GMB to GBP: 3 Invitations for Google to Alter Their Indifference towards SMBs

Software dashboards are supposed to feel clean and quiet, organized so that everything you need to do good work is right at hand, like this:

Seeing the rebrand of Google My Business to Google Business Profile include the news that single location businesses will no longer enjoy the dignity of a room of one’s own because nice dashboards will be the sole province of more fortunate, large enterprises, it feels like SMBs are now being told (with indifference) to manage their listings here:

In Google’s own words:

“Moving forward, we recommend small businesses manage their profiles directly on Search or Maps. To keep things simple, ‘Google My Business’ is being renamed ‘Google Business Profile.’...The existing Google My Business web experience will transition to primarily support larger businesses with multiple locations, and will be renamed ‘Business Profile Manager.’”

To wit, big businesses will be granted some version of the former Google My Business dashboard, with its helpful navigation and dedicated work areas, while SMBs must figure out what has changed and try to manage their most visible local business listings directly in the messy SERPs, amid an astounding clutter of ads, organic results, SERP features, carousels, images, video results, and so on.

Perhaps it’s no big deal and local businesses desiring the organization of a dedicated listings management dashboard can rely on the Moz Locals of the marketplace. Or perhaps it’s a turning point.

Maybe now is a critical moment in Google’s history to invite them to rethink this troubling pattern their powerful company has fallen into since they stepped into the lives of small business owners 16 years ago, and began to dominate so much of their fate. The highlighted words in the above quote are an emphatic statement of alignment with larger — often elite — brands instead of with the diverse small businesses, which are the very meaning of localism.

Personally, I see our socioeconomics deeply wounded by the pattern of giving preferential treatment to whatever is largest and treating whatever is smallest with chronic indifference, and I believe Google has the clout to change this dynamic within their own, very substantial sphere — if they choose to. Today, when champions of positive change are the most important people in any room, please join me in sending three invitations to Google from the local business neighborhood, in hopes of an RSVP.

1) Could Google stop hiding 59% of websites in local packs?

My friend and Moz’s marketing scientist, Dr. Peter J. Meyers, recently shared some numbers with me that deserve to be seen. Running 10,000 keywords through MozCast, half of which were specifically localized to cities, Google returned 3,322 local packs on desktop, meaning that 33% of the SERPs queried featured these types of results. Of these packs, 59% featured zero links to local business websites, in this fashion:

This was not a case of website links missing because no websites existed — packs in which some of the entries had website links and others didn’t (because no URL had been added) were 41% of the total number. Rather, these website-less packs were of the kind that have been dubbed “local teasers”, and a variety of other names over the years.

Dr. Pete ran the test twice, and on the second trial, website-less packs made up 58% of the total. In other words, nearly 6/10 of Google’s local SERPs intentionally hide URLs. This is not a force of nature, or a scientific principle — it’s a decision Google is making to obscure local businesses’ home base, where they work so hard to offer a customer experience they directly control.

Why am I inviting Google to change this? Granted, the chief charm of local business listings is that they can be just what customers need for very quick information. But the pandemic has made local business websites centers of help, commerce, and communication like never before, and these companies deserve a search engine that respects the investments they are making in shopping carts, booking systems, live chat, text and audio-visual media, and other brand-controlled assets.

Google’s vision is to be, as Tidings founder David Mihm says, “the transaction layer of the Internet”, but I invite them not to support that goal by hiding the transactional capabilities offered by the small brands that make up Google’s index. It’s not right or fair to do so.

Something Google can do to signal that they aren’t disrespecting single location businesses is to return websites links to all local packs whenever a business has uploaded a URL. This would show that Google understands that small business owners often feel powerless having a giant search engine own so much of the display of their information and reputation. Google can toss the ball back to Main Street so that more customers end up on a platform where the business controls the customer experience in their own, unique style.

2) Could Google align with straight talk, not scare tactics, for a healthier shared workspace?

As recently demonstrated in a study by Sterling Sky, Google’s local product has become a dominant driver of local business leads. Short of going completely off the Google grid, local business owners are forced to make Google’s place their own in order to be found by customers, and everyone deserves to have a shared workspace where they’re treated with dignity.

Unfortunately, Google chose to kick off the rebranding of Google My Business as Google Business Profile by subjecting local business owners to emails and CTAs developed to frighten them into believing that anti-trust regulations of Google’s monopoly will hurt small businesses.

The local SEO community tended to take it like this:

As reported by Near Media’s Mike Blumenthal, these scare tactics may not be new, but they are certainly antisocial. Having witnessed Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen explain how causing society anger, distress, and fear monetarily benefits publishers, all technology brands of good conscience should be pledging to become allies to a healthy and informed society instead of one that is being harmed with calculated misinformation.

As a Californian, I take Google’s attempt to cause fear personally, having recently lived through third party food delivery and rideshare corporations pouring a record-breaking $200+ million dollars into Proposition 22 in order to deny a living wage and basic protections to a group of drivers who are so poor that they are often living in their cars and eating part of the food they are meant to deliver. Prop 22 was recently ruled unconstitutional, and many voters and drivers now regret that they were manipulated into voting for it via a threatening, powerful ad campaign.

No business model should rely on creating the very stress physicians tell us to avoid to protect our health, and I would invite Google to rethink the workspace they’re creating, in which independent business owners have little other choice than to participate. These scary CTAs and emails are being received by the doctors who provide vaccines to Google executives and employees, the independent distillery owners who made your hand sanitizer when Purell disappeared, the local grocer or restaurateur who makes and delivers your meals while you work from home. Reciprocal respect is required.

Be an honest ally to the local businesses that have heroically served society through COVID-19 and kept our communities supplied. Don’t target them with misinformation and cause them distress just for the sake of protecting Google’s profits. Individual and societal health are priceless.

3) Could Google draft a good neighbor policy to establish a new relationship with small, local businesses?

In his inaugural address in 1933, FDR stated:

“In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor...the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.”

I’ve spent most of the last two decades of my life consulting with local business owners and becoming an advocate for the essential role they play in building diverse and sustainable communities. Perhaps it’s because I grew up hanging out in the imagined neighborhoods of Mister Rogers and Sesame Street that it seems so fundamental to me that respect for one’s self is the first step towards respecting others. Google, as a workplace, is full of good people who deserve an environment of respect that is felt by all staff, all local product users, and all communities. If you want to make localism your platform’s business, these folks deserve a good neighbor:

I can’t speak for the local business owners who have put on masks every day for the past two years to serve others at great personal risk, but I would like to start an open list today of suggestions for how Google, with its central role in the online local world, could become a better neighbor in serving the offline, real world we all share:

1. Reconsider excluding single location business owners from the dashboard; everyone deserves an equal workspace.

2. Return website links to all local packs.

3. Do not use fear to protect your profits; stress causes damage to human health.

4. Do provide accessible support for all Google local products, via a full staff of remote workers who have been deeply trained in all the things that can go wrong with Google Business Profiles and how to fix them.

5. Create a dedicated, remote listing spam removal team to the scale of the problem and demote easily-manipulated ranking factors like business title stuffing.

6. Create a dedicated, remote review mediation staff to the scale of the problem to promptly investigate and resolve business owner reports of review spam attacks.

7. Launch an investigation into the pattern of low quality Q&A answers and reviews that has arisen from the decision to incentivize Local Guides; if business owners aren’t supposed to offer perks in exchange for this type of UGC, Google really shouldn’t either.

8. Don’t use your power to favor Google products and partners over small business solutions.

9. Do use your power to lead on Climate Action to protect local business districts from wildfires, floods, and other increasing disasters.

10. Put @EthicalGooglers and other human rights and DEI groups within Google at the center of company policy-making to reflect a real-world diversity of people, values, and needs.

I’d like to ask the Moz community to be a good neighbor by adding their sincere suggestions for positive change you believe Google can contribute to. Tell me what you’d add to my list by tweeting me.

In his article entitled How Indifference Can Kill a Relationship, John M. Grohl, Psy.D. states:

“What a relationship has real difficulty surviving is when two people have gone into ‘autopilot’ mode and become indifferent toward one another. When you’ve given up on emotion entirely, when you feel nothing toward the other person, that’s a difficult thing to come back from.”

I don’t believe that the good human beings working at Google are personally indifferent to the doctors, restaurateurs, grocers, drivers, shopkeepers, teachers, religious leaders, and other community servants who care for their needs and whose entities make up the thing now called Google Business Profile. I believe all we have here is a relationship that needs to be fixed, and that Google already has everything they need to do it. 2022, with all we’ve been through together, would be a wonderful year for Google to show their deep investment in localism and their intentions to build forward from a place of mutual respect.

Image credits Kelly Sims, R. Kriatyrr Brosvik, and Baker County Tourism

How to Make Newsworthy Content: Part 2

Content marketing expert Amanda Milligan is back with three more ways to make your content more newsworthy. If you haven't seen part one, be sure to check it out! 

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

Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Amanda Milligan, and I am back with a part two for how to make newsworthy content. So when I made part one, I was working at Fractl, and I talked about three things. Let's see I remember them. It was data, emotion, and impact as three elements you need to be considering when creating newsworthy content. Those are still important. If you haven't seen that Whiteboard Friday, check it out after this one. It doesn't need to be in any particular order. 

Now I work at Stacker. stacker.com is a publication, but it's also a newswire. So like the AP for breaking news or Reuters for financial news, Stacker is a newswire for data journalism. So I work on the brand side though, where we partner with brands. They underwrite content, and we syndicate it to our newswire. I've been talking to the team, since I'm still relatively new, and they told me that these are three additional things that they consider when they are creating content for their publishing partners.

So it was fascinating to get their take on this, and I'm really excited to share this with you. 

Is it serviceable?

So let's just dive in. Three things to consider. The first is if the content is serviceable. Basically, all that means is how can it help the reader. So as marketers, we're actually already pretty good at this. This is like the how-to content of the world just with more of a news spin.

So it's not going to be your standard blog post. It's going to be more along the lines of how do you take something practical that's happening to people, that's also newsworthy, which we can get into exactly what that means. This will overlap with a lot of these other different qualities. So if it's serviceable and it's also adding context to a greater story, if it's serviceable and also based on new data, or it's based on an emotional component or it impacts a lot of people, those things all help it be newsworthy.

Is it contextualized?

The second is contextualized. This is something that Stacker really excels at and I find fascinating. So we can't break news as marketers. That's not our job. We're not in the business of doing really quick reporting off of big events. That's just not what we're doing.

So contextualizing is taking a look at what's trending, what people are talking about, what's happening and thinking about the other angles, the other perspectives that tell a more comprehensive story to that. This has worked really well. I think it's something that all brands should be considering when they're following like if you have those websites or blogs that you follow in your niche, thinking about what those kind of like top news stories are and how you can add to the conversation.

Is it localized?

Finally, localized. So this one is near and dear to my heart because I actually have a journalism degree even though I never became a reporter. I learned localization in college. I took a class called reporting that was extremely difficult. It was the weed out class for the journalism degree. The first time I got an A and I got my article run in the college newspaper, it was from localization.

There was a national story about how doodling can help improve your concentration, which I thought was interesting and kind of contrary to what you would normally think. I called up local experts, like people at the university, neuroscientists, and I said, "Hey, I just saw this report come out. Do you agree with it?" They were thrilled to talk to me about it, and they told me all about how they absolutely believe that that's true, that they doodle when they are listening to presentations.

Anyway, it's not that the data was any different or anything. It's that it was localized. It was that it mattered to the people who were reading it because it was being corroborated by people in their own community. So localization can be a huge asset if you're a brand that has a brick-and-mortar or not. If you specialize in certain areas, if your customers live in certain areas, localizing content can really speak to them in a way that the national content might not.

An example story

So I just ran through those things. So let's do a little exercise. This is a statistic I saw recently. The median home price for an existing home in August of 2021 increased by 15% compared to 2020. 

So this is from the National Association of Realtors. It's a statistic I saw. The exercise I want to do is let's try to come up with angles, not even necessarily the ones that you're going to run with for the story, but to brainstorm in that direction. 

1. Serviceable

So serviceable. How do you take a statistic like this and consider the serviceable angles? So I have written, "Where are the most affordable places to live?" So if we're finding that home prices are going up, it's a practical, helpful thing to know where it could actually be affordable to move.

If people are thinking about moving, they're like, "I don't know if it makes sense to do that." At least now they can have their options. Then going a little deeper or even just like a different way of approaching the same conversation is what an average home looks like in X place at X price. So you're taking those increased prices and you can show examples of what a home looks like.

I've seen projects like this before. You probably have too. But it's a different way of illustrating the same useful point, which is where could I actually see myself living. That's what makes it serviceable. You're giving them information that they can actually act on later. So those are some serviceable angles. 

2. Contextualized 

Contextualizing. So there's a lot to unpack in this stat. I believe this was a Forbes article I was reading, and they go into a little bit of detail about some of the context. But there are other ways to dive into the context. Even without reading the story, what I was thinking about was: What is the average down payment now? So if the home prices are increasing, presumably the down payment costs are increasing.

What I remember the article saying was that that's always the biggest hurdle, or not always, most of the time the biggest hurdle, especially for first-time home buyers, is the down payment. It's a big sum of money. So how much is that increasing, and what does that look like for the average person? What does that amount of money equate to in the rest of your life? How long would it take to save that amount of money?

These are all contextualizing details that make it feel a little bit more relevant to you. Then I said, "How does this compare to the average student loan debt for a person?" So just telling a greater financial, like personal finance story. The way the team at Stacker thinks about contextualizing is you're comparing it to similar things.

So things may be historically is the quickest way to do it. Like how has this been in the past? But also different things that are still relevant. That's where student loans come in. It's not just in a vacuum. Your financial situation is impacted by multiple elements, and it's good to get a full picture of that. 

3. Localized

Finally, localizing. So how have prices changed? So this is the average in general. But have they changed in different states at a different rate? Which states has the price increased more? Which states maybe have stayed the same or maybe have dropped? That's not being illustrated by a national statistic. What local programs exist for first-time buyers?

This is a great combo of serviceable and localized. So if you are a first-time home buyer and you're thinking, "I have no idea how I'm going to do this now because COVID happened. I don't know how I'm going to afford a house." An article that shows them all of their options, tells them what localized programs there are for first-time home buyers is extremely relevant and serviceable and local, and that is where you get the sweet spot of newsworthy content where publishers are really going to want that information.

So consider these as potential angles to brainstorm when you're coming up with content ideas. 

Final tips

Consider the data

Also consider what I talked about last time, which is data. We're all about data. If you can use original data in your story or take existing data and draw new conclusions and tell new stories with it, that's gold.

Consider emotion

Emotion, does it have an emotional impact? Impact, meaning how many people does it affect. All of these things are great, great lenses to come up with fantastic newsworthy content. 

Thank you so much for listening to this and taking the time. If you have any questions, feel free to reach me on Twitter. I'm @millanda, and my email is amilligan@stacker.com. I love talking about this stuff. Please reach out if you have any questions and thank you so much again.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com. 

Improve Your Reporting and Make Stakeholders Listen by Incorporating Share of Voice

What is “share of voice”?

Share of voice (SOV) in marketing originated as advertising terminology, defining the percentage of media spend by a company compared to the total spend in the market. In essence, it’s meant to gauge visibility of a brand compared to its competition. In the SEO world, it measures organic visibility compared to the rest of the search landscape.

Share of voice has been used in the SEO industry for years, but recently more SEO tools have begun incorporating it as an additional measurement alternative to simple rank tracking.

Rank tracking is extremely valuable, but when it comes to reporting and speaking with stakeholders unfamiliar with the minutiae of SEO, rank tracking can get people confused and caught up on a specific rank for one term at one point in time. Not to mention that search engines are extremely sophisticated now, and many factors can influence why a brand may rank position #1 in one location and position #8 in another.

Share of voice is an alternative measurement that brings rank tracking to a higher-level conversation about overall awareness performance.

I’d be remiss not to mention that share of voice is just one metric to incorporate. Good SEO measurement dives deeper into the business impact of the channel, But including SOV can be a great way to discuss overall awareness, which is an important step in the funnel to sales and conversions.

How is SOV calculated?

Share of voice is typically calculated as (Position Click Through Rate X Search Volume) / Total Volume summarized for all keywords. This allows higher search volume terms to make a bigger impact than those with lower volume.

For example, if you rank position #3 for a term with 1,000 monthly searches and position #1 for a term with 100 monthly searches, you would do the following math to get SOV:

• Keyword 1: Position 3 CTR 9.25% * 1,000 = 92.5

• Keyword 2: Position 1 CTR 34.76% * 100 = 34.76

• Total SOV = 127.26 / 1,100 = 11.57%

Thankfully, tools can do this automatically for us. (2013 me was doing this at scale in Excel, and ain’t nobody got time for that anymore!)

How to use STAT SOV

STAT automatically calculates SOV within their tool. They do this at a few different levels: the overall project, a data view, and a tag. This allows for flexibility to report on SOV for the whole site, a certain section, or a certain topic. You can get as creative as you want when setting up the tags and data views. Just keep in mind what you would want to report as SOV for a website when creating your tagging strategy.

There are plenty of resources already on how to set up tagging strategies. Here is a great article on the overview of using tags for analyzing data, and STAT resources have plenty of documentation on how to set up tags.

Out of the box, STAT utilizes their own click-through-rate percentages, but you can customize them to match your industry if you have different metrics you’d like to use.’

STAT automatically calculates the SOV for the top competitor sites in a group of keywords. You can add your sites domain(s) and any top competitors you want to make sure are included as “pinned” sites within the SOV settings tab.

Learn more about how to customize the SOV settings here.

Once you’re all set up with your customization, you’ll receive daily updates to SOV and can use the helpful reporting dashboard to compare over time.

Incorporating SOV into reporting dashboards

You can always export data directly from STAT or utilize screenshots in your monthly report format of choice, but I prefer using the STAT Google Data Studio connectors. These allow for an easy data connection and the ability to add custom visuals to existing or new reports. It’s a shortcut to making client-friendly visuals that don’t require custom updates.

Here is a great resource to start with if you are new to the STAT GDS connection. You’ll have to learn how to do simple API calls to get some of the data points you need, but I promise you’ll feel more powerful once you master.

If the API instructions scare you, use this builder to input your own account metrics as a shortcut.

Once you have your API details, go to this link to begin setting up the SOV data connection at the site level and use this link to set it up at the tag level. You should see a visual similar to the following. The site connector will have Site ID and the tag connector will have Tag ID. Fill in your fields and add to an existing or new report.

Once you have the data in your report you can now build your ideal visuals.

Visualizing SOV

Share of voice in STAT is listed in an ongoing line chart or a table. I find that useful as an SEO, but a stakeholder tends to just need a quick snapshot they can read as “good” or “bad” quickly. People's attention span is getting lower and lower with more things to distract them everyday. Good data visualization can get your point across faster and gain trust with stakeholders.

There are a few options I tend to use as a starting point. These range from snapshot in time visuals to trending visuals.

Bar chart

Bar charts are extremely easy ways to visualize the SOV in a way that allows the audience to compare and see who is winning and who is losing in a snapshot in time.

To visualize SOV within a bar chart use Site as your Dimension and Share of Voice as your metric. Ensure SOV is properly calculated as a percent of the total. You can either customize your date range to be a default time frame or use a date range filter on the page to allow it to be changed on the fly.

Pie chart

Pie charts are very controversial in the data viz industry. These are generally not a good option since you can’t easily compare the inputs to each other. I challenge that the share of voice is less of a comparison and more of a percentage of total, which is what a pie chart is meant to show, and therefore sometimes utilize them as a quick snapshot. I tend to include a bar chart next to this visual to dive in more just in case, but you do what you prefer.

Follow the same instructions as the bar chart when setting up the visualization.

Table

Tables are simple and effective ways to easily read data. I wouldn’t suggest this as a visual by itself, but it’s great to have as a reference for a chart or for an analyst.

By default the table settings will sum the share of voice metric so make sure you adjust it to be a percentage of total.

Line chart

This would be similar to the out-of-the-box visualization in STAT itself. The difference is that you can visualize in more of an aggregate format and make them a bit more in line with your reporting visuals. Add certain colors to draw attention to your sites or calls-outs as needed. When setting up a line chart, use a simple number versus a percent to make sure it aggregates properly.

Again, these are just starting points, use what you need to tell the right story to your audience.

Take it to the next level

One of my favorite parts of GDS is the ability to interact with your data and customize it on the fly. These are just some quick tips to make your dashboards even more useful.

Utilize filters

Filters allow you to adjust data on the fly. There are two types of filters: a page level filter that can change multiple visuals while looking at the report and a visual level filter that pre-filters specific visuals. Use a page level filter when you want the report viewer to have the ability to dig into the data and use visual level filters for when you want the data to only display the filtered data you selected.

Page-level filters

You can add a filter under the “Add a Control” dropdown. The most common page level filters I use include date range control and dimension filters. You can set up dimension filters to be self-selecting or custom search options. Which you choose depends on what you want a report viewer to have access to use.

For example, adding in a filter for Sites allows you to change the competitors listed in a visual. This can help you remove competition that is making the visuals hard to read (*cough* Google *cough*) or that the audience doesn’t care about.

Visual-level filters

There are different options to apply filters at the report, page and visual level, but all of these are filters that are applied to your visual before it’s created. This customizes the data in the visual to exactly what you want to show versus the report viewer having to self-select.

For example, you could add a visual level filter to only show the sites you have manually added, in case you didn’t want to show the full landscape.

I wouldn’t recommend using pie charts for filtered data, since it does remove key data points from the total.

You can learn more about filter options from Google's resources.

Create competition groupings

Calculated fields in GDS give the ability to layer data transformations on top of the raw data source. You aren’t modifying the data itself, but instead creating a new value to include in the report. There are plenty of resources to learn how to create calculated fields so I’ll just cover the high level steps here.

Example: You want to visualize the types of competition with the top SOV by site type versus domain. Setting up the following calculated field will summarize the SOV by grouping so you can get an even higher level view of your top competition:

To add a calculated field, open the data source and click “Add a Field” and then add in your custom code.

Make multiple views

Who says you only have to have one report? I’m a huge fan of an internal and external report view. This allows you to set up more details in your internal report while keeping an external report high level and focused on the visuals. Use the internal report to dive deeper and build your insights for the stakeholder-facing one.

For a client-facing report I tend to keep the visuals focused on a specific time frame without the ability to filter. This allows the client to see what I want them to see.

For my internal reports, I tend to include the ability to adjust timeframes, include multiple filter options, and include tables to support my visuals so I can easily download or see the raw data if needed.

Get creative with your data

With tools like STAT and Google Data Studio, you can combine data sources on a common data point. The SOV data source has “Date” as a field, so any other data source that includes a date can be combined.

Want to visualize SOV on the same chart as traffic? Want to combine multiple tag SOV data sources into one? Want to layer published content dates over SOV changes? Get creative and try it out! Might as well start asking if you can visualize something and then see if you, can versus feeling limited to the basics.

We’ve covered how to set up your projects to look at SOV with STAT and how to pull that data into the Google Data Visualization tool in this article. Now go forth and use your learnings to create something custom for your client or business. Remember to focus on the story you want to tell first, and let the data bring it to life.

Links and Brand as Ranking Factors: 2021 Correlation Study

It’s been a long time since Moz last published an in-house ranking factor study, and also a long time since I last published one prior to joining Moz. In my case, this is partly due to my long-standing skepticism and caution around how studies like these are typically very loudly misinterpreted or misrepresented. There’s also the complexity and difficulty of quantifying on-page factors within Google’s increasingly nuanced and sophisticated interpretation of relevance (although, yes, we’re working on it!).

Nonetheless, I think there’s value in a narrower study (or studies), for a few reasons. Firstly, it can be useful to set a comparison point that we might revisit — perhaps if we notice a change in Google’s algorithm, or if we think a given industry or set of keywords might be untypical. Secondly, we might still wish to compare narrower sets of metrics — such as link vs. domain level linking factors, follow vs. dofollow links, or branded search volume vs. Domain Authority — and this, too, requires a baseline. Lastly, there’s some merit in reaffirming what we would expect to be true.

How to interpret a correlation study

It’s a cliché to say that correlation does not imply causation, but one that few seem to remember in this context. I’ve written before at length about interpreting correlations, but if you don’t want to go back and read all that, I think the main thing to check before you go any further is whether you can simultaneously accept all of the following to be true:

1. Links are a fundamental part of how Google works

2. Links are correlated with rankings

3. Building links may not always improve rankings

4. Sometimes links are a symptom, rather than a cause, of SEO performance

I’m not asking you to agree with all those statements, just to be open to this kind of interplay when you consider studies like this one and how they affect your worldview.

As it happens, though, whatever you or I may think, most SEOs do still hold that links directly improve rankings, which seems reasonable. But surprisingly, a narrow majority will not say this without qualification: this recent study from Aira shows the commonly-cited caveats of a lack of technical issues, and of some verticals not really benefiting.

What counts as a good correlation?

When looking at large datasets and very complex systems, any one metric having a non-zero correlation is worth paying attention to, but obviously some context is needed, and comparison between metrics can be useful for this. For the sake of this study, it’s probably more useful to compare correlation values between metrics than to get hung up on specific absolute values.

With all that said, then, let’s get into the data.

Methodology

This study is based on the first 20 organic results for every MozCast keyword (10,000 keywords), on both desktop and mobile, from a suburban location in the USA.

Spearman’s rank correlation is used, as we’re comparing ranked variables (organic ranking) with logarithmic(ish) metrics like DA, and variables with extreme high-end values (like link counts). Using Spearman’s rank allows us to ask whether the order in which results appear is the one we’d expect based on a given metric, rather than getting bogged down in issues around different SERPs having vastly different distributions of link-count or DA.

Page, Subdomain, and Domain-level external links

In this chart, we look at how the number of links to a page’s domain predicts its ranking, compared to the number of links to a subdomain, compared to the page itself. Keen students of SEO theory will be unsurprised to see page-level links being by far the most potent predictor.

I’m sure this data will feel vindicating to SEOs and digital PRs who swear by building links directly to product or category pages, and they may have a point. However, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

• Often, homepages are the most linked-to page on a site. We shouldn’t be surprised to see homepages rank well in the SERPs where they’re relevant, and that is some of what this data describes.

• You can achieve, from a PageRank perspective, a similar effect to direct page-level link building through the use of internal links. (Depending where your built links are pointing, of course.)

Links vs. Authoritative Links

This is perhaps another chart that more reaffirms what we’d hope than blows anyone’s mind, but yes, Moz’s DA and PA metrics — which look at the overall authority as well as quantity of links to a domain or page — do outperform raw followed link count.

That said, I may find this unsurprising, but plenty of brands and agencies out there still do KPI link building campaigns based on link count, so perhaps this chart will be of particular interest in their case!

Branded Search Volume vs. Domain-level

This comparison is an old favorite of mine, and illustrates some of the reasons why link-level factors are valued by Google in the first place: they were, originally, a proxy for popularity.

Those of you paying attention may actually be surprised that DA outperforms Branded Search Volume here. That does tend to be the case as you get deeper into search results. If we look at the top 10 only, you see lower correlations in general (due to the smaller dataset), but the ordering is a little different:

This is a similar finding to studies I’ve published before, and makes sense when you consider the competitive and data rich environment on the first page for competitive terms.

Does this mean branded search volume is a ranking factor?

Not necessarily! And this is the type of conclusion I was seeking to warn you about earlier. Brand very likely is an important part of what Google is trying to measure with links, as ultimately they want to give us results that we trust and want to click on. Presumably, Google’s engineers are not narrow-minded enough to think that links are the only way they could measure brand, given the wealth of data at their disposal, but whether branded search volume specifically is used is anyone’s guess. What we can see is that it very likely correlates with things that are used — just as DA is not directly used by Google, but correlates very well with things that are.

Similar to click-based metrics, there’s a semantic debate to be had here around whether something that Google is optimizing towards in its algorithm — but possibly not directly using as an input — constitutes a ranking factor.

Certainly you should not take away that your best bet is to directly manipulate branded search volume by generating a load of artificial searches. That said, naturally causing people to search for your brand, especially in conjunction with relevant product terms, can only be a good thing. Whatever Google is measuring (whether it be links, search volume, clicks, or anything else) is likely to be improved by the same activities you’d use to naturally raise branded search traffic. Which is, of course, probably why it correlates so well.

Takeaways

No major shocks: “links correlated with rankings, SEO study finds!”

But, there are some important reminders here:

• Page-level performance is important, however you go about achieving it

• Raw link count isn’t a great metric

• Demand for your brand is at least as good a predictor of rankings as domain strength on the first page

Like I said above, though, please do remember in any incendiary tweets you’re now penning that the relationships behind these correlations can be more complex than meets the eye!

5 Simple Tips for SEO + Email Marketing Flywheels

If you haven't been using email marketing tactics to support your SEO efforts, now is the time to start. In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus explains how to use the complementary powers of these strategies over and over again, so that each becomes bigger and more powerful the more you do it.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard. I hope you're enjoying this video no matter which day of the week you're watching it on. Today I want to talk about SEO and email marketing, specifically five simple tips for SEO and email marketing flywheels.

What is a flywheel?

So when I talk about SEO and email marketing flywheels, what do we mean by flywheel? Well, that's where we're using the power of SEO to grow our email marketing list and conversely using our email marketing list to grow our SEO for more website traffic. There are actual ways you can do that and doing it over and over and over again so that each becomes bigger and more powerful the more you do it.

So it's like a flywheel. It's really hard to get started. But as you get going, it gets easier and easier and easier, and everything grows a little bit more effectively. So if you're an experienced SEO and email marketer, this video may not be for you. But if you primarily do SEO and you're looking for ways to improve your mail marketing, or you're primarily an email marketer and you're looking for ways to grow your SEO, these are the tips for you. 

Set goals

So let's talk about our goals. What are we trying to accomplish with this email SEO marketing flywheel? First of all is simply more visitors, more visitors to your website content, because more visitors usually leads to more links, sharing, and things like that. The links and sharing can be positive SEO signals to Google, which actually lead to higher rankings.

So if we can get more people to our content through our email, the downstream effect of that could be higher rankings and more traffic generally naturally generated through Google search results. But also we want bigger and more powerful email marketing lists because your marketing list is one of your best marketing channels, especially if you segment users, which we're going to talk about in just a little bit.

Ultimately, we want more conversions and sales. Whatever your marketing and business goals are, that's what we want to achieve with this flywheel effect. 

How to achieve those goals

1. Incentivize sign-ups

So let's talk about the specifics, how are we going to get into it. First of all, we want to get more sign-ups from our content, from our website material. So we want to incentivize sign-ups.

Now the important thing to realize is you don't have to incentivize sign-ups just through SEO. You can do it through any marketing traffic channel. That's direct traffic, social media traffic, and referral traffic. Any way that people are visiting your content, you want to target those to incentivize for sign-ups to your email marketing list. So one of the ways I like to do this through SEO is through what a lot of people call content power-ups.

That's where you're incentivizing sign-ups by offering bonus or exclusive content in exchange for people to sign up for your list. For example, this is "5 Simple Tips for SEO and Email Marketing." What if at the end of this post I would offer five additional bonus tips in exchange for signing up for exclusive content? The idea is that you want to offer something that they can't find on the website. That could be a tool, some additional content, downloads, any sort of free bonus, a coupon, whatever you can think of, something exclusive to incentivize those sign-ups from your content. 

2. Segmentation

Second tip, we don't want to dump everything onto the same large email list. We want to make sure that we're segmenting those sign-ups by topic and interest.

Unless your site is very narrowly focused, you generally want to segment your list among different topics. For example, here at Moz, we cover SEO, but we cover many, many different types of SEO based on user interest. So there's local SEO, there's technical SEO, there's copywriting, there's link building, all these niche interests that we want to segment users by.

So there's a couple different ways to segment. One is self-segmentation, where people can check a box and say I'm interested in this and this and this. But a little bit easier is automatic segmentation based on the type of content that people are visiting. So on your technical SEO pages, if that's what you were doing, you would put people onto a technical SEO sign-up list and make it clear that they're receiving technical SEO tips.

Always make it clear what they're receiving. But this segmentation is going to come in useful in just a little bit. 

3. Content promotion

So the third thing, the third tip, and this is where we're getting into the meat of it, is content promotion. This is where we're using our email list to send traffic back to our website. When people think about SEO and email marketing flywheels, this is what they typically think about.

They think about the content promotion aspect. Now the important thing is we're not trying to promote all of our content. No, we want to promote our best content, because your website, your visitors are coming, they're doing a Google search. They're not necessarily aware of what your best content is, and that's why you want to deliver your best content. Importantly, you want to personalize it with the segmentation.

You're not promoting all your content to all your visitors. You're personalizing it based on their interests because you already segmented them out based on the type of content that they consumed. So if we're sending out a technical SEO newsletter, we're sending the best of our technical SEO content to those people who have already indicated an interest in technical SEO.

One of the most important things to remember, you don't have to just promote your new content. It's okay to promote the best of your old content as well, because again your users aren't aware of what that is. So oftentimes in an introductory email, maybe the first email they receive in a series, you can promote and highlight old posts or even do it in a series.

"This is our best content over the last five years. Make sure you don't miss this." That old content, if it's truly the best, will oftentimes outperform your newer content. So that's how you can personalize and segment and send out your best content to get more promotion and more eyeballs on your best SEO content and hopefully more links, sharing, and all that to keep the flywheel going.

4. Incentivize sharing

So not only did we incentivize sign-ups, now that we're in the email part and sending emails out, we want to incentivize sharing. That's my fourth tip, incentivize sharing, because we don't only want people to visit and read the content, we're hoping that they'll share it with their audience as well. One of the ways I like to do that is to segment my best sharers.

Now what do I mean by this? I'm not only segmenting by interest, but I'm segmenting by influence. So I might put together a list of influencers or people I know in my particular industry that have signed up. Maybe I've targeted them. Just like I offer people exclusive content to sign up for the email list, I'm offering my sharers exclusive content before I share it with the rest of the world.

So I might email my sharing segment and say, "Hey, we just published a post. We haven't told anybody. We're going to announce it on social tomorrow. But I wanted to let you know about it ahead of time if you want to share it with your followers." Because we made it exclusive, we haven't shared it with our followers, it gives our influencers something to share and it makes them feel special and sharing it out with their own audience.

There are different strategies that you can use to do that. But it is often an effective tactic to segment your best sharers. It's a little advanced, but that can incentivize sharing and hopefully help out your SEO. 

5. Keyword research

Finally, when we talk about SEO, we talk about keyword research. Keyword research is one of those SEO areas that works really well in incorporating into email.

Now, here at Moz, we have a tool called Keyword Explorer. There are other tools out there. But millions of keywords suggestions. Traditionally, in SEO, you use keyword research to determine your content, targeting keywords that your audience has interest in. We have lots of guides here at Moz on how to do that, how to target content around keywords.

But you can also use that keyword research in your emails. One of the most important places to use them is your email subject line. If you know the interest that your audience is interested in, through your segmentation, you can start to understand the keywords that drove them to their content, and using those same keywords in your email subject lines can improve your open rates. But that's not the only place.

One of my favorite places to use keywords is in the sign-up CTA. So when you have a sign-up form on your website, you can use a generic sign-up form, like, hey, sign up for our newsletter. Okay, that's not very effective. But if you use the keywords, the targeted keywords sign up for our technical SEO tips or our local SEO or our best dog food recipes, the keywords that people use to find your website are going to be the best keywords to incorporate into your CTAs to get them to sign up. You use keywords in your email subject lines to get them back to your content and so on and so forth. It's another part of the effective flywheel. 

Bonus: turn your best emails into content

So finally, bonus tip, I want to make sure that you don't forget to turn your best emails into content. Your content doesn't have to live exclusively in separated channels. If you're writing killer emails to your audience, that get a lot of engagement, that have super high open rates, those are emails that you can turn into content for your website.

Or if you have a popular newsletter, you can simply archive all your emails into HTML so people can search. You may not want to do that for certain reasons if the quality isn't very good. But if the emails are actually good, go ahead and turn them into content, because that's going to help your SEO as well.

All right. I hope you enjoyed these tips. If you have any questions about email or SEO, please reach out to the team here at Moz. We're here to help. Hope you enjoyed it, everybody, and please share this video. All right, thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com. 

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.