MozCon 2022: The Initial Agenda

We’re just about three months out from the big event (can you believe it?)! Today, we’re excited to give you a preview of everything our speakers have in store when they take to the stage this year.

With a healthy mix of fresh faces joining us for the first time and fan favorites making a return appearance, our speaker lineup this year is bound to make waves. While a few details are still being pulled together, topics range from technical SEO, content marketing, and local search to link building, machine learning, and way more — all with an emphasis on practitioners sharing tactical advice and real-world stories of how they’ve moved the needle (and how you can, too).

And in case you hadn’t heard, you’ve got two incredible ways to join us this year, a fully immersive in-person experience in Seattle, or through our livestream only pass which will be broadcast live from the Seattle stage. Can’t join us in person or for the livestream? We’ve got you covered with an option to pre-purchase access to the post-event video recording bundle so you can catch the sessions when your schedule permits.

Grab your MozCon ticket today and get ready for all the fun!

Register for MozCon

The Emcees

We have two incredibly entertaining MozCon Emcees this year to guide you through each day and keep the show rolling along:

Ola King

User Researcher | Moz

Rob Ousbey

SEO Consultant

The Speakers

Take a gander at who you'll see on stage this year, along with some of the topics we've already worked out:

Amalia Fowler

Founder | Good AF Consulting

Leadership and Community in Search Marketing: Strong Teams, Better Results

As search marketers, we spend a lot of time optimizing our campaigns, but don't have the same time to put into nurturing our teams. This is especially true when faced with things like a global pandemic, the great resignation, increased competition and the whims of Google. It's easy to forget that taking purposeful action in our working relationships can help lead us to better results. In this practical and actionable talk, we'll bust the myth that you have to be a manager to have influence, discuss the importance of leadership and community, identify three key characteristics strong teams have in common, get tips on fostering those characteristics regardless of your role, and discuss how taking the time to do this serves all of us, clients included.

Amanda Milligan

Head of Marketing | Stacker

The Untapped Power of Content Syndication

Many marketers have long wondered whether syndicated content has SEO value. To help provide an answer, Amanda walks through case studies that illustrate the significant impact syndicated content strategies can have on your site's authority, rankings, and traffic.

Amanda Jordan

Director of Digital Strategy | RicketyRoo

The Future of Local Landing Pages

Location landing pages are extremely important for local business but are often repetitive and uninteresting. This presentation will focus on strategies that can make your location landing pages useful and interesting to search engines and site visitors. We'll discuss ways to incorporate first party data, third party data, and user generated content to create local landing pages that don't fall short.

Andy Crestodina

Co-founder / CMO | Orbit Media Studios

SERP Strategies

Every keyphrase is a competition. But the best competitor for that competition depends on what you see in the SERP. Getting your page to rank organically is only one of the many possible strategies. In this talk, Andy will explain big picture strategies in the context of ever-more crowded search results pages.

Areej AbuAli

Head of SEO | Papier

Unlocking the Hidden Potential of Product Listing Pages

E-commerce website product listing pages contain hidden potential. This talk is all about unlocking the magic of your listing pages by making the most out of filters and internal linking. Instead of being fixated on those landing page head terms, let’s turn our attention to the indexability of long-tail pages with high conversion. Whether you work in e-commerce or not, we’ll also cover how to embed yourself within tech teams and analyze impactful changes.

Chris Long

VP of Marketing | Go Fish Digital

Advanced On-Page Optimization

Take your on-page optimizations to the next-level using advanced tactics for one of the most common SEO tasks. This presentation goes beyond simply adding keywords. Chris will show you how to utilize tools such as IBM's Natural Language Understanding to find semantic entities of competitor pages, how Google's EAT guidelines apply to content, and what actionable steps you can take to improve content, perform on-page content experiments, and measure the impact of those tests.

Crystal Carter

Head of SEO Communications | Wix

Search What You See: Visual Search Tactics, Tools, and Optimizations

Visual search has been at the forefront of Google’s search and product innovations in the last year. Join this talk for “search what you see” optimizations via Google Lens and more.

Dana DiTomaso

President & Partner | Kickpoint

More Than Pageviews: Evaluating Content Success & Correcting Content Failure

Throw that tired pageview-and-bounce-rate-heavy report right out the (virtual) window — we can do better than that! Dana will peel back the layers on measuring content success. You'll learn which metrics will actually tell you if your content is doing what it's supposed to be doing, and how to link these metrics to your SEO strategies and tactics.

Debbie Chew

SEO Manager | Dialpad

How to Capitalize on the Link Potential of a Research Report

There are many types of link magnets, but there's one that'll never go out of style: data-backed research reports. When done well, you're creating a piece of content that helps your E-A-T, drives backlinks, and is genuinely interesting content for your target audience. This talk will cover the different steps needed not just to create a research report, but to create one that can get links.

Emily Brady

SEO Consultant

Get Your Local SEO Recipe Right with Content & Schema

Local SEO can be so much more than off-site listings, so let’s talk about it! By using content and schema on local landing pages, businesses can create unique value that satisfies customers and search engines.

Hanna Smith

Founder | Worderist

Myths, Misconceptions, & Mistakes (Lessons Learned from a Decade in Digital PR)

For more than 11 years, Hannah’s been tasked with coming up with content ideas that people will share and journalists will write about. In this session, she’ll be sharing some of the most important lessons she’s learned along the way.

Jackie Chu

SEO Lead, Intelligence | Uber

SEO In the Enterprise: Tips and Tricks for Growing Organic Traffic at Scale

In this talk, Jackie will show us how to identify, prioritize, and get buy-in on large-scale SEO campaigns to drive traffic and revenue.

Joe Hall

SEO Consultant & Principal Analyst | Hall Analysis

Understanding Key Performance Factors: Using Data to Make Smart Decisions for Organic Search

What KPIs are actually key? In this talk, Joe shows how organizations can use their own data to ascertain what’s relevant for actionable insights, in the hopes of helping you to develop smart SEO strategies.

Karen Hopper

Performance Marketing Strategist | Razorfish

Beyond the Button: Tests that Actually Move the Needle

In a world that has a million different options for every creative element... where do you start? How do you know this or that element is where you'll see an impact big enough to make a difference for your bottom line? This is the number one question CRO strategists get asked, and the answer every time is: it depends! This session will walk through how to understand your testing opportunities, generate test ideas, and measure your results with scientific accuracy.

Lidia Infante

Senior SEO Manager | Big Commerce

SEO Gap Analysis: Leverage Your Competitor's Performance

Ranking is as easy or as hard as doing better than your competitors. For that, you have to benchmark the sites on your search landscape, meet them where they are, and gain an edge. In this talk, Lidia will share how she built SEO strategies off the back of a gap analysis, along with her templates and success stories.

Lily Ray

Senior Director, SEO & Head of Organic Research | Amsive Digital

Why Real Expertise is the Most Important Ranking Factor of Them All

In this presentation, Lily will use real data to demonstrate how the rise of E-A-T has led to Google prioritizing expertise and authority above all else.

Miracle Inameti-Archibong

SEO Lead (Insurance) | MoneySuperMarket Group

Achieve Accessibility Goals with Machine Learning

3.8 million US adults aged 21-64 have a visual impairment, but 98% of the world’s top one million websites don’t offer full accessibility. One of the top issues is image alt text. This session walks you through easy, scalable alt text generation — an intuitive and easy to understand tutorial, with most of the heavy lifting already done for you.

Noah Learner

Product Director | Two Octobers

Breaking into New Areas with Topic Maps

In this talk, we'll go beyond keyword research to explore how to build topic maps and internal linking maps (that align with Google's understanding) to help you conquer new SERPS — and win more budget from stakeholders along the way.

Paddy Moogan

Co-founder | Aira

The Future of Link Building: What Got Us Here, Won’t Bet Us There

Ten years ago, Paddy stood on stage at MozCon and shared 35 ways to build links in 35 minutes. This year, he is going to talk about lessons he has learned during the last 10 years, some reflections on what he got right and wrong, along with what the future holds for link building.

Paxton Gray

CEO | 97th Floor

How True Leaders Transform a Marketing Department into a Dream Team

There are hidden, structural factors holding stellar marketers (and their teams) back‚ and it's not their fault. Discover what these factors are, how to root them out, and how to help your existing team members reach their potential.

Dr. Pete Meyers

Marketing Scientist | Moz

Rabbit Holes: How Google Pushes Us Down The Funnel

As an SEO, you've probably fallen down the rabbit hole of "organic" results that lead to more Google SERPs. If you map that rabbit hole, you'll see a systematic effort to push searchers down the funnel to commercial results. Why is Google doing this, what does it mean for SEO, and what can we learn about our own customers' journeys?

Petra Kis-Herczegh

Solutions Engineer | Yext

Things I Learned from Sales Teams that Every SEO Should Know

Whether you're trying to build a business case or get buy-in for your SEO project, some of the core challenges will come down to the same thing: How well can you sell it? As SEOs, we often forget that, even though we spend our day-to-day analyzing data and optimizing content and websites for bots, at the end of the day, we are working with human beings — and some of those people have decision-making power over what we can and can't achieve in our roles. This is where learning a good set of sales skills becomes crucial. In this talk, Petra will explore some of the key skills and methods sales teams use, and how you can apply these to your SEO work.

Tina Fleming

Senior Brand Strategist | Designzillas

How Marketing Data Intelligence Skyrocketed Our B2B Conversions

If you want to geek out on data, you've come to the right session. And we're not talking about Google Analytics or your plain old CRM data. We're talking about de-anonymizing your website traffic, providing one-on-one personalized user experiences, shortening your lead forms without missing out on valuable information, and doing everything you can to get to that SQL. In this presentation, Tina will demystify the basics of marketing data intelligence, reveal actionable strategies for your day-to-day conversion marketing, and share real examples of how her agency has skyrocketed B2B conversions with the addition of marketing intelligence.

Tom Capper

Senior Search Scientist | Moz

Trash In, Garbage Out: A Guide to Non-Catastrophic Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the first and most basic tasks that SEOs learn. And yet, it's strewn with pitfalls and ubiquitous errors, even for experienced practitioners. In this talk, Tom will walk you through the various ways the wrong data can lead you astray, and how to leverage the right techniques for the right tasks.

Wil Reynolds

Founder & VP of Innovation | Seer Interactive

Keyword Research for Thanks Instead of Ranks

Seer Interactive has used keyword research methods to uncover ways to help clients understand their customers better. From diversity and inclusion, to hopes and fears, customers are leaving clues in their long tail searches. Wil demonstrates why you should spend the time to find them.

Will Critchlow

CEO | SearchPilot

Moneyball is the Future of SEO

Advanced statistical analysis has changed the face of professional sports, and similar insights are changing the way we do SEO. In this talk, Will is going to share the approaches he's seeing from the most forward-looking SEO teams, as well as the lessons learned from their analysis of what's working and what's not.

---

We hope you’re as jazzed as we are for July 11th–13th to hurry up and get here. And again, if you haven’t grabbed your ticket yet, we’ve got your back.

New Competitive Research Suite: Actionable Data to Drive Real Results

I once compared keyword research to an avalanche – it’s loud, exciting, and you’re likely to end up buried alive. Over the years, as I’ve tested new product ideas (even with enterprise SEOs), I’ve found that people don’t really want all the data. They want the right data.

I’m thrilled to announce Moz’s Competitive Research Suite, built from the ground up to drive targeted data and actionable insights about your competitors, your competitive keyword gap, and your content gap. Instead of telling you, though, let us show you.

Your keyword gap, reinvented

I recently bought some sunglasses from Goodr. Let’s pretend I’m analyzing their competitive SEO landscape, and I’ve picked three targeted competitors in the online sunglasses market that specialize in active customers and sports sunglasses. I’d first enter the sites in the mini-wizard:

You can choose your market and either Domain or Subdomain for the target site and each competitor. After some summary statistics about the sites, you’ll see the “Keywords to Improve” section, which looks something like this:

Scroll horizontally to see our all-new Traffic Lift metric, Keyword Volume, Keyword Difficulty, your current ranking, and the ranking of each of your chosen competitors.

More signal = actionable results

If you did a traditional keyword gap analysis, you might look at each competitor individually and manually dig through the intersections. Let’s say we put SportEyes.com into our own Keyword Explorer. The first few results look something like this:

This is perfectly useful data about one competitor’s rankings, except for one problem — Goodr doesn’t sell swim goggles or ski goggles. Even intersecting a couple of competitors could easily produce irrelevant results, competitors’ branded terms, or keywords where your site already outranks competitors and has very little to gain. Put simply, there’s a lot of noise.

Keywords to Improve is a new way of thinking about the competitive keyword gap. We focus on keywords where your site ranks in the top 20 (you can easily expand this in the filters), but is outranked by one or more competitors. We also attempt — by analyzing on-SERP signals — to filter out branded and brand-like terms.

We cut through the noise, boost your SEO signal, and surface actionable results.

Lift your traffic, lift your ROI

We SEOs love big keyword volume numbers, but here’s the hard truth — even if we could perfectly accurately estimate volume, it’s a bit of a fantasy. If you create a competitive keyword research spreadsheet with 10,000 keywords with an average volume of 1,000, are you going to guarantee your boss those 10 Million visitors? Of course not.

What if you have no capacity to rank for that keyword? What if sites like yours (including your competitors) have a realistic ranking cap? SEO isn’t a process of going from no ranking to #1 on every keyword imaginable, and even #1 doesn’t get all the clicks.

All of this is why we’re introducing Traffic Lift. The Traffic Lift column looks at what we think you could gain by moving from your current ranking to your competitors’ best current ranking. In part, it’s tough love. Living in a fantasy isn’t good for business. More importantly, it’s a way to prioritize. See the sample results below:

Unlike swimming goggles, a product Goodr doesn’t even sell, cycling and running sunglasses are product categories that are very relevant and where they’re outranked by similar competitors. There is ample room for improvement here and real ROI. Traffic Lift finds the wins.

Your competitors’ top content

A little more tough love — keywords aren’t action. Keywords are potential. A mountain of keywords is more likely to bury you than benefit you. We can help you find the best keywords, but ultimately, we want to understand how those keywords are shaped into content.

Our first-generation (and there’s much more to come) Top Competing Content report shows you how your keyword gap is being served by your competitors. Let’s look at the Goodr data:

The “Top Ranking Keywords” are just a sampling, but here we can see, for example, how one competitor’s page is capturing multiple keywords related to “cycling sunglasses”. Now, you can start to see how those keywords function as a concept and you’ve got specific competitor pages to target.

This is the next step of competitive keyword research — going beyond a pile of individual, unrelated, and even irrelevant keywords to a plan of action that includes targeted, high-lift keywords, targeted content, and a top-level view of the competitive landscape.

If you want broader data or a different viewpoint, there’s a full range of filters and sorts to let you adjust our default settings. Of course, you can also export both Keywords to Improve and Top Content Competitors to carve through the pile as you please.

True competitors, truer results

In September of 2021, we launched True Competitor, and I promised that it was a first step in Moz’s new approach to competitive analysis. True Competitor is now more than a stand-alone tool — it’s a starting point to understanding your keyword and content gaps:

From True Competitor, you can now easily select up to three competitors and run your Keyword Gap analysis. As you can see, this is how I kicked off my Goodr example, even though I had almost no knowledge of their competitive landscape. Imagine what you could do with your actual knowledge of your site, your customers, and even your prospects.

Even for Goodr, this journey I took is just one possible journey. I chose to focus on sports sunglasses, but there are dozens of niches that they could explore, even as a relatively small site. Competitive analysis isn’t one and done — it’s a process of surfacing opportunities, acting on those opportunities, and re-evaluating as your competitors evolve.

The Competitive Analysis Suite is now available to all Moz Pro customers, and we’d love to hear your feedback via the ‘Make a Suggestion’ button in the app.

Sign up for a free trial to access the Competitive Research Suite!

Already a Moz Pro customer? Log in now for instant access!

Your First Three SEO Tests

Emily Potter, Head of Customer Success at SearchPilot, is an SEO A/B testing expert. Today, she returns as a Whiteboard Friday host to share with you the first three SEO tests you should run to kick-start your SEO testing program.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz. I'm Emily Potter. I'm Head of Customer Success at SearchPilot. If you haven't heard of us before, SearchPilot is an A/B testing software that was built specifically for the SEO industry. We run large-scale SEO tests on enterprise websites.

Today I'm here to share with you the first three SEO tests ]that you should run to kick-start your SEO testing program. But before we get into that, there are some foundations that we need to cover first. That's how to write a strong SEO hypothesis and then how to prioritize your SEO tests.

Writing a strong hypothesis

Starting with your hypothesis, you might not think of it this way, but every SEO optimization that you're making is trying to impact one of three mechanisms, and these three mechanisms are the only way we can improve organic traffic. At SearchPilot, we call these our three core levers. 

CTRs

So that's improving your organic click-through rates independent of rankings. By that I mean, yes, you can improve your organic click-through rates by going from position two to position one, but there are other ways you can do that as well. That's ways that you enhance your search results so that you stand out against search competitors, like getting rich results or rich snippets.

Ranking for more keywords

Next there's ranking for more keywords. That's ranking for keywords that you didn't before. It's improving your organic reach. So if you're ranking for more keywords, you're in front of more people, that's probably going to drive more organic traffic to your website. So that's our second lever that we can pull.

Improving existing rankings

Our last lever is improving our existing rankings. So that's links, improving Core Web Vitals, adding more content. All of those big, known ranking factors that we can target with SEO tests, that's a big driver of organic traffic.

So the three core levers, we need to be pulling at least one of them to have a valid SEO hypothesis. If you come up with a test idea and you can't actually find a way that it clearly pulls one of these core levers, then it's probably not a true SEO hypothesis and you probably shouldn't run it. You might want to consider running it as a CRO only test instead, but it shouldn't be your SEO testing program.

Now we can pull more than one of these levers. Think of something like title tags. That improves our rankings and it changes our appearance in the SERP, so that improves our click-through rates and maybe independent rankings as well. But that's okay. We just want to capture that in our hypothesis that we're going to pull more than one lever.

Prioritizing test ideas

So now that you know how to write a strong SEO hypothesis, let's talk about how to prioritize your SEO test ideas. At SearchPilot to do this, we use two core metrics. We look at potential impact and then level of effort or LOE.

In this quadrant, I have, on the vertical axis, high level of effort to low level of effort, and on the horizontal axis, I have high impact to low impact. In the upper left-hand quadrant I put "Avoid." So those are high level of effort tests that are also low potential impact. These are tests that are going to have heavy uplift from your engineering team, but aren't likely to pull a core lever and therefore probably not a good test for you to run and probably not worth your time. Just rule these tests out. Make them not even a priority.

Upper right-hand quadrant, we have high impact tests that are also high level of effort. So those are things like internal links or anything that's going to involve a lot of engineering support, but you know is going to potentially be a big win. It strongly pulls one of these levers. So you really want to put these in, but they probably require project management. It involves multiple teams working together, that sort of thing. Plan those in later. They shouldn't be your first three tests.

In the lower left-hand quadrant, we have low impact tests that are also low level of effort. I put this in amber because you should have these in your testing program. You still want to run them. Again, they shouldn't be your top priority tests, but sometimes they produce surprising results. So these are things that maybe pull a lever but are easy to implement. Or they are low impact changes, like adding alt text, that we know don't cause big swings in organic traffic, but, again, you might get surprising results. Or they're just good practice to do anyway.

Lastly, we have what I call the sweet spot. Those are your high impact tests that are low level of effort. So these ones we want to prioritize. They pull the lever strongly but they actually don't require that much effort for us to put in, and those are your biggest return on investment tests and you should prioritize them.

So now that we know how to write a strong SEO hypothesis and we know how to think about prioritizing our test ideas, let's talk about the first three that you should run.

Test 1: Title tags

Test number one, title tag tests, and yes, even if Google is overwriting your title tags, definitely still be testing them. We've seen wins even since that rollout, and it's definitely low-hanging fruit that you can grab. Title tag tests impact both click-through rates independent of rankings and they also impact your rankings. So that's why there are such big swings that we get from them. So something like adding price to your titles, good test, probably just targeting click-through rates. Something like adding a really big, primary keyword might impact both your click-through rates and your rankings. Put these in. Low level of effort, high impact tests, they're in our sweet spot.

Test 2: On-page keyword targeting

Next we want to run on-page keyword targeting tests. So things that are changing the keyword targeting maybe to something like a higher search volume keyword. This can be adding content. This can be updating headings. H1 changes fall into this category. I put these as low to medium impact and low to medium level of effort. So generally still pretty easy to run. Not going to cause as big of swings as title tags, but we definitely want to prioritize those in early on, targeting our rankings.

Test 3: Structured data to win rich results

Third, I put structured data to win rich results. These are medium to high level of effort, but also medium to high impact. So this is things like adding schema, review schema to get review snippets. They tend to involve a little bit more effort because oftentimes you might need engineering resources to get that schema into your HTML, or you might need to get the data somehow that you want to include in the structured data. But they're important SEO tests, and they tend to have a little bit less lift than other higher impact tests that are also higher level of effort.

Bonus: Internal linking

For example, I've put a bonus on here — internal linking tests. These fall into that quadrant that are high impact, high level of effort. Internal linking tests are high level of effort not only because you need engineering resources oftentimes to implement them. It's also really difficult to figure out the measurement for these tests. That's because we're changing two different pages. We're going to expect to see an impact on the pages where we're adding the links. We're also going to expect to see an impact on the pages that are receiving a link. But these cause big wins for SEO, so we definitely want to plan these tests in, but not one of your first three tests. These are going to be targeting your rankings.

So that's what I have for you today. Again, your first three SEO tests to run — title tag tests, improving your keyword targeting on the page, and adding structured data to win rankings. As a bonus, plan in those internal linking tests, but it's going to involve a lot of different teams probably to get those done. And then, remember, if you're not coming back to one of these core levers, if you're not improving either click-through rates independent of rankings, ranking for more keywords, or improving your existing rankings, probably not an SEO test.

That's all I have for you today. Thanks, Moz.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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.