Benchmark for Success: What Your Vertical Can Achieve With Content Marketing

Posted by Domenica

You’ve produced a piece of content you thought was going to be a huge success, but the results were underwhelming.

You double and triple checked the content for all the crucial elements: it’s newsworthy, data-driven, emotional, and even a bit controversial, but it failed to “go viral”. Your digital PR team set out to pitch it, but writers didn’t bite.

So, what's next?

Two questions you might ask yourself are:

• Do I have unrealistic link expectations for my link-building content?
• Is my definition of success backed by data-driven evidence?

Fractl has produced thousands of content marketing campaigns across every topic — sports, entertainment, fashion, home improvement, relationships — you name it. We also have several years’ worth of campaign performance data that we use to learn from our successes and mistakes.

In this article, I’m going to explain how businesses and agencies across seven different niches can set realistic expectations for their link-building content based on the performance of 626 content projects Fractl has produced and promoted in the last five years. I’ll also walk through some best practices for ensuring your content reaches its highest potential.

Managing expectations across verticals

You can’t compare apples to oranges. Each beat has its own unique challenges and advantages. Content for each vertical has to be produced with expert-level knowledge of how publishers within each vertical behave.

We selected the following common verticals for analysis:

• Health and fitness
• Travel
• Sex and relationships
• Finance
• Technology
• Sports
• Food and drink

Across the entire sample of 626 content projects, on average, a project received 23 dofollow links and 88 press mentions in total. Some individual vertical averages didn’t deviate much from these averages, while others niches did.

Of course, you can’t necessarily expect these numbers when you just start dipping your toes in content marketing or digital PR. It’s a long-term investment, and it usually takes at least six months to a year before you get the results you’re looking for.

A “press mention” refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. A press mention could involve any type of link (dofollow, nofollow, simple text attribution, etc.). We also looked at dofollow links individually, as they provide more value than a nofollow link or text attribution. For campaigns that went “viral” and performed well above the norm, we excluded them in the calculation so as not to skew the averages higher. 

Based on averages from these 626 campaigns, are your performance expectations too high or too low?

Vertical-specific content considerations

Of course, there are universal principles that you should apply to all content no matter the vertical. The data needs to be sound. The graphic assets need to be pleasing to the eye and easy to understand. The information needs to be surprising and informative.

But when it comes to vertical-specific content considerations, what should you pay attention to? What tactics or guidelines apply to one niche that you can disregard for other niches? I solicited advice from the senior team at Fractl and asked what they look out for when making content for different verticals. All have several years of experience producing and promoting content across every vertical and niche. Here’s what they said:

Sex and dating

For content relating to sex and relationships, it’s important to err on the side of caution.

“Be careful not to cross the line between ‘sexy’ content and raunchy content,” says Angela Skane, Creative Strategy. “The internet can be an exciting place, but if something is too out-there or too descriptive, publishers are going to be turned off from covering your content.”

Even magazine websites like Cosmopolitan — a publication known for its sex content — have editorial standards to make sure lines aren’t crossed. For example, when pitching a particularly risqué project exploring bedroom habits of men and women, we learned that just because a project is doing well over at Playboy or Maxim doesn’t mean it would resonate with the primarily female audience over at Cosmopolitan.

Especially be aware of anything that could be construed as misogynistic or pin women against each other. It’s likely not the message your client will want to promote, anyway.

Finance

Given the fact that money is frequently touted as one of the topics you avoid over polite dinner conversation, there's no doubt that talking and thinking about money evokes a lot of emotion in people.

“Finance can seem dry at first glance, but mentions of money can evoke strong emotions. Tapping into financial frustrations, regrets, and mistakes makes for highly entertaining and even educational content,” says Corie Colliton, Creative Strategy. “For example, one of my best finance campaigns featured the purchases people felt their partners wasted money on. Another showed the amount people spend on holiday gifts — and the number who were in debt for a full year after the holidays as a result.”

Emotion is one of the drivers of social sharing, so use it to your advantage when producing finance-related content.

We also heard from Chris Lewis, Account Strategy: “Relate to your audience. Readers will often try to use financial content marketing campaigns as a way to benchmark their own financial well-being, so giving people lots of data about potential new norms helps readers relate to your content.”

People want to read content and be able to picture themselves within it. How do they compare to the rest of America, or their state, or their age group? Relatability is key in finance-related content.

Sports

A little healthy competition never hurt anyone, and that’s why Tyler Burchett, Promotions Strategy, thinks you should always utilize fan bases when creating sports content: “Get samples from different fan bases when possible. Writers like to pit fans against each other, and fans take pride in seeing how they rank.”

Food and drink

According to Chris Lewis, don’t forgo design when creating marketing campaigns about food: “Make sure to include good visuals. People eat with their eyes!”

If the topic for which you’re creating content typically has visual appeal, it’s best to take advantage of that to draw people into your content. Have you ever bought a recipe book that didn’t include photos of the food?

Technology

Think tech campaigns are just about tech? Think again. Matt Gillespie, Data Science, says: “Technology campaigns are always culture and human behavior campaigns. Comparing devices, social media usage, or more nuanced topics like privacy and security, can only resonate with a general audience if it ties to more common themes like connection, safety, or shared experience — tech savvy without being overly technical.”

Travel

When creating content for travel, it’s important to make sure there are actionable takeaways in the content. If there aren’t, it can be hard for publishers to justify covering it.

“Travel writers love to extract ‘tips’ from the content they're provided. If your project provides helpful information to travelers or little-known statistics on flights and amenities, you're likely to gain a lot of traction in the travel vertical,” says Delaney Kline, Brand Promotions. “Come up with these ideal statistics before creating your project and use them as a template for your work.”

Health and fitness

In the health and wellness world, it can seem like everyone is giving advice. If you’re not a doctor, however, err on the side of caution when speaking about specific topics. Try not to pit any particular standard against another. Be careful around diet culture and mental health topics, specifically.

“Try striking a balance between physical and mental well-being, particularly being careful to not glorify or objectify one standard while demeaning others,” says Matt Gillespie, Data Science. “Emphasize overall wellness as opposed to focus on a single area. In this vertical, you need to be especially careful with whatever is trending. Do the legwork to understand the research, or lack thereof, behind the big topics of the moment.”

Improving content in any vertical

While you can certainly tailor your content production and promotion to your specific niche, there are also some guidelines you can follow to improve the chances that you’ll get more media coverage for your content overall.

Create content with a headline in mind

When you begin mapping out your content, identify what you want the outcome to look like. Before you even begin, ask yourself: what do you want people to learn from your content? What are the elements of the content you’re producing that journalists will find compelling for their audiences?

For example, we wrote a survey in which we wanted to compare the levels of cooking experience across different generations. We hypothesized that we’d see some discrepancies between boomers and millennials specifically, and given that millennials ruin everything, it was a good time to join the discussion.

As it turns out, only 64% of millennials could correctly identify a butter knife. Publishers jumped at the stats revealing millennials have a tough time in the kitchen. Having a thesis and an idea of what we wanted the project to look like in advance had a tremendous positive impact on our results.

Appeal to the emotionality of people

In past research on the emotions that make content go viral, we learned that negative content may have a better chance of going viral if it is also surprising. Nothing embodies this combination of emotional drivers than a project we did for a travel client in which we used germ swabs to determine the dirtiest surfaces on airplanes.

This campaign did so well (and continues to earn links to this day) that it’s actually excluded from our vertical benchmarks analysis as we consider it a viral outlier.

Why did this idea work? Most people travel via plane at least once a year, and everyone wants to avoid getting sick while traveling. So, a data-backed report like this one that also yielded some click-worthy headlines is sure to exceed your outreach goals.

Evergreen content wins (sometimes)

You may have noticed from the analysis above that, of the seven topics we chose to look at, the sports vertical has the lowest average dofollows and total press mentions of any other category.

For seasoned content marketers, this is very understandable. Unlike the other verticals, the sports beat is an ever-changing and fast-paced news cycle that’s hard for content marketers to have a presence in. However, for our sports clients we achieve success by understanding this system and working with it — not trying to be louder than it.

One technique we’ve found that works for sports campaigns (as well as other sectors with fast-paced news cycles such as entertainment or politics) is to come up with content that is both timely and evergreen. By capitalizing on the current interests around major sporting events (timely) and creating an idea that would work on any given day of the year (evergreen) we can produce content that's the best of both worlds, and that will still have legs once the timeliness wears off.

In a series of campaigns for one sports client, we took a look at the evolution of sports jerseys and chose teams with loyal fan bases such as the New York Yankees, Carolina Panthers, Denver Broncos, and Chicago Bears.

The sports niche has an ongoing, fast-paced news cycle that changes every day, if not every hour. Reporters are busy covering by-the-minute breaking news, games, statistics, rankings, trades, personal player news, and injuries. This makes it one of the most challenging verticals to compete in. By capitalizing on teams of interest throughout the year, we were able to squeeze projects into tight editorial calendars and earn our client some press.

For example, timing couldn’t have been better when we pitched “Evolution of the Football Jersey”. We pitched this campaign to USA Today right before the tenacious playoffs in which the Steelers and the Redskins played. Time was of the essence — the editor wrote and published this article within 24 hours and our client enjoyed a lot of good syndication from the powerful publication. In total, the one placement resulted in 15 dofollow links and over 45 press mentions. Not bad for a few transforming GIFs!

Top it off with the best practices in pitching

If you have great content and you have a set of realistic expectations for that content, all that’s left is to distribute it and collect those links and press mentions.

Moz has previously covered some of the best outreach practices for promoting your content to top-tier publishers, but I want to note that when it comes to PR, what you do is just as important as what you don’t do.

In a survey of over 500 journalists in 2019, I asked online editors and writers what their biggest PR pitch pet peeves were. When you conduct content marketing outreach, avoid these top-listed items and you’ll be good to go:



While you might get away with sending one too many follow-ups, most of the offenses on this list are just that — totally offensive to the writer you’re trying to pitch.

Avoid mass email blasts, personalize your pitch, and triple-check that the person you're contacting is receptive to your content before you hit send.

Conclusion

While there are certainly some characteristics that all great content should have, there are ways to increase the chances your content will be engaging within a specific vertical. Research what your particular audience is interested in, and be sure to measure your results realistically based on how content generally performs in your space.

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Heart, Ear, Eye, Mind, Mouth: Local SEO Exercises for Your Least Technical Clients

Posted by MiriamEllis

When was the last time you relaxed with a client?

As a local business consultant, I know that deeper marketing insights can be discovered when you set aside formality and share experiences: a moment, a laugh, a common bond. 

When I’m looking for ways to make life easier for a client, I sometimes reflect on ancient practices like yoga, tai chi, and mindful breathing, which are increasingly understood as beneficial to human health. For a space in time, they reduce the complex world we live in to a simpler one where being, breath, movement, and focus bring the practitioner to a more intuitive state. 

Local marketing agencies can empathize with the complex world their clients inhabit. Local business owners must manage everything from rent and employee benefits to customer service, business reviews, web content, and online listings. When you take on a new client, you expect them to onboard a ton of information about marketing their brand online. Sometimes, the most basic motivations go unaddressed and get lost in assumptions and jargon — instead of decreasing client stress for your least technical clients, you can accidentally increase it. 

Today, I’ll help you newly create an intuitive space by sharing five simple meditation exercises you can use with your agency’s clients. Instead of signaling via SEO, CTR, USPs, and GMB, let’s relax with clients by relating successful local search marketing practices to experiences people at any level of technical proficiency already understand.

Heart

To show their heart is in the right place, the Vermont Country Store publishes a customer bill of rights.

For a local business owner, there is no more important quality than having their heart in the right place when it comes to their motivation for running a company.

Yes, all of us work to earn money, but it’s the dedication to serving others that is felt by customers in every interaction with them. When customers feel that a business is there for them, it establishes the loyalty and reputation that secure local search marketing success. 

Heart meditation

Close your eyes for a few seconds and think of a time in your life when you most needed help from a business. Maybe you needed a tow truck, a veterinarian, a dentist, or a plumber. You really needed them to understand your plight, deliver the right help, and treat you as an important person who is worthy of respect. Whether you received what you required or not, remember the feeling of need. 

Now, extend that recognition beyond your own heart to the heart of every customer who feels a need for something your client can offer them.

A business owner with their heart in the right place can powerfully contribute to local search marketing by:

• Running a customer-centric business.
• Creating customer guarantees that are fair.
• Creating an employee culture of respect and empowerment that extends to customers.
• Creating a location that is clean, functional, and pleasant for all.
• Honestly representing their products, services, location, and reputation.
• Refraining from practices that negatively impact their customers and reputation.
• Participating positively in the life of the community they serve.

A good local search marketing agency will help the business owner translate these basics into online content that meets customer needs, local business listings that accurately and richly represent the business, and genuine reviews that serve as a healthy and vital ongoing conversation between the brand and its customers. A trustworthy agency will ensure avoidance of any tactics that pollute the Internet with spam listings, spam reviews, negative attacks on competitors, and negative impacts on the service community. An excellent agency will also assist in finding and promoting community engagement opportunities, helping to win desirable online publicity from offline efforts.

Ear

Keter Salon of Berkeley, Calif. really listens to customers and it shows in its reviews.

Local business success is so linked to the art of listening, I sometimes think Google should replace their teardrop map markers with little ears. In the local SEO world, there are few things sadder than seeing local business profiles filled with disregarded reviews, questions, and negative photos. (Someone cue “The Sound of Silence”.)

From a business perspective, the sound of branded silence is also the sound of customers and profits trickling away. Why does it work this way? Because only 4% of your unhappy customers may actually make the effort to speak up, and if a business owner is not even hearing them, they’ve lost the ability to hear consumer demand. Let’s make sure this doesn’t happen.

Ear meditation

Close your eyes for a few seconds and listen closely to every noise within the range of your hearing. Ask yourself, “Where am I?”

The sound of typing, phone calls, and co-workers chatting might place you in an office. Sliding doors, footsteps on linoleum, and floor staff speaking might mean you’re at your client's brick-and-mortar location. Maybe it’s birdsong outside and the baby in their crib that tell you you’re working from home today. Listen to every sound that tells you exactly where you are right now.

Now, commit to listening with this level of attention and intention to the signals of customer voices, telling you exactly where a local brand is right now in terms of faults and successes. 

A business owner who keeps their ears open can actively gauge how their business is really doing with its customers by:

• Having one-on-one conversations with customers.
• Recording and analyzing phone conversations with customers.
• Reading reviews on platforms like Google My Business, Yelp, Facebook and sites that are specific to their industry (like Avvo for lawyers or Healthgrades for physicians).
• Reading the Q&A questions of customers on their Google Business Profile.
• Reading mentions of their brand on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
• Reading the responses to surveys they conduct.
• Reading the emails and form submissions the company receives.

A good local search marketing agency will help their client amass, organize, and analyze all of this sentiment to discover the current reputation of the business. From this information, you and your client can chart a course for improvement. Consider that, in this study, a 1.5 star improvement in online reputation increased consumer activity by 10%-12% and generated 13,000 more leads for the brands included. The first step to a better reputation is simply listening. 

Eye

Moz’s Local Market Analytics (Beta) helps you see your market through customer location emulation.

When your clients choose their business locations, they weigh several factors. They compare how the mantra of “location, location, location” matches their budget, and whether a certain part of town is lacking something their business could provide. They also look at the local competitors to see if the competition would be hard to beat, or if they could do the job better. Success lies in truly seeing the lay of the land.

Local search mirrors the real world. The market on the Internet is made up of the physical locations of your clients’ customers at the time they search for what your client has to offer. 

Eye meditation

You already know most of the businesses on your street, and many of them in your neighborhood. Now, with eyes wide open, start searching Google for the things your listening work has told you customers need. Where appropriate, include attributes you’ve noticed them using like “best tacos near me”, “cheapest gym in North Beach”, or “shipping store downtown.”

See how your client is ranking when a person does these type of searches while at their location. Now, walk or drive a few blocks away and try again. Go to the city perimeter and try again. Where are they ranking, and who is outranking them as you move about their geographic market?

A local business keeping its eyes open never makes assumptions about who its true competitors are or how its customers search. Instead, it:

• Regularly assesses the competition in its market, taking into account the distance from which customers are likely to come for goods and services.
• Regularly reviews materials assembled in the listening phase to see how customers word their requests and sentiments.
• Makes use of tools to analyze both markets and keyword searches.

A good local search marketing agency will help with the tools needed for market and search language analysis. These findings can inform everything from what a client names their business, to how they categorize it on their Google My Business listing, to what they write about to draw in customers from all geographic points in their market. Clear vision simultaneously enables you to analyze competitors who are outranking your client and assess why they’re doing so. It can empower your client to report spammers who are outranking them via forbidden tactics. An excellent agency will help their client see their competitive landscape with eyes on the prize.

Mind

When an independent Arizona appliance chain surprised three shoppers with $10,000, it made headlines.

With hearts ready for service, ears set on listening, and eyes determined to see, you and your client have now taken in useful information about their brand and the customers who make up their local market. You know now whether they’re doing a poor, moderate, or exceptional job of fulfilling needs, and are working with them to strategize next steps. But what are those next steps? 

Mind meditation

Sit back comfortably and think of a time a business completely surprised you, or a time when an owner or employee did something so unexpectedly great, it convinced you that you were in good hands. Maybe they comped your meal when it wasn’t prepared properly, or special-ordered an item just for you, or showed you how to do something you’d never thought of before.

Recall that lightbulb moment of delight. Ask yourself how your client’s brand could surprise customers in memorable ways they would love. Create a list of those ideas.

A creative local business gives full play to the awesome imaginative powers of the brain. It gives all staff permission to daydream and brainstorm questions like:

• What is something unexpected the business could do that would come as a delightful surprise to customers?
• What is the most impactful thing the business could do that would be felt as a positive force in the lives of its customers?
• What risks can the business take for the sake of benevolence, social good, beauty, renown, or joy?

A good local search marketing agency will help sort through ideas that could truly differentiate their clients from the competition and bring them closer to making the kinds of impressions that turn local brands into household names. An excellent agency will bring ideas of their own. Study “surprise and delight marketing” as it’s done on the large, corporate scale, and get it going at a local level like this small coffee roaster in Alexandria, Va. selling ethical java while doubling as funding for LGBTQ+ organizations. 

Mouth

Put your best stories everywhere, like in this social media example. Moz Local can help with publishing those stories.

“Think before you speak” is an old adage that serves well as a marketing guideline. Another way we might say it is “research before you publish”. With heart, ear, eye, and mind, you and your client have committed, collected, analyzed, and ideated their brand to a point where it’s ready to address the public from a firm foundation.

Mouth meditation

Open your favorite word processor on your computer and type a few bars of the lyrics to your favorite song. Next, type the first three brand slogans that come to your mind. Next, type a memorable line from a movie or book. Finally, type out the the words of the nicest compliment or best advice someone ever gave you. 

Sit back and look at your screen. Look at how those words have stuck in your mind — you remember them all! The people who wrote and spoke those words have indelibly direct-messaged you. 

How will you message the public in a way that’s unforgettable?

A well-spoken local business masters the art of face-to-face customer conversation. In-store signage and offline media require great words, too, but local search marketing will take spoken skills onto the web, where they'll be communicated via:

• Every page of the website 
• Every article or blog post 
• Social media content
• Review responses
• Answers to questions like Google Business Profile Q&A
• Business descriptions on local business listings
• Google posts
• Featured snippet content
• Live chat
• Email
• Press releases
• Interviews
• Images on the website, business listings, and third-party platforms like Google Images and Pinterest
• Videos on the website, YouTube, and other platforms

A good local search marketing agency will help their client find the best words, images, and videos based on all the research done together. An excellent agency will help a local business move beyond simply being discovered online to being remembered as a household name each time customer needs arise. An agency should help their clients earn links, unstructured citations, and other forms of publicity from those research efforts.

Determine to help your client be the "snap, crackle, pop", "un-Cola", "last honest pizza" with everything you publish for their local market, and to build an Internet presence that speaks well of their business 24-hours a day.

Closing pose



One of the most encouraging aspects of running and marketing a local business is that it’s based on things you already have some life experience doing: caring, listening, observing, imagining, and communicating. 

I personally should be better at technical tasks like diagnosing errors in Schema, configuring Google Search Console for local purposes, or troubleshooting bulk GMB uploads. I can work at improving in those areas, but I can also work at growing my heart, ear, eye, mind, and mouth to master serving clients and customers.

Business is technical. Business is transactional. But good business is also deeply human, with real rewards for well-rounded growth.

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2020 Google Search Survey: How Much Do Users Trust Their Search Results?

Posted by LilyRayNYC

While Google’s mission has always been to surface high-quality content, over the past few years the company has worked especially hard to ensure that its search results are also consistently accurate, credible, and trustworthy.

Reducing false and misleading information has been a top priority for Google since concerns over misinformation surfaced during the 2016 US presidential election. The search giant is investing huge sums of money and brain power into organizing the ever-increasing amounts of content on the web in a way that prioritizes accuracy and credibility.

In a 30-page whitepaper published last year, Google delineates specifically how it fights against bad actors and misinformation across Google Search, News, Youtube, Ads, and other Google products.

In this whitepaper, Google explains how Knowledge Panels — a common organic search feature — are part of its initiative to show “context and diversity of perspectives to form their own views.” With Knowledge Panel results, Google provides answers to queries with content displayed directly in its organic search results (often without including a link to a corresponding organic result), potentially eliminating the need for users to click through to a website to find an answer to their query. While this feature benefits users by answering their questions even more quickly, it brings with it the danger of providing quick answers that might be misleading or incorrect.

Another feature with this issue is Featured Snippets, where Google pulls website content directly into the search results. Google maintains specific policies for Featured Snippets, prohibiting the display of content that is sexually explicit, hateful, violent, dangerous, or in violation of expert consensus on civic, medical, scientific, or historical topics. However, this doesn’t mean the content included in Featured Snippets is always entirely accurate.

According to data pulled by Dr. Pete Meyers, based on a sample set of 10,000 keywords, Google has increased the frequency with which it displays Featured Snippets as part of the search results. In the beginning of 2018, Google displayed Featured Snippets in approximately 12% of search results; in early 2020, that number hovers around 16%.

Google has also rolled out several core algorithm updates in the past two years, with the stated goal of “delivering on [their] mission to present relevant and authoritative content to searchers.” What makes these recent algorithm updates particularly interesting is how much E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) appears to be playing a role in website performance, particularly for YMYL (your money, your life) websites.

As a result of Google’s dedication to combating misinformation and fake news, we could reasonably expect searchers to agree that Google has improved in its ability to surface credible and trusted content. But does the average searcher actually feel that way? At Path Interactive, we conducted a survey to find out how users feel about the information they encounter in Google’s organic results.

About our survey respondents and methodology

Out of 1,100 respondents, 70% of live in the United States, 21% in India, and 5% in Europe. 63% of respondents are between the ages of 18 and 35, and 17% are over the age of 46. All respondent data is self-reported.

For all questions involving specific search results or types of SERP features, respondents were provided with screenshots of those features. For questions related to levels of trustworthiness or the extent to which the respondent agreed with the statement, respondents were presented with answers on a scale of 1-5.

Our findings

Trustworthiness in the medical, political, financial, and legal categories

Given how much fluctuation we’ve seen in the YMYL category of Google with recent algorithm updates, we thought it would be interesting to ask respondents how much they trust the medical, political, financial, and legal information they find on Google.

We started by asking respondents about the extent to which they have made important financial, legal, or medical decisions based on information they found in organic search. The majority (51%) of respondents indicated that they “very frequently” or “often” make important life decisions based on Google information, while 39% make important legal decisions, and 46% make important medical decisions. Only 10-13% of respondents indicated that they never make these types of important life decisions based on the information they’ve found on Google.

Medical searches

As it relates to medical searches, 72% of users agree or strongly agree that Google has improved at showing accurate medical results over time.

Breaking down these responses by age, a few interesting patterns emerge:

• The youngest searchers (ages 18-25) are 94% more likely than the oldest searchers (65+) to strongly believe that Google’s medical results have improved over time.
• 75% of the youngest searchers (ages 18-25) agree or strongly agree that Google has improved in showing accurate medical searches over time, whereas only 54% of the oldest searchers (65+) feel the same way.
• Searchers ages 46-64 are the most likely to disagree that Google’s medical results are improving over time.

Next, we wanted to know if Google’s emphasis on surfacing medical content from trusted medical publications — such as WebMD and the Mayo Clinic — is resonating with its users. One outcome of recent core algorithm updates is that Google’s algorithms appear to be deprioritizing content that contradicts scientific and medical consensus (consistently described as a negative quality indicator throughout their Search Quality Guidelines).

The majority (66%) of respondents agree that it is very important to them that Google surfaces content from highly trusted medical websites. However, 14% indicated they would rather not see these results, and another 14% indicated they’d rather see more diverse results, such as content from natural medicine websites. These numbers suggest that more than a quarter of respondents may be unsatisfied with Google’s current health initiatives aimed at surfacing medical content from a set of acclaimed partners who support the scientific consensus.

We asked survey respondents about Symptom Cards, in which information related to medical symptoms or specific medical conditions is surfaced directly within the search results.

Examples of Symptom Cards. Source: https://blog.google/products/search/im-feeling-yucky-searching-for-symptoms/

Our question aimed to gather how much searchers felt the content within Symptom Cards can be trusted.

The vast majority (76%) of respondents indicated they trust or strongly trust the content within Symptom Cards.

When looking at the responses by age, younger searchers once again reveal that they are much more likely than older searchers to strongly trust the medical content found within Google. In fact, the youngest bracket of searchers (ages 18-25) are 138% more likely than the oldest searchers (65+) to strongly trust the medical content found in Symptom Cards.

News and political searches

The majority of respondents (61%) agree or strongly agree that Google has improved at showing high-quality, trustworthy news and political content over time. Only 13% disagree or strongly disagree with this statement.

Breaking the same question down by age reveals interesting trends:

• The majority (67%) of the youngest searchers (ages 18-25) agree that the quality of Google’s news and political content has improved over time, whereas the majority (61%) of the oldest age group (65+) only somewhat agrees or disagrees.
• The youngest searchers (ages 18-25) are 250% more likely than the oldest searchers to strongly agree that the quality of news and political content on Google is improving over time.

Misinformation

Given Google’s emphasis on combating misinformation in its search results, we also wanted to ask respondents about the extent to which they feel they still encounter dangerous or highly untrustworthy information on Google.

Interestingly, the vast majority of respondents (70%) feel that they have encountered misinformation on Google at least sometimes, although 29% indicate they rarely or never see misinformation in the results.

Segmenting the responses by age groups reveals a clear pattern that the older the searcher, the more likely they are to indicate that they have seen misinformation in Google’s search results. In fact, the oldest searchers (65+) are 138% more likely than the youngest searchers (18-25) to say they’ve encountered misinformation on Google either often or very frequently.

Throughout the responses to all questions related to YMYL topics such as health, politics, and news, a consistent pattern emerged that the youngest searchers appear to have more trust in the content Google displays for these queries, and that older searchers are more skeptical.

This aligns with our findings from a similar survey we conducted last year, which found that younger searchers were more likely to take much of the content displayed directly in the SERP at face value, whereas older searchers were more likely to browse deeper into the organic results to find answers to their queries.

This information is alarming, especially given another question we posed asking about the extent to which searchers believe the information they find on Google influences their political opinions and outlook on the world.

The question revealed some interesting trends related to the oldest searchers: according to the results, the oldest searchers (65+) are 450% more likely than the youngest searchers to strongly disagree that information they find on Google influences their worldview.

However, the oldest searchers are also most likely to agree with this statement; 11% of respondents ages 65+ strongly agree that Google information influences their worldview. On both ends of the spectrum, the oldest searchers appear to hold stronger opinions about the extent to which Google influences their political opinions and outlook than respondents from other age brackets.

Featured Snippets and the Knowledge Graph

We also wanted to understand the extent to which respondents found the content contained within Featured Snippets to be trustworthy, and to segment those responses by age brackets. As with the other scale-based questions, respondents were asked to indicate how much they trusted these features on a scale of 1-5 (Likert scale).

According to the results, the youngest searchers (ages 18-25) are 100% more likely than the oldest searchers (ages 65+) to find the content within Featured Snippets to be very trustworthy. This aligns with a similar discovery we found in our survey from last year: “The youngest searchers (13–18) are 220 percent more likely than the oldest searchers (70–100) to consider their question answered without clicking on the snippet (or any) result.”

For Knowledge Graph results, the results are less conclusive when segmented by age. 95% of respondents across all age groups find the Knowledge Panel results to be at least “trustworthy.”

Conclusion: Young users trust search results more than older users

In general, the majority of survey respondents appear to trust the information they find on Google — both in terms of the results themselves, as well as the content they find within SERP features such as the Knowledge Panel and Featured Snippets. However, there still appears to be a small subset of searchers who are dissatisfied with Google’s results. This subset consists of mostly older searchers who appear to be more skeptical about taking Google’s information at face value, especially for YMYL queries.

Across almost all survey questions, there is a clear pattern that the youngest searchers tend to trust the information they find on Google more so than the older respondents. This aligns with a similar survey we conducted last year, which indicated that younger searchers were more likely to accept the content in Featured Snippets and Knowledge Panels without needing to click on additional results on Google.

It is unclear whether younger searchers trust information from Google more because the information itself has improved, or because they are generally more trusting of information they find online. These results may also be due to older searchers not having grown up with the ability to rely on internet search engines to answer their questions. Either way, the results raise an interesting question about the future of information online: will searchers become less skeptical of online information over time?

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The Rules of Link Building - Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BritneyMuller

Are you building links the right way? Or are you still subscribing to outdated practices? Britney Muller clarifies which link building tactics still matter and which are a waste of time (or downright harmful) in one of our very favorite classic episodes of Whiteboard Friday.

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

Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we are going over the rules of link building. It's no secret that links are one of the top three ranking factors in Google and can greatly benefit your website. But there is a little confusion around what's okay to do as far as links and what's not. So hopefully, this helps clear some of that up.

The Dos

All right. So what are the dos? What do you want to be doing? First and most importantly is just to...

I. Determine the value of that link. So aside from ranking potential, what kind of value will that link bring to your site? Is it potential traffic? Is it relevancy? Is it authority? Just start to weigh out your options and determine what's really of value for your site. Our own tool, Moz Link Explorer, can 

II. Local listings still do very well. These local business citations are on a bunch of different platforms, and services like Moz Local or Yext can get you up and running a little bit quicker. They tend to show Google that this business is indeed located where it says it is. It has consistent business information — the name, address, phone number, you name it. But something that isn't really talked about all that often is that some of these local listings never get indexed by Google. If you think about it, Yellowpages.com is probably populating thousands of new listings a day. Why would Google want to index all of those?

So if you're doing business listings, an age-old thing that local SEOs have been doing for a while is create a page on your site that says where you can find us online. Link to those local listings to help Google get that indexed, and it sort of has this boomerang-like effect on your site. So hope that helps. If that's confusing, I can clarify down below. Just wanted to include it because I think it's important.

III. Unlinked brand mentions. One of the easiest ways you can get a link is by figuring out who is mentioning your brand or your company and not linking to it. Let's say this article publishes about how awesome SEO companies are and they mention Moz, and they don't link to us. That's an easy way to reach out and say, "Hey, would you mind adding a link? It would be really helpful."

IV. Reclaiming broken links is also a really great way to kind of get back some of your links in a short amount of time and little to no effort. What does this mean? This means that you had a link from a site that now your page currently 404s. So they were sending people to your site for a specific page that you've since deleted or updated somewhere else. Whatever that might be, you want to make sure that you 301 this broken link on your site so that it pushes the authority elsewhere. Definitely a great thing to do anyway.

V. HARO (Help a Reporter Out). Reporters will notify you of any questions or information they're seeking for an article via this email service. So not only is it just good general PR, but it's a great opportunity for you to get a link. I like to think of link building as really good PR anyway. It's like digital PR. So this just takes it to the next level.

VI. Just be awesome. Be cool. Sponsor awesome things. I guarantee any one of you watching likely has incredible local charities or amazing nonprofits in your space that could use the sponsorship, however big or small that might be. But that also gives you an opportunity to get a link. So something to definitely consider.

VII. Ask/Outreach. There's nothing wrong with asking. There's nothing wrong with outreach, especially when done well. I know that link building outreach in general kind of gets a bad rap because the response rate is so painfully low. I think, on average, it's around 4% to 7%, which is painful. But you can get that higher if you're a little bit more strategic about it or if you outreach to people you already currently know. There's a ton of resources available to help you do this better, so definitely check those out. We can link to some of those below.

VIII. COBC (create original badass content). We hear lots of people talk about this. When it comes to link building, it's like, "Link building is dead. Just create great content and people will naturally link to you. It's brilliant." It is brilliant, but I also think that there is something to be said about having a healthy mix. There's this idea of link building and then link earning. But there's a really perfect sweet spot in the middle where you really do get the most bang for your buck.

The Don'ts

All right. So what not to do. The don'ts of today's link building world are...

I. Don't ask for specific anchor text. All of these things appear so spammy. The late Eric Ward talked about this and was a big advocate for never asking for anchor text. He said websites should be linked to however they see fit. That's going to look more natural. Google is going to consider it to be more organic, and it will help your site in the long run. So that's more of a suggestion. These other ones are definitely big no-no's.

II. Don't buy or sell links that pass PageRank. You can buy or sell links that have a no-follow attached, which attributes that this is paid-for, whether it be an advertisement or you don't trust it. So definitely looking into those and understanding how that works.

III. Hidden links. We used to do this back in the day, the ridiculous white link on a white background. They were totally hidden, but crawlers would pick them up. Don't do that. That's so old and will not work anymore. Google is getting so much smarter at understanding these things.

IV. Low-quality directory links. Same with low-quality directory links. We remember those where it was just loads and loads of links and text and a random auto insurance link in there. You want to steer clear of those.

V. Site-wide links also look very spammy. Site-wide being whether it's a footer link or a top-level navigation link, you definitely don't want to go after those. They can appear really, really spammy. Avoid those.

VI. Comment links with over-optimized anchor link text, specifically, you want to avoid. Again, it's just like any of these others. It looks spammy. It's not going to help you long-term. Again, what's the value of that overall? So avoid that.

VII. Abusing guest posts. You definitely don't want to do this. You don't want to guest post purely just for a link. However, I am still a huge advocate, as I know many others out there are, of guest posting and providing value. Whether there be a link or not, I think there is still a ton of value in guest posting. So don't get rid of that altogether, but definitely don't target it for potential link building opportunities.

VIII. Automated tools used to create links on all sorts of websites. ScrapeBox is an infamous one that would create the comment links on all sorts of blogs. You don't want to do that.

IX. Link schemes, private link networks, and private blog networks. This is where you really get into trouble as well. Google will penalize or de-index you altogether. It looks so, so spammy, and you want to avoid this.

X. Link exchange. This is in the same vein as the link exchanges, where back in the day you used to submit a website to a link exchange and they wouldn't grant you that link until you also linked to them. Super silly. This stuff does not work anymore, but there are tons of opportunities and quick wins for you to gain links naturally and more authoritatively.

So hopefully, this helps clear up some of the confusion. One question I would love to ask all of you is: To disavow or to not disavow? I have heard back-and-forth conversations on either side on this. Does the disavow file still work? Does it not? What are your thoughts? Please let me know down below in the comments.

Thank you so much for tuning in to this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I will see you all soon. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How Low Can #1 Go? (2020 Edition)

Posted by Dr-Pete

Being #1 on Google isn't what it used to be. Back in 2013, we analyzed 10,000 searches and found out that the average #1 ranking began at 375 pixels (px) down the page. The worst case scenario, a search for "Disney stock," pushed #1 all the way down to 976px.

A lot has changed in seven years, including an explosion of rich SERP (Search Engine Results Page) features, like Featured Snippets, local packs, and video carousels. It feels like the plight of #1 is only getting worse. So, we decided to run the numbers again (over the same searches) and see if the data matches our perceptions. Is the #1 listing on Google being pushed even farther down the page?

I try to let the numbers speak for themselves, but before we dig into a lot of stats, here's one that legitimately shocked me. In 2020, over 1,600 (16.6%) of the searches we analyzed had #1 positions that were worse than the worst-case scenario in 2013. Let's dig into a few of these ...

What's the worst-case for #1?

Data is great, but sometimes it takes the visuals to really understand what's going on. Here's our big "winner" for 2020, a search for "lollipop" — the #1 ranking came in at an incredible 2,938px down. I've annotated the #1 position, along with the 1,000px and 2,000px marks ...

At 2,938px, the 2020 winner comes in at just over three times 2013's worst-case scenario. You may have noticed that the line is slightly above the organic link. For the sake of consistency and to be able to replicate the data later, we chose to use the HTML/CSS container position. This hits about halfway between the organic link and the URL breadcrumbs (which recently moved above the link). This is a slightly more conservative measure than our 2013 study.

You may also have noticed that this result contains a large-format video result, which really dominates page-one real estate. In fact, five of our top 10 lowest #1 results in 2020 contained large-format videos. Here's the top contender without a large-format video, coming in at fourth place overall (a search for "vacuum cleaners") ...

Before the traditional #1 organic position, we have shopping results, a research carousel, a local pack, People Also Ask results, and a top products carousel with a massive vertical footprint. This is a relentlessly commercial result. While only a portion of it is direct advertising, most of the focus of the page above the organic results is on people looking to buy a vacuum.

What about the big picture?

It's easy — and more than a little entertaining — to cherry-pick the worst-case scenarios, so let's look at the data across all 10,000 results. In 2013, we only looked at the #1 position, but we've expanded our analysis in 2020 to consider all page-one organic positions. Here's the breakdown ...

The only direct comparison to 2013 is the position #1 row, and you can see that every metric increased, some substantially. If you look at the maximum Y-position by rank, you'll notice that it peaks around #7 and then begins to decrease. This is easier to illustrate in a chart ...

To understand this phenomenon, you have to realize that certain SERP features, like Top Stories and video carousels, take the place of a page-one organic result. At the same time, those features tend to be longer (vertically) than a typical organic result. So, a page with 10 traditional organic results will in many cases be shorter than a page with multiple rich SERP features.

What's the worst-case overall?

Let's dig into that seven-result page-one bucket and look at the worst-case organic position across all of the SERPs in the study, a #7 organic ranking coming in at 4,487px ...

Congratulations, you're finally done scrolling. This SERP has seven traditional organic positions (including one with FAQ links), plus an incredible seven rich features and a full seven ads (three are below the final result). Note that this page shows the older ad and organic design, which Google is still testing, so the position is measured as just above the link.

How much do ads matter?

Since our 2013 study (in early 2016), Google removed right-hand column ads on desktop and increased the maximum number of top-left ads from three to four. One notable point about ads is that they have prime placement over both organic results and SERP features. So, how does this impact organic Y-positions? Here's a breakdown ...

Not surprisingly, the mean and median increase as ad-count increases – on average, the more ads there are, the lower the #1 organic position is. So why does the maximum Y-position of #1 decrease with ad-count? This is because SERP features are tied closely to search intent, and results with more ads tend to be more commercial. This naturally rules out other features.

For example, while 1,270 SERPs on February 12 in our 10,000-SERP data set had four ads on top, and 1,584 had featured snippets, only 16 had both (just 1% of SERPs with featured snippets). Featured snippets naturally reflect informational intent (in other words, they provide answers), whereas the presence of four ads signals strong commercial intent.

Here's the worst-case #1 position for a SERP with four ads on top in our data set ...

The college results are a fairly rare feature, and local packs often appear on commercial results (as anyone who wants to buy something is looking for a place to buy it). Even with four ads, though, this result comes in significantly higher than our overall worst-case #1 position. While ads certainly push down organic results, they also tend to preclude other rich SERP features.

What about featured snippets?

In early 2014, a year after our original study, Google launched featured snippets, promoted results that combine organic links with answers extracted from featured pages. For example, Google can tell you that I am both a human who works for Moz and a Dr. Pepper knock-off available at Target ...

While featured snippets are technically considered organic, they can impact click-through rates (CTR) and the extracted text naturally pushes down the organic link. On the other hand, Featured Snippets tend to appear above other rich SERP features (except for ads, of course). So, what's the worst-case scenario for a #1 result inside a featured snippet in our data set?

Ads are still pushing this result down, and the bullet list extracted from the page takes up a fair amount of space, but the absence of other SERP features above the featured snippet puts this in a much better position than our overall worst-case scenario. This is an interesting example, as the "According to mashable.com ..." text is linked to Mashable (but not considered the #1 result), but the images are all linked to more Google searches.

Overall in our study, the average Y-position of #1 results with featured snippets was 99px lower/worse (704px) than traditional #1 results (605px), suggesting a net disadvantage in most cases. In some cases, multiple SERP features can appear between the featured snippet and the #2 organic result. Here's an example where the #1 and #2 result are 1,342px apart ...

In cases like this, it's a strategic advantage to work for the featured snippet, as there's likely a substantial drop-off in clicks from #1 to #2. Featured snippets are going to continue to evolve, and examples like this show how critical it is to understand the entire landscape of your search results.

When is #2 not worth it?

Another interesting case that's evolved quite a bit since 2013 is brand searches, or as Google is more likely to call them, "dominant intent" searches. Here's a SERP for the company Mattress Firm ...

While the #1 result has solid placement, the #2 result is pushed all the way down to 2,848px. Note that the #1 position has a search box plus six full site-links below it, taking up a massive amount of real estate. Even the brand's ad has site-links. Below #1 is a local pack, People Also Ask results, Twitter results from the brand's account, heavily branded image results, and then a product refinement carousel (which leads to more Google searches).

There are only five total, traditional organic results on this page, and they're made up of the company's website, the company's Facebook page, the company's YouTube channel, a Wikipedia page about the company, and a news article about the company's 2018 bankruptcy filing.

This isn't just about vertical position — unless you're Mattress Firm, trying to compete on this search really doesn't make much sense. They essentially own page one, and this is a situation we're seeing more and more frequently for searches with clear dominant intent (i.e. most searchers are looking for a specific entity).

What's a search marketer to do?

Search is changing, and change can certainly be scary. There's no question that the SERP of 2020 is very different in some ways than the SERP of 2013, and traditional organic results are just one piece of a much larger picture. Realistically, as search marketers, we have to adapt — either that, or find a new career. I hear alpaca farming is nice.

I think there are three critical things to remember. First, the lion's share of search traffic still comes from traditional organic results. Second, many rich features are really the evolution of vertical results, like news, videos, and images, that still have an organic component. In other words, these are results that we can potentially create content for and rank in, even if they're not the ten blue links we traditionally think of as organic search.

Finally, it's important to realize that many SERP features are driven by searcher intent and we need to target intent more strategically. Take the branded example above — it may be depressing that the #2 organic result is pushed down so far, but ask yourself a simple question. What's the value of ranking for "mattress firm" if you're not Mattress Firm? Even if you're a direct competitor, you're flying in the face of searchers with a very clear brand intent. Your effort is better spent on product searches, consumer questions, and other searches likely to support your own brand and sales.

If you're the 11th person in line at the grocery checkout and the line next to you has no people, do you stand around complaining about how person #2, #7, and #9 aren't as deserving of groceries as you are? No, you change lines. If you're being pushed too far down the results, maybe it's time to seek out different results where your goals and searcher goals are better aligned.

Brief notes on methodology

Not to get too deep in the weeds, but a couple of notes on our methodology. These results were based on a fixed set of 10,000 keywords that we track daily as part of the MozCast research project. All of the data in this study is based on page-one, Google.com, US, desktop results. While the keywords in this data set are distributed across a wide range of topics and industries, the set skews toward more competitive "head" terms. All of the data and images in this post were captured on February 12, 2020. Ironically, this blog post is over 26,000 pixels long. If you're still reading, thank you, and may God have mercy on your soul.

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