Why It's Getting Harder to Rank for Some Commercial Keywords (+ What You Can Do About It)

Our inbound lead generation is highly dependent upon SEO — it’s how we get more than 70% of our leads. So, naturally, we got a tad nervous when we saw some of our top commercial landing pages dipping out of top-five positions for their targeted search terms.

When we took to the SERPs to investigate who was unseating us, we discovered something equal parts unsettling and interesting: Our high-value, commercial-intent landing pages weren’t being displaced by competitors. They were being ousted by business directories and “listicles” that rank or compare multiple companies.

In fact, an evaluation of seven of our most important commercial keywords demonstrates a 50% increase in the number of lists and directories in top-five organic SERP real estate year-over-year (excluding SERP features such as People Also Ask).

Here’s an example for the keyword “SEO content writing services.” The image on the left is the SERP in 2022, and the one on the right is the SERP in 2021:

Notice the difference? The Featured Snippet, which we owned in 2021, is gone, we’ve dropped to position 5, and there are now three lists in the top-5 organic results where there used to be none.

We saw this again and again, and it left us with three questions:

1. Is there, in fact, an intent shift happening here, where Google is favoring lists, directories, and company rankings (consciously or unconsciously) over traditional commercial landing pages?

2. If so, what can be done about it?

3. What does this mean for the future of SEO?

Let’s tackle them one at a time.

Part 1: Are there more lists in 2022 than in years prior?

The answer: Based on a random sampling of commercial-intent keywords, yes. To what extent and who is most affected are the key questions, though.

Let’s look at how we figured this out, and evaluate the evidence

First things first: What do we mean by “lists” in SERPs?

For our purposes, we’ll define a “list” as any Google search result that compares, ranks, or evaluates multiple businesses. An example is something like, “8 best coffee grinders of 2022.” A Clutch directory listing for “Top Content Marketing Agencies” would also apply.

These could be off-site content from a third party writing about other companies, or an on-site list in which the publisher shrewdly ranks multiple companies, including their own. Here is NP Digital doing that very thing:

These different formats of “lists” are unified by a comparison-type commercial intent.

Second: How do we see a SERP change over time?

If we want to see how SERPs have changed from one year to the next, we need to be able to see what today’s SERP for a certain keyword looked like a year ago.

Here’s what the SERP for “mesh wifi router” looked like in 2021, based on Ahrefs data:

Third: How exactly should you compare one year’s SERP to another?

For it to be a fair assessment, I’d have to select keywords completely at random and then see how their SERPS differ from 2021 to 2022. The problem with Ahrefs’ historical SERP data, however, is that it plays poorly with local search intent.

For instance, I noticed that the search for “Landscaping services” was showing me results from Los Angeles.

I conducted most of this study from the literal opposite side of the country (Portland, ME), and I most certainly never see Los Angeles-specific results when I search for services here.

I noticed this with several other local-intent terms, like roofing for instance. Why does it happen? I suspect it has something to do with how they scrape or archive data to give their best estimate of what a SERP looked like at a point in time. Regardless, this means that my selection of commercial keywords had to be limited to terms that don’t have a strong local leaning.

Here is what that random selection of 25 keywords ended up looking like:

1. Content marketing agency
2. Moving services
3. HR Services
4. Website hosting services
5. Graphic design services
6. Email marketing services
7. Shipping service
8. Cloud migration service
9. Data center services
10. Staffing agency
11. Supply chain software
12. Keyword research tool
13. EHR system
14. Architecture firm
15. Cloud hosting service
16. IT consulting company
17. Accounts payable software
18. Marketing consultancy
19. Small business loan
20. Affordable laptops
21. Mesh wifi router
22. Water pick
23. Small coffee grinder
24. Budget printer
25. B2B lead generation service

So what did I do with these keywords?

1. Determined whether more lists are showing up in 2022, 2021, or 2020 SERPs. I simply counted the number of “lists” in the SERP in 2022 and compared it to the years prior.

2. Determined whether more lists are ranking in the top five organic listings in 2022, 2021, or 2020. I did this, again, by counting the number of lists for each year that appear in the top five. The point here is to see not just if there are more lists in SERPs, but whether more of them are ranking higher in 2022.

Note that I did not count SERP features, as I was primarily concerned with the actual listings.

Disclaimer: This is by no means an exhaustive or completely conclusive study. It’s really more of a random sampling, or a “head count.”

Finally: What did the results say?

Let’s look at the numbers. Below is the total lists from the 25 SERPs I looked at:

Overall, there was an 8.5% increase in the number of lists between 2021 and 2022 (and the difference between 2020 and 2021 is nominal).

That might not seem groundbreaking, but the sample size is not insignificant: I looked at approximately 200 total listings (using 25 keywords, most of the SERPs had nine or 10 listings).

So that 8.5% increase carries some weight.

Things get more compelling when we look at the top five results:

The number of lists in the top five positions increased by 35.5% from 2021 to 2022. In this case, our sample size is a hard 125 listings, since we counted the first five organic results for every single one of our 25 keywords.

Again, not a nail in the coffin, but it is meaningful.

In summary

Here’s what we know:

• 2022 had more lists than 2021 and 2020.

• 2022 had double-digit percentage gains in terms of lists in the top-five results over both 2021 and 2022.

• But, 2021 actually has slightly fewer lists than 2020.

• And 2021 saw a decline in lists in top-five results of nearly 12% from 2020.

Here’s what it likely means:

• Overall, the number of total lists and top-five lists has trended upward since 2020, with the latter trending upward much more significantly.

• Pulling from this data pool, there is sufficient evidence showing that lists are more dominant in the top five positions on SERPs for commercial keywords in 2022 than either of the preceding years.

Here’s what it does not mean:

• That this trend is universal. After all, we left out local intent, which is a big deal for some companies. The data seems solid for non-location searches, but we can’t evaluate what we can’t reliably see (local-intent commercial searches).

This is what it all looks like visually:

So why the slight dip from 2020 to 2021? It reads like a blip in what is otherwise an upward trend, but we can only speculate. Three years of data, while not bad, isn’t enough to conclusively signify a long-term trend.

However, it’s more than enough of a change to affect any company that relied heavily on those top-five positions in 2021. If you’ve seen this change (like we have), you know how much it can hurt.

Which brings us to:

Part 2: What can be done about it?

The answer: Get listed in relevant directories, make your own lists, and infiltrate others’ lists.

Again, we’ll go one by one.

1. Get listed in relevant directories

If a directory is outranking your landing page for an important commercial term, you want to be on that directory, and as high up in it as possible. Invest time and energy into sourcing the reviews needed to improve your rank.

For several years, we more or less owned the number one spot for “content marketing agency.” Today, we’re ranking third, and we are only one of two commercial LPs on the entire SERP.

The number one spot is now held by Clutch. When we saw Clutch coming for us in 2020, we ramped up our efforts to acquire more reviews on the platform. This got us ranking highly in their directory.

The result: It’s one of our top sources of referral traffic and the top source of conversions from referral traffic.

Before pursuing paid options with business directories, I’d recommend doing everything possible to bring your organic ranking up, as many directories use organic rank as a tie-breaker in their “bidding.” I’ll add one extremely important note here: You never know which directory will be the next big winner in the SERPs. Sure, target most of your reviews for the ones that sustain a strong presence, but also scour the web for directories that list your competitors, but not you.

Link intersect tools from the likes of Moz can help you do this, and it’s so worth the time. Another way is to just explore SERPs of some of the relevant keywords in your industry.

In mid-2021, our link building specialist spent literally five minutes getting us listed in a directory called Growth Marketing Pro. As a result of those five minutes, we’ve since earned over 1,500 users, and 46 conversions.

Just look at all the keywords that directory is on page one for — not to mention some of that keyword volume:

It’s just such an easy win.

2. Make your own lists

We’ve only recently begun exploring this option, and as you can see, position 14 is nothing to really brag about.

But we’re playing a long game. Our post about content marketing platforms went live a few months ago. It hasn’t landed on page one yet, but our hope is that we’ve created something that will build backlinks over time, and that we can update and re-promote year after year. And each time we update it, we’ll optimize the on-page copy to make sure it’s strongly positioned to succeed in search.

As with most of the strategies referenced in this section, it’s still too soon to attribute success to this, but it’s something to think about. If other sites can create comprehensive lists that feature their own product, you can, too. It’s just a matter of creating said list strategically, and then promoting it and monitoring performance over time.

3. Infiltrate others’ lists

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Or at least try by brokering your media strengths in exchange for a spot on their page one listing.

We’ve had mixed success here. In some cases, the promise of a link exchange, a guest blog post, or a guest appearance on our podcast were enough to get us included on a strategic list.

Appearing on those lists is great, as it gives us more visibility on SERPs for high-value keywords. But much to our existential chagrin, publishers have (on more than one occasion) flat-out told us we need to pay to be listed on their site. I’ll save the far-reaching, philosophical implications of this for Part 3 of this post.

For now, my advice is to add what we’ll call “referral SEO” to your existing backlink efforts. Think of it as targeted brand mentions. Your targets are based on what list is ranking for a keyword that is highly important to you. Once you’ve earned your placement, keep an eye on your referral traffic from that source.

Part 3: What does this mean for the future of SEO?

Answer: It’s complicated — and a potentially explosive subject.

Off the cuff, there’s a few big questions to unpack:

1. As directories and lists capture more page one SERP territory, they’re looking to cash in. One publisher literally told us they’d consider putting us on one of their lists if we paid them $3,500. Does Google care about that? Worse, at what point does commercial SEO become a pay-to-play situation, whereby if you want your company on a SERP, you have to pay your way onto someone else’s page?

2. When should you stop investing in certain commercial landing pages? Like I said, commercial pages are going extinct on the SERP for one of our most important keywords, “content marketing agency.” For now, we’re in position three. But we’ve seen all but one of our competitors get knocked onto page two. What happens then?

I can’t answer these questions confidently, but here goes:

I like to think the answer to the first question is that Google will catch on to what’s happening here, and start penalizing lists and directories that are presenting results based on who’s paying them, as opposed to what might actually be the best, most meaningful result for that query. But I have no idea if or how Google will do that.

For the second question, we’d have to shift our keyword target. At some point, we may need to bow out and understand where we can’t compete with these directories head-on, and assess whether there’s another keyword of equal value that we should target instead.

My first answer is hopeful and tenuous, and my second opens the floodgates to a whole lot of future work. But unfortunately, that’s the best we can do right now.

The final takeaways

Yes, there is some evidence that lists are now more prominent on page one for commercial keywords.

Yes, there is something you can and should do about it — and as always with organic SEO, you have to keep playing the game and run alongside the SERPs. Improve your rankings in directories. Get listed in new directories. Make some lists. Trade some backlinks. Get wily and start infiltrating some SERPs.

And no, we don’t quite know what this means for the future of SEO.

All you can really do is stay informed, stay data-driven, and keep updating your strategies to have a fighting chance of maintaining some sort of presence on page one for your most important commercial keywords.

How to Find Your Real SEO Competitors — Whiteboard Friday

Competitive research and analysis is a critical component of your SEO strategy. You may have an idea of who your busines competitors are, but your real SEO competitors are the ones who target the same keywords, speak to the same audience, and solve for the same consumer needs. 

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Lidia Infante walks you through two approaches to find out who those competitors are.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Fridays. My name is Lidia Infante, and I'm the Senior SEO Manager at Sanity.io. Today, we're going to be talking about how to find your real SEO competitors.

Competitor identification and competitor research is absolutely key to a good SEO strategy. And in order to nail it, you need to figure out who your competitors really are. So how do we know that someone is a competitor in search?

Essentially, they need to meet three criteria. They're targeting the same keywords as you, they're speaking to the same audience, and they solve for the same consumer need as you. That is, if your target audience goes with them, they have no more need for you.

There are essentially two approaches to identifying your competitors. You've got a top-down approach and you've got a bottom-up approach. 

Top-down approach to competitive research

So let's begin with this one. The very first thing you are going to do is contact other departments. Depending on where you are and the type of vertical that you're working in, you're going to want to talk to sales, you're going to want to talk to support, to customer success, to other areas of marketing, and even engineering, and ask them to provide a list of their perceived competitors. 

The next thing you're going to do is check an audience research tool. I recommend, for example, True Competitor by Moz, obviously. 

And then you're going to want to find the overlap between the two lists, right? So out of the list that your department and your colleagues say that are your competitors and the list that your tool says those are your competitors, you're going to want to find the overlap.

The advantages of this method is that it helps you get buy-in because other departments are going to recognize parts of their work into the output that you're going to present and build better connections with them. And it's really fast. You can get this done in a day, even less, depends on how long you're going to have to wait for that information from other departments. 

There are other aspects of it that are not as good. So, for example, it's not going to be the most accurate competitor research that you've ever had, and you're not going to be able to drill into competitors by topic.

However, this is best for performing sites. So if your site has been online for a while and you're ranking for a few of your target keywords, this is going to work really well for you. And going for the bottom-up framework might be overkill.

Bottom-up approach to competitive research

But then if you're starting a new site, or if you really, really want to dig into who your competitors are, you're going to want to do the bottom-up way. 

So the very first thing that we're going to do is we're going to identify what your target keywords are, and then we're going to cluster them into little topics. 

For each of those keywords, we're going to download the SERP results, the top 10, the first page. And we're going to analyze the competitor presence for each of your topics.

So if, let's say, Amazon shows up in 100% of your keywords for X topic, you know that this is very key for you. And then what you can do is drill down even further and identify the SERP features that are present in each topic.

You've already done the download. You already have the data. Just dig in a little deeper and you'll find out if you are best to attack these results with infographics, articles, video, any other format.

This is very accurate, but it can be really slow. The bottom-up framework is really good if you're starting a new site, or if you're not sure that the approach that you've had before is working. Since it's a little tricky, I have provided a free template that you can find linked in the text below. And you can find me on socials at @lidiainfante or my website, lidiainfante.com.

But before you go, to point two, I was using Moz's True Competitor tool, and it blew my mind. I recently joined a new company, Sanity.io, and I really wanted to figure out who my competitors are. I'm not an expert in headless CMSs and the structure content space, so I've been working on it for literal weeks. Just now, I was hanging out with the Moz team. They showed me the tool, and they immediately nailed my top five competitors on a click. What is that? Amazing.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

A Guide to Franchise SEO

As franchises can have a large number of locations by nature, search marketers are faced with the ever present hurdle of scale. More locations means more content and landing pages to manage, and a much bigger chance of running into technical SEO issues. These challenges can be even more daunting when combined with an older CMS, franchisee-generated content, and tracking issues.

At Go Fish Digital, we’ve been able to work with quite a few franchise businesses and advise on their SEO strategies. Over time, we’ve been able to identify common problems with these campaigns, and ways to solve these issues, the framework for which I’ll cover in this piece.

What is franchise SEO?

Franchise SEO is a set of initiatives to improve the search engine visibility of franchise websites, which are websites that promote an overall brand while at the same time offering localized pages for multiple locations of that brand. Strategies include scaling keyword research, creating localized landing pages, and removing duplicate content.

Broadly, franchise SEOs need to always be thinking about scalable approaches, local page quality, and technical issues that are common on these types of sites. Below I’ll cover some of our favorite approaches when handling a franchise site.

Franchise SEO best practices

Scaling keyword research

To start your franchise SEO campaign, you’ll want to identify and track the keywords that are most valuable to your business. Tracking your core keywords will allow you to monitor a couple of things:

1. Visibility changes for individual keywords

2. Aggregate rankings to see the overall SEO health of your website

The issue that most franchises face is that they offer a wide variety of service offerings across a large number of geographic areas. For instance, a national plumber may provide 20 different types of services (water leaks, sump pumps, etc.) across 50 high priority markets. This can make keyword research extremely difficult, as you’ll want to be sure you're tracking your site’s visibility across all of these different service/geographic combinations.

For this type of analysis, we love using the tool MergeWords. Once you identify the combinations of services and locations, you can easily plug this information into the tool to ensure that you’re creating queries for every combination.

This process allows you to more easily scale the keyword research process to ensure that there are no gaps in your rank tracking data.

Localize and segment your keyword tracking

With franchises, there is no such thing as a “national” ranking. Even queries with geographic modifiers such as “commercial cleaning” will have inherent local intent. A search for a query like this will bring up results that are specific to your area without you having to specify that information to Google. Tracking your keywords at a “national” level won’t provide you much insight as to how visible you are when real users perform a search.

Most rank tracking solutions will come with some type of location feature that will allow you to monitor a particular keyword in a specific geographic area. Many tools will allow you to get as granular as defining the exact ZIP code of the area that you want to track. We enjoy using tools such as STAT (pictured here) for this type of rank tracking.

This can still be useful even if you’re a business that has customers in a wide geographic area, but don’t have a physical location in each one. For example, a cleaning business might only have a few locations, but serve an entire state. In these situations, it can be beneficial to identify your highest priority/highest populated areas and set up localized keyword tracking for each one.

If you wanted to track all across the state of North Carolina, you could track keywords in geographic areas such as:

1. Charlotte

2. Raleigh

3. Durham

4. Chapel Hill

5. Winston-Salem

Once tracking your geo-specific keywords, you can then utilize keyword segments to monitor how you perform in a specific location. Keyword segments will allow you to drill down to analyze aggregate local rankings. You can do this by creating a segment for all of the queries you’re monitoring for a particular location.

For example, here you can see how a particular site ranks on the first page in Chapel Hill, NC:

Review high priority geographic areas

Now with segmented rank tracking set up, you’ll be in a great position to benchmark where you stand across your different locations. Doing this can help you better analyze the highest priority geographical areas. This can help you better focus your strategy, even if you’re managing a large number of locations.

For example, in our location in Chapel Hill, NC, we can see that 67% of our tracked keywords are ranking on the first page:

However, when we look at visibility in Fairfax, VA, we can see that only 36% of our tracked queries rank in the same positions.

This data allows us to see that we don’t rank as well in Fairfax when compared to Chapel Hill. If Fairfax is a high priority area for us, we might want to focus our efforts specifically on reviews for this market. Maybe our content isn’t as strong here or maybe that landscape is much more competitive. Whatever the case is, keyword segmentation has given us the knowledge of where we need to focus our efforts moving forward.

Create location-based pages

Another critical element of a franchise SEO campaign is to ensure that you have built out location pages for every area that you serve. This will give your site the opportunity to appear for geo-specific queries for your core keywords. As previously mentioned, Google naturally localizes the results in many industries, which means these pages could also appear for general keywords that don’t utilize geographic modifiers (“lawn care services”).

Unfortunately, most franchises heavily underinvest in this area. The vast majority of local landing pages contain fairly generic content that doesn’t add much value for users. Oftentimes, this involves general descriptions of a particular area. Even worse, these pages are notorious for having the same templates with just the location name replaced.

Ideally, your location pages would contain the following elements:

1. Optimized title tags and content for that specific location

2. Customized on-page content for that area

3. The address, phone number, and contact information (if a physical address exists)

4. Structured data markup from the most specific category in the schema.org library

5. Reviews specific to that individual area

6. External links to relevant local resources

For example, the Lawn Love franchise does a really good job of creating local landing pages for each area that they’re active in.

As a result, they rank well for “lawn care service” queries in a large spread of markets such as Philadelphia, Raleigh, and Pittsburgh.

What if you don’t have physical locations in the area you serve?

Even if your brand doesn’t have physical locations in the geographic area you’re targeting, it’s still definitely encouraged to create localized landing pages, as long as you provide services to that specific area. This can be a really useful strategy, especially if you only have a small number of locations but serve a much larger geographic area such as an entire state.

Below you can see the “Locations” page of a social security lawyer based in Pittsburgh, PA. While they only have a single physical location in the city of Pittsburgh, their business is regional and extends beyond the city into other parts of western Pennsylvania and even Ohio.

To improve the reach of their business, they’ve created location-based pages for all of the most popular cities and towns that they serve in these areas.

This gives their SEO the ability to cover a much wider geographic area than they normally would be able to with just a single location.

When performing any multi-location SEO campaign, we recommend one of the first things you do is assess all the major geographic markets that you serve. Next, you should audit your existing landing pages assets to ensure that you have a location page mapped to any high priority area. You can use tools such as CRM data or conversions in Google Analytics to determine what your most important locations are.

However, if you don’t have this information, another way to do it would be by evaluating populations. If we were working with a business in Texas, we could utilize municipality population data in order to determine which landing pages need to be created first based on where the majority of people are located. This provides a data-based way of informing where to focus your content generation strategies.

Create and optimize Google Business Profiles

For any locations where you have a physical address, you’ll want to be sure that you’ve created and claimed a Google Business Profile (GBP). These profiles integrate directly with Google Maps and Google’s local 3-pack results. This means that in order to be eligible to rank in Google’s map packs, you’ll need to have an active GBP that’s been properly verified:

Across all of your physical locations, you’ll want to audit your GBPs to ensure that the following information is accurate:

1. Primary category (most important)

2. Secondary categories (filled out as completely as possible)

3. Name

4. Address

5. Phone number

6. Hours of operation

The most crucial part of this step is ensuring that your primary and secondary categories for each location are filled out as completely as possible. If your business isn’t categorized properly, you could potentially be missing out on local pack visibility for relevant search queries for your franchise. To get a better understanding of how to categorize your GBPs, you can read Miriam Ellis’s excellent guide.

Ensure NAP consistency

Another great step to optimize your local pack rankings is to ensure there’s NAP (name, address, phone number) consistency across all of your physical locations. The more consistent this information is across the web, the more likely you are to appear in the map pack results. Since franchises face the challenge of scale, doing this manually is out of the question. Tools like Moz Local can help automate this process by improving each location’s NAP consistency in the most prominent data aggregators.

E-A-T optimizations

If you’ve already set up location pages but are looking to take their on-page optimizations to the next level, you can look for ways to improve the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) of their content.

Google has a responsibility to try to improve the visibility of sites that they feel will provide accurate information to users. For this reason, it needs to factor in how trustworthy a particular source is. While optimizations for E-A-T will be most relevant to sites in the health and finance verticals, multi-location sites can also leverage these concepts to improve their on-page content.

Here are some of our favorite content elements to utilize E-A-T concepts on your franchise location pages:

1. Information about laws and government regulations

2. External links to helpful local resources

3. Facts about a particular geographic area

4. Data points relevant to the local area

5. Profiles and information about specific employees at that location

Going back to the Lawn Love example, on their location pages, they provide users with specific data points about a particular area such as mowing costs, average yard sizes, and how frequently lawns are mowed.

Looking at another industry, the chiropractor franchise The Joint provides biographies of each doctor for each individual location, as well as information such as how many years of experience they have:

On-page optimizations like this may help improve the trustworthiness of your content to both users and search engines. Utilizing original data, linking to trusted government sites, and providing information about your specific location are all potential ways of sending additional trust signals. This type of content helps demonstrate your business's knowledge of the local market and differentiate your website from competitors that will likely have generic information.

Structured data

You’ll want to be sure that you're marking up your location based landing pages with structured data. Structured data is simply code that you place on a website to give search engines a better understanding about the context or the intent of that page.

Generally, structured data will be placed on a particular page template, such as your location pages. This makes schema markup a great way to improve the optimization of a website at scale.

One of the best things about schema markup is that, depending on your business, there might already be a schema type that closely describes what your business does. The vast majority of franchises will use some subtype of LocalBusiness structured data to markup individual location pages. While there are too many to list, below you can see some of the most common types of schema for franchise businesses:

• Attorney

• AutoDealer

• AutoRepair

• DryCleaningOrLaundry

• Electrician

• FinancialService

• GeneralContractor

• MedicalBusiness

• MovingCompany

• Plumber

• ProfessionalService

You can see that Two Men and a Truck have marked up all of their “Moving” location pages with the MovingCompany structured data type that highlights information such as the name, address, phone number, hours, and reviews.

Which schema you choose will vary greatly depending on the overall topic of your business. Your franchise should definitely be reviewing the schema.org library to see what the most specific type of structured data is for your location pages.

Review duplicate content issues

One of the biggest technical issues with large franchise sites is duplicate content. This is more likely to happen when steps have been taken in order to scale localized content initiatives. If not done properly, this can lead to pages that are too thin to be indexed or that Google has identified as duplicate.

As an example, here you can see a franchise that’s using templated content across a variety of pages:

As a result, Google may choose to ignore these pages and exclude them from the index entirely. If your pages are based on a template with little variation in content, this review is absolutely critical. To find pages this might be impacting, you can perform the following steps:

1. Navigate to Google Search Console

2. Go to the “Coverage” report

3. Select the “Excluded” tab

4. Review both the “Crawled - currently not indexed” and “Discovered - currently not indexed” reports

If you see pages that are built from a template getting flagged in these reports, there is a good chance that it’s due to a duplicate or thin content issue. These can be great pages to prioritize new content creation on as these changes could result in high converting pages getting indexed by Google.

Another method is to use a tool like Siteliner to identify duplicate content at scale. Siteliner crawls through your site and flags any duplicate/similar content that it finds. Pages with high match percentages can be audited and potentially adjusted to be more unique.

Create content that solves user problems

A great long term approach to franchise SEO campaigns is to connect with your customers before they’re ready to make a purchase. An effective way to do this is to identify queries that users would be searching before engaging with your franchise, and then create a content strategy around targeting those topics.

For example, a common reason to go to an auto repair franchise would be when you see the ominous check engine light appear on your car. In this situation, it’s likely that the user would seek to learn more about the issue and even try to fix it themselves before enlisting the help of a service.

The company AutoZone wisely understands this trend, and has created a page that provides information about reasons why the check engine light may appear. As a result, they rank on the first page for the query “check engine light”:

When analyzing the data more closely, AutoZone has clearly been investing in this type of content in recent years. As a result, it’s estimated that they’re generating over 580,000 organic sessions a month to these types of pages:

A particular type of content that I believe franchise owners should be paying attention to is video. This is especially true if your franchise provides some type of service that would be considered DIY. More and more we’re seeing SERPs around DIY queries where the bulk of the first page results are YouTube videos.

If you’re a franchise with existing video assets, it’s worth ensuring that any content you’ve uploaded to YouTube is optimized for relevant keywords. Doing this could provide more visibility through both YouTube and the Google search results, as they’re becoming more and more integrated.

A brand that positioned themselves very well for this trend is Ace Hardware. They’ve built up an extensive catalog of videos that directly integrate their products and teach users how to accomplish different projects. As a result, they often receive an embedded result directly on the SERPs for queries around their core products.

A brief franchise SEO case study

Applying these frameworks can be extremely powerful for franchise businesses, and we’ve seen some strong results when doing so.

For one environmental services client, we were able to identify that they didn’t have localized landing page content that targeted many of their core geographic areas. As a result, they were extremely limited in the number of markets their content was able to appear in.

By reviewing old versions of the site, we were able to create a plan to recreate many localized landing pages that had once existed, and utilize local content best practices. Doing this allowed them to experience a +270% improvement in the number of tracked queries that were ranking on the first page in the span of two years. 

Conclusion

When working on franchise SEO, marketers need to be aware of the contextual and technical considerations that apply most to these sites. Franchises need to be aware of the technical issues that come along with multiple locations such as duplicate content, indexation consistency, structured data, and more.

Google is placing a greater emphasis on quality localized content and more brands are starting to invest in these initiatives. By following the steps above, hopefully you’re able to think about your franchise’s search initiatives in a different way, and strengthen the quality of your site.

Post-Pandemic Travel Marketing: What Now?

As borders reopen and travel resumes, the stakes to make up for the time and revenue lost in 2020 and 2021 have never been higher. For many travel and hospitality organizations, there’s no question about it – the 2022-23 season must be a success.

The good news is that hope is firmly on the horizon. US Travel’s latest data shows that, for the first time since the pandemic began, travel spending was above 2019 levels by 3%. While nearly 60% of US travelers note that rising gas prices will impact their upcoming travel decisions, more than a quarter plan to spend more money on vacations this summer than in 2019.

We still live in uncertain times, especially with increasing costs in almost every industry a big concern for consumers. But for travel and tourism brands, now is the time to push forward with recovery and work with customers who, after two long years, are looking to finally take a trip away from home.

Following many near-complete strategy and product pivots of 2020, there’s plenty that travel and tourism brands can be doing with their marketing to support their own long-term success.

Anticipating consumer needs and concerns

One of the biggest changes that many travel and tourism brands have seen over the past year is a longer consumer buying cycle. Where customers may have been ready to book a flight, hotel, or tour experience with very little research before 2020, that’s no longer the case.

Instead, customers are taking their time deciding whether or not travel is safe, affordable, and accessible for them and their families. This has ultimately led to lengthier waits for travel companies as customers move down the sales funnel.

But as a travel business, part of your role has always been to reassure customers that their experience will be what they’re looking for. The biggest difference now is in anticipating and responding to new fears that have arisen in the past two years around travel safety.

Educational tour company Context Travel has seen this attitude change firsthand, and found success through adjusting their marketing strategy accordingly.

“We’re getting in front of travelers much higher up the funnel to gain trust by creating and sharing compelling content for people who are just dipping their toes back into travel”, says Director of Marketing, Ali Murphy. “This is a big shift from pre-pandemic, when we focused our marketing efforts on capturing people who were ready to buy a tour.”

Acknowledging the fear

You’ve likely spent the majority of the past two years continually adjusting your marketing strategy — and now isn’t the time to stop. While there may be some trepidation from consumers around travel picking back up, tourism and hospitality brands must acknowledge and accept these fears rather than turning a blind eye to them. This is where you need to think like your customers and alter your search marketing approach.

What is the data telling you? Instead of looking for large group tours, are your customers more likely to be interested in smaller, private tours with just their family group? Or are outdoor-based activities becoming the most-viewed pages on your site?

These are also the pages on your site that you might want to consider prioritizing in an SEO refresh. Consider whether the consumer landscape matches existing messaging and keyword strategy. If not, now might be the right time to find some copy and content resources to give those pages a re-write more consistent with current strategy and offerings.

There’s a good chance that your customers will be prioritizing different aspects of their experience for the foreseeable future, so it’s up to you to meet those needs. Instead of backing away from marketing your products and services, promote private accommodation, outdoor adventures, and a more people-concious travel experience.

Embracing new opportunities in search

Going after a whole new set of experiences in your search strategy is one thing, but travel brands should also be keeping tabs on what new features in search itself can be leveraged for their benefit. Mobile-first marketing is on the rise and your travel brand needs to be front and center.

You may not immediately think of TikTok as part of your search marketing plan, but we’ve all seen YouTube videos and tweets appearing in search results over the years, and TikTok content is finally making its way into SERPs as well.

While social content should still be focused on your primary channel audiences (aka the people that are actually seeing the content on its intended platform), there are plenty of benefits to be gained if your content can rank in traditional search results. When you’re working on your social strategy and planning for new content creation, keep this in mind as you optimize your videos later on (or loop in your brand team to tackle this across silos!)

This is just as applicable for in-destination brands offering consumers dinner, a night out, or an activity, as it is the destination marketing organization (DMO) marketing the destination itself. Social-as-search allows brands and organizations to actually influence the discovery phase, not just the decision-making phase of the consumer buying journey.

According to a recent study from TikTok, 49% of its users use the platform for discovering something new, and are 1.5 times more likely to immediately go out and purchase what they have discovered compared to other platforms. The opportunity to rank for high intent keywords, especially driven around experiential and food/beverage activities, with consumer proof in places like TikTok is a virtually untapped opportunity for brands across the board.

For many tourism brands, these opportunities simply didn’t exist in a pre-pandemic world. Yet many of the biggest companies are still refraining from embracing them. To stay competitive and attract both US-based and overseas customers, now is the time to jump on these opportunities before everyone else.

Leveraging existing marketing channels for conversion

At this point, we should all know that marketing channels work best when we think of them as complementary, rather than silos. “Always-on” marketing means that customers have access to brands 24/7, every day of the year. Because of that, they’re interacting with brand content across multiple platforms — from ads, to social media, to search results, to emails.

Travel consumers have always been a multi-platform, multi-stage audience. But the lengthening of the sales process means that securing a conversion after several touch points has become even more difficult for this industry. If your travel or tourism brand wasn’t already working to leverage different channels at once, now is the time.

Search is certainly still a long game when it comes to digital marketing, but it’s also one of the most trusted avenues out there. When you’re working on new content that can benefit you in six to 12 months, go back to thinking about your customers’ fears and needs first. How can you answer those questions and concerns better than your competitors?

From there, echo that content across other platforms. While you wait for the SERPs to catch up, get in front of your audience with additional messaging, proof points, and content that amplifies why to buy, why to visit, and why to trust your brand (user generated content is a great avenue for this). Search is undoubtedly important, but it is not the only channel that your consumer base is going to interact with on their path to purchase. Think about each channel as a unique opportunity to engage your audience and where they might be in the buying and consideration cycle when they encounter it.

For example, if a consumer is searching for content related to “best things to do in Costa Rica”, and your brand is well-positioned to answer that question through search, it might also be worth trying to get that user to sign up for your newsletter with Costa Rica travel tips, follow you on social media for local restaurant recommendations, and retarget with ads to re-engage them later in the buying cycle. Treat search as an entry point — not the only point — of opportunity and build your other channels as amplifiers.

This concept of social-as-search is also a great way to familiarize your brand to consumers. Almost no space on TikTok is as saturated as travel, and yet one airline manages to stand out for terms like “rating airlines” and “european travel”: Air Baltic.

@airbaltic it do be like that 🥲 #airline#cabincrew#airBaltic#okayletsgo♬ Okaaay lets go - Sarah Vilard

It’s not hard to see why. Their personality-driven content is relatable, humor-forward, and draws in viewers while educating consumers in the crowded low cost carrier space about their crew, destinations, and air frames.

Accepting changes within the travel industry as a whole

Instead of burying your head in the sand and thinking about the negative impacts, make travel industry changes part of your marketing campaigns. For instance, with non-refundable travel becoming a thing of the past, being more flexible with customers after they book isn’t going to land you more business. Letting them know their options ahead of time, though, can make you stand out.

Hotels.com is a great example of this. Their 2021 “revenge travel” campaign perfectly highlighted their understanding of customer concerns around making reservations: that may need to be changed or canceled last-minute. Instead of assuming that they could return to a point of non-refundable travel, their marketing fully acknowledged these customer pain points and made their position clear (with obvious dramatic humor), and favorable, for consumers looking to travel with flexibility.

Customers are ready for travel, and brands that embrace this “moment” and make it memorable are prepared to win. Brands that are prepared to go the extra distance will win favor with eager consumers, and brands that are simply meeting expectations will be seen as doing the bare minimum. The opportunity is in the “memorable”.

“Experiences sell way more than [traditional] products. Even more so in the hospitality industry. There are hundreds of hotels selling the same plans and accommodations as we are. So what makes us so special? Added value. Feeling. Belonging. Unique experiences. The most loyal clients buy that ‘special something’ that a product makes them feel rather than the product itself,” saya Ella Bencosme, Sales & Marketing Coordinator for the Holiday Inn Resort Aruba.

This is also a good time to make your reviews work for you as a marketing tactic. Many of your prospective customers will be looking for reviews that call out some of these widespread industry changes, like flexible change policies, hygiene standards, general safety, linens and laundering, contact with other guests, and the ability to “go private”.

Whether you like it or not, how you respond matters and your audience is watching. Customer reviews have always been a fundamental part of the travel and hospitality industry, and this has only become of increased importance in recent years. Stay on top of reading and responding to your reviews, particularly from those who may not have had a good experience. If you need just one more reason to put stock in the user experience, think of the visibility that Google reviews, and OTAs like Expedia and Trip Advisor, have in the SERP.

Brand guarantees are not enough to satisfy consumers. Instead, hearing and reading recent first-hand accounts of travel experiences from customers just like themselves will continue to be a significant deciding factor for many people.

In conclusion

Tourism and hospitality have changed — probably forever. Travel expectations that the pandemic introduced will not be easily walked back. In a post-pandemic world, travel brands must adjust their marketing strategies to align with new consumer needs, expectations, and fears. Embracing and leveraging new forms of search marketing, while continuing to build a reputable and consistent brand in the eyes of travel-cautious consumers is the only way to succeed.

Where Can You Go to Learn Local SEO?

Image credit: Fattoria la Maliosa

In 2023, I’ll have been studying local SEO for 20 years, and I definitely still won’t know it all.

If you’re just entering this fine and spacious field of local search marketing, welcome to what will be a habit of lifelong scholarship. In the next 20 years, you’ll see as many (or more) changes than we’ve witnessed in the nascent decades of this discipline. You’ll study how to lay a feast of options before the local businesses you market, regularly setting out new dishes as new promotional opportunities arise. Your education is what will keep this buffet fresh and hot while keeping you enthusiastic about your work.

Here’s the view from my side of the table of what’s happened culturally over the past two decades in the industry: we started out from a real place – marketing quite actual local businesses – and have come to prize their qualities of realness more with each passing year as we’ve learned to prioritize owner expertise, their earned authority, trustworthiness, community involvement, economic essentialness, and basic human-ness! It’s been good growth that has handily paralleled Google’s own messaging about what they want and it’s been a steady evolution, set amid an otherwise-hectic rate of technological change.

It’s this combination of how to consistently think local like a philosopher coupled with how to selectively act local like a chef in a stocked pantry that you’ll be pursuing as a career scholar in local SEO. Today, I’d like to set my table for you with high quality paid and free local SEO educational resources and tools to keep you thinking and acting successfully in the years ahead.

Resources for formal local SEO training

Image Credit: Andrea Alba

You can’t major in local SEO in college, but being able to access organized training will be a faster path to education than trying to cobble information together from a bunch of random sources. If you’re hoping to get a job in local SEO, are already working for a local business that needs to market itself, or have decided to expand your marketing agency’s service menu, dedicated programs like these will help you absorb a lot of knowledge in a logical order:

Moz Academy’s Local SEO Certification (Paid - $395, 5 hours and 45 minutes)

Invest in this paid on-demand video course and you’ll access nearly six hours of formal but fun training in how to do local SEO. Take an exam at the end and receive a certification badge as proof of your proficiency and accomplishment. I contributed course materials for this program which is led and presented by Moz’s Senior Learning and Development Specialist, Meghan Pahinui, and I don’t know of another learning opportunity quite like it anywhere else on the web in terms of its completeness, quality, and value.

BrightLocal’s Local SEO On Demand Course (Paid - £300, 3 hours)

I haven’t personally taken this three-hour paid course, but I have been a longtime viewer of the instructor, Greg Gifford, whom I consider to be a master at video-based teaching. BrightLocal’s track record of publishing excellent local SEO materials gives me the confidence to include this resource in my formal training list as doubtless being of high quality.

Sterling Sky/LocalU’s Agency Training (Paid - $1500 per session with volume discounts)

Pay for live, modular teaching from some of the best in the business. While I haven’t personally taken these classes, I can vouch for Joy Hawkins’ world-class SEO skills and am confident that any program developed by her organization would be of excellent quality for agencies ready to make a substantial business investment in one-on-one training.

Pigzilla’s Private Local SEO Training Community (Paid - $5-$49 per month)

This is a subscription-based community run by Dani Owens in which you pay monthly for access to ongoing local SEO mentorship and materials. I’m not a member, but respected local SEO, Claire Carlile, gives it her endorsement and this could be a good fit for new marketers in search of supportive guidance. A seven-day free trial will help you decide if it’s a good match for your style and needs.

The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide (Free)

Prefer to teach yourself from great materials? Look no further than this comprehensive 9-chapter, totally free guide from Moz. I’m the chief contributor to this resource that will walk you through conceptualizing and marketing local businesses from the ground up. If your company is onboarding new local SEOs, give them this guide as a training manual.

If none of these training resources are exactly what you were looking for, an alternative tip would be to contact an experienced local SEO whom you really admire and ask if there is room on their calendar to coach you at an hourly rate. Some may be too busy, but others may welcome the opportunity to mentor you.

Resources for thinking local

Image credit: Taymaz Valley

Once you’ve accomplished a basic level of training in local SEO, cultivating your ability to think of everything from a local perspective will be an ongoing practice that sets you apart professionally and helps you bring value to any relevant organization. Get into the best possible local mindset with these resources:

Near Media (Free)

Respected industry figures Mike Blumenthal, Greg Sterling, and David Mihm publish this podcast, newsletter, and blog which has become the best place I know of to view commerce, search, and social through a local lens. Industry developments are assessed with practicality and an eye keenly focused on benefitting real local businesses. I’ve contributed to the blog at Near Media, and am a weekly reader and viewer of everything published by this organization because, for me, it defines thought leadership in the local space. Become a local SEO who thinks as logically as these gentlemen do and you will be a major asset to any business or agency.

Moz Blog’s Local Column (Free)

In company with some outstanding industry guest contributors, the local column of the Moz blog is my home base, and I’m including it in the “think local” section of this guide because my own interest in local search has always had a philosophical root. I truly see local as a tool for prioritizing people and planet over mere profit and I hope readers are taking my work and using it to develop more inclusive, diverse, and sustainable local communities. Applause for you if you are thinking deeply about what strategic local SEO tactics can do to build a better world for all of us.

The Institute for Local Self Reliance(Free)

Start reading ILSR’s remarkable series of reports and you’ll quickly come to see the links between local businesses and larger concepts like politics, human rights, energy, and society. Keep a close eye on this organization for original data and statistics you can use to tell persuasive local business stories and get buy-in from colleagues and bosses on initiatives.

The American Independent Business Alliance (Free/Paid)

With a membership of more than 50,000 local businesses and organizations, AMIBA is a need-to-know resource for US local SEOs whose clients should be part of the Buy Local movement. AMIBA helps communities develop IBAs, and has both paid memberships and free learning resources to enable independently-owned companies become part of larger local initiatives. Truly a great org.

MozCon (Paid)

You’ll find outstanding local SEO takeaways from the live and livestreamed popular annual conference that is MozCon. MozCon is a general SEO and marketing conference with some presentations being local-specific and nearly all speakers sharing trends in thought and tactics that are applicable to most business types. Missed the most recent event? Check out the video bundles.

Local University (Free/Paid)

Free weekly video round-ups of local search news and a celebrated paid traveling conference series have made LocalU an industry favorite for many years. Some of the best minds in the local search community are involved in this organization, many of whom I’ve learned so much from outside the formal conference circuit. Great news is that LocalU has a virtual event planned for late 2022, so you can attend the conference from any location.

Street Fight (Free)

If the local businesses you market tend to fall into more highly-funded categories, Street Fight’s publication keeps a running tab on new local tech and bigger brand developments, acquisitions, and news. Awareness of what’s going on at the cutting edge of commerce can often provide inspiration for smaller-scale implementation for SMBs. All Local SEOs can benefit from learning how big businesses think and selectively draw lessons from this about how they want to operate and differentiate.

Pro tip for a never-ending stream of localistic thoughts enriching your mind: find your favorite local SEOs on Twitter and look at their profiles to follow whomever they follow. Their chosen sources will sometimes surprise you and can be real gems.

Resources for acting local

Now things are getting exciting. Once you know local search fundamentals and are working to develop your own business philosophy, you’ll want to be able to take bold action on up-to-the minute developments and use good tools effectively. Learn, test, and iterate with help from these resources:

Search Engine Roundtable (Free)

The local category of Barry Schwartz’s famed publication reports new local developments faster than any other site on the web. If you want to be the first (or the second) to know when Google rolls out a new feature or experiences a new large-scale problem, be a regular Roundtable reader.

Sterling Sky’s blog and forum (Free)

For some of the best actionable local SEO advice anywhere, tune into the ongoing small-scale studies Joy Hawkins’ agency conducts. Data-based tactics are best! Meanwhile, if you run into a problem while doing local SEO, head to her forum for good, free advice from the community.

Moz’s Competitive Local Business Audit Spreadsheet (Free)

Make a copy of the spreadsheet and start documenting client vs. competitor wins and losses to help you create an informed local search marketing strategy. This work deserves to be foundational and primary to most campaigns, and a ready-made spreadsheet makes it easier.

Whitespark’s Local Search Ranking Factors Survey (Free)

The tactics you prioritize for each unique local business you market should be customized to their potential and goals, but it’s great to know which factors a large pool of local SEOs feel are currently having the most observable impact on Google’s local and organic rankings. This annual survey has become an industry institution.

Whitespark’s Local Rank Tracker (Paid)

This paid tool is a step ahead of many others because it allows you to emulate rankings from local packs and Google Maps, which are typically different. There are also Google organic and Bing options as well, to give you a very big picture of online performance.

MobileMoxie’s SERPerator (Free/Paid)

Emulate mobile local ranking for free three times a month, and upgrade to a paid account if you love this.

Whitespark’s Review Link Generator (Free)

So quick, easy, and doesn’t cost a penny. Make it a cinch to request reviews from customers with this link-generating widget from the good folks at Whitespark.

GMBSpy Chrome Extension (Free)

For another vital action, get this great Chrome extension to reveal all the Google Business Profile categories being used in your market and industry.

GMB Everywhere (Free)

This extension also surfaces categories, but does even more in terms of auditing competitors’ posting strategy and contents.

Moz’s Check Presence Tool (Free)

Get an at-a-glance sense of the health of any local business’ citations by simply entering the company name and address.

Moz Local (Paid)

Build out and maintain a high-quality set of local business listings and manage your reviews with this trusted software. The tool also offers basic review sentiment analysis, which is one of the most important tasks of local campaigns.

Moz Link Intersect tool (Paid)

If you are a Moz Pro subscriber, don’t overlook the highly useful Link Intersect feature of Link Explorer which lets you discover local competitors’ linked unstructured citations, enabling you to see where you could earn linktations for the businesses you market.

Notify (Free)

Get slack or email notifications any time this tool finds social mentions of your business. Being where your customers are talking about you is a fundamental local search marketing practice.

Buzzsumo’s Content Analyzer (Free)

Get publication inspiration by entering a topic, keyword, or domain name into this widget to see how many social shares are occurring around that theme.

Aircam.ai (Paid)

This newcomer service is at the cutting edge of both the image and visual search trend we are watching take over the local space. This service generates local business photography that is geared at improving conversions.

Riverside.fm (Paid)

Working with a local business owner who is an expert at what they do, but doesn’t excel at writing? Film them talking with this up-and-coming tool and use a single session to spark multiple types of content.

Postamatic (Free)

If you can use a spreadsheet, you can use Noah Learner’s cool application for publishing Google posts to multiple Google Business Profiles.

Microdata Generator (Free)

Generate local business schema with this simple widget from Steven Ferrino.

This list could go on forever, but I’ll cut it off here and hope you’ll add some of these actionable resources to your kit.

Why should you learn local SEO?

Image credit: Jaime Walker

I’m not saying you should! Local may not be your dream career, but here’s something to consider: Google has been ruling the SEO world for as long as I’ve been working online, and local is the ace up their sleeve. They are deeply staked to it. It’s what they have that Amazon doesn’t, and, for that matter, local is the thing Amazon keeps trying to experiment with by opening and shuttering a series of physical stores of their own. Virtual e-commerce may have spiked over the past few years, but it’s downtrending again. And, to put it bluntly, saving the planet means breaking our overdependent long-distance shipping habit in favor of local fulfillment because of the problem of fossil fuels.

As we covered here in a recent column, working with independent local businesses can align well with personal convictions about healthy societies, but if that’s not a deciding factor for you, it could just be that local businesses are as old as dust and have great sticking power. You can choose to make career gambles on affiliate marketing, or crypto, or whatever the next thrilling surge may be. Many people thrive on the excitement and some get rich. But if you’d prefer a safer bet, look around your own town and see how many people are on their way right now to the grocery store, bank, diner, and doctor. They’ll keep in those well-worn grooves for the foreseeable future, and you can create a good niche for yourself in teaching established models the newest tactics for promoting themselves to a society in love with tech.

For me, local offers all the excitement I can handle, and if you value a working environment in which constant learning is part and parcel of the job, you may have just discovered the “you are here” on the big map of your career options.

Moneyball is the Future of SEO — Whiteboard Friday

Welcome back to Whiteboard Friday! First up in our fall season, Will Critchlow shows you how, much like the NBA, SEO is undergoing an analytic revolution — and how you can make the most of it.

To hear more on this topic, and from our other amazing MozCon 2022 speakers, be sure to pre-order the video bundle! 

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

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. Will Critchlow here, CEO at SearchPilot. I want to start today by talking about the NBA in 2001. This is what the shot chart looked like. So these are the 200 most commonly shot from locations in the NBA in 2001.

So in professional basketball, you can see that they took a load of shots around the rim. These are the dunks and layups. They took a load of shots from outside the three-point line, and they took a lot of these mid-range shots, which are all the jump shots in between. 

NBA analytic revolution

Something happened in the subsequent 20 years, because today the shot chart looks more like this. It's pretty mind blowing. You can see there's still a ton of dunks and layups, still a ton of three-point shots, but the mid-range has all but disappeared. Why is that? Well, what happened was they installed advanced camera systems in every NBA stadium and every NBA arena and applied a whole load of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence to track all of the players and the ball throughout every single game.

And using that advanced statistics, they could track all kinds of things that they didn't have before, like how closely guarded the player was when they were shooting, whether they dribbled left, whether they dribbled right, all those kind of little details. And out of that data, they discovered that these mid-range shots, that had been part of the game forever, were less effective than everyone had assumed.

It turned out that they were almost as hard to score as the three-point shots, but, of course, worth far less. The dunks and layups worth only two points, but easy enough to be worth shooting. The three-point shots worth half as much again, worth shooting, but the mid-range less so. But it took the advanced statistics to be able to figure that out.

SEO analytic revolution

I'm going to argue that we're undergoing a similar analytic revolution in SEO. The equivalent of the cameras in every stadium is not cameras watching us type. It's SEO A/B testing, where you can take a hypothesis. So you can take the particular onsite change that you're thinking of making, that you think is going to bring a big benefit to your organic search performance, and you can test it in a scientific way and get the expected impact as well as the confidence interval on that impact.

I'm not going to get into detail today about how to run those tests. We've talked about that before, and we'll link in the show notes to more detail on how you can run those tests. But the point being this kind of testing is available now. 

And what it's doing is it's bringing a similar kind of realization to especially enterprise SEO, very large website SEO that happened in the professional basketball game. And the equivalent, I'm going to argue, is that the mid-range is all of those untested changes to your website, all the little things that maybe you do because it's best practice, or you heard something from a Googler, or you heard something from an expert, maybe even someone like me, and they said, "Hey, you should do this thing," and you roll it out on your website.

But actually, they're way lower percentage than we'd always assumed, just like the mid-range shot is in the professional basketball game. And you have all of those cases where you get excited. The equivalent of your crossover is you find maybe an insight from some keyword research, and you have some new thought about how searchers might be looking for your website.

And you pull up for that mid-range jump shot, where you make the change. So you start modifying your titles and meta information, for example, on a whole bunch of pages based off these insights. But too often that's a massive air ball. We've seen so many cases where we have rolled out changes that are based on that kind of insight and huge negative impact, -20%, -27% organic search performance as a result of some of those untested changes.

Moneyball is the future of SEO

And so my argument that moneyball is the future of SEO, the strategies that I think those large websites are going to be building upon in the future is a combination of winning tests. Those are our dunks and layups, the things that we're very sure to make those shots.

The three-point shot: new content

And the equivalent of the three-point shot, I'm claiming that this is new content, so new pages, new site sections, super valuable. If you don't build out new content, you're going to struggle over time. But super hard as well, just like the three-point shots are in the game. They're harder, but they're worth more. 

So you build the strategy of building out new content and rolling out winning tests, which are your dunks. And you cut out the mid-range, which are all those little tweaks, all those untested onsite changes.

And then the final piece of the strategic puzzle here is that you drive your test cadence up. So the basketball equivalent, again, is that over this same time period possessions per game are up almost 10% over that time. And the reason for that is that if you have an edge, if you have an advantage over your opponents, which is exactly what this kind of advanced insight gives you, you want more goes.

You want more repetitions, and that's just like you walk into a casino and you play roulette once, maybe you win. You play roulette a thousand times, the casino is definitely winning and that's because they have the edge. So if we have the edge because we're running these tests, we want to drive the number of tests up and test cadence. And so the very highest performing teams that I see doing this kind of moneyball SEO approach, they are building their strategy off this kind of thing, new content and winning tests.

And then they're setting KPIs around test cadence and making sure that they run more of those tests, they run them more quickly, and that they're driving performance that way. So I hope you've enjoyed this little ramble through NBA basketball into SEO testing. I'm Will Critchlow, CEO of SearchPilot. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com