How to Win Potential Consumers with Customer Journey Mapping on Google

If your website is like most others, there is likely a mismatch between the content you provide, and what your prospective customers search for on Google.

This article is about understanding your potential customers and their conversation with Google by using the customer journey mapping method to provide them with the best content. The idea came to me when watching internal user experience teams at our agency, and I hope it will inspire you as an SEO to leave your spreadsheets for a moment and start working with sticky notes (yeah, sticky notes).

Later in the article, as an example of the method, I will show you how a Danish insurance firm managed to come out of nowhere and dominate the conversation for a strategically important insurance product.

I have built +100 customer journey maps over the last year, so I am excited to share my knowledge with you.

I will come back to this later, but let's get a few definitions in place first:

What is a customer journey?

The customer journey is a model, which describes the stages a prospective customer goes through in order to convert to your solution. It is a way for us as marketers to understand what challenges a user confronts during their journey. When we understand it, we know how our marketing efforts should show up at every stage.

There are many different customer journey models, but I prefer the classic AIDA model, adding the Loyalty stage at the end.

Here is a description of the five stages with examples of typical Google queries:

Awareness: The prospects realize that they have a problem or desire and actively start searching on Google. For example, they may think, “Hey, I'm coughing. How do I get rid of it?” and search for “How to stop coughing?” (40K monthly queries in the US).

Interest: The prospects start searching for simple solution queries. An example is “cough medicine” (59K monthly queries). In this stage, they will also look for substitutes (e.g. “honey ginger tea”).

Desire: The prospects become more educated and refine their search to find the right solution for them. They search for different attributes of the product such as segments (“infant cough medicine”) and types (“non drowsy cough medicine”). This is also the customer journey stage where users subsequently get into the buying mode with best/cheapest/discount queries (e.g. “best coughing medicine for dry cough”). They also begin to search for brands. Typical queries on Google could be “Delsym cough medicine” (5.2K monthly queries) and comparison queries, like “Delsym vs Robitussin” (1.6K monthly queries).

Action: The prospects have made their choice and are ready to take action. A typical search would be “Delsym near me” (90 monthly queries).

Loyalty: The prospects have turned into clients and could have questions about the newly purchased product. A typical example could be "Delsym side effects".

What is customer journey mapping on Google?

Customer journey mapping is a traditional exercise when working with user experience (UX), trying to visualize the typical touchpoints for a user and thereby understand how to create a frictionless experience.

As I mentioned in the intro, I had a light bulb moment watching our UX teams. Why couldn’t SEOs adopt this practice and map up the customer journey with Google data? Where UX teams use qualitative interviews, eye tracking, client feedback and gut feeling, Google data is the hard data that’s missing.

The idea of doing customer journey mapping on Google was born.

We have the data right at our feet. With Google's own data sources (e.g. Google Search Console) and third party tools (e.g. Moz Keyword Explorer), SEOs can map out a large part of the customer journey.

Just look at your user data in Google Analytics, and you will see how dominant Google is. According to a study by GrowthBadger, across industries 50-90% of all traffic came from Google. While social media is a great activation channel in 2022, prospects still go to Google when they need to educate themselves before they contact you.

By mapping the entire customer journey on Google we understand:

1. What are the major topics that potential clients are querying on Google?

2. What is the search intent behind the conversation potential clients are having with Google, that might match our USPs?

3. Where are the “peak ends”, meaning the most important conversation touchpoints on Google, that can win or lose a future customer?

4. What is the timeline of search intent, so we understand how to prioritize content development?

Why you should use customer journey mapping on Google

There are three main arguments for why you should use customer journey mapping.

1) Targeting specific keywords is outdated. We need to focus on owning user intent instead.

Especially with Google's introduction of BERT in September 2019, they understand searches better than ever. And with their MUM update, the search experience will become even more impressive. This also means that we, the SEOs, have to adapt to these advances, focus less on targeting specific keywords, and instead focus on the user intent.

To give an example, all the keywords below have the same intent and should be seen as one:

• sleeping bag wash

• Wash sleeping bag

• How to wash sleeping bags

• Best way to wash sleeping bags

The total monthly search volume for this search intent is 4,000 monthly queries in the US, so this is a big touchpoint to overlook in your content, if you sell sleeping bags.

2) We need to share SEO data insights with marketing teams – and do it fast.

It should be our aim to break out of the SEO silo and ensure that SEO supports marketing strategies and activities.

People in your marketing department may not even know that Google Search Console exists, and even fewer may have access, so SEOs need to share the insights from this goldmine of data.

SEO silo analysis can take weeks, but when aligning with the rest of the company, speed is crucial. Decisions in marketing are made on a daily basis, so SEOs need to be able to provide data quickly. A customer journey map can be created inside a few hours, and is a great way to visualize data in ways that any non-SEO can understand.

3) Topic clustering doesn’t give you the full picture.

Are you already working with topic clustering and think that customer journey mapping sounds like the same? It’s not.

A normal topic cluster only covers the Interest/Desire stages in the customer journey. A topic cluster consists of the main page (the money page), which ranks for the most important keyword (e.g. “car insurance”) and various supporting pages (pillar pages), which will rank for secondary keywords (e.g. “car insurance for teens” and “car insurance calculator”).

Customer journey mapping covers the full customer journey including the early part of the funnel and the post-sales stage. These two stages are important to pay attention to, in order to be seen as a topical authority by Google, and of course to help your prospective consumer along their entire journey.

Early-funnel

Studies have shown that helping a user early in the process will make them remember you later on. At an early stage of the journey, the prospect is not yet aware of the solution, so they will do symptom queries. This type of query isn’t so easy to identify, but this also means that your competitors are probably missing out on them. This can be a great opportunity for extra traffic.

To research symptom queries you need to think like your prospect. What would they search for when they aren’t sure what they’re looking for? A way to validate if the symptom queries are relevant for you, check in “Related searches” at the bottom of page one on Google, if any solution queries are listed. It is an indicator, if it is a relevant query or not.

Another important aspect is to educate the prospect so they won’t choose the wrong solution. In my last Moz Blog post on SEO sprints, I showed an example of prospects searching for yellow-tinted glasses for driving at night. This is the wrong solution, because opposing cars have blue lights. This is important content to provide your audience, in order to lead prospects in the right direction. What is a misconception in your industry?

Post-sale

The post-sale queries are very valuable, because these are queries done by actual clients. This is not only about helping them out with their actual problem, but it is also an important touchpoint to warm them up for their next conversion.

If you want to identify post-sale queries quickly, then use this regex formula in your Google Search Console:

\b(clean|broken|wash off|shattered|polish|problem|treat|doesn’t work|replace|doesn’t start|scratch|repair|manual|fix|protect|renew|coverage|warranty)[” “]

If you do not rank well for the queries that show up, then you most likely have a content gap.

Not all of your content will convert directly. Some content is more apt for micro conversions (see a video, read another piece of content, download pdf). With customer journey mapping, you’re forced to place the search intent in order of appearance. This will help you understand how to structure your content and what a piece of content should do.

How to build a customer journey map using Google data

Let me walk you through the process.

Step 1 : Define your persona and your objective

What do we want to obtain, and who is our persona/s? This important first step ensures that we create the scope for the mapping.

Step 2 : Get the data and map out the intents

Next up is to map out the user intent. I will initially use the client’s Google Search Console.

I will filter 12 months of data for a specific keyword. I will then go through my keyword list. In this example I am doing a map for “Natural playgrounds”. One intent is “natural playground equipment”. I have marked three queries below, which have the same intent: Natural playground equipment, Nature playground equipment and Nature play equipment.

This is one intent identified. Usually, I write the intent on a sticky note with the search volume and the average ranking. Here is an example below from a session.

When I am not able to find more intents in Google Search Console I will add data from third party tools such as Moz Explorer. Here I have inserted the keyword “Natural playground” in the suggestion box, and a list of relevant keywords appear.

Step 3 : Map the post-its in a funnel

I then draw up a sales funnel on a whiteboard, where I place the sticky notes. I will move them around and cluster them, where it makes sense. I will eventually revisit my tools to get more data, if I see gaps in the funnel. This should be a quick process. This is how my whiteboard ends up looking:

When I have completed this exercise I have a great understanding of the prospects’ conversation with Google. The next step is to insert the intents in PowerPoint, so it can be presented to the client. Here is an example. The traffic lights show how the site performs (Green = Rank 1-3 in Google. Yellow = Rest of page 1. Red = Page 2 or worse.). The size of the bubbles represent the search volume.

When a map like this is presented, it will naturally kick-start a focus on how we can convert all the intents to green.

How a Danish insurance firm won prospects with customer journey mapping

Købstædernes Forsikring is one of the oldest insurance firms in Denmark, established in 1731. Historically, they have not focused on SEO, so when I started helping them, they had very little non-branded presence on Google.

Step 1 - We want to own the conversation on Google for “salary insurance”

“Salary insurance” is a product offered by all the insurance industry players. If you lose your job, then with this insurance, you can cover 90% of your salary. This is a strategically important product for Købstædernes, and Google is a big touchpoint in their prospects’ customer journey.

Step 2 - Let’s get the data for “salary insurance” and create a customer journey map

To get an understanding of potential customer search intent, we created the following customer journey map. Each bubble represents a search intent. The size of the bubble shows the relative search volume and the color represents their average ranking. I use traffic light colors to visualize this (Green: ranks in top 3, Yellow: Rank 4-10, Red: Outside page 1 on Google).

To map out the conversation with Google, I used their Google Search Console data, supported with third party tools such as Moz Keyword Explorer. Furthermore, I held an interview with the product team to understand the potential client profiles better, so I could identify the initial symptom searches.

Since the marketing team at Købstædernes are not SEO savvy, then a customer journey map was a great way to explain that we were not part of the conversation at all. They immediately grasped our starting point, and could help by identifying the interesting conversations we should be part of. Furthermore, they could take the conversation insights and use them in the rest of their marketing mix.

Step 3 - Executing on the insights from the customer journey map

When the marketing team signed off on the journey map, we moved on to the second part, which was to understand what content to build, repurpose, and optimize. To be able to match topics between prospects' conversation with Google and the content on the website, we needed to optimize 10 pages and create five new pages.

As with most organizations, Købstædernes does not have unlimited resources. Thus, the customer journey map was a great asset to understand how to prioritize their efforts. Content in the lower funnel should be produced first.

Over a period of two months, my small team managed to perform these tasks. While it is not the topic of this article I would like to mention that a project management tool such as Asana, Monday.com, Trello or other is necessary to ensure an efficient process. If you use a spreadsheet (Excel, Google Sheets or other) focus on tasks can easily be forgotten. With a project management tool you can assign tasks, set deadlines, describe tasks and sub tasks, insert tags etc. I see it time and time again that when key employees leave a SEO project is put on hold. I would therefore strongly urge you to use one of these tools to avoid brain drain and focus.

The results after 10 months

Here is the development after 10 months. As you can see, we have managed to own a big chunk of the conversation:

Traffic has gradually increased, with 100% growth for the last three months compared to the prior period.

In summary

Google is by far the biggest touchpoint in most customer journeys across industries, so it is obvious that hard data from Google Search Console and third-party tools such as Moz Keyword Explorer can help us understand user intent. Customer journey mapping on Google is a model to enable the data by visualizing it, ensuring that the full marketing team understands the prospects’ conversation with Google.

At the same time, it gives a clear overview of content prioritization, which is an important point, since most teams have limited resources.

Let me end with a few tips about customer journey maps:

1. Make sure you have a clear goal with your customer journey. If there is more than one goal, break the customer journey into several different customer journey maps.

2. Understand your USPs to focus on the relevant search intent. If necessary, break down the broader user intents into smaller ones on underlying customer journey maps, to get a better overview.

I hope this blog post about customer journey mapping has inspired you to think about how you can understand your prospects' conversation with Google in a new way. Happy mapping!

7 Local Business Incentives to Offer Instead of Amazon Gift Cards

If you sell software, marketing services, or other goods to local business owners, it’s time to reconsider offering Amazon gift cards as incentives. According to ILSR’s 2022 survey of independent business owners:

• 65% of your customer base views Amazon’s market dominance as a challenge to the existence of their business

• 70% want the government to either break up or regulate Amazon

When budget is allocated to increase sign-ups or improve retention with a douceur, we want recipients to feel intrigued, recognized, engaged, welcomed, and understood. It turns out there are much better ways to sweeten a deal than sending a gift card with a logo on it that stands for a threat to the livelihood of the community we want to serve. Quotes from survey participants indicate how hard they are struggling, and how forgotten they can feel:

“Hard to understand how the growth and survival of small businesses has taken such a back seat in both political parties over the years.”

“Make Amazon […] pay their taxes. I have to pay mine, they should pay theirs.”

“We frequently have the opportunity to bid on school district purchase orders, and we lose them when Amazon's prices undercut our margin.”

“Amazon is killing the independent office supply industry.”

“If our cities and towns lose small businesses, we lose essential and culturally significant institutions. If large retailers continue to … monopolize industries, we as individuals also lose the ability to make meaningful choices with our purchases.”

Clearly, with distress signals like these being emitted by the majority of the local business sector, the last thing that will make them feel championed is the sight of an Amazon gift card in their inbox.

Better news via awareness and allyship

The better news is that survey data like this empowers our agencies to ditch vague assumptions that “everyone loves Amazon” in favor of some truly nice, thoughtful, useful alternatives that will demonstrate awareness of clients’ reality! Here are seven Amazon alternatives to suggest at your next marketing huddle:

1) Free consulting with your experts

Experience has taught me that the one thing local business owners may appreciate more than any other incentive you can offer them is a little bit extra of your time. Yes, the time of the experts at your company is very valuable, and you need to charge for it, but you can make a sales campaign much stronger by bundling it with some gratis consulting. Generously helping small entrepreneurs power through a session of their most important FAQs also turns out to be a great way to forge new relationships based on meaningful conversations. You will find out that you learn a lot from the experience that can be of use to your agency. Win-win, indeed!

2) A local business book bag

Offer a tote holding a selection of excellent books for small entrepreneurs. Topics could include economics, tech, marketing, DEI, environment, advocacy, history, and something just for fun. Choose titles that you feel will be of real help to SMBs learning to set up, improve, and market their business. And don’t forget to throw in a copy of “How to Defeat Amazon and Why” by independent bookstore owner, Danny Caine.

3) A ticket to an online local business event or training course

Image credit: Lynn Friedman

Offer a free pass to a virtual conference which business owners can attend from anywhere, a ticket to a post-conference video bundle, or access to an SEO training course like Moz Academy. The chance to learn from experts can take a local business owner to the next level of proficiency in their marketing skills and contribute to their success.

4) Paid subscriptions

How about an offer to pay the company’s subscription for a year to whatever their local newspaper is? We all know these outlets are really suffering with 2,100 local papers having closed since 2004, and this promotion could help both the business owner and their community at the same time. Alternatively, a subscription to one of the larger national publications will give SMBs access to paywalled financial and marketing advice they might otherwise be unable to afford. If doing appeals more than reading, consider paying a few months’ subscription to software or tools to get the business moving forward with their operations or marketing.

5) Grocery gift cards

1 in 5 Americans don’t have enough to eat and of those going hungry, nearly 12 million are children. Even in households where people are still managing to get by, the 7.4% increase in grocery prices over the past year is being felt by most of us. When we refine these overwhelming statistics to a story about just one person, we can easily imagine a mother or father who has a good local business idea which they do not have the ease to pursue because the struggle to put food on the table is all-consuming. Offering a grocery gift card could be a very practical, inclusive, down-to-earth way to create that tiny bit of breathing room a small entrepreneur needs to take the next step in their business plan.

6) Philanthropic options

When your customer base is independent business owners and not the rich, it’s good to remember that multiple studies indicate that the less people have, the more they tend to give. A philanthropic offer could be the perk that helps a local business choose your service over a competitor’s. I’ve seen some good marketing lately. Salesforce, Timberland, Clifbar and Microsoft are planting millions of trees. 4Ocean pulls a pound of plastic refuse out of the sea every time you buy from them. Everlane’s 100% Human clothing collection is underpinned by a 10% donation to the ACLU and Bombas gives clothing to homeless shelters for every piece of apparel you buy. Buy a toothbrush from Mable and they’ll match it by giving one to a child, buy bedding from SolOrganics, and they’ll give you a few bucks to donate to the charity of your choice.

The ROI of cause-driven marketing varies. One survey found that 87% of people will buy a product because the vendor aligns with a cause that matters to them. If your agency has an authentic conviction about a particular cause, extend the opportunity to do good to your potential customers so that benefits flow beyond the narrow confines of a single transaction.

7) General gift cards

If you feel that a gift card to a large, general marketplace is really the best fit for the

audience you’re trying to attract, Etsy has historically been more in keeping with the small business ethic than Amazon. Etsy’s sellers are nearly all small entrepreneurs, with over 90% operating from home and over 80% identifying as women. If you tend to associate Etsy with random crafts, check them out again. There are all kinds of useful office supplies, executive gifts, custom tech goodies, and other items on offer that would be appreciated by most business owners.

Unfortunately, the April Etsy seller strike due to the marketplace raising merchant fees by 30%, despite the brand pulling in record profits, is dimming the once-shiny small business rep of the brand. If this concerns you, you might consider a GoldBelly gift card, with its emphasis on gourmet food, an Ultimate Green Store gift card for a wide selection of eco-oriented merchandise, something from the GiveandGetLocal directory, or simply a pre-paid card from Visa, American Express or another vendor to allow the customer to spend where they choose.

It really is the thought that counts

It was Winston Churchill who said that we make a living by what we get but that we make a life by what we give. When your agency is seeking to give something to the local business community, survey data like ILSR’s can help you choose a gift that will make customers respond with that magic phrase, “This company really gets me.”

A final tip is to reach out for potential partnerships with other companies once you’ve narrowed your selection down to the gifts you’d most like to offer. Vendors will sometimes come up with a good deal for you if you’re using their product or service as part of your agency’s promotion, which can be a great opportunity to further grow your own B2B relationships.

Local business owners are already longing to make a life beyond Amazon, and with a little thoughtfulness, you can demonstrate your brand’s awareness and support.

Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Whiteboard Friday is back for another season of SEO tips, tricks, and insights! 

First up, Dr. Pete takes you through some of the new data we've collected on the ways in which Google rewrites title tags. In addition, he shares three titling patterns to avoid if you don’t want them rewritten. Enjoy! 

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

Video Transcription

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Dr. Pete, the marketing scientist for Moz, and I want to talk to you today about title rewrites. The new version, Google made a bunch of changes in the last 6 or 7 months, and the shortest answer is we don't like them. But as with many things with Google, us not liking them doesn't really change much. 

So I want to talk today a bit about what we've seen in the last six months, some new data that we collected, if things are different or the same, and some of the scenarios where maybe they don't seem that egregious, but Google is rewriting, and that we might want to avoid and that we might not expect to be a problem. I'm going to go through three of those scenarios.

New title rewrite data

So first of all, we did a re-up on our data from last August. Last August, we found that about 58% of the titles we measured across a set of 10,000 keywords were being rewritten. I'm going to define that in a minute. This time around, we found that number is down to 57%. Hooray, a whole percent! Recently, Cyrus Shepard, who used to be with us at Moz, found a very similar number. Google quotes a very different number. So I want to talk to you little bit about how we're defining things and how we're going to change that up a little bit on the Moz side.

Truncation

So our 57% includes a lot of stuff. It includes, first of all, this blue section of the pie, this bluish green, I used too many blue greens here, which I call truncation. That really is when the title is too long and Google has to cut it off. This has been around forever in some form. What can you do? The box right now is 600-ish pixels long. You run out of space, you're out of space. Not really Google's fault. They did change things up a little bit six or seven months ago. Now, instead of just that cutting off and the "..." at the end, they might take a piece from the middle. They might take a complete segment from the middle and not even put the "...". But I'm going to call all of that truncation because they are using your title tag and it's just too long. So I pulled that out.

Addition

I've also pulled out what I called addition, and in this case that's where Google appends either your brand name or sometimes a location. So they're using your title or a segment of your title, sometimes they truncate and add, which is a little confusing, and then adding some additional information they think is useful. Again, I don't think it's really fair to call that a rewrite. So when we pull those out, we're seeing about 30% of the titles in this dataset being rewritten on high volume, competitive keywords.

What is a rewrite?

If you read what Google says, they're calling a rewrite a situation where they take text from somewhere else on the page, say an H1 or some body text, and are using that instead of the title tag. So they're not counting modifications. So we just have to be aware that their definition and ours are a little bit different, and there is a lot of gray area.

I don't want to talk today about kind of the obvious rewrites, where I think Google is doing a good job. If every single page on your website is called website and Google rewrites that, I think that's probably fine. That's good for users, right, and it's probably good for you and for your click-through rate and your engagement. If you take your entire laundry list of keywords and CSV dump them and put them in your title tag and Google rewrites that, I'm going to side with Google on that one too. Sorry, but that's not great. So I think there are situations where Google is doing a decent job. I think it is going to get better over time.

Three title tag patterns to avoid

But I want to talk about three scenarios that might surprise you little bit and that I want you to be careful of. So I'm going to use this fictional business, Bob's Boba. I'm a boba tea fan. The red for the delimiters is intentional.

One of the things we're finding is that Google is getting a little aggressive about commas and pipes and dashes and using them to break things up or seeing them as ways to just separate keywords. So we have to be a little cautious. I think they're overdoing that right now and may tone it down. They've toned it down a little bit, but not quite enough.

Scenario 1: Keyword stuffing light

So my first scenario is what I'll call "keyword stuffing light". It's not egregious, and it kind of makes sense, but Google might not see it that way. So this example, "Boba Tea, Milk Tea, Oolong," okay, three products, "27 Varieties of Boba | Cupertino, Fremont, Sunnyvale | Bob's Boba," all of those things are true in our fictional scenario. All of them are useful. I'm not really stuffing more than three things of the same type in a row.

But a couple things. One, it's too long. Google is going to cut that off. Two, they don't really separate these things conceptually very well yet. They do a little bit. So they might just still see this as a string of keywords, and we are seeing things like this getting rewritten. Now, in the past, they might just take the first part of this and "..." and cut it off, and you'd be okay. The challenge now is they could take something in the middle. So you could end up with Cupertino, Freemont, and Sunnyvale as your display title. Probably not. But you don't really have that control. Now there are more options, from Google's standpoint, which in a way means you have less control. It's a little more unpredictable what's going to happen.

So this is a scenario where are you doing anything terribly wrong? No, but shorten this. Be in control. That's going to be the message of all of these. Take more control over this process because Google is going to take more liberties and they're going to do more than just truncate. So I would suggest focusing on your critical keywords here and not trying to do so much in the title.

Scenario 2: Superlatives

The second example is superlatives, going heavy on marketing copy. This doesn't seem that bad. "The 11 BEST Boba Blends for Boba Lovers." Okay, I put "best" in all caps. It's a little much. But this isn't super spammy. I'm not loaded with marketing terms. But we are seeing Google do a fair amount of rewrites on this kind of title and even stuff that's not that over the top. I think the argument is that it's kind of empty. It doesn't really tell people much. I think you could argue that there are better, more informative titles that might be good for search users and for your engagement.

Again, the challenge here is Google isn't going to just truncate this. They're going to pick something different on your page to replace it with. What's weird right now is the thing on your page they replace it with might be even more superlative and have more marketing copy. So I'm seeing some weird stuff. Okay, maybe if they take that H1 or that header, it's going to be okay. But, again, you don't control that. So be aware of these things and maybe tone the language down a bit and be a little more descriptive. There is a happy medium.

Scenario 3: Site architecture

Finally, we have something that isn't keyword stuffing at all. It's long and it's text heavy, but this is really just a reflection of the site architecture, going from brand to category to subcategory to product. We see this all the time. So this example "Bob's Boba | Drinks Menu | Boba Tea | Popping Boba | Fruit-Flavored Popping Boba | Mango Popping Boba," okay, I've overdone it a little bit. But this is a perfectly acceptable site architecture if the site was fairly large. It's very common for people and for CMSes to try and reflect that in the title. The problem here, again, is Google isn't just going to truncate this. They might pick something like "Flavored-Popping Boba - Bob's Boba" and actually mix and match this in whatever way they want. It could be okay. But, again, you're not in control of it.

We used to advise flipping this. We used to say put the most unique part for the page first. So Mango Popping Boba | Flavored Popping Boba, on and on, and Bob's Boba at the end. In a simple truncation scenario, that was fine. But now that Google is potentially taking something in the middle, I don't think that's going to work so well anymore. So I do think you need to tighten this up and control it.

I know some people are going to argue, well, this is a perfectly valid reflection of our site architecture. Yes, it is. You're not doing anything wrong. But is this really good for users? People on search, they have short attention spans. You scan. I scan. The way we use search and the way we think as SEOs aren't always the same. So you're not going to read all this, even if it was displayed, and this is not really all useful for the visitor. It's perfectly fine in your site architecture to navigate this way and to have that structure. That's great. But you don't need all of this in your title tag. So pick that most unique thing. You can put the brand on the end if you want. Again, you control that, not Google.

Conclusion

So three scenarios here — keyword stuffing light, going a little too heavy on that marketing copy, and finally trying to stuff your entire site navigation into the title. None of these are terrible things, and you're not a bad person, but you're very likely to get rewritten and the rewrites might be a little more random than you'd like.

This data just from this past month, about 30% rewrites. It really hasn't changed that much since Google did the rollout back in August. So be careful. Be aware. Measure and adjust as you go. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time on Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

How to Identify Whether Your Increased Traffic Is Spam

Traffic has spiked — hallelujah! This is what you’ve been working towards!

Pause: before you start celebrating, it’s good to do your due diligence and make sure that glorious, spiked blue line under “All Users” is in fact genuine users visiting the site, and not spam.

The checklist to determine whether or not increased traffic is spam is not too difficult to follow. You’ll probably know in 10 minutes whether it’s time to do a celebratory dance, or if you need to solve a problem. Either way, today you’re going to do something valuable.

Before taking action on that pesky spam traffic, be sure to read this article in full. It’s important that spam traffic is identified from multiple indicators.

Identify spam traffic by checking suspiciously high (or low) metrics in Google Analytics

There are four core metrics that can point toward spam traffic:

• Average Session Duration

• Bounce Rate

• Pages/Session

• New Users

These Google Analytics metrics are incredibly useful for SEO and can be found in Google Analytics > Audience > Overview. Simple!

The more metrics throwing a suspiciously high or low result, the more likely it is that traffic is spam.

GA graph shows Audiences > Overview report. Metrics are looking healthy; no suspicious results. The four metrics used to determine if traffic is spam are highlighted with a blue rectangle.

#1 Average Session Duration

Average Session Duration in Google Analytics shares how long, on average, a user (visitor/person) has spent on a website during one session (a visit).

Generally, spam traffic doesn't spend long on a website. Spam traffic isn’t browsing the site — it’s not reading blogs or researching the products or services provided. Instead, spam traffic usually lands on a page, then bounces.

#2 Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate on Google Analytics is an incredibly useful metric for indicating that there’s a problem on the site.

The Bounce Rate metric shares the percentage of users who visited one page on the site, didn’t engage, didn’t click to another page, and left. Every user who lands on a page and leaves on the same page without clicking to another counts as a bounce.

*A little note for those who are using GA4 (I salute you!), Bounce Rate is no longer a metric. It was replaced by Engagement Rate.

As always with SEO and data analysis, you need to contextualize the data. Not all pages with a high bounce rate indicate a problem. For example, organic traffic might search “brand name + telephone number”, visit the contact page from SERPs, grab the number, and leave to make a call. It’s a bounce, but it’s not a bad thing — the user was served.

One guarantee is that a percentage of users will bounce. Artificially low bounce rates definitely need attention. Pictured below is a screenshot from a client’s Google Analytics account. Their analytics was reporting a 1.47% bounce rate. Seem a little too good to be true? It is.

After some investigation, this site was found to have two analytics tags. The duplicated UA codes were skewing the results. It’s for reasons such as this that I reiterate the importance of checking numerous data points before assuming increased traffic is spam.

#3 Pages Per Session

If there’s quality traffic on site (aka not spam), then you can expect to see users viewing multiple pages per session. Naturally, engaged traffic clicks around the site.

Spam traffic is most likely going to view 1.00 (or a very low number of) pages. If the Pages Per Session metric is plummeting with increased traffic, then it’s a strong indicator the traffic is spam.

#4 New Users

If Google Analytics is reporting 100% new users to a site or a significant increase in new users, then this may be spam traffic. To determine if new users have spiked, compare the percentage of new users with historic data and look out for a spike.

Check your traffic sources: spam traffic is often hidden in referral traffic

If you’ve looked at the metrics in Google Analytics and it’s pointing to spam, then referral traffic is the next place to go.

By looking at the data under Traffic Sources, you can find which links are sending spammy traffic, then you can decide what to do about it. Generally, the action is either to disavow the link and/or set up a spam filter, which helps reduce the spam within Google Analytics reporting. Both of these options are covered below.

Find referral traffic

First, find referral traffic by visiting Google Analytics > Acquisition > All Traffic > Overview > Channels > Referral

Review the links pointing to the domain and driving traffic. If the links are highly relevant and recognizable, they’re fine.

If a link feels spammy and/or the traffic coming from the link appears to be returning some suspicious metrics (see bottraffic.pw pictured below), that’s an indicator of spam.

An increase in spam traffic from referral can go unnoticed on websites with a high volume of genuine traffic, since it’s often a minor inflation and impactless. However, spam traffic can have a greater impact on smaller or new websites since it can largely skew data by percentage.

The screenshot below shows a small website with only 120 users. The top referrer — bottrffic.pw — is driving 66 users, more than 50% of overall users. If the domain name alone wasn’t enough to conclude that the traffic is spam, the metrics — 0% bounce rate, two pages/session, 66 users (all of which are new), and an incredibly short average session duration — certainly point to spam.

Check your traffic’s geographics

Another indicator of spam traffic is increased traffic from countries that aren’t targeted by the digital strategy.

It’s incredibly important to reiterate here that in order to decide whether or not traffic is spam, numerous indicators of spam traffic must be present. It’s not enough to see an increase in traffic from a non-target country and assume it’s spam. Always do your due diligence and check different reports before reacting to potential spam.

The screenshot below shows the geographic report for a B2C website. The company ships products to consumers in the US and Canada, yet traffic from other countries is finding the site. Unlike bottraffic.pw above, the metrics don’t scream spam traffic.

Some investigation proved the traffic was genuine. It was organic traffic from blogs. In this instance, you can accept that websites will occasionally reach audiences in different countries. If the data is not useful, Google Analytics provides an option to filter out traffic by country.

Take action against spam traffic

If you’ve checked multiple metrics and see at least a few indicators that your traffic spike might be the result of increasing spam, you have a couple options.

Action option 1: Disavow spam backlinks

Disavowing links is not something to be taken lightly. Before you take any action with a disavow, you need to be certain that this is the right thing to do and the link is definitely spammy and harmful to the site.

Google’s disavow recommendation is: “You should disavow backlinks only if:

1. You have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, AND

2. The links have caused a manual action, or likely will cause a manual action, on your site.”

In the instance of bottraffic.pw, it might be enough to simply filter the traffic in Google Analytics (see instructions below), but if you feel a disavow is needed, then follow Moz’s instructions on When & How to Disavow a Link.

Action option 2: Filter spam traffic in Google Analytics

Thankfully, Google is pretty well informed about which websites drive spam traffic and which don’t. (You can see how Google might wise up to a domain like bottraffic!) This means that you can avoid risky disavows, and instead, simply set Google Analytics to filter out bot traffic.

Here are the five steps you need to take to filter spam in Google Analytics:

1. Head to the “Admin” cog in the bottom left-hand corner

2. See the “View” section within settings

3. Click “View Settings”

4. Look out for the tick box that reads “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders”

5. Save

Remember, a filter view will filter the data from the date it was added. Historic data will remain exactly the same. It helps to take note of the date you added this change so you can rationalize the inevitable drop, big or small, in traffic when you stop recording spam traffic in GA.

Keep an eye on spam traffic

All websites have a percentage of spam traffic, and how you deal with it depends on the website, the impact of the spam, and the potential harm. It’s wise to be diligent and stay close to the data so you can spot a problem if it arises.

• Check in on your core site metrics so you’d spot a drastic change when it happens.

• Run quarterly backlink audits and check that links to the site are not causing inflated traffic spikes.

• If you haven’t already, add the bot filter to GA

Stay aware of spam and always run a double-check if there’s a sudden spike in traffic. The optimist in all of us could easily overlook such a problem.

You Can Go Your Own Way: How to Get Things Done When You’re the Only SEO

If you’re an SEO like me, you probably spent at least a year or two at an agency where you worked with other experienced SEOs. On large teams, there’s always someone to learn from, bounce ideas off of, or to help finish projects on time.

But what happens when the SEO team is just you? This is the question I had when, after several years agency-side, I moved in-house to be the first and only SEO the organization ever had.

More than three years later, I’m still a team of one. I had to figure out how to accomplish my goals without the built-in support of an established team, and although there are challenges, being the only SEO is an opportunity to flex your knowledge, develop the practices that will bring the organization into the digital age, and maybe even grow your own team.

Here’s how I get things done, and hopefully some of these practices will be helpful for you as well!

How and why some organizations start with just one SEO

Many “legacy” organizations are going through a digital transformation: transitioning from traditional media to a digital presence by investing in their websites and digital specialists. The pandemic likely accelerated this process, and these groups will be hiring their first dedicated SEOs.

This is how I was hired. The Nature Conservancy is one of the largest environmental nonprofits in the world, with offices in dozens of countries and thousands of employees. One SEO. Yet this is fairly advanced — most nonprofits have zero*.

*Sidenote: If you are a nonprofit SEO I would love to connect!

One of the first digital transformation hires was the analytics director, Jenny. Jenny’s mission was to find opportunities to grow the site. Almost immediately, she saw that half of the website’s traffic is from organic search. So she asked, “Who manages search here?” Turns out, no one. She believed that if the website was important, the organization needed to invest in it. And that meant a strategy for search.

Jenny needed to highlight how beneficial an SEO would be. She built an analytics dashboard for the CMO, who was from a traditional media background. His first question was, “What’s organic search?”

Yes, really. Then he had a lightbulb moment: “Oh, so Google! Wow, that’s all our traffic?”

And a new SEO position was funded.

A rough start

Unfortunately, this realization came at a less than ideal time. The Nature Conservancy was in the middle of this digital transformation, starting to heavily invest in digital marketing, building a team, thinking strategically about the website, and the CMS was shutting down. They scrambled to find a new CMS and execute a site migration.

No worries, they thought, the web developer vendor will handle SEO. Their contract included this line item: “SEO industry best practices for relaunch”.

If your stomach just clenched, imagine how I felt when, during an interview, my soon-to-be-boss excitedly said, “You might have noticed that the website looks a little different today. Our relaunch went live this morning!”

Yes, they went through a site migration while hiring for an SEO. They celebrated with cake.

Teams without an SEO don’t know what they don’t know, and they’ll make mistakes that you will be responsible for fixing. Until that moment, I had been thinking that I’d be setting the SEO strategy for the future of the organization, help the website emerge as an authority and a leader in the nonprofit space, and contribute to my personal goal of furthering the mission. Instead, my first several months on the job would be cleaning up the migration.

When I started, there were hundreds of errors across the site. It was slow, there were no dedicated SEO fields in the CMS, and there were broken links everywhere. Worse, there was no SEO guidance for content creators, meaning each new page created more errors.

So, how did I start to move the needle on over 2,000 pages that were published with zero thought towards SEO? I had to triage: there was no way I could fix all the issues myself, so my priority was slowing the rate at which new, problematic pages were published.

The solo SEO process

Step 1: Make friends on other teams and find your evangelists

When you’re the only SEO, especially if you’re also the first, it might seem like no one at your organization understands your job. But someone, somewhere, does — at least a little. You just need to find them.

And when you do, don’t immediately ask for favors or demand they change how they do their jobs. Approach your new friend with empathy, interest, and understanding. Start by learning how you can help them do their jobs.

You don't need people skills to be an amazing SEO, but an SEO with unparalleled diplomacy skills and innate customer empathy is a force to be reckoned with.

— Eli Schwartz (@5le) February 11, 2022

Analysts

My first friends were on the analytics team. Obviously I had Jenny, the analytics director, and I also had Leigh Ann, an amazing analytics architect. She had been with The Nature Conservancy for 20 years and knew how desperate the site was for SEO guidance. Chances were if I was annoyed at an issue, she had been annoyed at it for years. She was thrilled some of these issues were finally being addressed, and I was thrilled I had current and historical data to back up my recommendations.

Developers

My second friends were the developers. When you’re the only SEO, you’re the default expert on both content and technical SEO. I give the developers a heads up on what the content team has planned that might require their involvement and, more importantly, educate the content team on the level of effort required for seemingly small tasks. This not only helps me directly, it also increases understanding and keeps relationships smooth across teams.

Other marketers

One unexpected friend I made early on was Rachel, a marketer with the Florida chapter. She worked with SEOs in a previous role and understood the value of organic search. She reached out to me after a training, wanting to collaborate. Together we created a new page specifically designed to bring in organic traffic.

The topic was mangroves, trees that grow in coastal saltwater that provide important habitat for animals and protect communities from storm impacts. The Florida chapter talked quite a bit about mangroves but didn’t have a dedicated page for them. I sent Rachel some keywords, questions, and examples of mangrove content and she built a new page. We collaborated on every element. We both wanted to show how SEO could improve the kind of content most marketers were creating.

A persistent notion among marketers is that their pages are primarily seen because they’re promoted. While the page was shared on social media and in an email, within a few weeks, it was ranking for our target keyword. Six months later, 85% of the traffic to that page was from organic search. I made sure to give that page — and Rachel — a shout out, both to give her credit and to show other marketers the kind of success SEO can bring. She also shares the success of the page with other marketers and is a valuable SEO evangelist.

Step 2: Provide SEO education every day

It doesn’t matter if you work with hundreds of SEOs or you’re the only SEO, every SEO role involves a good amount of education. The field changes frequently, new clients and stakeholders have varying levels of understanding (or worse, outdated ideas), and websites and priorities change. You need to keep up with the field and communicate changes and best practices simply and effectively.

When a Client asks you if you can “SEO this page” pic.twitter.com/DvNJc3tVO4

— Robert “Bert” Berousek (@RAABstatus) January 31, 2022

Agency clients expect their vendors to be consultants, but when you’re in-house, it can be easy to forget to treat your colleagues and superiors like a client. And when you’re the only one with SEO expertise, everyone has questions. It’s your job to not only answer their questions, but also to be proactive.

Being the only SEO means speaking up and asserting your knowledge. Within my first two months, I conducted an SEO 101 training open to anyone at the organization. I covered what SEO is, what it means for content creators, busted myths, walked through what a SERP looks like, how to optimize pages using our CMS, and highlighted examples of pages that were already doing a great job. I ended the training by giving attendees steps for conducting their own research, and offering to help anyone creating new content. (Giving out candy doesn’t hurt, either.)

Of course, not everyone is going to react well to someone who comes in and tells them the way they’ve been doing things this whole time is wrong. Naturally, you’ll encounter resistance. That’s okay — focus on those who do want to work with you, and minimize conflict with everyone else. Results, hopefully, will speak for themselves.

You get to choose the SEO hill you die on. Figure out what’s going to move the needle the most at your organization. Understand when to fight and when to let something go in order to appease that higher up you just can’t win over right now.

Step 3: Do (at least some of) the work yourself

One of the biggest culture shocks moving in-house was the level of bureaucracy standing in my way. The larger the organization, the more hurdles you’ll have to jump. Sometimes it takes half a dozen people to approve a title tag change and content owners are sometimes always too busy to fix their broken links. I quickly realized there would be times I’d need to just do things myself.

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[awaiting final ED review]

— Shit Nonprofits Say (@nonprofitssay) October 7, 2019

If your SEO agency experience ever involved providing recommendations to your point of contact and then wondering why almost nothing got implemented, you may have no idea how long it takes to actually do the work you’re recommending, or what very real barriers your client faces. I didn’t when I was with agencies.

At The Nature Conservancy, I tried everything I could think of to encourage content owners to fix their issues: meeting one-on-one with them, sending emails with step-by-step instructions, even setting up automated email reminders. They just didn’t have the time.

So, I started making some of the changes myself. I’d remove a few broken links on one page, update title tags and meta descriptions on another, and worked with my team’s writer (who was willing to pitch in) to update content. It’s important to not be too busy, proud, or afraid to do the work.

Thankful for the weekend, and the opportunity to do the work that was assigned to me in all of this week’s meetings.

— Shit Nonprofits Say (@nonprofitssay) August 23, 2019

If you’re thinking this is time consuming, you’re right. If content owners didn’t have the time to manage a dozen pages, how could I manage thousands? Right when I was starting to resign myself to spending Saturdays doing all the stuff I was recommending so we could start seeing results, we hired a production manager, Lane. He quickly made a sizable dent in our backlogged work.*

*In the never-ending cycle that is nonprofit work, Lane’s plate is now also overloaded.

I was lucky that we had the budget to hire Lane, but what if we didn’t? It would have been unrealistic and unfair for me to actually spend my weekends implementing optimizations across thousands of pages. If anyone is in this position now, build a case for hiring someone. Estimate the time it would take to implement your recommendations, and the cost of not implementing as much as you can. Use the metrics that matter to the powers that be, and show how SEO contributes to their own goals. Ask your advocates for help, especially if they might have some insights you don’t.

In the meantime, protect your priorities: Block off time on your calendar for focused work (and use it), enforce no-meeting Fridays, don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good” or “done”, learn how to say “no” to tasks that don’t fit your priorities, and recognize and admit to your limits.

In essence, do the work, but don’t actually work through your weekends!

Step 4: Find your community

It can be a bit lonely and isolating to be the only SEO at your organization. Who do you go to for a gut check, a proofread, or to ask a dumb question without judgment when you’re the only SEO? You need to find your community outside your employer.

First and foremost, you don’t need to have every answer immediately. “I don’t know, let me find out” is an acceptable answer. You can Google answers to the questions you’re asked, or you can find people to ask.

Former colleagues, former classmates in similar positions, website forums, even Twitter hashtags can be a good community. Women in Tech SEO is a wonderful, global community for women in the field. I also had some success reaching out to others in similar positions at related companies. There are SEO podcasts, YouTube videos, webinars, conferences, and online courses to learn from.

No matter where you find your community, don’t just take: remember to help others as much as they help you.

Why it’s actually great to be the only SEO

Being the only specialist at a company comes with unique challenges, as outlined here. But there are some wonderful benefits to being the only SEO on your team.

The wow factor

Chances are, your colleagues and superiors are learning a TON from you. I regularly hear things along the lines of, “Wow, I never knew we needed to do this!” or “This is hugely helpful!” for simple best practices.

Employee appreciation

Your colleagues can be extremely happy you’re on the team. Like Leigh Ann, the analytics architect, who had spent years measuring metrics that no one had been working on. And Rachel, from the Florida chapter, who got to show her boss results from our collaboration.

It feels good

When there’s no one else who knows SEO at your organization, there’s also no one to disagree with you! But in addition, if you’re the only SEO on the team, your company may be low on digital expertise, maybe even transitioning from traditional media to a digital presence. You get to genuinely help bring an organization into the digital future and show how SEO can have incredible results.

Core Web Vitals: Finding Common Ground Between SEOs and Developers

Working with developers to align on technical and SEO priorities is a challenge faced by many in-house SEOs, and by SEO agencies offering recommendations. How do we start conversations and support initiatives that get developers and SEOs all working towards the same goal? Is Core Web Vitals the common ground we need?

In this conversation with Moz Developer, Lucas Rasmussen, we explore his recent project aimed at improving our A/B testing experience and how it overlapped with Core Web Vitals.

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Question: What is your role at Moz?

Lucas: I’m a Web Developer at Moz. I manage the Moz website and content management system (CMS).

Question: What was the main objective of your recent Cloudflare project?

Lucas: I started a project based around making an A/B testing suite for the Moz website that focused on improving split test results and a better more consistent visitor experience. The problem we had to solve was to run client side A/B tests without a different customer/page experience. When someone loads the page as part of an A/B test, the page flashes white for a split second and it affects the experience, which affects the overall validity of the test. We wanted to do better for Moz.

We chose to create a system using Cloudflare, where Cloudflare automatically shows two different types of pages. This way we could build a system where the A/B test page loads just as fast as if it wasn’t an experiment.

I had an ambitious goal of getting average page load time across the whole site down to two seconds.

Question: How long did it take from ideation to completion?

Lucas: All-in-all it took around 2-3 weeks to complete with an additional two weeks of planning. This also involved changes with our CMS, and a few misplays along the way.

We needed some help from our engineers, learning how Cloudflare workers actually work. They are very powerful!

The core work took one week in its entirety, working out what needs to be done — getting feedback, responding to that, and actually doing the work.

Question: How are you tracking the results?

Lucas: I’m tracking my results in the Cloudflare dashboard specific to Web Analytics. We are currently limited to 30 days of tracking, I’d love to see more to see changes over time.

It might be worth noting that if you want more data, Moz Pro Performance Metrics section of Site Crawl displays historical data for up to 90 days for tracked URLs.

I’m keeping an eye on what’s going on with the page load time, especially the request time. When the timing goes up, that’s a flag that there is a problem somewhere. It indicates to me that something isn't cached.

Looking back at our ambitious goal of getting average page load time across the whole site down to 2 seconds. We have currently plateaued at 2.6 seconds. But we are tracking a large portion of users across the whole site.

Question: What was the most enjoyable part of the project for you?

Lucas: Turning it on and seeing the impact and change to page load time — l Ioved being able to see real-world results. And in this case IT WORKED. There are so many changes you can make and you think they are going to change something, and even if you know they are going to make a difference, you might not see the impact... When I changed users to cached the difference was significant, from around 1,500 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds.

Question: What do you know about the importance of Core Web Vitals?

Lucas: I do have visibility into Core Web Vitals as a concept. LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) in particular is a metric I track in the Analytics dashboard.

Click on the GIF for a handy refresher on what LCP is from our learn center.

If SEO practitioners are looking to explore their Core Web Vitals and start conversations with their developers, they can do that through the Moz Pro interface.

The Performance Metrics feature in Moz Pro really enables SEOs to automate and streamline performance analysis so you can collect and track performance in one place. It also allows you to identify critical pages that need to be optimized. Get a holistic viewpoint on how your pages are performing for core web vitals and performance, alongside other additional SEO data like page authority, rankings, traffic and other crawl issues. We provide non-technical, non-jargony language that helps you understand how you can start fixing things to improve those scores.

8 Q1 Local Search Developments You Need to Know About

A constant stream of developments and issues are the simple building blocks that shape our dynamic local search environment but the task of keeping up with the ongoing news can be complex when you’ve already got plenty to do. The first quarter of 2022 brought us some new opportunities (and a few problems) which you might have missed due to general busy-ness. Today’s column is a quick roundup of interesting happenings that merit your awareness for the sake of the local businesses you market.

1. Google really wants local businesses to discover Pointy

First time ever seeing this "Help customers find products they need" module inside the Google Business Profile dashboard. @rustybrickpic.twitter.com/2zWbpI0qvT

— Colan Nielsen (@ColanNielsen) January 25, 2022

Colan Nielsen spotted Google advertising free access to Pointy, right in the Google Business Profile dashboard. The time is right to get clients thinking about multiple ways to vend, and the Pointy system couldn’t be easier for retailers to use. The bigger picture, though, is whether Google’s efforts to promote their shopping functions can compete with Amazon for control of online transactions and how that may impact local business owners. Here’s how the experts at Near Media explain Google’s bet that inventory + local can help them win:

“Local inventory (online) can help divert consumers away from Amazon. But it's not inventory alone; it's inventory + convenience.... stores able to offer real-time inventory and multiple convenience options can win."

2. Google emphasizes recency of business status to bolster consumer trust

Google local panel showing “confirmed by phone call” notation https://t.co/OKPMurhlG3 via @tldrMarketingpic.twitter.com/RlIYQU6xZm

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) March 3, 2022

Barry Schwartz came across this notification on GBPs stating that business hours were confirmed via phone call, and other labels we’ve discovered have included “Confirmed by this business” and the somewhat mysterious “Confirmed by others”. I take this as evidence that Google knows if searchers are getting inaccurate data from listings that then misdirects and inconveniences them, it will erode trust in the product. It’s an awareness local SEOs have long advocated for the search engine to bring to its review corpus. On that note, the end of 2021 saw the rollout of an updated Chrome extension called Transparency which purports to use AI to predict whether a profile contains fake reviews. If you’ve used it, please let me know what you think.

3. Speaking of reviews, there was a big pause in them posting

If your clients were calling in fretting about missing reviews in mid-March, it was likely due to a confirmed Google bug. Hopefully, you saw resolution of this widespread issue about a week after it occurred. If not, time to review your review strategy to diagnose why feedback you’re expecting from customers isn’t showing up as there’s indication that Google’s review filters are becoming stricter. This development can seem like a big hassle to business owners, but it’s a necessary one. I’m seeing signs that consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the presence of fake local business reviews, and if Google doesn’t step up their efforts to limit review spam, customers will lose trust in their platform and your listing.

4. Review snippets can appear right on the map, and it’s pretty neat!

⭐️Seeing review snippets get some prominence directly on the map and I like it! Another reason to get keywords in your reviews - find out how: https://t.co/khK5WW4cmS. pic.twitter.com/u1VIwLkRKK

— Allie Margeson (@SeoAllie) January 17, 2022

We already know reviews are hugely influential but just think of the impression they must make on customers when they appear right on the map, as captured by Allie Margeson. In her search for local second-hand spots, we see customers exclaiming, “Best thrift store in the area!” and “It’s the best thrift shop ever!” amid the rolling blue and green of Google’s maps. While I’m not aware of any process to prompt this special treatment, it’s just one more incentive to keep public feedback coming in with an organized reputation and reviews strategy.

5. Owner responses are finally showing on LSAs

Local Services Ads finally started showing business owner replies to reviews about a month or so ago (but only on mobile)https://t.co/7pSVJm8zAz

— Tom Waddington (@tomwaddington8) March 17, 2022

Tom Waddington came to Twitter with the good news that Google’s Local Service Ad reviews are, at long last, displaying owner responses, though only on mobile. With the FTC’s recent accusation that HomeAdvisor misrepresented lead stats and pricing to small business owners, it’s a moment of serious opportunity for Google to treat its service providers base better. Displaying the work business owners put into writing great responses to reviews is one small step in that direction, but there’s so much more Google could do to become local business-centric. Here’s hoping!

6. GBP Insights in-SERP

👀OOH look - Google Business Profile post metrics 📊(views and clicks) made it to the IN SERP experience pic.twitter.com/yc1bwoR10J

— Claire Carlile🕊️ 🌊 🥑 🦥 (@clairecarlile) March 4, 2022

Don’t be startled if you see your Google Business Profile metrics show up right in the SERPs when you’re logged in. I’d predict that what Claire Carlile captured here is one of many developments we’ll see in this direction, now that Google has determined that SMBs should manage more of their experience inside the search engine results. I find that messy, but others may like the interface. This is a good time to review what the labels in GBP insights actually represent.

7. Refine/Broaden SERP Feature Rolls Out

This feature, which allows users to access more nuanced results, was previewed at an event last fall and has now emerged in the US English-speaking market. Barry Schwartz points out that this new option could have the impact of either offering searchers more ways to discover your business or simply distracting them from it. This rollout is a perfect example of the type of test Google is always running in their quest for more relevant results, as we recently covered in-depth here at Moz in QRG Clues to How Google Evaluates Local Business Reputation. From time to time, it’s smart to ask ourselves how our own search behavior is evolving across the lengthy timeline of Google’s feature rollouts. How differently do you search in 2022 compared to your behavior a decade ago?

8. We’ve learned more about Vicinity

Consider this a topic-in-progress because local SEOs and businesses are continuing to discover and interpret the impacts of Google’s late-2021 Vicinity update. This is what we know so far:

1. Sterling Sky reported that the update appeared to hinge on proximity (like our old friend Possum) and noted that this rollout correlated with the significant changes to pack layouts that occurred in December. Sterling Sky observed that packs were more zoomed in and featured a greater overall diversity of businesses. Their team also shared that keywords in business titles appeared to have been subject to this update.

2. BrightLocal then published the largest study I’ve seen, to date. Their survey of nearly 400 Google Business Profiles across 5,000 keywords turned up a loss of roughly 5 - 8 places in the local SERPS for listings with stuffed titles. What is a bit stranger, however, is that brands with legitimate keywords in their titles suffered the same demotion. In other words, if a company you market is actually called Luxury Town Cars of Marin, the Vicinity update may have docked it while boosting a competitor called Jim’s Nice Rides. Meanwhile, long business titles also saw downward movement, which will be problematic for any company with a name of more than 31 characters. Such brands saw the greatest losses of an average of about a 9-spot trip down the rankings.

It’s important to know that experienced local SEOs are interpreting Vicinity in different ways, as evidenced in this valuable Twitter thread started by Darren Shaw. On the one hand, you could say that keywords in the business title have become a negative ranking factor. Or, you could see them as still being a positive factor, but one which Google has now simply dialed down, causing the losses. However you style the outcomes, I think there are two important questions involved:

1. Will Vicinity curtail the practice of keyword stuffing business titles because it’s no longer yielding the same rewards. We can hope so, as the local SEO community has long urged Google to stop favoring this silly practice.

2. Does Vicinity finally answer all those forum FAQs about rebranding local businesses to suit Google’s historic bias toward keywords in business titles? Companies have done so in the past, but does Vicinity make the practice not worthwhile?

Read the Twitter thread to see a variety of opinions. My own is that a) spammers will take awhile to realize what appears to have happened with Vicinity and so they will continue to stuff for some time to come and b) I’ve historically found that it’s better to do your own thing well than to worry too much about pleasing Google’s foibles. The latter take may seem antithetical to SEO, but having witnessed patterns like the rise and fall of EMDs, I tend to disfavor legitimate local businesses jumping through too many hoops in hopes of Google’s biases and weaknesses shining upon them until the next update. My advice is to keep studying emerging research on the impacts of Vicinity to arrive at your own thoughtful interpretation before changing any of your best practices.

Onward to Q2

Image credit: Ron Frazier

A pattern of significant developments in Q1 reveal a Google which is highly focused on the many aspects of reviews. Take this as a sign that local SEOs and business owners should be, as well. Meanwhile, Google’s emphasis on transactions and search quality tracks their progress in convincing consumers to shop with them, not Amazon.

While the titans fight it out, my Q2 suggestion is to help independent local businesses plan and publicize their summer strategy to keep serving the community amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Don’t buy into the market-driven hype that everything is “back to normal”. Instead, keep ideating on bringing necessities and cheer to the whole community, including the households of your many neighbors with vulnerable loved ones. This is important work, and your success will be reflected in your reviews, results, and revenue in the quarter ahead.

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