Top 10 Changes That Impacted Google My Business in 2020

Posted by ColanNielsen

2020 has been a busy year for Google My Business (GMB). Since January, Google has launched new features, fixed bugs, and had to adapt to the global pandemic.

At Sterling Sky, we think it’s important to keep track of all the changes that happen in the local search space in general, and that impact GMB specifically. So far in 2020 we are up to 54 changes.

As you can tell, changes that impact Google My Business came at a fast pace — and at high volume — in 2020. In this post, I highlight the changes I think were most important in each month of this year, so far. For an exhaustive list of all the updates that have been made, check out this timeline.

January: Google posts borked — hello, 2020!

Foreshadowing things to come, GMB started off the year with a major issue in their Google Posts feature. Google Posts were getting rejected left, right, and center.

At first, it appeared to be a bug in the system. We were further confused when Google stated that everything was “working as intended”, but the Google My Business Forum was still flooded with users complaining that their Google Posts were being rejected, and not just for a single reason:

And then Google announced that they resolved the issue. Was it truly “Working as intended”? Likely not, but the issues have, indeed, been resolved.

This hiccup made it tough for SEOs who offer Google Posts as part of their service offerings to do their work, and it would have been even more difficult for software companies that connect to Google’s API and offer multi-location Google Posts.

When one of GMB’s products fail, it’s on us as SEOs to clearly explain what’s happening to our clients. Staying on top of GMB bugs, and being able to articulate them, is a critical component of the modern local SEO tool belt.

February: Google adds “suggested categories” for GMB Products

February saw the first of many visible changes to the GMB dashboard when Google added “suggested categories” to the Products section. As of today, we still don’t know if this specific addition impacts ranking, but they still appear in the business profile on mobile, so they can impact conversions. In addition, we do know that adding actual GMB Products does not impact ranking.

March: Google launches several COVID-related features

March saw the beginning of GMB allocating a large percentage of their support resources to the healthcare verticals that were impacted most by COVID-19. To complicate things further, Google disabled the GMB Twitter and Facebook support options.

In addition to allocating resources to healthcare verticals, they began launching specific GMB features to help businesses adjust and communicate their current state of operations to their customers. Some of these initial features included:

1. Shutting off the ability for businesses to receive new reviews and Q&A
2. Adding the option to report a location as “Temporarily Closed”
3. Disabling new photos uploaded by customers
4. Adding a COVID-19 Google Post type

These features have done a great job helping businesses through the pandemic, and give SEOs another venue to offer value by implementing them for our clients in a proactive manner.

For instance, the COVID-19 Google Post type appears higher up in the business profile, compared to regular Google Post types, which gives us the opportunity to offer businesses an effective way to give their message an increased level of visibility.

April: GMB adds telehealth appointment and COVID links

April concluded with GMB adding several new website link options to the dashboard. The two main link options that were added are the “COVID-19 info link” and the “Telehealth info link”:

Here’s how they look live on mobile:

We dug into Google Analytics for the example above. The COVID links, in addition to being a useful way to communicate new protocols, also drove traffic and conversions.

May: Google confirms April/May local ranking fluctuations were bugs

In November 2019, we described the local ranking algorithm as the “most volatile” we had seen it to date. The ranking fluctuation was so great that we named the algorithm update that was happening “Bedlam”.

When we started to see strikingly similar volatility in the local search results in April 2020, we jumped to the conclusion that this was another local algorithm update. However, Danny Sullivan confirmed that it was a bug this time around:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Just wanted to update. Thanks for the examples. They helped us find a bug that we got resolved about about two weeks ago, and that seems to have stabilized things since.</p>— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) <a href="https://twitter.com/dannysulli... 28, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Several of our clients who saw major ranking fluctuation told us that the real-world impact on their business was palpable. When their rankings dropped, they immediately felt it from a revenue perspective, and when their rankings moved back up, revenue went back up as well. I can only guess that the amount of revenue lost and gained due to this bug, across all businesses, was astronomical.

June: GMB adds “more hours” option

In June, GMB included a new set of hours that a business can add to their locations to indicate when they are open for special circumstances. Some of the “more hours” options appeared to be a response to the pandemic, such as “senior hours”. I suspect that this feature will be available long after the pandemic is over.

SEOs can add value for their clients by proactively setting this up. Some bigger chains such as Wal-Mart are already doing a great job utilizing this feature. Here are some examples I’ve found in the wild recently:

July: Google adds ability to flag user profiles

This is one of my favorite new features from Google this year. They now provide the option for any user to flag a user profile. This new feature is ideal when you want to report a reviewer’s profile that is engaging in clearly fake reviews.

Before this option became available, the only way to report an entire user’s profile was to send an email to Local Guides support.

The important thing to remember is that this feature is only available from the Google Maps App. Here’s how it works:

1. Open the Google Maps app.
2. Find a contribution from the profile that you’d like to flag.
3. Tap on the user name of the profile.
4. Tap the three vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner.
5. Choose “Report profile”.

August: GMB adds performance metrics to direct edit experience

The GMB direct edit experience has been around for a while now. (Ben Fisher did a great job covering it recently.) It’s a useful way for GMB page managers and owners to make edits to the listing directly on Google search, and not have to go into the GMB dashboard.

What GMB added to this feature in August was the ability to see performance metrics (GMB Insights) directly in Google search as well. What I like about this feature is that you can go back and get data from a six-month window, and as of today, you can only go back three months inside the GMB dashboard.

Here’s how you find the performance metrics. Please note that this feature is not available to all businesses yet. Google typically rolls out new features in phases. As Google gathers data on this rollout, and if it is being adopted well, I imagine we will see this rolled-out to 100% by early 2021.

Perform a branded search for the business that you manage and select the “View profile” button.

Next, you need to select “Add a highlight”. This used to be labeled as “Promote”:

After that, select “Performance”:

And finally, after selecting the performance option you will be able to view your insights data.

September: COVID-related health and safety attributes launch

The pandemic influenced several new GMB features such as the “temporarily closed” option and COVID-19 Google Post type, which we have already covered. I think the most significant feature related to COVID-19, however, was the launch of the coronavirus-related health and safety attributes, which were launched in September.

Google seems to be adding more attributes to the list as time goes on, but here is what they have added as of today. You can select these under the “Info” tab inside the Google My Business dashboard.

These attributes are powerful because they are highly visible in multiple places. You can see them on both mobile and desktop, and in both Google Maps and Google search.

Here’s what they look like in the wild:

October: New “preview call history” module in GMB dashboard

As of the beginning of October, I started seeing a module inside the GMB dashboard called “Preview call history BETA”. It’s not entirely clear what the final feature will look like, but experts have been weighing in over at the Local Search Forum.

Here’s what we know so far based on feedback from Google as well as members' feedback from the Local Search Forum.

1. It’s currently US only and opt-in.
2. No transcription or call recording.
3. Call logs remain for 45 days.
4. There is a whisper message telling the owner that the call originated from Google.
5. The number displayed to the caller will be the forwarding number.
6. This may interfere with off-site call tracking via GMB, so use cautiously if you’re using a call tracking strategy.

So what? November, December, and 2021

Like Bowie said, “Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes”. When it comes to Google My Business, you can expect the changes to keep coming as we complete 2020 and move on to 2021.

As for my future predictions, where Google My Business is concerned, I see guidelines opening up to include additional business models as a result of the pandemic, and due to the shift that businesses have had to make from an in-person, brick-and-mortar operation to online service.

Telehealth is a prime example. Google has been adding several GMB attributes that a business can select to indicate that they offer online services. Currently, the guidelines say you need to make in-person contact with customers to qualify for a listing. At the very least, Google has opened this rule up temporarily during the pandemic to accommodate this new health model. So the question is whether or not this will continue into the future once the pandemic is over. I think they will.

And with that, remember to turn and face the strange, and embrace Google My Business in all of its constantly changing glory.

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Supporting Small Business Saturday with 2020-Conscious Marketing

Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: Elvert Barnes

“Conscious spending with the community can contribute to neighborhood sustainability.” — Christine Araquel, The Park’s Finest

I encountered this quote from a restauranteur on the American Express Small Business Saturday website, and just these few words called a vivid image to my mind: local business owners and customers gazing together toward the horizon, hoping to pierce the clouds of COVID-19 and see them clearing away, revealing communities that are still standing, and still capable of sustaining our hometowns, our cities, and our dreams.

72% of consumers believe they will frequent neighboring businesses more after the crisis is over, but that will take all of us doing our part now to ensure as many SMBs are still there to greet us when better days return.

In Q4 of 2019, I used my column to encourage local business owners to start having meaningful conversations with customers about how “conscious spending” at independently-owned enterprises impacts local quality of life. Buying local affects everything from mental and physical health, to emergency services access, diversity, democracy, and climate change.

In 2020, it’s time to turn up the local SEO industry’s dial on conscious spending. Today, I’m urging every business owner and marketer to consider dedicating space to a concerted educational campaign on the topic on their websites, social profiles, local business listings, reviews, and real-world interfaces. Your work, and mine, depends on sustaining independently-owned local businesses through and far beyond Small Business Saturday. With the right strategy, we can make an impactful effort together.

What is Small Business Saturday?

American Express created Small Business Saturday in 2010 in response to the Great Recession. This annual event invites communities to shop at small, local businesses on the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Small Business Saturday’s date this year is November 28th.

Americans spent $19.6 billion at independent businesses on Small Business Saturday in 2019. In 2020, AmEx is placing special emphasis on shopping locally to help SMBs remain viable amid the challenges of the public health emergency. AmEx is also strongly encouraging shoppers to support Black-owned independent businesses this year.

Practical tactics for Small Business Saturday preparation

To ensure your local business is ready to welcome the maximum number of shoppers on the big day, check these off your list:

• Do a quick audit of your website to be sure all contact information and hours of operation are current and accurate for each location of your business.
• Do the same for your local business listings on the major location data platforms.
• Write at least one Small Business Saturday Google Post to explain your special offers for the day.
• Post a Google Q&A about your participation in Small Business Saturday.
• Publicize your Small Business Saturday offers on your social channels.
• Respond to any recent reviews that mention Small Business Saturday.
• Make use of any appealing partnership deals you qualify for by participating in AmEx’s official Small Business Saturday program.
• Make use of AmEx’s tutorials on topics like contactless payments, answering COVID FAQs, and implementing digital shopping.

These are all standard good practices to ready your company for this major shopping day, but amid the severe challenges of 2020, it’s time to go beyond common techniques.

Share-worthy Buy Local statistics

If conscious local shopping is the goal, education is the key to helping customers make informed choices.

There’s never been a better year for local vendors to re-envision themselves as heroic community educators. Beyond the typical preparations you make to get ready for Small Business Saturday, now is the time to start sharing with customers why conscious shopping with you matters. Consider:

In 2012, small businesses made up 99.7% of US employer firms. SMBs with 500 or fewer employees are the backbone of the US economy.

As of August 2020, 163,735 total U.S. businesses on Yelp were reported as closed, with 97,966 reported as permanently closed due to the pandemic. Meanwhile, the last Civic Economics Prime Numbers report found that Amazon had displaced 62,000 shops and 900,000 retail jobs in just one year. Small businesses are struggling to survive the tandem challenges of COVID and monopoly.

As much as $7 billion in uncollected state and local taxes were lost in one year by local communities due to Amazon, depleting resources needed to cope with emergency and ongoing needs. Meanwhile, if every US family spent just $10 extra locally each month instead of at a big box or national chain, over $9.3 billion would be directly returned to local economies. Our hospitals, fire departments, schools, and other essentials of community life depend on having a strong tax base.

Small businesses not only create the local and state tax base essential to civic life, they also contribute 250% more than big brands to community causes. Shopping locally directly impacts services and programs you care about like first responders, food and housing security, children’s resources, and animal welfare.

Make a copy of Moz’s free Why Buy Local stats sheet to help you tell a compelling small business story to the communities in which you serve and market.

For local business owners: Where to educate in the run-up to Small Business Saturday 2020

Share the stories (with supporting statistics) of your choice to boost awareness of the benefits of shopping at independently-owned, local businesses in the following places:

Websites

Determine which resources matter most to the communities you serve, and explain how shopping local funds those essentials. Create a section on the homepage of your website summarizing these benefits, and link it to a landing page that expands on how conscious local shopping is sustaining the community.

For example, in my community, taxes are absolutely critical to keeping official fire departments operational, and volunteer fire departments depend on local giving. In the American West, where we’ve been in a constant state of disaster due to fire for months, SMBs can use their websites to draw the throughline between shopping local and funding essential emergency services. In other parts of the country, it could be flood relief, or food banks, or the survival of local newspapers.

Build a strong internal link structure pointing to your shop local landing page, and sprinkle your product and service pages with stats proving the point that choosing your business instead of a big box or online monopoly makes life better where shoppers live.

Social profiles

Bring creativity to bear in publicizing your most compelling reasons to shop local on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms. You don’t have to guilt-trip customers into spending at independents, but you can engage them with statistics that show how shopping with you benefits the community, as well as inviting customers to tell their own stories.

Use social media to ask which services, resources, places, and causes matter most to your customers, and help locals connect the dots between where they spend and how their purchases fund whatever is valued most at a local level.

Local business listings

Concise statistics can be incorporated into the description fields of your local business listings, Google Posts, videos, photos, GMB messaging, and Google Q&A. Use these spaces to give local shoppers extra reasons to do business with you.

And, of course, be sure the basic contact information and hours of operation on your major local business listings are up-to-date before Small Business Saturday, so that first-time shoppers who like your messaging can find you without any misdirection or disappointment.

Reviews

Incorporate brief statistics into review request campaigns, encouraging respondents to voice their educated opinions on why they choose to shop locally with you.

For example, a review request might state that sales at your business contribute X amount of funding to first responders, and that you’d appreciate the reviewer writing about how supporting these services matters to them and to the community. A review corpus spangled with persuasive statements from fully-aware customers can help other shoppers choose you over corporate competitors.

Additionally, local business owners are sometimes at a loss for how to vary their “thank you” owner responses to positive reviews. Diminish repetition by including data in your replies. For example, a hypothetical owner response could read:

“So glad you enjoyed your soft tacos, Mary! Your great review is extra appreciated right now, as dining with us is also ensuring a 3% donation to our local food bank from every order. You’re making a difference by helping us make sure everyone in the community has food on the table this winter. Thank you so much for caring about our town. We hope to see you again soon!”

The new Moz Local plans will alert you to every new review that comes in on our partner networks. Use these alerts to craft timely, informative thank-you notes in your owner responses.

Real-world interfaces

Storefronts, window displays, in-store signage, menus, brochures, mailers, packaging, receipts, business cards, and many other real-world assets can convey educational statistics that will help locals choose you to support the local economy.

Google has interesting theories about the messy middle of the customer’s journey during COVID-19. Your online assets may be of most influence during the evaluation and exploration phases of the buyer’s path, but don’t overlook the messages you’re sending to customers whose attention you’ve already captured. Using tangible assets — like window displays seen by passersby — to showcase how local patronage directly sustains the community could bring you repeat business from convinced customers.

For agencies: Be more than a local SEO — be a local business advocate

Image credit Indie Bound/Raven Bookstore

Local SEO agencies know, first-hand, the difficulties they and their clients have been through in 2020. Consider Danny Caine: teacher, poet, author, and owner of The Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas. Like so many independent business owners, he gives back to his community. Whether he’s serving locally-famous pie to visiting authors, or donating to restore the neighborhood church where Langston Hughes worshipped, Mr. Caine walks the hometown walk with a good heart. He’s like so many of our SMB clients.

But Danny Caine has taken community advocacy one step further than most local business owners. His letter to Jeff Bezos on the distinction between healthy competition and harmful disruption made some news. His self-published zine, How to Resist Amazon and Why, sold 10,000 copies and is now headed for formal publication as a full-length book.

While so many local search marketing agencies have been offering discounts to clients to keep them going during the pandemic, or simply seeing their SMB contracts disappear, Mr. Caine is proactively offering education to inspire conscious local shopping.

If a busy independent bookseller like Danny Caine can make the time to utilize local, social, and print media as advocacy channels, how much could skilled marketers at good agencies do to boost messaging in support of their SMB clients? Is there anything standing in our way?

Just do it

Multiple inspiring speakers at MozCon 2020 advised brands to have strong opinions and take public stands on important issues, building affinity with customers based on shared values. Mention was made of the famous Nike ad featuring abolitionist, Colin Kaepernick. In dollars and cents, the year following Nike’s commercial brought them $163 million in earned media, a $6 billion brand value increase, a 31% increase in sales,

and all-time-high stock values. But it brought the country so much more than this — it role-modeled courageously doing the right thing in the face of adversity.

The local SEO industry doesn’t have the same visibility as a footwear giant or a beloved superbowl quarterback. Collectively, ten of my favorite local SEOs have about 130,000

Twitter followers. What can we do, with only this much reach, to support local business owners like Danny Caine in what has become a critical, nationwide struggle of independents vs. monopoly?

Marketers: you’ve spent your careers developing incredible publicity skills! I want to know what your best ideas are, and I have three suggestions of my own to share to get the conversation started:

Idea 1: Take a stand on education

Because local SEOs work in tech, we find ourselves in a work environment that sometimes reveres market disruption just for the sake of the “wow” factor. We look at our social media feeds and see our peers cheering for Amazon Prime Day because it’s cool, for every Google AI development because it’s cool, for big box brands because they’re cool.

But for our own client base and our own communities, we know in our bones that it’s the opposite of cool to see local businesses closing down and workers displaced, or to see independent business owners struggling to scrape together the budget for a competitive local search marketing campaign.

There are hundreds of good reasons not to cheerlead for the biggest competitors of independent businesses, but for local SEOs, we don’t have to look further than our client rosters to choose which side to champion. Unless you’re holding out in the hopes of a Fortune 500 company becoming your star client, you’re already working with one or two feet in the SMB camp. So why not speak up about it?

That audience of 130,000 Twitter followers would quickly get used to seeing local SEO agencies taking bold, principled stands on the basis of ethics, civics, and local economics. What you say could begin influencing the larger worlds of SEO and digital marketing, so that the norm becomes covering market disruption with greater thoughtfulness about its impacts on local community life.

In the run-up to Small Business Saturday, why not start by sharing some Buy Local stats on your social feeds? Then, looking ahead to 2021, see how far you can take your agency in the direction of client support. I’ll follow any marketer who takes the leap from local SEO to local business advocate.

Idea 2: Make your agency website a source of educational citations

Most digital marketing agencies already have some sort of portfolio, and they’re often one of the most underutilized areas of the company website. Reimagined, portfolios are only a couple of steps away from becoming useful directories of structured citations for clients that could help boost their organic visibility and associated local pack rankings.

Putting the power of your agency’s own PA/DA behind the local brands you want to see beating out spam and corporate competitors is a great act of SMB allyship. Your agency could:

1. Create an in-depth page for each client containing structured NAP, a link, and the best data you can amass about how choosing this SMB benefits its city of location vs. shopping with big boxes of online giants.
2. Build good internal links to these pages.
3. Seek out a few good inbound links to these pages
4. Promote these pages on your social feeds
5. Use these pages as your examples at conferences, on webinars, and podcasts in 2021

Try to build at least one of these citation pages for a favorite SMB client before Small Business Saturday so that you’re templating the process. Create more in the new year and track how they’re ranking in the overall scheme of your clients’ unstructured citation/reputation assets.

Idea 3: Educate pro bono and educate for a fee

“I felt like I had to do more,” says Local SEO Search founder, John Vuong, and I hope you will take two minutes to watch his highly motivational video:

Many local SEOs are giving knowledge and help away right now out of an honorable desire to help SMBs get through tough times. Mike Blumenthal and Mary Bowling recently discussed this on a LocalU Last Week in Local podcast:

Mary: One of the tactics that’s been used here in our little valley is having free “get your business online” things where an agency will go in and help small businesses in their area actually get online and get verified and start harvesting some of the rewards of having Google My Business set up properly. It’s a really worthwhile thing to do.

Mike: I think with just an hour a month, an agency can then both build out the listing and provide additional services including metrics that demonstrate significant key performance indicators as they build this business toward a full digital relationship.

I recommend listening to the full conversation starting at about 10:10 in the video, and to the interview by Garrett Sussman that sparked it. In completely practical terms, our industry knows that a thriving local business scene means more clients with better funding for really good marketing.

I’d suggest adding one extra ingredient into any pro bono or discounted work you’re doing for local businesses: freely share my stats sheet with independent business owners to help them better tell their own story of how shopping with them sustains community life.

Meanwhile, if you’re a local SEO who has earned enough of a reputation to be a guest on podcasts, a speaker at webinars, or a paid presenter at conferences, build education about the vital role of independent businesses into your pitches. The more the digital marketing industry hears from us, and the more awareness we raise about the importance of conscious shopping, the better position we are putting our clients in to win.

Simmering success this year for a better Small Business Saturday in 2021

Image credit: Mark

If 2020 got in the way of you doing everything you wanted to do leading up to Small Business Saturday, consider that we’ve all got 12 months ahead of us before next year’s event. That’s 12 months to double down on educational messaging to support year-round, conscious, local shopping.

I don’t want to say it will be easy — there will definitely be hurdles.

In particular, marketing on the promise of dubious convenience is as old as commerce. I’ve laughed at canned soup ad copy telling consumers to buy their product to avoid standing over a hot stove for hours. Education is what makes us able to spot the fiction here: when you make soup from scratch, you turn on the burner and then go about the rest of your day until it’s ready to eat. Nobody, not even Jacques Pépin, actually stands glued to the stove while homemade soup simmers.

The Amazons, the big boxes, the monopolies and near-monopolies, are counting on the public going along with the fiction of convenience indefinitely and never stopping to count the cost to our communities.

Actively point out to your customer base that it’s not actually more convenient to shop giant “everything stores” anymore (if it ever was?), because with the curbside pickup and home delivery revolution 2020 brought small businesses, “near me” shopping has never been easier. Highlight that we can all take a 10-minute drive to pick up an item and get ourselves out of the house, or place a quick order via the web from a local purveyor and go about the rest of our day.

At least, we can do this so long as we still have local independents to buy from, to support with our dollars, and with our serious marketing skills. The choice is ours, and the real convenience will be on the side of the people if we choose to build thriving tax bases, community health and safety, human well-being, and local character via locally-supported commerce.

With 12 months between Small Business Saturday 2020 and 2021, you have the time and talents to contribute to positive social change. What are your best ideas? Please share in the comments!

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Sustainable Link Building: Increasing Your Chances of Getting Links — Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Paddy_Moogan

Link building campaigns shouldn't have a start-and-stop date — they should be ongoing, continuing to earn you links over time. In this informative and enduringly relevant 2018 edition of Whiteboard Friday, guest host Paddy Moogan shares strategies to achieve sustainable link building, the kind that makes your content efforts lucrative far beyond your initial campaigns for them.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. I'm not Rand. I'm Paddy Moogan. I'm the cofounder of Aira. We're an agency in the UK, focusing on SEO, link building, and content marketing. You may have seen me write on the Moz Blog before, usually about link building. You may have read my link building book. If you have, thank you. Today, I'm going to talk about link building again. It's a topic I love, and I want to share some ideas around what I'm calling "sustainable link building."

Problems

Now, there are a few problems with link building that make it quite risky, and I want to talk about some problems first before giving you some potential solutions that help make your link building less risky. So a few problems first:

I. Content-driven link building is risky.

The problem with content-driven link building is that you're producing some content and you don't really know if it's going to work or not. It's quite risky, and you don't actually know for sure that you're going to get links.

II. A great content idea may not be a great content idea that gets links.

There's a massive difference between a great idea for content and a great idea that will get links. Knowing that difference is really, really important. So we're going to talk a little bit about how we can work that out.

III. It's a big investment of time and budget.

Producing content, particularly visual content, doing design and development takes time. It can take freelancers. It can take designers and developers. So it's a big investment of time and budget. If you're going to put time and budget into a marketing campaign, you want to know it's probably going to work and not be too risky.

IV. Think of link building as campaign-led: it starts & stops.

So you do a link building campaign, and then you stop and start a new one. I want to get away from that idea. I want to talk about the idea of treating link building as the ongoing activity and not treating it as a campaign that has a start date and a finish date and you forget about it and move on to the next one. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that as well.

Solutions

So those are some of the problems that we've got with content-driven link-building. I want to talk about some solutions of how to offset the risk of content-driven link building and how to increase the chances that you're actually going to get links and your campaign isn't going to fail and not work out for you.

I. Don't tie content to specific dates or events

So the first one, now, when you coming up with content ideas, it's really easy to tie content ideas into events or days of the year. If there are things going on in your client's industry that are quite important, current festivals and things like that, it's a great way of hooking a piece of content into an event. Now, the problem with that is if you produce a piece of content around a certain date and then that date passes and the content hasn't worked, then you're kind of stuck with a piece of content that is no longer relevant.

So an example here of what we've done at Aira, there's a client where they launch a piece of content around the Internet of Things Day. It turns out there's a day celebrating the Internet of Things, which is actually April 9th this year. Now, we produced a piece of content for them around the Internet of Things and its growth in the world and the impact it's having on the world. But importantly, we didn't tie it exactly to that date. So the piece itself didn't mention the date, but we launched it around that time and that outreach talked about Internet of Things Day. So the outreach focused on the date and the event, but the content piece itself didn't. What that meant was, after July 9th, we could still promote that piece of content because it was still relevant. It wasn't tied in with that exact date.

So it means that we're not gambling on a specific event or a specific date. If we get to July 9th and we've got no links, it obviously matters, but we can keep going. We can keep pushing that piece of content. So, by all means, produce content tied into dates and events, but try not to include that too much in the content piece itself and tie yourself to it.

II. Look for datasets which give you multiple angles for outreach

Number two, lots of content ideas can lead from data. So you can get a dataset and produce content ideas off the back of the data, but produce angles and stories using data. Now, that can be quite risky because you don't always know if data is going to give you a story or an angle until you've gone into it. So something we try and do at Aira when trying to produce content around data is from actually different angles you can use from that data.

So, for example:

• Locations. Can you pitch a piece of content into different locations throughout the US or the UK so you can go after the local newspapers, local magazines for different areas of the country using different data points?
• Demographics. Can you target different demographics? Can you target females, males, young people, old people? Can you slice the data in different ways to approach different demographics, which will give you multiple ways of actually outreaching that content?
• Years. Is it updated every year? So it's 2018 at the moment. Is there a piece of data that will be updated in 2019? If there is and it's like a recurring annual thing where the data is updated, you can redo the content next year. So you can launch a piece of content now. When the data gets updated next year, plug the new data into it and relaunch it. So you're not having to rebuild a piece of a content every single time. You can use old content and then update the data afterwards.

III. Build up a bank of link-worthy content

Number three, now this is something which is working really, really well for us at the moment, something I wanted to share with you. This comes back to the idea of not treating link building as a start and stop campaign. You need to build up a bank of link-worthy content on your client websites or on your own websites. Try and build up content that's link worthy and not just have content as a one-off piece of work. What you can do with that is outreach over and over and over again.

We tend to think of the content process as something like this. You come up with your ideas. You do the design, then you do the outreach, and then you stop. In reality, what you should be doing is actually going back to the start and redoing this over and over again for the same piece of content.

What you end up with is multiple pieces of content on your client's website that are all getting links consistently. You're not just focusing on one, then moving past it, and then working on the next one. You can have this nice big bank of content there getting links for you all the time, rather than forgetting about it and moving on to the next one.

IV. Learn what content formats work for you

Number four, again, this is something that's worked really well for us recently. Because we're an agency, we work with lots of different clients, different industries and produce lots and lots of content, what we've done recently is try to work out what content formats are working the best for us. Which formats get the best results for our clients? The way we did this was a very, very simple chart showing how easy something was versus how hard it was, and then wherever it was a fail in terms of the links and the coverage, or wherever it was a really big win in terms of links and coverage and traffic for the client.

Now, what you may find when you do this is certain content formats fit within this grid. So, for example, you may find that doing data viz is actually really, really hard, but it gets you lots and lots of links, whereas you might find that producing maps and visuals around that kind of data is actually really hard but isn't very successful.

Identifying these content formats and knowing what works and doesn't work can then feed into your future content campaign. So when you're working for a client, you can confidently say, "Well, actually, we know that interactives aren't too difficult for us to build because we've got a good dev team, and they really likely to get links because we've done loads of them before and actually seen lots of successes from them." Whereas if you come up with an idea for a map that you know is actually really, really hard to do and actually might lead to a big fail, then that's not going to be so good, but you can say to a client, "Look, from our experience, we can see maps don't work very well. So let's try and do something else."

That's it in terms of tips and solutions for trying to make your link building more sustainable. I'd love to hear your comments and your feedback below. So if you've got any questions, anything you're not sure about, let me know. If you see it's working for your clients or not working, I'd love to hear that as well. Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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HTTPS Is Table Stakes for SEO in 2020

Posted by Dr-Pete

Back in the spring of 2017, I wrote that HTTPS results made up half of page-one Google organic URLs. In over three years, I haven't posted an update, which might lead you to believe that nothing changed. The reality is that a whole lot changed, but it changed so gradually that there was never a single event or clear "a-ha!" moment to write about.

Now, in the fall of 2020, HTTPS URLs make up 98% of page-one organic results in the MozCast 10,000-keyword tracking set. Here's the monthly growth since April 2017:

There was a bump in HTTPS after October 2017, when Google announced that Chrome would be displaying more warnings to users for non-secure forms, but otherwise forward momentum has been fairly steady. While browsers have continued to raise the stakes, there have been no announced or measured algorithm updates regarding HTTPS.

I scoff at your data!

So, why am I writing this update now? While the MozCast 10,000-keyword set is well-suited for tracking long-term trends (as it's consistent over time and has a long history), the data is focused on page-one, desktop results and is intentionally skewed toward more competitive terms.

Recently, I've been gifted access to our anonymized STAT ranking data — 7.5M keywords across desktop and mobile. Do these trends hold across devices, more pages, and more keywords?

The table above is just the page-one data. Across a much larger data set, the prevalence of HTTPS URLs on page one is very similar to MozCast and nearly identical across desktop and mobile. Now, let's expand to the top 50 organic results (broken up into groups of ten) ...

Even at the tail end of the top 50 organic results, more than 92% of URLs are HTTPS. There does seem to be a pattern of decline in HTTPS prevalence, with more non-secure URLs ranking deeper in Google results, but the prevalence of HTTPS remains very high even on page five of results.

Does this increase in HTTPS prevalence at the top of the rankings suggest that HTTPS is a ranking factor? Not by itself — it's possible that more authoritative sites tend to be more sensitive to perceived security and have more budget to implement it. However, we know Google has stated publicly that HTTPS is a "lightweight ranking signal", and this data seems to support that claim.

You can't make me switch!

I don't know why you're being so combative, but no, I can't really make you do anything. If you're not convinced that HTTPS is important when 97-98% of the top ten organic results have it, I'm not sure what's left to say. Of course, that's not going to stop me from talking some more.

When we focus on rankings, we sometimes ignore core relevance (this is a challenge in large-scale ranking studies). For example, having relevant keywords on your page isn't going to determine whether you win at rankings, but it's essential to ranking at all. It's table stakes — you can't even join the game without relevant keywords. The same goes for HTTPS in 2020 — it's probably not going to determine whether you rank #1 or #10, but it is going to determine whether you rank at all. Without a secure site, expect the bouncer to send you home.

As importantly, Google has made major changes around HTTPS/SSL in the Chrome browser, increasingly warning visitors if your site isn't secure. Even if you're still lucky enough to rank without HTTPS URLs, you're going to be providing a poor user experience to a lot of visitors.

There's not much left between 97% and 100%, and not many blog posts left to write about this particular trend. If you're not taking HTTPS/SSL seriously in 2020, this is your final wake-up call. 

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4 Google My Business Fields That Impact Ranking (and 3 That Don't) — Whiteboard Friday

Posted by JoyHawkins

With so many customization options in your Google My Business profile, it can be tough to decide what to focus on. But when it comes to ranking on the SERP, there are actually only four GMB fields that influence where your business will land. 

In this brand new Whiteboard Friday, MozCon speaker and owner/founder of Sterling Sky, Joy Hawkins, takes us through the fields she and her team has found do (and do not) effect rankings.

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

Video Transcription

Hello, Moz fans. My name is Joy Hawkins, and today I'm going to be talking about which Google My Business fields impact ranking in the local pack. At my agency, Sterling Sky, we do a lot of testing to try and figure out what things actually influence ranking and what things do not.

We've come to the conclusion that there are only four things inside the Google My Business dashboard that a business owner or a marketing agency can edit that will have a direct influence on where they rank in the local results on Google. 

1. Business name

So to start us out, I'm going to start with the first thing that we found has impacted ranking, which is the business name. Now this is one that's kind of frustrating because I don't think it should have so much of an influence, but it does.

This year in the local search ranking factors study I actually put this as my number one. Of all the things that influence ranking, this one, in my experience, has the most weight, which is again unfortunate. So as a business owner, obviously you're thinking, "I can't really change my business name very easily". If you do happen to have a keyword rich business name, you will see an advantage there.

But the real action item would be to kind of look to see if your competitors are taking advantage of this by adding descriptive words into their business name and then submitting corrections to Google for it, because it is against the guidelines. So I'm not saying go out there and add a whole bunch of keywords to your business name on Google. Don't do that. But you should keep an eye on your competitors just to see if they're doing this, and if they are, you can report it to Google using the Google business complaint redressal form.

Now one thing that's kind of a tip here — it has nothing to do with Google — but we've seen the same thing on Bing, which doesn't get talked about a whole lot, but on Bing you're actually allowed to have descriptors in your business name, so go ahead and do it there. 

No impact: Q&A

Now I'm going to switch over to something that we found has not influenced ranking at all, which is Q&A. I kind of shoved it over to the section over there because it's not actually in the dashboard currently. There isn't a Q&A section in there, but it is on the knowledge panel on Google, and it is something that you should get an email alert about if somebody posts a question to your listing. 

So we did a bunch of testing on Q&A and found, despite putting random keywords and very specific things in questions that we posted and also in the answers, there was no measurable impact on ranking.

So, unfortunately, that is not one area where you can kind of manipulate ranking for your clients. 

2. Categories

Moving on to the second thing that we have found influences ranking — categories. Categories might sound kind of simple, because you go and you pick your categories. 

There are 10 that you can add on there, but one thing I want to point out is that Google has around 4,000 categories currently, and they keep adding categories, and then they also sometimes remove them.

So we have been tracking this month over month, and we usually find that there are about two to 10 (on average) changes every month to the categories. Sometimes they add ones that didn't exist before. For example, we found in the last year there have been a lot of restaurant categories added as well as auto dealer categories. But there are also some industries like dentists, for example, that got a new one a couple of months ago for dental implants.

So it is something that you want to kind of keep track of, and hopefully we will have a resource published soon where we can actually log all of the changes for you. 

No impact: services

Now moving on to another thing that does not impact ranking, we'll move over here to services. 

So the services section — at first glance it looks like an SEO dream. You can put all kinds of descriptive words in there. You can tell Google a lot about the different services you offer.

But we have found that whatever you put there has no actual bearing on where you rank. So it's not something I would spend a lot time on. Also, it's not very visible. Currently it's not really visible on desktop at all. Then if you go onto a mobile device, it's kind of hidden off to a tab. It's not something we have found really has a lot of weight, so spend a few minutes on it, but it's not something I would revisit quite often.

3. Website

Then moving back to the things that do impact ranking, number three would be the website field. 

So this is something where you do want to kind of think and possibly even test what page on your website to link your Google My Business listing to. Often people link to the homepage, which is fine. But we have also found with multi-location businesses sometimes it is better to link to a location page.

So you do want to kind of test that out. If you're a business that has lots of different listings — like you have departments or you have practitioner listings — you also want to try and make sure that you link those to different pages on your site, to kind of maximize your exposure and make sure that you're just not trying to rank all the listings for the same thing, because that won't happen. They'll just get filtered. So that is a section that I would definitely suggest doing some testing on and see what works best for you and your industry.

No impact: products

Now moving on to something that we have found did not impact rankings — products. 

So this is a feature that Google launched within I think about a year or so ago. It's available on most listings. They are actually slowly rolling it out at the moment to all listings with the exception of a few categories that don't have it. This section is kind of cool because it's very visual.

If you're a business that offers products or even if you offer services, you can technically list them in this section with photos. One of the neat things about the products section is that they are very visible on the knowledge panel on both desktop and on mobile. So it is something you want to fill out, but unfortunately we have found it doesn't impact ranking. However, it does have an impact on conversions for certain industries.

So if you're a business like a florist or a car dealer, it definitely makes sense to fill out that section and keep it up to date based on what products you're currently offering. 

4. Reviews

Then moving back to the final thing that we found: number four for what influences ranking would be reviews (which is probably not going to be shocking to most of you). But we have found that review quantity does make an impact on ranking.

But that being said, we've also found that it has kind of diminishing returns. So for example, if you're a business and you go from having no reviews to, let's say, 20 or 30 reviews, you might start to see your business rank further away from your office, which is great. But if you go from, let's say, 30 to 70, you may not see the same lift. So that's something to kind of keep in mind. 

But there are lots of reasons as a business, obviously, why you want to focus on reviews, and we do see that they actually have a direct impact on ranking.

There was an article that I wrote a couple of years ago that is still relevant, on Search Engine Land, that talks about the changes that I saw when a whole bunch of businesses lost reviews and just watching how their ranking actually dropped within a 24 to 48-hour period. So that is still true and still relevant, but it's something that I would also keep in mind when you're coming up with a strategy for your business.

Conclusion

So in summary, the four things that you need to remember that you can actually utilize inside Google My Business to influence your ranking: first is the business name, second would be the categories, third would be the website field, and finally the review section on Google. 

Thanks for listening. If you have any questions, please hit me up in the comments.

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Basic Reputation Management for Better Customer Service

Posted by MiriamEllis

The Internet can be a great connector, but sometimes, it acts as a barrier.

Your local business receives a negative review, and the slate-colored words on the bland white screen can seem so cold, remote. You respond, but the whole interaction feels stilted, formal, devoid of face-to-face human feelings, like this:

At least when a complaint occurs via phone, the tone of a customer’s voice tells you a bit more and you can strive to respond with an appropriate vocal pitch, further questions, soothing, helping, maybe resolving. Still, if you’re working off a formal script, the human connection can be missed:

Image credit: News Oresund, Elvert Barnes

It’s a win when a customer complains in person to your staff, but only if those employees have been empowered to use their own initiative to solve problems. Employees who’ve been tasked with face-to-face interactions but lack permission to act fully human when customers complain will miss opportunity after opportunity to earn the loyalty your brand would give almost anything to amass. Two people can be looking one another in the eye, but if one has to act corporate instead of human, too much formality ensures forgettable experiences:

Image credit: Jan-Willem Boot, Amancay Blank

What you really want as a local business owner is to have the power to turn those chilly black-and-white words on a review profile into a living color interaction. You want to turn one-way messaging into front porch conversation, with the potential for further details, vital learnings, resolution, and deeply informal human connection with a neighbor, like this:

Image Credit: Christian Gries

The great barrier: reviews

Seventeen years into my journey as a local SEO, I’ve come to realize that my favorite businesses — the ones I’ve come to patronize with devotion — are the ones with owners and staff who treat me with the least formality. They’ve creatively established an environment in which I felt liked, heard, regarded, trusted, and appreciated, and I’ve responded with loyalty. It’s really a beautiful thing, when you step back and think about it.

For me, it’s small local farmers who epitomize informal neighborliness in business. They:

• Do their best to grow high quality food
• Know me by name
• Know my dietary preferences
• Let me roam around their properties for enjoyment’s sake
• Trust me to pay via an honor system
• Ask me if there’s additional produce I’d like them to grow
• Want to know how I’m cooking their produce
• Tell me other ways I might prepare their produce
• Have nice conversations with me about a variety of topics

Am I describing a business here, or a friend? The line is blurry. I’ve hugged some farmers. Prayed for a few when they’ve had hard times. I may have first met them for monetary transactions, but we’ve built human relationships, and the entire way I relate to this sector is defined by how the farmers go about their business.

With a few exceptions, most local brands can work at building less formality and more neighborliness into their in-person customer service. Think about it. In most settings, your customers would enjoy being treated with the respectful interest and kindness that invites camaraderie.

But we hit a strange barrier when the medium is online reviews. If we learned to read and write in a formal school setting, we may unconsciously ascribe a certain stiffness to textual exchanges. We’re worried about getting lower marks for making a mistake, and we’re aware of being in front of a public audience in writing review responses. We’re missing vital communicative cues, like the facial expression of the customer, their tone of voice, and their body language.

On our side of the equation, we can’t shake hands, or physically demonstrate our willingness to help, or even signal our approachability with a smile.

To tell the truth, reviews aren’t a great substitute for in-person communication, but they are here to stay, and there’s a certain amount of fear on both sides of many transactions that builds up the layers of the barrier, like this:

What can be done to bring the two parties closer together, so that they are at least leaning over the same fence to talk?

Create a workflow for spotting single and aggregate review cues

The easiest way I know of to get started with a workflow surrounding reviews is via a very intuitive product like Moz Local. Basic components are built into the dashboard, offering a simple jumping off point into the complex world of reputation management.

The screenshot above shows a portion of the functions Moz Local offers for review management. The organization of the various data widgets create a bridge for getting closer to customers and engaging in real, meaningful dialogue with them in an atmosphere of goodwill, rather than fear. Let’s break it down by tasks.

1. Seek cues in single reviews with ongoing alerts

To enter into a conversation, you have to know when it starts. The right-side column of the Moz Local dashboard keeps a running feed of your incoming reviews on a variety of platforms, as well as incoming Google Q&A questions. On a daily basis, you can see who is starting a conversation about your business, and you can tell whether customers most recent customers were having a good or bad experience by looking at the star rating.

Make it your practice to click first on any review in this feed if it’s received a 3-star rating or less, and see how much information a customer has shared about the reason for their less-than-perfect rating, as in this fictitious example:.

Because the reviews are timestamped, you may have the ability to connect a customer’s poor experience with something that happened at your place of business on a specific day, like being understaffed, having an equipment failure, or another problem.

In fact, a second view in the dashboard makes it immediately obvious if the reviews you received on a particular day had lower star ratings than you’d like to see:

If you know a customer’s complaints can be tied to an issue, this gives you something more and better to say than just “I’m sorry,” when you respond. For example, broken equipment leading to a cold meal is something you can explain in asking the customer to let you make it up to them.

2. Seek cues in aggregated sentiment

Knowing whether you have just one customer with a single complaint or multiple customers with the same complaint is vital quality control intelligence. Very often, Google reviews are particularly brief in comparison to reviews on other platforms, and you need to be able to take a large body of them to see if there are shared topical themes. The Review Analysis widget in the Moz Local dashboard does exactly this for you:

In this view, you can see up to 100 of the most common words your customers are using when they review you, the percentage of the reviews containing each word, and the star rating associated with reviews using each word. You can toggle the data for each column.

In our fictitious example, the business owner could see that when food is served cold, it’s yielding very poor review ratings, but that, fortunately, this is a complaint contained in only 1.7% of total reviews. Meanwhile, the business owner could notice that 2% of reviews with a 3.8 star rating (only a moderately good experience) are revolving around the phrase “service”. The owner can click on each word to be shown a list of the reviews containing that term to help them identify what it is about the service that’s diminishing customer satisfaction.

The figures in the above screenshot are all pretty low, and likely represent only mild concerns for the business. If, however, the business owner saw something like this, that would change the narrative:

Here, 12.2% of the reviews mentioning the restaurant’s veggie burgers are associated with a very poor 2.0 rating. The owner would need to dive into this list of reviews and see just what it is customers don’t like about this dish. For example, if many of these reviews mentioned that the burgers lacked flavor, had bland condiments, or buns that fell apart, these would be cues that could lead to changing a recipe. Again, this would give the owner something genuine to say in response to dissatisfied customers. Ideally, it would lead to the customer being invited to come again for something like a free taste test of the new recipe.

Whatever details the review sentiment analysis function yields for your business, use it with the intention of having a two sided conversation with your customers. They complain, in aggregate, about X, you research and implement a solution, and finally, you invite them to experience the solution in hopes of retaining that customer, which is typically far less costly than replacing them.

3. Grade your business at a glance

These two views in the Moz Local dashboard allow you to analyze two key, related aspects of your business at a glance.

The Average Rating view is the fastest way to grade yourself on aggregate customer satisfaction. This example shows a business with little to fear, with 96% of customers rating the business at 4-or-more stars and only 4% having a three-stars-or-less experience. In terms of having happy customers, this fictitious company is doing a great job.

However, the Reviews Reply rate needs some work. They’re only replying to 1% of their overall reviews, 0% of their 2-to-5-star reviews, and only 21% of their 1-star reviews. The business is doing an excellent job offline, but unless they improve their online responsiveness, their average review rating could begin to decrease over time.

In sum, a workflow which investigates reviews singly and in aggregate tells the story or customer satisfaction across time, and gives the business owner a clearer narrative to tap into and write from in responding.

Make optimal response rates and two-way conversation your goal

As a local business owner, you have many demands on your time. That being said, my pro tip for you is to respond to every review you possibly can. There’s no scenario in which it’s smart to ignore a conversation any customer starts, whether positive or negative. Just as you wouldn’t ignore a percentage of your incoming calls or customers walking around your business, you shouldn’t ignore them online.

If thinking of reviews as a two-way conversation is a bit of new concept to you, consider that most review platforms enable people to edit their reviews for a reason: many of your customers think of the reviews they write as living documents, and are willing to update them to journal subsequent interactions that made a scenario better or worse. My own research has shown this to be true, and multiple studies have reached the conclusion that the majority of customers will continue doing business with brands that resolve their complaints.

This means that local businesses can manage a customer journey that follow this pattern for negative reviews, much of the time:

In black-and-white review land, this might look like this:

Or, when a customer is happy to begin with, offering extra incentives to come again while thanking the customer for taking the time to write their review could look like this:

Here, a conversation starter about salsa has been turned into a two-way dialog guaranteed to make the customer feel heard and valued. They’ve been invited back, their opinion has been solicited, and both the existing customer and all potential future customers reading Mary’s response can see that this is a restaurant with a lively, on-going relationship with its diners.

Takeaway: don’t just say “thanks” to every customer who positively reviews your business. Seek cues in their words that show what they care about and tie it to what you care about. Find common ground to further engage them and bring them back again.

How big of a priority are reviews, really?

I’ve consulted with so many local business owners over the years — everybody from beekeepers to bookkeepers. It’s a plain fact that all small business owners are extremely busy, and not all of them instantly take a shine to the idea of having a lot of little two-way conversations going on with their customers in their review profiles.

Statistics can change minds on this, when it comes to figuring out how much of a priority review analysis and management should be. Consider these findings from the Moz State of the Local SEO Industry survey of over 1,400 people involved in the marketing of local businesses:

Respondents placed aspects of Google reviews (count, sentiment, owner responses, etc.) as having the second greatest impact on Google’s local rankings.

90% of respondents agree that the impact of reviews on local pack rankings is real.

Nearly 14% of those marketing the largest local enterprises realize that more resources need to be devoted to review management. Yet, in another section of the survey, agency workers placed review management in a lowly 11th place in terms of something they are requested to help their clients with. Learn more about these trends by downloading the free State of the Local SEO Industry Report for 2020.

Statistics like these indicate that there is a maturing awareness of the vital role reviews play in running a successful local business. Management of all aspects of reviews deserves priority time.

Make a habit of reading reviews between the lines

Moz Local software will ensure you know whenever single reviews come in, and help you slice and dice review data in ways that tell customer service narratives in aggregate. If you’re already using this software, your first steps of reputation management are just waiting to be taken with ease and simplicity.

But to get the most of any review management product, you’ll need to bring a human talent to the dashboard: your ability to read between the lines of review text that can be brief, vague, sharp, and sometimes unfair.

With the exception of spam, there’s a real person on the other side of each text snippet, and for the most part, their shared desire is to be treated well by your business. Even if a review stems from a customer you can’t identify or one who communicates disappointment rudely, you can take the high road by making a mental image of yourself standing face-to-face with someone you highly value who is voicing a problem. Respond from that good place, with the conscious intention of improved neighborly communication and you may be pleasantly surprised by your ability to transform even the most dissatisfied person into a happier, more loyal customer.

I’ll close today with an excerpt of a very long real-world review which I’ve truncated. I’ve underlined the cues and the rewards I’m hoping you’ll spot and see as you strengthen your commitment to review management as a key component of your customer service strategy.

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The new Moz Local plans — Lite, Preferred, and Elite — are designed to offer more features and flexibility to better meet the needs of local businesses and their marketers. Customers on any of the new plans can now monitor reviews via alerts, and depending on the plan, respond to reviews and take advantage of social posting. It’s never been more important to actively engage and listen to the needs and concerns of your current customers — and potential customers will take notice.

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