Best of Whiteboard Friday 2021: UTM Tagging for Google My Business

As we wind down 2021, we’re taking a look back at the most popular Whiteboard Friday episodes from the year. First up, from August, small business SEO expert Claire Carlile walks you through the what, why, where, and how of UTM tagging for your GMB profiles.

Editor's note: Beginning at 1:49, when Claire mentions "referral traffic", it should be "referral information". 

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

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Do you have a Google My Business listing or do you work with clients that have Google My Business listings, and do you want to know more about the value of the traffic that Google My Business drives to your website?

Well, if you do, this is the Whiteboard Friday for you. So I'm Claire Carlile, and I am a local search expert at BrightLocal, and today I'm going to speak about UTM tagging for Google My Business. 

What's a UTM tag?

So you might be asking, "What is a UTM tag?" If you are, you wouldn't be the first person to ask that question.

So UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. But if you just think of UTM tags as tracking codes that we add to the end of our external links that tell us more about where that traffic came from and how it got to our websites. So when someone clicks on a UTM tagged URL, details of the source, the medium, and the campaign that that website visit comes from get transferred over into Google Analytics.

Why add UTM tags?

So why would we want to add UTM tags to our GMB URLs? Well, without tagging, all of the traffic will end up in the Organic bucket. So that's fine, but what it won't tell us is whether that organic traffic came from the regular organic results or whether it came from Google My Business URLs in the business profile or in Google Maps.

Another reason is that many mobile apps and browsers don't give their referral traffic into Google Analytics, and that traffic is just going to end up in the Direct bucket. We're marketers. We're very used to having to demonstrate our value and the value of our services. So this is a great way for you to illustrate the value that you're adding to your client or to your organization.

We also often need to secure a budget. So whether that budget is for more of our time or it's for photos or videos for Google My Business, it also lets us understand the value of various Google My Business features so we can say Google Posts is more valuable to this client than Google products, or Google products refers less traffic but at a rate that converts higher.

Also, we'll get the Google Search Console data for those UTM tagged URLs. So we'll see the query data. We'll see what queries are actually driving impressions and clicks on these UTM tagged URLs. 

Where can you tag?

So let's think about what we can tag. We hear a lot about zero-click search, but that really isn't a new concept if you've been working in local search for a while, because from the business profile a potential customer can click to call a business, they can download driving directions, they can look at photos, they can read reviews, they can look at services, all without clicking through to the business website.

But that said, we do actually have a lot of opportunities in GMB to link back to our website and to drive traffic to the website. So what you have in GMB will be dependent upon your primary category. 

But most businesses will have a website link. They might have an appointment or a menu URL. They might have Google products. They might have Google Posts. You might be using the new follower offer, which not a lot of people know about and even less people are using, and it might actually die and end up in the Google graveyard, but it only takes 10 minutes to set up. So if you have the type of business that could attract a local following, then it's worth adding because you can see: Does it actually drive value for the business? What does that traffic do when they get to your website? What content are they looking at? Where are they moving, and how are they moving around? Is the traffic from GMB actually driving revenue? Are they buying things when they get to your website? Then we've got all of our conversions and micro conversions that hopefully we have set up so we can measure in Google Analytics.

So do we get click to call? Do we get click to email? Do they download a resource? Do they click through to our social media profiles? Do they fill in a form? Do they sign up for our newsletter? We can find out all of these things when we add UTM tagging.

UTM tagging tips

So I'm going to give you some UTM tagging tips because I think the most important thing is to be very, very consistent from the outset, because it's quite easy to get this wrong. 

So consistency being key, think about how you're going to separate out your words. I like to use a dash. Some people like to use an underscore. Whatever you use, just make it very consistent. 

Then we have uppercase and lowercase letters. So I always stick with lowercase letters, the reason being that Google Analytics is case sensitive in all of its reports. So if you're using a mix of uppercase and lowercase, Google is going to report upon that separately. If you don't get this right, you're going to be dealing with a lot of messy and bought data that you're going to have to sort out outside of Google Analytics, and you really don't want that. 

So another thing is if you get your source and your medium in a muddle, then that traffic is just going to end up in the Other bucket, which is pretty much totally sad times. So a way to avoid that is by thinking of the source as where the journey started or where that traffic came from and the medium as the method of transport. It's how that traffic got from A to B. 

Who manages the data?

So before we think about which URLs on our website we're going to tag up, we need to think about who is managing the data and reporting in our organization or in our client's organization, because the UTM tags and the framework that you set up need to play nicely and sit within their framework. You don't want to be robbing clicks from them if they're trying to demonstrate the value of something. 

Now you might find that when you work with small and medium-size businesses, no one is managing the data and reporting, in which case happy days, this will work absolutely fine. 

Which URLs do you tag? 

So which URL will you tag?

Well, there are some questions here. Do you have one location, or do you have many locations? So if it's just one location, you probably tag up your homepage. If it's many locations, you're going to be linking to your location landing pages. 

If you're using Google products, then you'll be wanting to link to your products or your services pages.

If you have an appointment URL, then you will be linking through to maybe the Contact Us page. If you have booking or appointment functionality on your website, you'll link to that page. 

Now, unsurprisingly, the menu URL will link to your menu page. 

If you're using Google Posts, have a think about where will you link to. If it's a special offer post, is there a special offer page that it will link to? When that special offer expires, what will you do with that page? Will it continue to resolve, or are you going to 301 it somewhere else? Plan all that out beforehand. Actually, you need to make sure that you check the URL that you're wanting to link to. Are you linking to the correct version? If you're on https, which I hope you are, you won't want to be linking to the http.

You need to look: Does that page resolve? Can you see everything on that page? Does that page give a 404, in which case obviously we're not going to want to link to it? Does that page go through a series of redirects? Now, a series of redirects is going to strip the UTM tagging off of that URL, and we really don't want that. 

How to tag

So once you've checked which URLs you need to link to, you're actually going to tag those up.

So for the source, I'm using Google. Some people like to use GMB. But whatever you choose, again, make sure it fits within this framework and be consistent from the outset. For medium, I'm using organic. Then for campaign, I'm using that field to describe the location of that link within Google My Business.

So it might be the primary website link, menu, products, or the appointment. If you're using the new follower offer, you have this. Then with Google Posts, I like to be a little bit more granular so I can see what type of posts might be working the best, and I can also track any changes when Google starts moving posts up and around inside the business profile.

So we've got the what's new post, the offer post, and the event post. Finally, for Google Posts, using the campaign content field to describe the actual content of that post. So if you work with a business which has lots of unique and interesting content, you might just need to describe that content, so summer-21-sale, free-giraffe-rides, curry-night-may-21, or you might just like to use the date there in the campaign content field.

So top tip is if you're using Posts, you have access to Posts, I hope you're using them, then using a Google Sheets add-on called Postamatic, which is brilliant, it allows you to schedule your posts, and it also automatically adds UTM tagging within this format. So it's very much recommended.

So you're going to tag up your GMB URLs and those links with UTM codes. So you might use something like Google's Campaign URL Builder, which is something that I used to use when I first started tagging up business profiles. But since then I've been working on my UTM Tagging Guide with the Google Sheet, which is basically my gift to you with love.

So you can use that to keep everything nice and tidy and everything in one place. It auto-generates the tag. So all you have to do is just drop your URL into the sheet, and then it will give you the UTM codes for those URLs. It's a good way to keep a record of what you're adding, and that might be Google Posts, if you're not using Postamatic.

It might be your Google products. You have a record then, and you can understand what type of content resonates, what doesn't, and what you could do better with your content. So you will find that guide and sheet here, on this URL. 

So that's it for today. I hope you found that useful and hopefully see you here again soon.

How to Use Keyword Clustering to Seamlessly Optimize Your SEO Content

Keyword clustering is the SEO tactic if you want to seamlessly optimize your SEO content and streamline your workflow at the same time. The best part? Keyword clustering is fairly simple, and Google SERPs give you all the information you need to make an informed decision on exactly how to do it.

It’s a timely process, but trust me, it’s worthwhile. Done well, this tactic will pay dividends to your SEO and marketing strategy for years.

So, how do you do it and why is it important? Let’s find out!

Benefits of keyword clustering

Keyword clustering has as much commercial value as it does for SEO and marketing. Although its primary purpose is to assign keywords to content pieces and content types in a bid to secure organic ranks, what it also does is lay down the foundation for your marketing team’s efforts in the next six months (or more!).

Through keyword clustering, a business can expect to:

• Write content that better serves the buyer through a deeper understanding of search/keyword intent through Google’s data.

• Create a content architecture or plan that feeds into other marketing efforts through content repurposing. Done well, keyword clustering can support PR, PPC, social media, newsletters, marketing automation, and more.

• Increase productivity within the business by aligning marketing teams. Expect SEO and writing teams to have a plan of action for over six months.

• Reduce the risk of cannibalization — since you’ve already mapped your keywords, there won’t be any duplicates, and you’ll know what to link where and by what anchor text.

• Createa clear plan of action for SEO content that provides long-term scalability, since you have keywords to target over time that can be scaled indefinitely.

• Increase visibility in the SERPs through on-page optimizations.

• Increase chances of earning featured snippets by analyzing SERPs and finding what other articles rank for, what they cover and, as a result, what you should include within your own content.

How to use keyword clustering to seamlessly optimize your SEO content

1) Cluster alongside SERP analysis

While conducting SERP analysis, the first thing to determine is the content vertical — what’s ranking for your desired keyword? Is it generally home pages, product pages, service pages, collection/category pages, or articles? Whatever it is, that’s the type of content you need to create. If Google SERPs present eight articles and two product pages, then it’s most likely that your site will rank with an article. If it’s ranking product pages and you’re not selling anything, then no matter how relevant it seems, this keyword is not for you.

Once you know what you need to create and you’ve determined that you can create that page on your site, dig a little deeper and find out what type of content is featured within the top pages of websites that are most similar to yours in terms of niche and domain authority. Think about topics covered, headings, images, videos, and GIFs.

This investigative work provides you with an opportunity to understand exactly what your audience wants so you can serve them in the most meaningful way. It also ensures that you always create content with search volume, which has the possibility of ranking.

Pictured: an example of Google SERP for keyword: “how to complete a Rubik’s Cube”.

2) Use keyword clustering to discover new content opportunities

Another tactic for discovering what content to create, as well as new content opportunities, is through the SERP features and the prioritization of them.

Check for features and formatting such as featured snippets, video, images, knowledge panels and “people also ask” (PAA). PAA is especially useful; it’s a trove of questions, many of which can be answered within your content. Other questions may need a new article or page altogether, so you can start building out your content architecture and forming your internal linking strategy.

Additionally, by integrating these features, you’ll be covering more on your chosen topics, thereby increasing keyword density and closing the gap on your competitors. Plus, your content will use the language of your audience as opposed to your assumed keywords.

Keyword clustering is powerful. The graph below shows one article’s journey in Google SERPs. It ranks for 50 clustered keywords and includes questions from PAA. This article quickly achieved a featured snippet, image rankings, 9.37k clicks, 68.9k impressions, 13.6% CTR and an average of six minutes spent on the page. Oh, and this was achieved before a single website back-linked directly to the article.

Snippet taken from Fortune and Frame’s Google Search Console showing an article's journey in the SERPs from publication. This particular article is about messages to write in a book (see point #3 to understand what I did with this link here).

3) Choose the most appropriate keyword for the content (then use internal linking, naturally)

Keyword clustering presents you with opportunities you may have otherwise overlooked. If you pull together multiple keywords that all sit within one article or web page, you can determine the best angle to write in order to suit your focus keyword and your online presence.

You will have a selection of keywords and you can use their search volume, competition and your website’s domain authority to determine the best keyword for your site to focus on right now.

Additionally, it means that you can write meaningful anchor text as part of your internal linking strategy. Taking the example from the graph above (“This particular article is about messages to write in a book gift…”), the anchor text “messages to write in a book gift” is not the focus keyword. The focus keyword is: “what to write in a book for a gift”, which doesn’t sound natural at all in the context above.

Thanks to a selection of clustered keywords, an internal link using relevant keywords, was easily slotted into a grammatically correct sentence. Ultimately, you can fit your keywords into your content instead of writing your content around your keywords.

4) Say goodbye to cannibalization

You could argue that you can avoid keyword cannibalization without clustering keywords, but can you?

If you know which keywords you’ve used where, then you should, in theory, have no (ok, there might be a little bit) keyword cannibalization. You won’t fall for the mistake of assigning a focus keyword to two content pieces - or more subtly - creating two content pieces for keywords that should’ve been clustered and covered within one article.

By clustering keywords and analyzing SERPs, you might be surprised at what belongs within the same content piece.

Let’s take these two keywords: “Rubik’s Cube method” (260 searches/month) and “How to complete a Rubik’s Cube” (590 searches/month).

Without looking at the SERPs, one might be tempted to assign “Rubik’s Cube method” as a focus keyword for an article that shares different methods, whereas “‘how to complete a Rubik’s Cube” would be a step-by-step guide. Thankfully, Google SERPs is quite clear that these two keywords can be used—and should be used—on the same web page to avoid cannibalization and poor performing articles because they simply don’t cover the topics in full.

5) Keyword clustering streamlines the SEO content plan and improves productivity

There’s no shying away from keyword clustering. Whilst it does add a whole lot of time to the keyword research process, it saves a lot of time long-term. The more keyword research and clusters you can create early on, the more it pays back in Google ranks and seamless marketing strategy.

The main benefit is objective planning for content. If you use keyword clustering to create a clear plan of action for SEO content for every single page on your website and jot down suitable content ideas for the future, you’ll be left with long-term scalability, since you have keywords to target over time that can be scaled indefinitely.

Your team can work from one document detailing which keywords live where, which content needs to be created in order to achieve a rank, and also, how that content can be repurposed for use across the marketing landscape.

Keyword clustering is a crucial and preparatory step

You can think of keyword clustering as the preparatory work that takes place before you execute SEO. An analogy, shared with me by Adriana Stein, is that keyword clustering is like the shopping and preparation of ingredients before cooking. If you skip this crucial step you might find yourself a bit flustered later on with a dinner that wasn’t quite what it could have been.

Ultimately, what keyword clustering does is insist that you take a step closer to your marketing strategy. Through SERP analysis, you will understand your customer on another level—you’ll know the Google SERPs for your desired keywords inside and out and exactly what you need to work towards in order to secure that page one rank.

Then, you’ll be rewarded with a full, scalable content plan, an entire team working in pursuit of the same content goals, and most importantly, seamlessly optimized content!

Track Indented Results in STAT (New)

Last month, Google dramatically expanded indented results in organic SERPs. A recent study by Moz of 10,000 competitive keywords showed that up to 40% of SERPs displayed indented results on page one. Here’s just one example:

Google has determined that both pages are relevant to this search (for “how many algorithm updates per year”), but that the specific blog post is more relevant. Indented results are of particular interest to SEOs because not only can you double-dip, but the indented listing(s) can, in some cases, get pulled from lower positions and effectively get a ranking boost.

I’m happy to report that our STAT Product team has been hard at work implementing indented results in rank tracking and they are now available in SERP feature tracking. Here’s a quick walk-through of how to put indented results data to work.

Step 1: The SERP Features tab

You can quickly get an overview of indented results for your site by clicking on the “SERP Features” tab. You’ll see the indented results icon (two green rectangles, with one indented) in both the legend and the SERP Features graph, which you can view by share of voice or total count:

I’ve chosen “Count: Total” here, so that the feature doesn’t get dwarfed by organic results. You can use the legend to easily add and remove features from this graph.

Step 2: Filter on indented results

Just click on the double-rectangle icon, and you’ll automatically get back a list of all keywords in your current tracked site that have indented results:

Of course, you’re probably interested in either protecting the indented listings you already own or going after listings that someone else owns. We’ve got you covered ...

Step 3: Filter on owned vs. unowned

This is a bit easier if you zoom in on a single SERP feature, but the indented results bar is broken into two smaller bars showing both owned and unowned data:

Click on either section and the filter will automatically adjust to only show you keywords matching that choice. Here’s a sample screenshot for “owned” indented results:

What’s that you say? You want to track this data over time? No problem ...

Step 4: Tag and track data over time

Click on “Tag All Filtered Keywords” above the keyword list, and you’ll get a dialog box like the one below. Just select “Dynamic tag”, give your tag a name, and click [Save] ...

Now, you can easily track this filter from the “Tags” tab, and STAT will start collecting historical data for this filter, allowing you to see indented results that you win and lose over time.

How to Measure the Quality of Your SEO Traffic Using Google Analytics

Before you start reading, I'll forewarn you that this article will start with a tweet and end with a challenge. Sound good?

From one of my favorite SEO role models, and founder of Women in Tech SEO, Areej AbuAli: 

So, before getting lost in the sauce in the various metrics, it’s important you understand that your business goals are unique to you, so the way you measure your goals should reflect that. From there, the next steps are to get a better grasp of what quality traffic means for your website, and then evaluate how users engage with your content. 

To get a better understanding of what’s considered “quality traffic”, we’ll look into various Google Analytics metrics that will help you create a rock solid SEO strategy. 

Why does quality of traffic matter for SEO success?

At the end of the day, quality traffic is what accelerates business success, especially for post-publishing optimization. 

For example, let’s assume your blog has 200 visitors per month with a conversion rate of 1%, generating two leads. By improving the quality of your traffic, your conversion rate and number of leads will also increase:

• Traffic: 200

• Conversion rate: 4%

• Leads: 8

This indicates that “superfan” visitors are far more engaged and therefore more profitable than moderately excited users. Google’s new page experience algorithm update further solidifies this statement. 

It’s become crystal clear that the way that consumers interact with your website contributes to your business growth. 

How do you measure the quality of your organic traffic in Google Analytics?

We can go on and on about Google Analytics, but today we’re specifically looking at traffic quality. Here are the top metrics to keep an eye on:

• Engagement metrics: time on site, pages per session, exit rate

• Conversion metrics: conversion rate, form submissions, other goal completions, 

• Relevance metrics: bounce rate, user geo-location, new and returning visitors

Engagement Metrics

Time on site

The time on site is the measurement a user spends on a site, regardless of whether it’s being used or not. For instance, let’s say a user has multiple tabs open but isn’t necessarily using all of them at once — Google Analytics still counts the time the tabs were open. 

In fact, Google counts sessions up to 30 minutes without a visitor clicking on other pages. But once the timestamp hits 30 minutes, that session will be counted as a bounce. Knowing this, it's clear that not every user who lands on your site is highly engaged.

Generally speaking, the more time a user spends on your site the better. This indicates that your SEO strategy has defined content that is worth their while. Furthermore, the way you have structured your site not only helps them find the information they need, but they also read more about other topics or services that you might be offering. 

A good time on site indicates: 

• High-quality content

• Good site architecture

• Proper internal linking

• Great UX design

• High-quality traffic that’s interested in your products and services

To set efficient goals, you could measure time on site together with the next metric, pages per session. 

Here’s a sample goal:

Users who spend an average of four minutes on your site, and at least two pages per session are more likely to be engaged with your content. 

To find this metric, click audience (on the left side) > overview (underneath) > under overview, click average session duration.

Pages per session

To put it simply, pages per session is the average number of pages a user views in one session. It is one of the most important behavior metrics within GA, as it indicates how deep within your site a user navigates to. Essentially, the more pages they view, the more interested they are in what you have to say. Typically the first page a user lands on is your home page, but the goodies are on your service or product pages. With that said, to obtain quality traffic, you should aim to have at least two pages per session on average. 

If you aren’t seeing these results, you need to start investigating what isn’t working. It might be that you're targeting the wrong keywords or your audience is in the wrong country, and therefore they bounce. 

If they land on your home page and don’t move onto another page, it’s a possibility that your home page isn't properly linked to other pages, it’s too slow when loading, or the overall architecture of the site is confusing. Tweak this if necessary, and observe what happens. Often, the simpler it is to get around your site, the better! 

Now, as you view your pages per session, I recommend segmenting pages per session based on channel, so you can see which streams have a greater impact and double down on that. 

To find pages per session, navigate to GA, and then click “Acquisition overview”. Under the behavior bar you’ll see “pages per session”:

Exit rate

This one’s pretty straightforward. An exit rate tells you how often a customer has left your site from a page. Unlike a bounce rate (which I’ll discuss later), the exit rate tells you that a user left one page, and went to another. Let’s take a look at an example to illustrate.

Let’s say a new visitor enters your homepage, but they want to learn more, so they navigate to your blog. They spend some time reading your content and find what they want, so they exit. This shows up as a percentage under site content > all pages > exit rates. 

(see image below to visually see where to find the exit rate on your Google Analytics) 

Of course, if the exit rates are high you’ll want to assess elements like:

• Website copy

• Images/videos

• Site load time

• Page design

Start by tweaking one element at a time and analyze the results after each change until your exit rates start improving. Some pages will inherently have higher exit rates than others such as  your privacy policy and contact us pages (usually users find what they’re looking for on Google without entering your site). 

However, if you manage to decrease the exit rates for your services pages, blog posts, and/or product pages by tweaking the components we just talked about, you’ll find higher quality traffic and more conversions.

Now that you’re an expert in engagement metrics, let’s have a closer look at conversion ones.

Conversion metrics

Conversion rate

Google Analytics adds up all the goal completions of  your site  and calculates that as the overall website conversion rate. Nonetheless, consider looking at each goal separately to see how they’re performing so that you’ll know which goals you’re meeting and which conversion goals need to be adjusted. 

To view each individual goal, navigate to “goals overview” and then pick the goal you want to assess by selecting it in the drop down menu. From there you’ll see your conversion rate overview for that particular goal. Here’s an example of goals in the below image:

Now let’s look at how organic traffic plays a role in this scenario: 

How can we discover whether or not organic traffic on your site is helping you reach your conversion goals? If for example your conversion rate has gone down, while your organic traffic has gone up, it's possible that you’re targeting the wrong keywords, thus getting less qualified visitors to your site. From there, you’d need to analyze which keywords need to be replaced (hint: check Google Search Console for keywords that are bringing in the highest CTR).

By switching your perspective and looking at the conversion rate of each goal through individual traffic sources, you can make better decisions to optimize and therefore obtain higher quality leads. 

Form submissions

 To get the most out of Google Analytics, I suggest setting up event tracking for form submissions so that you have a clear overview of what users are doing on your website. Tracking your form submissions allows you to understand how users navigate to the form page and focus your marketing efforts there.

Coming back to SEO, the relationship between form submissions and quality of organic traffic is quite similar to conversion rate. A form submission is considered as a goal which users are prompted to complete. If a large percentage of your users don’t fill in a form, this indicates that they are not engaged and therefore are not the right kind of visitors you should be targeting. If this is the case, re-assess the kind of information you request, the usability of the form, and the overall UX of your form page to make it more relevant and engaging.

To track your form submissions, click on admin at the bottom left hand corner > click view > click goals. 

Other goal completions

In addition to the metrics mentioned earlier, you can also set up goals like trial sign ups, newsletter sign ups, ebook downloads, or case study downloads (to name a few). You can track these goals by time, events, pages, or url. 

For example, if you recently posted on your social media channels about a free download, you can set up a goal and pinpoint which social media post brought the most traffic and assess the ones that worked better.

As mentioned earlier, tracking your various goals helps you better understand your audience as well as how they engage with your website. You will be able to deep dive into the channels that work best for your overall marketing efforts, as well as identify ways to incorporate UX and content design into your SEO strategy.

False conversions

I’d like to mention that although tracking metrics in Google Analytics is important, it’s just as critical to ensure you’re not skewing your data through false conversions. Inaccuracies in your data set could cause several problems and lead you to the wrong conclusions about your traffic and its quality. Looking at such false data will be the reason to decide on and implement the wrong SEO strategy for your website. 

To double check the goals you’ve set up, look for the conversions tab > goals > reverse goal path. Once there, you can identify where your goal conversions are occurring and if there are incorrect pages popping up that could be a sign you’ve incorporated the wrong data for a goal. 

Check out the visual below for further direction. 

Relevance Metrics

User geo-location

To find your audience’s geo-location, scroll to the audience on the left hand side, then geo, and finally location. Here you’ll find all the different countries that users are coming from, their acquisition, behavior, and conversion data. To get even deeper, you can click on a specific country and see state or city level data. 

For larger and international businesses, the big picture geo location data will be most useful, but for smaller or location specific businesses, the granular data will be crucial. For instance, if you’re a boutique clothing store, the city view helps you understand what locations your customers are coming from so you can create more relevant content and optimize according to location. 

By understanding the demographics of your audience, you can create highly relevant content to answer their questions and improve the quality of your organic traffic. 

Bounce rate

We spoke earlier about bounce rates, but let’s unveil how to use this metric to help your company. The bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who land on your site and quickly exit without navigating to another page. 

For example, if you have affiliate links on your site, a user might click on a specific link and go off onto a new browser window. Your bounce rate would be high but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing in this particular situation, as affiliate purchases are one of your business goals. If you’re a service based brand and you have a high bounce rate, this indicates that people can’t find the information they’re looking for on your site and exit.

Your bounce rate will depend on the goals you’ve set up on Google Analytics and what type of business you have. If you look at the acquisition overview section of your Google Analytics, you’ll come across the bounce rate. Here you’ll notice the bounce rate percentages from different sources of traffic. If the bounce rates are high for organic traffic, that could mean you’re targeting the wrong keywords or audience.

New & Returning visitors

To get more information on your new and returning visitors visit the audience tab, then click on behavior and “new and returning visitors”. Instead of looking at these metrics separately, it's a good rule of thumb to view them simultaneously as your company grows. 

Over time, you should see both numbers increase. However, if there’s ever a drastic decrease in the amount of returning visitors, that could be an alarming metric. You’d need to deep dive into the reasons why this is happening (such as a recent change on your site or the wrong marketing tactic). 

Benchmarking Google Analytics traffic data 

Let’s be honest here… you need benchmark data to truly understand how well your website is performing. I get it, we’re humans and we need guidelines! So in this section, I’ll cover low and high percentage rates for metrics discussed above. 

For example: 

To add, the new versus returning customers metric varies by industry and type of business however 20-30% for returning visitors is a typical ratio to achieve. 

How to use Google Analytics data to improve your website’s SEO traffic quality and user engagement

Google Analytics data is valuable because it helps us prioritize and strategize how to improve our SEO traffic quality. To truly see the benefits of using Google Analytics and to improve the traffic quality of your site, you’ll need to monitor engagement, conversion, and relevance metrics  over a long period of time, but these are only one part of the puzzle. Sustainable growth will come from continuously researching, analyzing, and adjusting your site.

Downloadable version here

What to do if your engagement metrics are underperforming

On page optimization

Optimizing your published content is an easy way to improve the quality of your traffic and increase engagement. To do so, you want to look at applying keyword research that matches search intent. Group keywords with similar topics and identify the right terms to target through each page of your site.

Other specific on page optimizations include:

• Incorporating your target keyword in the first 200 words of your copy

• Your page title and meta description to have the acceptable Google length (72 characters for title and 170 for meta description)

• Your target keyword is included in H1 and subheadings

Now, let’s focus on design. 

Think of content design 

Another quote for you from Ginny Redish, Consultant Specialist in Web Usability and Writing: ​“Content is the user experience”.

With that in mind, the layout of your website and the way visitors consume content has a gigantic influence on your user experience. Not only can creating human-first content design improve your SEO, it can consequently enhance your traffic and engagement metrics. 

Here are some pointers on how to make this happen:

• Avoid large images and videos that take up a lot of page ‘real estate’

• Split your content into short paragraphs and headings

• Emphasize important words and elements to improve readability

• Use lists and tables where possible

Up next, what to include in your blogs to ensure an excellent website experience.

Write articles that provide the right amount of information

Articles should be comprehensive, not too long just for the sake of word count and not too short where information is missing. Users will know if you’re keyword stuffing or simply providing fluff content that doesn’t actually solve their problems. 

To make sure this doesn’t happen check out these tips:

• Create articles that match the word count of top-ranking competitors but also make content succinct enough so that it doesn’t overwhelm your readers

• Create longer articles that can be promoted on other channels such as social

• Create longer articles that increase time on site metrics

Use the right language

There should be a balance between SEO language and copywriting. Ensure you’re using the right language with these tips:

• I said it before but I’ll say it again...Avoid keyword stuffing (user’s can smell a keyword stuffed article a mile away!)

• Avoid language that is not understandable from the user

• Use simple language with the right amount of keywords and spread those out evenly across your content.

Study the way your audience communicates, and model your content and copy after that. You want your audience to feel comfortable and drawn to your content, not confused and repelled. 

Improve User Experience (UX)

Look at your website and assess how easy it is to read, navigate, find out key pieces of information, and perform any actions.

Here are some quick reminders:

• Place CTAs in the right spots

• Ensure readability is consistent 

• Make sure information is easy to navigate

• Make sure the site architecture has a solid flow

Ensure the website’s design works well on both desktop and mobile

As more consumers buy online for just about everything, the mobile user experience will contribute to your overall rankings. Here are five tips to optimize your responsive site:

1. Check Page Speed Insights for mobile vs desktop

2. Ensure all elements are properly visible and readable on both desktop and mobile

3. Optimize image scale on mobile

4. Simplify navigation

5. Shorten your text 

What to do if your conversion metrics are underperforming

Use direct-response copywriting techniques

Use compelling language that encourages users to take immediate action. Copy should be targeted and to the point. To support that statement, 54% of American adults read at a sixth grade level, or below according to the U.S. Department of Education. So the simpler the copy, the better.

Optimize call-to-actions

Make sure CTAs are placed in the right spots within a page, have the right color and the right text. Use powerful and emotionally driven words that’ll entice quick wins. You’d be surprised at how a single word tweak or color change can drastically increase conversions. Not to mention, this is the precise method to ensure that SEO is bringing in conversions and leads.

Avoid any elements that could distract the user

Although some may suggest pop-ups, let’s be real here— the majority of the time you scramble to click the x so you can get back to scrolling. With that being said, avoid pop-ups, numerous CTA’s, and banners. If people are always in a rush to leave your site, that certainly won’t help any element of your marketing strategy.

What to do if your relevance metrics are underperforming

Target the right keywords 

Before creating a page or a blog, start with keyword research to identify which keywords you should target through your new piece of content. Think like your customer and identify exactly what their intent is and what’s trending in your industry. Also, pinpoint long-tail keywords that are highly specific to the niche you serve. This way, the content you put out will be for a very targeted audience, therefore conversion rates will be higher. 

Review the topic and focus keyword search intent

If the keywords you have selected are not performing well, review whether you selected the right ones and if they match search intent. Research what competitors are doing, so that you can put your own spin on the content around these keywords. 

Localize your content so you’re targeting the audience in your target market

Create content that’s relevant to where you’re located. For instance, if you own a pizza shop in Chicago, you might create a blog about the best places to get fresh cheese in Chicago. So instead of just developing random content, think about localizing content and examples that’ll attract the most qualified audience.

Work on site speed (slower websites have higher bounce rates)

In this day and age consumers want information at the speed of light, in fact 1 in 4 consumers will abandon a website that takes longer than 4 seconds to load. Tough crowd, right? To ensure speedy load times, visit Google’s Page Speed Insights to assess where the site stands in terms of page speed and to identify elements that slow down your website.

Use Google Analytics data to measure and improve the quality of your SEO traffic

At the end of the day, more qualified traffic = more money in the bank. 

So your overall goal should be working towards creating the highest quality content, website, and user experience to convert those visitors into loyal customers. 

To reach these goals, make sure to map out engagement metrics like time on site, and pages per session, conversion metrics like form submissions, and relevance metrics like bounce rate and user geo-location. 

Now, in the beginning I said I’d end with a challenge, so here it is: Create a list of 3-4 priority metrics and craft a realistic goal for each of those. Can you do that? Great! And, for on-going reflection, bookmark this article so that you can refer back when need be. You’ve got this!

Lean into Email in 2022: An Interview with iContact’s Hank Hoffmeier

I like email. Data says almost all of us do.

Email breathes easier than the social noise pollution of customers and brands trying to shout at each other through a disjointed deluge of disaster and dog photos. Ever notice how your brain feels switching from the overstimulation of Twitter to the one-on-one hush of a list of emails which you can either choose to open or delete? Do you experience a difference? Stats indicate that our private email inboxes are a sort of refuge we’ve come to count on, a quieter corner where people can experience satisfying customer service when done right.

When Moz and SMB email marketing software provider iContact  joined hands this past summer, I began looking for an opportunity to explore our shared goals of facilitating brand discovery and brand-consumer communication. Like you, I’ve absorbed years of steady statistics about the outstanding ROI of email marketing amid louder social media hype, but this was my first chance to sit down with an expert like Hank Hoffmeier, who is Strategic Insights Manager at iContact.

I believe reading Hank’s tips and talk on trends today will make 2022 the year you center email in your customer service strategy for its welcome privacy, usefulness, familiarity, cost effectiveness, and excellent conversion potentials.

The profit and popularity of email marketing

Miriam: A stat which stunned me is that email marketing generates $42 for every $1 spent, yet I sometimes feel like email has been presented as “boring” vs. the glaring busy box of social. What is your take on this, Hank?

Hank: According to Demand Curve, email marketing has a higher ROI than any other form of publicity, can drive 6x more conversions than Twitter posting, and is 40 x more likely to be noticed than what a company posts on Facebook. Email marketing allows you to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time, at a ridiculously low cost. Stop throwing money at PPC and social media advertising that takes longer to convert and costs so much.

Email marketing allows you to get personal with your subscribers. This is either not plausible or can be very challenging with other channels like social media that require you to follow customers to message or DM them. Email is where we obtain long form personal messages, obtain order and shipping information, and communicate at work.

With your email marketing campaigns, each message can feel like a one-on-one conversation by using segmentation and personalization. Subscribers can be greeted by first name and can experience content that matters to them on the basis of data such as survey information, purchase history, engagement history and more. Make sure to ask for information to help provide a better experience for your subscribers.

Miriam: Email open rates increased 13.64% in 2020, mostly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but I was surprised to read that it’s actually millennials who are spending more time in email than any other group. What stats convince you most that email is popular, not just with brands, but with everybody?

Hank: A study from Pew Research says six in ten American workers who use the internet say email is “very important” for doing their job, while the Content Marketing Institute reported that 83% of B2B marketers use email newsletters for content marketing. Still not convinced? 95% of online consumers use email! In fact, to sign up for a social media account, you need an email address. The demise of email marketing has been reported year after year, but it is still a pillar in the content marketing world.

Email’s edge amid privacy concerns and consumer protections

Miriam: Consumer privacy has become a huge topic for SEO, and I’ve mentioned above my “quiet corner” idea about email, but I know it also faces challenges. What can you tell me about respecting customers’ privacy?

Hank: Data privacy is going to be trending next year. Email marketers are going to need to do more with less. We are seeing more of an emphasis being placed on data privacy. Apple in particular is creating a challenge in measuring email open rates and identifying subscriber location. For sure, we will see more email and technology companies follow suit. There is also the pending demise of third party cookies to worry about.

By collecting first party data, marketers will be able to continue segmenting, targeting and personalizing their emails for maximum effect. Things that will help marketers prepare would be updating sign up-forms, using surveys, and integrating with CRMs and e-commerce platforms to make better use of data being collected.

Miriam: I’ve talked about social channels being overwhelming, but complaints about groaning inboxes are common, too, especially when customers receive emails they don’t want. What can you tell me about double opt-in as a vehicle for respecting customers’ wishes?

Hank: Marketers should only send emails to people who want to receive emails from them. No exceptions. One way to ensure that subscribers really want your emails is to use a double opt-in process. This allows subscribers to confirm that they want your awesome emails and also helps them find your email in their inbox right away and dig it out from spam, should it land there.

Your double opt-in messaging should not be generic. Get potential subscribers excited to receive your emails and want to opt-in right away! Remember to offer value and entertainment.

More importantly, once subscribers opt-in, you need to send a welcome email right away, telling them what to expect and how often. It helps set expectations and allows you to start your relationship off right.

Miriam: So, what types of emails have you documented as being most welcomed by customers who have definitely opted-in, and have you noticed any differences in this between virtual and local business customers?

Hank: For the most part, the differences are small between brick-and-mortar and e-commerce emails. They are both similar in that brands are looking for conversions and the differentiation is that the conversion for brick-and-mortar can drive traffic into a physical location vs. e-commerce’s solely online purchases. The same email marketing best practices work for both entities.

According to the IDC, 80% of people check their email within 15 minutes of waking up. Email is still the preferred method of communication for consumers. We buy stuff and want to know when it will ship. We want to be entertained and inspired. Marketers need to educate and inform their subscribers using email.

Emails that have images and video tend to perform best. According to Forrester, video content has a 95% retention rate versus a 10% rate with text only. Use more images and videos in your email marketing campaigns to entertain and inform.

The mobile mountain and the marketers’ meh

Miriam: 64% of small businesses are using email marketing, but one-in-five campaigns isn’t formatted for mobile use. This is a huge mountain of a problem! Both Moz and iContact care a lot about SMBs. What advice do you have to help them make the necessary mobile transition?

Hank: Let’s face it, we live in a mobile world. More than half of email opens are on a mobile device. If you are not creating mobile responsive email campaigns, you are creating friction with your recipients. It is a bad experience that will lead to subscribers ignoring your emails or worse, marking them as spam or unsubscribing.

Almost every email marketing platform will have a drag and drop email editor that inherently creates a mobile responsive version for you. iContact has an easy-to-use editor that provides inspiration and great results.

Let’s cover some basic items:

• Email content needs to have the ability to stack elements on top of one another and images and text must conform to the size of the screen they are being displayed on

• Avoid images with small details that will not render well on mobile, while also making sure that your content is not cluttered and allows for finger-friendly clicks and scrolling. Calls to action, such as buttons need to be legible and clickable.

• Use larger font sizes, shorter subject lines, avoid stacking links, and the most important tip is to test, test, test!

Miriam: Sadly, about half of marketers confess they feel the email campaigns they’re engaging in are only poor-to-average in quality. It’s definitely a “meh” state of affairs. What are the top mistakes you see in your day-to-day work in this field and do you have tips for improvement?

Hank: The biggest mistake I see email marketers making is thinking of their campaigns through their lens. They do not get to know their audience (avatar) well enough to send emails that matter to them and wonder why the results are lacking. Consider:

1. It’s important to find the right frequency of emails that resonate. Do not send too many or too few emails. Survey your audience or watch trends in your reporting to find out the right amount of emails to send.

2. The days of “spray and pray” are over. Many marketers fail to use subscriber segmentation. Segmentation allows for better-targeted emails. According to the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), marketers can realize up to a 760% increase in ROI by using segmentation. How about that? Better results for sending the right message to the right person!

3. The most underutilized feature in email marketing is automation. By using workflows, you can create a powerful welcome or nurture series as well as have checks and balances along the way to drive better engagement and conversions.

Miriam: I do feel concerned for SMBs when I receive their emails with formatting errors or other problems that must be undermining the success of their campaigns. What are the bare minimum basics small business owners should look for in an email marketing tool?

Hank: Since email marketing has been around for a long time, whatever platform you choose should not be hard to use, should offer the most up-to-date features, and have good support. Look for these must-haves:

• Segmentation

• Automation

• Easy to use email editor

• Templates

• Dependable support

• Split testing capabilities

Email for welcome stability in 2022

I learned so much from chatting with Hank, and hope you’ve found good takeaways, too. As he says, email marketing has been around for a long time, and there’s something reassuring about that.

Make no mistake, email isn’t standing still. I’m interested in innovations surrounding AMP-style emails that turn mailers into microsites, enabling recipients to complete a checkout, book an appointment, or RSVP without having to leave their inbox. Dark mode email compatibility is another trend I’d like to know more about, and I’m always on the lookout for A/B split test developments that indicate how to prompt more engagement on matters of social progress.

But I think it’s the longstanding reliability of email that appeals to me most. As marketers and business owners, we feel constantly pressured to jump into the latest-greatest-new-thing. There can be fun in that, but also fatigue. Also, wasted client budgets when trendy experiments lack a foundation of proven results. Recently, I saw Rand Fishkin explain that email open rates are 252x higher than Facebook page engagements. Veteran marketers have been softly sharing this kind of wisdom about tried-and-true email marketing for years.

Do experiment! Do build the brands you market to converse everywhere. But don’t forget to take a breather when it’s so readily available, leaning on the steady edifice of email with its history of high conversion rates. Most companies, and most customers, have experienced more rapid change lately than we’ve wanted, and I’d say this should make the dependability of email communications all the more welcome to all parties in the year ahead.

Why Getting Indexed by Google is so Difficult

Every website relies on Google to some extent. It’s simple: your pages get indexed by Google, which makes it possible for people to find you. That’s the way things should go.

However, that’s not always the case. Many pages never get indexed by Google.

If you work with a website, especially a large one, you’ve probably noticed that not every page on your website gets indexed, and many pages wait for weeks before Google picks them up.

Various factors contribute to this issue, and many of them are the same factors that are mentioned with regard to ranking — content quality and links are two examples. Sometimes, these factors are also very complex and technical. Modern websites that rely heavily on new web technologies have notoriously suffered from indexing issues in the past, and some still do.

Many SEOs still believe that it’s the very technical things that prevent Google from indexing content, but this is a myth. While it’s true that Google might not index your pages if you don’t send consistent technical signals as to which pages you want indexed or if you have insufficient crawl budget, it’s just as important that you’re consistent with the quality of your content.

Most websites, big or small, have lots of content that should be indexed — but isn’t. And while things like JavaScript do make indexing more complicated, your website can suffer from serious indexing issues even if it’s written in pure HTML. In this post, let’s address some of the most common issues, and how to mitigate them.

Reasons why Google isn’t indexing your pages

Using a custom indexing checker tool, I checked a large sample of the most popular e-commerce stores in the US for indexing issues. I discovered that, on average, 15% of their indexable product pages cannot be found on Google.

That result was extremely surprising. What I needed to know next was “why”: what are the most common reasons why Google decides not to index something that should technically be indexed?

Google Search Console reports several statuses for unindexed pages, like “Crawled - currently not indexed” or “Discovered - currently not indexed”. While this information doesn’t explicitly help address the issue, it’s a good place to start diagnostics.

Top indexing issues

Based on a large sample of websites I collected, the most popular indexing issues reported by Google Search Console are:

1. “Crawled - currently not indexed”

In this case, Google visited a page but didn’t index it.

Based on my experience, this is usually a content quality issue. Given the e-commerce boom that’s currently happening, we can expect Google to get pickier when it comes to quality. So if you notice your pages are “Crawled - currently not indexed”, make sure the content on those pages is uniquely valuable:

• Use unique titles, descriptions, and copy on all indexable pages.

• Avoid copying product descriptions from external sources.

• Use canonical tags to consolidate duplicate content.

• Block Google from crawling or indexing low-quality sections of your website by using the robots.txt file or the noindex tag.

If you are interested in the topic, I recommend reading Chris Long’s Crawled — Currently Not Indexed: A Coverage Status Guide.

2. “Discovered - currently not indexed”

This is my favorite issue to work with, because it can encompass everything from crawling issues to insufficient content quality. It’s a massive problem, particularly in the case of large e-commerce stores, and I’ve seen this apply to tens of millions of URLs on a single website.

Google may report that e-commerce product pages are “Discovered - currently not indexed” because of:

• A crawl budget issue: there may be too many URLs in the crawling queue and these may be crawled and indexed later.

• A quality issue: Google may think that some pages on that domain aren't worth crawling and decide not to visit them by looking for a pattern in their URL.

Dealing with this problem takes some expertise. If you find out that your pages are “Discovered - currently not indexed”, do the following:

1. Identify if there are patterns of pages falling into this category. Maybe the problem is related to a specific category of products and the whole category isn’t linked internally? Or maybe a huge portion of product pages are waiting in the queue to get indexed?

2. Optimize your crawl budget. Focus on spotting low-quality pages that Google spends a lot of time crawling. The usual suspects include filtered category pages and internal search pages — these pages can easily go into tens of millions on a typical e-commerce site. If Googlebot can freely crawl them, it may not have the resources to get to the valuable stuff on your website indexed in Google.

During the webinar "Rendering SEO", Martin Splitt of Google gave us a few hints on fixing the Discovered not indexed issue. Check it out if you want to learn more.

3. “Duplicate content”

This issue is extensively covered by the Moz SEO Learning Center. I just want to point out here that duplicate content may be caused by various reasons, such as:

• Language variations (e.g. English language in the UK, US, or Canada). If you have several versions of the same page that are targeted at different countries, some of these pages may end up unindexed.

• Duplicate content used by your competitors. This often occurs in the e-commerce industry when several websites use the same product description provided by the manufacturer.

Besides using rel=canonical, 301 redirects, or creating unique content, I would focus on providing unique value for the users. Fast-growing-trees.com would be an example. Instead of boring descriptions and tips on planting and watering, the website allows you to see a detailed FAQ for many products.

Also, you can easily compare between similar products.

For many products, it provides an FAQ. Also, every customer can ask a detailed question about a plant and get the answer from the community.

How to check your website’s index coverage

You can easily check how many pages of your website aren’t indexed by opening the Index Coverage report in Google Search Console.

The first thing you should look at here is the number of excluded pages. Then try to find a pattern — what types of pages don’t get indexed?

If you own an e-commerce store, you’ll most probably see unindexed product pages. While this should always be a warning sign, you can’t expect to have all of your product pages indexed, especially with a large website. For instance, a large e-commerce store is bound to have duplicate pages and expired or out-of-stock products. These pages may lack the quality that would put them at the front of Google's indexing queue (and that’s if Google decides to crawl these pages in the first place).

In addition, large e-commerce websites tend to have issues with crawl budget. I’ve seen cases of e-commerce stores having more than a million products while 90% of them were classified as “Discovered - currently not indexed”. But if you see that important pages are being excluded from Google’s index, you should be deeply concerned.

How to increase the probability Google will index your pages

Every website is different and may suffer from different indexing issues. However, here are some of the best practices that should help your pages get indexed:

1. Avoid the “Soft 404” signals

Make sure your pages don’t contain anything that may falsely indicate a soft 404 status. This includes anything from using “Not found” or “Not available” in the copy to having the number “404” in the URL.

2. Use internal linking
Internal linking is one of the key signals for Google that a given page is an important part of the website and deserves to be indexed. Leave no orphan pages in your website’s structure, and remember to include all indexable pages in your sitemaps.

3. Implement a sound crawling strategy
Don’t let Google crawl cruft on your website. If too many resources are spent crawling the less valuable parts of your domain, it might take too long for Google to get to the good stuff. Server log analysis can give you the full picture of what Googlebot crawls and how to optimize it.

4. Eliminate low-quality and duplicate content
Every large website eventually ends up with some pages that shouldn’t be indexed. Make sure that these pages don’t find their way into your sitemaps, and use the noindex tag and the robots.txt file when appropriate. If you let Google spend too much time in the worst parts of your site, it might underestimate the overall quality of your domain.

5. Send consistent SEO signals.
One common example of sending inconsistent SEO signals to Google is altering canonical tags with JavaScript. As Martin Splitt of Google mentioned during JavaScript SEO Office Hours, you can never be sure what Google will do if you have one canonical tag in the source HTML, and a different one after rendering JavaScript.

The web is getting too big

In the past couple of years, Google has made giant leaps in processing JavaScript, making the job of SEOs easier. These days, it’s less common to see JavaScript-powered websites that aren’t indexed because of the specific tech stack they’re using.

But can we expect the same to happen with the indexing issues that aren’t related to JavaScript? I don’t think so.

The internet is constantly growing. Every day new websites appear, and existing websites grow.

Can Google deal with this challenge?

This question appears every once in a while. I like quoting Google here:

“Google has a finite number of resources, so when faced with the nearly infinite quantity of content that's available online, Googlebot is only able to find and crawl a percentage of that content. Then, of the content we've crawled, we're only able to index a portion.​”

To put it differently, Google is able to visit just a portion of all pages on the web and index an even smaller portion. And even if your website is amazing, you should keep that in mind.

Google probably won’t visit every page of your website, even if it’s relatively small. Your job is to make sure that Google can discover and index pages that are essential for your business.

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