Recently, after months of testing, Google pushed a full roll-out of indented results. These are groups of organic results from the same domain, such as this result on a search for “Halloween stores”:
Just to make life confusing, indented results are different from expanded sitelinks (in the #1 ranking position), such as these on a search for “Spirit Halloween”:
So, why should we care about indented results? To begin with, they seem to be appearing at a surprisingly high rate on page one. Here’s the prevalence since we started tracking them on MozCast (across 10,000 competitive keywords):
For the 13 days for which we currently have data, the prevalence of indented results on page one Google SERPs in MozCast has been stable at around 40%. Since we often see new features roll out at single-digit percentages, this is a significant development.
Note that the MozCast 10,000-keyword data set skews toward high-competition “head” terms and may not represent the entire universe of Google searches.
Did indented results replace sitelinks?
While Google was testing indented results, we initially wondered if they would replace expanded sitelinks. This does not seem to be the case. While expanded sitelinks only appear in the #1 position and seem to be limited to navigational or “brand” searches, indented results appear on a much broader mix. For example, here’s an indented result for the search “Halloween costumes”:
There’s clearly no brand or navigational intent around Good Housekeeping in play here — Google simply decided to surface two topical articles from their site. In addition, we’re seeing SERPs with both expanded sitelinks and indented results. Here’s the breakdown of the two features:
On October 12th, 23% of SERPs in our data set had expanded sitelinks, 39% had indented results, and roughly 8% had both features. Clearly, these are two distinct features with unique intent.
How many indented results can there be?
One domain can display up to three indented results, and more than one domain can have indented results on any given SERP (although it’s fairly rare on page one). In our data set, here’s the breakdown by result count:
About 28% of SERPs in our data set had one indented result on page one, 8% had two indented results, and the rest (3-5 indented results) accounted for just over 2% of SERPs. Here’s a screen capture of the organic results for a search for “The MLS online” in Hartford, Connecticut:
While this is a brand-like search, multiple sites surface the MLS database and none of them appear to be official, leaving Google in a bit of a quandary. Interestingly, the third domain has three indented results. Notice that the total organic results (regular + indented) on this page still add up to ten.
What should you do about all of this?
While a surprisingly high number of SERPs have indented results, these aren’t something you can easily control — there’s no schema or mark-up that activates indented results. We also don’t have the data yet to understand how these results impact click-through rates (CTRs) and other metrics.
It does appear, anecdotally, that Google may be elevating indented results from lower in the rankings, which suggests that those results could be getting an artificial ranking boost. Targeting this boost will require ranking multiple pages for the same search queries, though, which is probably not a good return on investment for most queries.
For now, it’s probably best to start monitoring these results on your most critical keywords and begin to track if and when they’re impacting your rankings and CTRs. We hope to have more news soon about tracking these results in our toolset.
In the first post in this series, I talked about how relatively few URLs on the web are currently clearing the double-hurdle required for a maximum CWV (Core Web Vitals) ranking boost:
Passing the threshold for all three CWV metrics
Actually having CrUX data available so Google knows you’ve passed said thresholds
For Google’s original rollout timeline in May, we would have had 9% of URLs clearing this bar. By August 2021, this had hit 14%.
This alone may have been enough for Google to delay, downplay, and dilute their own update. But there’s another critical issue that I believe may have undermined Google’s ability to introduce Page Experience as a major ranking factor: flimsy metrics.
Flimsy metrics
It’s a challenging brief to capture the frustrations of millions of disparate users’ experiences with a handful of simple metrics. Perhaps an impossible one. In any case, Google’s choices are certainly not without their quirks. My principle charge is that many frustrating website behaviors are not only left unnoticed by the three new metrics, but actively incentivized.
To be clear, I’m sure experience as measured by CWV is broadly correlated with good page experience. But the more room for maneuver there is, and the fuzzier the data is, the less weight Google can apply to page experience as a ranking factor. If I can be accused of holding Google up to an unrealistic standard here, then I’d view that as a bed of their own making.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
This perhaps feels the safest of the three new metrics, being essentially a proxy for page loading speed. Specifically, though, it measures the time taken for the largest element to finish loading. That “largest element” is the bit that raises all manner of issues.
Take a look at the Moz Blog homepage, for example. Here’s a screenshot from a day close to the original, planned CWV launch:
What would you say is the largest element here? The hero images perhaps? The blog post titles, or blurbs?
For real world data in the CrUX dataset, of course, the largest element may vary by device type. But for a standard smartphone user agent (Moz Pro uses a Moto G4 as its mobile user agent), it’s the passage at the top (“The industry’s top wizards, doctors, and other experts…”). On desktop, it’s sometimes the page titles — depending on what the length of the two most recent titles happens to be. Of course, that’s part of the catch here: you have to remember to take a look with the right device. But even if you do, it’s not exactly obvious.
(If you don't believe me, you can set up a campaign for Moz.com in Moz Pro, and check for yourself in the Performance Metrics feature within the Site Crawl tool.)
There are two reasons this ends up being a particularly unhelpful comparison metric.
1. Pages have very different structures
The importance of the “largest element” varies hugely from one page to another. Sometimes, it’s an insignificant text block, like with Moz above. Sometimes it’s the actual main feature of the page. Sometimes it’s a cookie overlay, like this example from Ebuyer:
This becomes a rather unfair, apples to oranges, comparison, and encourages focusing on arbitrary elements in many cases.
2. Easy manipulation
When the largest few elements are similar in size (as with Moz above), there’s an incentive to make the quickest one just a bit larger. This has no real improvement to user experience, but will improve LCP.
First Input Delay (FID)
First Input Delay is a much less intuitive metric. This records the amount of time it takes to process the user's first interaction (counting clicks on interactive elements, but not scrolls or zooms) from when the browser starts to process that interaction. So the actual time taken to finish processing is irrelevant — it’s just the delay between a user action and the start of processing.
Naturally, if the user tries to click something whilst the page is still loading, this lag will be considerable. On the other hand, if that click happens much later, it’s likely the page will be in a good position to respond quickly.
The incentive here, then, is to delay the user’s first click. Although this is counterintuitive, it can actually be a good thing, because it pushes us away from having pop-ups and other elements that block access to content. However, if we really wanted to be cynical, then we could actually optimize for this metric by making elements harder to click, or initially non-interactive. By making navigation elements a more frustrating experience, we would buy time for the page to finish loading.
On top of this, it’s worth remembering that FID cannot be measured in the lab, because it requires that human element. Instead, Moz Pro and other lab suites (including Google’s) use Total Blocking Time, which is closer to approximating what would happen if a user immediately tried to click something.
Overall, I think this metric isn’t as unfair a comparison as Largest Contentful Paint, because gaming the system here is slightly more of a shot in one’s own foot. It’s still potentially an unfair comparison, in that navigational pages will have a harder time than content pages (because on a navigational, hub, or category page, users want to click quite soon). But it could be argued that navigation pages are worse search results anyway, so perhaps, giving Google an XXL serving of the benefit of the doubt, that could be deliberate.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
And lastly, there’s Cumulative Layout Shift, another metric which seems intuitively good — we all hate it when pages shift around whilst we’re trying to read or click something. The devil, though, is once again in the details, because CLS records the maximum change in a 5-second “session” window.
Ignoring the issue with the use of the word “session” that is confusingly nothing to do with Google’s definition of the same word in other contexts, the issue here is that some of the worst offenders for a jarring web experience won’t actually register on this metric.
Namely:
Mid-article adverts, social media embeds, and so on, are often below the fold, so have no impact whatsoever.
Annoying pop-ups and the like often arrive after a delay, so not during the 5-second window. (And, in any case, can be configured to not count towards layout shift!)
At MozCon earlier this year, I shared this example from the Guardian, which has zero impact on their (rather good) CLS score:
So in the best case, this metric is oblivious to the worst offenders of the kind of bad experience it is surely trying to capture. And in the worst case, it again could incentivize behavior that is actively bad. For example, I might delay some annoying element of my page so that it arrives outside of the initial 5-second window. This would make it even more annoying, but improve my score.
What next?
As I mentioned in part one, Google has been a bit hesitant and timid with the rollout of Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor, and issues like those I’ve covered here might be part of the reason why. In future, we should expect Google to keep tweaking these metrics, and to add new ones.
Indeed, Google themselves said last May that they planned to incorporate more signals on a yearly basis, and improvements to responsiveness metrics are being openly discussed. This ultimately means you shouldn’t try to over-optimize, or cynically manipulate the current metrics — you’re likely to suffer for it down the line.
As I mentioned in the first article in this series, if you're curious about where you stand for your site's CWV thresholds today, Moz has a tool for it currently in beta with the official launch coming later this year.
In the third and final part of this series, we’ll cover the impact of CWV on rankings so far, so we can see together how much attention to pay to the various “tiebreaker” equivocations.
First, let me pull up the best seat in the house for you: the local business owner or marketer who has weathered so much in the past two years. For your work of serving the public, you deserve the comfy chair by the fire, the celebratory cup of hot chocolate, while we chat about preparing to take good care of your customers in the upcoming holiday season.
Thank you for how you’ve risen every day to countless challenges, kept communities supplied, and will even make some dreams come true when people give gifts to one another as expressions of love, hope, and generosity of spirit this winter.
We can prepare your local business to be both popular and profitable in the 2021 holiday shopping season by identifying and answering six types of scenario-specific customer questions, and strategizing where to publicize the answers. Comfortable? Here we go!
1. Do you have [x]?
It’s the most basic and obvious question at the start of every transaction, but the answer has become more complex in the past two years due to the pandemic and related supply chain issues. Customer satisfaction is now tied, more than ever, to simply communicating availability via the following methods:
Best-in-class e-commerce systems should warn customers if local inventory levels are low or items are out of stock. If your solution is lacking features, it’s a signal an upgrade may be necessary to keep customers happy.
Add your products for free to Google’s Merchant Center and be sure you’re keeping a good eye on them for accuracy.
If you’re selling one of those Cabbage-Patch-Tickle-Me-Elmo-iPhone-hot items, definitely consider investing in video sales. Even if your stock is less trendy, I predict we’re on our way to a QVC-like commerce future and this is a great time to experiment with this form of sales.
Social commerce is on the rise, too, and if your customers shop on Instagram or Facebook, you should be there. Meanwhile, purely informational social posting can help you signal availability of desired merchandise.
And, of course, be sure every member of your staff is well-trained in and has access to an accurate inventory database so that walk-in, phone, chat, and text-based queries can be quickly and correctly answered.
2. How can I get [x]?
Once a customer has established that you have an item they want, the natural next question is how they will access it, and success now depends on offering multiple options. At-home local delivery by in-house or third-party drivers, curbside-pickup, and shipping make up the present norm alongside in-store pickup. In certain verticals, shoppers will also want to know if items can be bundled as a gift or gift-wrapped.
Accuracy and transparency are vital to setting expectations for these services and their attendant fees. And don’t forget to publish purchase-by dates to ensure holiday delivery! Publicize all of your fulfillment options here:
Product pages on your website
A holiday shopping guide on your website
Shipping and service pages on your website
Customer satisfaction guarantee pages on your website
Social posting can bring further attention to your convenient holiday services
Via your all-staff training, to be sure every team member knows how to communicate the many ways customers can access your inventory.
3. Where are you and when are you there?
It’s never been more important for your website and local business listings to contain accurate contact information and current hours of operation. Your customers will likely span a spectrum of those who are choosing to continue to shop in person and those who are firmly resolved to avoid public settings. A desire that unifies them all, however, is that of avoiding inconvenience in these difficult times caused by driving to a wrong address for an in-store or curbside pickup, calling a wrong number to place an order, or trying to make contact during incorrect stated hours of operation. Now is the time to be sure that:
Your local business listings across the web feature a correct name, address, phone number, text line, email address, and holiday hours (Moz Local can help make quick work of this for your business!)
You’ve done a complete review of all pages of your website to find the above information anywhere it’s mentioned and edited it for 2021 accuracy
Your social profiles reflect this, too.
You’ve reached out to websites, blogs, industry publications, news sites, and other sources of unstructured citations if their information about your business is outdated.
4. How much do you care?
The entirety of your COVID-19 safety precautions is a source of vital information for customers. Vaccine requirements, mask mandates, sanitation, contactless services, self-imposed closures, and all other public health proceedings should be communicated by any business desiring to prove that company leadership cares about staff and customers, alike.
In the US, our news and social media tend to focus on individuals flouting safety, but our real lives are filled with vulnerable loved ones; children with autoimmune diseases, elders at high risk, friends with asthma. The local brand you are promoting can evince its care for the whole community and let people make an informed choice about the security of shopping with you by publishing your pandemic safety measures. Here are some good options:
Create a COVID-19 policy page on your website and practice strong internal linking to it from relevant transactional and informational pages
Include a form for customers to report failures of staff or other shoppers to adhere to the published policy so that you can take steps to correct these instances
I am sincerely hoping Google will do the right thing and add “vaccination card required” to their available attributes in the GMB dashboard. In the meantime, be sure you’ve selected as many attributes as are applicable to your policy in the Health & Safety section of the dashboard so that these appear on your listing.
Your Google My Business description is a great place to summarize your public safety policy.
Your policies can also be good topics for Google Posts.
Put your policies into question form. Do you require masks, is your staff vaccinated, do you require proof of vaccination, and similar questions are ones you can publish and answer in the Q&A section of your GMB listing.
Use social media to further disseminate your policy.
Get in touch with local reporters to get them writing about the positive side of businesses like yours taking as many steps as possible to keep people safer.
5. How well are you listening?
Real-world service and online reputation are inextricably linked. Near Media’s Mike Blumenthal recently published an important study of how Walmart’s online review counts went up and ratings went down in conjunction with customer disappointment over inventory shortages. Unfortunately, supply chain problems can be completely beyond a local business’ control, but what is almost always achievable is communication with customers who are taking the time to complain.
The Near Media report raised a big question for me: whether Walmart was responding to negative reviews related to shortages. I looked at the store nearest me for an answer. Sure enough, “shelves” was one of the top Place Topics trending for this location, but reviews like this one had received no response, weeks or months after publication:
67% of consumers say they are more committed to shopping small than they were pre-pandemic, and 91% say they prefer SMBs because they trust these businesses to treat them fairly. Any local business you’re marketing can do a better job than Walmart of proving that you are listening to customers’ needs and concerns simply by responding to their reviews as quickly and compassionately as possible.
Note that surveys don’t indicate customers expect perfection from local businesses; they expect fairness, and fairness starts with listening well. Good communication in return can reassure a customer that you care, and can even inspire them to edit a negative review to express an improved opinion of your customer service, even when something has gone wrong. Your review corpus, complete with owner responses, provides a constant, ready answer to potential customers who want to know how well they can expect to be treated by your brand.
Due to supply chain issues, this holiday shopping season will not be an easy one, but if you are using software like Moz Local to alert you to incoming reviews across multiple platforms and are coupling this with social listening for negative brand mentions, your transparency and responsiveness will go far towards keeping customers on your side and satisfied while also safeguarding your reputation.
6. Is there affinity?
If you’re acing questions 1-5, you’ve made sure that customers know what you have, where, when, and how to access it, the care you’re taking in regards to public safety, and the responsiveness of your customer service. You have one more major opportunity to persuade people that choosing you is the right choice for them, and this lies in publicizing the work you are doing to demonstrate affinity with the culture and needs of the communities you serve.
It speaks to the remarkable resilience of the human spirit that, even in the midst of crisis, many of your customers are continuing to actively advocate for solutions to local, national, and global problems.
Every part of the world is now being impacted by Climate Change, for example, and I’ve watched with admiration for the past several years how Irish media is making the transition via print, radio, television, and online marketing to promote more sustainable holidays. Meanwhile, Sweden has opened the world’s first second-hand mall, Peru is answering the 75% increase in searches for sustainable clothing by leading the fight against fast fashion, and France has outlawed planned obsolescence and is fining companies which design products intended to break. The US is also part of the 71% increase in searches for green goods over the past five years, and if your local business has made the commitment to being part of the essential change to protect the planet, what you publish about your activities can help you and your customers make the journey together.
For other customers, lived experience and allyship could be making other issues top of mind. Racial and gender equity, human or animal rights, localism, LGBTQ+ advocacy, the cure of disease, support for elders, the differently-abled, children, or the chronically ill could all be worthy causes of great importance to community members. When your leadership and staff authentically share a commitment to progress on issues that matter most, businesses have a role to play in the ongoing work and a story to tell that will have meaning to customers.
Your website, Google Posts, social profiles, local or national media, and industry publications are all excellent places to shine a light on your activism, advocacy, sponsorship, and philanthropy. The core goal of such work should be to move important causes forward by showing businesses can be part of necessary change. But an additional benefit of taking public stances can be winning new loyal customers not just for the 2021 holiday shopping season, but for life.
From my own longstanding and heartfelt affinity with local businesses everywhere, I am wishing you an excellent, inspired, and inspiring holiday season and a new year that sees your business and its community thriving!
Faced with so many SEO tasks to worry about, how do you know which ones to prioritize? In today's episode of Whiteboard Friday, Ola takes you through the important technical SEO fixes that should be a the top of your audit list.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hi, Moz fans. I'm Ola King. I work here at Moz, and I'm excited to join you today for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we'll be talking about prioritizing SEO fixes.
By now, you are probably already familiar with the concept of technical SEO, and if you aren't, there are a bunch of resources out there, including the Moz blog and other sites that you can check out.
But technical SEO is probably the most important part of SEO because if you have the best content on the web, you have the most backlinks, if your site is not technically sound, then you might not be able to get the best results from all of your efforts. So your technical SEO is really the foundation of everything else you do.
There's a bunch of tools, like Sitebulb, Moz Pro, and Screaming Frog, that can allow you to analyze your technical SEO issues involved. But once you have the list of the issues, you might not always know how to prioritize your effort. So today's session is to help you have a better handle on that once you have a list of those issues.
Indexing
For your technical SEO, the first thing the search engines will do towards your website is really to crawl it. So you want to make sure that you have your sitemap set up correctly, and then you have to make sure that your robots.txt is set up correctly so that the search engines can crawl your most relevant pages on your site.
Pages to index
But once they've crawled your site, you want to ensure that the crawl budget is spent towards indexing the relevant pages on your site. So today we'll cover the pages that you should be indexing, and we'll also then talk about how you can fix those pages or how to prioritize your efforts towards fixing those pages.
So the first thing, index. The pages that you should be indexing are really pages that are important towards your business. So what's your KPI, what's going to drive leads to your site, what's going to drive traffic, or are there strategic pages that you're trying to get more results from, start with that. Know what those are and those are the things that you want to make sure that are indexed.
Of course, the larger your website, the more you have to pay attention to these. Maybe on your own, when it's a brand-new site, it's okay to index everything initially. But as your site grows, you might want to be more careful with that. Of course, you don't want to index all the private and sensitive pages. So think of your login page, privacy policy pages.
They should exist on your site, of course, but they don't need to be indexed. So you want to ensure that meta no-index is set up for those pages, and you can do that from the source by setting up your robots.txt to ensure that those pages are not even crawled in the first place. So the pages that you should prioritize, in terms of indexing for your site, are the high traffic value pages.
So these are pages that either you want to get more traffic towards or are already getting lots of traffic, and they could also be pages that might not be getting lots of traffic, but they are strategic in terms of they bring quality traffic to your website or you expect them to bring quality traffic to your site. Then high links value.
You want to ensure that the pages that are positioned on your website to drive links are indexed. Or if they are already driving links, you don't want to mess up that aspect. You can use, once again, tools like Moz Pro to analyze pages that are getting links on your site. So you can use the Link Explorer for that.
Make sure that you're not messing up pages that are driving value to other pages as well. So even if they don't have external links, if they are important in terms of internal links, they are important to you to index as well. High keyword value as well. If a page is getting a lot of your keywords, you want to ensure a page like that is indexed as well. The role in the user journey. Some pages might not have much SEO value, but they are still very useful to your user journey. So think of like your help pages. They probably won't rank for a lot of keywords, to be honest.
However, if your customer goes to the search engine and searches for a solution to something, you want to direct them to those help pages, and you want to ensure that they are finding those easily. So not a lot of SEO value in the traditional sense, but it's still very useful towards your user journey.
Also pages that are placed in a very prominent position on your site should be indexed as well, so your homepage. Most likely every link on your page should not lead to a dead end. It should lead customers towards the intended target, so no 404 errors on your homepage or other pages that are very important to your user journey. So a way to prevent that is you can set up a Google Analytics custom report so that any time there's an issue on a page like that, you are alerted quickly.
So these are the pages that you should be indexing. If there's something that you think should be here, please let me know. This is not meant to be a perfect list. But this is based on my experience so far, what I've found, but you might know something that I don't. So please let me know.
Prioritizing fixes
So for the fixes, in terms of the fixes, this is how you should prioritize what you should fix.
Prioritization factors
So these are the prioritization factors. So once again:
Page value: pages that are ranking, that are getting links, that are getting clicks, you should prioritize fixing those quicker than other pages.
Pages that align with your priority or that would have impacts towards your KPI, you should probably prioritize those pages as well.
Ranking potential: There are some pages that might not be doing quite well, but they have high ranking potential. So if a page is like on page 2 and you know that it's going after a keyword that is not so difficult, then you might want to prioritize fixing that page so that you can start getting results a lot quicker.
Then by issue type as well. Some issues are worth going after and fixing quicker than other issues.
The technical effort as well. Some issues are a lot easier to fix. If you're not technical, this is not for you to determine. You might want to talk to your developers and for them to estimate how hard or easy a page would be to fix.
Prioritizing by issue type
If you're technical, of course you can be the judge of that yourself. But in terms of the issues type, this is a list of the common issues and how to prioritize them:
So you have the critical crawler issues. So you could have a server error or a broken page, so the 4XX pages or errors. Make sure you fix those immediately because they are impacting your user journey and potential rankings as well.
The metadata issues as well. So things like missing descriptions, those are things you want to to fix next after the pages are already accessible.
Redirect issues as well. No one wants a redirect chain. So make sure that's fixed after you fix your metadata issues.
Content issues are minor tweaks here and there. So they are important, but they're very much low on your priority. So if you are finding like you don't have the right keyword, for example, in your URL, that might not always be very important to fix right away because the efforts to fix that might not be worth the result in the sense of just fixing a URL issue would actually result in doing an audit to make sure that you're not breaking anything else on your site. So for something that might not have a lot of impact, it is leading to a lot of work which is not super valuable to you.
Conclusion
So, yeah, these are the things that I consider when I'm fixing a site's technical issues. There are still many steps to this. We are not able to cover all of that due to the time constraint.
But things like, for example, I mentioned the technical effort, so you might want to use things like T-shirt sizing, for example, to determine what issues are small, what are medium, large, extra large, and so on. Depending on your projects management tool, you might be able to set up a sorting function so that you are able to do this automatically.
So once you upload your URLs, for example, into a Google Sheet, you can be able to set up a script that allows you, once you've selected the effort, the issue type, and the value to you, you should be able to sort that automatically as well, so this work is a lot quicker. But yeah, I would like to know what you think about this, and I would love to learn from you as well.
It’s common to hear SEOs discuss the “increasing dominance” of big brands in SEO, and how smaller companies just can’t break into the rankings like they used to. Google even put out a “domain diversity” algorithm update a couple of years ago to address the issue, and people like me have shown time and time again how metrics like branded search volume and domain authority — typically signs of a big, well-known company — are key predictors of search performance.
This post, though, is to share some surprising data we’ve surfaced at Moz suggesting that, actually, right now is the best time in years to be an outsider in SEO.
What is domain diversity?
I think there are two appealing ways to define domain diversity, and we’ll look at data for both.
Normally, “domain diversity” is used to refer to a greater number of unique sites appearing in a given SERP. For example, if you have three results from Pinterest and two from eBay on the first page, that is an example of very low domain diversity. I’ll talk about this as “per-SERP” domain diversity below.
The other type of domain diversity I’d like to discuss is the extent to which the biggest sites dominate SEO in general. If the same few sites are ranking top 5 for any query you can think of, that doesn’t necessarily mean low per-SERP domain diversity, but it is still a very homogenous and inaccessible search landscape. I’ll talk about this as “overall” domain diversity, but this is also the domain diversity metric shown on MozCast.
Per-SERP domain diversity
For this measure, we’re using the percentage of page one results which are the first appearance of that subdomain. So for example, if the first page of results has 10 organic listings, of which eight are unique but two are en.wikpedia.org, that’s a score of 90% (i.e. 9/10). Another way of thinking about this same metric is the average ratio of unique subdomains (9) to total subdomains (10). The dataset used throughout is the MozCast corpus.
Here’s how that looks for the last four years, up to August 2021:
To my eye, this is almost incredibly level. For virtually the entirety of 2019, 2020, and 2021, we’ve hovered between 90 and 92%. That’s roughly equivalent to each SERP having one duplicated subdomain. I’ve also included the same statistic if we count sitelinks, which obviously is a little lower as sitelinks always repeat the main site domain, but this is still remarkably consistent.
There’s a five-day dip between October 4 and October 8, 2019, and a longer period of fluctuation starting June 28, 2018, but neither line up particularly closely with any major algorithm update or SERP feature change, and both were ultimately corrected.
Google’s own Site Diversity update on June 6, 2019 barely registers, with a 0.5% impact on the day:
For me though, the main story here is the incredible consistency. For this metric to have been so level for so many years, it feels very likely that this has been something Google has explicitly targeted.
Overall domain diversity
For overall diversity, rather than looking at the average ratio of unique subdomains to total subdomains per SERP, we’ve done it across every page one result in the corpus. So, for example, taking 100 results from 10 SERPs, a score of 30% would mean that there were 30 unique subdomains.
This chart has a bit more going on, but you can see that the current level of diversity is the highest in years (with the exception of a brief spike in 2020):
We last saw diversity this high in mid-2017, and we’ve not seen levels significantly higher since late 2016.
As with per-SERP diversity, much of the variance on this chart doesn’t line up with any known algorithm update. However, there are a couple of recent notable exceptions:
Two of the biggest one-day changes we’ve seen are associated with Google “glitches”. Some of the more gradual changes happen around known algorithm updates, but the biggest of all seemingly went totally unnoticed by the SEO industry.
Bonus: The Big 10
Another way of measuring domain diversity is by the percentage of results that are one of the 10 most common subdomains in MozCast. What features on this list varies over time, but for context, right now it looks like this:
en.wikipedia.org
www.amazon.com
www.facebook.com
twitter.com
www.webmd.com
www.healthline.com
www.yelp.com
www.walmart.com
www.mayoclinic.org
www.pinterest.com
This metric is also lower than it has been for a while, albeit not quite so extreme:
That big drop in 2018 coincides with the introduction of video carousels as non-organic results, heavily reducing YouTube’s presence as a big player. (It now sits just outside our top 10).
What does this mean for SEOs?
If you still feel that small brands are being crowded out in your industry, you could be right. We’ll be publishing more posts digging into narrower versions of this data — industries, specific big sites, and result types. Indeed, I’d love to hear what you’d like to see more of over on social media.
For now, though, the main takeaway is that the last few years — even with their focus on E-A-T and other factors we consider easier for bigger brands — have far from wiped out diversity in the SERPs. On the contrary, it’s rarely looked better.
No, please, do read on. This is a post about what has gone wrong with Core Web Vitals and where we stand now, but also why you still need to care. I also have some data along the way, showing how many sites are hitting the minimum level, both now and back at the original intended launch date.
At the time of writing, it’s nearly a year and a half since Google told us that they were once again going to pull their usual trick: tell us something is a ranking factor in advance, so that we improve the web. To be fair, it’s quite a noble goal all told (albeit one they have a significant stake in). It’s a well trodden playbook at this point, too, most notably with “mobilegeddon” and HTTPS in recent years.
Both of those recent examples felt a little underwhelming when we hit zero-day, but the “Page Experience Update”, as Core Web Vitals’ rollout has been named, has felt not just underwhelming, but more than a little fumbled. This post is part of a 3-part series, where we’ll cover where we stand now, how to understand it, and what to do next.
Fumbled, you say?
Google was initially vague, telling us back in May 2020 that the update would be “in 2021”. Then, in November 2020, they told us it’d be in May 2021 — an unusually long total lead time, but so far, so good.
The surprise came in April, when we were told the update was delayed to June. And then in June, when it started rolling out “very slowly”. Finally, at the start of September, after some 16 months, we were told it was done.
So, why do I care? I think the delays (and the repeated clarifications and contradictions along the way) suggest that Google’s play didn’t quite work out this time. They told us that we should improve our websites’ performance because it was going to be a ranking factor. But for whatever reason, perhaps we didn’t improve them, and their data was a mess anyhow, so Google was left to downplay their own update as a “tiebreaker”. This is confusing and disorientating for businesses and brands, and detracts from the overall message that yes, come what may, they should work on their site performance.
As John Mueller said, “we really want to make sure that search remains useful after all”. This is the underlying bluff in Google’s pre-announced updates: they can’t make changes that cause the websites people expect to see, to not rank.
Y’all got any data?
Yes, of course. What do you think we do here?
You may be familiar with our lord and savior, Mozcast, Moz’s Google algorithm monitoring report. Mozcast is based on a corpus of 10,000 competitive keywords, and back in May I decided to look at every URL ranking top 20 for all of these keywords, on desktop or on mobile, as tracked from a random location in the suburban USA.
This was some 400,000 results, and (surprisingly, I felt) ~210,000 unique URLs.
At the time, only 29% of these URLs had any CrUX data — this is data collected from real users in Google Chrome, and the basis of Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. It’s possible for a URL to not have CrUX data because a certain sample size is needed before Google can work with the data, and for many lower traffic URLs, there is not enough Chrome traffic to fill out this sample size. This 29% is an especially depressingly low number when you consider that these are, by definition, higher traffic pages than most — they rank top 20 for competitive terms, after all.
Google has made various equivocations around generalizing/guesstimating results based on page similarity for pages that don’t have CrUX data, and I can imagine this working for large, templated sites with long tails, but less so smaller sites. In any case, in my experience working on large, templated sites, two pages on the same template often had vastly different performance, particularly if one was more heavily trafficked, and therefore more thoroughly cached.
Anyhow, leaving that rabbit hole to one side for a moment, you might be wondering what the Core Web Vitals outlook actually was for this 29% of URLs.
Some of these stats are quite impressive, but the real issue here is that “all 3” category. Again Google has gone and contradicted itself back and forth on whether you need to pass a threshold for all three metrics to get a performance boost, or indeed whether you need to pass any threshold at all. Still, what they have told us concretely is that we should try to meet these thresholds, and what we haven’t done is hit that bar.
30.75% passed all thresholds, of the 29% that even had data in the first place. 30.75% of 29% roughly equals 9%, 9% of URLs or thereabouts can concretely be said to be doing alright. Applying any significant ranking boost to 9% of URLs probably isn’t good news for the quality of Google’s results — especially as household name brands are very, very likely to be rife among the 91% left out.
So this was the situation in May, which (I hypothesize) led Google to postpone the update. What about August, when they finally rolled it out?
CrUX data availability increased from 29% to 38% between May and August 2021.
The rate of URLs with CrUX data passing all three CWV thresholds increased from 30.75% to 36.3% between May and August 2021.
So, the new multiplication (36.3% of 38%) leaves us at 14% - a marked increase over the previous 9%. Partly driven by Google collecting more data, partly by websites getting their stuff together. Presumably this trend will only increase, and Google will be able to turn up the dial on Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor, right?
More on that in parts 2 and 3 :)
In the meantime, if you're curious about where you stand for your site's CWV thresholds, Moz has a tool for it currently in beta with the official launch coming in mid-to-late October.
Competitive research is a common and necessary task in any marketing landscape. This practice is particularly crucial in digital marketing because the ecosystem rapidly changes and brands constantly battle against each other for users across multiple platforms.
In the ideal scenario, performing competitive content research illuminates where your brand’s online content falters compared to competitors. With this information, you can solder the frail links in your marketing strategy and try to usurp the competition with superior content. The results should improve your brand’s content authority, keyword rankings, and organic share of voice.
However, competitive research rarely offers cut-and-dry wins. Your best practice acumen must be strong enough to scrounge for insights among multiple sources with varying content quality. You need to understand what content matters and what’s fluff. And ultimately, you have to know why some choices are more valuable and useful than others.
All of these factors make competitive research tricky. Because if you don’t discern the best content decisions, then you’re going to step into a pitfall trap and end up in a worse spot than before the research — especially if you emulate competitors whose approach to content is wrong, inadequate, or a bad fit for your ideal users.
To prevent turning your brand into a cautionary tale, you need to carefully choose what competitors you research, locate relevant pain points, and determine how effective their marketing strategy is.
Identifying competitors: Avoid the narrow path
When we think of competitors, we often think about direct competitors — the brands that offer similar products or solutions and vie for the same users online and in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Patagonia versus Prana.
Evaluating direct competitors’ content is a great place to start competitive research, but this narrow view is only half of the digital marketing equation. You need to widen your path and analyze how your content stacks up against SERP competitors, too. This panoramic view is even more important for small businesses that compete with national chains, like a local independent bookstore versus Barnes & Noble.
Unfortunately, many companies overlook the value of analyzing SERP rankings and organic share of voice for their vertical. Sometimes, this choice is because a brand doesn't directly compete with the websites that rank in the top positions. In other scenarios, a company won’t have the resources to tackle both segments at once and must focus on either direct competition or SERP rankings.
Regardless of the situation, excluding researching SERP competitors in favor of your direct competition is an enormous mistake.
For example, let’s say you’re shopping for rock climbing pants and are indifferent to the brand you buy. Patagonia and Prana both sell climbing pants that you can purchase directly from their website and both brands rank for “rock climbing pants” on the first page. However, neither brand breaks above the fold with its rankings. Patagonia ranks in position seven and Prana is in position eight.
The top organic position is owned by a niche climbing website with a review of different climbing pants. This website has a domain authority of 50, while Prana and Pataongia have domain authorities of 73 and 85, respectively.
The user’s search intent is the same for every result on the first page: buying climbing pants. However, in this example, apparently neither Prana nor Patagonia focused on indirect SERP competitors. If they had, they’d recognize that brand-agnostic users, such as people who use generic search terms, often buy products based on reviews and recommendations.
Google recognizes this user desire, which is why the term is increasingly ranking best-of lists higher than product pages.
Given the domain rating of both companies and their expansive resources compared to a small, niche website, if either brand used their influencers to create unbiased review-focused content for the “rock climbing pants” keyword, they’d likely clinch the number one ranking with relative ease.
Instead, these companies are relegated down the page and must use paid advertising to compete for users’ attention.
Ultimately, accurate content analysis comes from gleaning insights from both SERP and direct competitors.
For example, let’s say you operate a B2B contact center software company for small businesses and want to rank for the ambitious term, “contact center software.” You have three direct competitors with a similar domain ranking and each of them rank somewhere on the first page. The other rankings are dominated by “best software” listicles.
This split search intent creates a delicate ranking environment and fierce competition. To have any chance of ranking on the first page, you’ll need to carefully pick-and-pull the best content aspects of both the listicles and direct competitors. And that requires knowing how to identify the right competitor to review.
How to choose competitors to review
Instead of getting sucked into the trap of balancing the analysis of SERP and direct competitors, focus on competitors who are trying to achieve the same goal and that you have an honest chance of dethroning.
If you want to improve your website’s content, any competitor you research should meet the following criteria:
The brand’s services and content are relevant and target your ideal user group
The brand follows content strategy and SEO best practices or is innovating effective alternatives
The brand ranks well on SERPs for your target keywords
The content this brand has ranking is relevant toward your brand’s users and business goals
Your brand’s domain rating and page authority are reasonably competitive, so changes have the potential to spur keyword growth
You have the resources to directly compete with the brand’s online authority and presence
There are always exceptions to these rules, such as brands that don’t need a robust online presence because they rely on third-party contracts and word-of-mouth to survive, like government contractors. However, for the average B2B and B2C company, choosing competitors with these guidelines in mind will keep your attention focused on worthy competition and not riff-raff.
Identifying pain points
Once you know who your competitors are, you need to know what content to analyze and how to determine why their version is superior to yours. These choices come down to knowing your brand’s pain points.
Not understanding or researching your own pain points before delving into competitive research is a huge mistake. Pain points allow you to focus your competitive analysis. Without knowing what you want to fix, you’re aiming in the dark when you research the competitor’s content. Without light to guide you, it’s extremely easy to emulate ideas you shouldn’t or try to compete with a website that’s incompatible with your goals or organic authority.
What pain points should you focus on?
Ultimately, your business goals and content KPIs should determine what pain points you focus on. Let the slipping conversions, plummeting newsletter sign-ups, or poor website performance metrics guide your path.
Let’s say you run a documentary streaming service and are struggling to get users to sign up for a trial after reading relevant blog posts or research papers. You know one of your competitors doesn't have this churn, so you plan to read their related content and see how the experience is superior.
Before you can dive into the competitor’s service and learn why they earn trialists, you need to know why your users refuse to join.
In this scenario, your best option will be user research, such as:
User interviews
A/B tests
Surveys
Usability tests
Heatmap tracking
Net promoter score analysis
Once you determine why your brand is failing, then you can critically consider how your opponent solves the issues users have with your brand’s service.
The trick to knowing if a competitor’s pain point solution will work for your brand is understanding why it works for the competitor. There are plenty of ways to gain this knowledge, including best practice awareness, running the competition’s idea through a user research gauntlet, and comparing the options side-by-side.
These insights all rely on one common theme: the competition is following best practices and doing everything correct. However, competitors are fallible and often don’t offer users an ideal experience or perfect content. So what happens when the competition is wrong?
What if the competition is wrong?
Even if a competitor passes your initial screening and seems like a great brand from which to discover your weaknesses, first impressions can be deceiving.
There are plenty of mischievous marketing practices businesses can participate in that you wouldn’t notice at first glance, such as black-hat link building or paying users for positive reviews. And there are many innocent mistakes that your competitors may make that will harm your website if you implement them, like lackluster accessibility standards.
The amount of due diligence you perform should correlate with the amount of risk you undertake to emulate an idea or strategy.
For low-risk ideas, like rewriting a competitor’s blog post, the due diligence can be extremely simple, such as checking the post’s sources, keyword targets, and backlinks.
High-risk ideas, like overhauling your product pages or customer journey, need a more robust background check.
Here are a handful of red flags that should encourage you to avoid a competitor or at least do a deeper dive into their website:
Content automation (like scraper blogs) or similar signs of low-quality content
Link cloaking
Guest posting networks or other content sharing ecosystems
Link farms, private blog networks, or similar manipulation
Multiple domains with duplicate content
Paid user reviews or similar manipulation
Social media manipulation
Comment spam
Fraudulent cookies
Hidden text
How to spot when the competition is wrong
To prevent adopting erroneous high-risk ideas, you should always ask yourself the following four questions:
Does the brand’s content adhere to content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices?
Is the content meaningful, and how is its value communicated to users?
Why do you think the brand created this content?
If you implemented a similar (or the same) idea, how would your updated website and its content improve user experience?
These four questions act as a check-and-balance system for new ideas. They force you to consider the justifications of why a competitor made its decisions, how users may respond, and the consequences of copying those choices. Although this process isn’t necessary for every improvement you may glean from a competitor, it’s worthwhile when you’re considering significant changes that can swing KPIs toward success or failure.
Now, go avoid competitive research pitfalls
Competitive research is a necessary marketing strategy, and it’s immensely valuable if you take the time to ensure you’re evaluating a worthy competitor. While it’s easy to skimp on the background research and assume your competitors know what they’re doing, based on search rankings or public opinion, they may not be the skilled marketers you presume and you’ll end up wasting time, resources, and users on a faulty idea.
Here’s a quick reminder of what you should do to prepare yourself for competitive research and avoid implementing bad ideas:
Identify a mix of direct and SERP competitors that have relevant content, are trying to accomplish the same goal, and target the same users.
Determine your brand’s pain points and analyze how the competitors solve similar problems.
Do background research on your competitors and their content choices to ensure they follow content strategy, SEO, and UX best practices.
