It goes without saying that 2020 has been a wild ride. If you're like me, you've missed some exciting news or even taken some time away from all things digital when it felt like the world was just too much. At Moz, we created a lot of helpful content in 2020, publishing community resources, reports, and guides across topics like local SEO analytics, competitor analysis, keyword research, campaign management, and more. With all that coming your way, there’s bound to be some oversight. Here's a recap of what you might have missed in the chaos that has been 2020.
The State of Local SEO Industry Report 2020
The State of Local SEO Industry Report 2020 provides a snapshot of local SEO — both before and during COVID-19 — helping you understand the trends, ideas, and biggest challenges shaping your work in the new decade.
We found that 43% of respondents thought there weren't enough quality resources to train teams and clients. That insight led to some of the resources we created this year, and those we’ll be launching in early 2021.
How to Rank on Google
The freshly updated How to Rank on Google 25-step master checklist walks you through how to rank a page, from page ideation all the way to traffic pouring into your Google Analytics account. This framework for beginner to intermediate SEOs provides everything you need to get started.
The Keyword Research Master Guide
The Keyword Research Master Guide helps you understand exactly what content to create to best help achieve business goals and target relevant traffic. This guide provides concrete keyword research workflows that act as a practical place to start, and introduces intermediate and advanced SEO techniques that will help you step up your keyword game.
The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet
An enhanced web dev cheat sheet, this updated resource has been downloaded tens of thousands of times by SEOs and developers alike, to better align on the goals between both types of practitioners. It’s the go-to tool to explain technical and on-page best practices, and is easy to digest by all.
Other content you may have missed
Our favorite Marketing Scientist, Dr. Pete, published deep, technical research on Youtube and Google to understand how video is served in the SERP (shocker — we learned that there’s little room for competition when it comes to video and Google), as well as Google Core Update analyses to understand the impact and implications of Google’s algorithm changes.
In addition, we transitioned MozCon to a virtual platform, doubling the number of attendees of previous years and providing the most cutting edge insights and strategies from leading marketers across the country.
Moz’s commitment to the digital marketing community has helped the company thrive in a challenging year, but community-building means more than just business success. Moz has taken stances on diversity, equity, and inclusion by making a statement and taking action to support the Black Lives Matter movement, publishing diversity and gender in SEO reports with Nicole DeLeon of North Star Inbound, and making historic changes to the board of directors with the addition of Asia Orangio and Tara Reed.
As we turn the corner into 2021, we expect the challenges to continue, but remain hopeful that things will improve. No matter what surprises the new year has in store, we’ll be here to support you with resources and tools to help you improve your SEO proficiency and reach your goals. You’ll see a new course from Moz Academy, a guide on local SEO, and much more. If you have any suggestions on what resources would be helpful to you, please let us know in the comments below.
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We are living in a fast-moving time with new technology, ever-evolving social and political landscapes, and a pandemic on top of that. Any predictions about what to expect in 2020 for marketers was no doubt lightyears off what we’re experiencing now.
So what can we learn from this year as we move forward? You can bet things will continue to change and evolve in unpredictable ways. What worked last year might not work now. Heck, what worked last week might not work next week! How, then, can you be sure you’re getting the most out of your marketing efforts?
For one, pay attention to those around you. Learn from your peers and competitors. Some may be sharing: read blogs, watch webinars, consume all you can in your space. But you can uncover even more by doing things like conducting a competitive analysis of other sites, advertising messaging, advertising spend, and content creation.
Learn from yourself and adapt
Pay attention to your own analytics and results closely. Take in what you are seeing and adapt. Have a willingness to branch out and pivot strategy based on what the data is telling you. Again, something that worked before may not be working now, and vice versa.
Always. Be. Testing.
Knowing for sure what is going to work for your business, in your space, and at this particular time is a tough task. So the only way to find out for sure and stay on top of the changing trends is testing. We’re all vulnerable right now — and any time tough circumstances fall on us. Figuring out a new course of action, whether it is macro marketing decisions or micro adjustments, is key.
What to test
It’s easy to sit here and say “test to see what works and go with that”, but that can mean a lot of things. As I tie this back into maximizing your return during tough times, let’s talk about where to start first as you look to elevate your marketing and drive revenue and return.
Too often I see brands being timid in times of crisis. There is something to be said about caution, but testing and learning shouldn’t be a risk — it’s an opportunity.
The reality is, every industry is being affected in different ways in 2020. But challenging times come for us all, and when they do, focus on these few areas first.
Advertising
Advertising is always one of the first areas I look to when testing. It’s a fantastic testing ground that is often more controlled, and in which it’s easier to identify new, successful opportunities. You can look at ad copy, keywords, landing page content, calls to action, audiences, and different strategies altogether within the advertising platform.
We’ve measured positive results for clients in varying industries and in different platforms by changing aspects of the ads we ran.
For an SMB bike helmet retailer, we focused on creating social media ads during the peak of the pandemic that showcased a single rider as opposed to a group, typically in a more open environment instead of the city. Copy was also shifted to emphasize things like “embrace open space” and alluded to socially distanced riding without explicitly saying.
Due to the economic uncertainty of the time, our client scaled back the budget by nearly 44% in April, contributing to a 43% decrease in overall impression share. Despite this overall decrease, the click-through rate (CTR) increased by 61% in that month, the return on ad spend (ROAS) jumped from 0.25 to 1.34, and overall purchases more than doubled.
We saw similar results in a PPC campaign for a network security client. As many employees began working from home, we needed to position our client as a security solution provider for remote workers. Competition rose during the pandemic, which resulted in higher click costs and, despite increasing the overall ad spend, fewer clicks.
To improve our ads, we updated the copy to speak to users in need of remote security solutions and included free trial messaging. We also moved away from taking users to the homepage, instead directing them to a product-specific landing page that served as a remote worker solution hub. Doing this helped to focus the user’s path of exploration to pages that are more relevant to them at the time versus a homepage where their scope of exploration is wider and less tailored.
Making these adjustments in our paid ad campaigns increased the CTR by 11% and conversions by 31%. And since we were sending users to a more focused landing page and not the homepage, the user’s path to conversion was shortened and the conversion rate increased by 44%.
Use your advertising as a way to learn and inform other marketing efforts. A great example of this is ad copy headlines. Consider A/B testing headlines to see which is more captivating and clickable, and then roll those findings out to title tags on the SEO side of things to see similar benefits there.
Content
Run A/B tests for different aspects of your on-site content. Conversion rate optimization is a powerful tactic. This might mean trying new copy, new design, new imagery, new calls to action, or simply title tags and on-page SEO updates. Really everything on your site, in your emails, or any pieces of content you have created falls into this category. I’m not suggesting overhauling things, but don’t just stick with the tried-and-true when the industry and users are changing around you.
To give you an idea of what testing can do, Portent ran an A/B test for a client to see which of two forms performed better, the original form they had been using or a modified version, which removed non-pertinent information from the top of the form.
Switching to the modified form increased form fills by 6% across all devices and a 14% increase on mobile devices. On top of that, phone calls increased by 22%—all from a simple A/B test.
Goals
Experiment with different ideas of what a conversion even is. If sales are down, consider something like driving more email sign-ups as an alternative. It may not be the primary end goal, but can still add value and contribute to your marketing funnel.
If lead form submissions are down, consider driving traffic to a white paper download, or some alternative value-add to the end user. As primary conversion points slow, look for other ways to drive value and build to the future productively.
Promotions
More specific to the e-commerce space traditionally, testing new and creative promotions and sales may help provide a much needed lift in conversion rates. In today’s space specifically, many customers are experiencing tough times, too. Something as simple as offering a discount, even if it’s a small one, could be what is needed to get them to purchase. You may need to get creative with your promotions to drive people to your site, especially when competition is fierce.
A streaming service client ran a campaign in April when competition in the streaming industry was extremely high. To really stand out against competitors, most of which were offering free trials or adding new content, we needed to take a different approach. We offered to pay someone to do what they were already doing during quarantine—bingeing TV.
This campaign resulted in the site gaining over 1,200 new links and media coverage on various online outlets, driving nearly 154,000 referrals to the site (a 634% increase in referral traffic period over period). Overall, we saw an 86% increase in organic traffic period over period and there were over 343,000 new sessions on the site, more than 83% of which were new users. We also offered an extended free trial during the campaign, resulting in over 650 conversions.
Outside the e-commerce space, find ways to lower the barrier to entry and boost conversion rates in the short term. That might mean pushing traffic to more simplified forms or just asking less of the individual converting. In circumstances like what we are currently experiencing, something is better than nothing.
How to test
The “how” of testing is very easily its own post with many layers to it, from user research to focus groups. For most that are trying to maximize return for their business, that can be overcomplicating things. That said, there are some simple things you can easily do to test smarter and learn quickly.
Research
To start, do your homework. As mentioned before, do competitive research and learn from others. Review the keyword landscape and understand search trends so you can make updates to copy and content intelligently. Know your audience and personas before making updates.
This is essentially taking the guesswork out of it. If you are going to the trouble of testing something new, have research and data to support your hypothesis.
Use tools
Marketing testing tools come in many different shapes and sizes. There really is something for all situations. Here are a few great tools that can help you accomplish the following:
Hopefully, you’ve been using some of these or your own preferred tools already. Lean into your tools—they will make things easier and help you drive results more quickly.
Don’t rush
Set your tests up as scientifically as you can and require statistical significance before drawing conclusions. It’s easy to get impatient and quickly make changes when you see results coming in. But, let the data do the talking and give your tests time to run their course.
Have a testing budget
Remember: this is a test! It’s easy to see results that you don’t want, panic and pull the plug. If you are investing in testing, have a budget that allows for that.
Set clear goals and expectations
Before you start your test, define success. What are you trying to accomplish? Make sure all stakeholders have the same set of expectations for what you are trying to discover and what goals your test supports.
Wrapping it all up
Tough times happen. Many businesses are facing them right now and will likely continue to. Don’t give up hope. Do your research and be nimble. You can find where your biggest pain points are and thoughtfully test solutions.
And remember, testing never ends. It’s an ongoing process in the continuous quest to drive the best results you can.
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How effective is your link building campaign? I bet your answer is “I wish it could be better.”
Talking to business owners and executives on a daily basis, I have yet to meet one who would be satisfied with their link building strategy.
Everyone needs links, yet they are getting harder and harder to get.
The solution?
Change your link building mindset.
How link building is similar to lead generation
In any business marketing strategy, we’re really interested in one thing: sales.
Yet, if we keep focusing on that end goal, we won’t achieve much. A customer may need up to eight touchpoints before they finally make a purchase. If you only focus on that final sale, you’re missing out on all those extra steps that drive your customer to buy.
It may sound obvious (so I’ll stop here) but the point I’m trying to make is: Marketers cannot focus on the final sale. We need something in between — a secondary metric that will bridge the gap between “a stranger” and a “a buyer”.
This is where the notion of a “lead” came from, i.e. a contact which we consider our prospective/possible/future customer.
A journey from a “a stranger” to a “lead” is shorter and much more predictable than a journey from “a stranger” to a “a buyer”, and once we turn a visitor into a lead, we can reach out to them in a much more meaningful and personalized way (via email, Facebook re-marketing, on-site personalizations, etc.).
What does this have to do with link building?
In link building we need links, just like in marketing we want sales. But focusing on the final goal is just as limiting in link building as it is in marketing.
Very few link builders these days do anything beyond sending an email, then using automated follow-ups. There’s no “lead generation” in link building. It’s either “link or no link” reporting.
And that’s where that process is broken.
In link building, all those bloggers, publishers, editors, etc. may also need several touchpoints (from something beyond an email). Furthermore, they may not be proper decision makers within the publication you are targeting.
If you apply that lead generation process to link building, you may see much better results, and more importantly, those results will keep growing the more leads you acquire.
How to add lead generation processes to your link building strategy
1. Define your linking leads prior to creating content
In B2B marketing, this is called outcomes-focused data strategy, which basically means you need to know exactly what you want to achieve (the outcome) before you start developing your strategy of achieving said outcome.
This concept is — sadly — seldom applied to link building.
What usually happens:
The content team creates what they think is a great content asset.
The outreach team identifies website owners who are likely to be interested in that asset, and starts the outreach.
Both teams are working in isolation.
But what happens if you turn that process around?
The outreach team shows the content team what’s attracting links on a specific topic (with examples). This insight should come from prospect research, current or upcoming trends, from previous outreach campaign data, etc.
The content team (in collaboration with the outreach team) creates something better than what currently exists on that topic. At this point, both the teams may involve those linking leads in the actual content creation (by reaching out and asking for expert opinions on the topic).
The outreach team delivers that content to the contacts they identified prior to the content creation.
Depending on the outlined link building opportunities, the linkable assets should take a specific format or angle, for example:
Curated lists of resources: Make sure your article fits one of the existing categories in the list, better fills a gap, or fixes an existing broken link.
Links from influencers or experts: Prior to publishing your article, reach out to those influencers and get their quote (opinion) to include in your article. Influencers are more likely to link when they’re featured on that page.
Links from peers and friends: Follow those people everywhere and start interacting with them on a daily basis. Think of this as “lead nurturing” — increasing your chances of creating long-lasting partnerships.
Editorial links from popular blogs: Track down authors and editors of those sites and start interacting with them on social media. Consider inviting them to contribute a quote to your article as well.
By letting your link building research guide the content creation process, you will end up with a highly successful campaign that is still delivering links (without the need to do the active outreach anymore).
2. Organize your linking leads
As we said previously, in link building the end goal is a link. But different leads will need a different number of touchpoints to finally link. Plus, more links are better than one.
This is where a lead nurturing process comes into play.
Just like B2B marketers using different methods to “warm up” leads and take them close to a sale, in link building you will get many more links if you keep reaching out to your leads to remind them of your asset.
If you’re using an outreach tool (both Pitchbox and Link Hunter are good options, depending on your budget and complexity of your project), it will handle some of the lead nurturing for you. At the very least, any outreach solution will:
Save all the emails you sent
Update the email status and dates (replied, bounced back, followed up, etc.)
Many link building teams will find that sufficient. I recommend going further and using a solid customer relationship management approach, which would also include:
Creating a detailed profile for each lead (which would also include their sites and columns, social media profiles, etc.)
Reaching out on social media (through ads and/or manual outreach)
If you want to go even further, you can adopt a well-organized customer relationship management strategy towards your linking leads. To get you started, here’s a solid comparison of major CRM types, as well as lead generation and nurturing platforms allowing you to properly organize and monitor your link building prospects.
You can set your link acquisition workflow and automate some parts of it (like follow-ups) while being in full control of everything that is going on.
3. Find alternative contacts and decision makers within each publication
In B2B, this process is called “account-based marketing”, i.e. when you know exactly which company would make your ideal customer and you start researching how to best onboard it.
In link building, this strategy applies to huge multi-author publications that would make ideal and ongoing backlink providers for your content. Think of the New York Times, Mashable, or a huge research magazine in your niche.
Emailing one of their authors with a request to link to your study or your infographic may not be enough (in fact, it will hardly ever be enough).
To investigate publications I’m really interested in getting links from, I use the following tools:
LinkedIn
I don’t use Linkedin for outreach, but I just love its company profiles, which show me which friends (or friends of friends) I have associated with those entities. I have been introduced to quite a few great publications this way:
Twitter bio search
While Linkedin may be useful to identify existing contacts, Twitter is great for building new ones. For bigger publications, all you need is to find people including that publication in their bios.
A tool called Twiangulate is a great and free option for doing that: Just specify the company name (or its Twitter handle) as a keyword and the tool will find all the Twitter profiles that include it:
Now create a separate Twitter list to keep in touch with all of them.
Website’s “About Us” page
This may seem obvious, but it’s often a missed step. Many publications list their whole editorial team with all the emails included on their “About” page.
Try developing an outreach strategy for each of those emails. For example, a CEO may not be the best contact to request a link from, but they may reply and give you clearer directions for who to speak with, so ask for a contact!
4. Diversify your touchpoints
In my experience, an email is still the most effective link building outreach method. Truthfully, I’ve seen better success with a follow-up email versus the initial email.
But other ways to reach out certainly increase your chances of hearing back. These include:
A simple Twitter follow or retweet (no requests here)
A DM (especially when journalists claim their DMs are open for pitches and ideas)
A comment on their personal site
A LinkedIn message
Adding a contact to a Twitter list (Twitter will notify them)
Tagging them on social media (especially when they’re referenced or quoted in your content)
The bottom line here: Simply being there may remind them of your request and prompt them to open your email.
5. Diversify your assets
With diverse touchpoints comes the need to diversify your assets. Your outreach will be more effective if you give your linking leads something of value to include in their article.
If your initial email and the first follow-up weren’t successful, try creating a visual summary (an infographic) in your second follow-up to give them something fresh.
The process may turn quite easy and effective if you provide your outreach and content teams with tools enabling them to handle the creation of those assets. These tools include:
Your team is everything. If you fail to train them properly or distribute tasks among your team members effectively, the whole process will fail to move along.
At the very least:
Include your outreach team in your social media marketing so they can extend their outreach methods beyond emailing. Tools like Agorapulse will help in that process. You can set up lists, monitor certain keywords, save and delegate certain updates to turn them into tasks, etc.
Track your outreach activity. Tools like Email Analytics will help you with that. It will generate daily and weekly reports showing you how actively your team was emailing and how many responses they got. It will also save all emails to backup conversations.
7. Optimize your landing page
Your linkable asset should make an instantly positive impression on the people you email. There may by different ways to achieve that, but certain things help for just about any SEO campaign:
Your page needs to be ad-free
I’ve seen lots of people not willing to provide “a free link” to a page that is monetized with ads. There’s no point in arguing with your linking leads on that. It’s easier to remove the ads from the page you’re actively link building for at the moment. Besides, more often than not, it’s very easy to do.
Create CTAs targeting your linking leads
This one is a little bit advanced, but it will help a lot. Adjust your CTAs on the linkable asset page to fit your linking leads rather than your regular ads.
For example, instead of “Sign up for a free trial”, you may include a press coverage link or invite visitors to download additional data or resources.
Using Facebook pixel to record everyone who initially landed on the site through your linkable asset is another great way to re-market your asset to your linking leads.
8. Keep an eye on those links
Very few people will reply to you saying they have indeed linked to your content. But knowing if they have is important because conversion is a crucial part in the lead nurturing process. It doesn’t stop your relationships with your lead, but it impacts your interactions going forward. Those leads who end up linking to you are your best friends. Cancel your follow-ups, thank them, and keep interacting with them on social media.
Again, if you are using an outreach platform, chances are the link tracking will be included. Otherwise, check out Site Checker that has a handy link monitoring feature included.
Conclusion
Safe links mean those we cannot control. This turns a link building process almost into a form of art, or a well-manufactured serendipity (one of my favorite business concepts). You need to do a lot before reaching your end goal, all while keeping your end goal in mind.
These days, when any site owner — professional or amateur — is bombarded with link requests, you need to up your link building game. Luckily, there’s a neighboring marketing area that you can learn from: lead generation. Adopt more complicated and more diverse outreach methods to acquire great links to your website. Good luck!
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We know that content is our doorway to earning countless SEO benefits for our sites. Admittedly, though, it’s too easy to get stuck in a rut after one too many content marketing campaigns.
In this 2017 holiday edition of Whitebeard Friday (see what we did there?), Rand offers three novel ways to add sparkle to your content creation efforts.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a special Christmas edition of Whitebeard Friday. This week, I wanted to try and help with just a few tactical suggestions on some creative ways to pump up those content marketing campaigns.
I've seen that many, many folks in the SEO world, of course, naturally, are investing in content marketing because content is the path to links and amplification and search traffic. Sometimes those content campaigns can feel a little stale or repetitive. So I have some creative ideas, things that I've seen some people executing on that I think we might be able to leverage for some of our work.
1. Niche groups
First one, if you can identify in your community these sort of small but vocal niche groups that are . . . when I say your community, it doesn't have to be people you already reach. It can be people inside the community of content generation and of topical interest around your subject matter. Then help them to amplify their voices or their causes or their pet projects, etc.
So I'll use the example of being in the foodie and gourmand world. So here's a bunch of foodies. But this particular tiny group is extremely passionate about food trucks, and, in particular, they really hate the laws that restrict food truck growth, that a lot of cities don't allow food trucks to be in certain spaces. They have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get licensed. They are not permitted to be permanently in a place for a whole week. Whatever it is, whatever those legal restrictions are. So by serving this small group, you might think that content is way too niche.
The wonderful part is that content is the kind that gets amplified very loudly, very repetitively, that can help you earn links and traffic to this small community. If that community is small and loud and feels like their voices aren't being heard elsewhere, you can build some great brand advocacy inside that group as well. By the way, I would urge you to be authentic, choose causes that you or your company also care about. Don't just pick something at random.
2. Products and services
Second, if you can, try and seek out products and services that your audience uses or needs, but that doesn't actually directly conflict with your business. Then create a resource that lists or rates or ranks and recommends those top choices. We've actually done this a few times at Moz. I have this recommended list of agency and consultant providers, but Moz does not compete with any of those. But it's a helpful list. As a result of listing those folks and having this sort of process around it, many of those people are pumping up that content.
Now here's another example. Foodie Moz, Foodie Moz sounds like a great domain. I should go register that right after this hat stops hitting me in the back of the head. I don't know how Santa deals with that. So Foodie Moz presents the best cookbooks of 2017. Now, Foodie Moz might be in the food and recipe world. But it turns out, the wonderful part is cookbooks are something that is used by their audience but not directly conflicting with them.
Since it's not self-promotional, but it is useful to your audience, the likelihood that you can earn links and amplification because you seem like a non-self-interested party is much greater. You're providing value without asking anything in return. It's not like anyone buying these cookbooks would help you. It's not like you have some ulterior motive in ranking this one number one or that one number two. You're merely putting together an unbiased set of resources that help your audience. That is a great way to get a piece of content to do well.
3. Content creators
Third, last but not least here, if you can, find content creators who have been very successful. You can recruit them, the people who have had hit pieces, to create content for your brand. In a lot of ways, this is like cheating. It's almost like buying links, except instead of buying the links, you're buying the time and energy of the person who creates content that you have high likelihood or high propensity for being successful in that content niche with what they create because of their past track record and the audience they've already built.
Pro-tip here. Journalists and media contributors, even contributors to online media, like a BuzzFeed or something like that, are great targets. Why? Well, because they're usually poorly paid and they are desperate to build a portfolio of professional work. Some of these folks are insanely talented, and they already have networks of people who have liked their work in the past and have helped amplify them.
So if you can use a tool like BuzzSumo — that would be generally what I'd recommend, there's a few others, but BuzzSumo is really great for this — you can search for, for example, recipes and see the most shared content in the recipe world in, say, the last three months. Then we can identify, "Oh, here we go. This person wrote the hardest recipe challenge gifts. Oh, all right. That did really, really well. I wonder if we can see who that is. Oh look, she does freelance work. I bet she can write for us."
It's like cheating. It's a great hack. It's a great to way to recruit someone who you know is likely to have a great shot at their work doing well, give them the freedom to write what they want, to create what they want, and then host it on your site. A great way to do content creation, for a decent price, that has a high likelihood of solid amplification.
All right, everyone, look forward to some of your thoughts and tactics. For those of you who celebrate Christmas, a Merry Christmas from all of us at Moz. For those of you who celebrate Hanukkah, happy belated Hanukkah. I know that I'm filming this during Hanukkah, but it's probably after Hanukkah that you're seeing it. For those of you who are celebrating any other holiday this year, a very happy holiday season to you. We look forward to joining you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
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“My business makes local deliveries, but doesn’t have a storefront. How do I handle listings management?”
“I work from home. How should I be doing local SEO?”
“Are there any tips for doing local SEO for clients like NerdWallet or Credit Karma that serve all customers virtually?”
Queries like these about doing local SEO for businesses with nuanced, hidden, or no physical locations and with varied models of customer fulfillment are AMA FAQs and perennial topics on marketing fora. Attendees at the recent Moz Webinar on The ROI of Local SEO repeatedly asked about this subject.
Business owners and marketers who haven’t serendipitously discovered Google’s various guidelines are left wondering how to promote non-brick-and-mortar brands. Even where there’s awareness that such guidance exists, Google is continually evolving its stance. It’s easy to make mistakes, overlook updates, and miss out on opportunities.
The great news is, there are local marketing possibilities for almost every business type, but you have to know which pathway to follow, based on how the brand you’re marketing operates. In today’s column, I’ll help you identify your model along with the best opportunities available to you for being discovered by the maximum number of local customers.
Identify your business model
If you’re asking about how to do local SEO for something other than a brick-and-mortar brand, chances are, the business you’re marketing falls into one of four categories:
1. Service Area Business (SAB)
Most home services (plumbing, landscaping, housekeeping, etc.) fall into this category. You may or may not have physical street addresses that serve as headquarters or offices, but the defining feature of your business is that you serve nearby customers face-to-face at their locations, not at yours.
2. Home-based business
Your home address is your physical location, and you may either serve nearby customers at your house (like a daycare center), or go to nearby customers to serve them (like a dog walker), or you might do a combination of both (like a yoga teacher who teaches some classes at their home studio and some as private appointments at clients homes). The defining feature of your business is that you’re working out of your house.
*If you work from home but don’t ever meet face-to-face with customers for delivery or fulfillment of any kind, then you don’t fall under this category; you fall under category 3.
3. Virtual business
You conduct all transactions virtually, via phone, computer, shipping, and other remote means. Your business may be e-commerce (like the Dollar Shave Club), or offer digital services (like Credit Karma), or sell via print catalogue or other remote methodology. You may be operating out of one or more physical addresses and want to get the attention of customers in various regions or cities, but no customers ever come to your locations. The defining feature of your business is that you never interact in-person with customers.
4. Hybrid business
This category is a sort of catch-all that covers many variations.
One classic example is a restaurant with on-site dining where customers pay in person, curbside pickup where customers come to the location but may pay online, and delivery where customers pay online and drivers come to their homes.
Another variant would be a home services company like a security specialist with walk-in key grinding at a physical premise, at-home appointments for installation of new locks on doors, and e-commerce sales of security products.
Yet another hybrid would be a model like the Vermont Country Store, with its brick-and-mortar shops, e-commerce shopping, and huge volume of print catalog-driven sales.
Hybrid business models became more common in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors, and there is no single defining feature of them. They are only united when all of them are looking for ways to increase visibility to customers in a specific local region.
In most cases, if the business you’re marketing is a hybrid, then your best bet will be to find the relevant opportunities in models 1-3, pair them with any applicable brick-and-mortar opportunities if those also match your model, and move forward with a very broad, hybrid strategy that seeks geographic visibility by every means possible.
Never do these things, regardless of your model
Before we begin listing out your model-based local SEO opportunities, now is the time to protect the brand you’re marketing from unwanted outcomes by avoiding missteps. No matter whether you’re trying to earn local visibility for an SAB, a home-based business, a virtual brand, or a hybrid, scratch these from your playbook:
Don’t set up unstaffed virtual offices or P.O. boxes in an effort to fake locations for the sake of creating local business listings.
Don’t set up strings of locations via the houses of staff, friends, or family members in an effort to fake operating multiple locations.
Don’t set up listings for vacation homes, model homes, or empty properties. You can list the sales office of such businesses, but not the properties being rented or sold.
Never, as a marketer, silently engage in violations of Google’s Guidelines. If you and a client choose together to risk a penalty or suspension for some reason, you’re agreeing to share the risk of potential disaster, but never undertake a forbidden strategy without the client’s knowledge.
Be careful about over-promising results or agreeing to unrealistic goals when competing against brick-and-mortar businesses. Whether Google is genuinely biased towards locations that display their street address is a subject of long debate, myth, and speculation. What can be said with certainty is that it’s tough competing for local visibility with brick-and-mortar brands when you aren’t marketing a brick-and-mortar brand, so go into the work with informed expectations instead of unachievable aims, based on how Google appears to be handling results for your key search phrases.
Abundant opportunities exist for service area businesses without public physical locations. In fact, updates to Google’s Guidelines in 2020 created a more favorable scenario for SABs. We’ll break your activities down into three sections: local, organic, and paid.
Local marketing for SABs
Your path to success begins in understanding Google’s requirements (which exist here and here) specific to SABs. You should read them in full, but I’ll excerpt the most salient points here:
In-person contact required
The guidelines state that SABs must make in-person contact of some kind with customers to be eligible for a Google My Business listing. However, during the pandemic, do not worry that your transition to contact-less services disqualifies you from inclusion. The business you're marketing is still an SAB if it’s painting a house or delivering a meal while observing social distancing. Google likely needs to update its guidelines to make this clearer.
Hiding your address required
You’ll be providing an address to Google in the creation of an SAB listing. Even if it’s a home address, warehouse location, or other facility you don’t want the public to visit, you must have some sort of address. Then, Google’s guidelines state that you should tell them to hide the address when creating the SAB’s listing.
Google will automatically hide the address if you answer “no” to the question “Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?” when setting up a new listing.
There are many reasons businesses object to this requirement. As mentioned earlier, it’s long been debated whether hiding an address impacts a listing’s local rankings, but whether or not it does, listings with hidden address listings lack pins/markers on Google’s mapped displays, compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. It’s a definite disadvantage in terms of visual impact. The lack of a published address may also influence whether customers trust that a business is truly local to them, and this could adversely affect calls and leads.
Nevertheless, it’s Google’s position that this business model should hide its address, and clear its address from the GMB dashboard if it previously published one.
Setting a service area allowed
Older GMB listings had a feature that let you set a radius depicting the service area. On new listings, however, you must enter cities or postal codes to depict where your SAB serves. You can enter up to 20 such points. The boundaries of such areas shouldn’t exceed about two hours of driving distance from where the business is based.
No study has ever found that what you enter as your service area impacts your local rankings in any way. If you choose to depict them, it’s for the information of customers.
More than one listing allowed for some models
If the SAB you’re marketing has multiple, separately staffed locations about two hours apart from one another, and with non-overlapping service areas, you’re allowed more than one listing. I highly recommend having a unique phone number for each office, if possible.
Joy Hawkins has done a praiseworthy job summarizing the confusion that’s historically surrounded this topic, given that Google had previously stated that SABs could only have a single listing per state while not appearing to apply this rule to franchises. The latest addition of the two-hour context has made the guidelines better and clearer.
However, don’t create multiple listings for the different services the SAB offers. For example, an HVAC company may not have one listing for heater repair and another for air conditioner repair. Google sees this as just one brand, and it’s eligible for just one listing.
Other notes for SABs
A few last things to know:
Google defines the large, emergent field of ghost kitchens as SABs, so all of the above guidelines apply to this model.
It’s up to you whether you link from your SAB GMB listings to your website homepage or to local landing pages on your website. The former may provide a rankings boost due to homepages typically having the highest Page Authority. The latter may be better UX for your customers.
Don’t overlook the chance to create service menus in your GMB dashboard, listing out all the different offerings the business you're marketing provides.
Beyond Google, you’ll be glad to know that other local business listings platforms don’t make listing SABs so complicated in regards to hidden addresses. Unless a specific platform states otherwise, feel free to display your address on your other citations, if you like, and enjoy the opportunity to prove to searchers that you truly are local to them.
Moz Local can help you get listed on directories that allow you to hide your address, if you prefer to keep that private.
Organic marketing for SABs
No surprise here that every service area business should strive to publish the best possible website it can. Just like a brick-and-mortar brand, you want a mobile-friendly, secure website that provides a great user experience, has a strong internal link structure, persuasive consumer-centric content, and steadily growing Domain Authority based on inbound links earned over time. You want to get this site ranking as highly as you can for as many of your important search phrases as possible.
Where things become confusing for SABs in the organic marketing scenario typically relates to the concept of landing pages. This topic is constantly being discussed at SEO fora, and so we’ll break it down here.
It’s a best practice for brick-and-mortar models to create a unique location landing page for each of their physical stores. The goal of these pages is to serve a specific local audience with content that’s been specially designed for their needs related to a particular store location. These pages can rank well organically and can be used as the landing page URLs for a multi-location model’s GMB listings. SABs with multiple physical offices can also create these types of pages as proofs of local-ness, even if customers don’t come to the offices.
But the big question is: what if the SAB serves a large area beyond its own physical location? Should location landing pages be created for the locales an SAB serves?
The answer is, yes, you should consider creating SAB service area landing pages if you have something unique to showcase in each service city, and if you limit coverage to a reasonable geographic area.
For example, a house painter in the San Francisco Bay Area could create some really beautiful, highly-converting landing pages featuring houses they’ve painted in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, and Mill Valley, even if they don’t have offices in each place. Each page could focus on different completed projects, historic information about design styles in each city, happy customers in each city, home maintenance tips based on the different microclimates of each city, etc. These pages could rank well and convert customers if developed with thought and care.
The two things I would recommend that SAB marketers avoid would be:
Creating duplicate or near-duplicate service area landing pages because there aren’t actually unique features about the services or customers in association with the different cities.
Creating vast numbers of these pages in an attempt to get a single location SAB to rank over a huge area, like a dozen counties or even a state.
Take an approach that makes sense for the customer, and focus on content that will answer their questions and meet their needs. Build a strong internal link structure to these pages, try to earn a few good inbound links to them, and track how they are ranking in the localized-organic results for desired keyword phrases.
Paid local marketing for SABs
Anyone who markets SABs knows that one of their key, historic pain points has been being unable to rank throughout their service area because of Google’s bias surrounding user-to-business proximity. Despite having a separate set of rules for SABs, Google continues to treat these models too much like brick-and-mortar storefronts, typically focusing their ranking opportunities around their given (but hidden) locations.
When your local and organic efforts are failing to earn the visibility you need throughout your focus service area, Google’s Local Services Ads program lets you pay to fill in the gaps. If the business you're marketing is in a qualifying industry and geographic region, you can run these ads for the job types you want to do in the service area you want to cover, and pay Google for the leads they send. SABs can also simultaneously run Google Ads for additional paid coverage.
The downside to LSAs and Google Ads is that they require an investment (as opposed to the “free” visibility of local pack and organic results) and they increase local brand dependence on Google for revenue. Be sure you’re working hard to turn each Google lead into a repeat customer outside of Google’s lead gen loop. The upside to paid Google advertising is that it lets you pay for visibility you just can’t earn any other way. If it creates positive ROI for the brand you’re marketing, then it’s a worthwhile investment.
How to do local SEO for home-based businesses
Service area businesses may feel at a disadvantage because Google requires most of them to hide their addresses. For home-based businesses, the scenario is often the opposite: many owners of these models want to be sure their address is kept private and that and they don’t have confused customers showing up at their door expecting public premises.
But not all-home based businesses are the same in their requirements and opportunities. When marketing a home-based brand, ask the owner to select which of these scenarios fits their model:
1. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be public
This could be a daycare center, pet groomer, horse boarder, private instructor, or similar model. In this case, the business should invest in street-level signage and take every advantage of marketing themselves as a brick-and-mortar business. There’s nothing holding this business model back.
If the business is by appointment only, Google prefers that you set no hours of operation on your listing. Based on your chosen GMB categories, however, you may be eligible for Google’s booking features. And, you can choose to mention in the business description field that access is by appointment only.
2. I serve customers in-person at my home and want my address to be private
Google doesn’t have clear enough provisions for this specific model, but basically you will be handling it as you would an SAB that needs to hide its address. Google wants you to clear the address from the Info section of the Google My Business dashboard. You can choose to add a service area.
If privacy is a special concern for a particular business, it’s important to know that if Google has any record of your home address, bugs or policy changes could lead to it being visible at some point.
Beyond Google, you can choose to list the business only in those directories that support hidden addresses. You likely will not be creating location landing pages for this model, but may want to focus your website’s content on hyperlocal city and neighborhood terms to seek as much nearby organic visibility as you can without an address.
3. I work from home and serve customers at their locations
This could be a plumber, accountant, housekeeper, or similar model where the home base of the business is the owner’s house, but they travel throughout a service radius for work. This model is just like a typical SAB, in that Google wants the address hidden and a service area designated for the listing.
It’s important to emphasize here that home-based SABs are not allowed on the Google Maps product and that Google’s workaround for this is that they can be included in Google My Business by virtue of hiding their addresses. Failure to hide the address could risk suspension and removal of the listing.
Beyond Google, feel free to either show your address if you’d like to on your listings, or only list on directories that support hidden addresses if privacy is important to you. And, just like other SABs, review the above section about whether your operations lend themselves to developing high quality, interesting landing pages to represent various cities in your service area.
4. I work from home and don’t serve any customers face-to-face
These waters became somewhat muddy in 2020 due to the public health emergency causing so many people to work from home, and so many models to replace in-person service with tele-appointments and other forms of remote communication.
In the past, virtual business models have been strictly excluded from having Google My Business listings. But so much has changed in the world due to the pandemic, and so I went directly to a Google rep to see how they may have adjusted their stance on this.
I asked how a professional like a therapist who used to have an office and see clients in person, but who is now working from home and seeing clients via telemedicine appointments, should be listing themselves. Since their model is now virtual, have they become ineligible for a GMB listing, or can they still be listed as a home-based business would have been pre-COVID-19?
Here’s the answer I received:
So, according to this representative, if the business formerly served customers in person and intends to resume face-to-face appointments when it hopefully becomes safe to do so in the future, then eligibility isn’t harmed. List the business as you would any home-based business, following the guidance shared above in this section. It would be a good thing if Google would update their guidelines to share this timely information.
However, if the business is fully virtual and has never served customers in-person, move on to the next section.
E-commerce-only companies, purveyors of strictly digital goods and services, and large, national or international manufacturers and providers without storefronts all fall under the heading of “virtual business”. Questions most commonly arise in this sector from virtual brands that are frustrated by limits of competing fully with local, physical brands for online visibility.
To avoid wasting time and resources on dead-end strategies, it’s best to clearly outline what virtual brands can and can’t do to compete. And, we should also highlight grey areas.
Can’t do
Without offering in-person service, the virtual brand you're marketing is ineligible for a Google My Business listing. Without having a physical address, it’s also ineligible. You may be able to list the business on some other directories, but in Google’s world, you cannot compete for local pack/local finder/maps rankings. Just cross it off the books.
Can do
You can compete for organic rankings with the content you publish and the links you earn to boost the Page Authority of that content.
There are some cases in which a mainly-virtual business might qualify for a GMB listing, if they have a staffed headquarters that needs to be found, not by customers, but by associates like B2B partners. However, for virtual brands with national or international consumers, such a listing will not in any way help with competing for country-wide local pack rankings.
Localized organic visibility for virtual businesses
In recent times, Google reps have stated that 46% of searches have a local intent, and that it’s the location of the user that has a much greater impact on the search engine results they're shown than other forms of personalization. For fully virtual businesses, none of this is good news, and Google heavy localization of their organic SERPs leaves e-commerce and other digital-only brands struggling to compete.
In a recent Moz webinar, an attendee asked how companies like CarInsurance.com can rank for searches formulated like “car insurance near me” when Google is most likely to give precedence to truly local businesses + major brands. The reality is, virtual businesses have to build all of the organic authority they can and find a way to localize some specific content as much as possible for the cities that matter the most to the brand.
A common approach that I can’t recommend is the development of thin, duplicate city-level landing pages for every city across the country. You see footers all over the Internet laden with links to dozens of city-level pages of very little value.
Rather, brands competing for extremely tough terms have to continuously invest in building authority to rival a Farmers Insurance or a Geico if they want to be seen as relevant by Google for prime organic visibility for head terms. And, where possible, create landing pages for top cities with truly top-notch localized information on them, sometimes adjusting optimization to target fruitful longer-tail terms.
This is no easy task, and it’s why so many virtual brands simply end up paying for placement instead of struggling for organic rankings. But take heart. The company our webinar attendee asked about, CarInsurance.com, is doing extremely well with this landing page for the longer tail search of “best cheap car insurance in San Francisco” when I search from my locale in the SF Bay The Moz Pro On-Page Grader shows what a strong effort has been made, and that there’s even a bit of room to do better with a few tweaks:
So find your geographic market competitors and audit them to discover where competition may be possible with the right mix of authority + winnable search phrases. Designed especially to help you understand which search terms to target for organic rankings in different geographic markets around the country is the Moz Pro beta of Local Market Analytics:
Local Market Analytics breaks new ground in offering you a multi-sampled view of your competitors in your chosen regions for the search phrases you most need to support with your best content. Be part of the beta of this exciting product in your quest to help a virtual brand compete with physical local businesses.
Summing up
There’s a fairly straightforward local marketing path for each non-brick-and-mortar model, but I predict that 2021 is going to be a year in which we’ll see further blurring of traditional, well-trodden lanes.
Clearly, more brick-and-mortar brands will adopt digital sales in the coming months to meet the demand for contactless fulfillment, becoming hybrids. Physical retailers will implement sophisticated e-commerce solutions on their own websites and tiptoe into Google Shopping with it’s “available nearby” filter.
Meanwhile, digital-only brands will continue to experiment with the Warby Parker approach of transitioning from full DTC sales to having physical stores, making them eligible for local pack rankings. I’d say 2021 looks less promising for such tests than the environment of previous years because of the obvious need to limit in-person shopping due to the pandemic.
And, also because of COVID-19, entrepreneurs who spent 2020 researching opportunities to support themselves by working from home may begin to enjoy their first hard-won successes in the new year. They will run the gamut of brick-and-mortar, SAB, virtual, and hybrid models, all from their living rooms.
The onus will be on Google to remain relevant by absorbing all this change and continually reevaluating whether their guidelines reflect current commercial reality or need new updates. Be on sharp lookout for new opportunities that may arise from guideline revisions and new Google features over the next few months.
For brands and their marketers, the task at hand is to identify the easy, medium, and hard local and organic wins based on the business model, and then supplement with paid inclusion where wins can’t be had in any other way.
Having trouble finding your wins? Contact Moz to learn how our SEO software can help. We’re wishing you good fortune in the year ahead!
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Over the past five years, our team at Perficient has conducted continuous studies to evaluate the lasting impact of links on rankings. These studies consistently show that links matter as a ranking factor, but they also show that Google is dialing up their emphasis on the quality/authority of those links. We can say this because of the strong correlation our most recent studies show between the Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) of linking pages and the rankings of pages receiving the links.
Each year, Moz has graciously provided us with access to their Link Explorer index, where we obtain the raw data to perform our analysis. In these studies, we perform Spearman Correlation analyses to show how the following variables correlate with ranking:
Number of links to the ranking page
DA of links to the ranking page
PA of links to the ranking page
Please note that Moz has never compensated us for including, or asked us to include, the DA and PA calculations — we have chosen to do that of our own volition. In fact, Moz staff only learned that we had done so in early October of 2020, even though we published the post with our findings on April 16, 2020 (to be honest, I was too busy to catch up with the Moz team and let them know). In short, there is no quid pro quo here.
Study methodology
Go ahead and jump down to the study results section if you just want to see how things turned out!
We have been conducting this study on a nearly annual basis since May of 2016. In 2016, we started with an initial query set of 6K queries, but have expanded to 32K queries over time. The queries were obtained by pulling keyword ranking reports for web sites in three different target market sectors, and then manually reviewed to remove any queries that were poorly formed or not relevant to that sector. The market sectors we looked at were technology, healthcare, and finance.
Here is the breakout of the size of the query sets across the five studies we have done so far:
May 2016: 6K queries
Aug 2016: 16K queries
May 2017: 16K queries
August 2018: 27K queries
December 2019: 32K queries
Each of the expanded query sets includes all of the queries from the prior studies, which allows us to track the results on a consistent basis all the way back to 2016.
In putting together this study, I also consulted with two experts in statistics: Paul Berger of Bentley University, and Per Enge, formerly of Stanford University. Because of the nature and structure of the data set, it was decided that the best approach was to calculate the quadratic mean of the Spearman Correlation for all the queries in the study.
I went with this approach because it uses the square of the correlation variables (where the correlation value is R, the quadratic mean uses R squared). This is important because the correlation variable R is useful to know, perhaps, but it does not allow you to make a specific statement about what it means in real world terms.
The R squared value, however, is more interesting. If you have an R squared value of 0.56, for example, we can say that 56% of the variability of the observed behavior Y (in our case, rankings) is caused by the test variable X (in our study, count of links, or DA/PA).
Here’s a visual on how this calculation process works:
Summary of the results
As part of the study, we pulled data on the growth of the Link Explorer index over time. Since we have data on the index size over three years for our 16K query set, we looked at this snapshot of the data to show how the Link Explorer index has expanded:
One of the core purposes of the study was finding the correlation between the number of links a page has and its ranking. Of course, the relevance and quality of the content are the most important factors in ranking — they have to be. That noted, here is the quadratic mean calculation result for how the quantity of links a page has correlates to its ranking:
This score is a bit down from past years (the August 2018 score was 0.293, but still indicates that the number of links to a page correlates in a meaningful way with the ranking of that page).
However, we also took a close look at the correlation of Moz DA and PA with the ranking of a page. Here are the results that we saw for that evaluation:
This shows that Moz DA and PA are both better predictors of ranking position than the total link count. The scores of 0.328 and 0.307 are both very strong correlation scores in an environment as complex as organic search.
This is an important finding, as it lines up with what many of us in the SEO community have believed for a long time: that the sites you get links from matters more than the sheer number of links. In addition, it's likely that most of the pages ranking in our query set that had a large number of links likely had a significant number of higher authority links as well.
This data confirms that obtaining links from more authoritative sites has more value than obtaining a large quantity of links. Google's perspective of what makes better links is likely more nuanced than a simple metric like PageRank (the Google metric that DA and PA are most similar to). This may include evaluation of relevance to the topic, and the overall quality perception of the linking site.
As SEO professionals, increasing our own site quality and authority remains one of our core responsibilities in helping our sites, or our client's sites, grow.
Important Note: Google does not have access to Moz's DA and PA metric data and Google does not use Moz DA or Moz PA as a ranking factor.
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It would be downplaying it to say that 2020 has been a whirlwind of a year.
Many digital marketing companies packed up their office spaces in February, and employees — from the C-Suite to entry-level — had to adopt a new working style many were not accustomed to.
While few digital workers were previously able to work from home, the industry — and the world as a whole— had to adjust to full-time remote working during the coronavirus pandemic. Luckily, as SEOs and digital marketers, we have great experience in pivoting and adjusting our working styles and strategies, regardless of what challenges are thrown our way. It comes with the job.
Throughout this blog post, I’ll discuss the various tactics I’ve seen work incredibly well for our clients and in the wider industry as a whole, in addition to advice for increasing productivity and overall happiness with the change of scenery to full-time working from home. I hope that this post provides ideas and potential projects SEOs can work on in-house or with clients, and that my tips for working from home also help you take a step back, unwind, and increase your productivity and work/life balance.
SEO tactics that worked extremely well this year
“Low hanging fruit” initiatives
With the influx of users sitting at home and spending more time online this year, a strategy we employed across our clients was to tackle pages that ranked in positions 5-9, or 11-14, and optimize existing content to increase visibility in the SERP.
These optimizations consisted of simple, yet effective changes that match and cater to the user’s search intent. As it's been proven that people scan as few as the first two words of a title tag, the importance of having an effective title tag that concisely describes the content on the page cannot be overlooked. Title tag tweaks, H1, and meta description updates are some of the ways that our clients’ rankings have improved on the first page, and also won Answers Box and People Also Ask results.
Above is an example of a keyword ranking increase for one of our clients in the data intelligence industry. Through metadata optimizations and targeting People Also Ask questions, we’ve seen rank increase from 13 to 6 within this year.
Targeting “People Also Ask” questions
We’ve found that with increased searches in 2020, users are asking more questions overall and are looking for in-depth and valuable answers. Google’s People Also Ask SERP feature is the most effective way for companies to answer regularly asked questions, and drive more traffic to their site.
PAA questions have been an effective strategy in 2020 to increase traffic and increase brand awareness to our clients’ sites. The main way we targeted landing in the People Also Ask section for clients was to tailor new and existing content around answering these user’s questions. Tools such as AlsoAsked.com were vital in identifying these questions, and creative writers were extremely beneficial in attacking this SERP feature.
New content creation plans + updating existing content
Similar to the success I’ve seen with a PAA-focused strategy in 2020, another initiative we’ve taken with clients that has had success this year is a holistic new content creation plan. These plans focus on a dedicated and consistent approach to creating content, based on content gaps our clients were missing out on and had an opportunity to attack.
This holistic approach covered the following:
Priority topics that should be written as soon as possible. These new page recommendations entail targeting valuable keywords that have the highest potential ranking opportunity, in addition to topics that competitors are covering.
Content topic groups that display the full list of related keywords for our clients and their competitors in the space. Every keyword is categorized by an overarching topic and bucketed into a broader topic. These keywords within each content topic group are targeted overall with newly created content.
Recommend posting frequency and competitive insights where we highlight how often a client should be publishing various types of content relative to their industry. The posting frequency is formulated by identifying a client’s top industry and search competitors, analyzing their posting frequency, and creating recommendations appropriately.
Content types where we think out of the traditional blog content box and recommend different formats, such as videos, infographics, and interviews (pending each client’s needs).
Keywords to avoid – while in SEO we understand that building out a primary keyword’s hub and spokes by targeting relevant secondary keywords is beneficial, we want to ensure that a client isn’t overusing mapped keywords on various blog or website pages. To prevent keyword cannibalization on these pages, we set guidelines that focus on which keywords to avoid in the beginning of title and H1 tags.
Placement guide – many different clients in various industries have multiple places where they can post content (blogs, resource libraries, press rooms, and so on). Through this guide, we assist clients in understanding where specific content should be posted on their site.
While the above tactics proved to be beneficial for our clients, the traffic gains and increased value we provided would not be possible if our working situations were subpar. So, next I’m going to dive into some work from home tips that have helped increase my productivity and helped me grow as a remote worker.
Full-time work from home: an SEO’s perspective and learnings
While many digital marketers were used to virtual meetings while working in the office, some were left feeling excited — and others overwhelmed — by the idea of unexpectedly working from home full-time for months on end.
Workers around the globe were unable to leave the house during lockdowns, and had all the time in the world to focus on a new working style. This led to growth and experimentation for myself and many others in the space, so I’d like to share the strategies I found valuable.
1. Setting boundaries for work/life balance
Wake up at 8:00 a.m. Shower. Eat breakfast. Read the news. Log in and get your day started. Work for eight hours. Clock out. Send emails after hours. Think about projects for the next day...
And so on. It’s easy to fall into the routine — or trap — of feeling “always clocked in” when you work from home full-time. As we aren’t leaving a physical location (and our work laptop) at the office, some of us feel the need to constantly check communications, emails, and other work that can really wait until the next day.
One strategy I found beneficial was to have a section in my home dedicated to work and nothing else. Personally, this is my homemade desk – I use my dual monitors for projects, meetings, and firing off emails throughout the day. After hours, I’ll leave my work items on my desk, and refrain from using them or checking emails and internal messages until the next day, setting a defined boundary between my personal time and my work time.
2. Productivity breaks
The aspect of work I struggle with the most is batching out my work strategically. If I’m conducting a technical audit for a client, I start a project and power through as much of it in one sitting as possible. Having a strong focus is always beneficial during your work hours — you can think more effectively, make strong decisions, and piece together problems to formulate a solution that helps your client or your company.
While you’re providing strategic insights for an incredible content recommendation, or have uncovered technical problems on your client’s site, your shoulders are aching from being hunched over, your eyes are strained from looking at a screen for over three hours, and you’ve forgotten to eat lunch.
I find it extremely beneficial to schedule breaks for myself throughout the day. Go for a walk. Read a book. Stare at a wall. Take 15 minutes of your day to stand up, stretch, move away from a screen and unwind. Your body and brain will thank you for the rest, and you’ll be able to regain focus on a project, and maybe even come up with an out-of-the-box solution you haven’t thought of before.
Summary
Overall, this year has forced us to get out of our comfort zones and try new things — both at home and within our work. And as SEOs, we’re constantly growing and evolving, trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t along the way.
With the way we’ve adapted in 2020 to produce meaningful insights in the SEO realm, I’m confident that our industry and the professionals within it will remain ready to take on whatever the future brings. What strategies and tactics have worked for you this year? Let me know in the comments.
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