Your sales team has just asked you to hop on a call in 30 minutes with a new prospect, ClowdFyre. Not wanting to sound like an idiot, you pull up ClowdFyre.com and see the following: “ClowdFyre leverages the cloud to ignite blockchain synergies.” Cool, cool… hold on, there’s some sort of diagram. Surely, this will give you some insights:
Or maybe not. I’m exaggerating, of course, but having lived through Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and whatever it is we’re doing now, sometimes this feels a little too close to the truth. Maybe the simpler truth is that we’re just running out of names and the world is changing too fast.
So, how can you hope to quickly figure out what ClowdFyre is all about and sound like you did your homework? I’m going to present two real-world examples of how you can use Moz’s True Competitor research tool to solve this problem in under 10 minutes.
Case #1: From Xero to hero
Xero is a good example of a perfectly nice company with a perfectly uninformative name. Their tagline is: “Accounting software to do your to-do.” Okay, I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I understand what accounting software is.
Let’s see what I can learn from their competitive landscape. I plug them into True Competitor...
…and quickly get back something like this (edited down to the top 10):
For reference, we’ve got the Domain Authority (DA) of Xero.com and the DA, keyword Overlap, and Rivalry (a Moz metric that balances three factors, including DA and Overlap) of each of the top 10 organic search competitors. I can quickly spot a couple of things:
FreshBooks and QuickBooks immediately stand out as familiar brands in the accounting software space, and FreshBooks is in a very similar DA range. These are very likely product competitors and give us a talking point during the call. In addition, note these competitors:
These are content competitors that have significant overlap with Xero and are competing for organic traffic. Our prospect may not think of NerdWallet (just to pick one) as a competitor, but their content could provide key insights into questions potential buyers are asking.
If any are unfamiliar, I can click on them to visit the site. For example, I see that Wave (waveapps.com) is an up-and-coming competitor in the space. I could even feed a couple of these competitors back into True Competitor to paint a more complex picture.
In just a few minutes, I’ve got a sense of Xero’s product competitors, content competitors, and a couple of talking points. At the very least, I hopefully won’t sound like an idiot.
Case #2: A Missguided example
You might not know it from the name, but Missguided is a fashion brand focused on Gen-Z and Millennial women. Let’s put them into True Competitor and see what we can learn.
I’ll skip right to the insights (note that MissguidedUS.com has a DA of 64). I can see right away that Missguided is up against some big players in the retail space, including high-end department stores and Amazon. These competitors are aspirational and might not be a realistic focus, but this is a great topic for conversation. Who do they aspire to compete against and how do they face the reality of being in a market with these big players?
Let’s look at a somewhat different set of competitors:
I don’t know anything about these sites/brands, but my immediate sense is that they’re smaller brands (a sense that’s bolstered by their DA scores) and are trying to evoke an edgier vibe. That raises an interesting talking point — who are the most relevant competitors in this target market of Millennial and Gen-Z women, and what unique challenges does that market pose?
With a couple of clicks through to their sites (and less than a minute of work), I can also see that Aritzia and Tobi seem to be targeting a similar demographic and are likely direct competitors (they’re also much more realistic competitors than Macy’s or Amazon).
Glancing at my watch, I’ve still got a couple of minutes before the meeting, so let’s try something fun (well, I think it’s fun, anyway) — let’s click on those two “edgy” brands and use the [+ Analyze Competitors] feature. I’ll request the full keyword intersect…
… and I can immediately get a quick view of what keywords these sites share:
Obviously, five keywords (or even 500) is just a piece of the puzzle, but in a few minutes I’ve gathered enough pieces to have an intelligent conversation and help seal the deal.
Data-assisted human intelligence
From a product perspective, I believe that the most powerful thing we can do is to assist your human intelligence and help drive insights. Tools like True Competitor are never going to replace your own (or the client’s) industry knowledge, but I hope that — as they continue to evolve — we can empower faster and better decisions that help you do what you’re best at.
Ultimately, you’re not going to be able to spend hours researching every sales call — even if you want to. But by using True Competitor, you can make the little time you do have more productive.
I’d love to hear from anyone who puts this to work in their sales pitches (hit me up on Twitter @dr_pete) or about any ways that research tools help make your SEO prospecting easier.
Search marketers can't get our important work implemented if we can't prove that it's worth the investment to our higher-ups.
With that in mind, Moz’s own SEO Manager, Kavi Kardos, is going to give you the numbers and the talking points you need to justify the return on investment of your SEO work.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hi, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Kavi Kardos. I'm the SEO Manager here at Moz, which means I'm responsible for Moz.com's own SEO strategy and implementation along with the other SEO subject matter experts who you've seen many times before here on Whiteboard Friday.
The ROI of SEO
I'm going to talk to you today about the ROI of SEO, which is an important topic for website and business owners themselves to understand, but maybe even more important for the in-house and agency marketers who work on those websites to understand. The reason for that, as you probably are already well familiar with if you are one of those in-house or agency marketers with managers or clients to answer to, is that we as search marketers can't get our important and lucrative work implemented if we can't prove that it is lucrative.
People in positions like a CMO or a head of the marketing department or a small business owner have a lot to worry about all the time, and they often have to make really tough decisions about how to allocate really limited budget or other resources. So if I'm talking to you as the person who is responsible for making those tough decisions yourself, I'm going to help you understand why SEO is worth that resource expenditure.
If you're the person who has to do the convincing, I'm going to give you the numbers and the talking points you need to justify that return on investment.
Calculating potential profit
So I mentioned numbers, and you can see that there is some math going on, on this whiteboard behind me, but don't freak out. I am not a math person myself, but I do understand that a head of marketing or a small business owner, who has a really tight budget to deal with, needs to understand the actual potential profit if they're going to go all in on an SEO strategy.
Even here, working at an organization whose entire jam is SEO, I still have to justify the SEO projects I want to work on, the experiments I want to run, and the tools I want to use in terms of their potential to actually generate revenue, either directly or indirectly. You can do the same thing if you can identify a fairly solid key performance indicator for whatever it is you're proposing with some math that's actually pretty simple.
So let's look at our example website, widgets.com, which is currently ranking number three in this SERP for one of their most relevant and lucrative search terms "extra fine blue widgets." So we know that on average the organic click-through rate for a web page that's sitting in the third position on a SERP for a transactional search query like this is about 7%.
In this example, our KPIs are organic SERP ranking and also click-through rate. Yours might be slightly different, but those are pretty average concerns for SEOs. So right now, with that 7% click-through rate, this page is generating 500 monthly organic click-throughs on average, and once a customer actually arrives on that product page, they have about a 3% tendency to convert or actually purchase that widget.
That's on the high end of average for e-commerce. With that widget costing $50, we are looking at an average monthly revenue from organic search of $750 a month currently for that page.
So this is the beginning of our math. I hope you're still with me.
Chelsea, the SEO manager for widgets.com, wants to convince her boss to subscribe to an all-in-one SEO tool that's going to help her do in-depth keyword research, competitive analysis, identify potential link targets, and that's going to help her write some really solid on-page content, run her technical audits, and maybe earn some new, high-quality links pointing to the entire website and this product page in particular.
So her boss, of course, wants to know how much this is going to cost the company. So Chelsea does her research and finds a tool that can do all of that for $179 per month. So she gets to work after her boss signs off on that, and she is able to bump this page in the SERPs from the third position for this query, "extra fine blue widgets," up to position number two.
Now, we know that a transactional search query like this, the page that's in the second position in the SERP earns about an 11% organic click-through. So now this page is drawing in 785 organic click-throughs per month. We're going to keep this 3% conversion rate once the customer is on the page constant, just for simplicity's sake.
But, of course, we know that Chelsea's good work on that product description and user experience on the page could very well bump up that conversion rate too, which is great. But just to keep it simple, we'll leave that conversion rate constant. It still costs $50 to buy this widget. So now this page is bringing in $1,200 from organic search every month. That is currently a $450 increase per month over when this page was ranking number three. If we take out the cost of the tool that Chelsea is using, we end up with a profit per month of $270, and that works out to about $3,000 in profits per year.
We can run those numbers again and assume that Chelsea is able to get this page to rank number one for this particular SERP, thereby earning it a 22% average click-through rate.
If she can do that, then that much greater increase in organic click-throughs, with that constant conversion rate and the price of the widget, is going to get us an extra $1,600 per month in profits. Again, if we take out the cost of that tool, that is going to come out to $17,000 per year.
So now $179 a month for some tool sounds pretty good, right?
I know that's a lot of math that I just threw at you. But imagine if widgets.com sells hundreds of products and she's able to get even a small percentage of those to improve in search ranking. Even if you have glazed over the specifics a little bit, you can sort of get the idea here.
So in reality, the average return on investment in SEO for an e-commerce company is about $2.75 for every dollar that you spend.
Your mileage is obviously going to vary based on your industry and the website metrics that you have to start out with in actuality and your competitive landscape. If you're working on a website that is not e-commerce, it's going to be a little bit harder sometimes to work out the dollar value of the work that you're doing. If you're working on a lead gen site, you'll need to figure out an approximate dollar value for every lead that you generate.
Or if it's a content publisher, maybe it's the ad space that you were able to sell or whatever your site's moneymaker is. But this basic model will work regardless of industry or your competitive landscape.
Forecasting and proving ROI
So moving over here, I want to remind you that one of the most useful and effective tools that you have in your toolkit for forecasting and proving return on investment is something that you're probably already using for SEO, and that is Google Analytics.
So if you don't have your Analytics account set up to track the goals and conversions that are important to your business, you're missing out on a free and relatively simple way of showing exactly how much your SEO work is affecting your bottom line. You can set up your goals in your View Settings of your Google Analytics account, and you can customize those so that every time a user completes an action, like scrolling down a page to a certain point, clicking on a button, or obviously making a purchase, that gets recorded as a goal completion in Analytics.
You can see all of your goal completions for whatever time period you want within the Conversions menu of your dashboard. If you have a dollar value attached to some or all of those goals, you can filter this down to just organic traffic so that you can see exactly how much money each of those goal completions is bringing in per month.
This can still work if you're able to attach some kind of dollar value to your completions or your goals even if they're not e-commerce related necessarily. If you do sell products, though, the E-commerce menu under Conversions is going to have some other really great insights, like how well each of your products is performing each month and which of your coupon or affiliate codes is performing the best month over month.
Compared to the competition
So sometimes the best way to convince yourself or your managers that investing in something like SEO is a good idea is by talking about it in terms of dollars and profits, like we just did. But sometimes you want to recognize that your competition is already doing this thing that you're considering and already seeing success.
At this point, any organization with a website that's not investing in SEO is far behind the curve. So 60% of marketers currently say that SEO is their number one concern when it comes to inbound marketing. Forbes tells us that over $80 billion is being spent each year just in the U.S. on SEO, and that number is going up all the time.
So, obviously, if you want to contend with your competitors who are taking up space in those SERPs, you need to be able and willing to play the same game as they are.
But here's something else that's interesting. We saw a recent study that said that only 49% of small businesses say that they invest in SEO. So this is interesting because almost 100% of purchases these days involve organic search in some way, and yet less than half of American small businesses are doing the work that it takes to become part of that buyer journey. So if you are a small business or if you're an agency that works with SMBs, then, yes, your biggest competitors are absolutely already investing in SEO.
But if you join them, you may be able to beat out some of those smaller guys who didn't make the smart choice to invest. There is a lot of opportunity in this statistic.
Cost of inaction
So the opposite of return on investment is the cost of not investing or the cost of inaction. We just went over one of those costs — losing out in the SERPs to your competition.
But another cost that you face if you choose not to invest in that tool suite, not to hire the SEO agency, or not to let your team focus on SEO work is letting your website stagnate or at worst letting your website deteriorate as a result of lack of attention being paid to routine SEO maintenance. Your internal links can quickly become outdated if products get removed from your catalog.
On-page content can also really easily become outdated. If you had some valuable traffic being sent to your website from other sites that were linking to you externally, if your site changes, then those links could become outdated, or they might just choose to remove them and you wouldn't even notice. If you have to go through something like an entire site migration or a restructuring of your internal architecture, those results can be disastrous if you don't pay attention to the important SEO concerns that are at play there.
So if you were ever considering hiring an in-house SEO or an agency, it's probably because you knew that you didn't have time to pay attention to that kind of routine maintenance on your own. So the odds are that if you don't make the commitment to that investment and get someone in there to help you, your site is going to suffer.
Final thoughts
So the most important caveat in all of this, to remind yourself or to convey to your managers, is that SEO, of course, takes time. It can be really exciting when you're thinking about dollars and projecting those profits to get excited about the potential results. But remember that in our example earlier it took time for Chelsea to do the work that was necessary to improve those pages that she was working on.
Then it took even more time for Google to do its job and for that work to actually affect those SERP rankings and the click-through rate as a result. So there's a gap between where we spent the money on that tool suite and where we actually saw the return. That can be really frustrating for business owners and especially for the SEOs who are trying to justify their work.
That's why it's so important to manage expectations around timing and the plausibility of your results during that sign-off process, before that check is signed, so that you can minimize the frustration that can come from waiting. But if you can get your stakeholders on the same page as you are about your SEO work and use all the really great tactics that you've learned to get the best and most effective results possible, you will earn that buy-in, you will make your bosses happy, and it will be that much easier for them to sign off on the next project that you propose.
So thank you so much again for watching this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I hope this was useful to you. Again, I'm Kavi Kardos. You can find me on LinkedIn under my name or on Twitter @therarevos and tell me your favorite ways to demonstrate ROI. I'll see you next time.
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.
