How to Build Location Pages Humans (and Search Engines) Will Love

Location pages are an important part of multi-location SEO for enterprises and SMBs alike, but they aren’t easy to get right. At best, they should give potential customers zero excuse to choose a competing business. Often, though, they struggle to provide unique value and offer essentially the same information as the home or service pages — but with a different city in the H1 and meta title.

This happens because unique content is hard to come by when every location does or sells the same thing.

The question isn’t, “How should I go about creating an awesome location page?”, but rather, “Am I giving customers enough unique value to even justify this page in the first place?”

If the answer is “no,” it’s time to find new opportunities for valuable content. Read on for ways to determine whether you’re offering unique value for your location pages, and how to make them better.

Is your content actually unique?

When it comes to building awesome location pages that will impress your customers and search engines, content is your most powerful tool. And I’m not just talking about words-on-a-page, paragraph-form content. Content is any information on your page, in any medium.

Regardless of the way you communicate to customers (text-based content, video, images, etc.), location page content will fall into one of three buckets:

1. Boilerplate

Boilerplate content can be copied and pasted across all locations and remain accurate. A brand’s mission statement falls into this category, for example. The good thing about boilerplate content is it doesn’t require much work to implement. It also doesn’t provide the unique value we’re looking for.

As a rule of thumb, use boilerplate content when it’s necessary (and it will be) but avoid creating pages where the majority of content falls into this category.

2. Technically “unique”

Let’s say you want to avoid duplicate content across location pages so you rewrite the same information (business description, services, etc.) over and over again. Voila! It’s unique, right?

Not exactly.

Technically, it’s unique — but it’s not saying anything new about that location. (Hence the quotation marks.) In other words, the content isn’t duplicative, but it’s also not that valuable. You’re simply using different words to relay the same message.

This type of content is, in my opinion, the worst of the three because it takes manual effort to create but isn't more helpful to customers than copy-and-pasting the source material.

3. Unique value

The third, final, and best type of content is “unique value.” This content only applies to the location the page is about. It can’t be copied and pasted anywhere else because the value of the content is tied to the value of the location itself.

While this type of content takes a lot of work to create, it’s also the most helpful and should account for the majority of the content on location pages.

What should a location page include?

Creating enough unique value on location pages to outweigh boilerplate content isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either. The following list includes content features that can add new layers of unique value to your pages — or close to it.

1. Paragraph-form content

Paragraph-form content is a great way to provide information to users about your location. When writing location pages, focus on information that is specific to the storefront the page is about. Here’s an example:

• Diluted Value - “All of our locations have great customer service and we’re super passionate about offering [product / service] to people like you!”

• Unique Value - “We’re located at the corner of [Street] and [Avenue] and a five minute walk from [Landingmark].”

There is a time and a place for “diluted value” content, but your goal should be to provide as much unique information as possible.

2. Location attributes and features

If you’ve optimized a Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business or GMB), you’re familiar with location attributes. In short, these are a list of features that help customers plan their visit to your location.

If you’re not sure what to include in your attribute list, check your GBP and carry over any boxes you checked there. That said, don’t limit yourself to those items — feel free to add as many attributes as are helpful to your customers.

3. Staff profiles

One of the things that is (almost) always unique to each business location is the people who work there. Highlighting notable staff members’ profiles is a great way to show humans and search engines what (and who) to expect when they arrive.

4. Hours & NAP

Hours of operation and NAP info (name, address, and phone number) are the most basic form of unique content, but don’t forget to add them to your location pages. Additionally, make this information easy for customers to find on the page so they can get in touch or get directions quickly. NAP information can also be accompanied by an embedded map.

5. Photos

Photos on your location page (and GBP for that matter). Should be of the location the page is about. Avoid generic, santistized storefront images that aren’t of the actual storefront. Instead, include photos that show customers what they’ll experience at the store (inside and out).

Both of your audiences (humans and search engines) are very good at detecting these types of patterns and, should a website visitor become foot traffic, customers are more likely to be disappointed, confused, or frustrated if the photos don’t match reality.

It goes without saying that stock photos shouldn’t show up on your location pages, either.

6. Reviews

Think of reviews as user-generated content for your location pages.

When you add them, make sure you’re including ones specific to the location the page is about, as opposed to one feed of every review for every location.

The goal is to provide a realistic look at what potential customers can expect based on the past experiences of others. Additionally, reviews about the location itself (and only that location) add another layer of unique value to the page.

7. Products and inventory

I recommend adding product information or an inventory feed to every location page, even if the products offered at each location are the same.

Your customers only care if a given product or service is in stock near them, so inventory information is, in a way, another form of unique value content.

8. Nearby locations

Nearby locations are great if you have multiple storefronts in close proximity. They’re also another opportunity to add unique information to your location pages.

These can be added as their own module on the page or integrated with an existing map. I personally prefer to dedicate an entire page section to them to avoid confusion for readers who land on the page to get directions.

9. Offers and specials

Specials and offers don’t have to be unique for every location. I just wouldn’t make sense. That said, coupons and offers that are geographically relevant can be an opportunity to build additional value for local customers. Coupons, offers, deals, etc. by state or metropolitan area are one way to accomplish this.

10. FAQs

Frequently asked questions are one of my favorite ways to create rich, in-depth and unique content on local landing pages. I’ve seen a lot of businesses add FAQ modules to their pages, but I’ve also seen a lot of businesses only add generic questions and answers to those modules.

When adding FAQs to your local landing pages, ask questions that will elicit a unique response. Also, try to avoid yes or no questions, unless you plan to expound on the answers.

Generic:

• Question: “Do you have vegan options?”

• Answer: “All of our locations have vegan and gluten-free options for you to enjoy!”

Unique Value:

• Question: “Can I get to {Location} from public transportation?”

• Answer: “You sure can! We’re a five minute walk from the {specific} bus stop. Just head toward {street} and take a left at {street} and you’ll find us on the right.”

11. Departments and services

Departments and services are another example of content that can be unique, but isn’t always. For some business types (automotive dealers, for example), departments are clear: Sales, Finance, Repairs, etc.

For other business types, this content type isn’t as obvious. A bakery chain, for example, could include services in their location pages to highlight which locations offer wedding cakes versus their typical inventory.

Like inventory, the value of these departments or services comes from the fact that as a customer, I only care if the location nearest me offers the specific thing I’m looking for.

A few words about structured data

Schema (also called structured data) is code that tells search engines about your website content. Often, your customers won’t even know the schema is there — it’s strictly for search engines, with the exception of rich results.

Schema is important for two reasons:

• Context: It helps search engines understand how the “things” that make up your business form a larger entity.

• Specificity: It removes the natural ambiguity caused by keywords (and language).

If a website mentions the word “Avocado,” for example, it could be talking about the fruit or the mattress brand. Language alone isn’t enough to clarify without context. Marking up your content with schema removes this margin for error when it comes to Google understanding your content.

Structured data can also help you qualify for rich results like FAQs or review snippets for products.

Location page Schema best practices

When it comes to location pages, there are a few things you should keep in mind regarding schema markup.

First, make sure you’re using as many relevant schema types as possible. If you’ve optimized your page with unique images, FAQs, and staff bios, don’t add LocalBusiness schema to the page and call it done. Mark up every available item on your page to give Google as much information as possible. After all, search engines have to understand your content in order to index and rank it.

Second, use the most specific schema type available. Within the “LocalBusiness” schema category, there are 145 types of schema for specific businesses. Dentists, for example, should use “Dentist” schema instead of “Local Business,” and restaurants should use (you guessed it!) “Restaurant” schema.

Conclusion

Creating valuable location landing pages takes time, effort, and a bit of creativity. As you review the elements above, don’t gloss over the ones that seem the most difficult or time-consuming. That’s what your competitors are already doing.

Instead, prioritize the value you’re providing to potential customers because strategies that don’t scale may be your competitive advantage.

A Content Engine that Drives Revenue — Whiteboard Friday

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, MozCon speaker and content marketing expert Ross Simmonds walks you through his method for creating a content marketing engine that will ultimately make you money, rooted in four simple steps: research, creation, distribution, and optimization.

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

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz friends. I'm Ross Simmonds, and today we're going to be talking about something that I hold really deep to my heart — the idea of using content to generate revenue, generate business results. We're going to be talking about how to create a content marketing engine that ultimately will make your money jiggle, jiggle, or fold, I don't know. But either way, what we're going to be talking about today is something that I really hope you can apply to your content marketing teams, that you can apply to your entire engine and ultimately shape the way that your content culture operates. And it's rooted in four simple steps — research, create, distribute, and optimize. And if you can embrace a culture that leverages those four things consistently, year after year, quarter after quarter, month after month, I am convinced that you will be able to see revenue results and the goals that you have set out to accomplish directly from your content engine. Let's dive into each of them.

Research

So the first one is research. This is essentially tactics, people, and timeline, and goals that are going to be applicable to each of these different categories.

Tactics

Community research

When it comes to research, the tactics that you want to embrace upfront and initially are rooted in things like community research. What does that mean? It means you're going to go and find the communities that your audience is spending time on online. You're going to go into these communities and you're going to start to understand the trends and the types of content that they're consuming, the problems that they're talking about on a regular basis. You're looking for qualitative insight to understand the problems of the audience that you're trying to reach.

Keyword research

Then you're going to do things like keyword research. You're going to understand the search intent behind the words that your audience are going into Google and typing in to find problems, to find information, to solve problems that they're having on a day-to-day basis. Keyword research is a great solution and a great way to better understand the thinking and the things that people that you want to connect with are looking for. If you can understand this, if you can create content that services them as it relates to their informational intent or understand the way that they buy and whether or not they're looking for coupons or whether they're looking for things near me, and you can create content based off of this research, it will make it easier for you to be able to generate revenue off the back of your content.

Backlink research

You also want to do things like backlink research, which is going to inform backlink outreach. You want to do backlink research because it's going to give you insights into knowing what content you can create that is linkable. What is content that is being produced, the ideal publications that your audience is reading are linking back to? You want to use all of this to inform your own strategy.

Social sharing and paid media research

Social sharing research, paid media research. Look at the content that people in your audience are sharing on social. Look at your competitors and what information and resources they're promoting, because it's very likely that if they're running ads to a certain landing page, that it's probably generating some revenue. So you want to look at that and use it to inform your own strategy as well.

People

What type of people on your team do you want to have making these types of decisions and doing this research? It's pretty holistic. You want SEOs. You want social media managers. You want your community manager involved. You want your PPC folks involved. You want a strategist, an analyst, maybe even some developers involved. This is an important piece of the puzzle that oftentimes gets overlooked. When we think about our industry, content marketing, there's two words there — content and marketing. We forget about marketing actually being rooted in research. So you want to embrace the research side of things before you start creating content, and you want to have a holistic team doing this.

Timeline

This might take one to three months, and that's okay. It might take some time. But the key here is to understand that this investment in time is going to ultimately pay the bills. It's going to generate revenue for you. So be patient, embrace it, and use it.

Goal

The goal here is simple, folks. You want to unlock content market fit. What is content market fit? It's complete alignment between the content you create and the market that you're trying to connect with. And if you have content market fit, you're going to have content that is worth creating.

Create

So let's talk about that one. Creation. What type of content should you create? This is going to happen as the second step in your content marketing engine. 

Tactics

You don't want to just start writing blog posts without intent. You don't want to start creating white papers without intent. You want to first understand the research and let that inform what you create. Should you develop blog posts? Should you develop research-based assets? Should you create infographics? Or maybe you should just create some memes and share them on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook, etc. Maybe that's the play for you. Every brand is going to be different. And every single type of asset that you create, every single type of asset that you invest in is going to have a different outcome and it's also going to have a different type of goal that you're aligning with it. You should determine which content you invest in based on the research.

People

After understanding your audience, you will have a better understanding of the types of content that you should create. And you're going to have a handful of different people involved in this process as well, but it's going to be rooted directly in the types of assets you create. Maybe you'll have writers. You'll definitely want to have an editor. You don't want typos and all that good stuff. You're going to want a designer maybe. If visual is the way that you're going to go, you might need a videographer. You might need a developer, an illustrator. There's so many different people who you might need involved to create a great content. And that is the goal.

Timeline

It might take one to four weeks, it might take even longer than that. 

Goal

But the goal is simple. Create content that is worth reading, worth sharing, worth linking to, worth watching, etc. You have to have intent behind every single asset that you create, and you also have to recognize that not all assets are created equally. It might take a day to create a great meme. It might take months to create a research-driven asset that actually has some utility and functionality within it. And that, too, is okay. It's a different level of investment, which might mean it needs to deliver a different type of ROI and revenue, but at the same time, it's an investment worth making.

Distribute

All right, research and create, that's typically where most brands end. They create their content. They say, "Yay, we're successful. We're writing content. We're creating content. This is it." But they forgot, again, as I mentioned earlier, content marketing.

You actually have to market the content that you're producing. How do you do that? Distribution and optimization. These are two things that you actually have to do forever. Notice that, forever, forever? Create once, distribute forever. Create once, optimize forever. What does that mean?

Tactics

When it comes to distribution, these assets that you've created, you have to spread them. You have to ensure that they are reaching the audience that you want to connect with. Maybe that's through newsletters. Maybe that's through communities that they're already browsing in. Do you sponsor that new community? Do you go into that community and seed it yourself, where you actually start responding to people in that community with links to the content that you've created? On social media, maybe you're going to start injecting that content into threads on Twitter. You're going to share it on LinkedIn. You're going to go into Facebook groups and start to spread it in Facebook groups as well. You want to distribute your content where your audience is spending time.

SEO

And this might blow a few people's minds, but SEO is a distribution opportunity as well. When you're thinking about optimizing your content for search, search is a distribution channel. And you can optimize your content, not just from an SEO on the Google side, but also from a YouTube side, search from a Facebook side, from a TikTok side, from a Pinterest side. Search across the board is an opportunity to optimize your content to ensure it's being distributed.

People

Who's going to be involved with this process? Again, a handful of different people depending on the research that you did upfront. If the research tells you that you need to be in communities, maybe it's going to be a community manager. Maybe it's going to be a social media marketer. Maybe if you identified that sales team is going to play a key role in your distribution strategy, that it's your sales team that's actually going to be sending this to prospects and leads, that when that white paper goes live, you want your sales team empowered and in the loop so they can reach out to them. Maybe customer success is going to be involved and they're going to be sharing content and resources with people who have questions and problems with a product and a feature. Or maybe your product people need to be involved and it's going to actually be something that they can consume while they're using the product.

Timeline

Again, you create once, you distribute it forever. 

Goal

The goal? Simple, you want to reach the ideal audience with your content, no matter where they're spending time. You want to make sure that that content is being distributed there. And if you have that underway, by all means, trust me, you're probably 20 steps ahead of most brands that you're competing with because most people think that content marketing just means creating content and calling it a day. If you start to distribute your content, you're 10 steps ahead. Congratulations.

Optimize

If you want to go 20 steps ahead, also optimize your content. What does that mean? 

Tactics

It means that you are going to consider offsite optimization. You're going to consider onsite optimization. Ensure that the title tags, the H1s, all of those things are rooted in research. Make sure that if you have a piece of content, you're also cross-referencing the people also ask questions box on Google to inform what other content should we be adding into this piece. A piece of content that you published three years ago, that generated some backlinks, generated some organic traffic, and started to decline because more content on that topic started to show up doesn't mean it's no longer a good asset. What it means is it needs to be refreshed. It needs to be updated. 

So take the time to do that onsite optimization effort to make that content just as valuable today as it was three years ago. Invest the time in optimizing your content with new data, new information. You want to do that. You also want to ensure that the interlinking within your website between that asset and other assets' priority landing pages is happening.

You want to optimize your content forever, but not just from a search lens. You also want to think about it from a conversion lens. Can these pieces get people closer to the money? Can they get closer to sign up, to an acquisition point, to that key conversion goal that you're setting out to accomplish? Those are the types of things that you want to be thinking about.

People

Who would be involved here? Everything from SEOs to CROs, to writers and strategists. You might even have some people on your team that are solely dedicated to running an in-depth audit and review of your content assets and then updating them on a regular basis. If you have billions of pages, maybe you need to involve the team that's running engineering, etc. and make sure that they are building essentially a model that will make updates to your content on a regular basis.

Timeline

These are the things that you want to be thinking about because you should be optimizing your content forever. Why? Because the ultimate goal is to extract value from the content that you're investing in. And you will notice that over the course of this video, I've referenced content specifically as assets consistently. Why? Because assets are things that you create, you invest in, because you expect to have a return. And when you're thinking about your content marketing engine, you want a return. You want a return on your investment.

Goal

And the goal with all of this, with all of the content that you create, with all of the research that you've done, all the stories that you've started to distribute, and the content assets that you've optimized over and over again, is to ensure that you're generating revenue, you're generating results. And if you can do that, then you're going to have a content marketing engine that could fundamentally change the way that business is done in your industry, in your niche, and within your content culture.

So I encourage you to embrace it. Embrace a content engine that can drive results by researching, creating, distributing, and optimizing your content consistently. Thank you so much for your time. I hope you enjoyed this. You can find me on the internet. I'm all over the place. Love to connect with you there.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

The Top 5 Soft Skills SEOs Should Develop

When it comes to SEO, especially technical SEO, we often talk about the importance of hard skills. And while there’s no doubt that vlookup and regex can be your best friends, there are some essential soft skills to learn that will help you excel in your role and progress in your career.

But first, let’s look at the definition of what we actually mean by soft skills.

What are soft skills?

Soft skills are abilities that allow a person to communicate and work with others effectively and harmoniously.

Whether you’re a content or technical SEO, in-house or agency, your soft skills will help you navigate any work environment and process. That’s because in any role, even in tech roles, we are still working with other human beings. Not to mention that SEO is mostly a cross-functional team effort, which means you’ll need to be comfortable interacting with your stakeholders.

And if you are an SEO at management level, you might find that there are even trickier interactions to have with your leadership. Especially if you are responsible to get sign-off on your organic strategies and projects.

I’m going to share five soft skills today that you can start focusing on in order to improve how you engage with your team members, stakeholders, and leadership, thus helping you progress in your career and generate success.

Five soft skills for SEO success

1. Empathy

Empathy is the ability to sense other people's emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling. According to recent research, empathy is the most important skill in leadership. But why is it important for SEOs?

Well, the reason why empathy is the number one skill for leadership is because it helps you build better, more meaningful relationships with and a good understanding of the people you work with. This is essential for SEOs who work across several different functions and engage with a variety of stakeholders on a daily basis. Empathy will help to successfully engage in and resolve conflict, which improves productivity, collaboration and drives better results.

The best way to improve empathy is to examine your own biases and observe how you interact with the people around you. Focus on how you interact and engage with people who have a different point of view from yours. This is not about the logical reasoning behind anyone’s opinion, but more to see if you can understand the emotions and feelings behind why someone has a different way of thinking. You don’t need to agree with someone in order to be empathetic, but you do need to focus on understanding, accepting and validating other people’s experiences.

2. Critical thinking

Critical thinking is the objective, unbiased analysis and evaluation of available facts, in order to form a judgment. It’s absolutely crucial in a space like SEO and digital marketing, as SEO is filled with opinions and occasional facts, and it can be challenging to stay objective and be aware of our own biases.

Asking (better) questions is a big part of developing critical thinking. To do so, you will need a healthy amount of curiosity and skepticism. Skepticism will help develop the habit of questioning assumptions, and improve the practice of reasoning through logic, while curiosity will prompt you to seek out diversity of thoughts. You also want to improve your research skills by looking at the credibility of your sources and actively seeking out the opinions that are different from yours.

This is by no means an easy thing to do. It requires time and energy to go out of your way to do research, ask questions, and respectfully engage with views and experiences that are different from yours.

This skill is useful when reviewing any SEO opinions, analyzing data, reviewing search engine guidelines and algorithms. It can also be extremely helpful when presenting to stakeholders or decision-makers. Critical thinking can help keep your confirmation bias in check, and prepare to deal with concerns and objections. For more tips on improving your own critical thinking check out this article by Harvard Business Review.

3. Proactive listening

Proactive or active listening means that you attentively listen to whoever is speaking to you. It requires you to absorb what is being said, and to listen with the goal to fully understand what the speaker is communicating to you.

Now, you might’ve guessed, but proactive listening is actually an essential part of both developing empathy and critical thinking. And it’s important to not confuse listening to someone with hearing what someone is saying to you. Especially because when we talk about proactive listening, it means more than just absorbing the words being said. It’s not just about what is being communicated, but also how it’s done. Pay attention to body language and tone of voice in order to fully understand the other person.

You can improve this skill by first of all, being more conscious and more present when someone is talking to you. Create mental notes of the conversation. You can imagine to use labels to better grasp how the other person might be feeling. Are they excited, worried or indifferent? Proactive listening will help you understand your stakeholders, team members and leadership better, and set the foundation to our next soft skill.

4. Clear communication

Clear communication is the effective use of verbal and non-verbal communication in order to successfully exchange and explain thoughts and ideas. The goal of the communicator is to make sure that the content communicated is fully understood by their audience.

Clear communication is not to convince someone about your truth. It’s to help others understand the intended message. The reason why this is important to emphasize is because we often think that if someone rejects our idea, we haven’t communicated our proposition clearly. While that is a possibility, this is not a correlation. Unclear communication can lead to rejection just as much as clear communication and vica versa.

When you are trying to improve this skill, focus on improving how well your audience understands your message. The essentials of clear communication are therefore; a good understanding of your audience and their needs, the use of the right language and examples, and a clear message. You can further improve this by actively seeking and listening to feedback from your audience and improve your communication skills accordingly.

5. Storytelling

Storytelling is the act of sharing a story. Sounds simple, right? We all tell stories. We share our personal stories such as memorable events from our lives. Something we’ve seen, heard or experienced. We also share stories about what we aspire to achieve, or around something we fear. Stories help us make sense of the world, and it lets us share information in a way that creates emotional connections.

But why did I include storytelling on this list, if we all know how to do it? Well, it’s because we also need to learn how to use it in the workplace in order to achieve success.

Let’s break this down. Stories help us make sense of the world, which means a story could help communicate a clear message even about the most complex subject. So, if you want your non-SEO audience to understand the difference between crawling and indexation, you can tell an analogy about how search engines are like librarians and the database behind a search engine is like a library. Analogies are a great form of storytelling to help explain unfamiliar things with something familiar.

Stories also help build emotional connections, so using them in business can help you create trust with stakeholders and leadership, which is essential to get buy-in and achieve success.

It takes practice to find what narrative works well for your audience and to develop your own storytelling style. The good thing is that each of these skills build on each other, and you can totally focus on developing them at the same time.

In summary

When it comes to SEO, developing these five soft skills will help you be more successful in:

• Building better relationships with a variety of stakeholders, as well as better-functioning teams.

• Successfully presenting to and getting buy-in from leadership.

• Improving productivity in cross-functional projects.

• Deeper, and more factual, understandings of Google algorithms for non-SEOs.

• Improving your understanding of “the big picture”, and high-level connections between SEO and other business functions.

Building your soft skills can be hard, and there’s no tangible certification to say you’ve mastered them. It takes practice and consistency and — just like SEO — it’s never fully finished. It’s a mindset that inspires to do the work day-to-day and motivates to continuously develop your skill set.

How to Do Better, Lazier Keyword Research

This post is an expansion on something I discussed in my talk at MozCon this year: my view that a lot of time spent on keyword research is essentially wasted.

Don’t get me wrong — keyword research is, of course, important. SEOs and businesses use keyword research to decide which parts of their business to prioritize, to forecast the results of their activities, to appraise possible opportunities for expansion, and of course to write title tags, brief copywriters, or engage in other tactical activity. The point is, if you paid a non-SEO consultant — perhaps a management consultant — for this level of strategic insight, you’d pay a fortune, and you’d listen very carefully.

And yet, in SEO businesses, keyword research is the task most likely to be delegated to the most junior member of the team. It’s considered grunt work. It’s boring, tedious, repetitive, and easy — so we think. I know this, because I have made this (mistaken) assumption many times as a senior SEO, and was on the receiving end of that “grunt work” early in my career.

There are three main ways I think we’re turning what should be an involved piece of strategic thinking into tedium. I’ll cover them below, along with what to focus on instead.

Quantity vs. quality

If you hit up your favorite search engine and look for some guides on how to conduct keyword research, you’ll find that a common theme is to start by amassing the most exhaustive list of potential keywords possible. If you run out of rows in Excel, or cells in Google Sheets, that is seemingly a badge of honor.

Perhaps you’ll use tools like keyword multipliers, Google Search Console, and GA Site Search to add as many obscure variants of your target keywords as you can find.

This is a fool’s errand, though.

The very blog you’re reading right now gets 48% of its daily traffic from keywords that drive only a single click. And it’s not like we’re getting the same selection of low traffic keywords every day, either. Google themselves have said repeatedly that 15% of the keywords they see every day are totally new to them.

In this context, how can we hope to truly capture every possible keyword someone might use to reach our site? It seems entirely pointless.

Why not save ourselves an absolute shit ton of time, and greatly simplify our analysis, by just capturing the few main keywords for each unique intent we wish to target?

It’s easy to produce an enormous list of keywords that contains perhaps three or four intents, but it’s a grand waste of time, as you’ll be producing some small fraction of a vast unknowable sea of keywords, and you're going to optimize for the main ones anyway. Not to mention, it makes the rest of your analysis a total pain, and extremely difficult to consume afterwards.

Instead, try to capture 90% of the intents for your potential new page, product, or site, rather than 90% of the potential keywords. It’s far more realistic, and you can spend the time you save making strategic choices rather than swearing at Excel. On which note…

Removing automation

Another common piece of advice is to manually use the Google SERPs as a keyword research tool. This is fine in principle, and it’s advice I’ve given, particularly to editorial teams researching individual pieces of content, as it helps to make the research feel more grounded in what they’re actually trying to affect (Google SERPs).

However, for at-scale keyword research conducted by an SEO professional, this is an overly manual and redundant step. Why?

Because you’re probably already doing this, possibly twice, in other parts of your process. If you use a popular SEO suite — preferably Moz Pro, of course, but it’s not just us — this data is very likely already baked into any suggestions you’ve downloaded. Save yourself the manual data collection (or worse yet, the unreliable and finickety SERP scraping on your own personal computer) and just collect this valuable information once.

Similarly, if you’re mainly looking for keywords you ought to rank for rather than the wide open ocean of opportunity, you’ll get 90%+ of that by seeing who your competitors are, and what they rank for that you don’t.

It really doesn’t have to be some massive ordeal. Again, this is about spending more time on the important bit, and less time on the grunt work.

The wrong metrics

“The important bit”, though, is probably prioritization, which means it’s probably about metrics.

Typically, the primary metric involved in keyword research is search volume, and that’s probably unavoidable (although, not all search volumes are created equal — watch out for a Whiteboard Friday on this in the Autumn), but even the most accurate search volumes can miss the full story.

The core issue here is that click-through rates for keywords vary massively. The below range is for a random sample from MozCast:

The chart shows that only around a third of the keywords in this random set had a CTR close to 100% for all organic results combined. It also shows the high variance in total CTRs across the keywords in this group.

This is not untypical, and well-discussed in the SEO space at this point. Many SERPs have organic results that start essentially below the fold. What it means for keyword research is that volume is not that great a metric. It’s an important component — you need both volume and CTR to work out how many clicks might be available — but on its own, it’s a little suspect.

Again, this doesn’t have to be a massive ordeal, though, many tools, including Moz Pro, will give you CTR estimates for your keywords. So in the same place you get your volumes, you can get a metric that will stop you prioritizing the wrong things, or in other words, stop you further wasting your time.

TL;DR: stop wasting your time

There’s a huge amount of skill, nuance, and experience that comes into keyword research that I’ve not covered here. But my hope is that we can get into the habit of focusing on those bits, and not just screaming into the void spreadsheet.

How to Measure Content Engagement — Whiteboard Friday

 When it comes to content engagement, you can (and should) be measuring more than just page views. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, analytics expert Dana DiTomaso summarizes her MozCon 2022 presentation by sharing the four things you should focus on to make sure your metrics are giving you the best picture of your content's quality.

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

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. My name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm President at Kick Point. We're a digital marketing agency up in Canada. And today, I'm going to be talking to you about how to measure content engagement, which is a topic very near and dear to my heart, and it's actually what I talked about at MozCon this year. I'm even wearing the thematic T-shirt. So if you weren't at MozCon or are not going to buy the videos, which you should, they're good, I'm going to give you a quick summary of what I talked about in that talk.

1. People keep tabs open

So there are four different things that I think you should be looking at when you're trying to better understand your content engagement. The first thing is that people keep tabs open. And right now you might be looking at your 400 tabs you have open and thinking, "Okay, yeah, I keep tabs open. What's the problem?" The problem is that every time you wake up your laptop from when it's sleeping or you open up that list of tabs in your mobile browser, often an empty page view, what I call an empty page view is sent off to Analytics. It's a zero-second page view because you didn't actually look at the page. It just was checking to make sure the page was still live. But because it activates Analytics, what you end up with is a situation where you have a lot of what I call tab hoarders.

So there is a way to measure how to fix this. There's going to be a link in the transcript to get the actual recipe through Google Tag Manager to measure this. But the idea is that when a tab is activated, there are two different things you can measure. You can measure the action that was used to generate that tab, and you can look at the tab type. So the actions possible are navigating or reloading or the back and forward button, and the tab type could be new or existing. So if it's a reloaded tab in an existing tab type, then that means that person hoarded the tab. Essentially, they've just had it open. And this is just detecting from the browser. You don't need any fancy cookies or anything like this. This is built-in stuff for measuring.

So by looking at the percentage of which your tabs are run by tab hoarders essentially, you can see what percentage of your page views is actually fresh page views, like new people. And also consider that if you have a lot of tab hoarders, it might be making your conversion rate look like crap, because conversion rate in Universal Analytics is session-based. So if every time they come back to that existing tab every single day, like once a day, that's one session every day and they never convert, has a 0% conversion rate for this person, they could look at this page like 30 times before they actually end up converting.

In GA4, you have the option of session conversions or user conversions, so it'll be a little bit better, but you also have to assume that the cookies have remained to identify this person is a user, which is not always the case. So definitely keep in mind that you might want to discount hoarders when you're thinking about your conversion rate for your site.

2. Look at page views per day

Second thing, I also want you to look at the page views per day. So consider that when you have a report and you probably have in that report top pages, for example, like, "Look at this page. We published blog post. It's 8,000 views. We would like a raise." Right? We report on this stuff all the time. Everybody does. But what you don't do is you probably don't report on how many page views this page has had since it was originally published.

So I want you to think about that. So you can always capture like the publish date of the page. And then try having a report where you have the page, how many views that page has had since it was published. And then take the page views divided by the number of days that page has been around for and then look at the page views per day. And I've just sketched out an example here. You can see page A, 11,200 views, 18 views per day, page B, 9,000 views, 14 views per day, page C, 18,000 views, but only 12 views per day because this is an older post. And so this one might look really great if you just looked at views. But if you look at views per day, actually this one is pretty great. And then that helps you prioritize, well, this page is this quiet performer over the long haul. Maybe we should be looking at it and making sure that conversion rate is better. And you can also establish a benchmark of how many views per day you would expect for a new post over time. And then, when you publish something, then you can go back and say, "Is this actually, you know, are we happy with the amount of page views per day that this new page or new post that we've published is actually getting?" So a couple of different options there.

3. Was the content consumed?

All right, third thing, was the content consumed? So this is a recipe that is available on our website. Also the link, again, will be in the transcript to download it. Consuming is the idea that when you go to a site, and you're watching a video, we know you watched the video. We know you clicked on it. We know how long you watched it. If you're reading a piece of content, we don't actually know if you read the whole thing, because content is different lengths, which means that there are different times it would take to read that post. Some posts might be 15 minutes. Some posts might be five minutes. So you can't use a standard timer for all of it. Plus, you need to know if they actually saw the entire post.

So the idea of content consumption is that it is depth and time. If they reach the depth, the bottom of the post, then they saw the whole thing. If the time was the amount that it actually took to read the post, then if both these things are true, the content was consumed. And if they only got to depth but not time, then it would be that they skimmed. So they just roared on down to the bottom and they didn't actually read the whole thing. If they got no depth, but they got time, they're a tab hoarder, which we've already looked at here, but this is another way to tell. And if none of those things happened, then they just abandoned ship and they didn't care about your post. So by evaluating your page views with a percentage of what percentage were skimmers, or hoarders, or abandoners, or actual consumers, that can also tell you how compelling that content is.

And then a bonus metric would be, well, what's the average scroll depth of this page? So at what point are people bailing? If they're not consuming with this post, then you can see like, "Oh, you know what. We've got this really weird call to action. People think the post is done. So if we move things around, maybe people will realize there's more to read." So that's a good way to measure content consumption and how it can improve content on your site.

4. Was a conversion possible?

All right, fourth, last thing. Was a conversion possible? I'm sure everyone reports in conversion rates. What they don't report on is if the person could actually convert, which frankly doesn't seem fair. You're expecting someone to convert, and it's like, "Well, why didn't you do the thing?" They're like, "I didn't even know I could do the thing. I didn't see the button." And I know marketers, we all have these beautiful computers that we use, right? Like I'm a Windows person. I have this big desktop at home that I also use for video gaming, and it's got two giant monitors. And, of course, when I look at a page, I see a big section of a page. But on a mobile device, the same page, you probably aren't necessarily seeing the buttons. And so you really need to think about like, could the person actually convert? And this, I really encourage everyone, like look at your website on a mobile device now and again. I know we all think desktop first, even though we're supposed to think mobile first because we use desktops, but many of our website visitors may only visit your site on a mobile device. So really think about, based on that device, are people even seeing your call to action?

So to measure this it's what's called an element visibility trigger in Google Tag Manager. Again, in the link I have in the transcript, we'll show you how to set this up. It's a very simple trigger. You just need to know a tiny little bit of CSS. You just have to say, "What's the class or the ID of the thing that I want to measure?" So, for example, for some clients, I might say, show me every time an H1 enters the view, or an H2, or something like that, a Heading 1 or a Heading 2. And then I know exactly how many headings this person has seen as they went down the page. And you could do the same thing with buttons. So if you know you have a button and it always has a class of CTA, for example, you would just say, "Record an event every time a button with a class of CTA shows up in this visitor screen." And then you can look at it as more like a funnel. Instead of just a straight, what's the conversion rate for the session, it could be how many people looked at this page, how many people actually saw the CTA, what was that view-to-CTA rate, and then out of those people, how many of them converted? And you may find out that your pages actually convert a lot better than you thought, but people aren't seeing your CTAs. So maybe you should show it to them, or maybe things are fine, but you don't know until you measure it.

So there are four different ways here to measure content engagement. Maybe all of them will apply to you, maybe only some of them do. But either way, you can definitely go beyond page views when it comes to figuring out if your content is any good or not. Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

How to Get Started with Corporate Social Responsibility & Purpose-Driven Marketing

Sustainable marketing, purpose-driven marketing, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) are terms that are getting more and more popular. Brands are expected to already have strategies in place to become as sustainable as possible, as quickly as possible.

With that said, there's no one-size-fits-all way of measuring just how sustainable an organization is. Businesses are being told to do it now but are being left with no idea how to start.

I wholeheartedly believe that digital marketers can help with this, and by taking a more purpose-driven approach, the entire organization, their customers, and the planet can benefit.

I'm going to provide a glossary of terminology, give a brief history of how businesses have lost their focus on CSR, and show how taking a more purpose-driven approach to company operations and digital marketing doesn't have to be a big scary thing. It can actually be fun, fulfilling, and hugely rewarding.

You can use these links to jump to each section. 

• Glossary
• A brief history
• The rise of CSR
• Tips for starting

Glossary

Before I dive into everything purpose-driven marketing related, here are some definitions for terms I'll be referring to throughout this piece. If you want to skip this and head straight to the next section, feel free to use the jump links just above.

What is sustainability in digital marketing?

Sustainability can mean one of two things:

1) Ensuring that your marketing efforts don't cause harm to people or the planet and, where it does, taking steps to reduce or equalize that harm. This could include:

• Offsetting your carbon emissions (although please, please, please, don't buy carbon credits — these aren’t a true representation of carbon offsetting),

• Reducing the amount of energy your product and employees use, and/or

• Making efforts to update any products or services so that they are more environmentally friendly.

2) It can also mean future-proofing your brand so that it continues to thrive.

Whichever definition you like best, the two are not mutually exclusive now that 64% of consumers consider themselves to be belief-driven, choosing to invest in brands that they know make charitable contributions or have a strong CSR system in place. Breaking this down further, 60% of Millennials, 53% of GenZers and 51% of GenXers "buy on belief". When it comes to sustainability in purpose-driven marketing, it can mean a myriad of things such as:

• Reducing the carbon emissions created by our websites and the equipment used by digital marketing departments,

• Ensuring that everybody has access to our websites whether they have disabilities or are data-poor,

• Incorporating our sustainability efforts into our online campaigns.

Belief-driven consumers are looking for information on sustainability issues using online search (35%), social media (31%), and non-digital print media (29%).

According to Sustainable Marketing: How to Drive Profits with Purpose, consumers are looking for environmental information on brands and products using social media (41%) and product and brand websites (34%).

What is corporate social responsibility in digital marketing?

Corporate Social Responsibility refers to a brand's effort to have a positive impact on people and the planet. I'll go into this in a little more detail in the brief history lesson section, but essentially, CSR revolves around businesses understanding that they have responsibilities towards society. The role of a digital marketer here is to advise, plan and execute communication strategies that tell the brand’s loyal and potential customers how they are fulfilling that obligation.

What social marketing means

Not to be confused with social media marketing, which you probably know like the back of your hand. Social marketing "...has the primary goal of achieving 'common good'. Traditional commercial marketing aims are primarily financial, though they can have positive social effects as well."

It's a term closely related to purpose-driven marketing.

What is greenwashing and why is it a problem?

I can't really talk about corporate social responsibility and purpose-driven marketing without warning about greenwashing, which is essentially using your marketing powers for evil. Instead of putting in the effort to protect people and the planet as well as hitting financial KPIs, some brands are either pretending or making outright unsubstantiated claims, appearing to be a purpose-driven company with good people and environmental values, but when you scratch at the surface (and most of the time you don't even have to scratch that far) you'll find that they aren't really bothered and aren't doing much.

The sad thing is that this has resulted in pretty cynical consumers, so even if you have extremely positive purpose-driven branding and a great purpose-driven culture, you have to be so, so careful in how you communicate to ensure that you don't get accused of greenwashing.

What is the triple bottom line?

The term "Triple Bottom Line" was coined 27 years ago, essentially trying to convince companies to become purpose-driven brands, where they not only measure their financial success but also track how their actions are impacting people (including their employees, consumers, and even those who have no association with them) and the planet.

The triple bottom line is really what purpose-driven marketing is all about, and a corporate social responsibility strategy is the way to get there.

A brief history lesson

I'm based in the UK, and one of our most famous chocolate manufacturers is Cadbury. When they outgrew their factory, George Cadbury and his brother decided that their next location wasn't going to be as depressing or squalid. So, rather than invest in a factory premises, they bought 14.5 acres in a village in Bourneville (which is a lovely place to visit). This meant that factory workers didn't have to live in crowded city slums, but instead had access to a good water supply, train line, and a canal (which was probably a lot nicer back then than they are now).

George Cadbury's vision was to create a business in an area full of green spaces where his workers (and their families) wouldn't be surrounded by city pollution. Way back in 1878, Cadbury nailed a corporate social responsibility strategy with the motto:

"No man ought to be condemned to live in a place where a rose cannot grow."

This approach to business is actually how organizations historically believed companies should operate. Known as social enterprise, brands had a responsibility to provide support to:

• Their employees,

• The family of their employees,

• The wider community,

Including contributing generally to the well-being, health, and wealth of society at large.

Sadly, in recent years, this could be seen as a scarce approach to running a business, with more and more brands focusing on hitting financial goals and generating more revenue and profit rather than the overall impact they are making.

The rise of purpose-driven marketing

Like I said earlier, the official Triple Bottom Line approach has been around for almost three decades and there is loads of data available showing that consumers want brands to be more intentional with how they operate, ensuring that everybody and everything benefits from their actions.

86% of millennials think that companies should be measured in terms of more than just financial performance, according to The Rise of the Social Enterprise. Since this generation currently makes up half of the global workforce, as well as being consumers, it's something for every brand to consider.

More companies are also transitioning into B Corps, a label only given to companies who meet "high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability".

Since B Lab's creation in 2006, more than 5,000 global brands have transitioned into B Corps across 82 countries and 156 global industries (at the time of writing). That's massive. And it's really well-known, leading brands that are now B Corps including Innocent Drinks, Ben & Jerry's, and BrewDog. And the US and UK are leading the way, having the most certified B Corp businesses.

What's more, these brands are talking about these efforts as part of their online strategies:

1) Innocent Drinks: Doing business in the right way

2) Ben & Jerry's: We have a dream

3) BrewDog: Our responsibilities

It's time for a rise in purpose-driven digital marketing

I've been devouring the Can Marketing Save the Planet podcast and reading as many books as I can get my hands on (annoyingly, books on this topic can be pretty expensive). What I've found is that, while there seems to be a huge shift towards more ethical and environmental values, the focus and efforts seem to lie in more traditional marketing campaigns rather than digital marketing.

But as you've seen here, the data shows that people are looking for how brands are implementing corporate social responsibility through different channels online, so there's a real opportunity here for us as digital marketers to take the helm.

Whether you're in-house or agency side, how often are you asked to advise on key decisions like corporate social responsibility and purpose-driven marketing campaigns? We have the audience. If we can start to close the gap between traditional and digital, and cross the line that's drawn between brand decisions and marketing, we can achieve some exceptionally good things for everyone.

Tips for getting started with corporate social responsibility and purpose-driven marketing

First, you need to consider how you could approach putting together your own CSR strategy to become a more purpose-driven brand. If you work agency side, you can use this approach when helping your clients come up with their purpose-driven marketing campaigns.

I'm using what I've learned not just regarding CSR, sustainability, and brand purpose but also in my experience working in digital marketing over the last seven years.

1) Check out the United Nations SDGs

The first thing I'd recommend doing is familiarizing yourself with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There are 17 goals that can help you get started:

There's more information on each of these here, and it's a great starting point to see if you or your client is already doing things that fall under these goals.

For example, The Digital Maze recently implemented a new sick pay policy. Previously, the company gave full sick pay for five days. Now, employees get five days of full sick pay per "incident". So, if I were sick for five days in January and then again for five days in March, I'd get all of those days fully paid.

There has also been another recent policy change regarding working hours and locations so that employees can get out during the day — whether that's for a walk around a local park or hitting the gym when it's less crowded.

Finally, the hours of operation are fantastic. A standard working day consists of billable working hours for clients, however, employees are encouraged to step away from the screen between tasks, take a breather, and also do regular professional development.

All of the above could easily fall under goal two of the SDGs: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.

It's worth saying that these policies weren't implemented because of the SDGs. The SDGs are a great sounding board for figuring out what you or your clients are already doing that you may not have thought fell under a purpose-driven approach.

2) Involve the entire company

At a recent client meeting, the client asked if they should be talking about charitable efforts their employees are involved in independently of the brand.

I, for one, think this is a great idea, and an even better one is involving all of your employees in defining your brand's shared values. A simple anonymous survey could be taken by your team if you're a marketing agency looking to implement your own purpose-driven marketing campaign, or you can provide your clients with a survey template to give to their employees.

Ask what they stand for, what they want the business to stand for, and any ideas of how to get there. In a short space of time, you'll be inundated with ideas that you can work through.

3) Don't take on too much, too quickly

Slow and steady will win the race here. Rather than trying to do everything quickly, the result of which would be not achieving much at all, start with one, two, or three values at the most, and really explore what you can do to make a difference.

When it comes to sustainability, there's always this concept of time looming over our heads. While time is indeed running out, it's better to do a few things that make a substantial difference than trying to do a lot, getting overwhelmed, and achieving nothing.

4) Have fun

Yes, this is an incredibly important topic that needs to be taken seriously, but that doesn't mean it can't be fun. Some might even argue that when it comes to a successful digital marketing campaign, "fun" is often the secret ingredient.

There will undoubtedly be things that you need to do as a purpose-driven brand operating in the digital space (like calculating carbon emissions) that you wouldn't necessarily do as a hobby, but it can also be a passion project.

Once you confirm what's already being done, you can start creating marketing strategies to get this information out into the world and in front of your target audience.

5) Don't be scared to tell the truth

I'm so impressed with Costa Coffee's CSR page (I have no affiliation with this brand whatsoever, but they are my go-to coffee shop of choice when it’s a jumbo coffee morning). If you scroll down you'll see a rundown of how sustainable their coffee cups are. But the bit that really stands out is in their cold cup section, where they say that their lids are only made from 40% recycled plastic and that they have more work to do.

Remember the old days when companies were hesitant about using social media because they didn't want to get caught up in complaints? Well, the same thing is kind of happening in purpose-driven marketing. Companies are so worried that they will get flack for not being 100% perfect that they choose to do nothing, or to not talk about it.

Costa is a great example of how to do this: communicating that they are aware of where they need to be, but are also proud of how far they've come. 

6) Choose your platforms

Just as you would with any marketing strategy, you need to have a plan of what platform each campaign will use. Every single company operating online should have a CSR page on their website so that consumers who are looking for this information online (remember, that's 75% of people) can find it easily.

41% of those consumers are looking for this information on social media platforms, so if your analytics shows that this is where your audience is spending their time and interacting with you, it's worth testing some strategies there, too.

Innocent Drinks does this very well via a Twitter strategy that supports The Big Rewild. Here are just a couple of their posts:

"I've not seen a bed that wild since a tiger broke into my bungalow"
"wow... I didn't know you lived in a bungalow, Clive"
"yeah, terrified of stairs, Jeff"#WildOrMildhttps://t.co/mg06mzyUGT

— innocent drinks (@innocent) June 22, 2022

See how they're having fun with this campaign?

As digital marketers, we're in an excellent position to do this. We already know the ins and outs of these platforms and how to put together an incredibly strong strategy.

7) If you really don't know what to do or where to start

Do the same thing you'd do for any other marketing campaign: competitor research.

This isn't to steal ideas, it's more for inspiration. What societal issues are they trying to tackle? Are they focusing on climate change, for example?

It's a good sounding board but, remember: just because your competitors are doing something, that doesn't mean that you should be doing the exact same thing. It all comes back to defining your company's values. 

Take these steps to get started in CSR

I hope this has helped take some of the scariness away from such a big and important subject. Whether you're working in-house or as part of an agency, taking a purpose-driven approach is only going to get more important and in-demand.

If you've already gone through the process of setting up purpose-driven campaigns and CSR strategies, I'd love to hear about your experiences on Twitter.

Is TikTok Going to Replace Google?

TikTok has absolutely taken the world by storm since 2020. And it’s not just for the kids — with over 1 billion users, it’s popular across all demographics.

User behavior on TikTok has been evolving as its popularity grows. We’ve seen the app go from dancing teenagers to influencing shopping behavior across the world.

Now the next step for TikTok seems to be turning into the next big search engine.

Is TikTok the new Google?

Short answer: no.

TikTok is an internal search engine for TikTok content. It’s dedicated to a particular area of focus and a particular format: video.

There are a few different factors at play in how we choose the search engine to solve our need in the moment, but at the end of the day, TikTok and Google satisfy very different search intents.

Why do users search on TikTok?

We’re seeing TikTok take market share from Google in verticals such as food, gardening, and travel. These are low stakes searches where the outcome is unlikely to cause you harm. Since you don’t need a perfect or factual answer, you can use TikTok to find it.

TikTok’s video format makes a lot more sense if you’re looking for answers where the visual matters. Date spots in your city or a gardening tutorial are perfect searches for the platform.

Another reason users choose TikTok is that the answer will always be provided by a subject matter expert, not a niche blogger. Social proof abounds, as you can assess the expertise of your source by looking at the comments and number of views, likes, and followers.

A few concerns have been raised about the spread of misinformation on TikTok, as they have in most other content platforms. However, these are slightly more worrying on TikTok because it has an unprecedented potential for virality, and a large, young user base, who are more easily influenced during content discovery than during active search.

Users are even searching for TikTok content on Google, with queries such as “TikTok pasta”, amassing 1,778 searches per month in the US:

Branded queries on Google for TikTok content have a combined monthly search volume of 30.1 million in the US alone. But in the spirit of transparency, I’ll share that most of those are not PG (or even PG-13).

Active search vs. content discovery

There are two key behaviors on TikTok we must differentiate: active search and content discovery.

Content discovery

Content discovery is the main behavior on TikTok and it’s the one we’re most familiar with. It's when the user is scrolling through the app, passively hoping to find entertainment, financial advice, recipe ideas, or a new favorite beauty product.

Users have been enjoying a positive content discovery experience on TikTok for years. They have found new restaurants or a selfie angle that makes them look like Kylie Jenner.

This is the key to understanding TikTok’s rise as a search engine: This positive content discovery experience has earned the users’ trust. They know that the content they want to consume is on TikTok. So when the need arises, they turn to the video platform first.

Active search

This leads us into active search. Active search is when a user types a specific question into TikTok’s search box.

On TikTok, users can seamlessly scroll through all of the content that answers their query, without having to open multiple tabs on their browser. This improves user satisfaction, reduces friction and, most importantly, teaches TikTok the best answer. More on that later.

Let’s talk about psychology

Persuasion resistance is a natural psychological defense when we feel like someone is trying to manipulate us into buying, doing, or thinking something. We perceive persuasion as a threat and we try to move away from it or oppose it.

Over a decade ago, the online advertising industry started to worry about a decrease in the CTR of their display ads. Pop-ups got dismissed, banners went ignored. Users had caught onto advertisers: we were trying to sell them something.

This triggered a phenomenon known to psychologists as persuasion resistance. Advertisers called this response “banner blindness”. As an industry, we developed four different strategies to counter this resistance to persuasion.

1. First, we started making our ads look like they were part of the content. We called these “native ads”.

2. Then, we started placing the ads in unexpected places, where users were less likely to be bracing themselves to be sold to.

3. We started making ads a little bit more relevant to the context, so that they felt less intrusive.

4. Finally, we moved into social proof, and we started leveraging the power of trust. Thus influencer marketing was born.

TikTok leverages these four strategies to counter resistance to persuasion by design. How do they do it?

• Creators are paid for their content through the Creator Fund, based on how many views or engagement their videos get. They are incentivized to make quality, engaging content that users will enjoy, not just by making deals with brands.

• They regularly showcase their beauty routines, fashion, or home products, with or without a brand sponsorship. This makes affiliate or sponsored content look just like regular content.

• Their ads are served in exactly the same format as their regular content, with a small tag letting you know that it’s promoted content.

• All the videos have an identified creator, visible like and view counts, and open comments. Social proof abounds!

But SEO is not paid social or influencer marketing. So why should we care?

SEO is now omnichannel

Putting the right content in front of users at the right time is at the core of what we do. If we want to keep achieving this goal, we must provide content where the user is looking for it.

As technology integrates further into our lives, we’ve seen the rise of multisearch. Google created the term as a way to integrate their Google Lens functionality into the way we speak about search and SEO.

We now search by asking our home assistant devices questions or taking a picture of a tree we don’t recognize. We search on Google Maps, on Youtube, on Instagram and even on Amazon.

The days when SEO was about responding to a query in a search box are long gone.

By putting our content out on TikTok and optimizing it for search, we are helping users find our content when they need it, where they want it, and in the format they chose to consume it.

TikTok on the SERPs

An omnichannel SEO strategy will let you interact with your users beyond your own domain, and it can help your brand take up more real estate in the SERPs.

Google is trying to diversify the domains they show on search, so if you want to feature in the SERPs multiple times, you’ll have to distribute your brand’s content across different domains.

TikTok’s website has over 31 million pages built programmatically around topics, hashtags, and sounds:

Topic pages make up the most of their URLs and traffic, and seem to be built based on hashtags used, along with some form of machine learning consolidation of their variations. These include related videos, topics, users, hashtags, and sounds.

Based on the data available on different tools, we know that this section on TikTok’s website has about 157 million monthly organic clicks.

Based on the numbers alone, the benefit of having your content feature in these pages is obvious.

Industries that should be on TikTok

TikTok serves you content based on what the algorithm has determined you’ll enjoy, not based on who you follow. So users constantly discover new creators.

The TikTok algorithm does a genuinely good job at finding your interests or helping you discover stuff that you like. These topics of interest become small niches with their own name.

Much like a subreddit, TikTok has unofficial “toks”. You can find niches such as book-tok, finance-tok, food-tok, and many others.

Based on the data, case studies, and some expert opinions, there are industries that can truly benefit from being on the platform and surfacing content tagged for these various “toks”:

• Sports teams

• Streaming services and entertainers

• Fashion and beauty brands

• Restaurants and food bloggers

• Travel brands and influencers

• Home and DIY content creators and brands

If you think this list reminds you of the top industries on Pinterest, you are right.

TikTok and Pinterest have a lot in common. Both platforms prioritize content discovery based on your interests and serve mainly visual content.

When looking at suggested searches, the value becomes clear when I start typing keywords typically associated with an informational or commercial intent:

While these are personalized for each user, you can see that others are searching for content that brands or publishers have typically kept on their blogs and find valuable for their businesses.

Brands looking to increase their brand awareness can benefit from being on TikTok regardless of their industry. After all, nobody expected the success Duolingo has had on the platform.

@duolingo this dumpy is literally a single mom who works 2 jobs #Duolingo#fgoogletranslate#DuaLipa#Dulapeep#Dualingo#comedy#trend#twerkit_twerkit♬ Brujeria - ✿

Conclusion

Is TikTok threatening Google? No. Is it worth the attention of SEOs? Yes.

Over the next few months, keep an eye out for more pieces on how to make the most of this upstart and unlikely content discovery search engine. I will be writing about the TikTok algorithm, what the search experience looks like on TikTok, and how to make sure your videos rank.