Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Day Two Learnings From the Three-Ring MozCon Circus

Day one of MozCon Virtual gave us a great start to this year’s conference – from surviving the COVID news agenda, to the science of purchasing power, to game-changing ways to use the Google Search Console API. If day one was a preview of things to come, I knew we were all in for a treat as we headed into day two!

With that said, day two has arrived!

Oh, and before I forget, remember that dance breaks are not just okay, but encouraged at MozCon.

Ross Simmonds – Why Marketers Should Think More Like Investors To Drive Content Results

In this session, Ross talked about the parallels between content marketing/SEO and the world of investing. I am a lover of analogies, so I was excited to see how Ross was going to show us how an investment mindset can be applied to content marketing and SEO. As someone who loves SEO, and investing, I was pumped for this one.

Ross began by telling a story about his investment in General Motors stock. He put a lot of money into the stock…and it crashed. Ross had not done enough research into GM before making his investment.

The lesson: you need to invest time into doing your homework! You need to understand the market before you jump in. The same applies to SEO.

We all hope that our investments will deliver a return, but in 2020 we were all tested during the pandemic. Many companies put the investment of SEO on pause...and that was a mistake. Even during a recession, people still have a strong desire for content and information.

As Ross explained, every piece of content you create is an asset, and to see the most from our investments, we need to “invest more — guess less”.

Content presents money printing capabilities, and major companies are starting to realize this.

Needless to say, Ross left us all wanting to diversify our content portfolios!

Areej AbuAli — Taking Charge of Your Indexability: How to Optimize and Prioritize Your Technical Work

If you’re ready to take control of your website indexing, this session is for you! With a focus on aggregators and classifieds, Areej shared advice on how to best reduce index bloat for large websites.

She acknowledged that, while we are fully in control of how Google crawls and indexes our site, it can feel scary!

So if we’re suggesting audits, let’s focus on recommendations that can have an impact. Let’s “drop the 100-page audit!”. Websites do not (and most probably should not) need to have every single page indexed. Instead, focus on indexing pages that have the potential to provide good search results.

Honestly, there were so many amazing insights from this presentation, this is one you’ll want to revisit!

Joy Hawkins — To Post or Not to Post: What We Learned From Analyzing Over 1,000 Google Posts

What value do Google Posts have, and how should the average SMB prioritize them? Joy Hawkins dove headfirst into the data from two studies to answer these questions.

Joy opened up by sharing a Mario Kart analogy. Joy is a super competitive person. She shared how she followed a similar approach for this study as she did when she was working towards beating Dave DiGregorio at Mario Kart. Let’s just say that it required a lot of research, tracking, and analysis.

Joy shared a disclaimer and some initial considerations for the presentations data:

  • The data set only had a total of 36 conversions

  • Clicks in Google Analytics DO NOT equal clicks in Google My Business Insights

Study #1

The first study Joy covered analyzed over 1,000 Google Posts to see what types perform better based on clicks and conversions while measuring the impact of various features such as stock photos, emojis, titles, and more. Here are the types of Google Posts that Joy analyzed:

  • Offer Posts

  • COVID Posts

  • Event Posts

  • Update Posts

Joy also summarized the worst-performing post types. And the winners are:

  • Reviews

  • Seasonal/Holiday

  • Products (or services)

  • Who We Are (bios)

Study #2

The second study looked at whether posting on Google has any influence on where your business ranks in the local pack. The conclusion? Google Posts had no measurable impact on rankings.

Joy summarized by providing a “Successful Google Post Blueprint” — this is one to save for later!

Joyce CollardΓ© — Maximize Your Conversions: Harnessing Full-Funnel Optimization for B2B Success

In this session, Joyce covered the long sales cycles for B2B businesses that pose a unique set of challenges for converting visitors into coveted users. Success requires a strategic approach that goes beyond the landing page to include your entire site.

Joyce walked through strategies for three tried-and-true methods for increasing your conversion rate and winning more business:

  • Goal #1: Attracting users to your website

  • Goal #2: Giving users the best experience and leading them to conversion points

  • Goal #3: Tracking success and encouraging return visitors

Casie Gillette — Counterintuitive Content: How New Trends Have Disrupted Years of Bad Advice

I love the honesty in this tweet from Casie!

In her presentation, Casie looked at content from an entirely different perspective and talked about how you can start creating content on your own terms, because really, there's no one way to do content marketing.

According to Casie, counterintuitive marketing is “the idea of bucking trends to do what is right for YOUR site”. Casie showed that more content is NOT always best. Sometimes optimizing existing content can be far more powerful than creating new content.

There is no one size fits all solution to content marketing. Things change and sometimes you need to think counterintuitively.

How do we do this? Casie suggests a few focus areas:

Performance

  • What were your goals and did you hit them?

  • Utilize Google Search Console to find opportunities

Competitors

  • Don’t copy competitors, but pay close attention to what they are doing for ideas. What is working well that we can do better?

  • Utilize social media platforms, such as LinkedIn where you can gather intel on the ads that your competitors are running.

Search and keywords

  • Don’t forget to go back each year and re-evaluate the keywords that you are targeting

  • Remember, that just because something is driving traffic, it doesn’t mean that it’s the right traffic.

Brie E Anderson — Reporting for Duty: Why You Need to Start Using GA4 TODAY

Despite some pre-conference nerves, Brie absolutely blew us away with all her insights!

She also challenged us to get started with GA4 now — before we have to.

Brie told us that in GA4 we’ll find:

  • EASY, ADVANCED, TRACKING

  • BADASS (& CUSTOM) VISUALS

  • GOOGLE MAY TELL US SECRETS

But also highlighted that it is NOT a replacement for Universal Analytics, so you need to track both.

You might ask, then what are the benefits of using GA4? I’ll let some of Brie’s fans outline some highlights:

What are you waiting for? Get your website into GA4!

Rob Ousbey — Beyond the Basics: 5 SEO Tricks for Uncovering Advanced Insights from Your SEO Data

In this session, Rob showed us how to breathe new life into our standard SEO data, and we walked away with more advanced insights — and new tools — that are sure to impress our team (and our boss!)

And what are the five SEO tricks?

1. Find link opportunities from the SERP

2. Group ranking keywords to spot split opportunities

3. Tag URLs to find real issues

4. Tag GA for category-level insights

5. Tag competitors’ top URLs for ideas

Be sure to check out Rob’s presentation in the MozCon video bundle when it’s out on Friday for even more amazing tips!

Britney Muller — The Cold Hard Truth about CTR and Other Common Metrics

Britney closed out day two by showing us how to quash our reporting woes and make easy work of identifying exactly why your website’s performance changed.

She asked us what makes superforecasters — a group that has predicted future events with a great deal of accuracy — so successful. Before giving us the answer, she reminded us that it’s really easy to be led astray by data — but had some tips and tools to share to help make sure we don’t get too off track.

So, what made superforecasters so successful? Their ability to rethink everything. To do the same, Britney challenged us to:

  • Think like a scientist

  • Define our identity in terms of values, not opinions

  • Seek out information that goes against our views

Day two — done!

Wow! Only one more day left for this year's MozCon! What stood out the most for you on day two? Tell us on Twitter with #MozCon!

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Tuesday, July 13, 2021

Come One, Come All! The MozCon Virtual 2021 Day One Recap

Our favorite time of the year is here! The second ever MozCon Virtual kicked off yesterday with attendees from over 35 countries. There were networking rooms, photo booth pics, and live tweets. It almost felt like we were back together in one place (just minus the donuts).

Lack of donuts aside, everyone was super excited to be back at MozCon for another action-packed conference. Day one’s speakers brought their A-game and really got people thinking.

For those of you who may have missed it, or those of you who had a hard time keeping up with this three ring circus, here's a quick recap!

Sarah Bird — Welcome to MozCon

Moz's fearless leader started MozCon Virtual off with a bang! She introduced Moz Group, a result of the merger with J2. Then, she announced two product releases — one in alpha and one in beta! Both will be further explained by Mozzers later in the week.

Sarah’s introduction concluded with a moving tribute to Russ Jones. You can share your own memories with Russ or donate to his family at RememberingRussJones.com. 

Shannon McGuirk — Lessons in Surviving the Covid News Agenda & What it Means for the Future of Digital PR

As always, Shannon started out strong with some radical transparency. She walked us through Aira’s journey through COVID and how it changed everything. 

In past MozCon presentations, Shannon has shown us the outreach strategies that Aira has depended on for several years, but 2020 threw everyone for a loop. In the first two weeks of lockdown, Aira lost 50% of their revenue. Something had to change.

Actually, everything had to change.

We got insight into Aira’s three-prong, PR future-proofing system that developed as a result:

  1. Ideation: using the ROR framework of relevancy, opinion, resolution

  2. Production: create proven frameworks that can be customized for your client

  3. Promotion: through accessing, communicating, and having perspective

Shannon gave us the nitty gritty of how this system works for Aira, complete with actual photos of their best-performing, always-ready frameworks. Honestly, it felt like we were seeing something confidential, but we were here for it.

Flavilla Fongang — The Science of Purchasing Behavior: How to Use it Effectively to Attract & Convert More Prospects Into Customers

Flavilla was ready to prescribe some tactical medicine to those looking to increase their conversion rate. She jumped right in with explaining how our brains function. Ya know, limbic system, neocortex, and reptilian brain? Don’t worry, we didn’t either!

She broke them down as the emotional brain (limbic), rational (neocortex), and fight or flight (reptilian). Then Flavilla asked the big question: which brain has the most impact on buying decisions? The answer (which shocked most) was the reptilian brain.

Flavilla took us through six ways the reptilian brain can be stimulated.

But it wouldn’t be a MozCon presentation without something that can be put into action today. Flavilla dropped all sorts of tactics to test: putting the CTA closer to the consumer’s picture, using the power of the gaze, tapping into negative emotion, showing contrast (think before and after), and putting the most important information first.

We could have listened to Flavilla talk all day long. Hearing her take on buyer behavior was a bit like looking into a glass ball and getting answers to all of our questions. We can’t wait to put it into action!

Dr. Pete Meyers — Rule Your Rivals: From Data to Action

Always a crowd pleaser, Dr. Pete showed off a new Moz tool currently in Beta: True Competitor. True Competitor is a project Moz has been working on for the last few years, and this year it’s finally ready to take the stage! (You can request early access to True Competitor here.)

Dr. Pete used the new tool to remind us that those we assume to be our competitors sometimes aren’t actually our competition at all. Instead of focusing on who we think we’re losing traffic to, we need to be focused on who is preventing us from making money.

Using the new True Competitor tool, and a few cool search modifiers, Dr. Pete was able to find some opportunity keywords to test out.

The process looked a bit like this:

  • Use True Competitor to identify potential keywords

  • Use search modifiers to find the ranking pages for the competition

  • Find Moz’s current ranking content

  • Create content using the similar keywords

  • Link to the most updated and relevant content

We knew that Dr. Pete would bring the heat, but it’s safe to say he outdid himself this year. 

Noah Learner — Game-Changing Ways to Use the Google Search Console API

This first-time MozCon speaker came ready to play! Right away, Noah gave us some perspective on the actual limitations of Google Search Console. As most of us know, Search Console only gives you access to 1,000 rows. Well, Noah knew that there was a lot more data to be seen and started dabbling with the API.

Apparently this led to a 15-hour journey down the GSC rabbit hole, as Noah started working on creating a custom Google Search Console tool using Big Query and Google Data Studio. This tool, Explorer for Search, has already gotten some buzz from those in the industry.

Honestly, if you look at the Twitter feed for #MozCon, there aren’t a ton of tweets because nobody could keep up with him! Noah moved rapidly through exactly how he built Explorer for Search with his team, and how they’re using it.

Almost instantly, Noah and his team found over $300,000 of keywords that weren’t available in Search Console. They did this through building in position sorting, top of funnel/ bottom of funnel sorting, branded vs. non branded filters, and more.

We cannot wait to play with this and get started with the Search Console API!

Dana DiTomaso — Build for Search: Modern Web Dev That Puts SEO First

A long time MozCon favorite, Dana DiTomaso put on her coach’s hat for this year’s session. Far too often, we find ourselves in awkward situations that require us to scrap all of our work and start over again.

Dana ran into this way too many times, so she and her team came up with a better solution. She was ready to make us, and our web dev processes, agile(ish).

She showed us her team's entire process from presenting keyword research (IN A PIE CHART?!), to using GatherContent to create a website blueprint for clients, all the way to wireframe creation and presentation.

At each step, anyone can jump in and see what is going on and add to the conversation or process. It’s far less linear and allows for more collaboration.

Jackie Chu — Internationalization Errors: How to Go Global Without Losing All of Your Traffic

With a track record like Jackie’s, it’s hard to imagine not blowing minds. Jackie started by explaining one of the most complex SEO concepts: Hreflang. This explanation led to a few tactical suggestions right off of the bat:

  • Define target language and country

  • Self-canonicalize all URLs

  • Use consistent URL patterns

Honestly, there were so many takeaways from this presentation that they were hard to keep track of. Imagine, all of that information on Hreflang alone was in the first 17 slides… and this presentation was 60 slides long!

You’ll definitely want to revisit this presentation in the video bundle, available Friday, to glean all insights possible! 

Cyrus Shepard — Mastering 3 Click + Engagement Signals for Higher Rankings/Traffic

Cyrus, a long-time MozCon emcee, takes the stage himself this year to discuss how Google may — or may not — use user engagement signals as an input in ranking websites.

Cyrus started by explaining how 20 years of Google patents describe three different types of click signals they could measure: first clicks, long clicks, and last clicks. He then walked through a multitude of small-scale SEO experiments that attempted to influence these click signals to see if he could influence rankings.

Some of the experiments included:

  • Optimizing Meta Descriptions in non-traditional ways

  • Removing Title Tag "Boilerplate"

  • Improving the visibility of "Related Articles"

  • Adding FAQs

Finally, Cyrus shared some case studies including the migration of the Moz Q&A — which involved over 100,000 URLs — and how they improved user engagement.

At the end, Cyrus emphasized that SEO is not about manipulating numbers, but that "User satisfaction is ranking factor #1." After watching this presentation, you'll definitely walk away with several ideas for engaging your visitor.

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Friday, July 9, 2021

5 Ways to Measure and 3 Tips to Improve Website Engagement

Today is the last day to purchase MozCon Virtual 2021 tickets! As a sneak preview of the amazing content you can expect to see, please enjoy this very special Whiteboard Friday episode from MozCon speaker Dana DiTomaso, where she walks you through the ways you can measure and improve your website engagement in order to determine whether or not you actually need to redo your website. 

And don't forget to grab your ticket to see Dana's presentation, Build for Search: Modern Web Dev That Puts SEO First, along with our other amazing speakers on July 12-14: 

Secure Your Seat at MozCon Virtual

Photo of the whiteboard with tips for measuring and improving website engagement.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. My name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm President and partner at Kick Point, and we're a digital marketing agency headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I'm going to be talking to you today about a question that I think many people have, which is how do you actually measure website engagement.

I think it's something a lot of people struggle with because you might be approaching a period with your website where you're thinking: Is time to redo the website? Is the website actually meeting our goals? But you may not have a lot of the things set up in order to measure engagement in a way that helps you answer those questions. A lot of times you might just be shooting in the dark and saying, "I think this is what's happening."

But is it truly what's happening? You may think you need to add an expensive tool, some sort of screen measurements or something like that in order to get what you need. But there's a lot you can do with basic setup in Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics to measure website engagement. So that's what I'm going to talk to you about today. So over here I have different ways to measure, and then here behind me I have different ways to improve.

Ways to measure website engagement

So we're going to start with the stuff we're going to measure, and then we're going to move on to the things we're going to improve. 

1. Scroll depth

So first off, think about scroll depth. This is one of the basic metrics that I think people think about but they don't really do a lot with. So one of the things that if you're using Google Analytics 4, there's a built-in scroll depth metric, which you might already be using, but that only measures 90% scroll and that might be too far for a lot of people.

What I would recommend is, if you're not using GA4 yet or if you're still using just Universal, even if you are using 4, make sure you're also measuring at least 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%. You can also measure 90%. You can also measure 10%. I've seen lots of different ways. You can measure 1%. It seems a little much, but you can do that too.

What you're looking for there is the idea of setting individual triggers for each of these scroll depths, because what you want to know is when that 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% is hit, but you don't just want to save them as events in Google Analytics, because there isn't a lot you can do with that in terms of math. What you want to do is you want to set each scroll depth as a custom metric.

If you aren't familiar with custom metrics, in Google Analytics there are dimensions and there are metrics. So a dimension is something like the city that people were from or the page that they were visiting. A metric is the number of page views or users that happened. So, in this case, it's the number of times that somebody viewed a page versus the number of times that people went 25% of the way down the page or 50% or 75%.

When you save those as custom metrics, then you can do some math to figure out what the average scroll depth is, for example, and that's a really nice way to figure out if people are actually looking at your stuff or if they are interested, or maybe there's a really interesting CTA that's driving them away, but then they're not seeing something even cooler further down, or maybe the page looks like it ends, so they're not going any further. There are lots of interesting things you can figure out from that. 

2. Was an important CTA viewed? 

The next thing is: Was an important CTA actually viewed? So I think this is a metric that not a lot of people really think about. You sprinkle CTAs all over your site, but you don't know if anyone is actually looking at them. A page view tells you nothing, because a page view is just I opened up the page and I might have done it accidentally.

Maybe I hit back right away. It's still a page view. I could have the tab open in my browser forever. Maybe I don't want to get rid of it yet. That's a page view too. It doesn't mean they actually saw anything useful or did anything with that information. So one of the things you can do in Google Tag Manager is you can create something called an element visibility trigger.

An element visibility trigger is basically what it sounds like. Was the element visible? So let's say, for example, you want to record each call to action, and each call to action is in a specific div called CTA, for example. So in Google Tag Manager, you would set up an element visibility trigger, and you would say every time the CTA is visible I want you to record an event, and then you would know how many times people actually saw that CTA.

Another example we've done for this is sometimes clients will have forms that are only open if you click a button, and so then we would record how many times people actually clicked that button to open the form, because your conversion rate, if you're just looking at page views, isn't really accurate. It's not actually seeing the form itself. So that way you're getting a much better sense of how many people are actually viewing the form and how many people are actually filling out the form, and that can also help you make some good user behavior decisions with regards to your website.

3. Form engagement

Now, moving on to form engagement, some other stuff that I think you should be measuring is people, how they engage with forms, because, let's be honest, that required thing, it sucks. I know a lot of people are like, "Well, not all the fields are required. Look at this huge form that we have, but only 6 fields of the 18 are required." That's still not a great experience.

We've had forms for a long time now. Not a lot of people still know that the little star means required. They think they have to fill everything out. It seems intimidating. They walk away. I think it's pretty well-accepted knowledge by now, but I also think a lot of people are like, "Oh, but we have to have this big form for reasons." So what you want to know is how people are engaging with that form.

Again, in Google Tag Manager, there is a piece of JavaScript you can run that will record when people enter a form field and then did they fill it out or did they skip it, as in they just clicked into it and they clicked out of it. So I'm going to link in the transcript for this to a JavaScript recipe, made by the company Bounteous, that you can put into Google Tag Manager to record this information.

I find it really useful, particularly when you're in that situation where you're saying to a client or your team, "I think we have too many fields in this form." They're like, "No, everybody uses them." You're like, "Do they?" Now you'll know through this engagement trigger. 

4. Google Translate usage

Something else that I like to check too is Google Translate usage, because again maybe your site is just in English, but you maybe are wondering, "Is it worth translating our site into Spanish or French?"

There are more languages than English in the world. So one of the things you can check is if people are using Google Translate to view your website. Again, in the transcript, I will link to a recipe for Google Tag Manager to actually check if people are using Google Translate to view your site, which is really interesting and frankly pretty eye-opening for clients a lot of the time. So I recommend using that as well. 

5. Accessibility tool use

Then accessibility tool use. Accessibility is a conversation that I think every company should be having with regards to their website, because people use assistive devices to manage their website usage and how they're actually engaging with websites. Not a lot of websites really make accessible experiences unfortunately. So one of the tools that we use is called Monsido Page Assist.

If you go to our website at kickpoint.ca, you'll see this little widget down in the corner, and then if you click that, then we record that, yes, somebody actually engaged with this. Then we can see what percentage of people on our site are using that widget in order to make their experience better, and then we know maybe we need to improve something or maybe this is just them changing the fonts or whatever it might be.

So that's another really good thing that you might want to measure when you take a look at your website. 

Ways to improve website engagement

So I've given you some ideas of stuff you can measure. Now, how are ways that you can improve just generally with this data or overall in terms of your website? So this is this section over here, the ways to improve section. 

1. Tie metrics to your revenue and conversion goals

So the first thing obviously, and I always talk about this in every talk, is you really need to make sure to tie these metrics to your revenue goals.

I think that is just one of the biggest mistakes that people make, when reporting in Analytics or really anything, is you're not tying it to anything. You're measuring for the sake of measuring, but you're not saying what the impact of this is. So, for example, visitors who see this call to action are 90% more likely to convert than people who don't. Being able to measure that and being able to say that stat with confidence, maybe not that stat specifically, but a stat, when thing A happens, we make more money, that is how you get changes done, and that's one of the best ways to communicate this.

So if you can take any of this measurement stuff and communicate it in a way that really gets it across to whoever is the decision-maker, if it isn't you, that if you make this change, you're going to make more money, hit your goals, get to your revenue goals faster, that is a really easy way to make sure that this stuff happens. 

2. Record the full referrer path

Next thing, one of the things that I think, and again I'll link in the transcript to this — it's a lot of JavaScript and stuff, so I don't necessarily want to write JavaScript out on my whiteboard here — is recording the full referrer path.

Now you might know that in Google Analytics there is a dimension called referrer path, but it isn't necessarily useful. The full referrer path is something that's available in the browser a lot of the time, but it isn't something that is captured by default in Google Analytics. By capturing that full referrer path, you can get a little bit more information about exactly where people are coming from.

I find that that is also really helpful information because it can help you sort of segment out a little bit better and say it isn't just people from say Reddit who are coming to the site. It's people coming from Reddit from this specific subreddit, and those are the people buying our stuff. That is additional information that you didn't necessarily have available to you. So that, I call it the "complete referrer," is a nice custom dimension to add into your Google Analytics implementation to just get that little bit more information to help you make better decisions and figure out ways to improve.

3. Use a ?subscriber=yes parameter

Then the third thing, this is like a personal pet peeve of mine. If I'm already on your newsletter, don't show me a giant pop-up asking me to sign up for your newsletter when I click a link in your newsletter to get to your website. People think, "Well, I don't know how to do this." So here's how you do it. You can add a parameter to your URLs. It's like ?subscriber=yes, for example.

Then when you deliver that popover CTA, don't deliver it if that parameter exists in the URL that the person is viewing. That means they're already on the list. You can show them something saying, "Thank you for being a subscriber." It might be a little bit creepy, because people may not know how you know that they're a subscriber. But that's one of the ways that you can just generally improve things for your user experience.

So only show the CTA to the people who could conceivably convert, because otherwise you're just wasting bandwidth. I'm already on your mailing list. Stop trying to sell me. You already sold me. So I would really recommend adding this parameter. You can think about it for others CTAs as well. So, for example, if someone comes to the website via a link in an invoice or a receipt, like they bought something, then don't try to sell them the thing that they just bought.

There are lots of things you can do with Google Tag Manager and reading different parameter outputs in URLs and then making decisions based on what's shown or not shown based on what's in those URLs. That's again an easy way to improve things without necessarily having to measure a lot of engagement. It's just using the tools that you already have access to in order to make the user experience better for the people coming to your website.

Conclusion

So hopefully some of this measurement stuff, the ways to measure and the ways to improve, will help you build a better website experience. Maybe you still do need a new website. Maybe the website you have is difficult to manage and it's really expensive, or it's a big old flaming pile of trash. Who knows what could be wrong with it? But don't throw it out just yet.

If you're not sure, measure some stuff first and then make a call whether or not it's time to do your website. Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

 Tweet your questions and comments about website engagement using #MozBlog!

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Thursday, July 8, 2021

Fulfill Untapped Customer Demands Through Your Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigation allows customers to narrow down search results based on specific product attributes. They typically exist on Product Listing Pages (PLPs) and are a great way to help users intuitively discover products but managing this filtering system is a common SEO challenge. Crawling and indexation need to be controlled.

However, if we look beyond their inherent functionality, facets can offer us considerable potential. By centering your secondary navigation on long-tail keyword opportunities, you’ll be able to strategically utilize consumer intent, secure additional web conversions, and boost revenue levels.

Match consumer intent with long-tail search queries

Having an established brand and a solid domain backlink profile won’t guarantee success. This is great news for smaller brands, as industry giants aren’t necessarily going to win at this game.

If we search for “long sleeve wedding dresses”, we can see how David’s Bridal’s optimized facet page (Domain Authority: 67/100, Page Authority: 47 / 100) has obtained the top ranking position, while Nordstrom’s result (Domain Authority: 87/100, Page Authority: 39/100) appears in the third position for this particular query. We’ll take a look at what makes this page so effective later.

When looking at how we can optimize faceted navigations, it’s important to recognize that product attributes convey consumer needs and aspirations. If, for example, I’m looking for a wedding dress, then I may tailor my search by the color, fabric, neckline shape, and the sleeve length.

According to the search demand curve, long-tail queries account for up to 70% of all organic searches. They are highly targeted queries that offer big traffic-driving opportunities.

In the last few years, we’ve seen a big shift in the industry towards capitalizing this intent with long-form content. Blog articles and style guides have become the go-to methods for many to capture these visitors, as we can see from the examples taken from Marks & Spencers’ "Inspire Me" section:

People often look for inspiration when they’re shopping, and these pages provide an effective way to add more internal links to category and product pages. But relying on this approach is one-dimensional, given that these deeper content pages tend to have lower PageRank. An extensive amount of time and effort will, therefore, be required to achieve the desired result.

In comparison, Product Listing Pages usually target broader search terms, and faceted navigations typically exist as passive functions. This is because they’re often blocked from crawlers, making them devoid of any SEO value. Waterstones (a well-known British bookstore) is one retailer that applies this rule for their on-page filters:

In this particular example, I’ve applied a filter to only show me books for 5 – 8 year olds, but the appended URL (https://www.waterstones.com/category/childrens-teenage/facet/498) is blocked in the robots.txt file. This is going to prevent such pages from being served in the SERPs despite them having the potential to meet specific customer needs. This shows that there can be a fundamental disconnect in matching customer intent to the pages we’re providing them in the organic results.

From the diagram below, we can see how editorial content typically focuses on the “awareness” and “interest” stages, whilst Product Listing Pages tend to be more in line with the “consideration” and “purchase” phases:

Serving the right content to users throughout their buying journey is pivotal to success. For many retailers, competitors are continuing to prioritize broader, high-volume keywords in saturated markets. They’re targeting the same terms to secure a proportion of the same search traffic. This is a very challenging prospect to face, and without carving out a gap in the marketplace, they won’t necessarily deliver the results they seek to secure. Likewise, relying on informational guides to target long-tail keywords means that you’re missing a large percentage of users who have very specific buying requirements. Yes, they’re ready to make a purchase!

By shifting your focus to address your customer’s real needs and expectations, you’ll be able to deliver a satisfying, frictionless experience at every interaction and all the way through to that final purchase.

The solution

Step 1: Conduct long-tail keyword research

Build a really comprehensive view of your potential customers by harnessing data from a variety of sources, including:

a) Keyword research tools like Moz, Google Keyword Planner, and Answer The Public.

b) The SERPs — get inspiration from the auto-suggest results, People Also Ask, and the related search links at the bottom of the page.

c) Competitor activity — aside from using SEO monitoring software, you can use a data mining extension tool like Scraper, which will extract faceted options directly from competitor Product Listing Pages. These tools are often free to download and allow you to quickly transfer product categories.

d) Your Google Search Console, Analytics, and PPC accounts to determine which keywords and URLs are securing the highest number of visits and web conversions. Internal search data can also give you great consumer insights.

e) Speak to your merchandising team to understand product demands and fulfillment capabilities.

Step 2: Group into meaningful sub-topics

Once you’ve collated all this information into a spreadsheet, you’ll be able to discover long-tail, consideration-orientated keywords. While individually they may not boast huge monthly search estimates, they can collectively highlight where purchase intentions can be better fulfilled.

To help illustrate this point, we can look at a small subset of lingerie keywords and the facets the searches represent:

Table showing various average monthly searches and facet categorizations for various keywords.

From the table above we can quickly see a pattern emerging with color and material variations appearing across the search terms. We can then substantiate this information with session and revenue estimates with the use of a recognized CTR model. This enables us to help forecast the potential organic uplift and quantify the size of the prize for a number of different scenarios that are on offer from each new facet combination. This may include estimations for securing position 10, 7, 5, 3 and 1 in Google.

One thing to note here is that it’s worth excluding synonyms, as they will falsely inflate your calculations. An example here would be to exclude “storage drawers” (22.2k monthly searchers) when reviewing the performance for “chest of drawers” (201k m/s). Including both variants will cause a false positive result and will lead you to draw incorrect conclusions.

Step 3: Dig deeper into broader terms around offers, ratings, and price

These product filters are found in the “Sort” dropdown box and, from my experience, these are set to “noindex” from the outset as they simply allow users to re-order page results. Certainly, content management systems like Shopify and Shopware have this as a default.

This makes sense since their purpose is to allow visitors to simply sort or narrow page content rather than offering alternative results and additional value (which is offered through faceted navigation). As such, filter typically produce duplicate results which should not be discoverable beyond the immediate moment. But this hard-and-fast rule doesn’t always apply perfectly in the real world. This is why we need to look at our individual industries and understand what’s important to our unique set of customers.

If we look at the world of gifting, we often see people shopping with a particular budget in mind. Therefore, terms like “birthday gift under £20” (40 m/s) or “Secret Santa gift under £10” (2.9k m/s) are reasonably common, and opening up relevant listing pages could be useful for shoppers.

Step 4: The technical steps

Facet taxonomies are hugely complex and the number of attributes that can be strung together increases with the size of the domain. We, therefore, need to carefully manage the flood gates and mitigate against any potential risks including crawl inefficiencies and link equity dilution.

We can do this by:

1. Avoiding thin/doorway pages by regularly re-assessing your product offering. For instance, you may consider there to be little value in creating a new listings page if you’re selling a very small range of low price point products. In this case, you may decide against opening up an additional Product Listing Page when you sell as few as 10 eligible products. However, this is not a fixed rule, so it’s quite possible that your criteria may be lower for particular product lines. Either way, these numbers will change over time. Consider seasonal trends, when new collections are launched, and when they become discontinued. Setting up a product retirement strategy to manage expired products and categories at scale in parallel with this step is also highly recommended.

2. Prevent content cannibalization by arranging selected facets according to their value and significance. “Size” is very important for some electrical goods like TVs, laptops, and cameras, but is less so for beauty accessories or vacuum cleaners. You must also make sure page content is distinctive and reflects the focus of your chosen facet(s). Refer to step 5 for more details.

3. Follow the sequence in which adjectives and facets are typically selected by your customers. This can vary depending on where your audience lives. So, whilst products generally have five or more distinguishable features, English vernacular determines that we use more than four adjectives (e.g. size + color + material + shape) to describe something.

4. Control the controllables by dealing with overlapping variations. This typically occurs when multiples co-exist and each exhibits good search metrics. For instance, it’s reasonable for someone to simultaneously look for several color and/or fabric combinations in the different ways below.

Chart showing the faceted navigation flow for cotton white t-shirt and white cotton t-shirt.

When this situation occurs, we should follow the same linguistic rules as above and choose a preferred sequence. In this case, it would be color + material + product type.

In comparison to the noindex tag suggested for on-page filters you should canonicalize unnecessary facets to their parent page (remembering that this is merely a hint and not a directive). This will enable you to control how crawlers deal with highly comparable result pages and will, therefore, help to prevent your site from being demoted in the SERPs. Dynamic search parameters should continue to be defined with a “noindex, nofollow” meta robots tag, disallowed in the robots.txt file, and configured through Google’s URL parameter tool (within your Search Console account) to tell crawlers the purpose of your parameters and how you would like them to be treated. This is a helpful guide on parameter handling for Googlebots, but bear in mind that this last tip won’t influence how Bing or Yahoo user-agents interpret these pages.

5. Open your facets in phases and cultivate it into a test-and-learn process. This will enable you to identify issues a lot sooner and implement facet-wide solutions in a timely manner. Without having to unravel these additional layers of complexity, problems such as crawl inefficiencies, PageRank dilution, or excessive indexation can be swiftly resolved.

To show you what this could look like, I’ve provided a phasing plan that was created for one of our e-commerce clients. Our research showed a significant SEO opportunity for opening up some of the facets and filters: potential +£263Kpcm for the “colour + type” facet (UK):

What’s more, when we extended our forecast to include other facet combinations, we calculated an additional revenue opportunity of up to +£207K/pcm (before filtering out combinations with no products offering).

Step 5: Optimize your facet URLs

Optimize your new facet category URLs to establish relevancy for your selected search terms. The key on-page elements to focus on include:

  • URL

  • Page title

  • Breadcrumb anchor texts

  • H tags

  • Content snippets (e.g. introductory text and FAQ copy)

  • Image ALT texts

  • Product names

  • Link out to similar facet category pages (i.e. via a “You May Also Like” feature box)

David’s Bridal is a good example of a retailer that has done this well. Looking back at the ‘Long Sleeve Wedding Dress’ Product Listing Page, we can see that they’ve curated unique content and followed fundamental optimization tactics on the landing page in a way that feels helpful to the user.

URL: davidsbridal.com/long-sleeve-wedding-dresses

Page Title: Long Sleeve Wedding Dresses & Gowns | David's Bridal

Meta Description: Do you dream of wearing a long sleeve wedding dress on your big day? Shop David's Bridal wide variety of wedding gowns with sleeves in lace & other designs!

6. Provide accessibility and build page authority

Once you’ve opened up your new facet Product Listing Pages, you need to begin cultivating link equity towards them. This will ensure that they don’t exist as orphan URLs with no PageRank:

  1. Ensure they’re referenced in your product XML sitemap.

  2. If you have one feature per facet URL, then add them to your faceted navigation across CLP and Product Listing Page pages.

  3. If you have two or more features per facet URL, then create a “Popular Searches” or “Related Searches” option within your CLPs.

  4. Utilize your mega menu to showcase your new category landing pages. This will not only allow you to direct a large proportion of link equity, but it will also secure the highest click-through rate amongst your visitors.

  5. Integrate your editorial strategy by creating engaging content with in-copy links. Think about how you can use descriptive long-tail anchor text about the Product Listing Page you want to link to rather than relying on “click here” or “see more”.

  6. Connect to them via href links so you’re not solely relying on links from the main navigation or content hyperlinks. As this is difficult to do at scale, it can be done through modules such as “related categories”, “other subcategories”, “related products”, etc.

  7. Devise strategic outreach campaigns that will secure quality, external backlinks to them.

Implementing this holistic and robust strategy will help you to secure exponential growth from your new commercial landing pages.

Conclusion

There is a great deal of organic opportunity that exists within your faceted navigation if you begin to leverage mid- and long-tail search terms.

Seek out the opportunity from extended keyword research and competitor analysis before deciding which variants fulfill consumer demands and deliver optimal organic sessions and onsite conversions. Configure a single faceted URL for each opportunity and open them up for crawl and indexation. Ensure PageRank is distributed to them (both internally and externally) and develop your landing page content in line with quality optimization practices. This approach will help you to avoid having crawl inefficiencies, over indexation, cannibalization, or having thin doorway pages. In turn, your website will be better suited to attract highly-targeted users and guide them down the purchase funnel.

Maximizing UX and reducing reliance on other marketing channels means that your faceted navigation can truly deliver organic ROI. We have seen this work for our clients.

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Wednesday, July 7, 2021

MozCon Virtual 2021 Interview Series: Dr. Pete Meyers

Resident Moz search scientist Dr. Pete Meyers returns to the MozCon stage this year, and we're so excited for his presentation: Rule Your Rivals: From Data to Action. In our last interview before the show, we talked with Dr. Pete about 2020, the trends he's seeing in the SERPs, and what makes competitive analysis effective. 

Read the full interview below, and don't forget to grab your ticket to see Dr. Pete and our other amazing speakers at MozCon Virtual 2021 (ticket sales end Friday, July 9!): 

Secure your seat

An image of ring master roger under the big top tent with Dr. Pete's headshot in the center.

Question: 2020 was quite a year, how was this year for you? Did you have any favorite projects?

Dr. Pete: Honestly, there were a lot of days this past year when it felt like just staying alive and sane were our main project (and I’m not sure I completed the sane part). Here at Moz, the Product team and I have been hard at work on an upcoming suite of competitive analysis tools, and I’m excited to finally get the first part of that out to the world. We should have news at MozCon and a limited beta going out in the next couple of months.

Question: What key trends are you noticing in the SERP right now? What should brands pay attention to when competing for features?

Dr. Pete: It’s been a challenging year in SEO, as the volatility of the SERPs in many ways matches the volatility of the world. It’s been a big year for e-commerce and a bad year for brick-and-mortar, for obvious reasons, and as we return to a new normal, we really need to stay on top of things and monitor how changing consumer behavior is impacting SERPs, both because Google is changing to adapt and because search behavior itself is changing. SERP features are becoming more and more niche, and I think it’s really important to know your own industry and SERP space. There are a lot of features now that might only impact 1% of us, but for that 1% the impact is massive. There’s no one-sized-fits-all advice in 2021.

Question: How do you think the SERPs will evolve over the next year?

Dr. Pete: In just the past month, we’ve had two Core Updates (which is unprecedented) and the beginning of the Core Web Vitals (CWV) ranking updates. While I believe that CWV as a ranking factor is pretty low-volume right now, Google is clearly signaling to us that they want fast, user-friendly sites, and that’s something that all of us should be working toward anyway, regardless of our SEO. We need to be aware of the entire searcher experience and the SERPs as a journey, not a static collection of rankings and features.

Question: You’ll be talking about how to turn data into competitive insights at MozCon. What inspired you to tackle this topic in 2021?

Dr. Pete: I’ve actually been working on this particular project for at least four years, and generally questioning how we do competitive analysis and how we can improve that process. One thing the pandemic really drove home is that the “competition” isn’t a single or static set of companies — our competitive landscape is constantly changing. So, the idea of being able to re-evaluate that landscape and not just treat it as a one-and-done report took on new life in 2021.

Question: What are the biggest challenges brands face when conducting competitive analysis?

Dr. Pete: First, it’s incredibly time-consuming. Second, what you end up with after a ton of work is usually a giant spreadsheet of keywords or link prospects that’s ultimately not very actionable. No one is going to take a competitive analysis with tens of thousands of keywords and write a thousand unique, well-researched pieces of content. So, I think the big challenges are making the process both easier and more focused.

Question: What’s your #1 tip for conducting effective competitive analysis?

Dr. Pete: Don’t assume you know who your competition is or that they’re just one set of businesses. Your online/SERP competitors may look very different from your brick-and-mortar competitors, and the competition is always evolving. At the same time, you might have content competitors and product competitors and even partner-competitors, and those groups might not overlap much or require the same strategies to compete with.

Question: What are the key takeaways you want viewers to walk away with?

Dr. Pete: I hope people walk away with a better sense of how to evaluate their competition and turn that analysis into an actionable content strategy that considers not just keywords, but their target competitors’ content and their own historical content. While I’m going to be teasing some of our upcoming product features, I’ll also be demonstrating how to do some of this work with Google (including some tips and tricks with advanced search operators).

Question: Who in the MozCon line up are you most excited to watch this year? Anything else you are looking forward to?

Dr. Pete: I’m really behind where I want to be on Natural Language Processing (NLP) work, so I’m excited to see Miracle Inameti-Archibong’s talk. I’ve been a big fan of some of Miracle’s work over the past year or two. Excited to see Jackie Chu speak, too, and hear more about her role at Uber. I always value hearing from in-house SEOs at big brands, since so many of my own contacts are agency folks. Always eager to see my returning favorites, too, like Wil Reynolds. Of course, I’m probably most excited to watch my boss, Tom Capper, because he’s brilliant and very handsome and did not at all make me say that.

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A Statement in Support of Indigenous Peoples in This Time of Grief

We express solidarity with the Indigenous communities of this continent grieving their precious lost children. What occurred at the boarding and residential schools of Canada and the US is cruel beyond words. We call for the rights, needs, requests, and words of Indigenous Peoples in their own voices to be foregrounded in all areas relating to cultural genocide.

At Moz, we have been working for the past year with the Tribes, Nations, and Bands in the traditional homelands in which our offices are located to draft an approved Statement of Land Acknowledgement, but we still have so much more to learn. We recommend the following resources to our community for further learning in support of Indigenous Peoples.

Learn

The first step toward change is education. We've compiled resources you can use to learn more about these tragedies:

  • Learn about what happened at the residential and boarding schools.

  • Listen to survivors. Indigenous survivors and advocates have spent decades telling the world of these atrocities. Take the time to learn their histories and share them far and wide.

  • Read Indigenous journalism. Consider making publications like Indian Country Today, Windspeaker, and the Indigenous Environmental Network part of your regular news-reading schedule.

  • Learn how to be an ally to Indigenous communities. Dr. Lynn Gehl shares an Ally Bill of Responsibilities here, while Amnesty International offers a helpful resource here.

Honor

Many non-Indigenous people live on stolen land. Take the time to learn about and support the Indigenous communities near you.

Act

All of us have the power to make a difference. Here are actions you can take today to express solidarity with Indigenous communities.

  • Advocate for transparency in education. Inaccuracies and historical omissions are par for the course when it comes to teaching kids about North America's violent colonial history. Teaching children the truth about history, even the ugly parts, is one way to halt the cycle of harm.

  • Contact your representatives. If you're in the US, this government site will help you connect with your local elected officials. For Canada, see the On Canada Project here. If you are a non-Indigenous resident, let officials know you support the specific requests and demands of Indigenous Peoples, as expressed in their own voices.

  • Amplify Indigenous voices. The SEO community is highly active on social media. Consider following Indigenous neighbors on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms, learning respectfully from their accounts, and sharing their content from your own accounts.

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Friday, July 2, 2021

A Step-by-Step Strategy for B2B Pillar Pages

B2B companies are really focused on the middle of the sales funnel. They've got great e-books, lots of good data published, but they tend to neglect the top-of-the-funnel content. That type of content is actually crucial to B2B success, as it allows your potential customers to learn more about your brand. 

A great way for B2B companies to fill this gap is by creating pillar pages. To help get you started, in today's Whiteboard Friday, guest host Carly Schoonhoven of Obility walks you through a simple strategy for employing pillar pages on your website. Enjoy! 

Photo of the whiteboard walking through a pillar page strategy.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hello and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Carly Schoonhoven, and I'm a senior SEO manager here at Obility. We're a digital marketing agency focused on B2B in beautiful Portland, Oregon.

Now one of the biggest struggles I find that B2B companies have, when working on a content strategy, is how to create content that's able to effectively rank for those top-of-funnel, higher search volume, more conversational queries. A lot of times B2B companies are really focused on mid-funnel. They've got great e-books, lots of good data content, but they tend to neglect the top-of-the-funnel content.

However, that type of content is so important because it allows for your potential customers to perform self-discovery and really learn more about your brand, learn more about the industry you're in before they're ready to take a more meaningful step, like filling out a form or requesting a demo. So one great content strategy for a B2B company is creating a pillar page.

What are pillar pages? 

Pillar pages, you might have heard them referred to as hub and spoke content or umbrella content, but whatever you want to call it, it's essentially the same thing. So the idea is that you start with your pillar page. So this is one large piece of content that's really optimized for one very broad topic that's really relevant to your business.

Then it internally links out to your cluster pages, which are targeted at those longer tail, secondary keywords and really well-optimized to answer the questions that your customers may have. It's so important that you're linking back from the cluster pages to the pillar page and from the pillar page out to your clusters.

Again, this has multiple benefits. One that your customers are able to navigate to this content and get their questions answered themselves. Then, at the same time, it's great for SEO because it's so easy for Google to tell what this content is about since it's all internally linked to each other and it's all focused on one specific topic. So if this sounds like something for you, I'm going to walk you through step by step how to go about creating a pillar content strategy.

1. Pick a topic

So Step 1, of course, is you have to pick a topic. So there are a couple things you want to keep in mind when you're doing this, one of which is that you want it to be broad but not too broad. So obviously it has to be somewhat broad because you need to be able to find enough secondary keywords that also have search volume that it's worth your time putting the work in.

But if it's too broad, it's going to be really difficult to create one piece of content that covers everything you need to cover in this content. So, for example, a pillar page about SEO as a whole, that might be a little bit too broad. There's a lot of stuff you're going to have to cover, and it's going to be really difficult to rank for a lot of those keywords. But something like SEO content strategy, that's a little bit more focused, there's still a lot of potential there.

You can talk about ideating content for B2B. You can talk about on-site optimization. So something that is definitely broad, has lots of keywords, but not so broad you're biting off more than you can chew. 

2. Keyword research

So speaking of keywords, obviously you have to do keyword research. This is SEO.

It's so important. So you can start with that one topic, but then you really need to expand your list of keywords to find all of those secondary keywords that you want to include. Moz's Keyword Explorer is a great tool for this because you're able to put in your topic and then it will generate all of those related keywords for you, along with things like search volume and keyword difficulty. I also love that you can filter down to just the keywords that are questions, because again it's so important to make sure that you're answering your potential customers' questions in your content. 

3. Look at your existing content

So you've got your list, you've got your keywords, but don't forget to look at your existing content as well. So you're going to be putting a lot of work in. Find ways you can save yourself time. Maybe you'll have some content buried in your blog or buried in your resource section that you can repurpose and include as part of this strategy. Definitely make sure you're not neglecting content that you already have. 

4. Plan URL structure

Up next, planning your structure. So you're going to be creating a great new piece of content. You need to know where you're going to put it. You can just link to it in your top navigation, or maybe you just want to feature it on your resources section. But one thing to keep in mind is that you want to make sure that your cluster pages are in a subfolder of your pillar page.

5. Start writing (clusters first)

All right, Step 5, start writing. You actually get to start putting these pieces together. So ultimately, what do you want them to look like? Now ideally, for your main pillar page, what you want is to have sort of just an introductory section talking about the topic area as a whole, but really this page serves as that hub that links out to all of your other secondary pages.

So you want to make it really easy to navigate. You want to make sure you're including lots of mid-funnel CTAs within that content, because ultimately this is that hub piece of content where everyone is going to navigate to from those cluster pages. So start with your intro and then have a nice table of contents and then a little header for each of your cluster pages with a little bit of a summary, but then that ultimately links out to those cluster pages so that someone can visit that page if they really want to learn more and get more in depth into that topic.

As far as your cluster pages, this is where you really want to get in depth, spend a lot of time putting your content together and make sure you're covering it. I think that the question-and-answer format is a really good approach for this type of content because it really helps you optimize for featured snippets or for the people also ask feature. So you want to make sure that you're putting your question in the header, and then summarize the answer to that question in about 40 to 50 words if you're optimizing for a snippet.

6. Promotion

All right. Number 6 is promotion. So you've created your content. You've figured out where to put it. You've published it. You did all of this work. You want to make sure people see it.

So promote it internally. Make sure you're sharing it on your social media. Share it with your team. But then also flex your link building skills and reach out to anyone in your industry who you think would benefit from this content or be willing to share it as well. 

7. Measure everything

Number 7 is measure. So, of course, you put all this work in and you want to see how does it do. Did it perform well?

So you have your list of keywords, so use Moz to track your keyword rankings. Take a look to see if there are new keywords you weren't expecting to rank for. Obviously, keywords are super important. Also, look at Google Analytics. Check out your landing page report. Are you getting organic traffic? Are people actually converting?

See what you can learn from that, if you need to make tweaks, swap out your CTAs. Just make sure you're measuring and you don't let this content go to waste. You're bringing in this new traffic. Make sure you're converting those people. 

8. Repeat

Step 8, repeat. So once you have the process down, do it again. Find other topics that are really relevant to your industry you can create a pillar page about.

When you do, tell me about it. I really hope that this was helpful for you, and I hope you go out there and create some pillar content. So thank you so much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

 Tweet your questions and comments about pillar pages using #MozBlog!

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