Greatest Singers. According to Majestic, this piece managed to procure 2,839 backlinks from a whopping 590 linking root domains. Not bad going!

The company followed this up with a piece called Got Rhythm in June 2015. Although not as successful as its predecessors, it still managed to accumulate 899 backlinks from 236 linking root domains (source: Majestic). Still not half bad.

So in total that’s over 12,096 backlinks from over 1,347 linking root domains. And the impact on organic search traffic?

Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

SearchMetrics Organic Visibility Graph for ConcertHotels.com

SEMRush Organic Traffic Graph for ConcertHotels.com

SEMRush Number of Ranking Keywords Graph for ConcertHotels.com.*

JustPark: 5 million visits aren’t all they’re cracked up to be

Disclaimer: I was in charge of JustPark’s digital marketing when we kicked off our content marketing effects, and hopefully I can give you some insider insight on what we saw (or, more accurately, didn’t see) on the back of our activities.

Back in spring 2015 we identified domain authority as a clear SEO priority for JustPark, the UK’s largest parking marketplace. Domain-level linking root domains of the top competitors were 3 to 6 times higher than ours and correlated very well with their organic visibility.

Seeing the big authority building challenge ahead of us and knowing that we don’t want to engage in any risky, shady activities, we decided to invest in content marketing-led link building. Deep inside we all harbored the hope of striking content marketing gold and having one of our pieces going viral.

We selected Distilled as our partner for producing 5 “big content” pieces, and alongside this we also planned out multiple smaller interactive projects to be developed in-house.

After releasing 5 content marketing projects with average success over September and October, we kicked off on the piece that was going beat all of our expectations: Emergency Stop Game.

Rollout

After a quiet launch and a few small spikes of traffic, we decided to seed the content on Reddit in early November. All of a sudden its popularity started snowballing, with traffic (and referrals!) going up by the hour. Coverage started coming in from top-tier news publications around the world, and when the piece appeared on IFLScience (and took our servers down) we knew we were on to a big one.

By the time all of this madness had died down, the piece had accumulated 400k+ Facebook shares and 5 million+ visits. But what was all that worth?

SEO impact

As domain authority was our overall goal, we watched the build-up of linking root domains — many of them of very high quality — with great excitement. In total, Emergency Stop Game attracted links from more than 600 sites (by now 1,141 links from 389 linking root domains are left in Majestic’s fresh index), which doubled the total link profile of the whole JustPark website. Suffice to say, we expected to see a big change in our SEO performance.

The big surprise came when, week after week, we were looking at the SEO traffic to the core product side of the website (excluding the viral piece itself) and there was no boost to be seen.

SearchMetrics Organic Visibility Graph for JustPark.com

SEMRush Organic Traffic Graph for JustPark.com

SEMRush Number of Ranking Keywords Graph for JustPark.com.*

Here are the graphs from SEMRush and SearchMetrics. They do report improvements in Traffic and Visibility that dissipate over time, but the improvements that they’ve picked up likely have more to do with the gained visibility in (surprisingly popular) “reaction time testing” searches, rather than money-making keywords that drive traffic to the core website.

Conclusion

It’s easy to see how an underwhelming boost to the SEO bottom line by otherwise successful marketing projects might be kept under wraps. Nobody wants to be the one to rain on the parade, especially when those projects have earned visibility and kudos from the community at large. I invite anyone with contradicting (or reaffirming) case studies to openly share their learnings and help inform our industry.

In the meantime, I will take the liberty of making some generalizations as to what these case studies might imply.

Large amounts of links to a single page (with the possible exclusion of the homepage) might not pass that much SEO value to the rest of the website, especially if:

• …the single page is not particularly on-topic
• …many of the links have appeared within a short period of time
• …most of the links are from news websites, as opposed to sites focused on your product / service / industry
• …many links are from international sources whilst the website is nationally focused
• …the single page uses different page structure (headers, footer, menus, etc.) from the rest of the site
• …the single page is not well-interlinked with the rest of the site

My main aim in writing this article was to spark a conversation and critical evaluation of the current industry-wide assumptions on content marketing. If you agree with the above, great. If you disagree — even better! Come forth with your observations and let’s see what learnings we can extract from them.

A special thanks to Ben Johnson — a former colleague and now a freelance SEO and PPC consultant — for his help with this article.

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