Thursday, July 14, 2022

Gather 'Round the Campfire for the MozCon 2022 Day Three Recap!

If Camp MozCon has to come to an end, we wanted to send it off with a bang. After all, we have to get through the next 364 days before we get to do this again!

So, in true MozCon style, we brought in the good coffee, handed out more Roger figurines, and cheered on our best pals as they took the stage.

Now, we aren’t going to say we saved the best for last, but we have to admit that our camp counselors for day three were absolute powerhouses.

Why Real Expertise is the Most Important Ranctor Factor of Them All — Lily Ray

When it comes to E-A-T, there is no better person to look to than Lily. She kicked off the morning by reminding us that showing expertise to Google is paramount. But just because the word “expert” is in there, that doesn’t mean the tactics are overly complicated.

Lily shared multiple examples of businesses that are ranking for very competitive/authoritative keywords, and her analysis of how these sites rose to the top. Throughout this analysis, she reminded us that adding “E-A-T features” isn’t enough, and that our content actually has to be quality as well.

Some of the top websites noted in this session sported features like:

  • Step-by-step guides

  • Interactive content such as videos, quizzes, etc.

  • First-hand experience

  • Author bios

  • Expert sources

  • Qualified reviews

  • Cost clarity

  • Link to and accolades

As she often does, Lily mentioned (and showed examples) how E-A-T may work across the Google universe such as YouTube, Google Maps, Google News, and so on. With this in mind, it’s imperative that we continue to build our authority on and off of our sites.

You Need Audience Personas, Not Buyer Personas — Amanda Natividad

Buyer personas can be helpful, but only some of the time, for some of the people on your team. That’s why today Amanda schooled us on the audience personas, why they’re important, and how to create them.

First and foremost, your audience doesn’t end at “people who will buy from you.” Your audience also includes people who may amplify you and people who may pay attention to you. And as it turns out, each of these audiences are looking to you for different types of content.

Each of these audiences has different motivations. They are also different in what they talk about and where they hang out. By understanding the way each of these audiences works, you’ll be able to create more effective marketing strategies.

Rabbit Holes: How Google Pushes Us Down The Funnel — Dr. Pete Meyers

As SEOs, we like to focus on the keywords that land toward the bottom of the funnel. This is because we know these keywords lead to more conversions and revenue. But as Dr. Pete would argue, there is far more to search than what happens between awareness and conversion. Apparently, Google would too, hence their article: “Decisions Decoded.”

In this talk, Dr. Pete focused on the Refine Search portion of the SERP. As he clicked on the refinements and interacted with the SERPs, he found himself further down the funnel. And if Google can make him do it, he figured they could make anyone do it — including our customers!

Dr. Pete argues that the majority of searches happen in the exploration and evaluation phase of decision-making. If we want to play in that game, we must allow users to go through this journey through our sites. This can be done by introducing the idea of the next step, creating more middle-of-the-funnel content, and by optimizing for Google’s search features.

Our site needs to be present at all stages of the funnel, not just at the bottom. If we rely on users to know what they want right away, we are alienating ourselves from potential profit.

Beyond the Button: Tests that Actually Move the Needle — Karen Hopper

We’ve all run a CRO test on button colors. But Karen urged us to go a step further and play with fire.

She taught us to be curious about what works for others, use the first-party data we have available, and monitor how certain users interact with our content. Then, using this data, she showed us how to create a meaningful hypothesis that included what we want to test, how we would test it, and what we expect to happen.

With all of these hypotheses, we then learned how to prioritize tests using expected impact, learning priority, and technical effort.

Now, we are ready to run the test! But in doing so, we need to understand the size of the audience necessary to prove the statistical significance and remember NOT to make any assumptions based on early data.

This talk was a bit of a math-heavy one, but definitely one we needed to remind us how to properly execute SEO testing strategies.

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

SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, right? Right, but here’s the thing — “even marathons have finish lines.”

Clients want to see results and we have to deliver them. In order to do this, we have to shift our focus from what is important to what is impactful.

Every domain has unique characteristics that search engines understand. These unique characteristics are measured by what Joe calls “key ranking factors.” Each site also has its own goals, which can be measured by KPIs.

Key performance factors and key performance indicators, when used together, can help you prioritize impactful changes. Joe showed us how to collect the data for these metrics and find their correlation using the CORREL function. Once we have this data, we’ll be able to identify the recommendations that are most correlated to the KPIs set out by the client.

And yes, correlation doesn’t equal causation, but as Joe aptly puts – it doesn’t rule out causation, either.

Finding Your Way To SEO & Content Success: A Framework — Ross Simmonds

The king of content distribution is back and better than ever. Ross Simmonds taught us how to think like a media company so that we can stop halting at the word “content” and follow through with the “marketing” in content marketing. Doing so can show you up to 10x the pageviews.

The growth content framework Ross shared included four steps:

  1. Research

  2. Create

  3. Distribute

  4. Optimize

When we “think like a media company”, we need to think about distribution, development, finance, partnerships, and outreach.

A smart brand will distribute content in a way that keeps content relevant and hyped up for almost six months. We were reminded to tap into our owned channels, different niche opportunities, reframe the original content into a new format, and then to optimize for future success.

And here is the thing: Ross didn’t just tell us to do these things, he shared some of his secrets on how to make them scaleable too!

Things I Learned from Sales Teams that Every SEO Should Know — Petra Kis-Herczegh

Getting buy-in isn’t usually a linear process, and it’s hardly ever an easy one. Petra shared with us her theory of the “buy-in-ish” cycle, which goes: fake buy-in, half results, lack of proof, repeat.

This makes sense when we think of how most people go about getting buy-in. In most situations, people start by asking for questions that have no answer other than “yes”.

Our new goal is to focus on getting to the next step, not necessarily focusing on a sweeping “yes”. When you seek buy-in, you should engage in healthy conflict and spend time understanding the concerns and objections from stakeholders. By understanding your audience, you will be able to speak their language when proposing solutions.

In the actual proposal, Petra reminds us, it’s massively important to use the language spoken by decision-makers. After all, we aren’t logical decision-makers, we are biased and emotional decision-makers. With that in mind, we must play to the feelings of your stakeholders to make them comfortable with our ideas.

The Untapped Power of Content Syndication — Amanda Milligan

We care about what’s happening nearby. Yet local media remains untapped as a distribution resource, despite the fact that they also have respectable DAs. This is a missed opportunity.

The easiest way to create local content at scale is to tap into local data sets like the Census, Zillow, or Tripadvisor. Using this data, you can create content — or even better — tools!

Amanda shared an example of using AAA’s data to create a gas price calculator that they shared with local publishers. Spoiler alert: the publishers were stoked.

Because Amanda works for Stacker Studios, she has the pleasure of working with tons of publishers, and was nice enough to share with us the five things publishers are looking for:

  1. Employment & jobs trends

  2. Rent & real estate trends

  3. Trends in crime stats and rates

  4. Ways to avoid scams

  5. “News you can use” stories

Advanced On-Page Optimization — Chris Long

Chris turned a bunch of heads when he came out by claiming that we were in an on-page optimization rut. That’s because, eventually, most SEOs start to review old content and simply add a few keywords or internal links.

Chris covered the importance of making the shift from keyword-focused to entity-focused. To do this, you need to identify the most commonly used entities in top ranking content and ensure you’re mentioning them.

Another way to stay creative is to stay fresh. At Go Fish, they found that top sites were updating content as quickly as every eight minutes! To test the effect of this factor, they updated some of their pages’ titles, timestamps, and content (less than 5% of text) and immediately saw positive results.

If the data is outdated, why would Google trust that the content is trustworthy?

Chris covered five full strategies to become more creative with your on-page optimization, including a competitive research method that blew our minds. This session will definitely be one we rewatch.

Keyword Research for Thanks Instead of Ranks — Wil Reynolds

As he admitted in his presentation, the roots of what Wil presents will almost always be the same. He said it back in 2015, and he started off by saying the same thing again this year: “we have the power to influence what people find.”

It all comes down to customers, business, big data, and silos. If you want to be great, you have to overcome the things your competitors stop at. Your customers care about dollars, but when you report dollars, don’t just report on potential dollars. Dollars can be connected to opportunity costs, acquisition costs, and the like.

Keyword research builds empathy and can be used to speak to multiple people in the room, but be careful with your automated analyses and outputs. Wil shared how the Google Pixel 6 solved a very real problem for his family: a camera that can capture multiple skin tones in one image without under/overexposure. However, he then went on to show us how he could use keyword research for photography to address the real issues of potential Pixel 6 users. As it turns out, these issues should actually be taken to most of the decision-makers in a business (think UX, design, and DE&I).

The biggest takeaways from this year's talk were to dig a little deeper, think about where you can add value, take the extra step and take every finding as a clue, and remember that “the limit to your greatness at work is how quickly you fold at your first no/can’t”.

This talk was filled to the brim with amazing insights, and we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface, so make sure you pick up the video bundle to see the full thing.

So long for now!

Well, campers, we hope you had as much fun as we did this year. It’s hard to put into words how much we missed hanging out with all of you, and we are so happy to have had the chance to do so the last few days.

This isn’t the end, though! We want to see what insights you grab during the replays and what things you put into action, and hopefully gather again next year for even more amazing learnings.

Happy camping!

Read all the MozCon 2022 daily recaps:

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Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Ready for S'more? The MozCon 2022 Day Two Recap

Day two of Camp MozCon was everything we expected it to be: more networking, more marshmallows, and more brilliant presentations from the top minds in the industry. Speakers covered the SEO gamut — from research and content creation, to e-commerce, and more!

Not only were the presentations chock-full of insights, but the storytelling had us feeling as though we were all sitting around the campfire. Everyone was dialed in and ready to turn insights into actions.

More Than Pageviews: Evaluating Content Success & Correcting Content Failure — Dana DiTomaso

Dana started the day by making us think: what is the best way to measure content success? And she didn’t just mean which KPIs should we measure, but also how we are going to track those KPIs.

The example she talked about was pageviews, which sounds easy enough. The issue though, is that every time a tab is refreshed (even by tag hoarders) a pageview is tracked. This can very easily skew your data.

To collect accurate data, Dana’s team used Data Studio connected to GA4, which uses events collected through Google Tag Manager. She did this by collecting the publish date, creating a custom formula that collects the publish date, and dividing the pageviews by day. Now the client can truly see how pages are performing without skewed data.

This wizardry was just the tip of the iceberg, though. Dana then went through how to measure whether people are reading your content, what percentage of people who actually see the CTA are clicking it, and more.

As always, Dana closed by reminding us to focus on what is important and ignore what isn’t. Don’t introduce doubt if you don’t have to.

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

Tom’s storytelling reminded us all too well of a situation we despise as SEO: clients focused on head terms. We’ve all had a client who just wants to rank for “flower delivery,” haven’t we? Our solution as SEOs is to create so-called exhaustive lists of metrics and keywords, but Tom argues this is just as useless.

Instead, Tom suggests:

  1. Capture intent instead of keywords

  2. Identify true opportunities for click traffic

  3. Aim for accuracy (pick good tools)

Should you choose to skip these suggestions, it’s likely you’ll end up with overly-inflated and far-from-helpful data. Tom showed us an example of Google Ads data overestimating clicks by a factor of 18x, what happens when a keyword list reports volume data without organic CTR estimates, and that over 15% of searches every day are brand new.

SEO in the Enterprise: Tips and Tricks for Growing Organic Traffic at Scale — Jackie Chu

It’s always a treat to learn from Jackie, and this year is no different. She walked us through how she works with enterprise teams to grow organic traffic. Anyone who has had this goal knows one thing - it takes a lot of convincing. Luckily for us, Jackie shared her solution for gaining buy-in.

First, she identifies the most impactful projects by asking these three questions:

  1. Does it impact crawling/indexing?

  2. Does it impact a lot of pages?

  3. Is it strategically relevant?

After identifying potential projects, it’s time to prioritize them through forecasting and storytelling. Jackie shared her thoughts on three forecasting strategies: top-down, bottom-up, and competitive share forecasting, along with the pros and cons of each one, and how she uses the RICE framework to prioritize projects.

To keep people in your corner after they’ve worked with you, be sure to thank them! Not just privately, but in front of their bosses and colleagues as well. Overthinking and over communicating your wins ensures that the cross-functional teams you work with understand the impact they’ve had through working with you.

The Future of Local Landing Pages — Amanda Jordan

This is Amanda’s very first MozCon and she spent it rocking the stage talking about local landing pages. Notice the added adjective “landing”? Amanda told us that she sees each local page as a landing page that should convince users to do business with her clients, kind of like a page built for PPC users.

She believes that if a user gets to your local page, they are trying to complete a goal, and it’s up to us to provide the tools they need in order to do so.

The top features included on top local landing pages include:

  • Local reviews

  • Unique value propositions

  • Coupons or conversion opportunities

  • Awards and recognition

Aside from offering these tools, moving forward, local SEOs are going to need to pull data from their CRM to speak to the exact pain points of their customers, increase the use of local government statistics, and lean on user-generated content through surveys and polls.

How Marketing Data Intelligence Skyrocketed Our B2B Conversions — Tina Fleming

Tina took us down memory lane, and not necessarily in a good way. She reminded us of iOS 14 and the cookie-pocalypse, and how much that sent us spiraling. Tina used this example to assure us: it’s time for us to embrace being data-driven in order to create better user experiences (even when we feel like the data is impossible to collect).

And the best way to ensure you have data you can use is to collect your own! The first place this can be done is by using your CRM, but where the CRM falls off (i.e. unknown users) a data acquisition platform can pick up.

This data will then allow you to create personalized experiences for users. Tina even showed us the example of her company’s website, and how their homepage was optimized to speak directly to the user using the data they already had.

Lastly, Tina told us to focus on collecting the data we can’t collect using public data. If people are willing to share that information, they are much more likely to be sales qualified.

Achieve Accessibility Goals with Machine Learning — Miracle Inameti-Archibong

Asking for help in any situation is hard, which often means the ask isn’t brought to those who can help. For that reason, we feel so grateful to have Miracle at MozCon to remind our industry of the importance of site accessibility.

She reminded us that some of the tasks that we find to be “less important” for SEO are actually extremely important for site users. For instance, one-third of all images have questionable or repetitive alt text — despite the fact that we know how to monitor alt text, and how to change it for the better.

To be sure you aren’t contributing to the problem, Miracle equipped us all with the pillars of an accessibility audit. Your website should be:

  1. Perceivable

  2. Operable

  3. Understandable

  4. Robust

She also shared tools that help you with this audit, and demonstrated why using a screen reader yourself to assess your content is the best way to understand how your content will be consumed by a user who needs one.

How True Leaders Transform a Marketing Department into a Dream Team — Paxton Gray

You’re a badass marketer, which means you have likely — will likely — be asked to lead a team of marketers. Here’s the thing, though: our job changes every day, and there are very few resources to become educated on that job.

Due to this lack of education, once you become a part of the marketing leadership team, the fear of failure can become real. To overcome that fear, focus on clear, attainable goals. This may require you to dig a bit deeper than you’re used to and ask more questions, but it will help you to not just find more happiness in your role, but to help your clients more as well.

Once you have a clear focus to work toward, it’s time to close the feedback loop. Identify everyone involved with your campaigns and ensure they have access to all of the data. Doing so allows your team to work together more cohesively.

Lastly, remove the barriers to beneficial risk-taking by openly sharing the burden of campaign outcomes. Let your team know you are there with them, and you’re not going to let them fall.

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

Hannah used this talk to review some of the things she has said over the years. The first thing: “you don’t need luck, you just need to work really hard.” Which sounded nice, but she has come to realize that much of her success can be attributed to luck.

Hannah found that she just tended to downplay the role of luck, as she was afraid it made her appear as though she didn’t know what she was doing. She then reviewed a mistake she made which was simply stopping at “study what worked.” Instead, she admits the saying should have finished with “and find out why it worked.”

When it comes to PR, ask yourself these six questions:

  1. What stories were told in the pieces?

  2. Did the coverage of the piece feed into something else that was happening in the news cycle?

  3. Were there waves of coverage that led to the success of the piece?

  4. What emotions did this story invoke?

  5. What vertices covered the story?

  6. Did the piece get coverage in multiple countries?

She then closed by sharing a piece of misinformation she has been fueling: that it’s normal to be wildly successful. It’s not. Hannah assured us that only 10% of the pieces she’s been part of have generated notable results.

E-Commerce SEO Horror Stories: How to Tackle the Most Common Issues at Scale and Avoid an SEO Nightmare — Aleyda Solis

Aleyda brought so much energy to the stage as she spoke about e-commerce SEO. No matter the amount of tools we have access to as e-commerce SEOs, it’s still true that our job is really hard, which makes it very easy to overlook detrimental mistakes.

The first mistake Aleyda covered was allowing any and all internal search results to be indexable. This can create duplicate or thin content, and an overall poor user experience that will hurt your bottom line. While this is scary, the solution isn’t terribly complex, you could just canonicalize or 301 redirect these links to relevant facet pages.

Another mistake she discussed was poor unique descriptive content on product pages. The consequence of this mistake can be hundreds or even thousands of “crawled, not indexed” pages in Search Console. Google marks these pages as duplicate or thin content and therefore deem them unworthy of indexing.

To combat this problem you will want to add unique images, use descriptive language in your copy, incentivize reviews on product pages, and use structured data. By putting this effort in, Google will recognize that the product is unique and reward the page by indexing it. Alternatively, you may not want to index each page, instead you may want to focus on those facet pages.

These are just two of the issues Aleyda covered in her talk, but if we tried to cover all seven as in-depth as she was able to, we would be here all day. If you want to see all seven horror stories and how to defeat them, pick up the video bundle and watch her talk. Believe us, it’s worth it for this talk alone.

There is still one day left!

Can you believe MozCon is two-thirds of the way complete? We certainly can’t, but we aren’t letting anyone leave camp without enough new skills to fill their vest. Come back for day three to learn more about SEO, marketing, and growth.

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Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Welcome, Happy Campers! The MozCon 2022 Day One Recap

Today, after three years, we gathered some of our best friends in the industry to kick off the biggest SEO party of the year in Seattle. That’s right, Camp MozCon is back in all of its real-life glory and we could not be more excited! Cue all of the fist bumps, Roger selfies, and snacks, because we are back in action!

It wouldn’t be MozCon without the top minds in the industry sharing their findings, and we were not disappointed yesterday. They really brought the heat to the campfire.

SERP Strategies — Andy Crestodina

Andy is always a fan favorite as he combines analysis with strategy. This year he’s done the same as he walked us through his research on SERP pages.

We all knew SERPs have changed a ton, but Andy — the professional SERP screenshotter he is — has collected visuals of multiple SERPs over the last few years. Not only was he hoarding this data, but he has been using it to his advantage.

Andy walked us through his process of keyword research, and spoiler alert, it doesn’t just end with “difficulty, volume, CTR.”

The process he uses:

  1. Keyword research

  2. SERP analysis

  3. Optimize for the searcher experience within: SERP features, Directories, Marketplaces, Associations

Search What You See: Visual Search Tactics, Tools, and Optimizations — Crystal Carter

Crystal broke down visual search in a new way, explaining to us that “Visual Search turns our camera into a tool for understanding the world.” She then explained the difference between image search/optimization and visual search/optimization – contrary to popular belief, they’re not interchangeable! Image optimization is about making sure images can be returned for text queries. Visual optimization ensures visual queries can return necessary answers for the searcher.

If you want to start understanding what entities you have available to you, use your camera roll as a dataset. Google allows you to upload your images and will organize them into entities for you. Google also relies on your branding to match your business to photos uploaded by you and your customers. They are looking at your logos and color schemes and the images uploaded to the internet to see if they can match them.

Places you need to think of your visual search opportunities in real life (IRL):

  • Sponsorships

  • Merch and uniforms

  • Well placed logos in your facility

  • Photo op corners (ya know, 100% that pic)

Unlocking the Hidden Potential of Product Listing Pages — Areej AbuAli

In her research, Areej found that 60% of organic revenue came from product listing pages. This is interesting because as SEOs, we tend to focus on site-wide changes as opposed to identifying parts of a site that have the biggest impact. This doesn’t just apply to e-commerce, though, real estate sites have product listing pages.

Break things down into building blocks. For example, in e-commerce, the three main building blocks are:

  1. Content

  2. Tech

  3. Filters

She showed us how she went through an entire process of identifying a tech issue, doing the research, creating a workflow, sending in a ticket and getting it implemented without any breaks.

Now, while we were all excited for her, she then admitted that there was no impact of the change on the organic revenue.

The moral of the story? It’s worth diving deep into the one opportunity that delivers value, but you’ve got to dive deep and deliver solutions with cross functionality. Because it’s not as effective to address one of the building blocks when you could address them all effectively.

Areej also hit on a TON of other stuff in her 250 slides, so you may wanna snag that MozCon video package.

Get Your Local SEO Recipe Right with Content & Schema — Emily Brady

Have you ever wondered how you can create unique content for each of your location pages? We have, too. That’s why we were so happy to have Emily, one of our amazing Community Speakers, grace the stage (for the very first time!) and share her recipe for unique content and schema.

The recipe requires the following ingredients:

  • Hyper-local content

  • Attributes

  • Staff bios

  • Hours

  • Address & phone number

  • Photos

  • Reviews

  • Inventory

  • Nearby locations

  • Specials & coupons

  • FAQs

  • Departments & services

Once the ingredients are in place, schema can be used to help provide context to the content you’ve been able to create. For instance, use person schema for your staff bio and place mark-up for your attribute.

Sometimes, the difference between you and the competitor is the time you are willing to take in order to implement the hard things. Hard work is truly unique.

SEO Gap Analysis: Leverage Your Competitor’s Performance — Lidia Infante

Lidia started off by reminding us that ranking is as easy, or as hard, as doing better than our competitors. She then broke SEO down into three main pillars: content, tech, and links.

As you think of how you can do better than your competitor, you have to identify which pillar(s) they’re executing better than you. But how do you do that? Well, first, you must identify who your true competitors are based on the keywords of which you’d like to rank.

Once you’ve identified your competitors, you can move into benchmarking their content metrics, brand metrics, and tech SEO metrics. You can compare these metrics to your metrics in order to identify your opportunities for improvement.

Now, go improve! As Lidia said, there is no growth without execution.

The Future of Link Building: What Got Us Here, Won’t Get Us There — Paddy Moogan

The fundamentals don’t change that often. In fact, 10 years ago Paddy went on stage and shared 35 link building ideas in 35 minutes. As he reviewed his epic talk from a decade ago, he found that over 20 of them are still “good” ideas. This just enforced the idea that the fundamentals of what we do as SEOs, don’t really change that often. Major core updates, they don’t “just happen” that often. But sometimes, they do.

Based on the changes that have come about the last 10 years, Paddy has decided that outreach alone isn’t a sustainable strategy. Aria found that SEOs spend about 3 hours to build a link, if you’re down 10,000 links.. Well, that’s a lot of hours. If you stop putting time in, you stop getting results. So, what’s the other option?

Paddy talked about creating a link building strategy that outlasts you. The biggest difference here is pivoting from focusing on who can link to you, to thinking about who is doing business with you.

This strategy focuses on four things:

  • Audience (who are they)

  • Pain points (what do they struggle with)

  • Solutions (what can you offer)

  • Keywords (what can you rank for)

When you string these things together you force relevancy. And relevancy, friends, is what we are aiming for.

How to Capitalize on the Link Potential of a Research Report — Debbie Chu

As Debbie, our second amazing Community Speaker of the day, started to scour the pages for some of the keywords she wanted to rank for, she noticed they all had one thing in common: they linked to research reports. After uncovering this, Debbie went all in with research reports.

She came up with a process for creating these research reports:

  1. Come up with the story by looking at the products, features, and related topics.

  2. Do research and identify any gaps of opportunities.

  3. Score your ideas using HOT: Headlines, Other Teams (like PR, data, etc.), and Timeliness.

  4. Gather data from multiple sources.

  5. Analyze data and find the newsworthy stats.

After going through this process, all that is left is to create the content and reach out to the appropriate people. For example, if you find that Seattle is the best city for working from home, reach out to Seattle associations, as they may want to share your findings.

Breaking into new areas with Topic Maps — Noah Learner

As most of you know, Noah nailed it last year with his presentation on using Google Data Studio to find opportunities in the keywords you currently rank for. But this year, Noah wanted to tackle finding opportunities for businesses who don’t rank for a ton of keywords.

He started by looking at the source: how they’re getting their data. He found things like the fact that Knowledge Panels point to Wikipedia more times than not. Google has documentation on how autocomplete works, and in it, Google cites that it’s pulling data from Google Trends — which has an API.

So naturally, as the curious guy he is, Noah found a way to use the API to map all of the related terms into a Google Sheet. From there, he removed irrelevant terms, pulled in keyword metrics using his favorite keyword tools API, and ran the cycle again for each related term.

The best part: he provided all the documentation you need to create this yourself!

With this tool, you’re able to make decisions based on client goals, high search volume, your ability to rank, and high transaction value. Then refer back to the clusters and find opportunities for internal linking.

But most importantly, Noah closed with a piece of advice he received from the late Hamlet Batista: give, give, give to others, any time you can.

Building Remote Culture that Feels Like a Culture — Ruth Burr Reedy

The pandemic left marks that are likely to stand the test of time, and one of them is working from home. It’s awesome, but it’s also super hard to do well as a business. When we’re all distributed, there are far fewer built-in opportunities for connection.

We were super lucky to have Ruth come talk to us as someone who has managed remote teams over the last six years. She started by challenging managers to ask themselves, “what do we want it to feel like when you work here?” and to ask employees, “what does it actually feel like to work here?”

Once you know what feeling you want to create, you need to figure out when and where you can create that feeling remotely. This should start as early as onboarding. Have employees meet each other during onboarding, create an agenda for your new hires, etc.

The most important part of managing remote teams is having a concrete way to measure whether or not the work is getting done.

Moneyball is the Future of SEO — Will Critchlow

If something was *almost* as hard as the thing, but it was worth just as much as the easy thing, which would you choose?

With SEO testing, we can focus on tested on-site changes, brand new content, lets skip the untested, hopeful stuff. Create a hypothesis and test both the control and the variant. Run the test and analyze your data.

Will shared a ton of tactics they’ve tested multiple times, and some of these tactics include things like moving hidden content out of an accordion, using pop ups, changing SERP appearance, using structured data, and so on.

Will assured us that we are able to run these tests ourselves, and encouraged us to do so! Even if we can't have the tests 100% controlled or thought out, because in site testing Bing found that website experiments tend to bring rare but large wins.

So, as Dr. Pete would say, “run your own tests.”

On to day two!

Phew, can you believe that was just day one? Neither can we!

Now remember, what our speakers just shared with you is extremely valuable, but only if you put it into action! Take a second and write down one thing you can put into action next week.

Day one may be in the books, but we are so hype to see what today’s speakers bring to the picnic table.

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Thursday, July 7, 2022

How Stacker.com Earned 1M+ Organic Monthly Visits Through Content Syndication [Case Study]

Note: Amanda Milligan collaborated with Stacker’s SEO specialist, Sam Kaye, to create this case study.

When a marketer is asked about the value of content syndication, they’ll typically list two main benefits:

  1. Increased brand awareness, as you’re reaching a wider audience.

  2. Improved engagement, as people can share and comment across multiple versions of the story.

But one benefit of content syndication that marketers frequently overlook is the potential to improve a site’s SEO performance.

While paid syndication (like press release distribution) can’t carry SEO value, developing strong content that’s appealing to publishers and their readers can generate massive amounts of link authority back to a publishing domain, and drive significant organic growth.

But it’s difficult to test and implement a comprehensive syndication strategy, so there aren’t many resources about its SEO impact.

In this case study, we:

  • Outline the processes used by Stacker to syndicate content.

  • Look into organic results on Stacker.com as a result of content syndication efforts.

  • Discuss how content syndication can be used as part of a long-term organic growth strategy.

The content creation and distribution methods used for Stacker.com are the same as those used for Stacker Studio brand partners, making Stacker.com’s organic success an excellent case study for the long-term effectiveness for content syndication strategies.

The evidence of syndication’s impact

Before digging into how syndication works for SEO, let’s begin by proving that content syndication works.

Stacker.com has no proactive digital PR or backlinking strategies. Our growth strategy has been utilizing content syndication as a model to reach new audiences and drive valuable domain authority. The result has been Stacker accumulating 20K “dofollowed” referring domains and over one million unique backlinks over the last four years.

Organic traffic growth

Organic traffic: Google Search Console

Over a period of 16 months, Stacker.com saw a significant acceleration in organic growth, increasing by approximately 500% — from fewer than 10K organic entries per day to more than 50K entries per day. (Our site used to be TheStacker.com, and you can see the exponential growth on that domain as well before migrating to Stacker.com.)

Google Search Console traffic overview for Stacker.com

Backlinks

Backlinks: Google Search Console

Backlinks that appear on pages including rel=canonical tags are processed and valued by search engines, as evidenced by the 8M+ links created by this method & identified in Search Console. The majority of these links are in-text dofollows from syndicated article pickups with rel=canonical tags. This is an excellent indicator that Google is crawling and valuing these links.

GSC top external links overview for Stacker.com

Backlinks: Moz Pro (domain-wide)

Backlinks created via content syndication are also being picked up by Moz Pro and other third-party reporting tools.

Moz Pro reports a steady growth in the number of referring domains that correlates well with GSC link reporting metrics:

Moz: individual links

In addition to tracking account-wide backlinking growth, Moz also picks up individual instances of links created via content syndication, such as these syndicated SFGate pickups.

Domain Authority: Moz Pro

This accumulation of link authority over time has allowed Stacker to increase our Moz Pro Domain Authority score from 56 to 59 over the past year:

Organic performance: Summary

In 2021 alone, Stacker.com saw a 500% increase in referring domains, a 380% increase in organic traffic, and an improvement in domain authority from 56 to 59 due in large part to our content syndication efforts.

These long-term trends of organic growth, paired with the fact that syndicated links are being picked up by both Google Search Console and Moz Pro, are a clear indication that content syndication is an effective way to drive organic traffic.

How content syndication improves SEO authority

Stacker’s syndication approach provides link authority in two ways: in-text dofollow backlinks and rel=canonical tags.

An in-text backlink acts as a signal of source attribution, telling search engines that a particular piece of data or content has been taken from another source. A canonical tag does the same thing, except that it attributes the entire article, not just a piece of it, back to the original publisher. Both are signals of source attribution, and both indicate that a publisher trusts your content enough to feature and share the article on their website.

When a piece of Stacker content is syndicated (re-published in its original form on another publisher’s site), the syndicated version includes a rel=canonical tag back to the publishers’ hosted version, as well as an in-text dofollow backlink in the content intro:

Example rel=canonical tag from a syndicated piece
Example rel=canonical tag from a syndicated piece
Example of an in-text, dofollow backlink attributing authorship in a syndicated piece
Example of an in-text, dofollow backlink attributing authorship in a syndicated piece

When a Stacker article is rewritten instead of syndicated, (e.g., a publisher creates a locally-focused variant using Stacker source data), we request a backlink citing us as the original provider of the study.

Owned syndication vs. earned syndication

In the same way the industry talks about owned and earned media, you can think of two types of syndication as “owned syndication” and “earned syndication.”

Owned syndication involves reposting an article on multiple platforms by you. An example of this would be publishing an article on your blog and then republishing it on Medium, LinkedIn, and other accounts you run. While this might increase the number of people that see your article, the likelihood of driving organic traffic from these strategies reliably or at scale is virtually nil.

Earned syndication involves the approval from another publisher that your content is valuable to their audience, so this type of syndication is harder to achieve. However, in addition to reaching a wider audience than with owned syndication, you get the authority signal of having your content hosted on another publisher’s domain. (Someone decided your content was worth republishing in full, and what’s a greater sign of trust than that?)

Why isn’t everyone doing this?

Because it’s not easy. For the first few years of our existence, Stacker did nothing but build publisher relationships and master the art of newsworthy content. Getting content pickups at scale requires building trust with large news publishers, as well as a large volume of content news publishers find uniquely interesting and relevant. Content syndication is built upon a foundation of content quality, publisher trust, and the technical capability to share content at scale, and these three components can take years to develop.

Stacker journalists are committed to understanding the coverage needs of local news organizations and investing in stories that can drive meaningful value for their audiences. After five years of working with publishing partners, we’ve studied the data on pickups and audience reach to uncover insights into what stories can be most useful.

We landed on some key earned syndication tenets:

Contextualization is key

Any type of publisher you come across will have their core editorial calendar established with key topics they know their audience cares about. They’re not looking for outsiders to contribute to the heart of their publication, so don’t approach it that way. Instead, explore topics they typically cover and perhaps even particular stories they’ve run and ask yourself: What other perspective can I add to this story to contextualize it? Perhaps a historical angle or other comparison

Data always helps

Some publishers don’t have access to data analysts, or if they do, they’re working on a ton of other projects and it’s hard to scale data-focused content. If you’re able to provide stories based on data that’s been distilled and presented with clear insights, many publishers would appreciate that. Additionally, just knowing your content is backed by data rather than opinion makes it easier to vet (and trust).

Help publishers reach their goals

Our direct line of communication with multiple publishers, both local and national, has led to fascinating conversations around their goals. To sum it up, every publisher has unique focus areas when it comes to audience acquisition and engagement. Some are focused on converting users to subscription while others are focused on pageviews or time on site. Explore their site, see how they monetize, and consider how your content can help them meet these goals.

Let’s look at an example story Stacker created.

Feature image for Stacker MLB piece.

This piece uses Major League Baseball data to determine the most successful postseason teams. With data being the basis for the ranking, publishers don’t have to worry about the validity of the order, which is a major advantage in vetting.

This story offers original analysis in a way that can complement the local coverage of news organizations. While a sports beat writer might focus on the area team’s history, current team performance, or other local and newsy aspects of the story—this story offers contextual data analysis that can work for a variety of news organizations to augment their boots-on-the-ground reporting.

All in all, the article earned more than 300 publisher pickups and more than 100,000 story impressions. That’s an incredible amount of payoff for one piece of content, and earned syndication is the vehicle that made it possible.

The syndication takeaway

Like so many other SEO tactics, not all syndication is created equal. Potential clients have often asked me how Stacker is different from services like press release distribution platforms, with which they didn’t see SEO results.

Well, when you have sponsored or nofollow links, it’s never going to be the same as earned syndication. Getting white hat content pickups with consistency is difficult — it requires both top-tier content and the attention of journalists.

So my advice? Consider whether there are high-authority publications in your niche. Study what they publish and ask yourself:

  • Do you already publish content that they’d love?

  • Can you make some tweaks to already existing content to better fit their editorial style?

  • Can you create original research/reports that would interest their audience?

  • Would getting brand awareness with their audience help us improve your brand reach?

If the answer is yes to at least two of these questions, consider content syndication as a strategy.

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Wednesday, July 6, 2022

Freshness & SEO: An Underrated Concept

During my time in search, there are certain ranking factors that I’ve changed my perspective on. For instance, after coming to Go Fish Digital and working on internal linking initiatives, I started to realize the power of internal links over time. By implementing internal links at scale, we were able to see consistent success.

Freshness is another one of these factors. After working with a news organization and testing the learnings gained from that work on other sites, I started to see the immense power that content refreshes could produce. As a result, I think the entire SEO community has underrated this concept for quite some time. Let’s dig into why.

Reviewing news sites

This all started when we began to work with a large news publisher who was having trouble getting in Google’s Top Stories for highly competitive keywords. They were consistently finding that their content wasn’t able to get inclusion in this feature, and wanted to know why.

Inclusion in “Top stories”

We began to perform a lot of research around news outlets that seemed quite adept at getting included in Top Stories. This immediately turned our attention to CNN, the site that is by far the most skilled in acquiring coveted Top Stories positions.

By diving into their strategies, one consistent trend we noticed was that they would always create a brand new URL the day they wanted to be included in the Top Stories carousel:

As an example, here you can see that they create a unique URL for their rolling coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war. Since they know that Google will show Top Stories results daily for queries around this, they create brand new URLs every single day:

    • cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-05-16-22/index.html

    • cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-05-21-22/index.html

    • cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-05-23-22/index.html

This flies in the face of traditional SEO advice that indicates web owners need to keep consistent URLs in order to ensure equity isn’t diluted and keywords aren’t cannibalized. But to be eligible for Top Stories, Google needs a “fresh” URL to be indexed in order for the content to qualify.

After we started implementing the strategy of creating unique URLs every day, we saw much more consistent inclusion for this news outlet in Top Stories for their primary keywords.

However, the next question we wanted to address was not just how to get included in this feature, but also how to maintain strong ranking positions once there.

Ranking in “Top stories”

The next element that we looked at was how frequently competitors were updating their stories once in the Top Stories carousel, and were surprised at how frequently top news outlets refresh their content.

We found that competitors were aggressively updating their timestamps. For one query, when reviewing three articles over a four-hour period, we found the average time between updates for major outlets:

  1. USA Today: Every 8 Minutes

  2. New York Times: Every 27 minutes

  3. CNN: Every 28 minutes

For this particular query, USA Today was literally updating their page every 8 minutes and maintaining the #1 ranking position for Top Stories. Clearly, they were putting a lot of effort into the freshness of their content.

But what about the rest of us?

Of course, it’s obvious how this would apply to news sites. There is certainly no other vertical where the concept of “freshness” is going to carry more weight to the algorithm. However, this got us thinking about how valuable this concept would be to the broader web. Are other sites doing this, and would it be possible to see SEO success by updating content more frequently?

Evergreen content

Fortunately, we were able to perform even more research in this area. Our news client also had many non-news specific sections of their site. These sections contain more “evergreen” articles where more traditional SEO norms and rules should apply. One section of their site contains more “reviews” type of content, where they find the best products for a given category.

When reviewing articles for these topics, we also noticed patterns around freshness. In general, high ranking articles in competitive product areas (electronics, bedding, appliances) would aggressively update their timestamps on a monthly (sometimes weekly) cadence.

For example, as of the date of this writing (May 25th, 2022), I can see that all of the top three articles for “best mattress” have been updated within the last 7 days.

Looking at the term “best robot vacuum”, it looks like all of the articles have been updated in the last month (as of May 2022):

Even though these articles are more “evergreen” and not tied to the news cycle, it’s obvious that these sites are placing a high emphasis on freshness with frequent article updates. This indicated to us that there might be more benefits to freshness than just news story results.

Performing a test

We decided to start testing the concept of freshness on our own blog to see what the impact of these updates could be. We had an article on automotive SEO that used to perform quite well for “automotive seo” queries. However, in recent years, this page lost a lot of organic traffic:

The article still contained evergreen information, but it hadn’t been updated since 2016:

It was the perfect candidate for our test. To perform this test, we made only three changes to the article:

  1. Updated the content to ensure it was all current. This changed less than 5% of the text.

  2. Added “2022” to the title tag.

  3. Updated the timestamp.

Immediately, we saw rankings improve for the keyword “automotive seo”. We moved from ranking on the third page to the first page the day after we updated the content:

To verify these results, we tested this concept on another page. For this next article, we only updated the timestamp and title tag with no changes to the on-page content. While we normally wouldn’t recommend doing this, this was the only way we could isolate whether “freshness” was the driving change, and not the content adjustments.

However, after making these two updates, we could clearly see an immediate improvement to the traffic of the second page:

These two experiments combined with other tests we’ve performed are showing us that Google places value on the recency of content. This value extends beyond just articles tied to the news cycle.

Why does Google care?

E-A-T considerations

Thinking about this more holistically, Google utilizing the concept of freshness makes sense from their E-A-T initiatives. The whole concept of E-A-T is that Google wants to rank content that it can trust (written by experts, citing facts) above other search results. Google has a borderline public responsibility to ensure that the content it serves is accurate, so it’s in the search giant’s best interest to surface content that it thinks it can trust.

So how does freshness play into this? Well, if Google thinks content is outdated, how is it supposed to trust that the information is accurate? If the search engine sees that your article hasn’t been updated in five years while competitors have more recent content, that might be a signal that their content is more trustworthy than yours.

For example, for the term “best camera phones”, would you want to read an article last updated two years ago? For that matter, would you even want an article last updated six months ago?

As we can see, Google is only ranking pages that have been updated within the last one or two months. That’s because the technology changes so rapidly in this space that, unless you’re updating your articles every couple of months or so, you’re dramatically behind the curve.

Marketplace threats

The concept of freshness also makes sense from a competitive perspective. One of the biggest weaknesses of an indexation engine is that it’s inherently hard to serve real-time results. To find when content changes, a search engine needs time to recrawl and reindex content. When combined with the demands of crawling the web at scale, this becomes extremely difficult.

On the other hand, social media sites like Twitter don’t have this issue and are made to serve real-time content. The platform isn’t tasked with indexing results, and engagement metrics can help quickly surface content that’s gaining traction. As a result, Twitter does a much better job of surfacing trending content.

Thinking about the web from a platform based perspective, it makes sense that most users would choose Twitter over Google when looking for real-time information. This causes a big threat to Google, as it’s a reason for users to migrate off the ecosystem, thus presenting fewer opportunities to serve ads.

Recently in Top Stories, you now see a lot more “Live Blog Posts”. These articles utilize LiveBlogPosting structured data, which signals to Google that the content is getting updated in real-time. While looking for real-time URLs across the entire web is daunting, using this structured data type can help them better narrow in on content they need to be crawling and indexing more frequently.

Google seems to be aggressively pushing these live blogs in Top Stories as they often see strong visibility in Top Stories results:

This might be a strategic move to encourage publishers to create real-time content. The goal here could be increased adoption of content that’s updated in real-time with the end result of showcasing to users that they can get this type of content on Google, not just Twitter.

Utilizing these concepts moving forward

I think as an industry, sometimes there’s room for us to be more creative when thinking about our on-page optimizations. When looking at how to improve pages that have lost traffic and positions over time, we could take freshness into consideration. When looking at pages that have lost prominence over time, we might want to consider checking if that content is also outdated. Through testing and experimentation, you could see if updating the freshness of your content has noticeable positive impacts on ranking improvements.

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Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Planning for a Post-Local-Pack Possibility

Local SEOs are accustomed to continuous change in the SERPs, but if S.2992, the American Innovation Online Choice Act, becomes law and prevents monopolies like Google from preferencing their own assets, we need to prepare for what could be the largest search overhaul we’ve ever seen. 

This could be bigger than the day we saw 7-packs become 3-packs. It could be bigger than any of the major updates like Possum or Vicinity. We’re talking about major potential change and new opportunity for local businesses. Just how big might it be? That’s exactly what we’ll be looking at today!

Stats and tests

Pie chart showing 33% of SERPs have local packs

Per Moz’s most recent study by Dr. Peter J. Meyers, when we ran 1,000 search phrases through MozCast, half or which were localized to particular cities, 33% percent of our queries returned a local pack like this one in the SERPs:

A Google search for

If S.2992 should become law, industry experts observe that local packs would likely be one of the widgets Google would be obliged to stop preferencing in their results. And, in April of this year, marketers began spotting a test of a very different layout that could signal what local SERPs might look like, post-S.2992. 

I haven’t been able to replicate the test myself, but Mike Blumenthal of Near Media kindly granted permission for me to share this screenshot from his excellent piece, A Look at Google’s Local Results without ‘Self-Preferencing’:

An example SERP for the query

Instead of three local results grouped into a pack, this test shows a new widget we’re currently terming a “local card”, interleaved within the organic results. As Mike explains, when you click on the card, you’re taken straight to the Google Business Profile instead of to the long-established local finder. But perhaps of even more importance, the organic link to the website is now fully prominent, instead of totally absent as in some packs, or grey and easily-overlooked, as in the Google Business Profile. 

Rand Fishkin predicts that billions of clicks that were absorbed by Google’s widgets would become up-for-grabs by organic and paid advertisers. It’s this possible reality that’s really gotten me thinking about how local businesses could respond to what could be a tremendous opportunity.

Taking website inspiration from Google’s local playbook

Local SERP result for Sloat Garden Center

Google takes a lot from businesses. They take business data and make money from aggregating and displaying it in their local packs, finders, and maps. They take publishers’ content — which is the result of innumerable hours of paid work by human beings — and republish it in zero-click SERPs. Most SEOs learn to work within this system, this “partnership” in which we try not to be overly stressed so long as Google’s operations don’t hinder conversions. In other words, we resolve not to worry whether a sale results from a click on a Google Business Profile or the Contact Us page of a website, so long as transactions keep rolling in.

However, at the same time, there has been an ongoing saga of industry complaints that Google throws its weight around too much without any consultation with the business owners and publishers on whose livelihoods its profits are based. Of late, there has been particular distaste over Google using search as a political tool to protect itself from anti-trust actions like S.2992, threatening SMBs with negative outcomes if Google’s monopoly is regulated. Depending on your perspective, it might feel like Google takes it upon themselves to build a business model on your identity and content, doesn’t offer adequate support when things invariably go wrong with how they represent you, and then insults your intelligence with see-through scare tactics. It’s really no wonder when business owners and marketers grumble.

However you feel about this scenario, though, there is one thing that every local SEO knows by heart: local SERPs exist in a state of constant experimental change geared to maximize public engagement with them for Google’s benefit. They have the data and the engineers to discover exactly what works and what doesn’t. Think of this as a gift to us that we might take in return for all we’ve given, because Google’s SERPs are actually telling us what we should be doing with our websites if local packs go away, local cards take their place, and tons of clicks end up back on our websites instead of the Google Business Profile.

Check out this quick mockup I did of a GBP-inspired website homepage and see how many of the elements you can spot that correspond directly with fields you’ve come to know so well on your Google listing:

Native Plant Nursery webpage

Most important elements

Did you notice how my mockup emphasizes location and contact data, photos, and reviews? I believe that the ongoing iterations of Google’s packs and profiles indicate that these are the three listing elements that matter most to the public when choosing a local business. If more clicks should start going to the website, companies should organize the homepage so that visitors can instantly find the NAP, hours of operation (including whether the business is open right now plus its most and least popular time slots), see tons of relevant photos, and both read and leave reviews. You’ll notice I’ve also included some basic sentiment analysis of the reviews à la Google Place Topics.

Action-oriented elements

This mockup emphasizes all of the actions a visitor might be used to taking via Google Business Profiles. In addition to things like getting directions and interacting with reviews, the homepage should quickly facilitate whichever activities are most relevant to the model and customers, such as calling or texting the company, booking an appointment, asking questions, and, of course, shopping. If there is any actionable field on your GBP that you believe is connecting customers to the business, feature it or link to it on the homepage. This is basic website design of course, but think again about how Google organizes such features in their profiles to test what you should be emphasizing on sites.

Informational elements

Your website’s textual image and video-based content take the place of Google posts, business descriptions, categories, Q&A, and other informational media. Meanwhile, you can boost trust signals for Google’s quality raters and the public by displaying awards, accreditations, and associations. It’s great to think that, with a website, you have all the space you need to showcase a local brand’s community involvement, B2B relationships, customer-centric guarantees, environmental initiatives, and human rights policies. So, while you’re taking cues from GBPs on how to provide a ton of info at a glance for quick decision making, the joy of websites is that they support the architecture for telling a deeper story about why a business is truly the best bet in town for specific needs.

Your choice on UGC

Since the advent of Google Maps, Google has taken an open-source approach to local business data. Anyone, including bad actors, can suggest edits to your core business data, upload photos, leave reviews, and write questions and answers on your GBP. With your own website, the choice is yours on how much space you want to give to user generated content.

I’ve long been an advocate for featuring customers’ words and stories as central to business identity, and I would recommend that marketers and owners carefully plan how to present content like reviews, photos, and videos. There could be a temptation to show only flattering UGC, but be advised that activities like review gating can lead to litigation, and that businesses will already be facing something of a struggle in getting the public to trust website-based review content as much as they might trust the same content on a third-party platform. In seeking to emulate the successful layout of GBPs, do take your community into account, but also, take a breather knowing that S.2992 would return to local business owners some of the reputation and marketing control that they’ve lost to Google over the past 20 years.

Summing up, should the American Innovation Online Choice Act become law, sending more traffic directly to websites, owners and marketers should have a plan in place to revamp website homepages so that they are as informative and actionable as Google Business Profiles. In the case of multi-location brands, you may need to bring a GBP mindset to landing pages rather than homepages. Why not spend some time this week making a more beautiful and useful mockup than mine for some of the businesses you market? Maybe yours will feature bulleted list attributes, or key product and service menus, or direct message/live chat capabilities.

Would local cards and a less dominant Google be good for local businesses and marketers?

Photo of a beige
Image credit: Jo Zimny

To be honest, you’ll have to come up with your own answer to this question based on your philosophy and hands-on experience, should Google become the subject of increased regulation. For my part as a big supporter of localism, I observe that monopolies have an unsustainable negative effect on human happiness and the planet, on innovation and diversification, on commerce and culture. I am personally in favor of very strong antitrust measures and believe they will deliver amazing benefits to independently-owned businesses, the communities they serve, and the environment on which we depend for life.

But as to how something like the local cards might impact us, I think it’s important to note that the test that’s been spotted is unlikely to be the ultimate format we’d see in the SERPs. I’ve seen several peers asserting that they feel the layout is a bit messy, and it would certainly cause some temporary confusion for Internet searchers who have gotten used to former displays. But, time and again, we’ve all adjusted to SERP modifications, and we would simply do so once more. For local search marketers, regulation would signal that it’s time to double down on your organic SEO skills if what emerges is an increased emphasis on organic SERPs.

For owners, customers will still find you, and the great thing would be that more of them would likely be spending more of their time at your house instead of at Google’s. The role of host, then, will be more on your shoulders. It will be your patio, your deck chairs, your BBQ pit, and ramada that welcome and shelter people. And, after all, that’s what you went into business to do: to take care of your own customers. You’ve spent years learning to do that, so don’t worry - with some fine tuning of your website to make it as good as and better than a Google Business Profile, you’ve got some good times ahead!

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Friday, July 1, 2022

What Is Localism and How Does it Relate to Local SEO?

Local search marketing is a form of publicity unlike any other because of its potential for creating positive social change.

July 2022 is Independent Business Month and the perfect moment to reinvigorate our work as local SEOs by reflecting on the meaningful bigger picture to which we’re contributing. I’ve heard European social commentators say that you can’t publish books in America with the word “virtue” in their titles, but when an independent business owner opens their doors, it instigates a true virtuous cycle. When marketers have the honor of entering that cycle, we’re participating in something even more important than “traffic”, “conversions”, or “growth”; we’re contributing to the force for good known as localism. 

It can be an outcome of continual work with analytics and statistics to slip into viewing everything as a numbers game, but in local, each of those numbers is a real individual, a neighbor with a story, with needs. This month, we have the opportunity to re-center people, community, and environment by considering the definition of localism and seeing how our work in local SEO matters.

 A definition of economic localism

I can’t say it better than this:

“Localism is about building communities that are more healthy and sustainable – backed by local economies that are stronger and more resilient. It means we use regional resources to meet our needs – reconnecting eaters with farmers, investors with entrepreneurs, and business owners with the communities and natural places on which they depend. Economic success is measured less by production than by providing a decent standard of living for the most people while living in harmony with natural systems.” - Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BAILLE) 

In other words, instead of mere profits being the ultimate goal of this way of participating in civic life, localism strives to reduce suffering by building a community that actually functions well for everybody who lives in it - what the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. might have termed “a glorious and healthy place to inhabit”. 

The benefits of localism

Impact chart showing how much money is circulated locally when purchasing from a local brand vs. multinational vs. non-local online.
Image credit: Civic Economics and LOCO BC

Local wealth for local needs 

The most immediate and obvious benefit of economic localism is that the money you spend keeps circulating amongst your neighbors. As illustrated above, you buy a bike and put money into the pocket of the local bike shop owner. On their lunch break, the bike shop owner cycles down the road for lunch and hands your money over to the local restaurateur. After work, the restaurateur takes your money to the local hardware store to pick up some locally-grown veggie starts for their home garden. The next morning, the hardware store owner is using your money to pay part of their electricity bill to the community-owned utility. A few weeks later, an engineer at the utility company is using your money to donate to a new bike path being made in your community so that there are safer places for cyclists like you to ride.

Illustration showing how localism circulates money locally vs. extraction which sends money out of local communities.

In sum, a community built on localism recycles its money so that it can be dedicated to local people’s needs and projects, but a community without this model becomes increasingly under-funded because its wealth is leaking away into the wallets of national, multi-national, and remote entities with no stake in local life. When your community needs a new fire engine, repairs to the town hall, or schoolbooks, the money is there within the city instead of lost forever to the coffers of Walmart or Amazon where the CEOs have no thoughts about your local needs. So, basic economic localism begins with ensuring that local wealth is recycled instead of extracted, but this is just the first of its benefits and we’ll look at a few more that deserve priority focus. 

Healthy, green communities

Printed sign with green arrow and text "This way to the community garden site"
Image credit: Llandaff News

Environmental protections and localism go hand in hand, rooted in the acknowledgement that we have no life, no business, no anything without the Earth. Local delivery of your essential needs cuts carbon emissions in half vs. remote ecommerce shopping. Meanwhile, the central location of typical Main Streets means people can choose to walk, bike, or drive a much shorter distance to shop, while big box stores (which usually take up formerly-open or agricultural lands on the outskirts of cities) tripled pollution from driving between 1969 - 2009. George Washington University links two million annual new cases of pediatric asthma to driving our cars, meaning the less we use fossil fuel vehicles, the better our children can breathe. And as for formerly-green spaces acting as the healthy ecological lungs of your whole community, an economy driven by localism can defund big box sprawl and restore wetlands, waterways, and farmlands where megastores and asphalt used to be. 

Political will and power

Photo of a Town Hall sign
Image credit: Sue Day

At the most hyperlocal level, towns and cities running on localism can shape their own economic landscapes. Communities have repeatedly demonstrated the power to keep big boxes out and diverse small businesses open so that shoppers have some very meaningful choices at their disposal. Buy Local associations and related groups also have real power to help sway local elections and policies which determine how towns and cities develop and grow, directly impacting life quality for all residents.

Zooming out on the map, these local actions can have national benefits. A dilemma facing conscientious consumers is when their need for everyday goods collides with the dominance of monopolies that fund undesirable politicians and policies. The distress is real when, for example, a shopper becomes aware that there have been some 500 shootings at US grocery stores since 2020 and discovers that the chain where they shop is funding candidates or legislation promoting the sale of assault weapons. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees “life, liberty and safety of person” for all people, but if a big brand doesn’t uphold these conventions, resulting in the deaths or terrorization of its customers, ethical people will not want to do business with that company. When one town refuses to let such a business operate in their community, it is one small victory; when multiple towns do the same, it can govern the behavior and fate of that brand at a national level.

Human well-being and enjoyment

Sign that reads "Entrance Gilroy Garlic Festival"
Image credit: Becky Granger

The American Psychological Association finds that our chances of premature death are cut in half if we are protected from suffering loneliness and the Cambridge Journal of Regions proposes that there is a direct tie between local health and the proportion of small businesses in a community. When your local business owners, farmers, artisans, educators, and public servants know you by name, you experience the kind of quality social interactions that are a safeguard against isolation, despair, and untimely mortality. 

Localism can not only help you live longer, but it can make the savor of your years so much richer, with there being unique and interesting things to see and do in your town. Americans take 2.29 billion domestic trips every year, and when you think about the impulse to visit other places, it can’t be so that you can experience the exact same big boxes and fast food franchises in millions of cities! Rather, you want to walk and taste the real New Orleans, or San Francisco, or Seattle. If your town is host to a famous garlic festival, or apple fair, or chili cookoff, guard this regional richness from the kind of corporate homogeneity that would make colorless carbon copies out of vivid places to be alive. Localism can actually make the difference between human suffering and human joy.

The honor of working in local SEO

Photo of handwritten sign reading "Please won't you be my neighbor?"
Image Credit: THRogers

I confess to getting very excited whenever I think or talk about this: local SEOs have the skills to help shape towns and countries they actually want to live in. All those years we put in studying search and local commerce have actually empowered us to directly promote the independent businesses which bring the multiple benefits of localism to life. In fact, we can think of our abilities as a toolkit for rebalancing the economy, society, and even the planet.

How does that work?

It’s quite simple: any time your work results in an independently-owned small business outranking a corporate one, you are making it easier for local shoppers to choose localism. 

It’s a struggle to compete against the endless marketing budgets of national brands, but your skills at performing deft competitive local audits and quickly seeing a path towards greater independent business visibility are actually a key contribution to helping the public discover and choose a more humane and habitable future. In fact, filling your client roster with an eye to localism aligns your work life with the dignity of immigrants who own about ¼ of small US businesses, with minority-owned US businesses which are 99.9% SMBs, and with a massive and necessary reduction in everybody’s carbon footprint. It’s estimated that Americans will spend about ⅓ of their total lives at work; it’s heartening to know we have an option to commit all those hours to public good.

Our opponents won’t quit any time soon. We can slide into feeling helpless when our Twitter feeds are comprised of news about Amazon greenwashing Earth Day while allegedly underreporting its unsustainable carbon emissions, Walmart paying its employees such low wages that the company has become the nation’s largest recipient of welfare, and Target union busting while Starbucks threatens to close a shop where workers managed to unionize. 

Local SEOs, happily, are not powerless, because we can choose to be sure that there are other highly visible places for people to buy food, books, clothes, housewares, and a cup of coffee. We can embrace the honor of using our substantial marketing skills to amplify the narrative of localism, in partnership with our clients, to address the societal heartaches that hurt us most and get busy on the must-do work of healing the planet. No small tasks, perhaps, but what a tantalizing offer life is presenting us with to resolve to market for the common good. 

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