Why is everyone and their grandparents writing about content re-optimization?
I can’t speak for the people writing endless streams of blogs on the subject, but in Brafton’s case, it’s been the fastest technique for improving rankings and driving more traffic.
As a matter of fact, in this previous Moz post, we showed that rankings can improve in a matter of minutes after re-indexing.
But why does it work?
It’s probably a combination of factors (our favorite SEO copout!), which may include:
Age value: In a previous study we observed a clear relationship between time indexed and keyword/URL performance, absent of links:
More comprehensive content: Presumably, when re-optimizing content you are adding contextual depth to existing topics and breadth to related topics. It’s pretty clear at this point that Google understands when content has fully nailed a topic cluster.
It’s a known quantity: You’re only going to be re-optimizing content that has a high potential for return. In this blog post, I’ll explain how to identify content with a high potential for return.
How well does it work?
Brafton’s website is a bit of a playground for our marketing team to try new strategies. And that makes sense, because if something goes horribly wrong, the worst case scenario is that I look like an idiot for wasting resources, rather than losing a high-paying client on an experiment.
You can’t try untested procedures on patients. It’s just dangerous.
So we try new strategies and meticulously track the results on Brafton.com. And by far, re-optimizing content results in the most immediate gains. It’s exactly where I would start with a client who was looking for fast results.
In many cases, re-optimizing content is not a “set it and forget it,” by any means. We frequently find that this game is an arms race, and we will lose rankings on an optimized article, and need to re-re-optimize our content to stay competitive.
(You can clearly see this happening in the second example!)
So how do you choose which content to re-optimize? Let’s dig in.
Step 1: Find your threshold keywords
If a piece of content isn’t ranking in the top five positions for its target keyword, or a high-value variant keyword, it’s not providing any value.
We want to see which keywords are just outside a position that could provide more impact if we were able to give them a boost. So we want to find keywords that rank worse than position 5. But we also want to set a limit on how poorly they rank.
Meaning, we don’t want to re-optimize for a keyword that ranks on page eleven. They need to be within reach (threshold).
We have found our threshold keywords to exist between positions 6–29.
Note: you can do this in any major SEO tool. Simply find the list of all keywords you rank for, and filter it to include only positions 6-29. I will jump around a few tools to show you what it looks like in each.
You have now filtered the list of keywords you rank for to include only threshold keywords. Good job!
Step 2: Filter for search volume
There’s no point in re-optimizing a piece of content for a keyword with little-to-no search volume. You will want to look at only keywords with search volumes that indicate a likelihood of success.
Advice: For me, I set that limit at 100 searches per month. I choose this number because I know, in the best case scenario (ranking in position 1), I will drive ~31 visitors per month via that keyword, assuming no featured snippet is present. It costs a lot of money to write blogs; I want to justify that investment.
You’ve now filtered your list to include only threshold keywords with sufficient search volume to justify re-optimizing.
Step 3: Filter for difficulty
Generally, I want to optimize the gravy train keywords — those with high search volume and low organic difficulty scores. I am looking for the easiest wins available.
You do not have to do this!
Note: If you want to target a highly competitive keyword in the previous list, you may be able to successfully do so by augmenting your re-optimization plan with some aggressive link building, and/or turning the content into a pillar page.
I don’t want to do this, so I will set up a difficulty filter to find easy wins.
But where do you set the limit?
This is a bit tricky, as each keyword difficulty tool is a bit different, and results may vary based on a whole host of factors related to your domain. But here are some fast-and-loose guidelines I provide to owners of mid-level domains (DA 30–55).
Tool
KW Difficulty
Ahrefs
<10
Moz
<30
Semrush
<55
KW Finder
<30
Here’s how it will look in Moz. Note: Moz has predefined ranges, so we won’t be able to hit the exact thresholds outlined, but we will be close enough.
Now you are left with only threshold keywords with significant search volume and reasonable difficulty scores.
Step 4: Filter for blog posts (optional)
In our experience, blogs generally improve faster than landing pages. While this process can be done for either type of content, I’m going to focus on the immediate impact content and filter for blogs.
If your site follows a URL hierarchy, all your blogs should live under a ‘/blog’ subfolder. This will make it easy for you to filter and segment.
Each tool will allow you to segment keyword rankings by its corresponding segment of the site.
The resulting list will leave you with threshold keywords with significant search volume and reasonable difficulty scores, from blog content only.
Step 5: Select for relevance
You now have the confidence to know that the remaining keywords in your list all have high potential to drive more traffic with proper re-optimization.
What you don’t know yet, is whether or not these keywords are relevant to your business. In other words, do you want to rank for these keywords?
Your website is always going to accidentally rank for noise, and you don’t want to invest time optimizing content that won’t provide any commercial value. Here’s an example:
Go through the entire list and feel out what may be of value, and what is a waste of time.
Now that you have a list of only relevant keywords, you now know the following: Each threshold keyword has significant search volume, reasonable keyword difficulty, corresponds to a blog (optional), and is commercially relevant.
Onto an extremely important step that most people forget.
Step 6: No cannibals here
What happens when you forget about your best friend and give all your attention to a new, but maybe not-so-awesome friend?
You lose your best friend.
As SEOs, we can forget that any URL generally ranks for multiple keywords, and if you don’t evaluate all the keywords a URL ranks for, you may “re-optimize” for a lower-potential keyword, and lose your rankings for the current high value keyword you already rank for!
Note: Beware, there are some content/SEO tools out there that will make recommendations on the pieces of content you should re-optimize. Take those with a grain of salt! Put in the work and make sure you won’t end up worse off than where you started.
Here’s an example:
This page shows up on our list for an opportunity to improve the keyword “internal newsletters”, with a search volume of 100 and a difficulty score of 6.
Great opportunity, right??
Maybe not. Now you need to plug the URL into one of your tools and determine whether or not you will cause damage by re-optimizing for this keyword.
Sure enough, we rank in position 1 for the keyword “company newsletter,” which has a search volume of 501-850 per month. I’m not messing with this page at all.
On the flipside, this list recommended that I re-optimize for “How long should a blog post be.” Plugging the URL into Moz shows me that this is indeed a great keyword to reoptimize the content for.
Now you have a list of all the blogs that should be reoptimized, and which keywords they should target.
Step 6: Rewrite and reindex
You stand a better chance of ranking for your target keyword if you increase the depth and breadth of the piece of content it ranks for. There are many tools that can help you with this, and some work better than others.
We have used MarketMuse at Brafton for years. I’ve also had some experience with Ryte’s content optimizer tool, and Clearscope, which has a very writer-friendly interface.
Substep 1: Update the old content in your CMS with the newly-written content.
Substep 2: Keep the URL. I can’t stress this enough. Do not change the URL, or all your work will be wasted.
Substep 3: Update the publish date. This is now new content, and you want Google to know that as you may reap some of the benefits of QDF.
Substep 4: Fetch as Google/request indexing. Jump into Search Console and re-index the page so that you don’t have to wait for the next natural crawl.
Step 7: Track your results!
Be honest, it feels good to outrank your competitors, doesn’t it?
I usually track the performance of my re-optimizations a couple ways:
Page-level impressions in Search Console. This is the leading indicator of search presence.
A keyword tracking campaign in a tool. Plug in the keywords you re-optimized for and follow their ranking improvements (hopefully) over time.
Variant keywords on the URL. There is a good chance, through adding depth to your content, that you will rank for more variant keywords, which will drive more traffic. Plug your URL into your tool of choice and track the number of ranking keywords.
Conclusion
Re-optimizing content can be an extremely powerful tool in your repertoire for increasing traffic, but it’s very easy to do wrong. The hardest part of rewriting content isn’t the actual content creation, but rather, the selection process.
Which keywords? Which pages?
Using the scientific approach above will give you confidence that you are taking every step necessary to ensure you make the right moves.
Happy re-optimizing!
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Python is a programming language that can help you uncover incredible SEO insights and save you time by automating time-consuming tasks. But for those who haven't explored this side of search, it can be intimidating. In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Britney Muller and a true python expert named Pumpkin offer an intro into a helpful tool that's worth your time to learn.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're talking all about introduction to Python, which is why I have a special co-host here. She is a ball python herself, total expert. Her name is Pumpkin, and she's the best.
What is Python?
So what is Python? This has been in the industry a lot lately. There's a lot of commotion that you should know how to use it or know how to talk about it. Python is an open source, object-oriented programming language that was created in 1991.
Simpler to use than R
Some fun facts about Python is it's often compared to R, but it's arguably more simple to use. The syntax just oftentimes feels more simple and common-sense, like when you're new to programming.
Big companies use it
Huge companies use it. NASA, Google, tons of companies out there use it because it's widely supported.
It's open source
It is open source. So pretty cool. While we're going through this Whiteboard Friday, I would love it if we would do a little Python programming today. So I'm just going to ask that you also visit this in another tab, python.org/downloads. Download the version for your computer and we'll get back to that.
Why does Python matter?
So why should you care?
Automates time-consuming tasks
Python is incredibly powerful because it helps you automate time-consuming tasks. It can do these things at scale so that you can free up your time to work on higher-level thinking, to work on more strategy. It's really, really exciting where these things are going.
Log file analysis
Some examples of that are things like log file analysis. Imagine if you could just set up an automated system with Python to alert you any time one of your primary pages wasn't being crawled as frequently as it typically is. You can do all sorts of things. Let's say Google crawls your robots.txt and it throws out a server error, which many of you know causes huge problems. It can alert you. You can set up scripts like that to do really comprehensive tasks.
Internal link analysis
Some other examples, internal link analysis, it can do a really great job of that.
Discover keyword opportunities
It can help you discover keyword opportunities by looking at bulk keyword data and identifying some really important indicators.
Image optimization
It's really great for things like image optimization. It can auto tag and alt text images. It can do really powerful things there.
Scrape websites
It can also scrape the websites that you're working with to do really high volume tasks.
Google Search Console data analysis
It can also pull Google Search Console data and do analysis on those types of things.
I do have a list of all of the individuals within SEO who are currently doing really, really powerful things with Python. I highly suggest you check out some of Hamlet Batista's recent scripts where he's using Python to do all sorts of really cool SEO tasks.
How do you run Python?
What does this even look like? So you've hopefully downloaded Python as a programming language on your computer. But now you need to run it somewhere. Where does that live?
Set up a virtual environment using Terminal
So first you should be setting up a virtual environment. But for the purpose of these examples, I'm just going to ask that you pull up your terminal application.
It looks like this. You could also be running Python within something like Jupyter Notebook or Google Colab. But just pull up your terminal and let's check and make sure that you've downloaded Python properly.
Check to make sure you've downloaded Python properly
So the first thing that you do is you open up the terminal and just type in "python --version." You should see a readout of the version that you downloaded for your computer. That's awesome.
Activate Python and perform basic tasks
So now we're just going to activate Python and do some really basic tasks. So just type in "python" and hit Enter. You should hopefully see these three arrow things within your terminal. From here, you can do something like print ("Hello, World!"). So you enter it exactly like you see it here, hit Enter, and it will say "Hello, World!" which is pretty cool.
You can also do fun things like just basic math. You can add two numbers together using something like this. So these are individual lines. After you complete the print (sum), you'll see the readout of the sum of those two numbers. You can randomly generate numbers. I realize these aren't direct SEO applications, but these are the silly things that give you confidence to run programs like what Hamlet talks about.
Have fun — try creating a random number generator
So I highly suggest you just have fun, create a little random number generator, which is really cool. Mine is pulling random numbers from 0 to 100. You can do 0 to 10 or whatever you'd like. A fun fact, after you hit Enter and you see that random number, if you want to continue, using your up arrow will pull up the last command within your terminal.
It even goes back to these other ones. So that's a really quick way to rerun something like a random number generator. You can just crank out a bunch of them if you want for some reason.
Automating different tasks
This is where you can start to get into really cool scripts as well for pulling URLs using Requests HTML. Then you can pull unique information from web pages.
You can pull at bulk tens of thousands of title tags within a URL list. You can pull things like H1s, canonicals, all sorts of things, and this makes it incredibly easy to do it at scale. One of my favorite ways to pull things from URLs is using xpath within Python.
This is a lot easier than it looks. So this might be an xpath for some websites, but websites are marked up differently. So when you're trying to pull something from a particular site, you can right-click into Chrome Developer Tools. Within Chrome Developer Tools, you can right-click what it is that you're trying to scrape with Python.
You just select "Copy xpath," and it will give you the exact xpath for that website, which is kind of a fun trick if you're getting into some of this stuff.
Libraries
What are libraries? How do we make this stuff more and more powerful? Python is really strong on its own, but what makes it even stronger are these libraries or packages which are add-ons that do incredible things.
This is just a small percentage of libraries that can do things like data collection, cleaning, visualization, processing, and deployment. One of my favorite ways to get some of the more popular packages is just to download Anaconda, because it comes with all of these commonly used, most popular packages.
So it's kind of a nice way to get all of it in one spot or at least most of them.
Learn more
So you've kind of dipped your toes and you kind of understand what Python is and what people are using it for. Where can you learn more? How can you start? Well, Codecademy has a really great Python course, as well as Google, Kaggle, and even the Python.org website have some really great resources that you can check out.
This is a list of individuals I really admire in the SEO space, who are doing incredible work with Python and have all inspired me in different ways. So definitely keep an eye on what they are up to:
But yeah, Pumpkin and I have really enjoyed this, and we hope you did too. So thank you so much for joining us for this special edition of Whiteboard Friday. We will see you soon. Bye, guys.
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What keywords do your top competitors both rank for that you're missing out on? How do you know how much top real estate your URL or page owns in the SERPs? How can you discover answers to your searchers' most common questions and beef up that FAQ page?
We can answer all of those questions with some super-simple workflows using Keyword Explorer. In our last post in this series, we covered how to find ranking keywords, uncover new opportunities, check rankings, and more. This time around, we're diving into three more quick and easy workflows you can use to bolster your keyword research and work smarter, not harder.
Ready to get started? Follow along in the tool with Britney Muller as she shares her very favorite Keyword Explorer features:
And remember, if you have a Moz Community account that you use to thumbs-up and comment on Moz Blog posts, you already have free access to Keyword Explorer — let's show you how to use it!
1. How to discover competitive keyword opportunities
This is my favorite feature of all in Keyword Explorer and let me explain why. Let's say that you're this website, pimylifeup.com. They create projects and tutorials on Raspberry Pis. The two competing websites for Raspberry Pi, which is a mini computer, are raspberrypi.org and canakit.com.
If this is your site, we could paste that in here, select Root Domain, and do a search. Then we're going to grab these other two sites. We're going to copy their URLs and enter them in these additional site areas.
This is essentially going to look at the ranking keywords for your competitive sites that your site doesn't rank for. So it's a really great, high-level overview of what those keywords are.
Pi My Life Up is pretty good. Then you can view the Domain Authority for the sites. Where it gets really exciting is over in Ranking Keywords. Here you can see this is raspberrypi.org, and this is the amount of keywords that they rank for. This blue circle is Pi My Life Up, and then the yellow is CanaKit.
What you want to look at are the keywords that both CanaKit and raspberrypi.org right here rank for that you don't. So you click on the competing overlap keywords, and they will populate here below. You can export all of them, which is great.
Or you could filter by various things, like search volume or difficulty in ranking. What I suggest doing is going through some of these by hand and selecting the keywords that you think might be opportunities for your site.
From here, what you can do is, after you select and click around to the ones that you want, you can add them to a keyword list. So you can keep track of all of these keywords. Let's do Pi Opportunities. I've already saved these in a list over here that's populated.
From a high-level overview, you can see what the popular SERP features are. There are lots of images for these competing keywords. If I want to be competitive in those keyword spaces, I know I need to create content that has images. There are also lots of related questions.
Then from here, I can filter by SERP features or organic click-through rates. Maybe most interestingly I can add a URL. Let's say we'll enter Pi My Life Up, and again we're not seeing any rankings here because this was that overlap that Pi My Life Up didn't rank for but the two competitive sites do.
This is confirming that we don't currently rank for any of these keywords, but we can work on that. What's so great about these saved lists is that you can come back after a couple of weeks or a couple of months and you can select all of the keywords and refresh the data.
You might want to come back to this keyword list, refresh it, enter in your URL, and then filter by rank and see where you're starting to pop up for these keyword terms. It's a really exciting way to dig into the competitive keyword space. There's tons you can do with this, but this was the high-level overview of finding those keywords that your competitors currently rank for that you don't.
2. How to discover a URL or an exact page's ranking distribution of keywords
You can just paste in the URL or an exact page into Keyword Explorer. Let's just use webmd.com. From here, you get the Overview page. But if you scroll down to the very bottom, you see the ranking distribution.
You can see how many keywords are currently in positions 1 to 3 versus 4 to 10, all the way down to 41 to 50.
3. How to discover common keyword questions
This is one of my favorite features that we offer with Keyword Explorer. Just put in your keyword. Click Search, and from here you can navigate over to Keyword Suggestions. In this view, you can filter display keyword suggestions that are questions.
Here you'll see all of the results that are questions, and you can sort by various things. You can add all of these to a list, incorporate them into an FAQ page, whatever your end goal is.
Discover anything new or especially useful? Let us know on Twitter or here in the comments, and keep an eye out for more ways to use your everyday SEO tools to level up your workflows.
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If you own or market a business location that makes a real-world community more serviceable, diverse, and strong, I’m on your side.
I love interesting towns and cities, with a wide array of useful goods and services. Nothing in my career satisfies me more than advising any brand that’s determined to improve life quality in some spot on the map. It does my heart good to see it, but here’s my completely unsentimental take on the challenges you face:
The Internet, and Google’s local platforms in particular, are a complete mess.
Google is the biggest house on the local block; you can’t ignore it. Yet, the entries into the platform are poorly lit, the open-source concept is cluttered with spam, and growing litigation makes one wonder if there are bats in the belfry.
Google comprises both risk and tremendous opportunity for local businesses and their marketers. Succeeding in 2020 means becoming a clear-eyed surveyor of any structural issues as well as seeing the "good bones" potential, so that you can flip dilapidation into dollars. And something beyond dollar, too: civic satisfaction.
Grab your tools and get your teammates and clients together to build local success in the new year by sharing my 3-level plan and 4-quarter strategy.
Residents, new neighbors, and travelers seeking what you offer will almost certainly find something about your company online, whether it’s a stray mention on social media, an unclaimed local business listing generated by a platform or the public, or a full set of website pages and claimed listings you’ve actively published.
Right now, running the most successful local business possible means acquiring the largest share you can of those estimated 1 trillion annual local searches. How do you do this?
By feeding Google:
Website content about your business location, products, services, and attributes
Corroborating info about your company on other websites
Local business listing content
Image content
Video content
Social media content
Remember, without your content and the content of others, Google does not exist. Local business owners can often feel uncomfortably dependent on Google, but it’s really Google who is dependent on them.
Whether the business you’re marketing is small or large, declare 2020 the year you go to the drafting board to render a clear blueprint for a content architecture that spans your entire neighborhood of the Internet, including your website and relevant third-party sites, platforms, and apps. Your plans might look something like this:
I recommend organizing your plan like this, making use of the links I’m including:
Begin with a rock-solid foundation of business information on your website. Tell customers everything they could want to know to choose and transact with your business. Cover every location, service, product, and desirable attribute of your company. There’s no chance you won’t have enough to write about when you take into account everything your customers ask you on a daily basis + everything you believe makes your company the best choice in the local market. Be sure the site loads fast, is mobile-friendly, and as technically error-free as possible.
Build out your listings (aka structured citations) on the major platforms. Automate the work of both developing and monitoring them for sentiment and change via a product like Moz Local.
Monitor and respond to all reviews as quickly as possible on all platforms. These equal your online reputation and are, perhaps, the most important content about your business on the Internet. Know that reviews are a two-way conversation and learn to inspire customers to edit negative reviews. Moz Local automates review monitoring and facilitates easy responses. If you need help earning reviews, check out Alpine Software Group’s two good products: GatherUp and Grade.Us.
Audit your competition. In competitive markets, come check out our beta of Local Market Analytics for a multi-sampled understanding of who your competitors actually are for each location of your business, depending on searcher locale.
Once you’ve found your competitors, audit them to understand the:
quality, authority and rate of ongoing publication you need to surpass
number and quality of Google posts, videos, products, and other content you need to publish
social engagement you need to create.
As to the substance of your content, focus directly on your customers’ needs. Local Market Analytics is breaking ground in delivering actual local keyword volumes, and the end point of all of your research, whether via keyword tools, consumer surveys, or years of business experience, should be content that acts as customer service, turning seekers into shoppers.
Use any leftover time to sketch in the finer details. For example, I’m less excited about schema for 2020 than I was in 2019 because of Google removing some of the benefits of review schema. Local business schema is still a good idea, though, if you have time for it. Meanwhile, pursuing relevant featured snippets could certainly be smart in the new year. I’d go strong on video this year, particularly YouTube, if there’s applicability and demand in your market.
The customer is the focus of everything you publish. Google is simply the conduit. Your content efforts may need to be modest or major to win the greatest possible share of the searches that matter to you. It depends entirely on the level of competition in your markets. Find that level, know your customers, and commit to feeding Google a steady, balanced diet of what they say they want so that it can be conveyed to the people you want to serve.
Let’s keep it real: ethical local companies which pride themselves on playing fair have good reason to be dubious about doing business with Google. Once you’ve put in the effort to feed Google all the right info to begin competing for rankings, you may well find yourself having to do online battle on an ongoing basis.
There are two fronts on which many people end up grappling with Google:
Problematic aspects within products
Litigation and protests against the brand.
Let’s break these down to prepare you:
Product issues
Google has taken on the scale of a public utility — one that’s replaced most of North America’s former reliance on telephone directories and directory assistance numbers.
Google has 5 main local interfaces: local packs, local finders, desktop maps, mobile maps and the Google Maps app. It’s been the company’s decision to allow these utilities to become polluted with misinformation in the form of listing and review spam, and irrelevant or harmful user-generated content. Google does remove spam, but not at the scale of the issue, which is so large that global networks of spammers are have sprung up to profit from the lack of quality control and failure to enforce product guidelines.
When you are marketing a local business, there’s a strong chance you will face one or more of the following issues while attempting to compete in Google’s local products:
Being outranked by businesses violating Google’s own guidelines with practices such as keyword-stuffed business titles and creating listings to represent non-existent locations or lead-gen companies. (Example)
Being the target of listing hijacking in which another company overtakes some aspect of your listing to populate it with their own details. (Example)
Being the target of a reputation attack by competitors or members of the public posting fake negative reviews of your business. (Example)
Being the target of negative images uploaded to your listing by competitors or the public. (Example)
Having Google display third-party lead-gen information on your listings, driving business away from you to others. (Example)
Having Google randomly experiment with local features with direct negative impacts on you, such as booking functions that reserve tables for your patrons without informing your business. (Example)
Being unable to access adequately trained Google staff or achieve timely resolution when things go wrong (Example)
These issues have real-world impacts. I’ve seen them misdirect and scam countless consumers including those having medical and mental health emergency needs, kill profits during holiday shopping seasons for companies, cause owners so much loss that they’ve had to lay off staff, and even drive small brands out of business.
Honest local business owners don’t operate this way. They don’t make money off of fooling the public, or maliciously attack neighboring shops, or give the cold shoulder to people in trouble. Only Google’s underregulated monopoly status has allowed them to stay in business while conducting their affairs this way.
Outlook issues
Brilliant people work for Google and some of their innovations are truly visionary. But the Google brand, as a whole, can be troubling to anyone firmly tied to the idea of ethical business practices. I would best describe the future of Google, in its present underregulated state of monopoly, as uncertain.
In their very short history, Google has been:
The subject of thousands of lawsuits by global entities, countries, companies, and individuals
A cause of employee protest over a very long list of employer projects and practices.
I can’t predict where all this is headed. What I do know is that nearly every local business I’ve ever consulted with has been overwhelmingly reliant on Google for profits. Whether you personally favor strong regulation or not, I recommend that every local business owner and marketer keep apprised of the increasing calls by governing bodies, organizations, and even the company’s own staff to break Google up, tax it, end contracts on the basis of human rights, and prosecute it over privacy, antitrust, and a host of other concerns.
Pick your battles
With Google so deeply embedded in your company’s online visibility, traffic, reputation and transactions, concerns with the brand and products don’t exist in some far-off place; they are right on your own doorstep. Here’s how to fight well:
1. Fight the spam
To face off with Google’s local spam, earn/defend the rankings your business needs, and help clean polluted SERPs up for the communities you serve, here are my best links for you:
Follow Mike Blumenthal and Joy Hawkins for frequent reporting on local spam, and keep tuning into the Moz blog.
2. Stay informed
If you’re ready to move beyond your local premises to the larger, ongoing ethical debate surrounding Google, here are my best links for you:
ClassAction.org publishes ongoing articles regarding class action litigation against Google.
@EthicalGooglers on Twitter charts employee/employer conflicts specifically at Google.
The Tech Workers Coalition is a labor organization dedicated to organizing in the tech industry, at large.
If you belong to a local business association like the Buy Local movement, consider starting a discussion about how you community can become more active in shaping policy and reach out to groups like the American Independent Business Alliance for resources.
Whether your degree of engagement goes no further than local business listings or extends to your community, state, nation, or the world, I recommend increased awareness of the whole picture of Google in 2020. Education is power.
You’ve fed Google. You’ve fought Google. Now, I want you to flip this whole scenario to your advantage.
My 2020 local SEO blueprint has you working hard for every customer you win from the Internet. So far, the ball has been almost entirely in Google’s court, but when all of this effort culminates in a face-to-face meeting with another human being, we are finally at your party under your roof, where you have all the control. This is where you turn Internet-driven customers into in-store keepers.
I encourage you to make 2020 the year you draft a strategy for making a larger portion of your sales as Google-independent as possible, flipping their risky edifice into su casa, built of sturdy bricks like community, pride, service, and loyalty.
How can you do this? Here’s a four-quarter plan you can customize to fit your exact business scenario:
The foundation of all business success is giving the customer exactly what they want. Hoping and guessing are no substitute for a survey of your actual customers.
If you already have an email database, great. If not, you could start collecting one in Q1 and run your survey at the end of the quarter when you have enough addresses. Alternatively, you could ask each customer if they would kindly take a very short printed survey while you ring up their purchase.
Imagine you’re marketing an independent bookstore. Such a survey might look like this, whittled down to just the data points you most want to gather from customers to make business decisions:
Have pens ready and a drop box for each customer to deposit their card. Make it as convenient and anonymous as possible, for the customer’s comfort.
In this survey and listening phase of the new year, I also recommend that you:
Spend more time as the business owner speaking directly to your customers, really listening to their needs and complaints and then logging them in a spreadsheet. Speak with determination to discover how your business could help each customer more.
Have all phone staff log the questions/requests/complaints they receive.
Have all floor/field staff log the questions/requests/complaints they receive.
Audit your entire online review corpus to identify dominant sentiment, both positive and negative
If the business you’re marketing is large and competitive, now is the time to go in for a full-fledged consumer analysis project with mobile surveys, customer personae, etc.
End of Q1 Goal: Know exactly what customers want so that they’ll come to us for repeat business without any reliance on Google.
In this quarter, you’ll implement as many of the requests you’ve gleaned from Q1 as feasible. You’ll have put solutions in place to rectify any complaint themes, and will have upped your game wherever customers have called for it.
In addition to the fine details of your business, large or small, life as a local SEO has taught me that these six elements are basic requirements for local business longevity:
A crystal-clear USP
Consumer-centric policies
Adequate, well-trained, personable staff
An in-demand inventory of products/services
Accessibility for complaint resolution
Cleanliness/orderliness of premises/services
The lack of any of these six essentials results in negative experiences that can either cause the business to shed silent customers in person or erode online reputation to the point that the brand begins to fail.
With the bare minimums of customers’ requirements met, Q2 is where we get to the fun part. This is where you take your basic USP and add your special flourish to it that makes your brand unique, memorable, and desirable within the community you serve.
A short tale of two yarn shops in my neck of the woods: At shop A, the premises are dark and dusty. Customer projects are on display, but aren’t very inspiring. Staff sits at a table knitting, and doesn’t get up when customers enter. At shop B, the lighting and organization are inviting, displayed projects are mouthwatering, and though the staff here also sits at a table knitting, they leap up to meet, guide, and serve. Guess which shop now knows me by name? Guess which shop has staff so friendly that they have lent me their own knitting needles for a tough project? Guess which shop I gave a five-star review to? Guess where I’ve spent more money than I really should?
This quarter, seek vision for what going above-and-beyond would look like to your customers. What would bring them in again and again for years to come? Keep it in mind that computers are machines, but you and your staff are people serving people. Harness human connection.
End of Q2 Goal: Have implemented customers’ basic requests and gone beyond them to provide delightful human experiences Google cannot replicate.
Q3: Participate, educate, appreciate
Now you know your customers, are meeting their specified needs, and doing your best to become one of their favorite businesses. It’s time to walk out your front door into the greater community to see where you can make common cause with a neighborhood, town, or city, as a whole.
2020 is the year you become a joiner. Analyze all of the following sources at a local level:
Print and TV news
School newsletters and papers
Place of worship newsletters and bulletins
Local business organization newsletters
Any form of publication surrounding charity, non-profits, activism, and government
Create a list of the things your community worries about, cares about, and aspires to. For example, a city near me became deeply involved in a battle over putting an industrial plant in a wetland. Another town is fundraising for a no-kill animal shelter and a walk for Alzheimer’s. Another is hosting interfaith dinners between Christians and Muslims.
Pick the efforts that feel best to you and show up, donate, host, speak, sponsor, and support in any way you can. Build real relationships so that the customers coming through your door aren’t just the ones you sell to, but the ones you’ve manned a booth with on the 4th of July, attended a workshop with, or cheered with at their children’s soccer match. This is how community is made.
Once you’re participating in community life, it’s time to educate your customers about how supporting your business makes life better in the place they live (get a bunch of good stats on this here). Take the very best things that you do and promote awareness of them face-to-face with every person you transact with.
For my fictitious bookseller client, just 10 minutes spent on Canva (you have to try Canva!) helped me whip together this free flyer I could give to every customer, highlighting stats about how supporting independent businesses improve communities:
If you’re marketing a larger enterprise, a flyer like this could focus on green practices you’re implementing at scale, philanthropic endeavors, and positive community involvement.
Finally, with the holiday season fast approaching in the coming quarter, this is the time to let customers know how much you appreciate their business. Recently, I wrote about businesses turning kindness into a form of local currency. Brands are out there delivering surprise flowers and birthday cakes to customers, picking them up when they’re stranded on roadsides, washing town signage, and replacing “you will be towed” plaques with ones that read “you’re welcome to park here.” Loyalty programs, coupons, discounts, sales, free events, parties, freebies, and fun are all at your disposal to say “Thank you, please come again!” to your customers.
End of Q3 Goal: Have integrated more deeply into community life, motivated customers to choose our business for aspirational reasons beyond sales, and have offered memorable acts of gratitude for their business, completely independent of Google.
Q4: Share customers and sell
Every year, local consumer surveys indicate that 80–90% of people trust online reviews as much as they trust recommendations from friends and family. But I’ve yet to see a survey poll how much people trust recommendations they receive from trustworthy business owners.
You spent all of Q3 becoming a true ally to your community, getting personally involved in the struggles and dreams of the people you serve. At this point, if you’ve done a good job, the people who make up your brand have come closer to deserving the word “friend” from customers. As we move into Q4, it’s time to deepen alliances — this time with related local businesses.
In the classic movie Miracle on 34th Street, the owners of Macy’s and Gimbel’s begin sending shoppers to one another when either business lacks what the customer wants. They even create catalogues of their competitors’ inventory to assist with these referrals. In Q3, I’m hoping you joined a local business alliance that’s begun to acquaint you with other brands that feature goods/service that relate to yours so that you can begin dedicated outreach.
Q4, with Black Friday and Small Business Saturday, is traditionally the quarter in which local businesses expect to get out of the red, but how many more wedding cakes would you sell if all the caterers in town were referring to you, how many more tires would you vend if the muffler shops sent all their customers your way, how many more therapeutic massages might you book if every holistic medical center in your city confidently gave out your name?
Formalize B2B customer referrals in this quarter in seven easy steps:
Create a spreadsheet headed with your contact information and an itemized list of the main goods, services, and brands you sell. Include specialties of your business. Create additional rows to be filled out with the information of other businesses.
Create a list of every local business that could tie in with yours in any way for a customer’s needs.
Invite the owners or qualified reps of each business on your list to a meeting at a neutral location, like a community center or restaurant.
Bring your spreadsheet to the meeting.
Discuss with your guests how a commitment to sharing customers will benefit all of you
If others commit, have them fill out their column of the spreadsheet. Share print and digital copies with all participants.
Whenever a customer asks for something you don’t offer, refer to the spreadsheet to make a recommendation. Encourage your colleagues to do likewise, and to train staff to use the spreadsheet to increase customer sharing and satisfaction.
House flipping is a runaway phenomenon in the US that has remodeled communities and sparked dozens of hit TV shows. Unfortunately, there’s a downside to the activity, as it can create negative gentrification, making life less good for residents.
You need have no fear of this when you flip Google, because turning their house into yours actually strengthens your real-world neighborhood, town, or city. It gives the residents who already live there more stable resources, more positive human contact, and a more closely knit community.
Truth: Google will remain dominant in the discovery-related phases of your consumers’ journeys for the foreseeable future. For new neighbors and travelers, Google will remain a valuable source of your business being found in the first place. Even if governing bodies break the company up at some point, the truth is that most local businesses need to utilize Google a search utility for discovery.
Dare: Draw a line on the pavement outside your front door this year, with transactional experiences on your side of the line. Google wants to own the transaction phase of your customers’ journey. Bookings, lead gen, local ads, and related features show where they are headed with this. If Google could, I’m sure they’d be glad to take a cut of every sale you make, and you’ll likely have to participate in their transactional aspirations to some degree. But...
In 2020, dare yourself to turn every customer you serve into a keeper, cutting out Google as the middleman wherever you can and building a truly local, regenerative base of loyalty, referrals, and community.
Wishing you a local 2020 of daring vision and self-made success!
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New year, new you — when it comes to SEO reporting, at least! We're kicking off 2020 with a comprehensive yet gloriously simple recipe from Cyrus Shepard for creating truly effective SEO reports. From tying KPIs to business metrics to delivering bad news effectively, your reports have never looked so good.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Okay, so we have 400 broken pages. Ah, we rank number 7 for best plumbers in Idaho. Oh, hey, Moz fans. I'm Cyrus Shepard. Today I'm talking about SEO reports, specifically how to create 10x SEO reports.
I've gotten hundreds of SEO reports like this in my career, and I've got to tell you that's useless. No one is reading those. This is unfortunate because this is your direct way to communicate the value of what you're doing, drive action, and essentially make more money with your job. Now a good SEO report tries to accomplish three things:
You want to tie the report directly to your business metrics.
You want to show the value of SEO, what you're doing, how SEO is delivering to those business metrics.
Finally, you want to drive action. When people read your SEO report, you want them to take action on specific things, fix site issues, those sorts of things, etc.
But people make a lot of mistakes. Typically, if you've created SEO reports, if you've read SEO reports, you've seen these mistakes over and over and over again:
It's not a site audit. It's not a list of every single thing that is wrong, every single traffic metric. It's usually just the top things, the things that we want to focus people's attention on.
It's not something that only delivers good news. You see these time and time again, SEO reports, they paint a rosy picture. But people aren't dumb. They know that if their business is not improving and you're continually delivering good news, you're not really tying SEO to the business.
So we want to create even reports.
5 things to include in every SEO report
Now over the years, with the reports I've created, I find that there are generally five key things that you want to include in every SEO report that help you drive action and show the value of SEO and ultimately help you make more money.
1. 2–4 KPIs
The first thing that you want to include in every SEO report is KPIs. These are key performance indicators. These tie directly to your business metrics. Generally, you want to include about two to four of these. You want to keep them top of mind.
A) Conversions, goals, sign-ups, downloads, etc.
Now, generally in SEO, these can be conversions, goals, e-commerce, how many things are you selling. It can be sign-ups for your email newsletter. It can be downloads.
Generally, anything having to do with money, your business metrics, or your key performance indicators, these are good things to include.
Pro tip: When reporting on your key performance indicator, organic traffic, the SEO work that you do is often the last conversion channel that people will use. So it's good to use assisted conversions.
This is often found in Google Analytics or whatever analytics program that you use. This will set a look-back window and show how organic traffic, how your SEO efforts contributed even if their last visit was direct. So it's good researching that and understanding how you can use assisted conversions in your reporting.
B) Traffic MoM, YoY
Another key performance indicator that is very common in SEO reports is traffic. In fact, some people like to lead with it. I like to lead with the business metrics. But it's inevitable that if you're doing an SEO report, you're going to include traffic.
Now if you want to make that traffic report a little more valuable, you need comparisons, generally month-to-month comparisons or more useful year-over-year comparisons. This helps avoid the problem of like traffic was down because of Christmas or a certain holiday or regional event.
So when you compare year-over-year, you can show actual performance that varies a little more reasonably.
2. Search visibility & share of voice
Second, and this is where a lot of people stumble, search visibility or share of voice (SOV). Now where people stumble is this is not a rankings report.
A lot of SEO reports include rankings. Rankings, I've got to say, really aren't the best thing to include in your reports. Rankings fluctuate. They are so personalized from country, device, and individuals. So including rankings for individual keywords is not very informative. Fortunately, there are many great alternatives that you can include that are much superior to rankings.
A) Search visibility (click estimates)
Search visibility, you'll find this in many SEO tools. Moz has it. Different SEO tools have it. It's basically an estimation of clicks for all your tracked keywords. So if you're tracking hundreds or thousands of keywords, search visibility can show you an estimation of how much traffic you're actually getting from those keywords based on rank and search volume and things like that.
B) Share of voice (visibility & volume)
Share of voice is very similar to that, but it's not based on clicks. It's based on visibility and volume. For enterprise, STAT does an excellent job with share of voice. What's cool about share of voice is it tracks all of your keywords against all of your competitors for those keywords. So if you have 200 keywords ranking for best plumbers in Wisconsin, it will show you where all your competitors are and how much of that traffic you are actually gaining, whether it's 13% or 30%. That way you can track against your competitors. It's a much better metric than those individual keywords that don't tell you much.
C) Rank index (grouped keywords)
Finally, if you don't have access to the premium SEO tools, you can do something which is called a rank index. A.J. Kohn has an excellent post on this. It's a little older, but still very relevant.
A rank index is basically grouping all of your keywords by type. For example, maybe they all have the word "plumber" in them. You track their rankings together as a group, hundreds or thousands of keywords, and you can see fluctuations. That gives you a much better performance indicator than those individual keywords.
3. Site health
This is your on-page work, your technical SEO. Again, where most people stumble, this is not an audit. You don't want to list every issue on your site, all the 404s, all the 500s, and things like that because no one really wants to read those things. They get very repetitive.
Focus on your most important issues
Instead you want to focus only on your most important issues. Generally, when I create an SEO report, that's three to five issues. If people want more information, you can deliver it to them. You can give them in-depth downloads, site stats, and all that. But for the report, we only want to focus people's attention on three to five issues, that they can actually fix, that you want them to work on. We're going to list the most important issues on there that we want them to take action on.
Pro tip: When you're writing your site health report, use the word "because." When you use the word "because," it helps people take action. For example, "We have a lot of 404 pages on the site because we introduced some new broken links." That tells people that we have a problem, this is why, and they want to take action.
Show progress
Also, if you've made any progress since the last time you showed the report, you fixed those 404s, this is a good place to include it.
4. Content performance
One thing I like to include, that often isn't, is content performance. This is your top content, whether it's a blog or whatever content you produce, by links, shares, and traffic.
Drive actions through recommendations
Now the reason I like to point out to the site owners content performance is because I want to show them what's performing well to encourage them to create more of it. I want to drive action through recommendations. This content, this blog post that Britney wrote did very, very well. We should have Britney write another one on this.
Suggest topics, keywords, and authors
By doing this, you're helping your client or your boss or whatever help you by creating that content that's going to do well.
Highlight low-performing content
Also, if you want to highlight low-performing content or content that has gone stale and is going down, this is also a helpful place to do that, just to help inform the decisions of your content team.
5. Opportunities
This is probably the most important one. This is the crux of the SEO report — opportunities. Opportunities is the key that you're trying to drive here. These are recommendations.
4–5 recommendations per month
Based on everything that we talked about here, what are the four or five most important things that we can do right now to improve SEO next month?
Prioritize
You want to prioritize. This is the most important. This is the second.
Keep it simple
We want to employ KISS. If you're not familiar with KISS, it's an acronym, keep it simple, stupid. You're not stupid. You're just going to keep it simple.
You want to make your recommendations as simple and easy to follow as possible. One, two, three, four, that's it. We're not going to include everything. A lot of SEO reports want to list dozens of things. We want to hold those back. If you have dozens of fixes that you need fixed on the site, it's probably not a great thing to put them in there because you're going to overwhelm your clients and bosses and people taking action.
Provide exact steps monthly
Again, four to five a month or whatever sort of cadence you're on, weekly, monthly, and how many things you think your client can reasonably tackle. Next month you'll give them four to five more, and you'll stay employed and you'll continually have a new list of things to work on.
Tie fixes to KPIs
You want to make sure they're tied to the KPIs.
We want to fix these because they directly influence these. In fact, I want to shake things up a little bit. I know we listed number five as opportunities. Don't end your report with that. Make opportunities the number one thing in your report. Open it up, here are the opportunities, and then here are KPIs, search visibility, etc., so they know exactly what they should be working on.
We just released a new guide on SEO reporting. You should check it out:
We released some new functionality in Moz Pro too if you're into that sort of thing. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below. If you like this, please share. Thanks, everybody.
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Most of us have done site speed audits, or seen audits done by others. These can be really helpful for businesses, but I often find they're quite narrow in focus. Typically we use well-known tools that throw up a bunch of things to look at, and then we dive into things from there.
However, if we dig deeper, there are often other ideas on how site speed can be improved. I often see plenty of opportunities that are never covered in site speed audits. Most site speed improvements are the result of a bunch of small changes, and so in this post I’m going to cover a few ideas that I’ve never seen in any site speed audit, all of which can make a difference.
A different angle on image optimization
Consider optimized SVGs over PNGs
I was recently looking to book some tickets to see Frozen 2 (because of, erm, my kids...) and so landed on this page. It makes use of three SVG images for transport icons:
SVG images are vector images, so they're well-suited for things like icons; if you have images displayed as PNGs you may want to ask your designers for the original SVGs, as there can be considerable savings. Though not always better, using an SVG can save 60% of the filesize.
In this case, these icons come in at about 1.2k each, so they are quite small. They would probably fly under the radar of site speed audits (and neither Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix mention these images at all for this page).
So you may be thinking, “They're less than 5k combined — you should look for bigger issues!”, but let's take a look. Firstly, we can run them all through Jake Archibald’s SVG compression tool; this is a great free tool and on larger SVGs it can make a big difference.
In this case the files are small, so you may still be thinking "Why bother?" The tool compresses them without any loss in quality from ~1240 bytes to ~630 bytes — a good ratio but not much of an overall saving.
However… now that we've compressed them, we can think differently about delivering them…
Inline images
GTMetrix makes recommendations around inlining small bits of CSS or JS, but doesn’t mention inlining images. Images can also be inlined, and sometimes this can be the right approach.
If you consider that even a very small image file requires a complete round trip (which can have a very real impact on speed), even for small files this can take a long time. In the case of the Cineworld transport images above, I simulated a "Fast 3G" connection and saw:
The site is not using HTTP2 so there is a long wait period, and then the image (which is 1.2kb) takes almost 600ms to load (no HTTP2 also means this is blocking other requests). There are three of these images, so between them they can be having a real impact on page speed.
However, we've now compressed them to only a few hundred bytes each, and SVG images are actually made up of markup in a similar fashion to HTML:
You can actually put SVG markup directly into an HTML document!
If we do this with all three of the transport images, the compressed HTML for this page that is sent from the server to our browser increases from 31,182 bytes to 31,532 bytes — an increase of only 350 bytes for all 3 images!
So to recap:
Our HTML request has increased 350 bytes, which is barely anything
We can discard three round trips to the server, which we can see were taking considerable time
Some of you may have realized that if the images were not inline they could be cached separately, so future page requests wouldn’t need to refetch them. But if we consider:
Each image was originally about 1.5kb over the network (they aren’t gzipping the SVGs), with about 350 bytes of HTTP headers on top for a total of about 5.5kb transferred. So, overall we've reduced the amount of content over the network.
This also means that it would take over 20 pageviews to benefit from having them cached.
Takeaway: Consider where there are opportunities to use SVGs instead of PNGs.
Takeaway: Make sure you optimize the SVG images, use the free tool I linked to.
Takeaway: Inlining small images can make sense and bring outsized performance gains.
So often nowadays, thanks to the prevalence of JavaScript libraries that offer an off-the-shelf solution, I find JavaScript being used for functionality that could be achieved without it. More JS libraries means more to download, maybe more round trips for additional files from the server, and then the JavaScript execution time and costs themselves.
I have a lot of sympathy for how you get to this point. Developers are often given poor briefs/specs that fail to specify anything about performance, only function. They are often time-poor and so it's easy to end up just dropping something in.
However, a lot of progress has been made in terms of the functionality that can be achieved with HTML and or CSS. Let's look at some examples.
Combo box with search
Dropdown boxes that have a text search option are a fairly common interface element nowadays. One recent article I came across described how to use the Select2 Javascript library to make such a list:
It is a useful UI element, and can help your users. However, in the Select2 library is a JavaScript library, which in turn relies on some CSS and the JQuery library. This means three round trips to collect a bunch of files of varying sizes:
JQuery - 101kb
Select2 JavaScript - 24kb
Select2 CSS - 3kb
This is not ideal for site speed, but we could certainly make the case it is worth it in order to have a streamlined interface for users.
However, it is actually possible to have this functionality out of the box with the HTML datalist element:
This allows the user to search through the list or to free type their own response, so provides the same functionality. Furthermore, it has a native interface on smartphones!
LonelyPlanet has a beautiful website, and I was looking at this page about Spain, which has a ‘Read More’ link that most web users will be familiar with:
Like almost every implementation of this that I see, they have used a JavaScript library to implement this, and once again this comes with a bunch of overheads.
However, HTML has a pair of built-in tags called details and summary, which are designed to implement this functionality exactly. For free and natively in HTML. No overheads, and more accessible for users needing a screen reader, while also conveying semantic meaning to Google.
These tags can be styled in various flexible ways with CSS and recreate most of the JS versions I have seen out there.
For more examples of functionality that you can achieve with HTML instead of JS, check out these links:
http://youmightnotneedjs.com/
https://dev.to/ananyaneogi/html-can-do-that-c0n
Takeaway: Examine the functionality of your sites and see where there may be opportunities to reduce your reliance on large Javascript libraries where there are native HTML/CSS options.
Takeaway: Remember that it isn’t only the size of the JS files that is problematic, but the number of round trips that are required.
Note: There are cases where you should use the JS solution, but it is important to weigh up the pros and cons.
Networking tune-ups
Every time the browser has to collect resources from a server, it has to send a message across the internet and back; the speed of this is limited by the speed of light. This may sound like a ridiculous thing to concern ourselves with, but it means that even small requests add time to the page load. If you didn’t catch the link above, my post explaining HTTP2 discusses this issue in more detail.
There are some things we can do to help either reduce the distance of these requests or to reduce the number of round trips needed. These are a little bit more technical, but can achieve some real wins.
TLS 1.3
TLS (or SSL) is the encryption technology used to secure HTTPS connections. Historically it has taken two round trips between the browser and the server to setup that encryption — if the user is 50ms away from the server, then this means 200ms per connection. Keep in mind that Google historically recommends aiming for 200ms to deliver the HTML (this seems slightly relaxed in more recent updates); you're losing a lot of that time here.
The recently defined TLS 1.3 standard reduces this from two round trips to just one, which can shave some precious time off the users initial connection to your website.
Speak to your tech team about migrating to TLS 1.3; browsers that don’t support it will fallback to TLS 1.2 without issue. All of this is behind the scenes and is not a migration of any sort. There is no reason not to do this.
If you are using a CDN, then it can be as simple as just turning it on.
You can use this tool to check which versions of TLS you have enabled.
QUIC / HTTP 3
Over the last 2-3 years we have seen a number of sites move from HTTP 1.1 to HTTP 2, which is a behind-the-scenes upgrade which can make a real improvement to speed (see my link above if you want to read more).
Right off the back of that, there is an emerging pair of standards known as QUIC + HTTP/3, which further optimize the connection between the browser and the server, further reducing the round trips required.
Support for these is only just beginning to become viable, but if you are a CloudFlare customer you can enable that today and over the coming 6 months as Chrome and Firefox roll support out, your users will get a speed boost.
When users connect to your website, they have to open network connections from wherever they are to your servers (or your CDN). If you imagine the internet as a series of roads, then you could imagine they need to ‘drive’ to your server across these roads. However, that means congestion and traffic jams.
As it turns out, some of the large cloud companies have their own private roads which have fewer potholes, less traffic, and improved speed limits. If only your website visitors could get access to these roads, they could ‘drive’ to you faster!
Well, guess what? They can!
For CloudFlare, they provide this access via their Argo product, whereas if you are on AWS at all then you can use their Global Accelerator. This allows requests to your website to make use of their private networks and get a potential speed boost. Both are very cheap if you are already customers.
Takeaway: A lot of these sorts of benefits are considerably easier to get if you're using a CDN. If you're not already using a CDN, then you probably should be. CloudFlare is a great choice, as is CloudFront if you are using AWS. Fastly is the most configurable of them if you're more of a pro.
Takeaway: TLS 1.3 is now very widely supported and offers a significant speed improvement for new connections.
Takeaway: QUIC / HTTP3 are only just starting to get support, but over the coming months this will roll out more widely. QUIC includes the benefits of TLS 1.3 as well as more. A typical HTTP2 connection nowadays needs 3 round trips to open; QUIC needs just one!
Takeaway: If you're on CloudFlare or AWS, then there is potential to get speed ups just from flipping a switch to turn on smart routing features.
Let CSS do more
Above I talked about how HTML has built-in functionality that you can leverage to save relying on solutions that are ‘home-rolled’ and thus require more code (and processing on the browsers side) to implement. Here I'll talk about some examples where CSS can do the same for you.
Reuse images
Often you find pages that are using similar images throughout the page in several places. For example, variations on a logo in different colors, or arrows that point in both directions. As unique assets (however similar they may be), each of these needs to be downloaded separately.
Returning to my hunt for cinema tickets above, where I was looking at this page, we can see a carousel that has left and right arrows:
Similarly to the logic used above, while these image files are small, they still require a round trip to fetch from the server.
However, the arrows are identical — just pointing in opposite directions! It's easy for us to use CSS’s transform functionality to use one image for both directions:
Another example is when the same logo appears in different styles on different parts of the page; often they will load multiple variations, which is not necessary. CSS can re-color logos for you in a variety of ways:
There is a codepen here showing this technique in action. If you want to calculate the CSS filter value required to reach an arbitrary color, then check out this amazing color calculator.
Interactions (e.g. menus & tabs)
Often navigation elements such as menus and tabs are implemented in JavaScript, but these too can be done in pure CSS. Check out this codepen for an example:
Animations
CSS3 introduced a lot of powerful animation capability into CSS. Often these are not only faster than JavaScript versions, but can also be smoother too as they can run in the native code of the operating system rather than having to execute relatively slower Javascript.
You can find plenty more in this article. CSS animations can add a lot of character to pages at a relatively small performance cost.
...and more
For more examples of functionality that you can achieve using pure CSS solutions, take a look at:
http://youmightnotneedjs.com/
https://dev.to/ananyaneogi/css-can-do-that-18g7m
Takeaway: Use CSS to optimize how many files you have to load using rotations or filters.
Takeaway: CSS animations can add character to pages, and often require less resources than JavaScript.
Takeaway: CSS is perfectly capable of implementing many interactive UI elements.
Wrap up
Hopefully you've found these examples useful in themselves, but the broader point I want to make is that we should all try to think a bit more out of the box with regards to site speed. Of particular importance is reducing the number of round trips needed to the server; even small assets take some time to fetch and can have an appreciable impact on performance (especially mobile).
There are plenty more ideas than we've covered here, so please do jump into the comments if you have other things you have come across.
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What are the benefits of transcribing your podcasts and what's the best way to go about getting them on your site? Niki Mosier breaks it down into 8 easy steps in this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday.
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Video Transcription
Hey, Moz fans. Here's another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Niki Mosier, a senior SEO account manager at Two Octobers, and I'm here today to talk to you about the not-so-secret value of podcast transcripts.
I got the idea to play around with podcast transcripts after hearing Moz's Britney Muller talk about machine learning and podcast transcripts at TechSEO Boost last fall.
+15% increase in organic traffic, +50% keyword lift
I ended up getting the opportunity to play around with this a little bit with a pro bono client we had at a previous job, the Davis Phinney Foundation. They do Parkinson's research and Parkinson's education. They were already podcasting, and then they also had a pretty robust blog, but they weren't adding their podcast transcripts. After about three months of adding a couple of podcast transcripts, we saw some pretty good value for them. We saw a 15% increase in organic traffic to the website and a 50% increase to some keyword lift around the keywords that we were tracking.
Google is now indexing podcasts
Why we think this is relevant right now, as you may know, Google announced, at I/O 2019, that they are indexing podcasts. If you do a search for your favorite podcast, you'll see that come up in the Google search results now. So adding that podcast transcript or any audio transcript to your website, whether that's video, a webinar, or anything, just has some really good value.
How to transcribe & optimize your podcasts
I'm going to walk you through the process that I used for them. It's super easy and you can turn around and apply it to your own website.
1. Download your audio file
So obviously, download the audio file, whether that's MP3 or MP4 or whatever you have, from your video, podcast, or your webinars if you're doing those.
2. Transcribe it
You need to be able to get that text transcript, so running it through either Temi or Otter.ai, both two resources that I've used, both really good. Otter.ai seems to be a little cleaner out of the gate, but I would definitely obviously go through and edit and make sure that all of your text and speaker transitions and everything is accurate.
3. Figure out which keywords the content should rank for
Next up is figuring out what keywords that you want that content to rank for, so doing some search volume research, figuring out what those keywords are, and then benchmarking that keyword data, so whether your website is already ranking for some of those keywords or you have new keywords that you want those pages or those posts to be ranking for.
4. Get a competitive snapshot
Next up is getting a competitive snapshot, so looking at who's ranking for those keywords that you're going to be trying to go after, who has those answer boxes, who has those featured snippets, and then also what are the people also ask features for those keywords.
5. Get your content on-site
Obviously getting that content on your site, whether that's creating brand-new content, either a blog or a page to go with that podcast, video, webinar, or whatever it is, or adding to it to existing content.
Maybe you have some evergreen content that's not performing well for you anymore. Adding a transcript to that content could really kind of give it a lift and make it work better for you.
6. Optimize the content
Next up is optimizing the content on your site, so adding in those keywords to your metadata, to your image alt tags, your H1 tags, and then also adding any relevant schema, so whether that's blog post schema most likely or any other schema type that would be helpful, getting that up there on the page as well.
7. Make sure the page is indexed in Search Console
Once you've done all the hard work, you've got the transcript up there, you have your content and you have it optimized, you obviously want to tell Google, so going into Search Console, having them index that page, whether it's a new page or an existing page, either way, dropping that URL in there, making sure Google is crawling it, and then if it is a new page, making sure it's in your sitemap.
8. Annotate the changes in Google Analytics
Then the last thing is you want to be able to track and figure out if it's working for you. So annotating that in Google Analytics so you know what page, when you added it, so you can have that benchmark date, looking at where you're ranking, and then also looking at those SERP features. Have you gotten any featured snippets?
Are you showing up in those answer boxes? Anything like that. So that's kind of the process. Super easy, pretty straightforward. Just play with it, test it out.
If Google is indexing podcasts, why does this matter?
Then kind of lastly, why is this still important if Google is already indexing podcasts? They may come out and do their own transcription of your podcast or your video or whatever content you have on the site.
Obviously, you want to be in control of what that content is that's going on your site, and then also just having it on there is super important. From an accessibility standpoint, you want Google to be able to know what that content is, and you want anyone else who may have a hearing impairment, they can't listen to the content that you're producing, you want them to be able to access that content. Then, as always, just the more content, the better. So get out there, test it, and have fun. Thanks, Moz fans.
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