As an SEO consultant, I was always on the lookout for a good SEO audit checklist. One that I could use and present to my clients. One I could modify to my own needs. One that covered all the important SEO bases. One that was up-to-date. And importantly, one that I didn't have to pay several hundred dollars for.
This, my SEO friends, is that checklist. And Moz is making it available to you.
One cool thing about this audit checklist is that you can perform it almost entirely 100% for free, or using free versions of SEO tools. This is important for SEO starting out on a budget, or small business owners who want to learn to audit a small site on their own.
That said, if you're looking to audit medium/large sites or more than a few pages at a time, you likely want to look into more scalable solutions, such as our Moz Pro Site Crawl including our new Performance Metrics Beta.
We also like the audit checklist by Benjamin Estes over at BrainLabs, in particular, the pass/fail selector for each item. While our own audit is substantially different, we incorporated this feature into our own.
Site Audit Coverage
Originally, we set out to create a solid technical SEO audit checklist — one that covered all the important technical SEO areas which could have a significant impact on rankings/traffic and could be completed in a short amount of time.
As we created the audit, we realized that SEOs also want to check other traffic-impacting site issues that aren't necessarily technical. Hence, we ended up with a more complete Technical SEO and beyond site audit — one that covers nearly every important SEO area with the potential to impact traffic and rankings.
Briefly, the audit checklist covers:
1. Basics
Here you take a few quick steps to set your audit up for success: making sure you have analytics installed, Search Console access set up, and optionally, running a site crawl. Go to Basics.
2. Crawling & Indexing
Covering the foundations of technical SEO, the crawling and indexing section of the audit makes sure that search engines can find, crawl, and index your content without challenge. Go to Crawling & Indexing.
3. Meta & Structured Data
Both metadata and structured data have become increasingly complex in SEO. Here we include 8 quick checks to ensure maximum visibility in all types of search results. Go to Meta & Structured Data.
4. Content
Content isn't often considered "technical" SEO, but many technical issues with the content itself can impact indexing and rankings. Beyond the quality of the content itself, these technical issues need to be checked and addressed. Go to Content.
5. Links & Navigation
Links are the roads that hold your site together and connect it to the larger internet around the world. Google uses links in a variety of ways to rank content, so here we include 8 brief audits to make sure your links are optimized for crawling and ranking. Go to Links & Navigation.
6. Images
Images not only add relevance to web pages, but also improve engagement, and can help with rankings. Additionally, Google Images is one of the largest search engines by itself in the world. Here we include 5 quick checks to make sure your images are up to snuff. Go to Images.
7. Video
Videos play an increasingly important role on the web, but in truth, many sites pay no attention to video SEO. This is one area where Google simply won't "figure it out" without solid, technical SEO. Here are 4 audit items to make sure your videos can rank. Go to Video.
8. Mobile
Google is now mobile-first! (Well, almost there.) Most SEO audits take place on desktop, but doing a few quick mobile checks can make the difference between ranking or not. Go to Mobile.
9. Speed
Ready for Core Web Vitals? In truth, page speed has been important to SEO for years, and now there's more attention to it than ever. Go to Speed.
10. Security
Many SEOs often overlook security issues, but Google takes it very seriously. Beyond implementing HTTPS, there are a couple of areas you want to check if your site experiences problems. Go to Security.
11. International & Multilingual Sites
This optional section applies if your site targets multiple languages and/or regions. Implementing hreflang and international targeting is a technically tricky area, so you want to make sure you get it right. Go to International & Multilingual Sites.
12. Backlinks
While backlinks are only rarely included in a technical SEO audit, a lack of relevant backlinks is often the number one reason good, relevant content struggles to rank. While this doesn't represent a complete link audit, we recommend a few quick link checks to make sure you aren't leaving rankings behind. Go to Backlinks.
This is a living document. That means we'll work to keep this audit checklist up-to-date as SEO changes, so be sure to check back for new updates. If you have any additions or suggestions, please let us know in the comments below.
Exciting news, Moz fans! We are thrilled to announce that Moz has been acquired by iContact Marketing Corp!
Our readers know how critical SEO work is when it comes to the success of marketing strategies, and as an industry leader, Moz was the natural choice for iContact's expansion into the SEO space. If you’re not familiar with them, iContact and its sibling brands —Campaigner,SMTP, andKickbox — together operate as a subsidiary of J2 Global (NASDAQ: JCOM). They help small and mid-sized businesses reach and retain loyal customers with advanced email marketing automation tools. As part of the iContact family, Moz will be even better equipped to assist our subscribers with all of their SEO and digital marketing needs.
I sat down with Michael Pepe, President of iContact Marketing Corp, to talk more about the acquisition. Check it out below to learn what this means for Moz!
Video Transcription
Sarah: Hi, everyone. I'm Sarah Bird. I'm the CEO of Moz, and I've got some exciting, very exciting, very significant news to share with you all and I have invited Michael Pepe here to share with me. Michael, will you introduce yourself?
Michael: I sure will. Thank you very much, Sarah. So I'm Michael Pepe, and I serve as the President of iContact Marketing. And we do have some very exciting news to share today because Moz has been acquired by iContact.
Sarah: Wow, that feels so good to say.
Michael: Me too, publicly.
Sarah: At last. It's time. At last. I love it. Why don't you share a little bit about iContact?
Michael: Sure, sure. So iContact is an iconic brand in email marketing, and along with its sister brands, Campaigner, SMTP, Communicator, and Kickbox, all of those brands really focus on the email marketing needs of small to midsize customers. And it's a big business. Last year we delivered 68 billion emails.
Sarah: Woo, nice work.
Michael: Big. Big. So . . .
Sarah: Wow, that's impressive.
Michael: . . . I'm sure there's no one on the call who's not heard of Moz. But for the handful who may not have . . .
Sarah: Yeah.
Michael: . . . tell us about Moz, Sarah.
Sarah: Yeah, Moz is an SEO company through and through, from our earliest days, you know, 15 years ago when we started understanding and teaching about SEO through the blog and then really thought through how much more people we could help if we got more data behind our suggestions and then transitioned to being a software company. And so from the core has been this desire to help people understand and master a really complex, a complex marketing practice that is so vital and data driven. So some of our data stats, you know, we have over 40.7 trillion links, and we have over 1.2 million websites tracked, and we have over 500 million keyword suggestions. And all of that is to help people make better, smarter SEO decisions, whether you are at a small company or you're at a big company, whether you're a beginner in your SEO journey or whether you've been doing this for a very, very long time. And I love that we have that in common, Michael. iContact and Moz, they all want to help as many people as possible, and we're very focused on two core marketing strategies that are just as vital for organizations today as they've ever been.
Michael: Absolutely. And, you know, what I think sets Moz apart is the fact that you do focus on the size, quality, and accuracy of your data, but to be able to translate that data into insights to help marketers of all levels of sophistication, companies of all sizes, I think that's truly remarkable and sets Moz apart. And, Sarah, you know we've been talking for some time. This is not a new idea that we came up with last week.
Sarah: Right.
Michael: And, you know, we've just added, you know, a long list of reasons of why our two companies belong together. And maybe just it would help to share a few of those ideas on the call.
Sarah: Yeah, I bet people are real curious. Yeah, what's the why? Give us the why, Michael.
Michael: Focus on the same customers and serving small to midsize customers. If we ask our customers, which we do routinely, what the number one tool that they need, beyond email, it's undoubtedly SEO. So there's a great pairing of SEO and email marketing. And I would say that I think really importantly Moz is a value-driven company. And particularly in this day and age, you know, we live in a complex ecosystem that involves our customers, our colleagues, our partners. And to be able to think about supporting all of their needs and having all of those components thrive I think has really been an agenda on Moz's part and one that we believe in wholeheartedly ourselves, you know, to really think about values, integrity, and principle to drive ourselves forward. And so I think that we not only share values, but we have a shared future together.
Sarah: Yes. Oh, Michael, you said it so well. I can't say it better myself, so I will only add to that, that, you know, Moz is going to thrive in this new family, and I know that for certain because I know that you guys genuinely understand the value of SEO and are excited to share that with your broader customers. And really, we know that email is critical and will remain critical. It's not going anywhere. It's just getting better. And we have the shared values. So what more do we need, right? I think that together we can and will accomplish great things for all of our customers. So excited to make it to this moment with you and to start running towards that future together. So thank you so much.
Michael: Thank you. The future is bright.
Sarah: It is. All right, everyone, thank you and watch our blog. Stay tuned. More to come.
Fixing broken links has long stood as an SEO best practice. But if you've run into situations where you've fixed a broken link and nothing happened, you’re not alone. In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, SEO expert Cyrus Shepard discusses whether these fixes still matter, and takes you through steps to increase your chances of seeing the benefits.
For more link building tips, be sure to check out our recent update to The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building:
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard. I am a full-time SEO consultant, working here with Moz. Today I want to talk to you about a subject I saw on Twitter that I thought was really interesting: Does fixing old broken links still matter to SEO?
Now I thought this was a great question because fixing broken links is an SEO best practice. You read about it all the time. But if you've been doing SEO long enough, like I have, you've run into situations where you've fixed a broken link, or you found a page with hundreds of broken links, maybe thousands of broken links, you fixed it, you redirected it to a new target, and nothing happened.
So does this happen all the time? Is this common? Has Google changed the way it treats broken links? What's going on here, what are best practices, and what steps can we take to increase our chances of seeing a benefit from fixing broken links? That's what we're going to talk about today.
Why we fix broken links
So let's start off with why do we fix broken links. This is the basic stuff, the introduction.
Links pass link signals. Google uses links for things like PageRank and anchor text. So when they find links, they can give you a rankings boost. When a page 404s when those links break, when they go to a page that doesn't work, those link signals don't have a chance to pass anymore, and that can hurt your SEO. Usually these are caused by one of two reasons.
One, the link itself is just bad. It points to a page that doesn't exist on your website or something like that. There's a weird parameter in it. Someone typed it in wrong. But oftentimes pages break on your own site. You remove a page and you don't redirect it to another page. A combination of these factors means that on any given site you can find tens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of links sometimes because this is a very common scenario.
So that's why we fix broken links, to regain that link juice and get that ranking benefit that Google is looking for. So it's supposed to work and oftentimes it does work and a lot of times it's great. But there are times when it doesn't work.
Why it might not work
So what could be going on here during these times that it doesn't work? So here are four reasons why fixing broken links may not be effective in certain situations.
1. The links didn't count
First of all, the links may not have counted in the first place. The truth is there are a lot of links Google just doesn't count. These could be spam links, manipulative links, or links they find that are non-editorial. Just because a tool reports a link as being broken or pointing to a non-existent page doesn't mean that link actually has value. So that could be one reason why fixing the broken link may not work.
2. The links were low value
Second reason, Google may have counted those links, but they were considered low value or not fresh. Consider a link on a page that's a broken link from a page that's 10 years old. It doesn't have very much traffic or no traffic. It's buried at the bottom. No one even visits this page. Google doesn't even rank it.
Would you expect Google to attach a lot of value by fixing that broken link? Probably not. So a lot of times when you're fixing broken links, you may find low value, not fresh links, pages that aren't updated. They may not pass a lot of value and fixing them may not have a lot of benefit.
3. You redirected to an irrelevant URL
Third, and this is a really common reason, you fixed the link, but you redirected it to an irrelevant URL or a URL that's not as pertinent.
We see this a lot with sites that discontinue an entire section and they redirect everything to the homepage. They get rid of a subdomain. They redirect to a category page or something like that. Google will often report these as soft 404s, meaning they see your redirect, but they don't think the page that you're redirecting to is as relevant as the original page or the page that was broken or intended to be there in the first place.
So that's another reason why Google may not pass these link signals through these links when they see a soft 404 or they see you redirecting to a page that just isn't as relevant as the original.
4. Google may not rely on "live" links
The fourth reason it may not work, there's this phenomenon, this theory that Google may not rely on live links, that these link signals don't necessarily have to be there all the time for Google to pass value to them.
Now Google advises us, when we do redirects, to leave those redirects in place for a year. Now why would they say a year? The theory is that after a year any value in those link signals has already passed. Rand Fishkin noticed this phenomenon and named it ghost links several years ago, where links that no longer exist might already have passed their value.
So sometimes we don't really know how Google treats these older links. But sometimes it may not be necessary for links to be live for them to pass value, so fixing them doesn't really have an impact. Again, this is an area where we don't have a lot of insight into how Google actually works, but it's possible that the link signals have simply passed on their relevance anyway.
5 broken link building best practices
So what can we do about it? What can we do about these situations to maximize fixing old broken links on our website? So here are my five best practices.
1. DO fix broken links
One, yes, you should fix broken links. Do continue to fix broken links, because we don't know which links Google isn't counting, and there are several, often many instances where it does work and you can see a benefit.
Plus it's just a good user experience. When users are coming from one URL to another, they don't want to see broken pages, and those link signals can pass relevance and value to Google.
2. Prioritize pages with high authority
Two, prioritize pages and links with high authority. Your site may have thousands of broken links or millions of broken links. You don't need to fix all of them. But what you want to prioritize are the high value links, the pages with lots of links pointing to them, or links from pages that have lots of value themselves.
We score pages here at Moz on a value called Page Authority. A lot of SEO tools have different metrics that help rank pages based on links. So fix the pages with your highest number of links, your highest Page Authority or whatever score you're using, and prioritize links from pages themselves that also have high Page Authority. These are going to be your most valuable links to fix.
3. Prioritize links with freshness signals
Third, we want to prioritize links with freshness signals. We want to avoid these 10-year-old pages. Well, we don't necessarily need to avoid them, but we want to prioritize the most important pages. So what are freshness signals? Generally, we want to prioritize links from pages that get traffic themselves, that are regularly updated, that get links coming to them.
There are many, many different types of freshness signals. There's an old post I wrote a while back. We'll link to it in the transcript below. But we definitely want to prioritize those links that have the highest value.
4. Redirect to relevant URLs
Fourth, we want to make sure we're redirecting to relevant URLs. You don't want to redirect everything to your homepage or necessarily a category page that's off-topic.
A question to ask is: Does the page you're redirecting to rank for the same types of keywords as the old URL? Or would it provide a good user experience to someone coming from the old link, or would the user be confused? The closer you are in topicality to the original page, the more likely those link signals are to pass from one target onto another.
Ideally, you're linking to the exact same page and it just happens to be a broken page and you can fix it and it's relevant and everything is great. But in cases where you can't redirect to a relevant page, as close as possible or maybe you just shouldn't redirect at all, because 404s are okay. They're a natural part of the internet. It's not always bad to have a 404.
5. You don't need to fix every link
Which brings us to best practice number five, you don't have to fix every link. This happens all the time. Broken links are a natural part of the internet. Moz, if we go into our broken links report, we have tens of thousands of broken links. It would not be worth our time to fix every one of them, and it would be a waste of money and effort. But fixing the good ones, fixing the ones with high authority, with freshness signals, and redirecting to relevant URLs or the original URLs, those are the ones that are going to have value.
So you don't want to give your developers a list of 10,000 broken links and say, "Hey, fix all these." They're going to be mad at you, and you're not going to see the value out of it. So if you want some tips on how to fix broken links, how to find those high value links, we have a video from Dr. Pete on tips on exactly how to do that using Moz. You can use many other tools.
Google Search Console and others are great at this. So yes, fix those broken links. You don't have to fix all of them. That's how you're going to get the value. Leave us your tips in the comments below. Thanks, everybody.
Hey folks, this is Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist here at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. I want to talk today about a long-standing theory in search engine optimization, which generally goes like this: reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers will, over time, push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs. The recent Google Product Reviews Update is just one further step down this long path leading away from makers and manufacturers. Let’s dive in.
Who’s who?
Before we get started, we need at least a few definitions. What is the difference between a reviewer, aggregator, distributor, non-manufacturing retailer, and a “maker”?
Reviewer: A site like Tom’s Guide or PCMag uses its industry credibility and writers to produce comparison guides for products. They’re normally funded by advertising or affiliate agreements.
Aggregators: While I have no clear sitewide example, these are content providers that rely on the ratings of other sites to determine the content, whole cloth.
Non-manufacturing retailers: While there is some overlap here as many retailers have gotten into the manufacturing game, these are sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock.
Makers: These are businesses that both make and sell their products. They can be big brands like Blue Buffalo and Apple, or smaller businesses like Hardcore Hammers or Eley Hose Reels.
Why should we care?
This is a fair question. Do we really care about the performance of maker/manufacturers on Google as some sort of moral or ethical measure? I think we should, so let me give you just a few brief reasons why before examining the evidence of the squeeze:
Bias filtering: Each class of site (reviewer, aggregator, retailer, and maker) have a different set of biases that can only be overcome by weighing each one against another. Reviewers and aggregators tend to be paid by ads or affiliate agreements, which can incentivize dishonesty. Retailers are paid by the sale of products on their shelves, thus they also have an incentive to be dishonest in rankings. And makers themselves have a self-bias. It’s the middle of the Venn Diagram of these data sources that makes good decisions possible.
Innovation: I wouldn’t be the first to point out the perverse system of startup funding, which has — at best — an unbalanced impact on who and what gets produced. If startups that produce a truly amazing product must pay their pound of flesh to the gatekeepers (reviewers, aggregators, and retailers) from the offset because direct, organic e-commerce is no longer an option, there’s an unnatural filter on what is produced and by who.
Finally, and this is the most important reason we should care: Google has a vested interest in pushing maker/manufacturers out of their organic results because they represent a massive advertising market. I want to be clear, here: I’m not accusing Google of intentionally doing this. Proving intent is one of the hardest things you can do without actual admission. However, if it is part of a growing pattern of Google pushing businesses out of organic, making them rely on ads, we should pay attention.
Now, I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most exciting subject. Most websites aren’t maker/manufacturers, so you may be tempted to dismiss this research as simply irrelevant to your activities as an SEO or webmaster. However, I think that it’s important we understand directional trends that are driven economically and algorithmically in Google — it’s a way of thinking and planning, a strategy wrapped in a cautionary tale.
Is the trend real?
While access to data on Google and its algorithm has never been easy to obtain, there are good sources for historical SERPs. As a brief side note, I want to emphasize the importance of rank tracking, as it remains a primary source of information well beyond where your site currently ranks for a keyword. It allows us to investigate much larger trends, behaviors, and updates, all of which help us do our jobs better.
So, what does the data show? I took 50 singular, superlative product terms in the form of “best {product type}” and accessed the top 10 search results for that term in the month of January over the last nine years. I specifically chose singular terms like “best blender” so as not to intentionally bias the search results towards rankings where the intent was clearly for comparisons. (Asking “what is the best blender?” versus “what are the best blenders?” is an important distinction.)
Thus, we’re looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021. Each website that ranked in these cohorts was labeled by hand to identify whether a site was a reviewer, aggregator, non-manufacturing retailer, or maker/manufacturer.
I compiled a number of statistics with relation to the categorization of a site and its likelihood to rank. The first, most straightforward question to ask is whether there is any “squeeze” at all, so to speak.
Are maker/manufacturers less likely to rank for singular product terms in 2021 than they were in 2013? The results are, frankly, stunning.
Between 2013 and 2016, roughly 50% of the SERPs collected in January included at least one maker/manufacturer. This is a very important data point, in my estimation, because it reveals that the search result was — at least in principle — capable of delivering the user to the answer of “what is the best {product}” rather than through an intermediary (non maker/manufacturers). Given the expectation of at least some diversity in results, a reasonable user should expect that on some occasions, Google could actually identify what is (based on some set of metrics) the best product of a certain type and include it in the top 10.
Something dramatic happened between January 2016 and 2017, but there are no clear updates that would target just this type of site and type of query, at least from a cursory review of update histories. Nevertheless, we see a stunning drop to just 15% (from 50%) in a single year. The trend continued such that by 2020 and 2021, out of the 50 terms and 500 rankings, only one was a maker/manufacturer. One.
In order to further confirm the trend, I followed the average (mean) ranking position for maker/manufacturers that were in the top 10 over that same time period. What’s interesting in this equation is that we see a much smoother line between 2017 and 2020 in rankings drop for maker/manufacturers. While many just dropped out of the top 10 in the first year (2017), the losses were steady over the next few years.
This additional information indicates that the trend is continuing, and that other maker/manufacturers who are holding on to rankings for these types of generic terms may not have much time left.
But there is another insult to injury in this trend, which was well articulated by Dr. Pete in 2015’s “The Incredible Shrinking SERP”. You see, once the mean position for maker/manufacturers passed the number 8 spot, they were at great risk of being removed from the first page altogether.
By 2019, for the same set of terms, the average SERP had nine or fewer results. This meant that the remaining maker/manufacturer pages were no longer on page 1. Effectively, 0% of maker/manufacturers benefited directly from organic traffic for these singular, superlative terms.
When considering the many reasons why this might occur aside from the simplest explanation that Google decided it didn’t trust the maker/manufacturer websites, the thought came to mind that perhaps users just prefer comparison pages. This would be a charitable explanation and, as an information query, users would want to find a variety of sources that help them make an informed decision. However, I think there are several problems with this assessment.
Let’s take the example of “best mattress topper”, one of the 50 queries tested as part of this project. The first clue that there is more to the story than simply trying to include good review and comparison content is that Google chooses to include non-advertisement products in the search results! Instead of pages, they use a carousel.
There are several important points to make about this inclusion of a product carousel:
They prove that Google is aware, at least to some degree, that users would like to know exactly what the best topper is and be able to click immediately to that product.
Two of the first four in the carousel are not mentioned at all, anywhere, in the top 10 comparison reviews, while later items are.
They do not appear to be ordered with any relation to popularity, rating, or relevance to the query.
They indicate that Google has significant entity information on the products in question.
It’s a strange occurrence that Google knows users want the product (the answer to the question, not links to pages that answer the question), and that they have the product information but choose not to use it to either link directly to the maker/manufacturer, OR to rank the product carousel based on data extracted from the top reviews and comparisons that fill the organic rankings. But I think it gets worse.
Google’s product review update
Google announced an update that would target reviews and comparisons to ensure quality results. Among the many expectations listed in the update were knowledge about the product, what sets it apart from competitors, and providing quantitative measures. There is something incredibly important about this type of request of webmasters:
Either Google is in the position where it knows this information and will be able to validate it in an effort to determine which reviews and comparison sites are trustworthy,
Or Google is in the position where it does not know this information, and will only be able to compare this information from site to site in order to identify trustworthiness.
If Google is in scenario #1, then they have the capability to aggregate the results from the current review and comparison pages and determine the truthfulness of their statements (insofar as they are not merely opinion). If they’re in scenario #2, they have absolutely no business judging reviews and comparison sites until they’ve elevated their algorithmic capabilities, in order to use comparative data to determine truthfulness, thus warranting a move up to position #1!
In any scenario, Google should be capable of extracting the answer — or at least handful of answers — to these queries using their entity knowledge, product knowledge, link graph, and information extraction capabilities, which allow them to send traffic directly to the makers and manufacturers rather than intermediaries.
For example, we know that the two companies with the most listings in the top 10 reviews and comparisons are Tempur-Pedic (8 top 10 listings) and Viscosoft (7 top 10 listings). Tempur-Pedic does enjoy the second listing in the product carousel but that, of course, does not link to Tempur-Pedic’s product but rather to another Google listing of products filled with ads.
We have a word for this in our marketing lexicon: nothing more than a glorified interstitial.
Perhaps Viscosoft has a more egregious position. Despite nearly edging out the top position among the organic comparison sites, their products occur nowhere within the 24 products in the product carousel, despite having the highest ranking maker/manufacturer page for best mattress topper at #18!
Maybe they aren’t in this supposed “organic product carousel” because of this:
Why would Google ever choose to add a product to their carousel if they can’t ultimately make money off of it? The Viscosoft mattress topper search result page, as of this writing, has no ads.
The sad reality: Google hasn’t learned its lesson
Despite congressional inquiry and incredible research performed by Rand Fishkin and many others proving that Google is doing everything they can to keep you on Google, it appears that they are still intent on capturing potential customers into a giant click jail where the only way out is to click on an ad. But what is more egregious in this case is not that Google is merely keeping you on their site, but that they have a non-ad-labeled carousel called “Popular products” that clicks through to a special advertising experience search result (which we can trigger with specific search parameters, all of which is documented below.
Step 1: Popular products
Step 2: Specialized ad experience interstitial
Step 3: You can change the query, but retain the right bar ad experience.
Takeaways
I wish there was some good news for takeaways, but I just don’t really see much in the way of things getting better for maker/manufacturers. There are strategies, of course, but most of them will involve getting other sites to sell or market your product rather than your own.
The new review guidelines explicitly state that you should compare products to their competitors, which is a huge legal risk for most maker/manufacturers. This leaves them in a really difficult situation: either try to get your product reviewed by honest sites (which is an incredibly difficult task often requiring giving away free products that then must be acknowledged in the review), or spending money advertising or selling on major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon.
But if there is one thing we do know, it’s that there is no reason to believe that Google will actually list the best product or its site in the search results any time soon — there is too much money to be made by putting Google Ads between the user and the product.
If you’ve ever had the privilege of being present for a baby’s first joyful encounter with a household pet, you’ll have noticed the profound wonder and excitement of the little one’s reaction. Once upon a time, that was each of us beaming and bouncing up and down with the thrill of meeting our first dog or cat.
Don’t lose that joy — be like these Canadian women watching whales from their garden:
From our earliest days, most of us have simply loved animals. We fill children’s books with tales of them and choose them as life companions. In many cultures, animals are sources of sacred power, and in all parts of the world, wildlife is absolutely essential to balanced ecosystems.
67% of American households now include pets — that’s the majority of your consumer base signalling just how much animals matter to them. When local business owners and marketers communicate with most customers about animals, shared affinity is ready-built into the exchange, drawing on feelings of warmth, admiration, responsibility, concern, and happiness. These dearly-held sentiments can be sturdy building blocks of benefit for other-than-human creatures, communities, and your business. This is deeply good marketing, which can yield personal satisfaction, press, links, citations, loyalty, and positive social change.
Today, we’ll consider eight options for honoring the love both you and your customers have in common when it comes to animals, plus tips for weaving your efforts into your local business marketing strategy.
All animal-centric activities, great and small
Almost any local business will find one or more actionable ideas here to demonstrate care for animals.
1. Expand your welcome to customers’ pets
Where local health codes and business models permit, make provisions for pets at your place of business. Before the pandemic, dog-friendly dining patios, water stations, lodgings, and shopping center-based dog parks were on the rise and can return once safety does. Put a bowl of dog treats outside your storefront to make your business a memorable highlight of neighbors’ daily dog walks, keep a stash of them behind the counter if pets are permitted indoors, and take note of the dairy delivery drivers who toss snacks to dogs when bringing groceries to customers in the pacific northwest.
A kiosk of free doggy cleanup bags could be a draw to your door and a boon to the neighborhood. Bring customers inside when it’s safe again to do so with a feature wall of local pet photos. Hold contests that center pets or feature pet-centric prizes, or host a pet-based event. Meanwhile, if your business is located in a neighborhood far from large pet supply stores, consider whether a pet section makes sense in your inventory.
Every year, new studies are published indicating that when pets interact with people, humans benefit from lowered cortisol and blood pressure levels and a variety of improvements in states of whole body well-being. As a shopper, I can say that my household loves visiting businesses with resident pets. Prior to stay-at-home orders, some of our most memorable shopping excursions were to the nursery with the noble-looking Australian shepards, the craft store with the little terriers, and the farm stand with the dachshunds. To-do lists sounded like this:
“We need to buy mulch. Oh, and we’ll get to see Pushkin the little red dog!”
Companies are always seeking out methods of creating memorable experiences, and friendly cats and dogs on-site can be instant magic in this regard.
At Moz, even before we were working remotely, honored staff pets added calm and pleasure to company meetings, with an established policy for animal etiquette and safety practices Mozzers agreed to in order to bring their companions to the office. Even at companies that can’t have animals on the premises as a regular thing, bring-your-pet-to-work days can signal to staff that a brand is sensitive to work/life balance once it becomes safe again for people to return to offices. Evaluate how a company you’re marketing might safely incorporate animal companions into the workplace for the happiness of both staff and customers.
Many businesses have the space to hang a bird feeder and water dish or set up a bird bath. Nesting boxes for birds and bats are small and can be fitted into all sorts of nooks and eaves around your building in any spot where droppings won’t be a nuisance.
If your business is lucky enough to have the space, planter boxes can provide flowers, fruit, seeds, nectar, pollen, and nesting materials for birds, butterflies, bees, and other pollinators.. Call a local nursery to ask which native plants will fit in your containers and support winged visitors. If you have more space and can plant a hedge, you’ll be making a home for many types of birds and insects, and may even offer protection to rabbits, raccoons, possums, and other small animals.
Well-planned Main Streets and shopping districts can provide more than just sidewalks for humans and streets for cars — they can be places where hummingbirds sip from flower to flower, bees gather pollen, butterflies migrate, and herbivores find forage. Take your seat at city planning meetings and become an advocate for green space in commercial areas, bird-friendly windows, accessible waterways, and other ecological development strategies.
4. Sponsor wildlife crossings, corridor, and rescue programs
Millions of domestic and native animals lose their lives on our roads every year, but wildlife corridors that create safe roaming paths through fragmented areas can reduce animal-related car accidents by as much as 80%. If your heart sinks every time you see a dead animal on the highway, talk to your city council about planning wildlife crossings and corridors in your community and then either help build them or have your brand sponsor their construction. Extra credit to you if you can get your customers involved, too.
Meanwhile, if you’ve ever had to call a wildlife rescue and rehabilitation number after encountering an injured animal on the road, having a bird stun itself by crashing into a window, or finding unfledged nestlings on the ground, you know what a lifeline these programs can be. Do some research on agencies and groups in your community that contribute this vital work and offer volunteer hours or financial support.
5. Sponsor guide dog and companion animal programs
Dogs that act as the guides, protectors, and friends of differently-abled people are heroes, and it takes a great deal of care, time, and money to train them for their work. Additionally, many communities have programs that bring pets to children’s hospitals, elder care homes, and other centers for the important benefits humans can experience just from interacting with a loving, friendly animal.
If you’re looking for a sponsorship opportunity that can make a world of difference in people’s everyday lives, research these types of programs and volunteer or sponsor them.
6. Sponsor no-kill animal shelters
When animal lovers seek pet adoption, many insist on visiting only no-kill shelters in order to make a statement consistent with their humane values and to avoid the trauma of having to choose among animals who may be killed if not brought home.
If your region has a no-kill shelter, it’s not only a good thing to contribute to, but can also be a source of fostering community goodwill when you allow these programs to place donation jars at registers.
7. Offer plant-based and cruelty-free options
There’s a reason even fast-food franchises are offering veggie burgers now, and I see the source of it in my own family where 65% of the young people are vegetarians or vegans. Meanwhile, nearly all of them actively seek out self-care products labeled as cruelty-free.
Even if your business isn’t staffed by herbivores or animal rights activists, you can include them in the welcome you’re building so that all community members have something to eat, drink, and purchase. Nielsen found in 2018 that 39% of Americans are upping the amount of plant-based dishes in their diets, and it’s my belief that these numbers will continue to rise. Now is the time to be sure you’re not overlooking this growing consumer base who will reward your care for their needs with patronage.
If a deep regard for animals is shared by your company and customers, there is likely no better cause to support than the protection of all forms of water, on which we all depend for life. Cleaning up and defending the future of streams, rivers, ponds, wetlands, lakes, and oceans is challenging, vital work for us all.
Take an active role, and invite customers to learn and change with you, in removing pollutants and plastics from water sources, abandoning oil pipelines in favor of green energy, replacing forever-products with biodegradable ones, replacing many ecologically-disastrous man-made dams with biodiverse beaver dam habitat, encouraging local water boards to include Indigenous leadership in sustainable community planning, protecting remaining wetlands from development, and providing safe drinking water to all communities.
In some cultures and faiths, acts of private charity and kindness are meant to be kept secret. At a corporate level, though, social good can be exponentially expanded when brands are willing to take public stands on matters of conscience. The larger your business, the louder your voice inviting participation in works and causes that honor animals.
Once you’ve determined how you’ll be incorporating care for other creatures into your business plan, here are 10 ways to get the word out to the community you serve:
Publish optimized website content, based on keyword research and community interest, to explain your brand’s animal-centric activities.
Ask the organizations you support to interview someone at your company to explain why your staff/customers are volunteering/donating to this particularly worthy cause. These groups will also likely be looking for content opportunities. Volunteering to be the subject of an interview can expand their reach and hopefully deliver a good link or two to your website, as well.
Reach out to local reporters to let them know that this is an angle of your business operations that the public might enjoy reading about; we could all use some good news these days in the local paper!
If appropriate, create image and video content about company pets, wildlife stewardship, and local ecological efforts, demonstrating your business’s participation and inviting customers to enjoy taking part.
Promote content that you and others have published about your activities on your social media channels.
Partner with other local business owners with similar policies and programs to share work and send customers to one another.
Write some animal-centric Google posts on your Google Business Profile
Assess whether Google My Business Categories or attributes could be added to your listing to represent animal-related features of your business.
Add photos of staff pets or wildlife features at your location to your GMB listing if they add to the welcoming ambiance of your place of business.
Wag more
Watch the above video by a local business and you’ll see how almost any company can make memorable, emotional connections with the people they serve thanks to a widely-shared love of animals. Actions that celebrate, rather than exploit, our animal relations surely fall under the phenomenon of kindness as currency with multiple studies showing how people are more apt to act with generosity of spirit when they see others do so.
When you’re tasked with marketing, you’re always looking for that extra reason to be chosen by customers. 73% of people say they care about the company they buy from, not just the product. The furry paw poised on your knee right now, the purr emanating from behind your laptop, the songs of birds outside your window could be calling you to connect with customers in an authentic new way, over your joint, abiding care for animals. These days, who wouldn’t welcome a chance to wag more?
Looking for more authentic local search marketing tips to make your community a better place to live and work? Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.
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We hope you’ve enjoyed this series on SEO and accessibility. In the final installment, Cooper shows you how the technical SEO strategies you implement across your site can help make it more perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to the latest edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cooper Hollmaier. I've been doing SEO since 2016, and today I work for a large outdoor retailer helping our technical SEO strategy come to life. Thank you so much for attending this series on SEO and accessibility.
I hope that you've gained a broad perspective and new tips and tricks for creating content that not only is resonating with your audience, performs well in search, but is also accessible to more people. Today we're going to talk about technical SEO and accessibility.
Technical SEO and accessibility
Let's dive in. Last time we talked about Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and you might remember that the four principles of WCAG are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
Perceivable
As a technical SEO, you're probably most concerned with perceivable because your day-to-day operations, your day-to-day work stream involves making sure that the pages, the content, the experiences you're creating are accessible to search engines and perceivable to search engines.
A lot of times when we go through SEO recommendations or SEO audits, I hear a lot of common themes, like the header tag is baked into the image and so a search engine can't see it, or the content I'm producing is visible to bots but it's not visible to people. These are issues with base level perception. I want you to take that mindset and consider if you apply that to your whole audience as well. So can all of your people that are hoping to engage with your service or product or experience, are they able to perceive all the things you have to offer at a base level?
1. Styles
Some things you might be thinking would be similar to what you would be seeing in this audit, like: Is all of my text on the page visible? Is it active text? Is it native to the page, so can I select it and copy and paste it, or is it baked into the image and unreachable by assistive technology or browsers or what have you? You might also be thinking: Is the color contrast to my background and my text, is it the right contrast?
Is there enough clarity and crispness between my layout elements? If things seem a little bit fuzzy or it's not quite clear that something is accessible to a search engine and a user, go back to the drawing board and figure out how to make both of those things work out well.
2. Rich media
We also like to add images, text, video, and audio to the pages that we're building for our customers. It's important that these rich elements, now that we're kind of past the basic text and the styling elements, the rich elements we're putting on the page are perceivable by all of your users as well. There's a couple of things we can do to make that happen. For images, giving them a text alternative and providing something that is in addition to that imagery will help it be seen by a screen reader and understood by someone who has a visual disability.
Also naming things with human-friendly names versus "DSC1352.JPEG" is going to help search engines as well as assistive technology see that image and understand what it is. On-page context, it's also important that you put images on pages that add value. You want to enlighten a user with some additional content to give them a little bit more of a feeling or give them some more context on what you're talking about. Add images for value, not just to show up in Google image search.
What about video? So video is a little bit different. Video has a series of moving images. So every time I think about movement, I think to myself, "How can I make sure that if a user wants to stop this movement, they can?"
Having clear playback controls is crucial when we're talking about accessibility as well as having a great video player experience for any user. In addition, synchronous equivalents for those text alternatives. We talked about images having text alternatives. Videos need to have text alternatives as well, but they need to be synchronized to time with that video. Otherwise they won't make sense in context.
Then making sure that they're distinguishable. This is the same between video and audio. We want to make sure that the foreground and the background are easily distinguishable from one another. If your video feels muddy, if your audio feels muddy and it takes me straining my ear or straining my eyes to be able to see that content and understand what's happening, you need to be a little bit more crisp, a little bit more clear on those two distinctions.
Then text transcripts. Just like you need closed captions for videos, for audio you want to have a text transcript, so if I'm maybe in a loud place and I can't hear the audio or I don't have my headphones plugged in or I needed to use assistive technology, I'm able to access that audio.
These are all things that you'll be seeing as you're reviewing code as a technical SEO and you should be aware of.
If you don't have these things going on, on your website, I would empower you to ask those questions, the hard questions like: Hey, is there a text alternative to this image? How will a person with a visual disability, how will a person with an auditory disability access these things?
3. Page structure
Three and four are about page structure and semantic HTML. So this is a little bit less about is this perceivable and is it kind of understandable.
It's kind of grazing the understandable, but it should be a little bit about perception, too. Having a bunch of H1s on a page, as you can imagine, a search engine might perceive as very confused, right? They're like, okay, there's a bunch of H1s on this page. I'm not really sure what this page is about. Adding structure and cascading headings to signify parent-child relationships is going to help your content be a little bit more perceivable. It's going to be easier to understand what's happening.
4. Semantic HTML
Same thing with semantic HTML. We tend to put lots of divs and spans and unidentifiable elements in our HTML. But by marking them up in more appropriate ways, so that we understand what their meaning is, understand what those tags contain, whether it's navigation or forms or tables, providing that extra layer of information and understandability is going to allow search engines and assistive technology to be able to parse through those things, to allow them to perceive the things you're putting on your page that are different from one another and provide a richer experience.
Operable
Okay, so we're able to perceive the content. But how do we make sure that it's operable?
1. HTML sitemaps
A couple of SEO recommendations that I often see people making are build an HTML sitemap and put breadcrumbs on your page. A lot of times you might get some pushback from that. The HTML site map is super important we know for SEO, for discoverability of those pages deep in our website's hierarchy.
We know that breadcrumbs are also pretty equally important for discoverability. Both of these elements help users with assistive technology better navigate the website. The HTML site map allows for if your menu doesn't include all the pages on your website or if it's confusing or you're using JavaScript or some other technology that's not accessible to my tech stack.
2. Breadcrumbs
Then breadcrumbs allow me to parse up and down the particular let's say it's a product search page on an e-commerce website without having to go back to the menu and then parse through every single menu item again. So these two are super important for navigation but also especially for people who are navigating with a keyboard and using assistive technology.
3. Develop keyboard-first
Then a non-SEO thing but important nonetheless and relatable, develop your website and your experience keyboard first. Not everyone has a mouse or the ability to use a mouse because of a movement disability or because of an impairment or because of a lack of technology or hardware. So make sure you develop keyboard first, and you're going to kind of encapsulate more of those people that you're looking to encapsulate with your audience.
Understandable
1. Language
Understandable. So we talk about in international SEO, when we're dealing with different countries and different languages, how important it is to use the HTML on our page to signify what the language of the page is. It helps search engines provide the right results in the right maybe national or international context. It also helps screen readers read your content aloud in the right language.
2. Navigational layout
Then navigational layout and interstitials I think are pretty common, but nobody likes a navigation or a layout of a website that's confusing. The easier you make it, the easier it is for people to convert or do what you're looking for them to do with this website, whether it's learn, whether it's buy, whether it's engage in a service. That's easier when the navigation and layout is streamlined and we're not using different words in different places to mean the same thing. It's even more important for people with assistive technology.
3. Interstitials
Interstitials, nobody likes those pop-ups in our face, that don't allow us to browse the rest of the website. Google doesn't love them either. But especially people with assistive technology, if we're not treating those pop-ups in the right way, we're going to end up in a scenario where users may be in a keyboard trap and they can't get out of the interstitial, or they don't understand that an interstitial is even put up on the page. So it's important to be very mindful when using interstitials.
Robust
Last but not least is robust. How do we make sure that the content we're putting on the page is compatible for a large variety of devices and scenarios?
1. Validation
Just using proper HTML is a big way to do this. You can use a validator and you can look at your HTML, your CSS, and your JSON-LD. Creating the right code and especially when you're using semantic HTML as well providing meaning to that code, you're going to have a lot better experience and everything your building is more digestible.
2. Responsive
Is your website responsive? You should be doing this already. But if you're not, make sure it's operating on a mobile and a desktop and a tablet device and the layout stays the same, it's just maybe resized or re-imaged in a different way.
3. Interactable
Make sure it's interactable. If a user wants to be able to zoom in because they have a visual disability or they want to be able to change the colors, does your technology on your website allow them to do that? It should. If you do these three things on the bottom, I think it's going to do a lot of heavy lifting and you're going to have to do a lot less work because you've kind of built in the framework, the foundation to be accessible.
That's technical SEO and accessibility. If you have more questions or want some validation tools, there are some on the right-hand side here, or you can hit me up on Twitter @cooperhollmaier for some more advice. But thank you so much for listening to Whiteboard Friday and accessibility along with SEO. I hope that you take this and you become more and more inclusive in the way that you're doing SEO in the future.
