You’ve spent months crafting the “perfect” brand message, focus-grouping it to core demographics and psychographics, and lovingly/hatingly crafting hundreds of page titles. You wake up, grab your coffee, and fire up Google to admire your handiwork, only to see this:
For reference, here’s the original <title> tag:
You may be feeling confused and more than a little frustrated after Google’s recent title rewrite update, but why is Google rewriting title,s and what can we learn from it? I explored over 50,000 <title> tags to find out.
Title rewrites by the numbers
All of the data was collected from the MozCast 10,000-keyword tracking set on August 25, 2021, and compared to original title tags collected using Screaming Frog (we only attempted one collection, since these were third-party sites). Here’s a brief rundown:
85,340 page-one results
71,603 unique URLs
57,832 <title> tags
33,733 rewrites
You might be doing the math right now, realizing that 58% of the <title> tags we tracked were rewritten, and rushing to Twitter to express your outrage. Please don’t — at least not yet.
First, there are bound to be quirks, like cached <title> tags that don’t match the current site, sites that blocked or modified our requests, cloaking, etc. I suspect those cases are relatively rare, but we can’t discount them.
Second, “rewrite” is a tricky word, because it implies a meaningful difference between the original version and rewritten version. Of this data set, over 13,000 <title> tags were over 600 pixels wide, the physical limit of Google’s desktop display title. Over 7,000 showed simple (...) truncation. Google has been doing this for years. Here’s an example from October 2011 (via the Wayback Machine):
Are these really “rewrites” in any meaningful sense? To understand what Google’s doing, and how it differs from the past, we need to dig deep into the unique scenarios at play.
Scenario #1: Simple truncation (...)
Google can only fit so much on one line. That limit has changed over the years, but the basic fact remains. In many cases, <title> tags are just too long, and that’s not always a bad thing or necessarily spammy. Here’s one example and its corresponding search result:
This is a wordy <title> tag and we could certainly argue the merits of academic vs. marketing copy, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with or spammy about it. It simply doesn’t fit the available space, and Google has to account for that.
Scenario #2: Complex truncation (...)
Even prior to the recent update, we saw a less common variant of this scenario, where Google would truncate a title and then append the brand after the “...”:
In this example, Google truncated the tag with “...” but then re-inserted the brand. Note that the original pipe (|) was replaced with a hyphen (-).
Scenario #3: Rewrite truncation
More recently (and possibly beginning with the August 16th update), Google is truncating long titles without displaying ellipses (...) and, in some cases, taking the display title from other elements of the page. For example:
This text actually appears in the middle of the <title> tag, but it’s possible that it was extracted from somewhere else on the target page. I would argue that this is a pretty successful truncation that serves the search query (in this case, “Dodd Frank”).
Scenario #4: Keyword stuffing
This scenario tends to overlap with 1-3 — sometimes titles are too long and have clearly been stuffed with keywords. I can’t speak to anyone’s motivations, but here’s an example that seems pretty egregious:
Mistakes were made, etc. Interestingly, this rewrite seems to be pulled from an <H2> on the page, but an entire paragraph is wrapped in that <H2>.
These are fun. Let’s do another one:
This reminds me of that joke, “An SEO walks into a bar, grill, tavern, pub, public house…”. In this case, it appears that Google is taking the truncated title from the primary <H1> on the page. It’s hard to fault Google for rewriting either of these examples.
These extreme examples can be entertaining, but it appears Google has also made some significant changes around less-extreme situations where phrases are strung together with separators like pipes (|). Here’s one example:
While this <title> tag does appear over-optimized, it’s obviously a far less problematic example than the previous two. Google seems to be taking a dim view of pipes (|) in general with this new update. In our data set, over 10,000 titles with pipes were rewritten, and nearly 6,000 of those were below the pixel-width limit.
In some of these cases, the original <title> tags simply appear to be reflecting the site’s information architecture. Take this example from Zales:
While you could make an argument that echoing the site’s IA isn’t particularly helpful to searchers, there’s nothing spammy or misleading about this <title> tag. It appears Google may be getting too aggressive with rewriting delimited phrases.
Scenario #5: Brand name added
For a while now, Google has been appending brand names to the end of display titles in some cases. Here’s one example:
We don’t know exactly what signals Google uses to make this call. It could be a function of brand authority or based on measuring some kind of SERP engagement signals. In the case of a high-authority brand like WebMD that’s only five letters long, this change may be beneficial.
What about long brand names, though? Consider the example below:
Here, Google has exchanged a naturally-sounding and relevant title for a combination of the <H1> content and the brand name. Unfortunately, the addition of the 27-character brand name severely limits the rest of the display title. Fortunately, across a few hundred brand name addition examples I reviewed, this appears to be a rare occurrence.
Scenario #6: Brand name moved
One surprisingly common occurrence since the August 16th update is when Google takes a <title> tag with the brand name at the end and moves it to the beginning. For example:
Here, Google has moved the brand name to the front, followed by a colon (:), and has also shortened “I.T.” to “IT”. This version (with “IT”) is nowhere to be found in the page source.
On occasion, Google seems to be doing the opposite, and moving a brand name at the beginning of the <title> tag to the end of the display title. Here’s one example:
Unlike the back-to-front move, I believe this example is actually a variant of scenario #3. Google appears to be truncating the <title> tag and appending the brand name to the end of it. The removal of the brand name from the front is probably an accident of truncation.
Scenario #7: <Title> is too short
Channeling a bit of Goldilocks, sometimes your <title> tag is too long for Google and sometimes it’s too short. Here’s an example from a recipe result:
This one’s an odd duck (pun intended) — in addition to appending the brand name, Google has expanded the title, and that exact phrase appears nowhere in any major page elements.
Here’s an example where Google rewrote a brand-only <title> tag:
Again, this was pulled from an <H1> tag on the page. What’s unclear is whether Google is rewriting these titles because they’re too short or because they aren’t particularly relevant to the query space. This brings us to Scenario #8:
Scenario #8: Relevance issues
At this point we don’t really know the exact trigger for a rewrite, but it does seem like some titles are being rewritten because they aren’t a good fit to query intent. Sadly, dozens of pages in this data set still had some variant of “Home” as their <title> tag:
In the majority of these cases, Google is rewriting the display title as the brand name. Of course, “Home” is also potentially just too short. Here’s an example of a longer <title> tag where relevance might have come into play:
Putting aside the odd orphaned pipe (|) at the beginning, I’d argue that this <title> tag is generic marketing copy that doesn’t do much to inform searchers.
Scenario #8.5: Marketing lingo
That last case led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, and I’m not sure if this is a sub-case of #8 or a separate phenomenon. There were about 700 cases in our data set where Google rewrote a <title> tag with the word “Best” in it to remove that word. Here’s another example:
Once again, Google pulled the <H1> from the target page, but the rewrite and the original <title> tag share very similar intent and format. It’s possible that Google is taking a dim view of superlatives like “Best,” but that’s only a theory at this point.
Note that there were over 3,000 <title> tags in our data set where “Best” did not get removed, but some of those were contextually important, like “Best Man Speech” or “Best Buy” (the electronics retailer).
Speaking of superlatives, here’s an amusing one:
I think we can probably all agree that “Must Do Super Fun Things to Do” is pushing the envelope. Again, we can’t really prove what specifically is triggering this rewrite, but the pattern here is interesting.
We saw some similar patterns around marketing terms like “cheap,” “official,” and “2021.” Here’s the kicker, though: in some cases, Google is taking <title> tags without superlatives and adding them back in. For example:
Here, Google took a perfectly nice <title> tag, and chose the <H1> that included both “Best” and “Bespoke” instead. This begs the question — are <title> tags with words like “Best” being rewritten because of specific content, or are they being rewritten because of other factors, like length or keyword-stuffing, that just happen to be correlated with that content?
Scenario #9: Query-based rewrites
We’ve long suspected that Google would rewrite some display titles in real-time based on their relevance (or irrelevance) to the search query. In Google’s explainer about the August 16th update, though, they stated the following:
Last week, we introduced a new system of generating titles for web pages. Before this, titles might change based on the query issued. This generally will no longer happen with our new system.
So, are we seeing any evidence of query-based rewrites after the August 16th update? One way to test this is to look for pages/URLs that rank for multiple keywords and show different display titles (even though, being one URL, they share a <title> tag). For example:
The first result appeared on a search for “department of corrections,” and the second result on a search for “prison inmate search.” While this seems interesting at first glance, these results were collected across two different locations (and probably two different data centers). When I attempted to reproduce this difference from a single location, I only got back a single (rewritten) display title.
In our data set, only 96 URLs showed multiple display titles and only one of those showed more than two variants. In every case I spot-checked from a single location, those variants disappeared. It appears that Google really has removed or dramatically reduced query-based rewriting.
How do you prevent rewrites?
There’s currently no way to tell Google not to rewrite your <title> tag (although this latest update has the industry buzzing for that ability), but we can use the scenarios above to develop a few guidelines.
(*) Take a deep breath
Changing your <title> tags at scale is a time-consuming job and carries risk. Before you overreact, collect the data. Are your display titles even being affected? Are these changes impacting your click-thru rate or organic search traffic? Is that impact negative? Frankly, we also don’t know when and how Google might adjust this update. If you’re seeing serious negative consequences, then definitely take action, but don’t panic.
(1) Mind the length limit
While Moz tools track <title> tags that exceed the length limit, my advice the past couple of years has basically been “Be aware of the limit, but don’t lose sleep over it.” Truncation isn’t the kiss of death, as long as the important bits of the <title> tag appear before the cut-off.
Now, I may have to revise that advice. With truncation, you at least control the pieces that happen before the cut-off. Now that Google is potentially rewriting long titles completely, you could end up with substantially different display titles.
(2) Don’t keyword-stuff titles
I hope that most of the people reading this article aren’t engaging in old-school keyword-stuffing, but we may have to be even more careful now, especially with stringing phrases together using delimiters like pipes (|). I hope Google tones down this particular case, as a lot of non-spammy titles seems to be getting caught up in the mix.
(3) Write for searcher intent
This was good advice long before the recent update. Frankly, no one cares about your marketing copy when they’re trying to find something and scanning results. Write for the average intent of the audience you’re trying to attract. It’ll reduce the chances your display titles get rewritten, but it’ll also drive relevant clicks and engagement.
For now, I think the best thing you can do is be aware of the situation and try to assess how much it impacts your site. If the impact is minimal, there are far better uses of your SEO efforts than rewriting hundreds of <title> tags. One exception to this advice is if your CMS is creating a pattern of problematic titles. In that case, a small tweak (or a few small tweaks) could yield sizable results.
Wordpress published a useful, early case study about how they spotted a problematic rewrite and fixed it. I think this approach — consciously focusing on high-impact pages — is a good one with potentially high ROI.
If you'd like to take a crack at the raw data, I've made it available in Google Sheets. These are the 57,832 unique URLs from which were able to extract <title> tags. All data was collected on August 25-26, 2021 on Google.com (en-US) via desktop SERPs. Please note that some <title> tag data may be inaccurate if the sites in question modified or redirected the request. For example, I believe the "Amazon.com" <title> tags with no other text do not properly reflect the original tags.
Is life about to throw you into the deep end of the local SEO pool? Maybe you’ve just opened your business or have slowly realized that your existing business isn’t showing up very well on the Internet. Maybe you just got a new job at a local business that’s struggling because no one on staff has a background in online marketing and the boss is looking to you. Maybe you’re trying to learn new skills to become a stronger candidate for a digital marketing agency job opening.
Splish splash, hang on! I’ve got water wings for you in this column, answering seven of the most common questions Google receives from folks like you searching the Internet for an introductory understanding of what this thing called “local SEO” means, who needs it, how it works, how to study it to benefit a business you need to market, and more!
Instead of expecting you to tread midstream as though you magically already know all these things, we’ll wade in together gently before we start swimming anywhere near the high water mark.
1. What is local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (local SEO) consists of many actions you can take online and offline to make it easier for people in your community to find and choose a business you’re marketing.
It’s simplest to think of local SEO as a form of customer service. In the real world, you take all kinds of actions to make a business visible, accessible, and appealing. For example, you rent or buy a property at an address near your customers, buy a phone number, organize and display your inventory of goods and services, hang bold signage, seek advertising, and train staff to greet people who walk in, answer their questions, and resolve their complaints. You do all of this to connect with customers.
Local SEO has the same goal of connection. It builds a digital mirror image of what you do offline and enriches it with online-only opportunities, as you become an Internet publisher and promoter of your business’ contact information, offerings, reputation, expertise, and customer service amenities.
When done well, your local SEO efforts convince search engines like Google that your business deserves to be visible in their results when people are searching for what you offer in the place you offer it.
2. How do you know if you need local SEO?
What are the rules, guidelines, and circumstances that determine whether local SEO is the right match for your business?
If your business is physically located near customers who need to find it, then it’s likely you need local SEO to run as profitable a venture as possible. However, needing and qualifying for a complete local SEO campaign are two different things.
If you want to be seen by customers in a specific geographic area (like a neighborhood, city, or county) then you need local SEO to become visible online to these people. However, the number of local SEO actions you are qualified to use in promoting a specific business online is dictated by two things:
The exact model of the business you’re marketing
Google’s interpretation of how businesses of your model can use Google’s products
Take these three steps to determine your eligibility opportunities:
First, answer a simple question:
Does my business serve customers face-to-face? Or, at least, did it do so prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and plans to resume in-person transactions once it is safe for society to do so again?
If your answer is “no”, because you are operating a completely virtual business with no face-to-face interactions with the public, then a complete local SEO campaign is likely not the right match for you and you should read this article: How To Do Local SEO Without Physical Locations in 2021.
If your answer is “yes”, read on.
Second, identify your model
There are more than 10 different local business structures that Google recognizes:
Brick and mortar, like a retail shop or restaurant customers can visit
Service Area Business (SAB), like a plumber or caterer who goes to customers' locations
Hybrid, like a pizza restaurant which also delivers
Home-based, like a daycare center
Co-located/co-branded business, like a KFC/A&W chain location
Multi-department business, like a hospital or auto dealership
Multi-practitioner business, like a real estate firm or dental practice with multiple staff
Solo practitioner business, like a single attorney operating in two areas of law
Multi-brand business, specific to auto dealerships vending multiple car makes
Mobile business, like a stationary food truck
Kiosk, ATM, and other less common business models
Determine which of the above descriptions most closely matches how your business operates.
Third, read all of Google’s guidelines that apply to your model
Give yourself thirty minutes to read though The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google, making a special note of all of the guidelines that specifically call out the model you’ve identified as describing your business.
These all-important guidelines teach you what you can and can’t do to promote a local business via Google’s local platforms. Failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in penalties and removal of your information from Google’s system (a disaster!).
If, at this point, you’re wondering why this article is referencing Google so heavily, it’s because Google’s platforms dominate where local businesses list themselves online and where local consumers search for local businesses. In fact, their market share is more than 92%, making them central to your local SEO activity. There is much more to complete local SEO than just Google, but Google tends to set the tone of how we view and promote local businesses.
To sum up, if you need people in your community to be able to find your business online, your business normally transacts with customers in-person, and your model matches one of those recognized by Google, you likely both need and qualify for a local SEO marketing campaign.
3. How does local SEO work?
If you’ve now determined that local SEO is the right lane for you to swim in, you’ll want to know the specifics of how to actually do the work. Now is your chance to learn how local businesses do SEO and what local SEO includes.
How local search engines work
Google is a search engine. It’s an “answer machine” that exists to discover, understand, and organize information on the Internet so that it can present that information in response to people’s searches.
Google gets information about local businesses from a variety of sources including:
The Google My Business listings you create for your business
Your company’s website
Other websites, directories, and platforms that list, mention, or link to your company
Information the public submits to Google about your company, such as reviews, ratings, photos, suggested edits of your Google My Business listings, and other forms of feedback
Unconfirmed relationships with other local business data providers and indexes
Your Google My Business listing is something you get to actively submit to Google, but Google also looks all over the internet for information about your business (this is called crawling), then stores and organizes the information they’ve found (this is called indexing), and finally, provides a ranked display of that information to humans who are searching for it.
Google uses secret, internal calculations (algorithms) to rank the information they’ve indexed. One of your key goals in spending time on local search engine optimization is to persuade Google that your business deserves to be ranked highly when someone searches for something that’s relevant to what you offer. When Google decides a searcher’s query has a local and intent and you’ve convinced Google that your business is a relevant answer, local SEO can help you show up in all of the following displays:
Search engine results are often given the generic name, “SERPs” (search engine results pages) but local SERPs also have these more specific names:
Google local packs
Google business profiles
Google local finders
Google Maps
Google organic results
Additionally you can show up in image, video, and shopping results, if pertinent to your business model. Your overall goal in investing time and money in local SEO will be to convince Google that you’re a good result to show to people searching for what you offer.
How do you do local SEO?
So what is the work that actually goes into a local business doing SEO? There are many, many possible tactics and strategies, but a “starter kit” will almost always consist of these 4 basics to get you into the game:
1. An operational local business
You need a business founded on a product or service that local customers want and that is actively building an offline reputation for excellent customer service.
2. A website
While it’s possible to market your business without a website, you should consider one as an essential business asset.
Your website should:
Present what your business is, does, and offers, centering customers’ needs and customers’ language.
Include your geographic terms (neighborhood, city, etc) in the website’s tags, text, and links.
Provide accurate contact information, hours of operation, and abundant cues about how to connect with the business.
3. Local business listings
You need to actively create online listings for your business, such as your Google My Business listing and a variety of other listings (also called “structured citations”) on local business directories and related platforms. Fill out as many fields and provide as much information as possible when creating these listings. Be sure you update your listings any time your information changes (Moz Local can help with this time-consuming task!).
4. Online reviews from your customers
You need to actively acquire and respond to customers’ reviews on your Google My Business listing, all your local business listings that have a review component, and any review platform profiles you’ve created.
You’ll be off to a strong start with the above four basic local SEO components, but as you become more advanced at marketing your business, you will want to explore these additional promotional avenues:
5. Market research and competitor analysis
You’ll want to actively survey your community to refine your understanding of local needs and supplement this with ongoing keyword and trend research to add to your knowledge of the language people use when searching the Internet for what you offer. Your findings can then be used to grow your inventory, service menu, and the optimization of your website for an expanded set of search phrases.
Meanwhile, you will want to regularly search Google for your business, while you are located at your place of business and at different spots around town, to see how you are showing up in their results. Where competitors are outranking you, you’ll want to audit their websites, listings, reviews, and marketing strategies to develop theories of why they’re ahead of you. Your goal, then, will be to emulate their tactics and eventually surpass them.
6. Unstructured citations + links
Unstructured citations are any online reference by a third party to your company’s complete or partial contact information. You can learn more about them here. Links are the clickable elements that take an Internet user from one place to another, and if you’re ready for a more technical explanation, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
The more often Google finds your business referenced by other relevant sources, the better your chances of them considering your company a good result to show to searchers. The relationships you build with local colleagues, local media sources, different groups in your community and industry can be reflected online when these entities cite your business and/or link to it.
For example, if your business sponsors a town food drive, the charity may list you as a benefactor. Or, if you host an exciting contest, a local lifestyle blogger may pick up your story and link to your website for further details. If the platforms that cite you and link to you have achieved a strong local or industry standing, this will help build the authority of your website in the eyes of Google, as well as expanding your visibility to customers. Finding opportunities for unstructured citations and links is a key part of an advanced local SEO campaign.
7. Expanded media
Each business will need a custom approach to expanding its reach. A social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might be right for you and your customers. Or it could be email marketing, video media, podcasting, blogging, or publishing articles on respected third-party sites in your industry or geographic region that will solidify connections with your customers and introduce your business to a wider audience. Experimentation is key.
Profitability is your bottom line goal, and you will get there by becoming a continuously-chosen resource in your community. Customers can come to you via many paths, but the ultimate endpoint is a first transaction followed by repeat transactions once you’ve earned loyalty. Analytics tools help you track stages along those paths (like customers clicking on your listing to find driving directions or to phone you) so that you can improve the experience the customer is having at each step, increasing the chances of a transaction.
Whether basic or advanced, all eight of the above components are ones you will be sustaining, improving and expanding on for the life of your business, in addition to other efforts you may explore as your company grows.
How can anyone know how to influence rankings if Google’s algorithms are secret?
The entire concept of SEO is based on decades of business owners and marketers testing activities to see how Google and other search engines react to them and how the business then benefits from this reaction. From this ongoing testing, we arrive at theories about certain actions we can take that tend to cause Google to make a particular business or other entity become more visible to searchers.
For example, let’s imagine you own a pizza place in Sacramento, California with a one-page website that simply lists your menu items. You don’t rank very well for “gluten free pizza” even though it’s on your menu, and you seldom receive orders for this item.
You decide to create a second page on your site to tell the story of how and why you make this type of pizza, and you carefully include keywords like “gluten free pizza crust” and “Sacramento” in the page’s tags and text. A month later, your orders for this item triple, and when you check, you find that Google is now bringing up your new page for local customers seeking “gluten free pizza”. You’ve successfully taken an action that has influenced the search engine to the benefit of your business.
All local SEO and organic SEO basically comes down to this sort of experimentation, however complex a given strategy or tactic may be. Decades of such testing and clues from Google have enabled local SEOs to summarize Google’s local algorithm as having three main components:
Proximity: the distance between a searcher and a business
Relevance: the result that is the best match for the intent of the searcher’s query
Prominence: how well-known and well-cited a business is, based on what Google has learned about it by their crawl of the Internet
In practical terms, if I search for “gluten free pizza” while located in close proximity to the pizza place example, and Google finds the page you’ve created about this menu item with lots of relevant text on it, and Google has also found a lot of other websites referencing your gluten-free pizza (making it a prominent local resource), then your restaurant has a good chance of being shown to me as a result.
So, while the hundreds of factors that make up Google’s several algorithms are secret, you’re standing on established ground by doing all you can to work on the relevance and prominence of your business so that Google returns it as a result to searchers within Google’s concept of appropriate proximity.
4. What are the benefits of local SEO?
Once you dive into local SEO in earnest, you can expect to find treasure.
If the goal of local SEO is to make your business easier for customers to find and choose on the Internet, then the most obvious benefit for your company will be increased profitability. Customers reward businesses that make things easy for them, and a greater number of transactions should ultimately result from your work. But, the total array of benefits is enormous! When done well, local SEO can increase your:
Customer service quality
Knowledge of your customer base
Sales
Repeat sales (customer loyalty)
Bookings
Rankings
Publicity
Foot traffic
Website traffic
Phone calls
Texts
Chats
Reviews
Form submissions
Brand awareness + positive reputation
Email subscriptions
B2B relationships
Word-of-mouth referrals
Power for civic good
And so much more!
The amount of benefit you can expect to enjoy from engaging in local SEO will depend on:
1. Your budget of both time and money
2. How far that budget takes you vs. how far your market competitors’ budgets are taking them
3. The maximum growth potential defined by the size and characteristics of your local consumer base
A very small business in a very small town can make a modest investment in local SEO, easily surpass a few disengaged competitors, and reach pretty much every local customer who is on the Internet, plus new neighbors and travelers. As the competition and the consumer base becomes greater, local companies will have to increase their investment to see optimum return.
5. How local is local SEO?
Google indicates that lots of folks are asking about this, and I’m having to make a best guess that what business owners and marketers are wondering about is how big the radius of their visibility in Google’s results will be if they invest in doing local SEO. For example, if a business is located at 123 Main Street in Somewhereville, will they only show up for searchers who are walking along Main Street, or for people anywhere in the town, or for people beyond the town’s borders, or for several adjacent cities, or even the whole state?
The answer to this common question depends on Google’s idea of the intent of the searcher coupled with the competitive level of the market. For instance, Google might only cast a very small radius of results if someone searches for “coffee downtown Portland”:
But if I change my search to just “coffee portland”, Google expands the radius of the results being returned to a much larger area:
Meanwhile, if I signal to Google that I’m not searching for something quick and nearby like “coffee”, and instead search for something where my intent might cover the whole state, like “wedding venues oregon”, Google again expands the results to show me quite a large region:
In general, queries with a very “nearby” intent or queries happening in a dense city with many competitors located near one another will typically return a tighter radius of results. By contrast, queries that could be reasonably fulfilled by the searcher driving further, or that are seeking a rare good or service, or that take place in a rural area with few businesses tend to receive a larger radius of results.
Please note my use of the phrase “in general”, because there are so many exceptions. Moreover, Google’s own products deliver varied results. For instance, I’ve noticed that Google’s local finder often delivers a tighter radius than Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s organic results can behave quite differently than their local ones. And, it’s foundational knowledge for you to know that Google delivers different results to each searcher, based on their physical location at the time they search, the exact search language they use, and their search history.
One of the commonest local SEO forum questions comes from business owners located at a specific place on the map and wanting to expand the radius in which they show up for users’ queries. For a deep dive on this popular topic, read I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.
6. How do I check my local SEO rankings?
This is an excellent foundational question. First, you must know that local and localized organic rankings are not stable. As mentioned, above, Google orders results for each searcher based on:
Google’s perception of the searcher’s intent coupled with an algorithmic calculation of which results are most relevant to that intent
Google’s knowledge of where the searcher’s device is located at the time of search
The density of competition for the search term
The searcher’s history of previous searches.
The time of day
Because of this, consider it a myth and a mistake when people talk about being #1 for a search term, because local rankings are so highly customized and can literally change from hour to hour. The best you can aim at is a general sense of your visibility for a particular search phrase for people located at different points on the map at different times of day.
The most bare-bones, manual approach to understanding your visibility is to search for a phrase while standing inside your business and note the local and organic rankings. Then, physically move out from there, searching from a block away, a few blocks away, the other side of town, the city border, and beyond the city border. It can be an educational experience to try this, but it’s not one that’s practical to replicate on a regular basis.
For the sake of convenience, many platforms have developed location emulators and local rank trackers that can approximate the results you might see if searching from different geographic locations. It’s important to note that no tool can claim to be 100% accurate, because of how highly customized results can be for each searcher, but as we’ve covered, you’re looking for a general idea of your visibility rather than set-in-stone numbers. There are many popular emulation and localized rank tracking options. Consider these:
On the paid side, both Whitespark and BrightLocal have sophisticated local rank tracking dashboards, and LocalFalcon is also lauded for its nifty visual interface. Mobile Moxie has a 7-day free trial of their rank tracker so you can give this type of analysis a test drive.
Moz Pro customers can use the beta of Local Market Analytics to see localized organic rankings mapped out with innovative multi-SERP sampling.
You’ll want to track your rankings on a regular basis, but always remember, it’s “conversions” that deserve the lion’s share of your focus. Learn to think beyond how your business ranks to how that visibility is resulting in clicks on your listings, clicks-to-call, requests for driving requests, reviews, chats, questions, leads, bookings, and sales!
7. How can I learn local SEO?
Having read this article, you’re ready to move out from the shallow end of the pool into more exciting waters. The important thing is for you to find resources for further local SEO learning that are worthy of your time and won’t steer you wrong. I suggest these as your next 4 laps:
This free, eight-chapter guide has been praised by readers as being not just about the “how” of doing local SEO, but the “why”. Studying this guide will get you into a strong mindset for engaging in holistic local search marketing in an authentic way that takes your business and its community into account.
2. Go where the advocates are
Specific organizations, media outlets, and publications are making names for themselves through pro-local business advocacy. Get to know these entities and rid yourself of the feeling of “going it alone” as a local business owner:
The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes some of the best local business/local community reports on the web with statistics you can work into the narrative of your business’ story.
The American Independent Business Alliance can get your community started with a formal Buy Local program, if one doesn’t yet exist in your city, and they offer events you can attend virtually.
Near Media is an emerging outlet featuring thought leadership from top local SEO industry experts in strong support of independent business owners, with a growing library of articles, podcasts, and video media.
Plan to virtually attend a LocalU seminar for presentations by local SEO experts on the latest tactics for local search marketing success. This popular conference circuit is special for its all-local focus.
3. Make a regular local SEO industry reading schedule
Local search changes continuously, meaning your opportunities for marketing your business consistently alter. Bookmark these publications and make time for a weekly reading session:
The Sterling Sky blog offers excellent takeaways from their ongoing tests, discovering what works and what doesn’t in online local business marketing.
Search Engine Roundtable’s blog has some of the fastest reporting of emerging Google features, updates, and bugs of any publication out there.
Streetfight covers both small businesses and enterprises, with a strong focus on developing technologies.
I’m also a longtime fan of the good minds behind the Whitespark blog for the sound advice they give
It may seem obvious, but read your local newspaper to keep tabs on the business scene nearest you
If you get tired from reading so much, many outlets like Moz, Near Media and LocalU offer audio and video media, as well, so you can kick back and listen for a bit. Also, multiple platforms have popular newsletters that round up the latest happenings for you so that you don’t have to seek them out yourself. And to follow local SEO industry experts on your favorite social media platforms; here’s a starter list of Twitter accounts you might like to check out.
4. Hire a local SEO to teach you
In some cases, it’s the right fit for local businesses to outsource all of their local SEO work to agencies. Not every business owner is going to have the time to become an expert in this form of marketing, on top of running their company.
That being said, if you can learn to do some or all of your brand’s local SEO or train your employees to do it, you’ll be acting from a place of ultimate knowledge, power and control. If this sounds appealing, you may want to consider hiring a pro to tutor you for accelerated learning.
My advice would be to find a small local SEO agency with an excellent reputation and inquire if their consulting services can be customized for you into training sessions with one of their talented team members. Ideally, you’d set up virtual meetings in which the tutor can visually walk you through tools and tactics, using your business as the workbook. Expect to pay well for this specialized training, knowing you’ll be using what you learn for years to come.
5. Learn from experience — it’s a good teacher!
Provided that you adhere to the guidelines of the third-party platforms on which you’re marketing, it’s your own experimentation that is likely to teach you the most about local SEO. In fact, many of today’s most-recognized local SEOs started out as business owners who became excited by what they realized they were able to do online for brands.
There are excellent free guides to get you started, amazing software to support your journey, and experts who freely share their advice on blogs and social media. All of these will strengthen you. The most essential takeaways will be ones that match the right technology and outreach to your specific customers. When you’ve mastered applying what you learn, and commit to ongoing experimentation, you’ll be ready to swim with the best of them.
Obility's Austin Peachey joins us once again to discuss conversion rate optimization (CRO) — specifically for B2B companies.
B2B SEOs know that, compared to B2C businesses, the sales cycle in B2B means multiple visits from potential customers before they make their final purchase. To help you encourage conversion, Austin covers four areas for optimization.
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, an SEO manager at Obility, a B2B-focused digital marketing agency based in Portland, Oregon. Today, I'd like to talk to you about conversion rate optimization, specifically optimizing sites for B2B organizations.
When compared to the offerings of a typical B2C business, the sales cycle in B2B means that users will be visiting your site multiple times throughout their sales cycle before making a final purchase, and it's necessary that you are reaching them at different stages in their journey.
CTR optimization
The earliest and sometimes overlooked step in conversion rate optimization is actually click-through rate optimization.
Increasing the traffic to your site from Google search results can help grow your potential pipeline and increase total leads. Google Search Console is a fantastic tool to review and optimize your listings on search page results. Audit your queries and pages and find out which are the lowest performing. For example, pull in a report of all things that have a click-through rate of less than 1%.
Once you've targeted your underperformers, review the title tags and meta descriptions. Start out with the easy things, like are they getting truncated and your full message isn't showing up. But go beyond that and actually evaluate the language being used. Are you providing incentive for them to click on you versus a competitor? Is there a CTA? If not, try adding one. It can also be helpful to look at the pages that do have a high click-through rate and see what is written for their title and their description.
What's different and what could be moved from a high performer to a low performer to try to replicate those results?
Know your audience
The next step in conversion rate optimization is to know your audience. This is especially important when it comes to B2B businesses as you have individuals from many different roles exploring your site, providing input and ultimately making critical decisions.
Don't make assumptions and let the data help you along the way. Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and heat mapping tools, like Hotjar and Crazy Egg, can provide valuable insights to your customers and how they interact with your website. When using a heat mapping tool, you can see how far users are typically scrolling down your page, and from that you can get a lot of different insights.
For example, if they don't get very far down your page, but all your CTAs are in the footer, try moving a second CTA mid-page that might capture more of the audience that isn't getting all the way to the bottom. You can also use heat mapping tools to see where users usually click on the site. If they continuously click on a piece of content that doesn't have a link, that continuous click most likely means that they want to click there and read more about it.
So you can improve the user experience by going in and adding one to the relevant content. Follow your user's journey with Google Analytics and see where in the funnel they might commonly drop off and is there an opportunity to shorten the time from entry to the site to where your site's conversion points are. A key point of knowing your audience is to be mindful of where they are in the buying process.
Take a look at the keywords that are driving traffic to that page using a tool like Moz's Keyword Explorer. If they are using long tail keywords, they're more likely a more seasoned user and are ready for a gated asset, like a white paper or a case study. But if it's short tail keywords, they're probably still in the discovery phase and just want to read a blog post or a recent article. Try not to think of things as a marketer, but instead put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers.
Figure out what they want and not what you want them to want.
Solve for poor UX
Now that you know your audience, the next step is to solve for poor user experience on the website. User experience tip number one, please remove the pop-up from your website. No one wants to go to a page and immediately have a big ad block the content they're trying to see.
They're going to that page for a reason, and it's not to have them be redirected somewhere else on the site. Once you have gotten rid of all of the pop-ups, the next step is to optimize your top navigation of your site. Make sure it's easy to access all the different areas of your site's content and make sure that you have a CTA available in the header to easily send them to conversion points.
To help optimize your navigation, track what people are searching for using site search in Google Analytics and make sure the topics that they are searching for on a regular basis are easy enough to find. Next step is to review your content and add internal links to relevant pieces of content that may help the user with their decision-making process.
Technical health is also important. Make sure that your site loads quickly and users aren't running into broken links all the time that will then hinder them on their process of discovery and learning more about your product. The last thing I'd like to discuss, when it comes to user experience, are contact forms.
As mentioned before, you could have anyone from a small team manager to a C-suite executive looking through your site, and they want a form that's going to be quick and easy to use. Only collect the data that is needed to get the conversion and don't bog them down with extra form fields that don't mean anything. Now I wouldn't be talking about conversion rate optimization if I didn't mention optimizing your CTAs.
When it comes to CTAs, you want to make sure that they're unique and relevant to the content of the page. Skip out on the Contact Us and Learn More that's on every single site and really try and tailor it to what's happening. If your content is about the benefits of your software, say something like, "Don't believe the hype and try a demo to see for yourself." It's really going to push them to make that conversion more than just learn more.
Test everything
The final thing, when it comes to conversion rate optimization, is testing. Test everything. There's so much data being collected and analyzed, so there's no reason that you need to be making all of your changes just based on hunches. If you see something underperforming on your site, set up an A/B test or a multivariate test to gather information on what really works best for your users.
Software like Google Optimize or Optimizely let you easily conduct these tests and make strong, data-driven changes to your site. There are so many potential things you can test. Try different ways of saying things, different colors of buttons or components, or even entire layouts completely. But just as you're doing the testing, remember to go through the five phases of testing something.
One is the research phase. What can you learn from your data as it is right now? Two, the hypothesis phase, what educated ideas can you think of to potentially test? Three, the prioritization phase, what changes are going to have the biggest impact on your site and make sure you're doing those first to drive further conversions in the future.
Four, the testing phase, run and collect your data, whether it's an A/B test or a multivariate test, and make sure you can get some substantial evidence to make a permanent change on your site. Then five, the learning phase, what can you learn from these tests to make other further improvements in the future? Remember, the only failed test is one where you don't learn anything.
Well, that's it, everybody. That is our best tips for conversion rate optimization. Thank you for listening and I hope you all have a great day.
Note: This guide was co-authored by Caitlin Boroden and Kristi Barrow.
The largest players in website analytics are Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics (GA), and for many SEOs, GA is typically their first foray into the world of analytics.
While there are plenty of guides to self-learn GA, there is noticeably less documentation for Adobe Analytics. In this new guide, we’ll cover the basics of Adobe Analytics for SEO, guide you through creating a simple dashboard, and help you ensure your Adobe Analytics implementation is set up correctly for your business needs. Then, we’ll show you how to add a few new and exciting elements to your SEO dashboard.
What is Adobe Analytics and why is it important for SEO?
On a basic level, Adobe Analytics functions just like Google Analytics. They both allow you to monitor website traffic across channels, track conversions, and understand customer behavior.
However, Adobe Analytics has many advanced features that allow you to get down and dirty with the data. As for SEO, with even a basic setup, it can provide you with a wealth of information about your website and its visitors.
For an excerpt, read on for a brief how-to on building a basic SEO dashboard.
Build your first SEO dashboard
In this section, we guide you through creating your first SEO dashboard. By the end, you’ll have built a dashboard that includes all the SEO basics in one place.
Now, open up a blank Adobe Analytics Workspace and let's get started!
1. Organic Traffic Overview
The first panel we’ll be creating is an Organic Traffic Overview. This panel is simple and meant to give a quick gauge of SEO performance. Here are the steps to recreate this panel:
1. First things first, create a new workspace panel and add a Natural Search segment. To do so, within the components panel, search for Marketing Channel. Once found, click the small > to refine the dimension. Find Natural Search and drag and drop into the top of the panel.
2. To create the field that summarizes the total Organic Visits, within the visualization panel, select Summary Number, and drag and drop into the panel. Two things will pop up: Summary Number and Summary Number Data. In the Summary Number Data chart, drag and drop Visits into the Drop a Metric Here (or any other component) placeholder. If you only want to report on December, for example, within the component panel search, search for Last Month or any time frame you desire. Drag and drop this into the chart too. It should look like this:
Your summary number should now be showing. To hide the chart and only show the line graph, click the colored dot next to the title of your Summary Number. Then toggle off Show Data Source. Lastly, rename and resize the summary number as you see fit.
3. To create the month-over-month (MoM) change visualization, within the visualization panel, select Summary Change, and drag and drop into the panel. Two things will pop up: Summary Change and Summary Change Data. In the Summary Change Data chart, drag and drop Visits into the Drop a Metric Here (or any other component) placeholder. Then filter visits with the time periods you want to compare. For example, add a filter for Last Month vs. 2 Months Ago for a MoM comparison. Then, drag and drop All Visits into the chart as well. It will look like this:
Now, your summary change should be showing. To hide the chart and only show the line graph, click the colored dot next to the title of your Summary Number. Then toggle off Show Data Source. Lastly, rename and resize the summary change to your liking.
4. Finally, to create the line graph, first update the time panel to Last Year (or whatever time period you plan to report on). Then, from the visualization panel, select Line and drag and drop into the panel. Two things will pop up: Line and Line Data. In the Line Data chart, drag and drop Visits into the Drop a Metric Here (or any other component) placeholder. Your line graph should now populate. To hide the chart and only show the line graph, click the colored dot next to the title of your line graph. Then toggle off Show Data Source. Lastly, rename and resize the line graph as you see fit.
2. Top Entry Pages Report
The second panel we’ll be creating is a Top Entry Pages Report. This panel is also relatively simple and is meant to quickly show which website’s pages are performing best in the SERPs. Here are the steps to recreate this panel:
1. First, add a new panel to your dashboard and add a Natural Search segment. To do so, within the components panel search Marketing Channel. Once found, click the small > to refine the dimension. Find Natural Search and drag and drop into the panel.
2. To create the table, within the visualization panel, select Freeform Table, and drag and drop into the panel. An empty table will show up. In the Freeform Table, drag and drop Entry Page into the body of the table. In the Drop a Metric Here (or any other component) placeholder, drag and drop Visits, Bounce Rate, and Average Time on Site side-by-side. Lastly, rename and resize the table as you see fit.
3. Marketing Channels Report
The third panel we’ll be creating is a Marketing Channels Report. This panel will break down your website’s marketing channels with two different visualizations: a donut chart and a freeform table.
1. To begin, add a new panel to your dashboard. No segment is needed for this report.
2. To create the table, within the visualization panel, select Freeform Table, and drag and drop into the panel. An empty table will show up. In the Freeform Table, drag and drop Marketing Channel into the body of the table. In the Drop a Metric Here (or any other component) placeholder, drag and drop Visits. Lastly, rename and resize the table as you see fit.
3. To create the donut chart, within the Freeform Table you just created, highlight the Marketing Channels like so:
Then, right click, go to Visualize, and select Donut. A Donut Chart should appear and be populated with your information. Lastly, rename and resize the donut chart as you wish.
4. Referral Reports
The fourth panel we will be creating is a Referral Report. This panel is meant to provide a glimpse into what external websites are driving traffic to your website. Here are the steps to recreate this panel:
1. To start, add a new panel to your dashboard. No segment is needed for this report.
2. To create the table, within the visualization panel, select Freeform Table, and drag and drop into the panel. An empty table will show up. In the Freeform Table, drag and drop Referring Domain into the body of the table. In the Drop a Metric Here (or any other component) placeholder, drag and drop Visits and Unique Visitors. Lastly, rename and resize the table as you see fit.
5. Conversion Reports/Examples
In this final panel, we’ll be creating a Conversion Report to highlight the top conversions for the website. In this example, we will simply be using Summary Numbers. However, feel free to include a line graph, bar graph, or any other visualization that fits your needs. If you’ve been following along so far, you’ve got all the skills you need to create these visualizations, too.
1. To start, add a new panel to your dashboard and add a Natural Search segment. To do so, within the components panel search Marketing Channel. Once found, click the small > to refine the dimension. Find Natural Search and drag and drop into the panel.
2. To create the various Summary Number visualizations, in the visualization panel, select Summary Number, and drag and drop into the panel. Two things will pop up: Summary Number and Summary Number Data. In the Summary Number Data chart, drag and drop your Goal Metric into the Drop a Metric Here (or any other component) placeholder. Your summary number should now be showing. At this time, don’t forget to update the time period range to fit your needs. To hide the chart and only show the summary number, click the colored dot next to the title of your Summary Number. Then toggle off Show Data Source. Lastly, rename and resize the summary number as you see fit.
3. Repeat step two for all the conversions you want to display, renaming and resizing each Summary Name to your liking.
Celebrate — you did it!
That’s that! You have created a simple SEO dashboard in Adobe Analytics, and are hopefully feeling more confident about the basics.
Three years ago, I wrote a post for the Moz Blog advising how the latest news on mobile-first indexing would impact internal linking strategies, particularly for larger sites.
“By now, you’ve probably heard as much as you can bear about mobile first indexing”, I joked in my introduction. Little did I know.
Only now — in the summer of 2021 — are Google, supposedly, maybe, finalizing the rollout of mobile-first. Even as of August 2021, Google is still very much actively crawling sites with Googlebot desktop*.
As with the recent delays to the Core Web Vitals rollout, the issue here for Google is that they can’t push changes which make their results worse. As Mike King pointed out back in March over at iPullRank, there’s still a big disparity between the mobile and desktop versions of the web, especially when it comes to links.
I don’t need to persuade most SEOs that they should care about links, but I maybe do need to remind you that internal links are, for most pages, a much bigger part of how they get their strength than external links. On an even vaguely established site, it’s not unreasonable to think that including a landing page in your top nav is going to generate more impactful links than most digital PR campaigns could ever hope to. And yet, sites tend to focus disproportionately on the latter, which is perhaps what brings us to this conundrum today.
In this post, I’m going to point out some of the common causes of disparities between mobile and desktop internal linking, when you should care, and what you can do to fix these issues without throwing UX under the bus.
*(thanks to Dom Woodman and the wealth of data at his fingertips for confirming for me that this is still the case!)
A brief history of mobile-first
Back in 2015, SEOs had two months’ warning to prepare for what the industry nicknamed “Mobilegeddon”. This wasn’t the first time that Google had factored mobile friendliness into its rankings, but it was probably the first time they tried to make a really big deal out of it as a way of steering webmasters — a sign of things to come.
About 18 months later, in November 2016, we got the phrase “Mobile-first indexing”. Over the next few years, SEOs with access to multiple Search Console properties became familiar with the routine trickle of emails informing them of sites moving over to the new paradigm.
During this period, some SEOs, including the late Russ Jones, myself in the aforementioned post on the Moz Blog, and my old boss Will Critchlow, started to voice concerns about the potential impact on the linkgraph:
The overall impression at the time was that Google was using a hybrid index for now, but that “mobile only” was already on its way.
Fast forward to March 2020, and Google warned we had six months to prepare for the final toll of the desktop index. This initially suggested a September 2020 rollout, then that became March 2021, and then, as I’ve mentioned above, that date too seemed to pass without incident.
We should assume, though, that this is still coming, or perhaps largely already here, and as such that our mobile sites need to present the version of truth we want Google to see.
The roles of internal links
Internal links, like all other links, fulfill multiple vital functions:
Allowing search engines to discover new URLs
Passing on clues as to topical relevance, via their anchor text, and source URL
Passing on authority, via PageRank or equivalent
That’s of course without even getting into their roles in user experience, which is a topic for another post. (Although if you want to learn more about internal links, I recommend this Whiteboard Friday.)
A disparity in internal links between desktop and mobile versions, then, is likely to have far-reaching implications. (This also goes for any other two versions, such as rendered and raw HTML.) In most cases, one of the two versions will be the one that the site’s SEO practitioner(s) were happy with, and as such the other will not be.
At this point it’s common best practice, at least for your major templates, to routinely produce a list of links from both versions of the page and look for discrepancies.
That said, some differences are more impactful than others. For illustrative purposes, I’ve compared the desktop and mobile versions of five homepages, and in the rest of this post I’ll discuss some of the more interesting differences I noted, and what I’d recommend to the respective sites. Just to be clear: I am not involved with, or indeed pitching, any of these sites.
Interestingly, of these, two had no differences at all for us to discuss — congratulations to Optimizely and Zoopla for paying attention back in 2018. For the other three, read on...
Less harmful examples
Anchor links within a page
The Amazon UK homepage links to itself no fewer than six times, with anchor text such as “back to top”, “see product details”, and “next page” (within a carousel). These links are all unique to desktop, although the mobile version does have a “Top of page” link instead of the “Back to top” link.
Amazon UK desktop (top) vs. Amazon UK mobile (bottom)
You probably don’t need to be too concerned about links like these from an SEO perspective. There’s no dramatic difference in optimization or targeting implied by the different text, and pages linking to themselves probably aren’t going to reshape the linkgraph.
Links to non-indexed pages
Amazon UK desktop (top) vs. Amazon UK mobile (bottom)
The main nav link to the “Pet supplies” category on the Amazon UK homepage comes with different internal tracking tags on mobile vs. desktop:
From a general SEO perspective, this isn’t an ideal way to handle internal link tracking — both of these URLs have a canonical tag pointing at the actual indexed page, but there’s still unnecessary dilution and wasted crawl budget here, compared to just tracking the link click using a JavaScript event listener.
However, from a specific mobile/desktop parity point of view, this isn’t a big deal. As I said, they both share a canonical tag pointing to the same place, so we end up with equivalent behavior.
A similar rule applies when linking to pages like “my account” or “basket” — there may be differences in desktop and mobile implementations, but as both pages are noindex and/or robots.txt blocked, it isn’t a big deal.
Anchor text
Ebuyer has a few instances of the same element using different anchor text on mobile vs. desktop:
Ebuyer desktop (top) vs. Ebuyer mobile (bottom)
Note the longer anchor text on mobile(!). I also noticed something similar on the New York Times site, although that may be due to them rapidly testing different headline variants.
Either way, I don’t think this is a huge deal as long as the behavior is intended and the implied topic is largely similar, which it is in these cases.
Common problems & solutions
Device-specific elements
One of the most common causes of disparity is navigation elements that are desktop-only. The example below is from Ebuyer, and shows a bunch of links that I was unable to find anywhere on their mobile homepage.
These links all point to URLs that also feature in the top-nav, so the impact on the link graph may not be huge. However, Google is likely to place different weightings on a prominent homepage link like this vs. a link buried in a navigation, so there are SEO implications to this disparity. Ebuyer’s desktop site implies that these are some of the most important subcategories on the site, whereas their mobile site gives them a more equal footing with other subcategories in the mega-menu.
Happening across millions of sites, this is the sort of issue that might impact the quality of Google’s results. Ebuyer has presumably featured here the categories that are core to their business, and if they rank slightly better in these cases than in other cases, that means Google is slightly more likely to show people results from a business that is highly competent in that area. That, from Google’s perspective, is surely a win, but one they miss out on by exclusively using the mobile version.
From Ebuyer’s point of view, the choice of what to feature in this element is a strategic lever that is lost when Google stops counting their desktop links. The only real solution here is to develop a mobile equivalent to this element, but one can be creative. It could be somewhere slightly different on the page, for example, or it could be a carousel on mobile but static on desktop. Alternatively, you can accept that this is a desktop-specific UX element that should be disregarded in any SEO consideration, and instead must justify itself through its benefit to conversion rates.
Mega-menus & subcategory linking
Many sites, especially e-commerce, handle internal linking by having a huge mega-menu on desktop that collapses into a hamburger menu perhaps four layers deep on mobile. This leaves users very many clicks from anything they might hope to find, and the ironic thing is that super-exhaustive top navigations aren’t necessarily optimal from an SEO perspective either. Sure, they get a lot of pages crawled and pass on a little equity, but they do nothing to concentrate relevance around subtopics, and they don’t allow you to focus your strength where it’s most needed.
Some sites improve on this with a section-specific subnavigation, for example these links on Amazon that only appear within the Grocery section:
This is a great alternative to a mega-menu in general, in that there are fewer sitewide links (meaning that each remaining sitewide link is a little stronger), and, proportionately, more links between closely related pages.
However, of course, this element doesn’t appear at all on mobile. D’oh.
Similarly, Amazon has these featured subcategories on desktop, performing a similar role:
Again, I’d say this is a great idea from an SEO perspective, but these links don’t exist on mobile.
Zoopla handles the same issue much more neatly:
Sidebar links to relevant subcategories
They similarly have subcategory links that only feature in the relevant category, but then on mobile, they retain them — just moving them to the bottom of the page instead of a sidebar:
Sidebar links shuffled to bottom of content on mobile
This isn’t hugely attractive, but it doesn’t matter — few people will scroll to these depths anyway, and Zoopla’s SEO strategy is robust to the mobile-only index as a result. Plus, because of the focus on interlinking only relevant subcategories, the volume of links here isn’t extreme.
SEO copy & hidden content
A similar argument could be made for Ebuyer’s treatment of SEO copy here:
It’s right at the bottom of the page, so perhaps this is an opportunity for internal linking? Indeed, there are a couple of links at the end of this block of text.
Without going too much into the benefits and drawbacks of this kind of copy in general, I’d say this is a little excessive for the bottom of an e-commerce category page (you can only see a fraction in the screenshot above). Instead, Ebuyer could do something similar to what they’ve done with their footer:
Collapsed or tabbed content can be a great way to handle bulky internal linking structures on mobile
On desktop, all of these footer sections are expanded by default, and all visible. On mobile, they’re hidden in these expandable sections. This is generally a good way to handle SEO elements on mobile, as Google has said repeatedly at this point that there’s no downside to doing this.
Conclusion: On-page linking, but tastefully
I’ve tried to explore here some of the common issues that sites face when aiming for mobile/desktop linking parity.
To quickly recap, the main issues I recommend sites focus on are:
Missing navigation elements
Opportunities for deep-linking without resorting to mega-menus
And my suggested solutions are:
Pushing linking widgets to the bottom of the page on mobile, rather than removing them altogether
Using tabs, carousels, expandable sections and other creative solutions to make better use of on-screen real estate
I’m keen to see more examples in the wild, though — how is your site handling mobile-first internal linking? Tell me on Twitter!
SEO is one of the most crucial digital marketing strategies, but it’s such an in-depth concept that it pays off in the long-term to work with a qualified professional. Putting it off or hiring the wrong person can waste time, energy, and resources (not to mention all the lost revenue and business opportunities).
While there are as many SEO strategies as there are SEO experts, there are still essential skills that you should look for when hiring for your next in-house SEO expert.
With that said, open a new Google Doc… it’s time to take notes!
An overview of the SEO knowledge tree
There are a lot more to SEO experts than meets the eye, but let’s start with a basic overview of what an SEO specialist should be proficient in. I’ll also note here that not all specialists have the same knowledge, and typically specialize in one area, but may know some parts of all of these subtopics: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is exactly what you think it is: everything on a website that you have control over from keyword optimization to internal linking. Other elements include title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, URL structure, and the quality of the content. While this type of SEO is most often the star of the show, a well-designed SEO strategy also includes the next two elements.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO has more to do with how popular your website is. Think back to high school for a moment… if you were someone who had a lot of friends, you may have been considered “popular”. The same goes for off-page SEO — the more websites that know and link back to your website, the higher the chances of ranking on search engines. However, this is only true if the links are high quality and the sources are credible. Aside from backlinks, other contributing factors include website age, domain name, and how many of your social networks link to your website.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is a bit more complex. To put it simply, a website that has optimized specific features allows it to be crawled easier by search engine spiders, which in return ranks your site more efficiently. This might mean that your site is mobile-friendly, has quick loading times, and/or has an XML sitemap (like a roadmap but for search engine spiders). All these items work in unison to ensure a website has the highest probability of ranking. When it comes to the detailed elements, there is a lot of overlap between on-page and technical SEO, so I don’t recommend viewing these as entirely separate.
Top skills today’s in-house SEOs must have
You might think, “Isn’t SEO only about the technical side of digital marketing?” However, the reality is that emotional intelligence and logic are integral skills that an SEO specialist needs to succeed. The top candidate will have a balance of these top skills.
#1 Empathy
One might argue if we all had a bit more empathy, the world would be a better place. But that’s a topic for another day. For the context of this article, let’s think back to 2020 in its entirety. Brands that lacked empathy and failed to adapt to the COVID crisis or the Black Lives Matter movement lost customers.
You see, at the very core, SEO experts put themselves in the shoes of the reader. They might ask, “would my reader care about this?” or “would my reader search for this topic?” To back it up even further, an empathetic SEO specialist would first fully understand the target audience as a whole.
An SEO expert is not just in tune with SEO, oh no. They’re aware of how copy evokes emotions in your readers, how it makes them think, inspires them, and urges them to take action. This person guides you in understanding how tweaking your copy can result in ripples of success for your business.
So, how do you know if a candidate has empathy? During the interview, observe the following:
How are their listening skills? Candidates that genuinely listen instead of formulating a response while you’re still talking have high levels of empathy.
How much effort do they make in trying to understand you and your target audience? Do they ask questions about the company’s business goals during the interview? Do they share suggestions on how to engage with your target audience? Do they make an effort to explain how SEO is not just about numbers, but it involves the human side, too?
The next one on this list goes hand in hand with empathy: critical thinking.
#2 Critical thinking
An SEO expert has essential critical thinking skills. This quality is needed to go from following a template, to looking at your business from a holistic standpoint and understanding how to take action accordingly.
Digital marketing is a forever-changing industry and SEOs must adapt by actively searching for solutions. Give your potential hire an SEO problem on the spot and see how effectively they can propose a solution to you (I emphasize that this is a fair question, because it is truly what experienced SEOs do every day). If they struggle to come up with suggestions, they may not be the best candidate.
#3 Data analysis
Using data to drive decisions is another crucial skill for an SEO expert.
Consider this: SEO is the makeup of a trial, error, analyze, readjust, and relaunch cycle. Nothing more, nothing less. All SEOs are learning as we go. Those who learn more than others and have the ability to better understand how data drives strategic decision-making are able to come up with better solutions.
To put it simply, being able to gather and analyze marketing data gives you the competitive advantage to quickly iterate and optimize your SEO strategy.
You might consider compiling some of your SEO data and asking your interviewee what they think about it. Ask them what they notice and what they’d change in the next campaign to get more attractive results. This is a surefire way to get a pulse on their data analysis skills.
#4 T-shaped marketing expertise
The term “T-shaped marketer” refers to someone competent in many marketing disciplines, and an expert in one or two specific niches. We’re often told to find our niche or specialize in one area, but the truth is that having broad knowledge in the many different areas of marketing cultivates more connections.
How? Let’s say, for example, the potential hire knows about copywriting, email marketing, and social media marketing. With all this information, they’d be more likely to enhance all these areas using their overlapping insights of SEO.
Look for this element by asking hypothetical questions like:
What role does SEO play in a social media strategy?
How can we use SEO to drive lead generation and conversions?
Their answers will provide valuable information to find out how they plan to leverage SEO to grow the business as a whole.
#5 Strategic planning
You know the saying, knowledge is power? Well, it’s partially true. The true power lies in the combination of knowledge and action. A strategic plan is the key to propelling your business forward, and without it, you’ll be left in the dust. Strategizing involves assessing the data, understanding the goals, and curating a detailed plan to make progress.
The ability to tend to the details while also acknowledging long-term goals is a large piece of the SEO puzzle. And considering SEO efforts take months to get results anyways, your next in-house SEO hire should be comfortable with short-term and long-term strategic planning.
To test for this ability, tell the interviewee your goals, share some insights, and see what sort of plan they present to you. If they’ve listened to your needs and prioritized key factors, they’re a winner!
#6 Technology skills
Even our grandparents are on Facebook these days, so the phrase “tech-savvy” has become watered down. Technology skills expand far beyond using Google Docs, navigating through Facebook, or hosting a Zoom call. Experienced SEO experts should be familiar with some helpful tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console or be willing to learn these platforms.
These tools should be used in appropriate ways to derive the right data and make relevant strategic decisions, as well as compile reports. Here’s how to test for it:
Ask them to find the top keywords on a certain topic in your niche
Ask them to provide an outline of the content with those top keywords
Ask them how they’d track the results from that content once it’s live
It’s crucial to gain an overall sense of where your in-house SEO hire is before onboarding them. To truly gauge this, keep reading for a couple of considerations to keep in mind.
How to screen and test in-house SEO hires
Because SEO efforts only truly started in the early 2000s, the concept is still relatively new in the grand scheme of the internet. So when testing your potential hire, test them, but also be fair. Below are a few factors to think about.
#1 Be clear on what you need
First, understand what your company needs specifically. Review the previous sections and break down the areas of your business that you’ll need to focus your SEO efforts on. Then, write it down for yourself and in the job description. If you don’t take the time to investigate this, it may be difficult to distinguish if this person is a good fit.
Important note: I’ve seen many job descriptions that list the job title as something like “SEO Manager” but then also include that this person is responsible for a bazillion other types of marketing. So when formulating your job description, consider a balance of the most important elements you need this person to accomplish — don’t go overboard. If you’re unsure about what to include, check with another SEO or someone in your marketing department to make sure the job description is accurate and fair.
#2 Look for someone with proven results
Ask for a portfolio. Their portfolio may include strategy work and/or optimized content (depending on the type of SEO they specialize in). However, it can be the case that company data is restricted, so if they’re unable to provide this, a trial test (see #4) will clarify their skills.
You want someone with a good balance of experience in your industry and other industries, as they are most likely to find creative solutions and approach SEO strategies more holistically. If they can explain to you how they’ve guided another business towards success using the SEO strategy they developed, then keep them in mind when you make your final decision.
#3 Assess SEO know-how during an interview
Assess their knowledge of SEO using the questions mentioned earlier. Other important questions I’d recommend asking are:
What are the top SEO KPIs to track on a monthly basis?
How do you know when content needs to be optimized after it’s already published?
How do you know when your SEO strategy is working vs. not working?
Someone quick on their feet with well-thought answers will tell you a great deal about their ability to adapt and help your business grow.
#4 Give them a trial test to check their strategic planning skills
As I noted before, knowledge doesn’t do much without action. To determine if a candidate for an SEO position is a match for your needs, they should be able to create a mock strategic plan. One of the best testing methods is to ask candidates to do a mini SEO audit to see how they approach combining data with strategic insights. In combination with their SEO knowledge, their process will tell you everything you need to know to make your choice.
Hiring an in-house SEO is one of the best decisions you’ll make for the longevity of your business
Ultimately, putting in the work upfront to fully vet your next in-house SEO position will pay dividends in the long term. SEO can skyrocket your business efforts to a whole new level, but only with assistance from the right person and with the right strategy.
Without these ingredients, missed opportunities could prevail. To avoid this, be sure to first understand what your marketing team needs and make sure this aligns with the candidate’s particular skill set.
At the end of the day, the most important skill is the ability to keep on learning and improving, because, like SEO, we must all continually optimize.
