Data Visualization: Win Friends and Influence People with Accurate Data

Marketers love graphs. Oftentimes, however, we visualize complex data in a way that can be unintentionally misleading. The graph trends upwards but is the data the right metric to be plotting? Are we choosing data that genuinely conveys the state of play, or just information that supports our case?

We have reams of data at our fingertips, and using that to support business cases or budget increases is paramount. How do you do this in a way that conveys truth to a less-knowledgeable audience?

When presenting results to stakeholders, marketers will often find themselves talking to people who don't understand the metrics to the same degree. Let’s make smart choices in how we choose and display data. From cleansing data and choosing the right metrics, to visualizing them in a way that helps build support and omits bias.

Winning friends with reporting

Marketing reports are about communicating a message through data. Often that data can be fairly complicated — augmented by segments, audiences, time periods, and campaigns. The message is usually much more simple. There is a key thought, implication, or decision that you want to leave the reader with. The key to good reporting is making sure the data elicits those thoughts in an unbiased way that is easily comprehended.

Consider your audience

The first step in ensuring your reports are useful to other people is putting yourself in their shoes. Go back to basics with your report and ask yourself this: who is the audience of this report? 

The audience is central to the reporting process. After all, you’re trying to convey a message. So, when designing your reports, you may want to conduct some research first — that is, speak to the people who will be receiving your report. This might be a client, your line manager, a colleague, or an outside stakeholder. Whoever it is, they’re likely to have a different set of questions they want to have answered by the data than you.

Ask them some of the following:

What questions do you want this report to answer?

Find out from the report receiver if there is a specific question they need answered by the data you're presenting. This might well be something along the lines of needing to know if the campaigns being run are generating ROI. It might be wanting to know if the budget is being assigned efficiently. Perhaps they need to know whether the new marketing channel being trialled is bringing about results, or if the test you’ve been running should be rolled out across more pages of the website.

If you don’t know what the report needs to answer, it'll be hard for you to write one that’s useful to the people you’re presenting it to.

Who else needs to see this report?

Your key stakeholders may not be the only people who will pick up the report and draw conclusions from it. As an agency account executive, you may have a key contact who you send the reports to, but find out from them if they then send them on to others. If it goes to your contact’s colleagues or boss, they may have different needs.

Perhaps you send the reports to your line manager, who then discusses it with the board of directors. Is there key information the board needs that you can include front-and-center in your reports?

What insights do you want to be able to pass on?

The marketing report you provide might be useful in helping the recipient communicate ideas to their stakeholders. For instance, if the report is designed to show the performance of SEO for your company, might your line manager like to be able to argue for a bigger budget? What can you include in your reports to make this decision clearer?

What do you already report on that you would also like to see in this report?

There’s often a lot of duplication going on with marketing reports. Each marketing channel will be commenting on their impact on the website, or how they’re improving brand awareness. Can you help to simplify the reporting process by bringing some of these other reports into yours? If your report’s recipient is already reporting on metrics of their own, find out if they’re aligned enough to include in your reporting. You'll instantly be adding value to the report you’re creating.

What are your key objectives and performance metrics?

Ascertain what metrics actually matter. Marketing reports can end up cumbersome, and unfortunately, skim-read as a result. Are there any pertinent metrics that your report recipients really need to know? What are the KPIs they're being measured on? How does your work impact those? Include these metrics directly into your report so your stakeholders can see how your activity is benefiting them.

How much of what I report on are you already familiar with?

It’s not an easy question, and requires some tact, but it’s important to understand your report recipient’s level of understanding about what you’re reporting on. Are they marketers themselves, or are you their main touch-point within your marketing department? Are they seasoned SEOs who have seen every iteration of an SEO report under the sun?

Once you know their level of understanding on the subject, you can decide how to format your report to aid in explaining details more clearly, like including a glossary or notations.

An example email to a stakeholder designed to help understand what a marketing report needs to cover.

Learn to use your reports for your own marketing purposes

Let’s not forget that we’re reporting on marketing data because we want to show how our work is paying off. That means there will always be an element of showing our successes and failures. How we communicate those through our reports is important.

What do you want to communicate?

Are you looking to prove that a concept works or that a campaign has been successful? Are you wanting to share an update on the general trends of an account?

Consider your marketing reports as a marketing tool in their own right. Once you have a better understanding of their audience, you can use them to present data to clearly convey your message.

Your reports can help you get sign-off

Your marketing reports will serve to sum up the successes and room for growth in your previous marketing endeavors. Done well, they'll help to show off your skills and achievements. This can pave the way for future buy-in from your stakeholders. “Referral traffic to the website has increased by 50% due to the last digital PR campaign you ran? Of course you can run another!”

Your reports prove the worth of your work

Along with showing off all the good you’ve achieved, your reports should also cover what you’ve learned. That might include projects or campaigns that have not performed as you hoped. Being honest about what didn’t work and how you would change that in the future can help to solidify your reputation as a diligent, accountable marketer.

Not everything will go to plan all of the time, and our reports should reflect when they don’t. Only giving one side of the story through reports can lead to some awkward conversations later down the line when stakeholders want to know where their budget has gone or why goals haven’t been met.

Summarize effectively

The unfortunate truth about marketing reports is that they don’t always get read. You may spend hours putting together an intelligent, thought-out commentary to go alongside your carefully crafted graphs and charts, only for it to lie attached to an unopened email for weeks.

One of the ways our reports can be off-putting to their audience is length. Send a Data Studio document consisting of 15 pages to a busy executive and they may never click “open” again. A way around this, and to make sure the pertinent information is definitely being read, is a succinct summary.

Add the main message to the first page of the report. Write it after the rest of the report has been constructed and take from that analysis the most salient points you want your audience to know. Summarize the key points and include only the important data on that first page. If the recipient reads nothing else from the report they should be able to take away the key information you need from this one page alone.

The rest of the data, tables, charts and commentary should be backing up that first page. This can be where the deep-dive analysis of the data is carried out, but not where the important information is first raised.

Continually review your report structure and tone

Your reports might need to go through several iterations in order to get the right level of “comprehensive” and “clear”. Don’t be afraid of asking for feedback on your reports. Think of them like marketing collateral – you may need to refine the messaging to make sure it's resonating with your target audience. Reports shouldn’t be a case of “set-it-and-forget-it” — they may need to be adapted to new team members or stakeholders.

Share insight, not just intelligence

There's a difference between insight and intelligence. In this instance, intelligence is the sharing of data. It's valuable in its own right, but not necessarily the best way to communicate through your reports. 

Instead, consider insight to be the goal. Insight should come from a place of analysis. When reporting on your marketing campaigns, dig deeper to look into trends, seasonality, social, and political factors that might be having an effect.

Your expert take

If you're producing marketing reports, chances are you're a skilled marketing professional with a broad or deep knowledge of marketing disciplines. Your opinion matters.

Depending on the type of report you're creating, and the audience who's receiving it, you may need to go into quite some detail explaining what the data shows. Guide the readers to the conclusions that can be drawn from the data. This way, the reports become useful decision-making tools.

Evaluate how this report backs up your other comms

It's likely that your marketing reports aren't the only source of information about the campaigns or channel your stakeholders are receiving. You may be updating them on progress through meetings, dashboards, and emails. Progress might be frequently discussed by other members of your team. Your reports need to be cohesive with these other communications. If they aren’t, how do stakeholders know which one is the source of truth? 

There are many of ways in which the results may be misunderstood or miscommunicated. When creating your reports, it's imperative that you're aware of what other discussions around the report-subject are being held so you can ensure you're providing the data that evidences and reiterates those discussions.

Keeping data accurate and unbiased

Using your reports as a marketing tool makes sense when you think about them being a reflection of your hard work. However, this approach could lead to some distortion of the facts.

One key takeaway from this article is this: keep your reports honest and unbiased.

This is hard to do. There’s often a lot riding on your reports — new budgets, recurring revenue, your promotion opportunities, etc. To help, the following are ten tips for making sure you're presenting the data in the best way possible for your audience to see the true message.

1. Choosing the right data set

What data do we need to report on? This might seem like a simple decision to make, but it’s actually more nuanced than you might expect. 

Consider what you're trying to demonstrate through your reports. If it's the success of a marketing campaign, then the data you need to report on might go beyond the data you have a direct impact on.

For instance, if you're tasked with driving converting organic traffic to a website, then it might not be enough for you to just report on the Google Analytics organic channel traffic and conversions. To create a truly useful marketing report, you may also need to include data from what happens after the traffic completes a conversion on the website. Can you include data from software like Salesforce or Hubspot, which gives an indication of how much of that traffic actually became a marketing qualified lead, or even a customer?

Your data should be chosen based on the overall goals of the marketing initiatives you're reporting on. Rarely is that simply to drive more traffic to a website or generate more awareness of a product. It usually comes down to revenue. To really identify whether the work you're carrying out is making an impact on a company’s bottom line, then you may need to include that revenue data in some way. Doing this gives a much fuller picture of how effective your marketing is, and keeps you accountable to the role that your marketing activity should be playing in the success of the business.

2. Reporting on the key goals

Think about the big picture of the company. What are the overall KPIs it's working with? How can the information provided in your report tie into those KPIs?

Say, for example, your company has released a new line of sneakers. The overall goals of the new campaign are to have sold 20,000 units of this new stock by the end of the year. How can your SEO report include information that might help identify whether that launch has been successful?

By including references to wider company goals in your report, it will stay more relevant to a wider audience. It also means there's a direct correlation to be drawn between the activity you're carrying out and the success of the business.

This might mean that your report structure needs to change seasonally as the goals of the company change. You may have a page of your report dedicated to data that tracks the success of the sneaker launch until the end of the year. As a new product line launches and the focus of the company changes, so may the focus of that page of the report.

3. Keeping the integrity of that data set

Our reports ride on a lot of trust that the data we’re using is… actually right. Consider: Who has access to your Google Analytics data? Your Search Console account? Who can add filters, delete views, change custom groupings, delete properties?

It’s really important to lock down who has the ability to make changes to your data that could drastically affect its reliability. It’s even more important to build processes that will reduce the risk of it happening. Even the most seasoned Google Analytics user will not necessarily be aware of how adding a traffic filter to the account may affect the integrity of data that someone else in the team is reporting on.

You may well be trying to clean up your data source by better attributing channel data, or filtering out bot traffic. These are all good ideas. However, unless it's carried out in conjunction with other people who are using that data, properly noted and even annotated within your data source, it can cause a loss of integrity.

Even outside of the data source itself, there can be factors that affect it. For instance, Google Analytics channel data relies on people using UTM codes correctly. Make sure you invest time in creating training programs that inform stakeholders of how their actions can impact data. Create processes that limit the effect of those changes. Consider keeping a centralized document of UTM codes used on marketing campaigns and develop a system for creating them consistently. This way you can limit the poorly attributed traffic polluting your marketing reports.

4. Avoiding bad data

To reiterate: Our marketing reports should be useful to their recipients. Safe reports — ones that just cover basic metrics or cherry-pick data— do not add value.

When writing your reports, avoid just choosing data that is “bad”. That is, data that obfuscates truth and hides issues. This can be through choosing metrics that, on the face of it, look good (like a low site-wide bounce rate), but in reality do not provide sufficient information to base decisions on. For bounce rate to be a metric on which to base decisions, a reader would need to know what the bounce rate of individual pages were, or the type of content they contained, or even just whether the low bounce rate is coupled with a high engagement rate.

Bad data can also be data that has been highlighted because it's positive, but at the expense of showing data that might reflect badly on the marketing activities. Showing that traffic to a webpage is growing may look great. Not including the fact that conversion rate has steadily been declining could hide the issue of the decreasing quality of that traffic.

For example, look at these two charts. They show the same organic traffic data to a webpage:

The first image shows just the organic traffic to the page. If an agency presented this image to a client, it would suggest that their work over the past year had been successful. Organic traffic has almost doubled during those 12 months.

This second image uses the same organic traffic data, but adds in the leads generated by that traffic during the same time period. By adding in the leads generated by that organic traffic, you see a different story emerge of the success of that campaign. The traffic has increased but leads have decreased. There could be several reasons as to why that has happened, but this image would not suggest the recent SEO work has been successful in adding to their client’s business goals.

5. Giving a clear picture of the data

Your report needs to analyze, detail, and display the data in a way that tells a story. This is the insight that adds value. Think of your report like a journey. You want to draw your reader into the data in a way that helps them to understand the context, the results, and the conclusions.

Consider starting your report broad: What is the context of this data? Depending on your niche, this might include all sorts of related information like political background, weather data, economic factors, societal restrictions, COVID-19 case levels, etc. 

Your report should then narrow down to what is being reported on, looking specifically at the business. Perhaps this will include some of the more business-focused KPIs we discussed earlier. It might be the wider marketing team’s goals and metrics.

Next up should be the KPIs that your work has directly impacted. For instance, SEO traffic data, conversions, or content engagement.

From there it would be worth narrowing down further to look at the results of activity that has been carried out during the reporting time period. For instance, detail the results of that link-building campaign, or demonstrate how the changes to the webpage copy impacted bounce rate and dwell time.

6. Using the best visualizations for the data

Choosing the best way to display your data can make or break a report. You can take data from a confusing mess to being easily understood by simply changing the scale on an axis.

It's also very easy to mislead your audience by using an inappropriate chart or graph. Consider what you're trying to demonstrate. Is it the changes in data over time? Then perhaps a line or bar graph is the best bet. Need to show the relationship between the parts of a whole? Then a pie chart might be a good choice.

Whatever you do, make sure you avoid these common ways of skewing the data visually:

Manipulating the axis scale: Not starting at zero is a common way of making data look more significant than it is. A scale going from 1,000 to 3,000 makes the comparison of two data sets that differ by 500 look huge. Similarly, the axis not being labelled in the right increments can be very misleading. Too big a gap between increments and differences between plots on the graph look small. Too small a gap and the differences look very significant.

Parts not adding up to a whole: The key to a pie chart, or any graph that is meant to represent parts of a whole, is that it needs to add up to 100%. That is, every part should be represented, even if it's included in an “other” segment. 

Percentages instead of actual numbers: You’ll see these sorts of statistics all over social media when marketers are showing off their work. Growth will often be spoken about in terms of percentage changes rather than absolute numbers. Which sounds better: increasing traffic to the site from 10 to 20 users, or a 100% increase in users?

Missing data: Only showing the best quarter of a year of poor results can make the results look a lot better. In reality, the missing context is significant and shouldn’t be hidden.

7. Annotate your charts and graphs

Wherever possible, annotate your visualizations, especially if they're time-based. For instance, did you start filtering out internal traffic in March 2021? If so, that could have caused a dramatic drop in website traffic from that point onwards. Someone new to the business or your team may not know that it happened and will be looking for reasons for this change in traffic.

Equally, when comparing March 2021’s traffic to the previous year, the graph may give the impression of a drop in traffic year-over-year. In fact, this could be masking an increase in the external traffic to the site. Noting significant changes in the context of your data on your marketing charts and graphs can help identify genuinely significant changes.

8. Waiting for the right time to draw conclusions and report on data

It might be tempting to call out successes in your campaigns as soon as you see them. Often, though, it pays to wait before drawing those conclusions.

You may be only a month or two into a six-month campaign. Instead of declaring it a success now, note in your reports how other factors may yet influence it. 

It would be better to wait for a longer period of time to pass before you call a campaign or activity a success. There may still be insights to be gleaned from how successful it is or could be.

9. Showing a clear link between the data and next steps

Remember to be clear about the conclusions you want the reader of your report to take away. These conclusions should result in actions or decisions. Otherwise, the report isn’t actionable and its value is arguably limited.

What would you want someone who is less knowledgeable about the work you’ve been doing, or marketing as a whole, to take away from it? The data you're choosing to report on should be sufficient enough to back-up your analysis, and clearly link the conclusions you've drawn to your next steps.

10. Stay true to the data

Your reports need to be factually accurate in order for you to achieve a good balance of marketing collateral and reliable analysis.

If you gave this data set over to another industry professional with the same level of expertise as you, and with access to the same contextual knowledge, would they be likely to draw the same conclusions? If not, you may have introduced some bias into your analysis.

When analyzing your data, always consider whether another person who is more objective of the situation would be interpreting the data in the same way. This should help you to be more critical of the information, and less prone to highlighting only the positives.

Conclusion

The key aspects of any marketing report is that it needs to be accurate, factual, and clear. It should also show how your marketing has had an impact — whether it be positive, negative, or if it remains to be seen. Reports shouldn’t leave the reader confused as to their significance. Help your audience understand the data's context, and clearly show the actions that can be taken off the back of it.

Magento SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Magento Websites

When it comes to e-commerce platforms, there are few that are more robust than Magento. Due to its power and customizability, Magento is still the go-to e-commerce platform for retailers. This is especially true for enterprise stores. Magento is utilized by many enterprise sites such as American Express, Ford, Puma, Xerox, and more.

In 2019, it was estimated that Magento accounted for 30% of the e-commerce market share. Using BuiltWith data, we can see that 1.04% of the top 1 million sites utilize the platform, and Magento’s share of the market grows to 1.77% in the top 10,000 sites.

If you’re an SEO working in the e-commerce space, it’s going to be important to learn how to work with Magento. Fortunately, there are a lot of really good things that Magento does out of the box from an SEO perspective. However, there are definitely some considerations you’ll need to take into account with any Magento site.

What is Magento SEO?

Magento SEO is a set of SEO adjustments that are unique to the Magento platform. Magento has great features for SEO such as a robots.txt file, sitemap.xml and multiple ways to redirect pages. Magento SEO issues include duplicate content from the faceted navigation, improper canonical tags, and a lack of blogging functionality.

Below you can see our recommendations for improving SEO on the Magento platform:

1. Crawling & indexing

Duplicate content & faceted navigation

One of the biggest SEO issues with any Magento site is likely going to be the faceted navigation. Faceted navigations create huge crawling and indexing issues since their existence exponentially increases the number of pages that can be crawled. As pages in the faceted navigation will only either sort or narrow existing products, these pages create duplicate and similar content. Alsol, if you think about the fact that every single combination of parameters could be considered a unique page, the number of pages a faceted navigation creates can be enormous. In this example, Google showsa video from Google, they indicate how a store with 158 SKUs actually created 380,000 unique URLs that Googlebot could crawl. Not ideal!

If your Magento store utilizes faceted navigation, you’re likely going to need to take steps to control the crawl. While a how-to on controlling the crawl of a faceted navigation could warrant multiple blog posts, I’ll try to summarize steps that should be taken.

1. Audit to find low-quality, indexed pages from the faceted navigation. Identify steps to remove them from the index (noindex, canonical tag)

2. Review the site’s log files to find any low-quality pages that are getting crawled

3. Block the crawl of any low value parameters through the robots.txt

4. Consider only allowing pages with high search potential to be indexed

Of course, the steps taken here are going to vary a lot depending on the site. The overall point is that if you utilize a faceted navigation on your Magento site, one of the most important things you’ll need to do is review how Google is crawling and indexing the pages that are being generated and take steps to remove the indexation and then block the crawl of low quality or duplicate pages.

Product & category page canonical tags

By default, a Magento site’s canonical tags won’t be set for both product and category pages. This isn’t ideal, as it’s best practice to ensure that product and category pages have self-referential canonical tags. This indicates to the search engines that these pages are the pages that should be ranking well.

Fortunately, you can adjust this in vanilla Magento:

1. Navigate to Stores > Configuration

2. In the “Catalog” dropdown, select “Catalog”

3. Select the “Search Engine Optimization” dropdown

4. Ensure that “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories” and “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products” are set to “Yes”

5. Select “Save Config”

By adjusting these settings, this should ensure that all of the site’s product and category pages will have self-referential canonical tags applied to them.

Canonical tags in pagination

When looking at paginated URLs of Magento sites, we can see that, by default, proper canonical tags are not set. In Magento, all of the paginated URLs in a given series have a canonical tag that points back to the root category page. For example, here is how the canonical tag of “Page 2” of a particular category would look:

URL: www.example.com/category?p=2

Canonical Tag: www.example.com/category

Technically, this is not best practice from an SEO standpoint. Canonical tags should only be used to consolidate duplicate content. Since paginated content are not duplicates of the root versions (as they contain different products), they should not have canonical tags that point to this version. Instead, every page within the pagination series should have it’s own self-referential canonical tag. This will tell Google that the paginated URL contains unique content and should be crawled accordingly.

URL: www.example.com/category?p=2

Canonical Tag: www.example.com/category?p=2

You might need to have a developer create a custom solution that allows the site’s pagination to utilize self-referential canonical tags instead of pointing to the root category page.

Indexable internal search pages

Another Magento SEO issue is that internal search pages are indexable out of the box. This means that Google can crawl and index these low-quality pages. These pages will generally be in the /catalogsearch/ URL path.

For example, here’s a Magento site where over 4,000 internal search pages have gotten caught in Google’s index:

In order to ensure that these pages don’t get indexed by Google, you’ll want to be sure the “noindex” tag is applied to them. We recommend having a developer implement this for you and providing this article as a reference point for them.

After you’ve implemented the “noindex” tag, you’ll want to be sure that none of your internal search URLs are actually getting indexed. Perform a search for “site:example.com inurl:/catalogsearch/”. If you see URLs appearing in the index, we recommend waiting until Google removes the majority of them. If you don’t see the URLs in the index, you might consider blocking them by using a robots.txt command.

Robots.txt

Within Magento, you can also configure the robots.txt file. You’ll want to utilize the robots.txt file in order to limit how many pages of your Magento site that Google is eligible to crawl. This is especially important to configure if your site utilizes a faceted navigation that allows users to select from a variety of attributes.

Fortunately, Magento does allow you to control the robots.txt of your site. To do this, you can perform the following steps:

1. In the Admin sidebar, navigate to Content > Design > Configuration

2. Find the “Store View” you want to adjust and select “Edit”

3. Expand the “Search Engine Robots” dropdown

4. Add your robots.txt commands in the “Edit custom instruction of robots.txt File” field

How you adjust the robots.txt is going to depend on your particular store. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all option here. The main objective will be to block the crawling of any low value pages (that aren’t indexed) while allowing the crawl of high priority ones.

Below are some general things you might consider blocking in the robots.txt:

1. Low value pages created by the faceted navigation and sorting options

2. The site’s internal search pages

3. Login pages

4. The user’s shopping cart

Sitemap.xml

Sitemap.xml files ensure that Google has a pathway of discovering all of your site’s key URLs. This means that regardless of the site’s architecture, the sitemap.xml gives Google a way of finding important URLs on the site.

Fortunately, Magento has the capability of creating a sitemap.xml file and does a good job of this in it’s default settings. You can technically configure the XML sitemap settings in Magento’s “Catalog” menu. However, most of these should be okay.

While these settings are configured, you might need to generate your sitemap.xml file so it will actually be published on the site. Fortunately, that process is very straightforward. You can do this by:

1. Navigating to Marketing > SEO & Search > Site Map

2. Click the “Add Sitemap” button

3. For “Filename” add the text “sitemap.xml”

4. For “Path”, choose the URL path you want to be associated with your sitemap.xml file. This is generally at the “/pub/” URL path

5. Click “Save & Generate”

This should correctly set up your sitemap.xml on Magento. You’ll then want to be sure to submit your sitemap.xml file to Google Search Console so Google can discover your sitemap.xml file.

2. JavaScript rendering

Something else that you’ll want to be mindful of on Magento sites is any content that is loaded through JavaScript. Magento frequently utilizes JavaScript to load key content on the store. While this isn’t inherently a negative thing for SEO, it is something you’ll want to be sure you’re reviewing.

If JavaScript is required to load key content on a page, this means that Google must perform a two-step indexing process where it processes the initial HTML, and then must return to the site to render any content loaded via JavaScript. Where SEOs need to check is in the second stage of the indexing process, to ensure that Google was able to “see” all of the content that is on the page. If any elements are loaded via JavaScript, it’s worth checking whether they’re indexed.

For instance, here’s an example of a product page in Magento where JavaScript is enabled in the browser. We can see thumbnail images, text in tabs, and a related products section at the bottom:

However, most of that content is reliant on JavaScript to load. When turning JavaScript off using the Web Developer extension for Chrome, most of those elements do not render. Notice how we can only see the initial three tabs on the page:

Since JavaScript is required to load a lot of the content on the page, we’ll want to ensure that it’s getting indexed properly. Fortunately, we can use tools such as The Mobile Friendly Testing Tool and The Rich Results Test to determine what Googlebot is able to render on the page.

We also like to manually check the index by identifying content that’s loaded via JavaScript, and then using a “site:” search operator to verify that Google is able to read that text on the page. JavaScript SEO is a very expansive subject and I suggest reading this guide by Pierce Brelinsky for more information. Just understand that if you use Magento, some of your content is likely loaded through JavaScript.

3. URL paths

Out of the box, Magento will add the URL extension “.html” to the end of the site’s product and category URLs. While this isn’t necessarily “bad” for SEO, it does create lengthier URLs that are harder to read from a user perspective. URLs without the “.html” extension will have a much cleaner format for users.

To remove the .html extension from the end of URLs, you can take the following steps:

1. Navigate to Stores > Configuration

2. In the “Catalog” dropdown, select “Catalog”

3. Select the “Search Engine Optimization” dropdown

4. Find “Product URL Suffix” & “Category URL Suffix”

5. Replace the “.html” field with “/”

6. Select “Save Config”

The result will be cleaner and easier to read URLs for your store.

Please note that this is best done for a brand new Magento site. This change will automatically adjust all of the URLs on your Magento store. If your store has already existed for some time, without proper migration planning, changing this field could actually result in ranking drops. Therefore, tores that have been established a while may want to consider keeping the “.html” extension.

In addition, the old URL paths won’t automatically redirect back to the new URLs without the “.html” extension. This means that you might need to implement global redirect rules to ensure that the old pages will redirect both users and search engines.

4. Redirects

Global redirects

Magento does implement global redirects on your site. This means that if your store utilizes a “www” subdomain or “https”, if a user doesn’t enter those attributes, Magento will still redirect the user to the correct destination URL. This is great for the user experience of the site, as users should land on the correct content even if they don’t type in the exact destination URL in those instances.

However, Magento does this through 302 redirects instead of 301 redirects:

Back in 2016, there was a famous study by Wayfair that showed that 302 redirects could significantly dilute link equity. While Google has claimed that 302 redirects pass link equity, this argument is still a never-ending debate in SEO. While we believe that 302 redirects do distribute much more link equity then they once did, we take the stance that you should never utilize 302 redirects unless you absolutely need to.

For this reason, we recommend adjusting this in the Magento platform. Fortunately, this is a very straightforward change:

1. Navigate to Stores > Configuration

2. In the “General” dropdown, select “Web”

3. Select the “Url Options” dropdown

4. Change “Auto-redirect to Base URL” to “Yes (301 Moved Permanently)”

This should ensure that your Magento website’s global redirects now utilize 301 status codes instead of 302:

Custom redirects

Of course, aside from the site’s global redirects, you’re also going to want to implement 1:1 redirects for individual pages. This ensures that if you ever need to implement redirects for old pages, you can do so. Fortunately, Magento offers this functionality out of the box.

In order to implement redirects for individual pages, you can perform the following steps:

1. In the Admin sidebar, navigate to Marketing > SEO & Search > URL Rewrites

2. Select “Add URL Rewrite”

3. Enter the URL you wish to redirect in the “Request Path”. This must be a relative URL

4. Enter the destination page in the “Target Path”. This must be a relative URL

5. Choose the “Redirect Type”. Generally, you’ll want to choose “Permanent (301)”

6. Select “Save”

Please note that in order to implement redirects, the page must be completely deleted from Magento, as you can’t redirect active pages. This makes redirects very “all or nothing”, as they need to be completely removed from the platform first.

Automatic redirects

One thing that’s good to know about redirects in the Magento platform is that it will automatically create redirects when you change the URLs. For example, here I’m changing the URL path of a page:

FROM: dash-digital-watch

TO: dash-digital-watches

We can see how there is an option to “Create Permanent Redirect for old URL”

This is a really nice feature that makes it easier to handle the site’s redirects, and is definitely a best practice if you plan on changing URL paths for any key pages of the site.

5. On-page content

Title tags & meta descriptions

Want to set your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs for an individual product? No worries, Magento includes this SEO feature by default.

When you’re on an individual product or category page, simply scroll down and find the “Search Engine Optimization” dropdown. From there you can enter your title tag in the “Meta Title” field and your meta description in the “Meta Description” field.

Related products

Another great feature that Magento allows you to implement is “Related Products”. You can set this on individual product pages. Adding “Related Products” to all of the site’s product pages is a fantastic way to improve several SEO aspects of your site:

1. This can help improve the overall UX and engagement by showing users other products that are similar to the one they’re on

2. This can result in more revenue from showing users upsell opportunities

3. The internal links from these products can help Google easily discover and distribute link equity to them

On Magento product pages, you can manually set “Related Products” for a particular product. To do this, navigate to the product and then find “Related Products, Up-Sells, and Cross-Sells”. You can then select “Add Related Products” and add any other SKUs you offer that users might be interested in. This should add these internal links to the bottom of your product page!

6. Blogging functionality

One of the biggest weaknesses of Magento from an SEO perspective is that the platform doesn’t contain blogging functionality out of the box. While generally an e-commerce site’s category and product pages are going to be the most important from a revenue perspective, blogs can still be very important for e-commerce sites.

In recent years, there has definitely been a shift towards more informational content ranking for keywords where we would expect a category or product page to rank instead. We can see that, more and more, Google is choosing to rank content such as guides, affiliate sites, or “how to” content above product and category pages. This means that not having a place for informational content to live can limit Magento stores’ SEO success.

For instance, let’s say we set up a store that sells cameras that are great for selfies. Naturally, we might want to create a page to rank for the term “selfie cameras”. However, when we check the SERPs, some of the top ranking results are informational pieces of content.

In the screenshot below, you can see how ShotKit (#2) and B&H (#3) actually rank above Best Buy and Amazon for this query with “Best Selfie Camera” pages:

When we look at the B&H page, we can see how they’ve set up a blog post that ranks the best selfie cameras that they offer. They’ve then intelligently linked to the products in their store. Instead of trying to force a category or product page to rank, they were able to use this listicle-style blog post to improve their visibility for an important query:

A blog allows a natural place for your informational content to live. Without informational content, Magento stores might not be able to rank for some of their target keywords by only using product and category pages.

Fortunately, there are extensions that you can utilize such as the Magento 2 Blog Extension from Magefan. You could also consider setting up a blog on WordPress and creating a subdomain for your Magento store (blog.example.com). We highly recommend setting up one of these options to give your site the ability to host informational content.

7. Structured data

Structured data is code you can add to your site that gives Google a better understanding of what an individual page is about. As Magento sites can be quite large, structured data can be a great way to improve Google’s understanding of the site at scale.

For e-commerce sites, here is our ideal mapping of which structured data types should go on different page templates:

1. Home Page: Organization

2. Category Page: CollectionPage, BreadcrumbList

3. Product Page: Product, BreadcrumbList

4. Blog: Article

This mapping can help give Google a stronger understanding of your store’s content. Below is a little more detail about CollectionPage and Product structured data, as these will be included on the most important pages of your site.

CollectionPage

By using CollectionPage schema, you can signal to Google that your category pages contain a collection of different products, and provide key information about each one. Here are some of the properties you can include about each product:

• Name

• URL

• Position on the page

For example, here is some CollectionPage structured data that we’ve been able to implement:

Product

Of course, Product structured data is a staple of e-commerce sites. Product schema tells Google and other search engines that the page contains information about a particular SKU. Ideally, this structured data will contain key properties such as:

• Name

• Description

• Image

• Price

• SKU

• aggregateRating

One of our favorite properties to include both on-page and within the structured data is the “SKU” property. It’s very common on Magento sites to see queries for SKU numbers appearing in Search Console’s “Performance” report. These are high-intent queries where users could be looking to purchase the exact product that you’re offering in your store. You’ll definitely want to be sure you’re including this in both the on-page content and Product schema markup.

Conclusion

Overall, the good news for Magento store owners is that the platform is built well for SEO. Since it’s open source, store owners have a lot of control over a particular site’s SEO elements such as the robots.txt, sitemap.xml, redirects, metadata, and more. While there are a few SEO issues that store owners might run into, such as duplicate content through the faceted navigation and no blog functionality, Magento does give store owners and SEOs the tools they need in order to fix these issues.

If you have any other strategies that you use to improve the SEO on Magento sites, let us know on Twitter @moz and @gofishchris. 

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

• The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

• Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

• Spam became more and more common

• Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

1. The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

2. Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.)

That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

• Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

• New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

1. We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

2. We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

3. We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

1. Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

2. Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

• Higher time on site

• Lower bounce rate

• More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

The Roadmap to B2B SEO Success

It can be hard to navigate the B2B marketing landscape. Today, guest host Austin Peachey walks you through the stops on the roadmap that his team at Obility uses to create successful B2B SEO strategies. 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey there, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Austin Peachey, SEO manager at Obility, a Portland-based B2B marketing agency. 

Working for a B2B-focused agency, I know it can be hard to navigate the B2B marketing landscape. If you want to succeed in B2B SEO, you need to make sure you follow the proper steps. Today, I'm going to walk you through our roadmap for SEO success. 

Data collection

The first step on this road map is data collection. It's so important to have all the data you collect be clean and precise because it's going to help you make crucial decisions down the road. Three key pieces to that are tracking, filters, and goals.

Tracking

For tracking, you need to ensure that your scripts are properly set up so they're collecting data every day, and to minimize scripts on your website, try to implement as many as you can through Google Tag Manager. 

Filters

Filters are the next step that are really important for clean data. These will help you to remove website sessions that have no purpose in your analysis.

The three key filters to include would be: IP filters to remove traffic from your client, your office, or remote workers; domain filters to remove traffic from commonly known spam websites; and host names filters to ensure that the sessions are actually hitting your website. 

Goals

Lastly, it's very important to have your goals properly set up and you're not tracking things like bounce rate or time on site as a recorded goal.

These are good metrics to check in on the health of your site, but they're not going to be meaningful enough to make strategic changes on down the road. When it comes to B2B SEO, we focus on two different types of goals — micro and macro conversions. Micro conversions may be things like downloading a white paper or signing up for a newsletter. Macro conversions focus on bigger, lead-based goals, like form fills or demo requests.

The buyer's journey is so much longer when it comes to B2B versus B2C, and you need to make sure that you are there with conversion points no matter where in the cycle they are. 

Technical SEO

Once you get your data collection properly working, the next step is to look at the technical health of your website and anything that might impact your indexation or traffic coming into the site.

Focus first on critical crawler issues that may be bogging down your site. These could be 404 errors, duplicate content, and website speed performance. 404 errors affect the crawlability of your site as well as the user experience as they're actually going through your content. Duplicate content errors can be as major as having two full instances of your website available to crawl as well as something as small as just having a blog post posted twice on your website. Big or small, though, it's really important to have unique content throughout your entire site. 

Site speed and Core Web Vitals are important to both SEO and the user experience. Work with your web developer to minimize the scripts used on the site, optimize your images, and really just clean up the code. 

Once your main crawler issues have been addressed, you can start looking at creating well-optimized title tags and meta descriptions. Make sure these are written for the user and not the search engines. A title tag isn't going to make a difference in your position on Google, but it could make a difference in somebody clicking on your posting versus a competitor. 

The Moz crawler is a great tool to help you improve the health of your site. It provides an organized breakdown of all the issues your site might be having as well as tips on how to remedy those issues.

Keyword research

Now that your site is in tip-top shape, the next step is to move and do keyword research. 

When doing SEO for B2B companies, it's important to remember that the customer's journey is so much longer than in B2C. These purchases are larger, and there are more stakeholders that are part of the buying process. Because of this, when you're doing your keyword research, you need to think about keywords throughout the entire consumer's journey, targeting keywords at the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom of the funnel.

Think of it in this way. If your product is a software that does task management, you can't just focus on optimizing for the bottom of the funnel keywords, such as task management software or business organization tool. Instead think about the keywords that your user might be searching for just because they have a problem — what is the best way to keep my team organized or tips on how to meet deadlines on time.

Start your keyword research by reaching out to your client and seeing what keywords are important to them and what they want to focus on. Then once you have that seed list, expand that by exploring their site, competitor websites, Google Search Console, and keyword tools, like the Moz Keyword Explorer. 

Once you have this list, it's time to actually prioritize those keywords, and by prioritize, we don't just mean whatever has the highest volume on a monthly basis. It's much more about what is relevant to your product and your consumers and what will eventually drive conversions down the road. 

Create content

Then now that we know these keywords, our next stop is to actually focus on the content development that goes with these keywords. Evaluate the existing content on your website and determine whether you need to build something brand new, expand on what you already have, or more likely a combination of both of those things.

As you develop this content, you have to remember the golden rule — write for users, don't write for search engines. The best content is the content people actually find useful and answers their questions. Make sure your content is easy to read, links to other relevant topics within the content, and covers the keywords you're focusing on as effectively as possible.

That doesn't always mean writing the longest piece, but a piece that really delivers the content most effectively to the user. If you aren't sure what to write about, a good place to start is the search engine results for the keyword currently. What currently ranks well? What questions are they answering, and what was the intent of the user when they made that search? Answering these questions will really lead you to develop better content down the road. 

Now, as mentioned before, with your content like your keywords, you do need to follow the user through the funnel. Make sure you're providing content through every stage of where they might be in the buying cycle. So having top of funnel content, like strategies on how to meet deadlines, will be just as important as detailed content on the software you provide and the benefits it provides to the users. By doing this, your company will be seen and be a part of their decision-making process, whether they are just beginning to solve their problem or they're ready to go out and make a final purchase. 

Conversion rate optimization

The last stop on our journey is conversion rate optimization. You figured out your keywords. You have great content. But that really doesn't mean much if they're not coming in and actually purchasing your product.

There are multiple points of conversion rate optimization that you need to pay attention to — search engine page conversion optimization, information seeker optimization, and lead optimization. As mentioned in our technical health assessment, search engine conversion rate optimization comes from your title tags and your meta descriptions. These are the first things your users see as they kind of start on their journey searching and finding answers.

You need to make sure they're well-written and entice the user to actually click and learn more about you. Test out different wordings and see what really drives the most clicks. Information seeker conversion rate optimization is for those users that are really at the beginning of their journey and they just need information. They're probably gathering it from many different points, but you just need to provide them with more information about you, whether it's a case study, a white paper, a video, or it's signing up for your newsletter program.

Lead focus conversion rate optimization is really getting the user to perform the action, such as filling out a form, taking a product demo, anything that's kind of that final step before actually making a purchase. Maximizing these conversions is really what's going to help generate the most revenue for your business. The important thing to remember when doing conversion rate optimization is that you aren't just making guesses.

Use heat mapping tools or A/B tests to determine what is actually working the best and then make strategic changes to your site based on those results. Well, there you have it, folks. 

That is our road map to B2B SEO success. Thank you very much for listening and I hope you all have a great day. Thank you.

How to Choose Pillar Page Topics

With so much content online, search engines like Google are in overdrive trying to read it all and rank it properly. While keyword research and relevant content is still key, your authority on a subject matter is coming into question more and more.

Users themselves have started to use queries that are longer form, in fact, 29.13% of keywords with 10,001+ monthly searches are made up of three or more words. With the growth of conversational search intent, pillar page strategies have entered the scene to fulfill those queries. By providing umbrella-like content, pillar pages and topic clusters allow for easy categorization and clear indication of authority. 

Sounds easy enough, right? Like anything in the SEO space, pillar page strategies take time and a great deal of planning to do correctly. Let’s break down this process.

What is a pillar page?

A pillar page is a piece of long-form content, like a guide or a white paper, that will serve as the basis for topic clusters on a particular topic. It gives basic information on its particular topic, with links out to cluster pages that delve deeper into a specific aspect of said topic.

Pillar pages should be thorough in their explanation and be framed as an early-stage piece of content. The cluster pages that the pillar page links out to should also link back to the pillar page. (Check out this quick Hubspot guide for some great visualizations.)

What is a cluster page?

Now that we understand the structure of a pillar page, we can better comprehend cluster content. When choosing a topic for your pillar page, you’ll decide what specific keywords within that topic you’d like to rank for. Each keyword then gets its own dedicated page. That dedicated page is a “cluster page”.

Cluster pages can be a blog, a white paper, a solution page — really any piece of content can serve as part of the cluster. Since all of the cluster pages are on the same topic, it should be fairly easy to link out to other related cluster pages as well as to the main pillar page. This strategy not only organizes your content library in a cohesive way, it also creates broader search engine authority.

How to choose a pillar page topic

Choosing the right topic for your pillar page is integral in the success of the strategy. Keywords are still essential in SEO, but topic targeting has become increasingly important as search engines have updated their algorithms. Search engines reward content that is organized by topic, not keywords.

Here are the key steps you need to take in order to choose a pillar page topic that will be successful.

1. Choose a relevant solution

This may seem like an obvious one, but it cannot be stressed enough. Some SEOs get so stuck on finding the right keywords, that they forget about the big picture. Similar to how you would conduct keyword research, think about solutions and topics that your product solves for.

This is where the buyer persona comes into play. What is your buyer searching for, and what questions might they have along the way?

Once you have a list of possible options, choose a topic that is broad enough to be able to create “cluster pages” around. A query that only poses a “yes” or “no” answer will not be suitable for this strategy.

For example, “What is communication?” is too broad of a topic, and “communication between a coworker and boss” is too specific. However, the query “What is effective communication in the workplace?” is broad enough to write a long piece of content on, but also presents opportunities to link out to other areas of workplace communication that are more specific.

2. Analyze the SERP

Oftentimes, we can forget how helpful the SERP can be in identifying related queries. Enter your pillar page topic into the search bar and examine the results.

What sort of questions are being asked in the People Also Ask? Is there a featured snippet? Are there targeted ads on related topics? These are all great indicators that you’ve chosen the right topic. If your pillar page topic brings up none of these, perhaps it is better served as a cluster page, or maybe it isn’t the right topic for you at all.

People Also Ask queries can be great for your pillar page structure as well. Would these questions make sense to answer in your pillar page as H2s or H3s? Are you answering this question in any of your cluster pages? Search engines often give us the answer to our own questions, especially when it comes to related topics.

3. Evaluate your content

Auditing your content can seem like a daunting task, but it’s crucial in the pillar page strategy process. It’s difficult to start writing new content without knowing what content you already have — you wouldn’t want to end up with duplicate content competing against yourself.

Sort your existing content into topics. From there, you can identify pages that are similar. Can you re-prioritize any of the existing content to fit this strategy? Can you combine two pieces of content together? By the end of your content audit, you should be able to identify where your content gaps are.

This is where new content will come in. This process will also eradicate any duplicate content, so the reorganization of your content library will be primed for the best results. A Google Sheet with your library is a safe and easy way to map out this content.

For the pillar page strategy itself, I recommend a Google Sheet with tabs for existing content that needs to be optimized, new content that needs to be written, the structure of the pillar page, as well as current rankings.

Here is an example of how I sort out my overview tab for content regarding a particular pillar page topic:

What are the benefits of a pillar page strategy?

This may seem like a lot of work, which poses the question, is a pillar page strategy actually worth it? The short answer is: yes.

Pillar page strategies force you to take a look at the buyer personas in your industry. If you combine those with topic clusters, you’re going to be answering top of funnel queries, like “what is?”, mid-funnel queries like “benefits of”, and bottom funnel queries like “the best of”. Not only are you creating content that search engines find relevant — you’re creating content for every stage of your buyer’s journey.

This allows your users to easily make their way through the sales funnel and bridge any gap you may have had in your sales process. This strategy can tie content creation to revenue, which is becoming increasingly important in B2B.

Besides the clean-up that you get from the content audit, your website should also experience legitimate SEO benefits. When I implemented my strategy, there was a clear indication that it was working. This strategy was implemented in the middle of February 2021. Both impressions and clicks drastically increased, and continued to climb through the spring: 

Conclusion

Creating a pillar page strategy does not have to be difficult if you follow these easy steps:

1. Use your buyer persona to identify solutions you can easily write diverse content about.

2. Analyze the SERP to understand what sort of questions are being asked and what content is being written around your chosen topic.

3. Audit your content for gaps and optimization opportunities so your team can easily cluster related content together and identify duplicate content.

Pillar pages are crucial to your content strategy as a whole. By identifying the topics for which your company provides solutions, you’ll be able to create long-form content that is posed to answer all questions in the buyer's journey, while improving keyword rankings and domain authority.

5 Local Business Marketing Takeaways from MozCon Virtual 2021

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.

Get the MozCon Virtual 2021 Video Bundle!

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 influence local justifications for 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:

1. 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.

2. Google Search Console is also free and lets you see which assets are losing search positions over time.

3. 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.

UTM Tagging for Google My Business

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.