In this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday, Jo Cameron — Moz’s Learning Team Manager — dives into the process of addressing and capitalizing on traffic spikes, including how to determine where traffic is coming from and what to do with the increased attention. Enjoy!
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Video Transcription
Hi. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. I'm going to be talking through the journey that you embark upon when you notice a sudden change in traffic to a particular page on your site. In our case, this was a sudden and consistent increase, which may on the face of it look great.
You may perceive that this is exactly what you and your clients have been striving for. But as we know, traffic funneling into your site isn't the end of the story. You're also going to want that traffic to convert. But also, when something like this happens, there can be other lessons that you can learn and potentially apply to other pages and areas of your site.
I'm Jo. I'm the Learning Team Manager here at Moz. We create all the course material that you'll see on the Moz Academy. This is where you can advance your SEO education and earn your SEO Essentials Certification. We also write the documentation for how to use the Moz tools, and this is where our story begins.
What's driving the spike?
Over the summer, we noticed a fairly drastic increase in visitors to a particular MozBar help page. We wanted to go beyond trying to understand why we're getting that traffic and turn this into an opportunity to support our company goals.
So when you see something like this happen, your first question might reasonably be: Why? Why are we getting this traffic? What has changed? What has caused this? And also, what do we already know from the metrics we're collecting?
What do we know?
On the Moz Learning Team, we track top-level metrics monthly, including unique visitors. We also collect visitor sentiment through the "Feedback" button on the page. And we also collect reporting every month in our Moz Pro campaign, using Keyword Explorer and Link Explorer as handy research tools in our toolkit.
So first of all, we had a dig into the monthly metrics on a more granular level. We looked at the cadence of the traffic in Google Analytics to see if this was a sudden spike or a consistent trend over time.
Now before you can be totally confident in the quality of your Google Analytics data, you may want to clear up and filter that data. You can learn all about this in the SEO Essentials Certification. With this course, we take you through our SEO methodology, which helps you to approach SEO strategically. This is made up of five sections: research, audit, optimize, amplify, and iterate. Reporting sits in the fifth section of the methodology, which is iterate. Within that, we break it down into awareness metrics, on-site activity, and the all important conversions. The lessons in the SEO Essentials Certification take you through this in much more detail, and you can download the SEO report card when you purchase this course.
So back to what we saw in Google Analytics, we noticed an upward trend that also reflected the pattern followed by our previous traffic trends. We saw these scallop shapes, which nicely line up with the weekdays and the weekends. You may be used to seeing a different shape depending on your industry.
We also looked at referral data in Google Analytics and compared this to what we saw before the spike. We also looked at how traffic was entering and exiting that page through Google Analytics, and we had a dig around in Google Trends to see if we could identify any related topics taking off. I'm tracking the help section of the moz.com domain in my Moz Pro campaign, and I have this connected to Google Analytics. This pulls in the overall visits and landing pages. This is the data that you'll see in the acquisition section of Google Analytics.
So while my team is focused primarily on one area of moz.com, this gives me an idea of where this page sits as a percentage of search traffic in relation to other landing pages.
Now this is where it all starts to come together. Under the rankings tab in my Moz Pro campaign, I can now see the landing page data cross-referenced with my tracked keywords and their rankings. So I can also see search volume and estimated visits for each tracked keyword. We also entered the MozBar URL into Keyword Explorer to review the ranking keywords for that URL, and then added these keywords to my existing campaign to track them over time.
We know that SEO and SEO reporting is iterative. So by building out your tracked keywords in this way, this will help you to fill in the blanks as to which keywords are sending traffic to your site.
We also saw some interesting data from the "Visitor Satisfaction" button. This is the thumbs up or thumbs down option that you can select on this page and generally indicates if the content was helpful or not.
We saw that there were a lot more people responding that this content was indeed helpful. So this is not only positive for my team and I, but it's also informative. It gave us a really good idea that the content on this page was generally matching the intent of the visitors. So we looked at all of this together, and we drew some conclusions.
It didn't seem like this visitor traffic was coming from one particular source or campaign that we could reasonably attribute this to. It looked like it was reflecting our previous traffic trends, just a lot more of it. So it's probably quite important now to explain a bit more about the page that we are investigating.
The page is about MozBar. It's an overview of how to use our free Chrome extension. Now it would also be remiss of me not to mention the fact that we have had a massive shift this year in terms of changes to our lives and businesses due to COVID-19, which has had a massive impact on how people spend their time, how businesses are run, and many, many other areas of our lives.
So after we looked at data for that page, in addition to all the other reporting metrics, we took a step back and we thought, "Well, what is this page about, and how has this shift impacted demand for these types of tools?" Because of these two things, nothing else really standing out as a flag to indicate a single event and this global change, we started to lean towards this being part of an increase in demand for free tools.
MozBar is a free extension that sits at the top of your Chrome browser, and it displays link metrics for your pages that you visit on the web. It's also got some other handy features, like the ability to highlight different types of links, so it can show you internal or external links on a page, and to check your on-page elements, and so on. So with all of this information we collected, we're now circling around understanding what caused this.
What do we do with the traffic?
The trick for us wasn't just to figure out why this was happening or why it happened, but to turn this into some kind of positive action. So what we decided to do was to test driving traffic directly from these pages or this particular page to our key Moz initiatives. So this would be our personalized, one-to-one walkthroughs of the Moz Pro tool and the Moz Pro free trial.
This was a quick edit for my team. We could add those in there fairly quickly to test this out. We already know that this page is doing a standup job of helping people to understand how to use MozBar, so let's see if they are interested in our other SEO tools. We added length to this page to help people identify what to do next once they've given MozBar a go.
And what we found out was that we are indeed seeing people taking us up on this offer, and they are clicking through to have a chat with our excellent Onboarding Team and also to check out the Moz Pro 30-day free trial. So with this relatively small amount of effort from my team we've now started to collect data on visitor behavior that can better inform future decisions and future projects.
Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope that this helps.
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If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that you can’t predict the future of tourism. Unlike nearly any other industry, tourism is simultaneously dictated by a number of factors including consumer proclivity, weather and climate, global economics, and government.
Travel was undoubtedly one of the hardest hit sectors in the 2020 shutdowns, which affected every business domain from the largest destination marketing organizations (DMOs) to local small businesses that thrive on the foot traffic tourism normally brings. US Travel’s year-end assessment determined there was a 48% drop in travel-related spending for December 2020 compared to 2019, and a year-long loss of $500 billion. Success in tourism in 2020 meant simply surviving for many businesses, accompanied by total content strategy revamps, product pivots, local SEO investments, and local marketing activations.
What worked in 2020
Locals-only tourism
With out-of-state quarantines in effect for most of the US, and especially prevalent in the northeast, once global destinations and metros became intensely local. Succeeding locally meant celebrating local culture and playing to the hometown advantage, and creating and activating hyper-local content and SEO to sell reimagined experiences and drive renewed interest at home.
Visit Philadelphia, the DMO for the greater Philadelphia region, revamped its 2020 marketing efforts to rollout “Our Turn To Tourist” through winter 2021, a “regional marketing initiative [that] encourages people to take staycations and close-to-home drive trips.”
Visit Philadelphia’s main objective is to attract tourists from all over the country to the city of Philadelphia. With millions of out-of-state visitors each year, and huge growth each year proceeding 2020, Visit Philadelphia had the early foresight to create content geared towards both locals and visitors, and adopted a local-first SEO strategy for things to do, see, and eat nearby.
The organization went so far as to create local-centric mini itineraries based off of current restrictions, optimizing for local tourism and attraction-related keywords, and widely distributing new COVID-19 content. This campaign supported not only the hotels and attractions in the city, but also the local restaurants and small businesses.
While not totally divergent in its approach, the long-term investment that Visit Philadelphia has made into winning at local search, snagging SERP features, and embracing new features like Discover, helps ensure it will continue to be a successful advocate for Philadelphia as “the greatest city in the USA to spend the weekend”.
Reinvented experiences
Tourism and experience-based companies hadn’t extensively ventured into the virtual space prior to 2020 — after all, why plan to watch the action from home when you could board a plane and take part live and in-person?
Philadelphia-based Beyond the Bell Tours, the only LGBTQ+-owned-and-run tour operator in the city, faced a critical decision in May 2020: Their hallmark Pride-themed “Drag Me Along” drag queen trolly bar crawl was unable to launch with bars closed indefinitely and social gatherings restricted. As searches continued to increase for virtual events, virtual gatherings, and virtual things to do, businesses that rose to meet the demand found success. For Beyond the Bell, that meant turning the “Drag Me Along” concept into “Pride In A Box”: a series of five different themed Pride boxes that included products and experiential components for use at home.
Though their website was originally built on a tour-booking engine, to execute a pivoted product strategy, they restructured it to allow an e-commerce integrated function, and optimized to sell products and experiences for Pride.
Founder Rebecca Fisher said, “We thought about how a box could embody a community. We highlighted queer people, businesses, and queer products, and held weekly events for Pride, all proceeds of which were donated to racial justice. A single ‘box’ purchased during Pride supported many queer businesses, and we wanted people to feel that impact.”
Ultimately, businesses that adapted quickly to changes in consumer search behavior, and that conducted and implemented keyword research for new content targeting previously unranked/low-volume terms, were better positioned to maintain consumer support and visibility even though actual travelers continued to drop.
Up-to-date info on expanding and changing regulations
Domestic travel is rarely regulated in the US, so when cities across the country responded to shut down orders, hot spots beloved by locals and tourists alike emptied out and revenue began to drastically fall.
As an SEO community (especially local!) we’re always advocates of the value of keeping local listings in Google My Business up-to-date, and it never mattered more than in 2020. Coming out on top were those who updated hours, COVID-19 policies and procedures, and published delivery or third-party partnerships. Unsurprisingly, AirBnB’s and VRBO’s new Covid content “enhanced cleaning protocol” and “guidelines for owners” come out top in searches for short term rental cleaning best practices, and cleanliness related to travel accomodations. Updated local listings allowed exasperated consumers to easily see what businesses were open, and allowed search-savvy businesses to leverage their GMB to position themselves as safety-conscious, accessible, and prioritize addressing consumer concerns (not to mention the features released to help businesses access these tools).
What to expect from tourism in 2021
It’s hard to remember a time of greater collective cabin fever. Though with border closings, pre-travel testing, and business closures remaining a moving target, we can still expect that a majority of travel will happen closer to home in early 2021. Here’s where we can expect to see growth first.
Short term stays: road trips, workspace respites, and snow birds
What's ahead for short-term travels? Continued RV sales, for one, which were up 4.5% annually in 2020. These growth indicators, as well as public perceptions of travel safety, continue to slate hometown and close-by exploration as the early 2021 winners.
Outdoor and spaced-out activities show continued interest in search volume and sales. Yellowstone National Park alone saw a 21% increase in year-over-year visitation in September 2020. Don’t expect this to slow down any time soon.
Another trend we expect to see continue in early 2021? Snow birding. Once reserved for the retired, heading south for the winter is especially popular this year for northerners leaving lockdowns at home. Expect extended stays, fuller flights, and busier beaches than normal.
One final place you can expect to see travelers? In a nearby hotel. Formerly reserved for the luxurious staycations, local hotels have become workplace respites for those fully remote workers who lack adequate home office space. Though not “technically” travel, many hotels (Hyatt, Marriott, and Hilton, for starters) are offering single-day, day-time only, “work from hotel” deals to help relieve lost revenue and fried nerves of managing co-occurring zoom calls at the kitchen table.
Extended visits: remote relocations
With many children and families, not to mention formerly remote employees, feeling the squeeze of their walls at home, many hotels and villa properties are offering cost-effective extended stays (three weeks or more). Mid-term relocations are becoming incredibly common, with particular flight happening from metro centers in New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. Individual countries are actively trying to scoop up consumer demand for change of scenery and pace, with countries like Dubai, Jamaica, and the Cayman Islands offering temporary extended work visas to US citizens as a way to revive local tourism.
Short term rental properties such as beach house bookings, waterfront properties, mountain cabins, and southern getaways — or you know, just a yard if you’re a city-dweller — are booking in greater numbers in 2020 than nearly any time in 2019. AirDNA notes, “Among those leading the rebound are beaches, mountain towns, lakeside getaways, and really anything within driving distance of a major urban hub.”
Longer-term remote stays, whether for yourself or your family, are increasingly popular, as are remote work options which, according to Google trend data, have increased by two-times the previous levels pre-pandemic. Searches for extended stay vacations peaked at the end of December 2020, with previous highs in October and April 2020. Moving into 2021, we’ll likely see expanded tourism offerings to match this consumer demand, and also to accommodate pre-quarantine requirements, which vary city to city.
In conclusion
Travel isn’t what it used to be, and for the time being, we’re seeing increasingly important local search activations and feature adoption. And as remote work and location agnostic work becomes more the norm, the lessons we learned from pandemic travel search will help businesses thrive in this new tourism climate moving forward.
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Last November, Moz VP Product, Rob Ousbey, gave a presentation at Web Con 2020 on the evolution of SEO, and we're sharing it with you today! Rob draws on his years of research experience in the industry to discuss how SEO has changed, and what that means for your strategies.
Editor's Note: Rob mentions a promo in the video that has since expired, but you can still get a free month of Moz Pro + free walkthrough here!
Video Transcription
Hello, everyone. Thank you for that introduction. I very much appreciate it, and it's wonderful to be with all of you here today. I'm Rob Ousbey from Moz.
Real quick, I was going to share my screen here and say that my gift to you for coming to the session today is this link. This won't just get you a free month of Moz Pro, but everybody who signs up can get a free walkthrough with an SEO expert to help you get started. I'll put this link up again at the end of the session. But if you're interested in SEO or using a tool suite to help you, then Moz might be the toolset that can help.
Also, if you want to learn more about SEO, come join me on Twitter. I am @RobOusbey, and it would be wonderful to chat to you over there.
One reason I put my bio up here is because I've not been at Moz for all that long. I just started about a year ago. Before that, I was at Distilled, which is an international digital marketing agency, and I ran the Seattle office there for over a decade. I mention that because I want to share with you today examples of what I discovered when I was doing my client work. I want to share the research that my team members did when we were in your shoes.
A troubling story
So I wanted to kick off with an experience that stuck in my mind. Like I say, I've been doing this professionally for about 12 or 13 years, and back when I started, SEO was certainly more straightforward, if not getting easier.
People like my friend Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, used to do correlation studies that would discover what factors seem to correlate with rankings, and we'd publish these kinds of reports. This was the top ranking factors for 2005. And back then, they were broadly split between factors that assessed whether a page was relevant for a particular term and those that asked whether a site was authoritative. A lot of that relevance came from the use of keywords on a page, and the authority was judged by the number of links to the site. So we would help companies by doing good SEO. We'd put keywords on a page and build a bunch of links.
And I want to tell you a story about one of our clients. This is from just a couple of years ago, but it definitely stuck in my head. We were doing a lot of content creation for this client. We created some really informative pages and some really fun pages that would go viral and take over the Internet, and all of this earned them a lot of links. And this was the result of our efforts — a consistent, steady growth in the number of domains linking to that site. We had an incredible impact for them.
And here's the graph of how many keywords they had when they ranked on the first page. This is fantastic. They ranked for a lot of keywords. And finally, here's the graph of organic traffic to the site. Amazing.
But if you looked a little closer, you notice something that is a bit troubling. We never stopped acquiring links. In fact, a lot of the content we produced is so evergreen that even content built two or three years ago is still gathering new links every single week. But the number of keywords we have ranking in the top 10 went up and up and then stopped growing. And not surprisingly, the same trend is there in organic search traffic as well. What appears to have happened here is that we got strong enough to get on the front page with these keywords, to be a player in the industry, but after that, just building more links to the site didn't help it rank for more keywords and it didn't help it get any more search traffic.
SEO fundamentals
It seems like all the SEO fundamentals that we've learned about, keywords and links and technical SEO still apply and they're still necessary to help you become a player in a particular industry. But after that, there are other factors that you need to focus on.
Now this evolution of SEO into new factors has been an accelerating process. My colleague at Moz, Dr. Pete Meyers has been tracking and collecting a lot of data about this. Last year, Google made close to 4,000 improvements to their results, and that's the result of running something like 45,000 different experiments.
Pete has also been tracking how much the search results change every day. Blue is really stable results. Orange is a lot of changes. And so if you felt like your rankings for your site are getting more volatile than ever, you're not wrong. When we hit 2017, we saw more changes to the results every day than we ever had before.
Now the way that Google's algorithms used to be updated was by a bunch of people in a room making decisions. In fact, it was this bunch of people in this room. They decided what factors to dial up or down to create the best results.
Google's goal: portal to the Internet
But what does this mean? What does it mean to make the best results? Well, we should think about what Google's real goal is. They want to be your portal to the Internet. They want your web experience to begin with a Google search, and you'll continue to do that if they make you satisfied with the results you see and the pages you click on. If they send you to the perfect web page for your query, that's a satisfying experience that reflects well on Google. If they send you to page that's a bad experience, it reflects poorly on them.
So it's interesting to ask, "How would Google avoid doing that, and what would be a bad user experience?" Well, there are some obvious things, like if you arrive on a page that installs malware or a virus on your computer, or you arrive at a product page where everything is out of stock, or you go to a website that's really slow or full of adverts. These are the pages Google does not want to include in their results.
And they've always been good at measuring these things pretty directly. More than 10 years ago they were testing how fast sites are and then using that to inform their rankings. If they spot malware or viruses on a site, they'll temporarily remove it from the search results.
But they also tried more opinion-based measures. For a while, they were running surveys to ask people: Are you satisfied with these results? This was how they knew if their algorithm was working to get people what they wanted, to give them a good experience.
But the Google way of doing this is to try and do it at massive scale and hopefully to do it in the background, where users don't have to answer a survey pop-up like this. And doing this in the background, doing it at huge scale has been more and more possible, firstly because of how much data Google has.
Click through rates
So I want to take a look at some of the kinds of things they might be looking at. Here's an example of something they may want to do. Let's consider the average click-through rate for every ranking position in the search results. Imagine that Google knows that 30% of people click on the first result and 22% click on number two and 5% click on number six and so on. They have a good understanding of these averages. But then for a particular keyword, let's say they notice number six is getting 12% of the clicks. Something is going on there. What is happening? Well, whatever the reason why this is, Google could be better satisfying its users if that result was higher up in the rankings. Whoever is ranking at number six is what people want. Maybe they should rank higher.
"Pogo sticking"
Here's another example. This is what we call pogo sticking. A user does a search and then clicks on a result, and then after a couple seconds looking at the page, they realize they don't like it, so they click the back button and they select a different result. But let's say they don't like that one either, so they click back and they select a third result, and now they stay here and they use that site. Imagine a lot of people did the same thing. Well, if we were Google, when we saw this happening, it would be a pretty strong indicator that the third result is what's actually satisfying users. That's actually a good result for this query, and it probably deserves to be ranking much higher up.
User satisfaction: refinement
There's even an extension of this where users pogo stick around the SERPs, and then they decide they can't find anything to do with what they wanted. So they refine their search. They try typing something else, and then they find what they want on a different query. If too many people are not satisfied by any of the results on the first page, it's probably a sign to make a pretty serious change to that SERP or to nudge people to do this other query instead.
Google's evolution with Machine Learning
And doing this kind of huge analysis on a massive scale is something that was made much easier with the advent of machine learning. Now for a long time the folks in charge of the search results at Google were very reluctant to incorporate any machine learning into their work. It was something they did not want to do. But then Google appointed a new head of search, and they chose someone who had spent their career at Google promoting machine learning and its opportunities. So now they've moved towards doing that. In fact, Wired magazine described Google as remaking themselves as a "machine learning first" company.
What we're seeing now
So this is where I want to move from my conjecture about what they could do into giving some examples and evidence of all of this for you. And I want to talk about two particular modern ranking factors that we have evidence for and that if you're doing SEO or digital marketing or working on a website you can start considering today.
User signals
Firstly, I talked about the way that users interact with the results, what are they clicking on, how are they engaging with pages they find. So let's dive into that.
A lot of this research comes from my former colleague, Tom Capper. We worked at Distilled together, but he's also a Moz Associate, and a lot of this has been published on the Moz Blog.
User engagement
Let's imagine you start on Google. You type in your query, and here's the results. Here's page one of results. Here's page two of results. Not going to worry much about what happens after that because no one tends to click through further than page two.
Now let's think about how much data Google has about the way people interact with those search results. On the front page, they see lots going on. There are lots of clicks. They can see patterns. They can see trends. They can see what people spend time on or what they pogo stick back from. On the second page and beyond, there's very little user engagement happening. No one is going there, so there's not many clicks and not much data that Google can use.
So when we look at what factors seem to correlate with rankings, here's what we see. On page two, there is some correlation between the number of links a site has and where it ranks. That's kind of what we expected. That's what SEOs have been preaching for the last decade or more. But when we get to the bottom of page one, there's a weaker correlation with links. And at the top of page 1, there's almost no correlation between the number of links you have and the position you rank in.
Now we do see that the folks on page one have more links than the sites on page two. You do need the SEO basics to get you ranking on the first page in the first place. We talk about this as the consideration set. Google will consider you for the first page of results if you have good enough SEO and if you have enough links.
But what we can take away from this is that when all that user data exists, when Google know where you're clicking, how people are engaging with sites, they will use those user metrics as a ranking factor. And then in situations where there isn't much user data, the rankings might be more determined by link metrics, and that's why deeper in the results we see links being a more highly correlated factor.
In a similar way, we can look at the whole keyword space, from the very popular head terms in green to the long tail terms in red that are very rarely searched for. Head terms have a lot of people searching for them, so Google has a lot of user data to make an assessment about where people are clicking. For long tail terms, they might only get a couple of searches every month, they just don't have that much data.
And again, what we see is that the popular, competitive terms, where there's lots of searching happening, Google seems to be giving better rankings to sites with better engagement. For long tail terms, where they don't have that data, the rankings are more based on link strength. And there have been plenty of studies that bear this out.
Larry Kim found a relationship between high click-through rates and better rankings. Brian Dean found a relationship between more engagement with a page and better rankings. And Searchmetrics found that time on site correlated with rankings better than any on-page factor.
Contemporary SEO
And even though Google keeps a tight lid on this, they won't admit to exactly what they're doing, and they don't describe their algorithms in detail, there are occasionally insights that we get to see.
A couple of years ago, journalists from CNBC had the chance to sit in on a Google meeting where they were discussing changes to the algorithm. One interesting part of this article was when Googlers talked about the things they were optimizing for when they were designing a new feature on the results page. They were looking at this new type of result they'd added, and they were testing how many people clicked on it but then bounced back to the results, which they considered a bad sign. So this idea of pogo sticking came up once again.
If that was something that they were monitoring in the SERPs, we should be able to see examples of it. We should be able to see the sites where people pogo stick don't do so well in SEO, which is why I'm always interested when I find a page that has, for whatever reason, it has a bad experience.
User metrics as a ranking factor
So here's a site that lists movie trivia for any movie you might be interested in. It's so full of ads and pop-ups that you can barely see any of the content on the page. It's completely overrun with adverts. So if my hypothesis was correct, we'd see this site losing search visibility, and in fact that's exactly what happened to them. Since their peak in 2014, the search visibility for the site has gone down and down and down.
Here's another example. This is a weird search. It's for a particular chemical that you buy if you were making face creams and lotions and that kind of thing. So let's have a look at some of the results here. I think this first result is the manufacturer's page with information about the chemical. The second is an industrial chemical research site. It has all the data sheets, all the safety sheets on it. The third is a site where you can buy the chemical itself.
And then here's another result from a marketplace site. I've blurred out their name because I don't want to be unfair to them. But when you click through on the result, this is what you get, an immediate blocker. It's asking you to either log in or register, and there's no way I want to complete this form. I'm going to hit the back button right away. Google had listed nine other pages that I'm going to look at before I even consider handing over all my data and creating an account here.
Now if my theory is right, as soon as they put this registration wall up, visitors would have started bouncing. Google would have noticed, and their search visibility would have suffered.
And that's exactly what we see. This was a fast-growing startup, getting lots of press coverage, earning lots of links. But their search traffic responded very poorly and very quickly once that registration wall was in place. The bottom graph is organic traffic, and it just drops precipitously.
Here's my final example of this, Forbes. It's a 100-year-old publishing brand. They've been online for over 20 years. And when you land on a page, this is the kind of thing you see for an article. Now I don't begrudge advertising on a page. They need to make some money. And there's only one banner ad here. I was actually pleasantly surprised by that.
But I'm baffled by their decision to include a video documentary in the corner about a totally different topic. Like I came to read this article and you gave me this unrelated video.
And then suddenly this slides into view to make absolutely sure that I didn't miss the other ad that it had in the sidebar. And then the video, that I didn't want any way about an unrelated topic, starts playing a pre-roll ad. Meanwhile their browser alert thing pops up, and then the video — about the unrelated topic that I didn't want in the first place — starts playing. So I'm trying to read and I scroll away from all this clutter on the page. But then the video — about an unrelated topic that I didn't want in the first place — pins itself down here and follows me down the page. What is going on? And then there's more sidebar ads for good measure.
And I want to say that if my theory is right, people will be bouncing away from Forbes. People will avoid clicking on Forbes in the first place, and they will be losing search traffic. But I also know that they are a powerhouse. So let's have a look at what the data said.
I grabbed their link profile, and people will not stop linking to Forbes. They're earning links from 700 new domains every single day. This is unstoppable. But here's their organic search visibility. Forbes is down 35% year-on-year. I think this is pretty validating.
At this point, I'm confident saying that Google has too much data about how people engage with the search results and with websites for you to ignore this. If your site is a bad experience, why would Google let you in the top results to begin with and why would they keep you there?
What can you do?
So what can you do about this? Where can you start? Well, you can go to Google Search Console and take a look through the click-through rates for your pages when they appear in search. And in your analytics package, GA or whatever else, you can see the bounce rate for visitors landing on your pages, particularly those coming from search. So look for themes, look for trends. Find out if there are pages or sections of your site that people don't like clicking on when they appear in the results. Find out if there are pages that when people land on them, they bounce right away. Either of those are bad signs and it could be letting you down in the results.
You can also qualitatively take a critical look at your site or get a third party or someone else to do this. Think about the experience that people have when they arrive. Are there too many adverts? Is there a frustrating registration wall? These things can hurt you, and they might need a closer look.
Brand signals
Okay, so we talked about those user signals. But the other area I want to look at is what I talk about as brand signals. Brand can apply to a company or a person. And when I think about the idea being a brand, I think about how well-known the company is and how well-liked they are. These are some questions that signal you have a strong brand, that people have heard of you, people are looking for you, people would recommend you.
And this second one sounds like something SEOs know how to research. When we say people are looking for you, it sounds like we're just talking about search volume. How many times every month are people typing your brand name into Google?
Again, my colleague, Tom Capper did some research about this that's published on the Moz Blog. He looked at this problem and said, "Okay. Well, then let's see if the number of people searching for a brand has any correlation to how well they rank." And then there's a load of math and a long story that led to this conclusion, that branded search volume did correlate with rankings. This is in blue. In fact, it correlated more strongly with rankings than Domain Authority does, so that's the measure that shows you the link strength of a website.
So think about this. We've worried about links for two decades, but actually something around brand strength and maybe branded search volume seems to correlate better.
For data geeks, here's a way of using the R-squared calculation to answer the question, "How much does this explain the rankings?" Again, what you need to know here is that branded search volume explained more of the rankings than anything else.
So we've been preaching about this for a while, and then literally two days ago I saw this tweet. A team in the UK was asking about controversial SEO opinions. And the SEO manager for Ticketmaster came out and said this. He believes that when Google sees people searching for your brand name alongside a query, they start ranking you higher for the non-branded terms. And I don't think this is controversial. And in fact, one of the replies to this was from Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz. He also now believes that the brand signals are more powerful than what links and keywords can do.
What can you do?
So what can you do about this? Well, first you have to realize that any investment you make in brand building, whether that's through PR activities or through like traditional advertising, is good business to do anyway. But it now has twice the value because of its impact on SEO, because those activities will get people looking for you, following you, sharing your brand. If you work for a billion-dollar company, you should make sure that your SEO and PR teams are well-connected and well-aligned and talking together. If you don't work for a billion-dollar company, I've got two small, interesting examples for you.
Example: AdaFruit
First I want to call out this site, AdaFruit.com. They sell electronic components. There are many, many sites on the web that sell similar products. Not only do they have great product pages with good quality images and helpful descriptions, but I can also look at a product like this and then I can click through to get ideas for things I can build with it. This is some LED lights that you can chain together. And here's an idea for a paper craft glowing crystal you can build with them. Here's the wiring diagram I'd need for that project plus some code I can use to make it more interactive. It's only an $8 product, but I know that this site will make it easy for me to get started and to get value from making this purchase.
They go even further and have a pretty impressive AdaFruit channel on YouTube. They've got 350,000 subscribers. Here's the videos, for instance, that they publish every week walking you through all the new products that they've recently added to the site.
The CEO does a hands-on demo telling you about everything they have in stock. And then they have other collections of videos, like their women in hardware series that reaches an audience that's been typically underserved in this space.
AdaFruit made a significant investment in content for their own channels, and it paid off with some brand authority, but brand trust and brand engagement as well.
Example: Investor Junkie
But I want to show you one other example here from arguably a much less exciting industry and someone who couldn't invest so much in content. This is InvestorJunkie.com, a site that does reviews of financial services and products. And when I was working at the agency, we worked with this site and specifically with its founder, Larry. Larry was an expert in personal finance and particularly in personal investments. And this was his solo project. He blogged on the site and used his expertise. But as the site grew, he hired some contractors as well as our agency, and they created a lot of great content for the site, which really helped with SEO. But to make a significant impact on brand strength, we had to get the word out in front of loads of people who didn't already know about him.
So we took Larry's expertise and we offered him as a guest to podcasts, a lot of podcasts, and they loved having him on as a guest. Suddenly Larry was able to provide his expertise to huge new audiences, and he was able to get the Investor Junkie brand and their message in front of lots of people who had never heard of the site before.
But better still, this had a compounding effect, because people who are interested in these topics typically don't just subscribe to one of these podcasts. They subscribe to a bunch of them. And so if they hear about Larry and Investor Junkie once, they might never think about it again. But if he shows up in their feed two or three or four times over the course of a few months, they'll start to form a new association with the brand, maybe trusting him more, maybe seeking out the site.
And as an aside, there's one other thing I love about podcasts, which is that if you're creating a blog post, that can take hours and hours of work. If you're creating a conference presentation, it can take days or weeks of work. If you're a guest on a 30-minute podcast, it literally takes you about 30 minutes. You log on, you talk to a host, and then your part of the work is done.
So this can get you in front of a new audience. It gets people looking for you, which Google will notice. But it has even more SEO value as well, because every podcast typically has a page like this with show notes. It's a page that Google can index, a page that Google can understand. And Google can see the signals of trust. It can see your brand being mentioned. It can see the links back to your site as well. I obviously can't speak highly enough of podcasts for PR, for brand awareness, and even for SEO.
Did this help Larry and the Investor Junkie team? Yeah. This obviously wasn't the extent of their SEO strategy. But everything they did contributed to them getting great rankings for a variety of competitive terms, and it helped them rank up against much bigger sites with much bigger teams and much bigger budgets. And that story actually came to an end just about two years ago, because the site was finally acquired for $6 million, which is not bad for a solo founder who was just busy building his own brand.
In summary
All right. I'll wrap up with some of these thoughts. Google has been evolving. They've now been able to collect so much more data about the way people interact with the search results and other pages, and they're now using machine learning to process all of that so they can better assess: Are we giving people a good user experience? Are the sites that we're ranking the ones that satisfy people's queries? The game of SEO has changed.
Now when you're starting out, all the basics still apply. Come to Moz, read the Beginner's Guide, do great technical SEO, do great keyword research, do great link building. Those are still necessary to be considered to become a player in your industry to help get you near the first page for any terms you want to target.
But when you're trying to move up the front page, when you're trying to establish yourself much further and become a much bigger brand, we're not seeing a lot of correlation between things like links and getting into the very top rankings for any particular term. Instead, think about the good game that Google is playing. They want to make sure that when someone clicks on a result, they stay there. They don't want to see this pogo sticking. They don't want to see the link and the title that people want to click on sitting down at number six. So target their KPIs. Think about how you can help Google by making sure that your results are the ones people want to click on. Make sure that when people click on your results, that's the page that they stay on.
But ultimately, you will never lose out if you improve your brand authority and engagement with your content. These are just good things to do for business. A stronger brand, content, and a website that people want to spend time on is hugely important and pays dividends. But now it's all doubly important because it also has this massive impact on your SEO.
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My warm New Year’s greetings to all local business owners and local SEOs reading my column today. Add to this my sincere sentiments of solidarity for what we went through together in 2020 — we won’t soon forget it, and our stories from the journey contain important teachings for our market and industry.
I often find that the best local SEO takeaways sprout from the real-world anecdotes of colleagues and friends, and you’ll find those here today along with my personal predictions for the year ahead. Let’s get learning!
Teachings from the real lives of local SEOs
In a year when we were physically distant from one another in unprecedented ways, I’ve found memorable lessons in how local business owners broke down barriers to keep communities connected. I asked four wonderful colleagues to share a personal anecdote with me about a local business they transacted with, both prior to and during the pandemic. As you read these brief stories, see if you can identify six common threads running through them.
“One of my favorite businesses that I have used before and during 2020 is Pete's Diner. I first found out about them by driving by, but they have been in the community for decades.
Before the pandemic, my husband and I would have breakfast with his parents every Saturday at a different local restaurant. It became one of our regular breakfast spots because their food is great and it's pretty close to our home. They also carried a hard-to-find, high-quality olive oil that we would buy in large quantities while we were there.
During the pandemic, we decided to do our best to continue to support local businesses. Pete's really has adapted to the current climate by offering online ordering and delivery without raising prices significantly or compromising on the quality of their food. Moving into 2021, I recommend that local businesses continue to offer delivery and online ordering even after the pandemic is over. Use Google Posts to keep customers up to date on specials or new services and products.”
“I discovered my favorite Vietnamese pho restaurant three years ago. I was on the hunt for something that was close to my home, was family-run, and that had an amazing Vietnamese bone broth noodle soup that would remind me of my childhood (my family immigrated to Canada from Vietnam).
Like many SEOs do, I found it through Google Search. I always check Google reviews to see what a company's online reputation is. The first time I stepped foot in their restaurant, they recognized that I was new. They took the time to explain their business and tell me their most popular dishes. They took the time to build a personal relationship and rapport with me by asking my name and sharing theirs. It felt like there was a real personal touch. And of course, the food was amazing, the service was quick, and they topped it all off with complimentary dessert. I was hooked!
I'd been going to this pho restaurant weekly — that is until the pandemic hit. I didn’t visit them for a little over three months when lockdown first went into effect. But when I did, I was so happy to see that they had implemented all of the necessary health precautions to make their customers and staff feel safe. I noticed a huge influx of takeout orders.
I think my best local marketing advice for 2021 would be to take care of your customers! Listen to them intently and go over and above what you typically would. Treat every single customer like they’re your family and they will feel the love! Don’t expect anything in return, and you will be rewarded when you least expect it!”
“There is a local cafe/coffee shop near me that I would frequent, especially for their homemade doughnut Fridays. The proximity of the location (two blocks away), the quality of the food, and the customer service made me a repeat customer.
The business was quick to offer delivery (even for two blocks away), which has been amazing — who doesn't want Irish coffee and fresh doughnuts delivered to their door on a Friday morning? They’ve added other fun takeaway options, too, like bake-your-own cookie dough, meals, and a Thanksgiving pie and beer collab with the brewery down the street. Think outside the box and don't be afraid to pivot. Focus on customer service and your customers will stay loyal.”
“Some might argue that Wegmans, the northeast grocery chain, has a cult following. It's easy to understand why. I first discovered the store from my father. He raved about the way they had special baked goods, quality produce, and an assortment of branded products. I was living in New Jersey at the time, and I was hooked after my first visit. Maybe it was the takeout sandwiches, the fresh sushi, or the large and open layout of the store — and it didn't hurt that they were about five minutes from my apartment at the time.
Since then, I’ve learned more about the brand and appreciate their philosophy: 'Employees first, customers second.' I want to go to a store that takes care of their employees. They've even invested $5 million dollars in employee scholarships. How cool is that?
In 2020, they adapted to the pandemic by being one of the first grocery stores to implement mask policies, glass splash guards, and social distancing. They increased their employees' wages in March by $2.00, and had hand sanitizer at entrances very early on. If I had to give them one piece of local search marketing advice, I'd recommend utilizing Google Posts more frequently. Adding a post once every couple of months is better than nothing, but it's such an opportunity to attract more customers to their grocery stores.”
Did you spot the commonalities in the four stories? When I distill them down into local SEO themes, here’s what I see:
1. Essential local businesses take pride of place
When I asked for a story about a favorite business, Amanda, John, Niki, and Garrett all chose an essential business — a restaurant or grocery store that fed them! Eating is the most fundamental of all activities, as recent times have highlighted for us all. One of my major takeaways from 2020 that I’ll be bringing with me into 2021 is that operating an essential business which fulfills the basic structural needs of a community is the wisest entrepreneurial strategy.
If you’re adjusting your business model and its inventory, opening a new business this year, or advising local entrepreneurs, learn to map community essentials and create a business plan that puts basics before luxuries.
2. Local business discovery is multi-channel
Getting found is the preliminary step to every local business transaction:
Amanda found a restaurant while driving
John looked at Google listings and reviews
Niki needed a spot in close proximity to her workplace
Garrett heard by word-of-mouth from a family member
Being there for the customer means being discoverable both online and offline, via vehicle, foot traffic, web-based local business platforms, and by word-of-mouth recommendations. Your visibility strategy for the year ahead needs to cover all these bases.
3. Local businesses can deliver multiple types of value
The local businesses you’re marketing have the best chance of success if you can unlock the secret of what patrons value most. These examples abound in our four anecdotes:
High quality — clearly, all of these foods are extra delicious!
Convenience — everyone wanted something nearby.
Brand affinity — John wants a family-owned business, Garret wants employees to be cared for, Niki likes businesses that partner up with one another, and Amanda likes a brand that maintains quality without raising prices too much.
Brand adaptability — all four brands made safety adjustments to keep serving the public.
This year, find out what your customers and potential customers value most, and make common cause with them.
4. Pandemic adaptations drive loyalty
The four businesses our contributors highlighted are successfully weathering an incredible storm via the praiseworthy changes they made to keep serving the public safely, like:
Implementing new sanitary policies
Implementing digital commerce
Offering home delivery
Doubling down on takeout service
Increasing employees’ wages
Trying new things, like meal kits
Forming new cross-sales partnerships with fellow businesses
Taking maximum safety precautions, delivering at the curb or the front door, facilitating online purchasing, and experimenting with new ideas are all must-haves for 2021.
5. There’s even more that good local brands can do
I asked our experts what they’d suggest if they could offer once piece of local SEO advice to their favorite businesses for 2021. They recommended:
Maintaining all new sales and service channels, even after the hoped-for end of COVID-19.
Making consistent use of Google Posts as a communications channel.
Listening intently to evolving customer needs.
Putting customer service at the center of everything.
Making customers feel loved.
6. The most important local SEO factor is the human factor
These are the parts of the stories I like best, because they show businesses making us feel less alone, despite our necessary distancing.
Amanda found a place a family feels so welcome, they made it a regular multi-generational hangout.
Niki found a place that added a sense of fun to life with their creativity.
John found a place that not only served a beloved dish from childhood, but where the staff took the time to build a personal relationship with him.
Garrett found a place where he can feel good shopping because they take genuine care of their staff.
Philosopher ThÃch Nhất Hạnh might say that each of these businesses found a way to shatter the illusion of separateness, in the midst of a pandemic, by making each of these patrons feel like valued members of the community. Any local business you market in 2021 can definitely do the same.
My own local SEO predictions and tips for 2021
Here we go!
1. Your local business website will be more essential than in any previous year
It’s hard to believe that just three years ago, I felt compelled to publish a piece on why you still needed a website, pushing back on the narrative that the amount of zero-click-type SERPs was making websites irrelevant. Nobody can claim this in 2021, and recent stats from Moxtra’s Small Business Digital Resilience Report make the “why” of this clear. Consider:
66% of respondents say the pandemic made them more likely to do business with SMBs in the future (and I’ve seen higher numbers than this in other surveys).
But, 2020 saw 30% growth in consumers requiring that digital capabilities be present to facilitate transactions (think e-commerce and telemeetings).
And, 84% said if these capabilities were lacking, they’d consider looking elsewhere for a brand that could serve them online (84% is a huge number!).
Local digital sales are where it’s at in 2021, so finding the best possible e-commerce provider should be the top priority for all relevant brands. Don’t worry too much about zero-click SERPs this year. Yes, Google has its shopping engine and has even ramped up its “nearby” filter in 2020, but focus on pulling in every bit of traffic you can to your website’s own shopping cart this year. This goal will build stronger-than-ever bridges between local and organic SEO, so this is the time for local-focused agencies to double down on organic skills.
I’m also watching with interest the rise of medical devices and apps that monitor heart rate, blood pressure, and other vitals. There’s a telemedicine revolution going on, which should seep into other professional services that could improve customer convenience via secure telemeetings, any time face-to-face appointments aren’t essential.
Has anyone ever really enjoyed sitting for hours in a waiting room to speak to an accountant, a consultant, a banker? I don’t think so. In 2021, websites for professional service providers should be optimized to drive online bookings for as many remote meetings as possible.
2. The triumphant return of the milkman and the everything-delivery person!
What I find absolutely key to this story is that Alpenrose is managing delivery in-house. They aren’t outsourcing to a third party and losing something like one-third of their revenue. If a local business you’re marketing can deliver, it definitely should.
Further, I’d urge digital marketing agencies to have vital conversations with clients in Q1 about the problems inherent in outsourcing customer experience to a third party. As I’ve learned from both restaurateurs and grocers, it’s generally too costly and too risky to let another company get between you and your customers. This means that a key problem to solve in the year ahead is the employment and transportation of in-house drivers.
“Oyster man. Oyster manny-manny-manny!”
A vintage cookbook tells me this is the song residents of mid-century New Orleans heard each day as a seafood wagon came down their streets. When I look through and beyond 2021, my best inspiration comes from examining the past, with its bountiful produce trucks making rounds, and ladies coming onto porches to purvey gumbo file powder. Ask your elders for reminiscences to inspire 2021 opportunities, because everything old is becoming new again, and whenever I ask around, customers who have gotten a taste of home delivery want it to continue beyond the hoped-for end of the pandemic.
But here’s one problem I need help to solve: If I’m predicting the continued expansion of delivery, and I’m looking back in time, I see lots of households with somebody available to accept perishable orders. In June of 2020, 42% of the US workforce was working at home, but if and when we return to formal workplaces, who will be in situ to bring in the meat and dairy before they spoil?
Will the return of the milkman necessitate the return of the outdoor icebox, or at least some form of it, like a fridge on the porch, a cooler the driver knows to fill, an apartment complex cold case? Inventors, please speak up, because there’s just no way I’m going to let Amazon into my house.
3. My tossed salad of local search marketing predictions
So, solving for local digital sales and delivery are the two biggest stories I’m focused on in the year ahead, but here are my mixed greens of other developments I think we’ll see in the next twelve months:
1. Google’s Core Web Vitals is coming, and it will be felt on local business shores. But the truth is that — as recently as 2019 — one-third of small businesses still reported having no website at all (hence, nothing to optimize for Google’s latest initiatives). While local SERPs make it clear that it’s quite possible to rank a site-less local business in even moderately competitive packs and finders, 2020 turned the lack of a digital presence into a dire disadvantage for the smallest brands. Even a free website will be better than nothing in the year ahead.
2. Google will push harder on Google Messaging, and brands and agencies will need to decide whether to invite them into customer communications to this degree. If Google Messaging ever fully takes off, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google sunset Questions & Answers as a result.
3. Google’s purchase of Pointy should start to surface more clearly as key to their strategy for a local transactional future. I strongly believe Google’s greatest growth potential lies in facilitating local online shopping through a mapped interface, and I’m expecting their game plan for this to be more obvious by the end of 2021.
4. Reviews will continue to be absolutely central, but unless Google does something more about vetting the quality of reviews and Q&A responses from its Local Guides program, searcher experience will suffer. We won’t see a massive erosion of trust to threaten Google’s review dominance in 2021, but review spam and poor content will continue the confidence leak at a slow, aggravating trickle unless Google plugs it up.
5. If Apple launches its search engine this year, the local SEO industry’s necessary hyper-focus on Google could see some welcome variation. Moz Local already distributes to Apple Maps, so if you’re a customer, you’re ahead of the Apple game, but coverage of optimizing for Apple search will deserve your closest attention to be an early bird.
6. The rise of Nextdoor for local business visibility will hit a new high, and hopefully prompt the company to start developing more agency-friendly solutions. Nextdoor is the structured citation platform in which I’m most interested for the new year, and Moz Local now offers a top tier plan with a solution for agencies to help get all their clients onto Nextdoor (a function that’s absent from the platform’s own interface). Watch the Moz Blog for further coverage this year!
7. Local medical and personal service providers may need to expand hires (at least temporarily). Once a truly successful COVID-19 vaccine has been widely implemented, expect a glut of bookings from clients who have put off all kinds of appointments during lockdown. Now is the time to investigate good booking software and also evaluate Google’s options for this, because online reputation will be impacted by the ability to see clients in a timely manner once it’s safe to do so.
8. Public-brand affinity will set conscientious local businesses apart. Centering deep concern for whatever your local public cares about most will be increasingly important in the coming year. Whether through brand activism or allyship with major movements like Black Lives Matter or climate change addressal, or diligent support of local programs to alleviate poverty or increase diversity, equity, and inclusion, company reputations will become further tied to actions for the common good.
In summary
I’ll sum up by saying that there’s never been a tougher year than 2021 for making marketing predictions. After all, how many of us foresaw the harsh realities of 2020? But, as I look to the sunrise of a vaccine, and couple this with multiple polls indicating just how strongly the public wants to support local businesses, I think there’s both reason for optimism and genuine opportunity ahead.
2020 reminded us of just how interdependent we all are, for the basics of daily living and for human support, encouragement, and hope. Everyone benefits from inhabiting well-resourced, sustainable communities and if your brand or agency can help with this, the future belongs to you.
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Happy new year, readers! We're back with a brand new season of Whiteboard Friday episodes for your viewing pleasure.
First up: Moz SEO expert Cyrus Shepard shares his top 21 tips for successful Google SEO in 2021, including what to prioritize and what to look out for in the year ahead. He's also included a bunch of helpful resources for your reference in the transcription below!
Watch and enjoy, and as always, leave your questions and your own suggestions in the comment section.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard. Today, so glad that you can join us. We are talking about 21 smart Google SEO tips for 2021. We're getting ready for a new year, a new year of SEO strategies. These are 21 practical tips that you can implement that should, hopefully, move the needle on your organic traffic.
These are some of the best tips that I've collected over the past year. Many of them that I'm going to use myself in my own SEO strategies.
Now we have four categories: increasing clicks, content/on-page SEO tips, technical SEO, and a little bit of link building. There are 21 of these. These are going to go fast. We're trying to do 10 to 12 minutes, so we don't get to spend a lot of time on each one. But don't fret. We're going to link to appropriate resources in the transcript below so that we can keep along and explore a little bit more. All right. Ready to dive in?
Increasing clicks
Let's start with clicks, specifically earning more clicks from Google without actually ranking higher, because that's one of the great things about SEO. You don't actually have to rank higher to get more traffic if you can get more clicks from the rankings that you already have. So let's talk about some specific strategies for getting more clicks without increasing rankings.
1. Favicon optimization
First, favicon optimization.
Now I'm surprised more people haven't talked about this in 2020. Google displays favicons in mobile search results, and they can influence your click-through rate if they're high contrast, if they're visible or not visible. Having a good favicon can make a few percentage points difference, very minor, but it does make a difference if you can get it right. Aaron Wall, SEO Book, wrote one of the very few posts about that.
2. Breadcrumb optimization
While we're optimizing our favicons, let's take a look at breadcrumb optimization. Google displays breadcrumbs in both desktop and mobile search results. They can be keyword-rich breadcrumbs, which can influence your click-through rate. Now Google gets their breadcrumbs from a lot of places. That can be your URL, your schema markup, your actual breadcrumbs on the page.
What you want to do is make sure Google is displaying the breadcrumbs that you want them to display, using those keywords that you choose. The best way to do that, make sure that you have breadcrumbs actually on your page with links, that you're using schema markup. Ideally, it would match your URL structure, but that isn't always necessary. So a great breadcrumb optimization audit.
3. Meta descriptions
Let's optimize those meta descriptions. This is so old-school SEO. But a recent study shows that 30% of websites don't even use meta descriptions. Now that's understandable because another study shows that 70% of the time, Google will rewrite the meta description, usually because it's not using the keywords that the user is searching for. But if we write a well-crafted meta description, it can compel users to click, and that means using keyword-rich descriptions that people are actually searching for, so when Google does use your meta description, it's encouraging those clicks and acting as marketing copy for your website.
4. Numbers in titles
Along with meta descriptions, titles. Just shared a study recently showing that dates added to titles increased rankings for a particular brand. Numbers are generally one thing that I always test in title tags that usually produce pretty consistent results. Specifically, dates in title tags are often a winner, January 2021.
Don't be spammy about it. Don't include it if it doesn't make sense and don't fake it. But if you can include a number, it will often increase your click-through rate for any given query.
5. <Title> boilerplate
How about doing a boilerplate audit for your title tag? Tip number five. What's boilerplate? Boilerplate are the parts of your title tag that repeat every single time.
For example, here at Moz, we put "Moz," our brand name at the end of every title tag. We used to put "Whiteboard Friday" at the end of every Whiteboard Friday until we tested it and found out that we actually got more clicks and higher rankings when we removed it. So boilerplate, you want your titles to be unique, provide unique value. So I would encourage you to experiment with your boilerplate and see if removing it actually increases your rankings.
Tip number six: schema, specifically FAQ and how-to schema. Google gave us a huge gift when they introduced these in search results. FAQ schema gives you a lot of SERP real estate. You can't always win it, and you can't always win the how-to schema, but when you do, that can definitely increase or influence people to click on your result, expand those FAQ schemas out.
It's not appropriate for every page. You want to make sure that you actually have those FAQs on your pages. But it is one way, in appropriate situations, that you can increase clicks without increasing your actual Google ranking. All right.
Content can go stale after a few years. So we launch content. You have a blog, you launch it, and you share it on social media. Most people forget about it after that. So go back, look at your top content over the last two to five years or even 10 years, if you want to go back that far, and see what you can relaunch by updating it, keeping it on the same URL. In some cases, you can see gains of 500% to 1,000% just by relaunching some of your old content with some updates.
So do a relaunch audit in 2021.
8. Increase internal linking
Number eight: increasing internal linking. Now a lot of top SEO agencies, when they need to quickly increase rankings for clients, there are generally two things that they know are the easiest levers to pull. First, title tags and meta descriptions, what's getting more clicks, but second is increasing the internal linking.
You know that you can increase internal links on your site, and there are probably some opportunities there that you just haven't explored. So let's talk about a couple easy ways to do that without having too much work.
9. Update old content with new links
Number nine is updating your old content with new links. This is a step that we see people skip time and time again. When you publish a new blog post, publish a new piece of content, make sure you're going back and updating your old content with those new links.
So you're looking at the top keyword that you want to rank for, and going in Google Search Console or checking tools like Keyword Explorer to see what other pages on your site rank for that keyword, and then adding links to the new content to those pages. I find when I do this, time and time again, it lowers the bounce rate. So you're not only updating your old page with fresh content and fresh links and adding relevance. You're adding links to your new content. So make sure, when you publish new content, you're updating your old content with those new links.
10. Remove unnecessary links
Number 10, remove unnecessary links from your content. Now this is a form of PageRank sculpting. PageRank sculpting is a dirty word in SEO, but actually it works to a certain extent. It's not nofollow link page sculpting.
It is removing unnecessary links. Do you really need a link to your team page on every page of your website? Do you need a link to your contact form on every page of your website? In many cases, you don't. Sometimes you do. But if you remove the unnecessary links, you can pass more link equity through the links that actually count, and those links are a major Google ranking signal.
11. Mobile link parity audit
Number 11, need you to do a mobile link parity audit. What is that? What is a mobile link parity audit? That is ensuring that the links on your mobile site are the same as the links on your desktop site. Why is that important? Well, the last couple of years Google has moved to a mobile first index, meaning what they see on your mobile site, that's your website.
That's what counts. So a lot of sites, they have a desktop site, and then they reduce it to their mobile site and they're missing links. They get rid of header navigation, footer links, and things like that. A recent study showed that the average desktop page has 61 links and the average mobile page has 54 links. That means on the web as a whole there are seven fewer links on mobile pages than desktop pages, meaning a lot of link equity is being lost.
So do a study on your own website. Make sure you have mobile link parity between your desktop and your mobile site so you're not losing that equity.
12. Invest in long-form content
Number 12: need you to invest in long-form content. Now I am not saying that content length is a ranking factor. It is not. Short-form content can rank perfectly well. The reason I want you to invest in long-form content is because consistently, time and time again, when we study this, long-form content earns more links and shares.
It also generally tends to rank higher in Google search results. Nothing against short-form content. Love short-form content. But long-form content generally gives you more bang for your buck in terms of SEO ranking potential.
13. Use more headers
When you're doing that long-form content, make sure you do number 13: use more headers. I'm talking about H2 and H3 tags.
Break up your content with good, keyword-rich header tags. Why? Well, we have research from A.J. Ghergich that shows that the more header tags you have, generally you rank for more featured snippets. Sites with 12-13, which seems like a lot of header tags, rank for the most featured snippets of anything that they looked at in their most recent study.
So make sure you're breaking up your content with header tags. It adds a little contextual relevance. It's a great way to add some ranking potential to your content.
14. Leverage topic clusters
Number 14, leverage topic clusters. Don't just launch one piece of content. Make sure you write about multiple pieces of content around the same subject and link those together. When you do that and you link them intelligently, you can increase engagement because people are reading the different articles.
You can add the right contextual inner links. I have a great case study that I want to show you in the transcript below, where someone did this and produced amazing results. So look into topic clusters for 2021.
15. Bring content out of tabs
Finally, bring your content out of tabs. If you have content that is in accordions or drop-downs or you have to click to reveal the content, study after study after study shows that content that's brought out of tabs and brought into the main body, so people don't have to click to see, generally performs better than content that's hidden in tabs.
Now to be clear, I don't believe that Google discriminates content in tabs. They seem to be able to index and rank it just fine. But I think people generally engage with content when it's out of tabs, and maybe some of those signals help those pages to rank a little better.
Technical SEO
All right. Just a very few technical SEO tips. We're going fast.
16. Core Web Vitals
Number 16: this is the year to invest in Core Web Vitals. These are some of the page experience signals that Google is bringing to the forefront in 2021. It's going to be an actual ranking factor very soon. We're talking about cumulative shift layout, hard word to say. Generally, we're talking about site speed and delivering great page experience. Now some of these things are very technical, and Google has some tools, like Lighthouse, to try to help you to figure them out.
One tip I like to share, if you are on WordPress, I highly recommend using Cloudflare, in particular their APO for WordPress. It's a great way to speed up your WordPress website and help you score better for some of these Core Web Vitals. It's very low cost, it's easy to implement, and it's a great way to speed up your WordPress website.
17. Limit sitemaps to 10,000
Number 17: sitemaps. Sitemaps, you're allowed to have 50,000 URLs per sitemap. This is always a question in every SEO quiz. How many URLs per sitemap are you allowed? Instead, if you have a large site and you have indexing issues, tip number 17, limit your sitemaps to 10,000 URLs. You don't have to use all 50,000.
We have some evidence that using smaller sitemaps, compressing those into a limited URL set can actually improve your crawlability of those. It's kind of like Google might prioritize those in some way. The data seems to support it. You also get a little bit better data out of Google Search Console. You can see what's being indexed and what's not.
18. Leverage dynamic sitemaps
Also, leverage dynamic sitemaps. Our friend Oliver Mason shows — that I'll link to in the transcript below — that a dynamic sitemap is a sitemap that changes based upon what you want Google to crawl. So if you have a large corpus of URLs that you want Google to crawl, put the high priority ones in their own special sitemap.
Maybe you limit it to one thousand URLs. As Google crawls and discovers those, remove them and put in additional high priority URLs that you want Google to discover. Keep the sitemap small and tight, and let Google know that those are the ones that you want them to pay attention to.
Link building
Let's quickly talk about link building tips for 2021, because everybody loves link building.
No, kidding. Everybody hates link building. Link building is so hard. There are some professionals and there are some great people in the industry who do love it, who are great at it. Personally, I'm not that great at link building, but I still am able to build a lot of links.
19. Passive link acquisition
One way that I'm able to do that is number 19: passive link acquisition. What passive link acquisition means is creating content that passively earns links as people discover it in the SERPs.
It means I don't have to outreach to people. It means that when they find it, when journalists find it, when bloggers find it, they naturally want to link to it. You do that by creating the types of content that journalists and bloggers and web creators are looking for. These are generally data, guides, definitions, how to, such as this video. When you create that kind of content, it generally earns a lot of links as people find it. Passive link building is one of the most sustainable ways to earn links over time.
20. Page-level link intersect
Number 20, page-level link intersect. When you do have to do outreach, you want to do outreach to the pages most likely to link to you. Now we've known for a long time one of the top SEO tips for link building is find websites that link to your competitors but not to you.
I like to make that a little more specific and find web pages that link to at least two of my competitors but not to me. That means that they are generally a resource page, if they're linking to multiple competitors but not to me, and more likely to link to me if I ask them. We have a great tool here at Moz, Link Explorer, that does page-level link intersect. I think it's the best tool for this specific task in the SEO industry, not because I'm biased, because I actually use it.
21. Be the last click
Tip number 21 for 2021, be the last click. What do I mean by that? I mean satisfy your users. Once you earn the first click, you want to get that first click that people click, but you also want to be the last click. That means they found what they are looking for. User satisfaction is ranking signal number one. Your goal with all of this is to satisfy the user, to give them what they search for.
That's the magic of SEO. They're searching for something, and you're delivering it to them at the exact moment they search for it. When you can be the last click, you're almost guaranteed to rise in rankings and get the traffic that you deserve.
All right, those are 21 tips. That's your roadmap for 2021. Hope you enjoyed it. Please share this video and share your tips for 2021 in the comments below.
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