What a treat to experience three days of deep learning at MozCon Virtual 2021 with some of the world’s most respected digital marketing professionals. While only one of the sessions was specifically focused on local business strategy, it’s my local SEO bias to see everything through that lens. I took pages of notes of tips that I know will have tremendous applicability for local business owners and their marketing partners.
The MozCon 2021 video bundle is now on sale for anyone who couldn’t make it to the conference, and today I’d like to give you a taste of what you stand to learn from some of the most relevant and exciting presentations, which you can put to work for the local businesses you’re promoting.
1. Studies begin to surface Google Posts strategies
Google Posts have existed for about five years, but it’s only recently that we’ve started to see studies done that identify winning tactics utilizing them. Joy Hawkins was our one strictly-local expert at MozCon 2021, and she used her speaker spot to set out a smörgåsbord of Google Posts tips for viewers based on her agency’s testing. Here were some of my favorites:
Offer and COVID-type Posts received the most clicks in 2020, and posts featuring specials are clear winners.
Don’t use stock photography, but do use text in your images to increase engagement.
Have fun with emojis in your posts — they increase clicks!
These are just a few of the takeaways you’ll derive from Joy’s session, with the overall understanding that, while posts don’t appear to have a direct impact on local pack rank, they can influencelocal justificationsfor 60 days at a clip, and, of course, boost traffic to your website!
2. Local customers need information, even amid disruption
I picked up a running theme in the outstanding presentations by Shannon McGuirk, Cyrus Shepard, and Ross Simmonds: the COVID-19 pandemic has definitely not decreased the public’s need for information from the Internet. Each speaker approaches this phenomenon from a different angle:
Shannon’s company lost 50% of its revenue in the first couple weeks of the pandemic and had to transition from long-term content planning to a more reactive style of marketing that is able to move quickly with the times. Just like virtual businesses, local ones are encountering a scenario in which it’s harder to plan promotional activities, especially when there are fewer available local journalists to outreach to. Shannon’s presentation offers up, in extremely transparent detail, how her company has learned to survive amid disruption.
Cyrus explains how the patents Google is investing in surrounding user behavior set goals for businesses to be the first click, the long click, and the last click for searchers. With the right content, your local business should be the resource the public chooses first from Google’s results, stays on longest, and then doesn’t need to navigate away from because their needs have been met. As Cyrus explains, “User satisfaction is the #1 ranking factor!”
Ross explains why you need to think of your brand as a media company, and predict what will be important to your community so that you can invest in relevant content. This is a guiding principle in Moz’s Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide in which we urge local business owners to see themselves as publishers.
3. Sorry, but your local business website has content decay
It may feel a bit like you’re sitting in a dentist’s chair hearing this, but thankfully, Kameron Jenkins from Shopify has a remedy for this scenario, in which traffic to your website’s older pages and posts naturally deteriorates over time. If your local business relies on content publishing to generate traffic and revenue, content decay is a big problem (and a continuous one) because your articles are always getting older. The solution to this is to have an ongoing content refresh strategy in which you identify and update aging articles to keep them relevant.
But the larger your content library is, the harder it can be to accomplish this task. In fact, Kameron found that 25% or less of content marketers’ time is spent on content refreshes. The good news is that a combination of free tools can make it much easier for you to start reversing decay. To wit:
The free “landing pages” report in Google Analytics lets you set a date range to see which of your content assets are losing traffic over time.
Google Search Console is also free and lets you see which assets are losing search positions over time.
Back in Google Analytics, the Goal Conversion Rate and Completions columns show you which of your assets have the highest conversion rates, helping you prioritize refreshing older assets that have the potential to deliver the most conversions if you update them.
If you purchase the MozCon 2021 video bundle, you’ll see all the screenshots in Kameron’s tutorial, and she will walk you through considering how to refresh a page to give it a new competitive advantage with original research, fresh quotes from experts, improved internal links and more! Any local business that has seriously embraced publishing as core to their online marketing strategy should see meaningful benefits from learning to refresh decaying content instead of letting it sit unmanaged.
4. A touch of expertise can make a ton of difference in a local context
Many speakers at MozCon consult with large enterprise clients and are always having to look hard for tactics that can set brands apart in ultra-competitive markets. The great news for local businesses and their agencies is that our markets are, by nature, limited to local geography, meaning that nifty tactics can provide enormous wins for us within a set city or region!
Check out Joyce Collardé’s side-by-side comparison of a client on the left using video schema markup vs. a brand on the right without schema. Imagine how your local business can command more screen space, with just a touch of technical know-how:
She also has a ton of great tips for B2B models, many of which are, of course, local!
Meanwhile, Lily Ray’s phenomenal presentation is a must-watch for any local business in an industry that has a direct impact on people’s lives and finances (think doctors, dentists, financial advisors, etc.). Lily demonstrates the massive changes that have taken place in organic search engine results since Google’s 2018 “Medic” update, favoring brands that meet Google’s criteria for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T). If your business is in a your-money-or-your-life (YMYL) category, learning to bake E-A-T into your content and marketing strategies can give you a significant lift in your local market.
Rob Ousbey mentions a favorite tool of mine for finding local linktations: Link Intersect. Then he turns this idea on its head with a new Moz alpha experiment called Topical Link Finder to help you find topically-relevant link opportunities for keywords your competitors are ranking for. Moz Pro and Moz community members are invited to play with this tool, and I think it could be a great advantage for local businesses seeking industry links. While you’re at it, check out the alpha of the On-page Keyword Grouper to help you determine when to break up a topic into multiple pages instead of putting it all on a single URL.
Finally, Casie Gillette’s reference to Recordit that lets you custom create GIFs immediately brought to mind Darren Shaw’s recent discovery that you can use these instead of static images on Google My Business Products if you save them as a JPEG instead of a GIF. Don’t go overboard, but subtle animation could really help your local business’ products stand out!
5. Buck local trends and dare to be different
Multiple MozCon 2021 speakers warned against running a business on assumptions. There are always news trends in marketing and shiny new things in the way of tech and strategy, but what actually matters is what works for your customers. For example:
Casie Gillette, mentioned above, made a great point in reminding us that there’s a widespread narrative that “print is dead”. Tell that to Yankee Candles, whose print catalogues played a key role in their 122.9 million sales in 2020. It wasn’t long ago that almost everyone assumed the milkman was a thing of the past. Not so! Takeaway: don’t just latch onto fads. You may read that your local business needs to invest hours a week on social media marketing, but if your own customers are telling you that what they really want is home delivery, or better-trained staff, or a cleaner store...put your money there and give it to them!
Moz’s own Dr. Peter J. Meyers reminds us that our brick-and-mortar competitors may not be the same as our competitors in the organic SERPs. You’ve got to study the results that come up for the searches that matter to your specific customers to see whether you’re right about who is actually competing with you there for important phrases.
Wil Reynolds advises bringing a small ego to the SEO process, and a willingness to be wrong and question everything. He urges brands to make marketing decisions on the basis of data, summing it up deftly: The less you understand your customer, the more you spend to acquire them.
It’s my take that local business owners have an advantage over their virtual counterparts, because you live where your customers do and may even have been absorbing the culture of your town or city your whole life. In the local context, tech is there to make talk easier, and your highest-level takeaways from the MozCon 2021 video bundle will be a new level of confidence and expertise to make you a more thoughtful, equipped communicator.
Your online-only colleagues have to take these skills into a vast arena, competing with everyone in the world to be heard. But for you, marketing a local business, an educational investment in yourself and your team can give you an extraordinary boost along the worthy journey of becoming a local household name.
Welcome back to Whiteboard Friday! In today's episode, guest host and small business SEO expert Claire Carlile walks you through the what, why, where, and how of UTM tagging for your GMB profiles.
Editor's note: Beginning at 1:49, when Claire mentions "referral traffic", it should be "referral information".
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Do you have a Google My Business listing or do you work with clients that have Google My Business listings, and do you want to know more about the value of the traffic that Google My Business drives to your website?
Well, if you do, this is the Whiteboard Friday for you. So I'm Claire Carlile, and I am a local search expert at BrightLocal, and today I'm going to speak about UTM tagging for Google My Business.
What's a UTM tag?
So you might be asking, "What is a UTM tag?" If you are, you wouldn't be the first person to ask that question.
So UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. But if you just think of UTM tags as tracking codes that we add to the end of our external links that tell us more about where that traffic came from and how it got to our websites. So when someone clicks on a UTM tagged URL, details of the source, the medium, and the campaign that that website visit comes from get transferred over into Google Analytics.
Why add UTM tags?
So why would we want to add UTM tags to our GMB URLs? Well, without tagging, all of the traffic will end up in the Organic bucket. So that's fine, but what it won't tell us is whether that organic traffic came from the regular organic results or whether it came from Google My Business URLs in the business profile or in Google Maps.
Another reason is that many mobile apps and browsers don't give their referral traffic into Google Analytics, and that traffic is just going to end up in the Direct bucket. We're marketers. We're very used to having to demonstrate our value and the value of our services. So this is a great way for you to illustrate the value that you're adding to your client or to your organization.
We also often need to secure a budget. So whether that budget is for more of our time or it's for photos or videos for Google My Business, it also lets us understand the value of various Google My Business features so we can say Google Posts is more valuable to this client than Google products, or Google products refers less traffic but at a rate that converts higher.
Also, we'll get the Google Search Console data for those UTM tagged URLs. So we'll see the query data. We'll see what queries are actually driving impressions and clicks on these UTM tagged URLs.
Where can you tag?
So let's think about what we can tag. We hear a lot about zero-click search, but that really isn't a new concept if you've been working in local search for a while, because from the business profile a potential customer can click to call a business, they can download driving directions, they can look at photos, they can read reviews, they can look at services, all without clicking through to the business website.
But that said, we do actually have a lot of opportunities in GMB to link back to our website and to drive traffic to the website. So what you have in GMB will be dependent upon your primary category.
But most businesses will have a website link. They might have an appointment or a menu URL. They might have Google products. They might have Google Posts. You might be using the new follower offer, which not a lot of people know about and even less people are using, and it might actually die and end up in the Google graveyard, but it only takes 10 minutes to set up. So if you have the type of business that could attract a local following, then it's worth adding because you can see: Does it actually drive value for the business? What does that traffic do when they get to your website? What content are they looking at? Where are they moving, and how are they moving around? Is the traffic from GMB actually driving revenue? Are they buying things when they get to your website? Then we've got all of our conversions and micro conversions that hopefully we have set up so we can measure in Google Analytics.
So do we get click to call? Do we get click to email? Do they download a resource? Do they click through to our social media profiles? Do they fill in a form? Do they sign up for our newsletter? We can find out all of these things when we add UTM tagging.
UTM tagging tips
So I'm going to give you some UTM tagging tips because I think the most important thing is to be very, very consistent from the outset, because it's quite easy to get this wrong.
So consistency being key, think about how you're going to separate out your words. I like to use a dash. Some people like to use an underscore. Whatever you use, just make it very consistent.
Then we have uppercase and lowercase letters. So I always stick with lowercase letters, the reason being that Google Analytics is case sensitive in all of its reports. So if you're using a mix of uppercase and lowercase, Google is going to report upon that separately. If you don't get this right, you're going to be dealing with a lot of messy and bought data that you're going to have to sort out outside of Google Analytics, and you really don't want that.
So another thing is if you get your source and your medium in a muddle, then that traffic is just going to end up in the Other bucket, which is pretty much totally sad times. So a way to avoid that is by thinking of the source as where the journey started or where that traffic came from and the medium as the method of transport. It's how that traffic got from A to B.
Who manages the data?
So before we think about which URLs on our website we're going to tag up, we need to think about who is managing the data and reporting in our organization or in our client's organization, because the UTM tags and the framework that you set up need to play nicely and sit within their framework. You don't want to be robbing clicks from them if they're trying to demonstrate the value of something.
Now you might find that when you work with small and medium-size businesses, no one is managing the data and reporting, in which case happy days, this will work absolutely fine.
Which URLs do you tag?
So which URL will you tag?
Well, there are some questions here. Do you have one location, or do you have many locations? So if it's just one location, you probably tag up your homepage. If it's many locations, you're going to be linking to your location landing pages.
If you're using Google products, then you'll be wanting to link to your products or your services pages.
If you have an appointment URL, then you will be linking through to maybe the Contact Us page. If you have booking or appointment functionality on your website, you'll link to that page.
Now, unsurprisingly, the menu URL will link to your menu page.
If you're using Google Posts, have a think about where will you link to. If it's a special offer post, is there a special offer page that it will link to? When that special offer expires, what will you do with that page? Will it continue to resolve, or are you going to 301 it somewhere else? Plan all that out beforehand. Actually, you need to make sure that you check the URL that you're wanting to link to. Are you linking to the correct version? If you're on https, which I hope you are, you won't want to be linking to the http.
You need to look: Does that page resolve? Can you see everything on that page? Does that page give a 404, in which case obviously we're not going to want to link to it? Does that page go through a series of redirects? Now, a series of redirects is going to strip the UTM tagging off of that URL, and we really don't want that.
How to tag
So once you've checked which URLs you need to link to, you're actually going to tag those up.
So for the source, I'm using Google. Some people like to use GMB. But whatever you choose, again, make sure it fits within this framework and be consistent from the outset. For medium, I'm using organic. Then for campaign, I'm using that field to describe the location of that link within Google My Business.
So it might be the primary website link, menu, products, or the appointment. If you're using the new follower offer, you have this. Then with Google Posts, I like to be a little bit more granular so I can see what type of posts might be working the best, and I can also track any changes when Google starts moving posts up and around inside the business profile.
So we've got the what's new post, the offer post, and the event post. Finally, for Google Posts, using the campaign content field to describe the actual content of that post. So if you work with a business which has lots of unique and interesting content, you might just need to describe that content, so summer-21-sale, free-giraffe-rides, curry-night-may-21, or you might just like to use the date there in the campaign content field.
So top tip is if you're using Posts, you have access to Posts, I hope you're using them, then using a Google Sheets add-on called Postamatic, which is brilliant, it allows you to schedule your posts, and it also automatically adds UTM tagging within this format. So it's very much recommended.
So you're going to tag up your GMB URLs and those links with UTM codes. So you might use something like Google's Campaign URL Builder, which is something that I used to use when I first started tagging up business profiles. But since then I've been working on my UTM Tagging Guide with the Google Sheet, which is basically my gift to you with love.
So you can use that to keep everything nice and tidy and everything in one place. It auto-generates the tag. So all you have to do is just drop your URL into the sheet, and then it will give you the UTM codes for those URLs. It's a good way to keep a record of what you're adding, and that might be Google Posts, if you're not using Postamatic.
It might be your Google products. You have a record then, and you can understand what type of content resonates, what doesn't, and what you could do better with your content. So you will find that guide and sheet here, on this URL.
So that's it for today. I hope you found that useful and hopefully see you here again soon.
Elite Consulting provides Amazon Online Store Management and Wholesale FBA Inventory Automation Management, Store Health and Recovery Services. We are dedicated to providing automated management of online stores coupled with auxiliary services that wrap around that managed to keep your store running without interruption and resolve suspensions.
Content audits: the brief report generated as part of your pitching process and then forgotten about, or perhaps a small section of your broader SEO audit. These two words will mean different things to different marketers, and the time you assign to this project will also vary depending on how much value you put into your content strategy.
It's true that copywriting and content marketing fall under the umbrella of SEO, but if you want to get the most out of your efforts, you need to look at content creation as a department all its own. While it can aid SEO, PPC, and social media strategies, content has its own set of roles and goals to accomplish. Therefore, a content audit and a content SEO audit are two very different things, in my professional opinion.
I’ve been working in digital marketing for six years, helped to build an SEO department from scratch, and have probably written more content than Marcel Proust. My current role is 100% content focused, and while I do incorporate SEO techniques to give my work the best chance of success, my focus is first and foremost on the quality of what I write.
With that in mind, most of this piece revolves around the importance of, and how to carry out, content audits. However, I’ve also included a few ways these can be used to help your SEO team.
Why are content audits useful?
A content audit done once to highlight current issues with a website as part of the pitching process, and then consumed by a wider strategy, will have a short shelf-life of usefulness. However, a content audit that is continuously updated and used to guide next steps has multiple uses, including:
1. An insight into the past
When you take on the management of a website, you might not have the opportunity to speak with the person who managed it before you. You may be able to gain some insights from the site owner, but it is extremely rare that you get the full picture.
A content audit can help you piece together some additional information. The call-to-action on the page, for example, will show what the previous content manager was hoping to achieve.
Where the content is placed on the site will also give you some information:
Top-level pages will rarely be end-funnel pieces
Product pages will often be sales-orientated
Blog posts with internal links will show what pages your predecessor was trying to strengthen.
Etc.
Reviewing historic content topic concentration can also guide you on which product type or services were the most important to either the previous manager or the business owner. This can help you ascertain whether it’s a focus worth continued investment, or if you should move on to something else entirely.
2. Ascertaining at which point content is picked up and becomes successful
It’s easy to write-off (see what I did there?) a content project as failed if you don’t see success in the first few weeks or months of publication. However, as with PR, you may find that a piece that wasn’t considered successful at the time of publishing gets picked up later down the line. Understanding how long pieces take to become “successful” by your standard of measurement will help guide future strategies and prevent current frustrations growing.
3. Guiding current/future strategies
Understanding what worked well previously offers a fantastic insight into what your target audience is looking for. Are there specific trends that you can glean and utilize within your current strategy? Does your target audience respond more to a particular structure or topic?
From the analysis, you will be able to gauge quick wins, whether it's reworking pieces that you believe can perform better, utilizing other marketing methods to promote certain pieces, or scrapping something entirely and starting again. Likewise, you can determine topics to stay away from if necessary.
You can also highlight topic gaps in the current content and discuss these with your client. Perhaps there are certain angles they don't want you to take but forgot to mention. Or your client may give you the go-ahead to create new content to fill these gaps and measure the impact.
It's worth mentioning that you should carefully consider the metrics you’re using to evaluate content performance. There is no point in measuring a top-level informational or educational page against ROI alone, as it will always fail when compared to pages that focus on bookings or purchases. For higher-funnel pages, measuring engagement metrics and assisted conversions will give you better insight into how the page is actually performing.
4. A tool for reporting
While the initial creation of a content audit can be a time-consuming task, maintaining it takes minutes. With that said, we all know that minutes are valuable, and they stack up. Additionally, some clients will always prefer hands-on tasks to be completed and will struggle to see the value in these “admin” types of projects.
Using the audits as part of your reporting will save you time at the beginning of the month (or whenever you send out your reports), particularly if you add an analysis and next steps to your audits ahead of reporting week. That's what I call a winner-winner, vegan chicken dinner situation.
Current content audit recommendations from the SERPs
I reviewed the top-ranking content for the topic "How to do a content audit". I wanted to see what they had in common. While they all made their own points, there were some common recommendations:
This chart essentially works as a step-by-step guide on carrying out an effective content audit already, however, these were largely focused on analyzing content for SEO purposes.
The following audit recommendations can have some applications to SEO (and I do add a few suggestions of my own at the end), but the main aim is to provide insights into your content's quality concerning the reader's experience, and the SEO implications of those, rather than concentrating on ranking or backlinks, for example.
How to start a content audit
Before you even think about exporting and diving into a pool of data, you should first speak with your client. I mentioned earlier that content audits can be time-consuming and that some clients may not be keen on you spending a bulk of your time on this type of analysis.
To get your client on board, I suggest discussing the following:
1. The reason behind the audit
There are multiple reasons you may want to carry out an audit. Are you trying to:
Guide your content strategy?
Remove outdated content or update it to boost performance as a quick win?
Learn what type of content your audience responds best to?
Understanding what your client will find most valuable and acting on that will reduce the time you spend on your audit and increase the likelihood of getting the go-ahead.
2. The type of content you’re going to audit
This is an excellent route to take if the site you’re working on is extensive, as you'll no doubt want to carry out tasks that will move the needle as well as conduct your audit. Speak with the client and decide together whether you should start by analyzing blog posts, e-books and guides, service pages, category or product pages, and create a schedule to work from.
Breaking up your audit by content type will allow you to tackle chunks of the analysis and reporting while still having time to undertake other tasks and add to your content strategy month-over-month.
3. Important goals, CTAs, and metrics
Ask your client what the main website goals are and dig deeper than merely "more sales". In addition to content that targets end-users, there will — or should be — pieces that target every stage of the marketing funnel to either guide a website user to a desired action, or solve their problem or question both pre- and post-sale.
Additionally, understanding what metrics your client cares about most will help hone your audit and any strategies that stem from it.
4. How far back the audit should go
You may want to focus on content published up to a year ago, or you may want to go back as far as possible, but what does your client want? How much budget are they willing to allocate to this project? These are essential questions to ask before you do any audit work.
How to conduct the initial audit
Remember that this audit is for content purposes only. While the SEO team can add their own columns to the spreadsheet afterwards so that all of the information is in one place, you won't necessarily be looking at metrics like backlinks, page speed, or rankings.
1. Export a list of all URLs
Using whichever tools you prefer to find content published during your pre-agreed time-scale.
2. Assign a function to each URL
This could be any function from the marketing sales funnel and will give you insight into what other departments to approach when it comes to content improvements.
For example, pages targeting people in the exposure phase of the funnel that already have quality and engaging content but aren't performing could benefit from optimization from the SEO team. In contrast, you could reach out to the CRO team for pages targeting the conversion phase.
3. Assign a goal and call-to-action
Assign each of these to every page based on the conversation you had with your client. If you struggle to assign a function or a goal, then this is content that can immediately be labelled "to be improved".
4. Make things colorful
Color is an excellent visual aid to understand each page’s health based on your assigned metrics. If, for example, a page doesn't target the call-to-action you set, that cell would be colored red. Once the issue has been resolved, you can change the cell to green. Make sure you download the original so that you have quick evidence of the work you’ve done.
5. Include additional information
You'll want to include the usual metrics based on the assigned page function so that you can analyze how the pieces are performing. These metrics can be traffic, conversions, new or returning users, etc., and color code these, too, based on how well they’re doing.
You may want to implement a sliding color scale and organize it from best-performing to worst-performing, to better show whether a specific topic outperforms or underperforms.
It's also a good idea to include information such as publish dates and authors to find any trends that you can replicate. For example, if one author seems to produce continually high-performing content, perhaps you could speak to them about their process to see if your writers can replicate it.
6. Next steps
Your initial content audit could look something like this, and you should be able to pluck out some next steps to incorporate into your content strategy.
This is my favorite part of the audit, where you give your overall opinion of each page. You can be as detailed or succinct as you like. Here are a couple of examples to give you an idea of what you could look for:
You may find that a product page has very clinical information and could be improved by adding in some emotive content.
Or perhaps a blog post has some really great content, but it is clunky and hard to read; which could easily and quickly be resolved with some restructuring.
A service page may be improved by incorporating content that targets People Also Ask Boxes; answering questions you know a searcher is seeking.
These notes will also give you an idea of the time-frame required to improve these pages. I like to color code the notes in red, amber and green:
Green means the page is fine (or great) as is, or could be a quick win to target.
Amber refers to pages that could be improved, but would require more time. It’s not so much a quick win, but the optimizations are worthwhile.
Red represents pages that should be removed entirely.
Initial content audits should be extremely flexible. The amount of information you include is entirely up to you and can change from client to client. Notice that I don’t focus on performance metrics. I do look into performance metrics and use these to guide my notes, but as we are dealing with such a large volume of pages with an eclectic variety of goals; I don’t include them in the actual audit to prevent unnecessary comparisons and overcomplications.
How to carry out monthly content audits
Initial audits are perhaps the most time-consuming, as you’re working with unfamiliar pages, but they’re incredibly valuable and well worth the time and effort.
Maintaining monthly audits — whether in the same spreadsheet or a stand-alone document — is a fantastic (and quick) way to measure the success of any content you create or adapt moving forward.
They can also work as a checklist to ensure your team is producing consistent content if you want. You could include checks in your monthly audit such as:
Whether images were used
What alt tags were used (remember they have functions other than communicating with Google)
What internal links were added
Specifying what CTA was included
Another great thing about monthly content audits is that they can be used as part of your monthly reporting; killing two birds with one stone. Here’s how I experimented with monthly content audits:
1. Set a deadline for reporting
If you’re only producing one piece of content per month, you’ll most likely be able to report on the success of each piece every month for a year. But the chances of that are unlikely. Therefore, it's good to agree with your team and client on how long you’ll measure your content's success.
Perhaps, after some research, you’ve discovered that most blog posts in this particular audit take three months to reach their peak. If that's the case, you’ll want to look at success metrics once the piece has been live for three months. This cuts out unnecessary time spent updating the audit and will also prevent awkward conversations with clients about why the content isn’t performing yet.
Alternatively, you may have created evergreen content and want to monitor this piece every month.
Whatever avenue you choose to go down, ensure that your client is clear on the plan to set expectations.
2. Add in essential information
Later down the line, whether your client, a team member from another department, or even you are viewing the monthly audit, you should be able to see key information within the first few seconds such as:
The title of the piece
Type of content: a how-to guide, listicle, case study, etc.
Function
Goal
The author of the piece
The department the page is assisting: content marketing, SEO, social media, etc.
How long the content took to produce: this will help your client understand how much of their budget was allocated to each task.
Date published: this is particularly important if you aren’t responsible for uploading the content to the site.
Performance metrics: based on the function and goal of the page. This should help you establish whether or not a piece of content succeeded or requires additional investment.
3. Next steps
If a piece performs exceptionally well, you can analyze what made it so successful and try to duplicate the results. For example, if you notice that your how-to guides were the highest performers, include more of these in your content strategy moving forward, or perhaps update an underperforming piece into this format to see if things improve.
Likewise, if a piece doesn't perform how you hoped it would, you should consider whether it’s worth improving it. Should you try re-structuring it? Perhaps you could advertise it via social media or PPC? Or maybe it's best to leave it behind and adapt your strategy to ensure similar pieces aren’t created?
All together, your monthly content audit could look something like this:
How to do annual content audits
Finally, the annual audit. These make yearly reporting a snap as you already have a lot of the information in your monthly audit. Once you've copied and pasted the initial information, all that's left is to update it with the latest performance data and write an in-depth analysis to be included in your report. This can consist of showcasing the best performing pieces and highlighting any patterns.
You can also highlight what was learned from the worst-performing pieces, as these will also offer valuable insights.
Complete the audit with ideas of how you can use the data to increase performance next year and set some benchmarks.
Let’s talk about SEO
Many of us wear both SEO and content hats as part of our role, and I appreciate that merging the two audits is both a time-saver and helps form a holistic strategy. But I do urge you to look at your content as more than just a means to an SEO end, and I hope this post has highlighted the value of doing so.
Right, let’s talk about how you can use your content audits for SEO purposes:
1. Search term cannibalization identification
When gathering data for historic content, use your favorite tools to identify what search terms the pieces are ranking for. You can then (temporarily) reorder the spreadsheet from A-Z by search term and see if any URLs are competing for the same terms.
You can then incorporate resolving these issues into your SEO strategy. There’s a fantastic piece that goes into this in much more depth here.
Additionally, once you know which search terms you want to target for any pieces moving forward, a quick check of your records will tell you whether you or a predecessor has already tried this. If so, you can decide whether to create a fresh piece and redirect the original which will hopefully bring with it some backlinks, or update the old piece (which will take a lot less time and effort).
2. Potential quick wins
By tracking how the search terms for each piece are ranking, you’ll be able to identify any content that is teetering at the top of page two, or on the lower side of page one.
From here, you can identify if the problem is content- or SEO-related. Do you need more backlinks to strengthen it, some schema markup added, or does it need to be updated word-wise? Perhaps you’re better off targeting a featured snippet or people also ask boxes to get you up where you want to be?
When I carry out a content audit, I read every single page. Time-consuming? Yes. Pointless? Far from it. You see, by reading through older posts, I learn so much about the products and services the client offers. I also learn about the history of the industry and any questions that pop into my head as I read, I jot down and use them in my content strategies. If I’m asking the question, chances are someone else is too.
This not only puts me ahead of the game when it comes to content strategy creation, it cuts down on research time when I'm tackling a writing task and improves the way I interact with my clients.
And I also know from experience what will take the piece up another notch. Perhaps the headers aren’t optimized or the piece has excellent bones but the copy is just a bit cringy — we all remember adding .gifs into our content whenever possible to make ourselves look “cool” and “with it” (and the fact that I just said “cool” and “with it” shows I'm not). But the point is, I get a good sense of how to make things perform better by reading everything.
Add any quick wins to your strategy and grab that low-hanging fruit.
3. Internal linking optimization
I love internal links. I love internal links more than I love backlinks. And while I agree that not every piece should be linking to an end-of-the-funnel page, I do think that content audits are an excellent opportunity to connect newer pieces with older pieces for better overall synergy. It also improves the user experience.
Summary
I know exactly what you’re thinking. That's a lot of work to do for every single client. But I truly believe that it’s worth the effort. Not only will you be able to ensure your content stays fresh, relevant, and has more chance of performing well, but you will be saving time (and your client’s money) by not creating content that your audience isn’t interested in.
Just three examples of how really getting to know your web content can fuel your performance before I wrap up:
During one client audit, I noticed that there was a lot of similar content but from a slightly different angle each time. By merging these pieces, the pages were fighting for ranking less and the overall quality was improved.
One client of mine seemed very bonded to their previous content, and felt hesitant about us merging or reworking any of their blog posts. Because I’d carried out an initial content audit, I knew the topics and angles already covered, and so instead recommended implementing a hub-style page on one of their main category pages as a means to gain more visibility for the content. We kept the original content (only slightly optimized for search terms) and ensured that a visitor wouldn’t have to jump from page to page trying to piece together a full picture before investing.
Finally, when UK gyms were reopening post lockdown, we wanted to do everything we could to give our fitness client a boost. Rather than spend hours and hours producing fresh content, we tweaked old posts and built a "welcome back pack". Before publishing this, there was a post that had been the top-performer since it was published about a year ago. This new pack pushed the piece off the pedestal and brought with it a good chunk of assisted and direct conversions.
When done well, content audits are a fantastic tool to have in your belt. They will not only help guide your strategies and get results, but they will also help you bond with your client too, which is a more than welcome side-effect if you ask me.
The laws and best practices around website accessibility can seem forbiddingly complex at first sight. Unhelpfully, there are also several myths and half-truths in circulation, which can muddy the waters and give companies a false sense of security about the accessibility of their digital content. It’s vital to make sure your website is accessible to people with disabilities, so the goal of this short blog post is to bust some of the more common myths and get you on track for compliance!
What is website accessibility, and why should you care?
Website accessibility is the practice of making your website usable by the widest possible group of people, regardless of their ability. Generally, online accessibility refers to functionality designed for individuals with disabilities — those who may have a visual impairment, an auditory limitation, motor control difficulties, neurological disorders, a learning disability, or age-related ability impairment.
If your site is not created to properly function with Assistive Technology (AT) — such as a screen reader — people with disabilities will essentially be blocked from engaging with your content. In the physical space, this would be the equivalent of building a restaurant with no wheelchair access. It’s against the law, and it’s uncommon.
The same standards should apply to website accessibility. As we deepen our dependency on online interactions — paying bills, virtual education, shopping, even socializing — all individuals of every ability deserve the right to a barrier-free interaction.
Myth 1: Only a small percentage of the global population has a disability.
This is the biggest myth out there, and it most likely stems from the invisibility of many disabilities. Disabilities may present no obvious physical signs to the untrained eye, and of course many disabilities make it difficult for people to take part in the same activities as people without disabilities. The net result? Many people are simply unaware that a large number of their fellow citizens are living with a disability.
The numbers may surprise you:vv In the US, the proportion is larger still: the CDC estimates that 26% of US adults are living with a disability.
Myth 2: Making a website accessible is costly and time-consuming
The truth is, making a website compliant and immediately more accessible does not have to take a significant amount of time or cost a lot of money.
Our research suggests that around two-thirds of accessibility issues can be uncovered and resolved using automated technology, which massively accelerates and reduces the costs of remediation. Signing up with a provider of digital accessibility services can mean your website is protected from the first day of installation, with artificial intelligence (AI) technology immediately finding and fixing hundreds of the most common errors.
Myth 3: Using automated tools on my site is all you need to do to make it accessible
Here’s the fact: Artificial intelligence is sophisticated and getting better. But automation on its own will never identify and fix every accessibility error. A computer simply cannot interpret intent or contextual meaning. The limited scope of even the most advanced automation will leave many compliance issues unresolved and your company at risk.
That’s not to say automation and toolbars are useless. These are vital elements in an accessibility tool kit that should include regular monitoring, manual testing led by human experts, reporting, analytics, and a method by which users can report barriers they encounter. A hybrid approach that combines technology and people is a great way to achieve and maintain an accessible online experience.
Myth 4: Digital accessibility is only needed for those who are blind or who have low vision
Most believe that a visual impairment is the most prominent disability impacted by an inaccessible website.
The fact is, mobility problems and cognitive issues impact a higher percentage of the population than visual impairments. This means website accessibility is essential for those who are not able to move their hands or arms and require a switch device, as well as those who have dyslexia and need the option to switch to a more legible font to easily read your online information.
Accessibility also impacts aging users, including those who experience declining vision and need a higher contrast or a larger font, have difficulty hearing, or struggle with motor control.
Bottom line: an accessible digital experience benefits users of all abilities. And design doesn’t have to suffer in the process.
Myth 5: Digital accessibility applies only to websites in the US
While it's true that the US has one of the strongest legal frameworks around digital accessibility — including both federal and state laws — most developed countries around the globe have enacted legislation to protect the rights of users who have a disability. The legislation is particularly well-developed and far-reaching in the European Union, Canada, Australia, the UK, and Israel.
Depending on what your organization does, how it is funded, where it is headquartered, where it operates, and whether it offers a transactional website, you may be required to comply with one or more of these laws.
Myth 6: Digital accessibility applies only if you also have a brick-and-mortar store
According to Title III of the ADA, discrimination is prohibited in any “place of public accommodation". Legal precedent in numerous cases has firmly established that websites are regarded as places of public accommodation, just as much as physical stores. And while there are certainly some nuances in how the law is interpreted, especially around the status of non-transactional websites, any business with an internet presence needs to comply with digital accessibility legislation — or run the risk of costly legal action and reputational damage.
Myth 7: Digital accessibility doesn’t apply if you have 15 or fewer employees
The reference to “place of public accommodation” in Title III of the ADA makes no special exemptions for small companies. You can't claim that your business is too small to be able to comply, nor can you plead ignorance of the law: the ADA is a “strict liability law,” so there are no excuses for non-compliance. Besides which — see also myth 2 — compliance needn't be excessively costly or time-confusing.
Fact: web accessibility is smart business
In ethical terms, individuals of all abilities deserve the right to barrier-free use of the web. And as we’ve seen, there are strong legal incentives for ensuring that your website is as accessible as possible.
But for businesses, perhaps the most convincing arguments are those that concern the bottom line. If you don’t take accessibility seriously, people with disabilities will essentially be blocked from engaging fully with your content — and that’s potentially one-fourth of the US population! Don't be fooled by myths and misconceptions: invest in accessibility for your website.
Hiring SEOs has never been more necessary and more competitive. The pandemic catapulted e-commerce growth, with online spending up 44% in 2020.
As more businesses rely on their online presence, the more necessary SEOs become to help them grow their visibility. The proof is in the data: SEO job postings increased significantly during the pandemic.
But the supply does not appear to be keeping up with demand. In a recent Twitter poll, I asked if there was a shortage of SEO talent. The results skewed “yes”, and comments from industry veterans showed this is likely the case.
With the demand being this high, where do you find good SEOs? Hiring an experienced SEO is top of mind for many companies, but isn’t always an option due to budget and increased competition for talent.
Consider this instead: Businesses can hire and train entry-level marketers to become the new, experienced SEOs.
This may sound simple, but I know firsthand the level of work that goes into finding and training the right candidates. In the past year, I’ve helped our agency, Uproer, hire four incredible entry-level SEO analysts and interns, all of whom started adding value right away.
In this article, I’ll share unique places to source talented entry-level SEOs (none of which include Indeed or LinkedIn Jobs), and tips to support their growth once they’re hired.
Why hire entry-level?
Not surprisingly, most open SEO positions are for more tenured candidates. Backlinko’s 2020 SEO Jobs Report shows that the two most popular SEO job post titles are Senior SEO Manager and Head of SEO.
It’s clear that businesses want a senior-level hire to start getting work done from day one. The idea of training someone up who’s rather green might not be all that appealing to a business looking to move fast.
However, hiring entry-level SEOs might actually be the better option. Consider these factors:
There’s a huge pool of candidates to grow into the position. Entry-level candidates can be sourced from many different majors and backgrounds. They have fresh perspectives, new ideas, and are adaptable. They don’t come with processes from previous workplaces baked into their working style. And if you're hiring from the Gen Z pool, they know a thing or two about digital. And they pick up new things quickly.
They fit more budgets. Considering the average Sr. SEO Manager makes around $90,000 USD, a business might not have the financial resources to hire a more senior candidate. Opening up the position to entry-level candidates can meet most small business needs without breaking the budget.
We need to increase racial and gender diversity in the industry. Recent surveys found 68% of SEOs are male, and 71% of SEOs are white. Hiring only from this group keeps these statistics locked in place. Prioritizing diversity when hiring entry-level candidates builds a more inclusive, diverse workforce.
Where to find entry-level talent
OK, cool. Now we know a few reasons why entry-level SEOs can be a great option for your business... but where does one find them? Below are several unique ideas to source entry-level SEO talent:
1. Universities
What better place to meet talented students and young professionals, who are actively looking for careers in their chosen field?
Start building relationships with professors and students at local (or non-local) universities. A good place to start is your alma mater, but you can also reach out to other universities to offer your knowledge. To get you started, many professors are on LinkedIn and their contact info can be found on the university website.
Some great ways to work with universities:
Ask to be a guest teacher. Offer to speak about SEO in marketing, communications, or business classes and student organizations. Many students may not be familiar with search marketing, and introducing them early is a great way to generate long-term interest. And guess who they might be interested in working with? Yeah, that’d be you.
Mentor students. Some ambitious students may want to continue the conversation outside of class. Support students by sharing your experiences and offering advice about their career. Not only are you helping the next generation of marketers, but you’re building relationships with potential hires.
Connect with university career centers. This is one key place students look to find open internships or full-time positions. Get your job description in front of more students by sharing with the career centers. Also share with the professors of classes you’ve taught and ask if they’d send it to their students.
2. Student/recent grad conferences & programs
Ask the students and professors you meet about existing marketing programs for students and recent grads. This is an amazing place to find candidates, as the people involved generally have natural leadership skills and ambition.
To get involved, you can often apply to be a mentor or speaker for the group, or sponsor the program. A couple great examples are Camp Adventure or BoundarylessMN, which offer free advertising experience for students and recent grads.
3. Digital marketing & tech organizations
Career-focused organizations are a fantastic way to meet people in the industry. You can meet folks with a year or two of experience, or more seasoned professionals looking for a change of pace.
Attend the org’s events, like monthly meetings, happy hours, or conferences. These meet-ups are a great place to share your open role and meet new people in the industry. Many have job boards that you can leverage as well. A few marketing organizations include:
The people already on your team may be a gold mine of referrals. If you’ve recently hired a new grad, chances are they have peers who are still on the job hunt.
Simply ask your team members if they’d be willing to share the job description with qualified candidates or their alma mater. You can offer an incentive if you really want to step it up.
5. Speaking
Share your SEO knowledge at conferences, local events, and webinars, especially those that are beginner-friendly. This raises awareness for your company and provides a platform to broadcast your open role. You never know who might be looking for that next opportunity!
Important: As you meet people from these various efforts, you’ll want to keep track of those who stand out. Create a “Talent to Watch” list so you know who to reach out to when it comes time to hire.
What traits to look for
For greener folks, “soft” skills are often much more important in an SEO role than actual experience. (And while we’re here — can we nix that term for good? “Human” skills feels much more accurate.)
Some crucial traits to look for in these hires include:
Curiosity
Strong written & verbal communication
Eagerness to learn
Positive attitude
Demonstration of leadership
These “human” skills may seem trivial to some, but they can be a far better predictor of success than having years of experience. Site audits can be taught — curiosity and motivation are inherent.
Important: Be open-minded to folks with different experiences and degrees, because there’s really no linear path to SEO. Need proof? This Twitter thread found that SEOs come from many different paths, whether it be sales, IT, or (my personal favorite) a World of Warcraft guild leader.
Job description tips
Once you have a solid group of candidates, you’ll need a solid job description.
Making job descriptions more inclusive and less intimidating for women and people of color is a must. Here are some guidelines for inclusive job descriptions that can help you craft a welcoming and unbiased message. These include:
Removing gender-coded words (think “aggressive”, “rockstar”, “outspoken”)
Swapping “cultural fit” for “value alignment”
Eliminating requirements that are not essential or labeling them “preferred”
Adding in salary range
How to support new hires
Now onto the final step. You’ve put in the work, and have found the perfect new hire. They're motivated, curious, and eager to get started in this grand world of SEO.
But your work does not stop there, my friend. In order for your new hire to be successful, managers need to invest in their continued growth. Here are several ways to do this:
1. Encourage learning on their own time
The search marketing world has resources galore. In fact, that’s how so many people have taught themselves SEO. Create a document with your team’s go-to resources for learning SEO. These should probably be on that list:
Make sure to give your new teammate dedicated time for reading in their weekly schedule. You can also consider offering a budget for courses, especially if you don't have a senior SEO to mentor them. Which leads us to our next point...
2. Provide mentorship
New hires should have a go-to person to ask questions and talk through things with.
If your team doesn’t have a mentor in-house, here are a couple places that offer SEO mentorship:
3. Pass on leadership & speaking opportunities to the new hires
If an opportunity arises to take on a big project or lead a pitch, consider passing it to your hire. This gives them a chance to put their own spin on the process and start building valuable strategic skills.
Similarly, ask if any team members will pass on speaking engagements to the new hire once they’re feeling comfortable in the role. This can build their confidence and allow them to share all the cool things they’re learning and testing.
4. Create a supportive and inclusive working environment
This one doesn’t happen overnight. Ongoing steps must be taken to create an inclusive work environment for your staff.
A few ways to work on this:
Offer a flexible work environment
Advocate for gender and pay equality when hiring
Build up your team’s confidence with regular feedback and recognition
Ask your team members what holidays they observe, and celebrate as a team
Wrapping up
The new generation of marketers are ambitious, capable, and motivated. They can become experienced SEOs and add value quickly if we shift our mindset from “must have 5+ years of experience" to “must be motivated and curious".
SEO talent is truly everywhere, if we take even a small amount of effort to seek it out. So with that, go forth and hire!
Technical SEO work ensures that the time you’ve spent on on- and off-page SEO pays off — if a website can’t be crawled and indexed, the content on that site can’t rank no matter how high-quality or link-worthy it is. For that reason, SEO pros know that a comprehensive search marketing strategy should include periodic audits of a website’s technical health and its opportunities for improvement. But as you uncover these opportunities, how do you know which ones are most important? What information can you provide to your managers and web developers so that they know which issues deserve their time and attention?
Every website’s technical SEO situation is different, depending on platform, code base, history, and complexity. As the SEO Manager here at Moz, I use information from our Campaign tools to make recommendations about the urgency and predicted impact of our site’s technical SEO needs. Our devs use these insights to plan their sprints, making sure to prioritize the most pressing fixes and those that are most likely to move the SERP needle.
The Site Crawl tools within Moz Pro can help you identify a wide variety of issues that may affect the crawling, indexing, and ranking of the content you’ve worked so hard to develop. In this series of Daily Fix videos, we’ll show you where to find those issues and, just as importantly, how to use the tools’ sorting, filtering, and CSV export functions to organize them by the impact they’ll have on your overall technical SEO health.
How do you prioritize your technical SEO work? Let us know which metrics mean the most to you and your website in the comments!
Prioritize Crawl Issues
Once the Moz crawler has finished its crawl of your website, the All Crawled Pages report will offer a full list of crawling, indexing, and content errors discovered during the process. With such comprehensive coverage, this list can be overwhelming!
Zac demonstrates how to filter and sort your full list of issues within your Moz Pro Campaign and using a CSV export, allowing you to focus on pages with the most issues or those with the highest Page Authority.
Analyze Crawl Depth of Important Pages
The Crawl Depth metric describes how many clicks it takes to get from your homepage to any other page within your site. Both search engines and users visit easy-to-reach pages more often, so it’s important that all pages with user value are quickly accessible.
Eli shows how to analyze your site’s architecture via crawl depth, so you can adjust your internal linking structure to ease access to your most important pages and save on valuable crawl budget.
Identify and Fix Duplicate Content
The Content Issues tool within Site Crawl provides a fast and easy way to identify potential duplicate content on your site, which can cause search engines to index and rank the wrong version of a page.
Jo uses the Duplicate Content feature to find pages that would benefit from canonicalization, redirection, or rewriting of content to avoid SERP confusion.
Prioritize Site Performance/CWV Improvements
As of June 2021, Google uses important site performance metrics called Core Web Vitals to inform its SERP rankings. Sites that load slowly or otherwise provide poor user experiences could get left behind in the wake of this newest algorithm update.
Using Moz’s robust Performance Metrics tool, Emilie shows how to audit your pages’ Core Web Vitals in bulk, saving you time and helping you understand where your site developers should concentrate their efforts.
