Should You Pay for Local Listings Management? Double-Digit Lifts and Customers Say: Yes!

Image credit: Loren Javier

It’s a whale of a question: Does citation management still matter in the grand scheme of local SEO? Our industry has been trying to gauge which way the wind is blowing on this subject for years now, and I’ve been professionally frustrated by a lack of large-scale studies to inform my own take.

SEOs live through ongoing cycles of one formerly-favorite tactic or another being proclaimed “dead”, whether that’s link building, guest posting, or search engine optimization, itself. The reality, we come to realize, is much more nuanced than the headlines. I wanted more than my own anecdotal opinion as to how location data distribution and management correlate with shifts in visibility and engagement, and was gratified when discussions with Uberall helped spark a major study with real numbers.

Today, I’ll share the results of this study which interested me most in hopes of offering a data-based answer as to whether citations still matter, as well as whether the local businesses you market should be paying for ongoing local business listing management services.

Useful context for the citation question

Professionals say citations are a piece of the pie

A structured citation is an online listing of a local business on a platform that exists to publish this type of information. The above screenshot shows a structured citation for a restaurant on Yelp, containing basic contact data for the eatery, as well as a variety of other enrichments such as ratings, reviews, and images.

A decade ago, citations were widely considered to be a top local search ranking factor. Over the past eight years, however, as perceptions of the influence of organic factors and Google’s reliance on its own location and reputation data have grown, experts are cutting citations a smaller piece of the pie. For example, the 2020 Local Search Ranking Factors Survey allots a 7% slice to citations amongst the seven most important types of local pack influences. It’s still a good-sized serving of a dish no local business can pass up; it’s just not as super-sized as it used to be, according to respondents.

Google says it relies on directories to understand prominence

Now that we’ve listened to opinions from people like me who participate in these kinds of ongoing surveys, the next thing we have to check is what Google says about directory citations:

In its article on How to Improve Your Local Ranking on Google, directories are transparently listed as a source from which Google derives its sense of how well-known a business is (a characteristic called “prominence”). Prominence, proximity, and distance are the three types of factors Google tells us it takes into account when ranking local businesses. In short, Google says citations matter.

Google continues to tell us it looks at third parties for information

This experimental text regarding reviews from third parties was recently reported at the Sterling Sky Local Search Forum. It’s part and parcel of Google’s ongoing testing of different displays of reviews from non-Google sources. It’s also of a piece with Google’s long standing crawl of third party platforms and directories for the information it includes in the Web Results section of local business listings:

Though the ramparts of Google’s walled garden are always getting higher, it’s clear that they are still pulling in information from third parties.

But where’s the data?

Anecdotal experience is useful, and Google’s hints are informative, but SEO is at its best when it’s data-based. I longed to see a big before-and-after study of what happens to visibility and engagement when location data is distributed across a network of directories, platforms and apps, and this is what Uberall delivered.

The study looked at thousands of small and enterprise business locations across the US and Europe, and tracked the results of pushing data out to just the “big 4” platforms (Google, Apple, Facebook and Bing) vs. distribution to these sources plus 10 or more directories.

The most difficult barrier to conducting a massive study like this is not being able to fully control the data set or environment, so do note that this report couldn’t weigh in on rankings prior to the study nor control what other SEO tactics all these brands might have been using during the period of analysis. It would be all but impossible to conduct an investigation on this scale in a vacuum, so take note that Moz always warns that correlation doesn’t equal causation. That being said, let’s look at the notable trends which access to this volume of data provided!

The data, or: why I’m not going to pass up the chance for a 91% increase in Maps Views

This chart comprises 6,000 total small business and enterprise locations in the US and Europe. In green, we have distribution to the big 4 platforms, and in red, the extraordinary difference in local pack visibility when local business data was pushed out beyond this to 10+ directories over the course of the 13-month testing period. Increased local pack visibility is defined not as the numeric rankings within a specific pack, but as the overall existence of a business in a greater number of packs. These double digit increases were recorded:

• Direct search 89% — This is people searching for a business by name or address

• Indirect search 77% — This is people discovering a business when searching by category, or for a product or service, rather than for a specific business by name

• Search View 65%, — This is the number of times a listing was encountered via Google’s search services

• Maps View91% — which is the number of times a listing was encountered via Google’s Maps services

Here is how these local visibility increases correlated with noteworthy growth for the 6,000 locations in the actions consumers can take on a listing — a metric we call “engagement”.

Given that these metrics fall at points in the consumer journey when a purchase is the next logical, and greatly desired, step, it’s exciting to see these figures associated with distribution to directories beyond the big four:

• A 102% increase in requests for driving directions

• A 13% increase in people clicking to call the business

• An 87% increase in people clicking to visit the business’ website

Local business owners and marketers are generally perspiring hard to earn single digit increases in any metric because of how they can convert to sales. In some industries, just one extra lead can mean thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands in added revenue for the business. I honestly can’t think of any local business I’ve ever consulted with that wouldn’t jump at the chance for growth of the kind depicted by this study.

Finally, the third takeaway that interested me most is that there’s evidence of a sweet spot, for both enterprises and SMBs, in distributing to about 31-40 directories for optimum increases in total search volume. This test looked at 800 SMB and 6,000 enterprise locations. The average increase was between 55-58% with distribution of this kind. This indicates, then, that business owners don’t need to distribute their location data to hundreds of platforms. About three dozen will do.

The customers: why citation accuracy and consistency are basic to customer service

Now that we’ve established the data side of the equation, we need to think about the humans, because at the end of the day, it’s customer service that makes or breaks brands. In 2020, Moz found that 66% of local business owners and marketers listed conversions and revenue as their top priorities. When managed properly, citations are meant to be conversion and revenue engines. When neglected, though, opportunity can vanish.

Our peers at BrightLocal found that 85% of consumers encountered incorrect or incomplete information on business listings in 2021, that 81% visited a business that was listed as open on the web but that had actually closed due to the pandemic, and 63% said that incorrect listing information would prevent them from doing business with a brand. This is the overwhelming majority of human searchers having terrible customer experiences like driving to closed locations or calling old phone numbers. Then negative reviews like the one shown above result, degrading the overall rating of the business. If a pattern like this snowballs, the accumulation of low ratings can be enough to contribute to permanent business closure.

In sum, inaccurate data on a listing and incorrect data across multiple listings are significant barriers to offering the kind of trustworthy customer service that underpins profitability. My own takeaway is that, regardless of trending sentiment on the impact of citations on Google’s local business rankings, their impact on humans outweighs all other considerations.

There’s simply no gainsaying that shedding 63% of your potential customers and seeing your reputation and profits deteriorate is an acceptable loss from ignoring citation management.

So, should you be paying for citation management?

“If you’re worried that people might see the wrong name or phone number online, it might be a good idea to stomach the annual fee.” — Joy Hawkins, Sterling Sky

Who can you trust?

Moz sells a local business listing management product called Moz Local. Let’s face it — we have a vested interest in finding that it’s a useful business strategy to pay for help with location data distribution and stewardship, as do many of our peers who publish these kinds of studies and surveys about the role of citations in local search marketing.

What I’ve noticed is that brands which sell ongoing location data management services tend to feel their methodology is best, and those which vend one-and-done deals think their way is right. I personally think what matters is what works for the local businesses you are marketing, and again, I wanted to see an actual study about this rather than relying on my own opinion.

More real data, please!

I took notice when the independent local search marketing firm, Sterling Sky, (which doesn’t develop local business listings software) ran an experiment in which they cancelled an annual contract with a service that manages information on location data aggregators. While they saw no impact on rankings or links within the timeframe of the study, their number one finding was that their listings then became polluted with bad information, possibly stemming from government entities, utilities, and other offline sources.

Doubtless wisely seeing the looming threat of lost reputation and customers, Sterling Sky concluded that, for the sake of accuracy, ongoing management fees are a business expense you should likely plan for.

I’ll add that it’s important to remember that many citations, including Google My Business listings, are basically open-source. It’s not just a case of large data aggregators pulling in information from government records. Any member of the public, including competitors and spammers, can suggest inaccurate edits to your live listings, and the brands you market need to know when this happens so that you can take action to maximize damage control.

Will you take a DIY, one-and-done, or always-on approach to your listings?

I was recently at a virtual conference at which reps from two citation services companies agreed that no one seems to question that multi-location businesses need help controlling their listings because manual management just doesn’t scale. Instead, questions about value tend to arise for smaller brands with just one or two physical locations. Should these local business types be paying for help with location data distribution and management?

My heart is always with the independent local SMB, so I’ve seriously pondered this question for the past several years and this is what I’ve concluded:

• I do consider it quite possible to build citations manually  but managing them is another story. If 31-40 citations is the sweet spot found in the Uberall study to see maximum ROI, that’s going to involve substantial work just in terms of submitting data and keeping track of where you submitted it. And then you’re left with a big spreadsheet of platforms you’ll have to return to any time something changes at the business or you need to refresh content for seasonal purchase, or for the never-ending work of review management.

• I don’t consider citations to be one-and-done. The COVID-19 pandemic proved the exact opposite, with nearly every local business in my town having to adjust their hours of operation, rapidly distribute information about changed conditions, and post temporary or permanent closures. The person with the manual spreadsheet was in a real fix in this scenario and the person who paid for a one-off citation building service found that it wasn’t truly one-and-done and that they’d have to pay the provider again to update their listings. Meanwhile, a business with an always-on product like Moz Local was able to take a couple of minutes one morning to edit their record in one place to have these changes distributed everywhere.

• I can’t overlook the review aspects of citation management that make a central dashboard for management so valuable. I’ve seen it questioned, even in the midst of the life-altering pandemic, that small business data changes too infrequently to warrant an annual subscription to location data distribution software, but I’ve never seen a marketer promote a hands-off approach to reviews. They come in constantly and require immediate responses, day-in-day-out. If your software bundles location data and review management into a dashboard, your life as an SMB owner or marketer will be so much easier.

Given these three factors, my advice for SMBs would be two-fold:

1. Whenever possible, consider citation management a necessary business expense. Given the actual data we’ve looked at today and the wisdom of putting customer service at the center of your marketing plan, this is an investment you should make if you can afford to.

2. If you just can’t budget for an on-going subscription right now and have to handle your local business listings manually, block out the time on your calendar to build your Google My Business listing and citations on, perhaps, the top 10 directories that rank for your brand name and your core business categories. Keep track of them in a spreadsheet and build into your daily calendar a check across these platforms for new reviews, and a weekly check across your listings for accuracy. Invest your time this way until you can invest in wider distribution and the ease of single-dashboard management. Be cautious about one-and-done offers, because, as we’ve seen in multiple studies today and in real life, changes in society, business data, and incoming reviews make a myth of the idea of set-and-forget listings.

There is a right path for you, one that ensures you are meeting customers’ expectations for accuracy and building visibility commensurate with your marketing budget, and I hope the studies we’ve looked at today will help you make an informed choice that will work for you in the new year.

Why SEOs Need to Invest More in Long-Form Content (and How to Do It)

Long-form content can often be overshadowed by other forms of execution that may be “shinier” or more visually engaging. We see it all the time in blog posts, case studies, conference decks, and on Twitter: the big, flashy content is often what our attention is drawn towards. Of course, with the right expertise and resources, you can do both. But it’s hard for many of us to execute at this level over and over again.

The truth is that the value of long-form content shouldn’t be overlooked because it can do so many things for a brand:

• Drive traffic

• Build authority and credibility

• Add value to a website as a whole

• Generate links and brand awareness

The final point is one that was recently reinforced in our survey, which asked digital marketers what they felt the best form of execution was for a link building campaign:

When it comes to the execution of your idea, which of the following do you find to be the most effective in generating links?

These results were a little surprising because, as mentioned, it’s usually the larger, more visually appealing content pieces that generate attention. Clearly there is much more to long-form content than meets the eye.

Let’s take a deeper look at this method of link building, why it works well, and how to execute it successfully.

Why long-form content works well

There are many reasons why long-form content can work well for a business, and brands rarely take advantage of all of them. We can often get so caught up with writing the actual content, that we forget about the related work we need to do, and lose sight of the benefits.

Let’s look at some of the reasons why long-form content can work so well, along with how we can get the most from it.

It’s copy-rich, and easy for Google to crawl and understand

Long-form, written content is very easy for Google and other search engines to understand. This can be a stark contrast to more complex content such as data visualizations or interactive infographics. Whilst these executions can indeed look beautiful, they present an issue when it comes to Google understanding your content. This is because many of the assets that power these kinds of content pieces are things such as images, data files and JavaScript. Google is able to crawl and index the content, but interpreting it as a human would is more challenging for them.

This can have an impact on two areas:

1. The potential for interactive or visual-led content to rank well in organic search results. If Google can’t understand the context of a page, it’s much harder (but not impossible) for it to reach it’s ranking potential.

2. Value to your website as a whole is reduced because you’re adding pages that Google may not be able to fully understand.

If we contrast this with long-form, copy-led content, which is far easier to understand, we can see how it can add a lot more value from an organic search perspective.

You can target a range of keywords and generate organic traffic

Along with its crawlability, long-form content allows you to target a range of keywords and topics. This means that it’s possible to get your content ranking and generate traffic for a long time to come. Whilst SEO isn’t as simple as it used to be, and you can’t just drop keywords into content and expect to rank, keyword research is still very much alive and well and needs to be incorporated into the writing process and buyer’s journey.

Unlike short-form content, long-form content can target keywords across an entire topic, expanding your ranking potential and audience. You can incorporate several headings and sections to do this.

With Google rolling out changes that help users jump directly to the section of a page that helps them the most, along with their steps forward in understanding specific passages of a page, it’s possible to cover a range of topics within a long-form piece of content in order to generate traffic.

A search like this:

Can lead to a specific part of the article:

Long-form content is great for doing this kind of deep dive into a topic and, fortunately, the chances of small details like this being surfaced by Google are increasing, meaning that the potential for organic traffic is increasing.

Long-form content can attract links and become reference material

The other, often overlooked, advantage of long-form content ranking well is that it can attract more links from third-party websites. This is because writers, bloggers, and journalists will often go searching for sources to reference in the content they’re writing and — if your content ranks well — it may be the one they choose.

This is particularly true if your content includes data points or statistics that can then be referenced by other writers. For example, this huge piece of content from HubSpot on marketing statistics has attracted over 10,000 links to the page. It ranks extremely well for a bunch of keywords that someone may use when looking to reference data or statistics, which will have played a huge part in the growth of links.

Not only does this mean that your brand gets more exposure to a wider audience, but the links generated can also help your organic rankings — because links are still an important part of SEO.

Long-form content can be evergreen and regularly updated

If you plan it effectively and the topic is evergreen, long-form content is often very easy to update and release over and over again. For example, if you run a study on a key topic in your industry in 2021, it’s often perfectly relevant to update that content again in 2022 with new study information or data. This isn’t always as easy when it comes to production of visual content or video content, where the production resources can be more intensive and expensive to change.

A great example of this is Rover, who will update this list of the top 100 dog names each year:

They’ve updated this content every year for the last few years, meaning that every time they do this, they have another chance to promote it and drive more traffic to the page. This also helps establish them as an authority on the topic, because users will become more and more familiar with them providing this information each year.

Also, note the URL that Rover has chosen:

There’s no date in it, meaning that when the time comes to update the data for 2021, they can simply update the existing page without needing to create a new one. This consolidates all of the historical social shares, links, and existing organic search rankings into a single page, making it easier for it to build strength over time.

Long-form content can contain mini stories and several angles

If you’re working at a brand or agency that has an in-house digital PR team, they’ll love you for this one.

A long-form piece of content allows you to spin out multiple angles and stories that may be used for promotional purposes. Again, Rover are a great example of this because within this single content piece, there are a range of angles, here is one about video games and their influence on pet names:

In the same piece is another angle which focuses on pet names inspired by celebrities:

From a PR perspective, this layout means you have multiple ways to promote a single piece of content. This not only gives you more websites to target with your outreach, but it de-risks the content, because if one angle fails, you have more to use to try and get links and coverage instead.

How to execute long-form content

Now that we’ve looked at some of the reasons why long-form content can help your brand, let’s look at some of the key points to remember if you or your team are going to create such content.

Agree on the core topics you want to write about

Start with the basics: what do you want to write about? It can be easy to go off-piste very quickly whilst brainstorming, and while making connections between ideas isn’t a bad thing, you need to be able to focus on topics that follow this structure:

1. What do you have the credibility to talk about?

What is the collective knowledge, wisdom, and experience of your company? What are the topics that you can credibly talk about that no one else — or very few others — can? The thing to avoid here is coming up with topics that appear to sit too far away from what your brand does. If someone looks at your topic and asks “why are they talking about that?”, then you may have a problem.

2. What topics will resonate with your audience?

Think about the topics that your audience wants to read and learn about. What problems or challenges do they have that you can help educate them on? Put yourself in their shoes and ask what they’d expect to read when they visit your website.

3. What do you want to be known for?

Finally, what topics does your brand want to be known for? This is an important question because you may well have topics that resonate with your audience and that you’re credible to write about, but do you want to? This is especially important if your company is trying to change the perception of itself, or perhaps expand into new areas or product lines.

What’s the right execution?

It could well be that long-form content isn’t the best way to execute your idea. The worst thing you can do is start the process by saying “I want to produce a 5,000-word article” or “I want to produce a video”, because you’ll shoehorn your idea into this format, even if it’s not the best way to communicate it.

A good way to figure out if long-form content is the best way to execute your idea is to start planning the structure of the piece. You’ll quickly get an idea of what you want to say, and if it quickly grows into lots of different points and angles that fit within the core topic, long-form content may well be the way forward.

Alongside this, put yourself in the shoes of the audience again and ask if long-form content is what they’d expect to find if they looked for information on this topic. Or would they be expecting something much shorter and succinct? Is it even a topic that requires lots of detailed copy?

See what’s already out there

Building on the previous point, you should be sure to assess what is already out there, in particular what Google is showing on page one of its results. Google is very good at understanding what their users are looking for and will craft their search results (particularly page one) to meet their expectations.

During the course of your research, note what Google is showing on page one, it could be a mix of e-commerce results, short content, long content, videos, research papers, etc. Ask yourself if long-form content is likely to fit within what’s already there.

You can also do this really quickly using a tool like Thruuu, which can take a keyword and tell you a bunch of things about page one of search results, including things such as:

Whilst you may not want to match all of these, it gives you a great insight into the types of pages that Google is already ranking for this keyword.

In addition, you should also assess whether you feel that you can produce a piece of content that’s a step above what’s already out there. If you look at what already exists and feel that the job has been done pretty well already, you may be better off focusing on a different area or looking for ways to expand the topic to add more value.

Assess your resources

Wanting to do this type of content is all well and good, but can you actually produce it? Do you have skilled copywriters, editors, and designers on your team who can take your idea and bring it to life? Can you do any of this yourself?

If not, it’s not the end of the world, but you may have to look externally and engage with freelance specialists to help you instead. The important thing is to be honest about what you and your team are capable of doing. If you need a specialist, don’t be afraid to go and find one, because the final product will be much better for it.

In summary

To wrap up, the value of long-form content is clear: it can add value to your brand in a number of ways, some of which are not immediately obvious, but are hopefully clearer to you now. These insights should enable you to take advantage of them and improve your outputs.

Ultimately, it’s always about the quality of the idea and the way you execute. An amazing execution is unlikely to save a bad idea, while a great idea is unlikely to get the attention it deserves if it’s executed badly. Focus on these two areas and everything else will be much easier.

Sarah's Goodbye

Hello, Moz friends…I’m signing off on the blog after a wonderfully wild, 14-year ride at Moz. It’s time for me to move on and make space for new voices, new leaders. I am so grateful for the way you have cheered — and challenged — me and Moz over the years. Your lively engagement helped us become the company we are today.

I’m going to take the winter off to reflect, rest, and cherish my loved ones. I don’t know what the future holds for me, but I know it will be a grand adventure.

I feel good knowing that I’m leaving Moz, and all of you, in good hands. It’s just the beginning of an exciting new chapter — if you haven’t seen our latest Performance Metrics and True Competitor releases, you should check them out — you’re in for a real SEO treat.

I will keep rooting for all of you, and of course for Moz. I wish you joy, courage, success, and love on your journeys. Thank you for the opportunity of a lifetime to learn and grow alongside you.

Best Wishes,

Sarah

How to Invest in SEO

Testing out a new paid marketing channel is relatively easy. You can assign someone in-house, allocate some test budget, and pretty quickly quantify the return on your investment.

Testing out SEO can be quite a bit trickier:

• Results often take time (more than six months)

• If results do materialize, they’re often hard to quantify or attribute to any one project

• It’s more than just a financial investment — you'll usually need product resources as well

There are exceptions but most companies can’t say: "let's spend $10K on SEO over the next few months and see if there's potential there". You have to take a leap of faith, and weighing that leap of faith against very quantifiable, much more immediate projects isn't always easy.

I've seen this issue firsthand, first as a consultant at Distilled, then working in-house on SEO at Etsy, SeatGeek, and now Course Hero. So, here's my attempt at a framework for investing in SEO:

1. Should you invest in SEO in the first place?

2. How much should you invest in SEO?

3. How should you structure your SEO investment?

4. How should you measure your SEO investment?

This post will not cover what SEO work is actually worthwhile, or how to determine your SEO strategy, or how to hire the right SEO, or what tools to use, etc. Those are all aspects of investing in SEO that very much depend on your unique context. That said, hopefully this framework will help you navigate those questions.

Should you invest in SEO in the first place?

The most relevant question here is, how big is the addressable search market? A company like Slack will have a relatively small addressable search market (there aren't that many searches that Slack really wants to rank for), whereas a company like Expedia has an enormous addressable search market (flights from Vancouver to Toronto or Montreal or Calgary, hotels with free breakfast in Vancouver, cheap motels in Vancouver, car rentals in Vancouver, etc.).

Slack could always go all-in on content marketing and try ranking for top-of-funnel queries (anything related to communication, for example), but the intent of this traffic will usually be low.

All companies have the option of targeting a large range of top-of-funnel queries. For example, Away could write about travel tips, Warby Parker could write about eye health, Workday could write about hiring, etc. However, this traffic isn’t usually very transactional and therefore lower value (though not worthless).

The easiest way to estimate the size of your addressable search market is to look at competitors through a tool like Moz, SEMrush or SimilarWeb. To use an example, if I were at Tuft & Needle, I'd do something like this:

1. Look at organic search competitors within Moz’s True Competitor tool

2. Estimate the non-branded search traffic of those competitors with Similarweb or SEMrush

Non-branded SEO visits/year (millions)

Non-branded visits are visits that don't include the brand name (e.g. Casper). For instance, Casper receives 8.5 million visits per year from branded queries, but these don’t tell you much about your own search opportunity (though could be interesting from a brand perspective).

3. Assign a value to these visits by either using internal metrics (how much is a search visit worth to you?) or by considering the Adwords cost of this traffic via a tool like SEMrush:

Using the largest competitor from the competitive set above, sleepfoundation.org, we can see that if you were to purchase their monthly SEO traffic via search ads, you’d need to pay an estimated $10.9 million per month or $2.14 per visit ($10.9/5.1).

Therefore, by looking at these five competitors, we can conclude that:

• There are roughly 100 million search visits per year that are likely somewhat relevant to Tuft & Needle (the sum of search traffic to the five competitors).

• The value for each visit could be somewhere around $2.14

• The total value of search traffic available to Tuft & Needle could be somewhere around $214 million per year (100 million * $2.14)

The above exercise should help you decide:

1. Is SEO worth investing into in the first place? I’m certainly biased, but the answer to this will almost always be “yes”. It’s very unlikely that the right SEO investment won’t be ROI positive for most sites. I’d even posit that very few sites have ever over-invested in the right SEO to the point that their SEO investment dipped into ROI negative territory.

2. How should we prioritize our SEO investment relative to other opportunities?

3. How large should our SEO investment be?

Even if you’re confident the investment will be ROI positive, investing in SEO might still not make sense if:

• You can't afford to wait for the pay off (often over six months)

• You can't find the right SEO talent

• You have other, more compelling opportunities

• You can’t provide the necessary resources to SEO (more on this later)

How much should you invest in SEO?

Let’s dig into this a bit and stick with the same example. If Tuft & Needle believes:

• The actual search market is only 25% as large as what the above exercise suggests (about $50 million per year instead of $200 million per year)

• They can capture 5% of that market with the right SEO investment

• They need to maintain that investment to maintain their market share

They could justify spending $2.5 million per year on SEO (5% of $50 million). I don't know of many companies investing that amount into SEO — at $150,000 per person, that would be a 16-person SEO team. Therefore, I hope if nothing else, this exercise helps to illustrate how high the ceiling can be for even a non-SEO-centric company like Tuft & Needle.

But the more exciting calculations involve SEO-centric companies like Thumbtack, Etsy, Pinterest, SeatGeek, Expedia, etc. For companies like this, which operate in enormous search universes, it's almost impossible to invest too much into SEO. Let's do some thought exercises.

eBay's ceiling

According to SimilarWeb, SEO accounts for 22% of eBay's total site traffic. Let's say that it only accounts for half as much revenue since those visits are likely less valuable than direct or paid search visits. Based on their 2020 financials, that 11% (half of 22%) would amount to $280 million in net income per year (income not revenue):

Let's conservatively say that the right SEO investment can increase their search income by 5%, that would represent an impact of 5% multiplied by $280 million, or $14 million per year. How many SEOs and engineers could you hire for that amount?

Here's another thought: if eBay commissioned an SEO audit every single month, and each audit only produced one insight worth implementing, and that one insight increased their SEO income by only 0.1%, they could justify a price of $280,000 per audit ($3.3 million per year). Or forgetting about audits for a moment, do you think a team of SEOs ($3.3 mil can buy a lot of headcount) could generate one insight worth 0.1% in lift every month?

Here’s another example: eBay spent over $2.5 billion on sales and marketing in 2020:

And here is the rough breakdown of their traffic according to SimilarWeb:

Traffic/channel to eBay.com according to SimilarWeb

How much of that $2.5 billion should be spent on SEO? We can use our earlier estimate of SEO's 22% traffic share representing an 11% income share to guide this. Should SEO get 11% of eBay's marketing budget to match its share of income? 5%? 2%? At 1% that would represent an investment of $25 million per year.

What could you do with a $25 million per year investment into SEO?

• Hire a 50-person SEO team of engineers, analysts, and SEO experts at $200,000 per year each ($10 million)

• Hire five agencies on retainer at $50,000 per month each ($3 million)

• Hire a 50-person team of strong content writers at $100,000 per year each ($5 million)

• Spend $2 million a year on tooling

• Admire the remaining $5 million per year

Okay, last one! Here are some recent case studies from SearchPilot outlining the impact of relatively small SEO projects:

• Reprioritizing of content on the page = 16% lift

• Adding internal links = 7% lift

• Bringing content out of tabs = 12% lift

• Adding month and year to title tags = 5% lift

• Adding review schema markup = 20% lift

Let’s say:

• Those projects only affect 20% of the site (a lift of 10% would actually be a sitewide lift of 10% * 20%)

• 50% of your SEO work produces a lift

• The average lift is 5%

• You ship two projects per month

Those are pretty conservative assumptions, and yet would produce a sitewide SEO lift of 12% per year or about $34 million in income per year for eBay. The kicker to all of this is that the majority of SEO projects actually pay dividends for many years to come, so a 5% sitewide lift might be 5% per year for 3+ years.

Now to be clear, the quality of your SEO investment is much more important than the size of it. If you hire a terrible agency for $50,000 per month, then devote some engineers to shipping every single one of their recommendations, you might be "investing in SEO", but you certainly won't see the returns you're hoping for. In fact, you'll likely torpedo future SEO investments as the company gradually starts to look at SEO as a whole with skepticism.

Furthermore, a $25 million per year investment into SEO is overkill for all but a very small set of companies. In fact, I doubt there’s a single company in the world that invests more than $10 million per year in SEO (though some should). However, the above exercises are really to drive home two points:

• Even for a non-SEO-centric company (Tuft & Needle), the point at which their SEO investment turns ROI negative is likely quite far away.

• For an SEO-centric company (eBay), it’s almost impossible to over-invest in good SEO, one incremental insight is just too valuable to them.

How should you structure your SEO investment?

Now for the real question. By now you've hopefully bought into the case for investing in SEO, and are somewhat convinced by the previous exercises that you should probably do more than just commission a one-time SEO audit. But how do you actually structure your SEO investment?

The TL;DR is:

• Hire a very strong SEO (or team of SEOs if budgets permit)

• Provide them with the resources necessary to execute the roadmap they lay out

It really is that simple in theory, but both parts can often be hard in practice.

Hiring a very strong SEO

There is no surer way to sabotage an SEO program than to have the wrong person leading it. At minimum you'll be devoting resources to projects that don't drive much incremental traffic. At worst you'll give SEO a bad name within the rest of the organization and make it that much harder to invest in going forward. You'll end up with people who's framework for SEO is something along the lines of "I know SEO is important but I don't think anyone really knows how to influence rankings all that much". Good luck getting buy-in from those people.

So what should you look for? In a nutshell, you'll likely want a small baseline of SEO experience and a solid helping of:

• Data savviness

• Intelligence

• Web development knowledge

• Communication ability

I would much rather hire someone with one year of SEO experience and a healthy dose of the above attributes than someone with 10 years of SEO experience but little of the above.

In fact, I think many companies are better off turning someone with the above attributes into an SEO than trying to find an external SEO who meets those requirements. It is just so difficult to hire good SEO talent and it's not uncommon for roles to go unfilled for 1-2 years.

In response to the difficulty of hiring good SEOs, one route I've seen companies take is having an engineering or product manager learn SEO and take it over, this has a few benefits:

• They are sometimes technical enough to ship things themselves if necessary

• They can effectively communicate with engineers and already have relationships with them

• They have already been hired so are presumably a good fit for the non-SEO dimensions of the job (conscientiousness, work ethic, cultural fit etc.)

• Their product or engineering instincts will usually be very applicable to SEO

Plus the primary benefit being: it might actually be faster to have someone internal learn SEO than to find the right external SEO candidate.

Another approach to finding SEO talent if you yourself don’t have an SEO background would be to use a reputable SEO person in the interview process as a contractor.

Providing them with the necessary resources

There are many different types of resources your SEO program might depend on:

• Budget for tooling, working with an agency, hiring contractors etc.

• Writers for producing content

• Analysts for assessing the impact of SEO projects and monitoring the health of SEO metrics

• Designers for helping with any type of user facing change

• Product managers for managing SEO related product work

• Engineers for shipping product dependent SEO work

Some companies will need all of the above to really reach their SEO potential while others might only need one, you’ll need to work with your SEO team to figure out your unique resourcing needs. For reference though, the SEO opportunity for a company like Tuft & Needle will usually be very content oriented (writing articles to target top of funnel queries) whereas the opportunity for a company like Etsy will usually be very engineering dependent (never ending list of technical SEO opportunities). For the purpose of this discussion, we’ll focus on engineering resources but much of this can be applied to any type of SEO resource.

The typical approach is to not earmark/dedicate engineering time to SEO. In theory this makes sense, you'll consider SEO projects against all other engineering dependent projects and weigh them against each other when allocating your scarcest resource, engineering time. In practice what happens is a very haphazard investment in SEO. Here's a common way this plays out:

1. You decide to invest in SEO so you open an SEO role, you're able to fill it in 3 months

2. The SEO gets onboarded then does a site audit to generate an SEO roadmap, let’s say say this takes 2 months

3. The SEO is able to immediately pitch a couple projects from their roadmap (no delays waiting for quarterly planning to start or anything)

4. Two SEO projects are committed to in the upcoming quarter, work starts on them in a month and they take another month to actually ship

5. It takes another couple months to see results but both projects end up having a positive impact

The above, very optimistic, timeline is already 9 months long before you see any impact from investing in SEO and assumes:

• You fill the SEO role very quickly

• SEO projects are committed to immediately

• The initial SEO projects produce a positive impact

What if this quarter was particularly busy with other initiatives and you couldn't commit to SEO? Or the projects had made an impact but it was difficult to quantify? At minimum the whole timeline would have been elongated, at worst it would be harder to secure engineering resources going forward.

The alternative is dedicated engineers. You can have an SEO PM, you can have your own SEO department, you can have the SEO folks live on the product side or the marketing side etc. - all of those permutations can work. The important piece is that you have dedicated engineers to quickly and consistently invest into SEO.

As mentioned above, you can swap out “dedicated engineer” for “dedicated analyst” or “dedicated writer” and much of what was said still applies: figure out what resourcing your SEO strategy will require and make a long term commitment to provide those resources.

How should you measure your SEO investment?

SEO takes time. One of the most important requirements for SEO success is having appropriate expectations. You probably won't see results for 6+ months and some of those results will not be easy to quantify. BUT this should not be interpreted as a license for SEOs to never demonstrate their impact. It might take time but it shouldn't take over a year to start seeing some results and sure not all SEO projects will be quantifiable but many of them should be, especially early on when the credibility of your SEO efforts is most vulnerable.

The main decision you have here is whether to measure SEO success on a project by project basis or a site-wide basis. If you’re expecting >50% growth from SEO efforts then you can just look at overall SEO driven revenue to measure success because this level of growth should cut through any noise. Proxy metrics such as rankings or traffic are helpful to keep tabs on but you'll ultimately want to measure SEO driven revenue to understand the real impact of your SEO work. Acquiring irrelevant rankings or low intent traffic won't do much for your business.

For a site with a more established SEO traffic profile though, success might be a 20% lift in SEO traffic, or even less. The problem with using overall SEO driven revenue to evaluate this type of situation is that so many factors influence your SEO driven revenue that are outside the control of your SEO team:

• Competitive trends (SEO is zero sum, a new competitor will inevitably eat away at some of your traffic)

• Business trajectory generally (SEO isn't immune to a general decline in your business)

• Google changes (algorithm changes, new SERP features, increased ad prominence etc.)

• Search behavior changes (maybe the keywords you rank for are simply less popular now)

• etc.

Therefore, a 20% lift can easily get lost in the noise of all the above. For example, going from 40% YoY growth to 30% YoY growth might be a great success if the alternative was 10% YoY growth without SEO investment. The problem is knowing what growth would've been absent from your SEO investment. In such a situation, you'll want to lean more on the individual wins your SEO team is delivering rather than on overall traffic numbers. There are many ways to quantify individual SEO projects but in general, I’d recommend pairing your SEO team with some analytics support to measure individual projects and running SEO A/B tests when possible.

Even if you take the project by project approach, I wouldn’t ignore overall traffic numbers, I would just take them with a grain of salt given how much is outside of the SEO team’s control. The reason growth is down this month might be attributable to inaction on the part of your SEO team but it could just as easily be due to some of the factors listed above.

One approach you can take to contextualize overall traffic/revenue numbers is to compare your SEO growth rate to your "branded growth rate" to estimate your incremental SEO growth rate. Branded growth rate in this case would usually include any direct visits and any homepage visits (though you can include other brand heavy visits here, visits to your jobs page, about page etc.). By comparing your branded growth to your SEO growth, you can somewhat control for the non-SEO specific factors that might affect both:

• A new competitor should hurt both branded and SEO traffic

• A decline in the business or the quality of your inventory or the usability of your site should hurt both branded and SEO traffic

• A decline in demand for what you're selling should hurt both branded and SEO traffic

To recap:

• SEO should be held accountable to a measurable impact

• You should be patient (waiting >6 months to see progress is reasonable) but not too patient (waiting >1 year for any pay off is likely too long)

• If the expectation is that the impact will be large enough (>50%) to clearly cut through any variance in the data, then you can just look at overall SEO numbers to gauge success.

• If the expectation is that the impact might get lost in the variance of overall SEO numbers, I would focus more on the impact of individual SEO projects while still keeping a close eye on overall SEO numbers.

Conclusion

In summary, why investing in SEO can be hard:

• Results take a while

• Many results are unquantifiable (a 2% site-wide lift can be meaningful but also easily lost in the noise of traffic variance)

• The combination of the previous two points makes it hard to discern good SEO work from bad SEO work. Sure after a year of not seeing any results you might realize that the SEO direction you're on isn't working out but you've lost a year of potential SEO growth in the meantime.

• It usually requires your scarcest resource, engineering time

Or to put all of this another way, here's how not to invest in SEO:

• Hire someone with a ton of great SEO experience who doesn't seem that strong otherwise

• Do not allocate resourcing to SEO, put the onus entirely on your new SEO person to secure engineers or analysts or writers

• Expect the growth rate of overall SEO traffic or revenue to be meaningfully different within a few months of this person starting

Daily SEO Fix: SEO Reporting Basics

A crucial aspect of improving your SEO performance is reporting. By reporting on what you’ve done, you can analyze the data you’ve collected, and learn from it. 

In this Daily Fix series, we’ll show you how to create clear, insightful reports that you can easily share with relevant stakeholders. These reports cover all of the key elements of SEO, and can be customized to suit your needs. 

If you’d like further assistance with creating custom reports, you can book a one-on-one walkthrough with a member of our Onboarding Team. We’ll guide you through how to create a personalized report that looks exactly like you want it to.

Book a walkthrough

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How do I set up a custom report?

Custom reports allow you to effectively communicate the SEO work you’ve been doing to clients, colleagues, or other stakeholders on a consistent basis.

In this Daily Fix video, Kerry will show you how to set one up when tracking your site in Moz Pro.

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Reporting on rankings changes monthly

Keeping tabs on how your rankings are changing month on month gives you a better insight into both short and long-term SEO performance. If your performance is changing, this type of report can give you an insight into why that might be.

Maddie shows you how you can create a custom rankings analysis report to suit your needs.

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Report branding/labelling your report

Branding a report helps to give it a polished, professional look that will impress your client. Moz Pro gives you the option of easily including your very own logo in your custom report.

In this video, Emilie guides you through adding some of the finishing touches to your report.

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Report links adding colleague as a user

When working on SEO as part of a team, it can be useful to share access to reports with your colleagues. You can manage who has access to your custom reports with Moz Pro by adding them as an additional user in your account.

In this Daily Fix, Jo goes through the steps you need to take to add your colleagues.

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General question about SEO reporting

In the final video, Varad discusses exporting data from Moz Pro as a PDF or CSV file. If you need to quickly extract data from specific sections of your campaign, you can do this by following this method. You can also create a single custom report that includes all of the data you want to include.

Why Search Agencies Should Embrace the Adjacency of Email Marketing [Updated 2021]

I originally made this case back in January 2018, and it’s hard to believe that’s almost four years ago now. So much has happened since: the evolution of website platforms like Squarespace, Shopify, and Square/Weebly into full-blown digital operations hubs, the start of serious antitrust proceedings against Google and Facebook, and of course, a global pandemic. 

But if anything, the case for historically search-oriented agencies to add or expand their email marketing offerings has only strengthened. Email remains an under-appreciated and under-addressed channel among digital agencies of all stripes, even as “social media management” seems to have become an almost table-stakes-level offering.

Some of that prioritization of social media is understandable — social remains very much in-demand among small businesses. And yet, visibility and engagement for organic social media remains flat on Facebook and Twitter, and has started to decline on Instagram.

Meanwhile, email open and engagement rates have actually surged across many industries in the COVID era, and not just in the earliest days of the pandemic.

As the saying goes, there’s no time like the present to start an email offering. I hope I’ll convince you that email should be a natural and profitable complement to SEO, SEM, and SMM. And if you’re a local business reading this post, I hope many of these points convince you to take a look at email marketing yourselves!

Making the case for email

High ROI

With a return on investment (ROI) of 36:1, marketers consistently rate email as the top-performing channel. That’s down from 42:1 in 2019, but is directionally in the same ballpark. And the profitability of email remains particularly truefor B2B marketers. Email newsletters rate as the #1 channel to nurture leads. Despite the supposed unpopularity of email among millennials, it remains far and away the most-preferred channel by which to receive communication from a business — even for Millennials and Gen Z.

Just plain cheap

The fact that email’s so cheap helps the denominator of that 36:1 stat a bunch. MailerLite and SendinBlue offer free plans, Mailchimp offers a more limited free plan, and many other providers offer small plans under $10 per month depending on your number of subscribers. Comprehensive tools like Campaigner have starter plans beginning around $30, along with free one-month trials. 

It’s also cheap in terms of time cost. Unlike social media, where daily or even hourly presence performs best, email allows you to duck in and duck out as you have time.

And as I said in the intro, average email open rates far exceed social media reach on most platforms. And even if they don’t open, one-third of people report purchasing based on an email they received from a brand(!). 

As a result of Apple’s iOS15 privacy features, open rates are likely heading to the great analytics dashboard in the sky, but the word-of-mouth power of email will remain long after its trackability has eroded. Search provides better purchase intent, but the top-of-mind awareness and referral potential from email is unmatched.

Makes other channels more effective

Gathering customer email addresses is essential for other critical forms of local business marketing already — you need an email address to ask for a review, build lookalike audiences, and make customer intelligencesolutions or predictive analytics most effective.

The impending (though delayed) death of the third-party cookie means first-party opt-in emails will increase dramatically in value.

Actually offering something of value, whether that’s a discount code, loyalty program, whitepaper, or newsletter subscription, increases the odds of earning that email address for all of those purposes.

Last best option?

Frankly, the number of organic digital channels available to small businesses is shrinking.With each passing year, social media becomes more pay-to-play, and Google’s expansion of its Local Service Ad program is now nationwide in the United States and continues to add new verticals seemingly every quarter. Now is the time to start building an email program as these monetization pressures intensify.

Why agencies should offer email

Your customers know it works.

Local businesses might be more aware of email’s potency than some of the agencies that are serving them. Email consistently rates among the top three marketing channels in industry surveys — CampaignMonitor, TheManifest, and CallRail among others. (The CallRail study is a trove of market research for agencies, by the way.) 

At the very least, email requires barely any client education. Unlike the black box of SEO or the complexity of paid search, by and large, small businesses inherently understand email marketing. They know they should be sending emails to their customers, but many of them just aren’t doing it yet, or are doing it poorly.

It’s a concrete deliverable.

Unlike so much of the behind-the-scenes work that leads to success in SEO, clients can actually see an email campaign delivered to their inbox, as well as the results of that campaign: every major Email Service Provider tracks opens (again, less valuable post-iOS15) and clicks by default.

It leverages existing offerings.

I already mentioned some of the ways that email marketing complements other channels above. But it can tie in even more closely to an agency’s existing content offering: many of you are already developing full content calendars, or at the very least social content.

<pitch>(For those clients whom you’re helping with social media, their newsletter can be built using Tidings with no additional effort on your part.)</pitch>

Building email into your client content strategy can help their content reach a deeper audience, and possibly even a different audience.

It’s predictable.

Though you could argue that the Gmail and Apple Mail interface configurations are algorithms of a kind, generally speaking, email marketing is not subject to wild algorithmic changes or inexplicable ranking fluctuations.

And unlike Google’s unrealistic link building axiom that great content will naturally attract inbound links, great content actually does naturally attract more subscribers and more customers as they receive forwarded emails.

In fact, email newsletters are how many link creators actually discover interesting content to link to.

You can expand it over time.

Unlike SEO for local businesses, which generally includes relatively easy wins up front and gets progressively harder to deliver the same value over time, email marketing offers numerous opportunities to expand the scope of your engagement with a client.

Beyond fulfilling the emails themselves, there are plenty of other email-related services to offer, including managing and optimizing list sign-up, welcome emails and drip campaigns, A/B testing subject lines and content, and ongoing customer intelligence.

Tactical ingredients for success with email

Use a reputable Email Service Provider.

Running an email marketing program through Gmail or Outlook is an easy way to get your primary address blacklisted. You also won’t have access to open rate or click rate, nor an easy way to automate signups onto specific lists or segments.

Be consistent.

Setting expectations for your subscribers and then following through on those expectations is a particularly important practice for email newsletters, but also holds true for explicitly commercial emails and automated emails.

You should be generally consistent with the day on which you send weekly specials, appointment reminders, or service follow-ups. Consistency helps form a habit among your subscribers.

Consistency also applies to branding. It’s fine to A/B test subject lines and content types over time, but don’t shoot yourself in the foot from a brand perspective by designing every email you send from scratch. Leave that kind of advanced development to big brands with full in-house email teams.

The other reason to be consistent is that designing for email is really, really difficult — a lesson I learned the hard way last year prior to launching Tidings. Complex email clients like Microsoft Outlook use their own markup languages to render emails, and older email clients can’t interpret a lot of modern HTML or CSS declarations.

Choose a mobile-first template.

Make sure your layout renders well on phones, since that’s where most of your middle-age and younger subscribers will be opening your email. Two- or three-column layouts that force pinching and zooming on mobile devices are a no-no, and at this point, most subscribers are used to scrolling a bit to see content.

As long as your template reflects your brand accurately, the content of that layout is far more important than its design. Look no further than the simple email layouts chosen by some of the most successful companies in their respective industries, including Amazon, Kayak, and Fast Company.

Pick a layout that’s proven to work on phones and stick with it.

Include an email signup button or form prominently on your website.

It’s become a best practice to include social icons in the header and/or footer of your website. But there’s an obvious icon missing from so many sites!

An email icon should be the first one in the lineup, since it’s the channel where your audience is most likely to see your content.

Also consider using Privy or Mailmunch to embed a signup banner or popover on your website with minimal code.

The specific place of newsletters

Plenty of people way smarter than me are on the newsletter bandwagon (and joined it much earlier than I did). Moz has been sending a popular “Top 10” newsletter for years, Kick Point sends an excellent weekly synopsis, and StreetFight puts out a great daily roundup, just to name a few. As a subscriber, those companies are always top-of-mind for me as thought leaders with their fingers on the pulse of digital marketing.

But newsletters work far beyond the digital marketing industry, too.

Twitter, Facebook, and even Google have raced to build out or acquire their own newsletter platforms — partly driven by the success of Patreon and Substack among content creators.

Sam Dolnick, the man in charge of the New York Times’ digital initiatives, puts a lot of stock in newsletters as a cornerstone channel, calling them “a lo-fi way to form a deep relationship with readers.”

I love that description. I think of a newsletter as a more personalized social channel. In the ideal world it’s halfway between a 1:1 email and a broadcast on Facebook or Twitter.

Granted, a newsletter may not be right for every local business, and it’s far from the only kind of email marketing you should be doing. But it’s also one of the easiest ways to get started with email marketing, and as Sam Dolnick said, an easy-to-understand way to start building relationships with customers.

For more newsletter best practices, this ancient (1992!) article actually covers print newsletters but almost all of its advice applies equally well to digital versions!

A great option or a strategic imperative?

The graphic below is nearly five years old at this point, and despite my wildly incorrect prediction that voice search would become the dominant paradigm this year, Ads and Oneboxes have continued to eat more and more SERP real estate. And at least in terms of mobile search, the ⅓ traditional web result ratio I predicted seems to have held up pretty well.

Google and Facebook are both automating more and more ad features, and agencies simply can’t charge the margin to place paid ads that they can charge for organic work, particularly as Google and Facebook do a better and better job of optimizing low-budget campaigns. More ads, more Knowledge Panels, and more voice searches mean fewer organic winners at Google than ever before (though because overall search volume won’t decline, the winners will win bigger than ever).

Basic SEO blocking-and-tackling such as site architecture, title tags, and citation building will always be important services, but their impact for local businesses has declined overthe past decade, due to algorithmic sophistication, increased competition, and decreased organic real estate.

To grow or even maintain your client base, it’ll be critical for you as an agency to offer additional services that are just as effective and scalable as these techniques were 10-15 years ago.

As a concrete, high-margin, high-ROI deliverable, email should be a centerpiece of those additional services. And if it just doesn’t feel like something you’re ready to take on right now, Tidings is happy to handle your referrals :D!

Performance as a Ranking Factor: The State of the Web and Core Web Vitals [Part 3]

In part one of this series, we talked about how Google and the web in general were not really ready for the Page Experience Update — Google’s CrUX data covered too few websites, the vast majority of which were not hitting the required thresholds. That was why, I suggested, the update had been so delayed and watered down.

In part two, we talked about the metrics themselves — their flimsiness, their arbitrariness, their openness to manipulation. This, too, I suggested, might be holding Google back.

However, the proof is in the pudding. Are Core Web Vitals, taken individually or as a whole, correlated with rankings? If so, is that any more true than it was before the Page Experience Update? In this third and final post of this series, we’ll see what the data tells us about the relationship between Core Web Vitals metrics and organic ranking performance.

Viewer discretion advised

This is, at most, a correlation study. There are many mechanisms by which something can be correlated with rankings without having directly influenced rankings.

For example, perhaps websites that take SEO seriously rank well, and also tend to work on their loading performance. If so, loading performance and ranking would be correlated even without any direct causal link.

We’ll talk through potential implications as we go, but please, proceed with caution!

Performance of passing vs. failing URLs

To start with, I decided to look only at the URLs that had CrUX data in the first place. You may remember from part two that, at the time of the update rolling out in August this year, that was some 38.3% of URLs. This is taken from the top 20 results for 10,000 MozCast keywords, across mobile and desktop device types.

Note that these URLs are all taken from the top 20, so it’s interesting that the averages are both well above the rank of 10.5 we’d expect. This is likely because higher traffic URLs are disproportionately likely to rank well, and also disproportionately likely to have CrUX data.

We see a solid 0.39 ranking position lead here for the URLs that pass all three CWV thresholds, above those that fail at least one.

Does that mean this is a ranking factor?

On the face of it, the above data looks very promising for CWV as a ranking factor. However, it’s worth tempering our excitement a bit.

Let’s have a look at the same data but from May, before the Page Experience update rolled out:

We can notice a few things here:

• The average rank of URLs with CrUX data was generally worse in August than in May. This is to be expected, as more URLs had CrUX data by August, so it had worked its way further down the rankings.

• URLs which pass the CWV thresholds already had a ranking difference even before the update. This suggests that perhaps URLs which pass the test were already better in other ways that already counted towards rankings (for example, perhaps rankings were rewarding URLs with a good user experience).

• The difference between URLs which passed the thresholds and those which did not has grown from 0.38 in May to 0.39 in August — although this is probably very easily within the margin of error.

It’s also interesting to contrast with a performance metric which was not part of the Page Experience update: Speed Index, as reported in Lighthouse lab results.

As “passing” the three thresholds for CWV represents being in the top 36.3% of URLs by that metric, we can compare what ranking difference is associated with being in the top 36.3% for Speed Index.

We can see in this chart that Speed Index, despite not being an explicit ranking factor, has a modest improvement in average rank associated with this percentile breakdown (0.17, vs. 0.39 for passing all three CWV thresholds). This doesn’t mean that Speed Index is a ranking factor, it just means that these things can be related in more complex ways.

(If you’re a mathematics nerd like me and you’ve just noticed the weighted average rank of the two groups is not the same, that’s because there are a tiny number of URLs for which I was able to obtain CrUX data, but not lab data, due to server errors, etc.)

So did anything happen?

Actually, yes. But it’s more subtle.

The real impact was felt for URLs that failed all three tests. Although these URLs often started out ranking best of all (probably because they disproportionately represent some important, household name brands) they’ve taken a hit with the update. These URLs have had a 1.15 position ranking drop, compared to around 0.2 for URLs with CrUX data taken as a whole.

This, as I mentioned in part one, is different to what Google set out to do. Back in the original FAQs for the update in 2020, Google said:

"If a page hits the recommended targets for all three metrics, it passes the web vitals assessment… The page experience ranking impact will be the same for all pages that are in the good range for all Core Web Vitals, irrespective of their individual Core Web Vitals scores."

(emphasis mine, original source here)

For all the data reasons I covered in part one, likely they weren’t able to do this, and had to improvise a bit, instead only applying the relative penalty (or absence of a boost) for URLs that failed all metrics, rather than for URLs that failed one or more.

Wait, so all I need to do is pass one metric?

Well, no, that’s not quite the attitude. There are still lots of other reasons to want to pass all three, and more importantly, to have a generally good page experience. Google is only going to be looking for more ways to augment and ramp up these factors over time.

Also, the rest of SEO still counts. Check out the rather more pronounced difference associated with Page Authority, for example:

Good luck out there :)

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