In this week’s episode, MozCon 2022 speaker Crystal Carter talks you through the different optimizations that you can make for visual search, and the kinds of results that you might see for visual search content.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to my Whiteboard Friday on visual search. Today, I'm going to talk about the different optimizations that you can make for visual search and the different kinds of results that you might see for visual search content.
Visual search optimization
So what happens with visual search is that you would do some optimizations on your website. Then, the user would do a visual search, and then they might get a different kind of result.
Image SEO
So the kinds of optimizations that you should consider for visual search, which is searches that are made via Google Lens or Pinterest Lens or via Bing's image search tools, include image SEO around making sure that you've got images that are performing well for image SEO with good file formats, titles, alt text, alt tags, schema, all of that sort of thing.
Entities
Also, you're going to think about the kinds of entities which are within your photos. So visual search recognition software and tools, they can understand lots of different kinds of entities. There are a few that they prioritize in particular, though, and they include logos, landmark, text, and entities, which I've called "things" in this particular instance just as a shorthand, but entities that are essentially things that are found within the knowledge graph.
Composition
And then, the other one you want to think about is your composition. So the composition that you have for your image will affect what Google understands the image to be about.
So, for instance, the way that different elements are positioned within an image can affect how Google understands the image. So I did an article for Moz at the beginning of the year, where I compared a teapot, and there was a teapot where the handle was here and the spout was here, and they understood that to be a teapot.
And then, when they turned it this way, they understood it to be a kettle, and those are two different things. So the way that you think about composition for your image can affect it.
So make sure that you have clean and clear images and also that you're thinking about your images being similar to user-generated content, particularly if you're in a B2C business, and also that you understand the primary focus. So, for instance, if you had a photo of a bicycle and you were trying to emphasize the bicycle part of the image, if you had somebody who was sitting on the bicycle or standing next to the bicycle and they were taking up most of the image, Google would think that that picture was more about that person than it was about the bicycle. So think about where the primary focus is in your image in order to optimize for visual search.
You also want to think about contrast, just making sure that it's very clear what the focus of the image is and so that you've got whatever is the focus of your image very clear and easy to decipher and not too busy if you need it to be about a single thing.
So these different elements are things that you should consider when you're optimizing your images for a visual search, particularly for Google Lens, and as users carry out a visual search.
Visual search results
So, for instance, if you use Google Lens and you take a picture of a butterfly or a caterpillar or a flower or a chocolate donut, you're going to get lots of different types of results.
Image pack
So, first of all, you may very well get an image pack result, and this will include some of the information that we were talking about before.
So the difference between visual search and image search SEO is that in an image search SEO, like when you go to the Image tab within Google, you can enter the word "chocolate donut." But let's say you didn't know what a chocolate donut was, or let's say it was a different language and you didn't know the local word for chocolate donut. So what would happen is that the user would make the search of the chocolate donut, and Google would use its tools, like Vision AI, for instance, to understand that that's a chocolate donut, and then they would look through their images to understand which ones had text cues that were talking about chocolate donuts and that sort of thing. So that would return, potentially, some image pack information, and also, in the chocolate donut example in particular, it might return something like multisearch.
So, for instance, you would do a modification. You might say a donut like this, but with sprinkles maybe, for instance. You might also get a result that's around Google Shopping, for instance.
SERP features
The other one you want to think about is the kinds of result you might get for a different SERP feature. So Local Pack is something that might come up. Also, knowledge panel. So particularly with the entities, the entities may very well be attached to a specific knowledge panel. So, for instance, logos for businesses or landmarks will have a knowledge panel, and also certain things, like if you were to think about something like Lego, that may very well have a knowledge panel as well. And landmarks, again, also could very well be showing in Google Maps.
So think about the kinds of SERP features that you might show there. And that means that you could also, while you're optimizing this as part of your optimization for visual search, you might think about the optimizations that you make for these types of SERP results as well.
Visual match
Finally, the other kinds of results that Google might give to someone when they make a visual search is a visual match. So visual matches are images that look really similar to the picture that the person took, and these will sometimes return image packs and sometimes return a Local Pack, and they'll sometimes just return a general SERP result, like including a featured snippet that might have an image in it. You might also see something for a Google Business Profile. So if there is something that's local that has that, then they may very well get a Google Business Profile visual match, and also just general web content that might come through there.
So there's lots of different opportunities to return a visual match, but this one is particularly good when you're thinking about the composition of your images. So if you have a lot of footfall, if you have a lot of interaction with customers where they are reviewing your content, where they are visiting your establishment, and they're creating a lot of user-generated content, then think about how you can create images and add images to your website that satisfy the visual match queries that users might be making.
And I think there are some great opportunities across visual search in the next few years. Google has been investing in this quite a lot, and I think that this is an opportunity for businesses of all sizes, and I hope to see more people getting involved with visual search optimizations.
Earlier this year, the Department of Justice (DOJ) published its first web accessibility guidance in 10 years. It was meant to remind businesses of all sizes that their websites — just like physical storefronts — need to be accessible to people with disabilities.
According to WebAIM’s most recent accessibility analysis of the top one million homepages, 97% of websites have accessibility errors — such as low contrast text and missing written descriptions of images — failing to meet some of the basic Website Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), a de facto international standard. This is a slight improvement from 2020, when 98% of homepages were inaccessible.
With only 3% of the Internet accessible, we have an urgent problem on a big scale.
There are a number of reasons why, despite the growing awareness of digital accessibility, expectations of inclusivity, and renewed efforts by the government, we are still lagging behind.
Among those reasons are the following three challenges that reflect that state of digital accessibility today.
Three key challenges in digital accessibility
1. The lack of clarity on legal requirements
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which prohibits discrimination based on disability, and other laws governing accessibility in the United States were written before the Internet became an integral part of our lives. Today, the Justice Department and courts across the country decide on digital accessibility lawsuits on a case-by-case basis, relying on WCAG as a technical standard. But because these guidelines haven’t been codified, for many businesses it’s hard to know with certainty which standards are applicable to them, whether their websites meet legal requirements, and what specific steps they should take to comply with the laws.
The Justice Department’s 2022 guidance somewhat addresses this ambiguity by reaffirming that web accessibility is a requirement under Title III of the ADA. Title III of the ADA requires any business “open to the public” to make their online content and services accessible to people who rely on assistive technologies, such as screen readers, to browse the Internet.
With the current laws, businesses can choose how to ensure their content is accessible to people with disabilities. The DOJ guidance points to the WCAG and the Section 508 Standards (which the US federal government uses for its own websites), but it doesn’t provide a new legal standard. For example, it’s not clear whether businesses with online-only stores have to adhere to the same legal standard as those with both physical locations and e-commerce sites.
With so much left to interpretation, including how many and which WCAG criteria a website needs to conform with in order to be considered ADA compliant, it’s hard for businesses to know where they stand when it comes to digital accessibility compliance.
Further complicating matters is the complex and ever-changing nature of the Internet.
2. The dynamic nature of the Internet
Whether it’s personalization based on user actions and preferences, or new content creation – websites are constantly changing, posing an ongoing challenge to keep them accessible. Every change, no matter how small — like adding a new product description or an image — can potentially make content inaccessible to users with disabilities.
In a recent analysis of 3,500 websites across 22 industries, including healthcare, e-commerce, and employment, AudioEye, a web accessibility platform, found that 79% of the websites had at least three severe accessibility errors that could potentially block an assistive technology user from interacting with the content and/or completing the goal of a site visit, such as submitting a form or requesting information.
When comparing different industries in the same analysis, the analysis found that 83% of e-commerce sites, 78% of healthcare sites, and 77% of jobs and career sites had accessibility errors that blocked or significantly impacted users’ ability to complete key tasks, such as viewing product descriptions, making a purchase, filling out an application, or booking an appointment.
Considering the dynamic nature of the Internet and the speed of content creation (more than 250,000 sites are launched every day), it’s clear we need a web accessibility solution that can monitor for accessibility errors in real-time and help fix issues as they come up.
And while automation can provide rapid improvement at scale, it cannot solve all errors.
3. Current limits of technology
Even the best accessibility automation today, which can detect up to 70% of common accessibility errors and resolve two-thirds of them, cannot solve complex accessibility issues that require human judgment. Detecting more subtle errors often requires an understanding of context that is beyond even the most sophisticated AI today. For example, automation can detect that an image lacks a written description, or alt text, but it cannot tell whether an existing description is meaningful or accurate. Even with human judgment, if you ask two people to describe an image, their descriptions may be similar, but it is unlikely they would be exactly the same. Determining which description is the better one is also subjective, and AI is not yet able to make those types of judgments.
AudioEye’s analysis of 20,000 websites across industries showed that even the sites that were using some type of an automated digital accessibility solution — or about 6% of all sites in the analysis — still had accessibility errors with significant impact on the user experience.
In another analysis — this time a manual audit of randomly selected 55 websites that used manual testing and remediation services, or traditional approach — AudioEye found over 950 accessibility issues. More than 40 of these sites had one or more severe accessibility issues, such as non-functional site navigation, unlabeled graphics, inaccessible video controls, and other issues that made digital content and tools inaccessible to people with disabilities.
Looking specifically at their own customers’ websites, AudioEye found that the majority of accessibility issues (up to 95%) can be fixed and prevented using a mix of automated and manual remediations, leveraging JavaScript, without the need to modify the original source code.
What will it take to solve digital accessibility at scale?
Accessibility solutions today range from simple automation-only tools to labor-intensive manual audits. AudioEye’s research, which included both automated and manual analysis of websites across industries, showed that the most effective way to solve web accessibility at scale is through a combination of technology and human expertise.
As a writer at a content marketing agency, I’ve written for a lot of different clients, and almost everything I’ve produced has been intended to rank on Google and encourage website traffic.
Here’s the challenge I (and every other marketing writer on the planet) am up against: search competition.
No matter what industry you’re in, or target audience you’re speaking to, you’re not alone. You have competition. And if you and your competition both understand the SEO game (which is very much the case for most companies nowadays), then what do you have to fall back on to protect your visibility in the all-important SERPs?
According to Google, it’s E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
But here’s the complicated thing: Every one of my clients — even the small ones thriving in very big industries — has expertise, and authoritativeness, and even trustworthiness. So, how does that help them in search? And how can they possibly prove to Google, amid all the noise and competition and other experts out there, that they deserve a place on Page 1?
Last year, I set out to find out.
Methodology
Google is pretty clear about the fact that websites need E-A-T, but what they don’t really clue us in on is what E-A-T actually is or how it’s measured. I hypothesized that, if I compiled a big list of SERPs and closely analyzed all the Page 1 results, I could narrow down what may comprise E-A-T.
Theoretically, E-A-T affects different industries in different ways. That’s because some topics and subject areas are more critical than others to have extremely reliable information — like when you’re searching for information about prescription drugs or complicated financial products.
So, the first thing I did was choose seven topic categories to focus on: legal, insurance, health care, loans, pharmaceuticals, military, and informational questions. Next, I picked 10 queries for each category.
Then I searched. The resulting 70 SERPs produced 647 results. I analyzed each of those results, looking specifically for 32 different factors.
Finally, I reviewed what I had recorded and asked:
Which factors were the most prevalent across all 647 results?
Which factors were most prevalent among the 210 Top 3 results?
Were there differences in prevalent factors across the various topic categories I chose?
Before we get into the results, let’s talk about correlation vs. causation for a moment. While each of these factors seemed to be very common among Page 1 results, and it seems clear that some of these factors do play a role in establishing E-A-T, all I can really say for sure is that these traits are associated with pages that rank well in search. They could be indicators of a good page or website, but not necessarily the determining factor that’s putting them on Page 1.
With that in mind, here are five lessons I learned about E-A-T after closely analyzing the results from those 70 searches.
Lesson 1: Original, relevant, recent content is essential
Of all the lessons, this is the least surprising to me, but perhaps the most important. To rank well for relevant terms, you need to strongly demonstrate that your website belongs in search results. How? Content, obviously.
But it’s got to be high-quality content. Usually, I’d say that means you’re addressing the topic from all angles and leaving no questions unanswered. But after this SERP inspection exercise, I’d actually say the three most important characteristics of high-quality content are that it’s:
Original
Relevant
Recently published or updated
Original research
One factor I sought throughout this study was original research. To me, this included any content that’s created using information the organization sources, analyzes, and publishes themselves.
Just shy of two-thirds of the results’ websites contained original research, but among the websites whose results were in the Top 3 positions, 70% had original research available. This shows the importance of creating your own, unique content — a story only you can tell. Trust me, you have one.
Relevance and topical authority
Beyond content just being unique, it also needs to be relevant to your industry and target audience. Topical authority is a weird concept because SEOs know it’s real, but there’s no way to measure it, and Google hasn’t exactly come out and said they have a topical authority ranking factor.
However, they have given us a lot of clues that point to topical authority being a highly important factor in E-A-T — like this patent they filed in 2017. Even in their recent Helpful Content Update, Google highlights questions that creators should ask themselves when considering their own site content. The question, “Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?” in particular alludes to the importance of creating content for a topic niche or specific subject area.
Given the limited tools on this subject, I decided to create my own (rudimentary) method of measuring topical authority by way of roughly determining the topic coverage depth throughout the whole website. Here’s what I did:
Determine the parent topic of the query in question. “Insurance” is the parent topic for “types of insurance” and “world population” is the parent topic for “how many people are in the world,” for example.
Find the Topic Coverage Score (TCS, as I call it) of each result’s website. That’s the number of pages indexed by Google that contain an exact-match of the parent term.
Calculate the average TCS of all Page 1 results for each query.
Compare the TSC of each result with the average TSC for that query.
After that procession of steps, I found that while 25% of Page 1 results had a TSC higher than the average, 40% of Top 3 results boasted the same. In other words, the websites that had the most topic coverage were more likely to land at the top of the page.
Recently published or updated
Half of all Top 3 and 48% of Page 1 results were dated within the previous two years. There are plenty of evergreen topics that don’t need regular content changes (the oldest result in my study was a page explaining why the sky is blue from 1997). Updating content just for the sake of giving it a new date won’t help you rank any higher in Google. However, creating timely content and updating old content as necessary could help.
Lesson 2: Your off-site, online presence matters
Here’s a lesson I wasn’t expecting to learn. When I set out on this study, I thought the biggest E-A-T factors would correspond to the website in question more so than the organization that manages it. Not so much: It became clear to me that your off-site, online presence plays a role in helping you rank in Google search results.
The vast majority (95%) of all results had third-party reviews of some kind, whether they’re Google My Business reviews, comments on Glassdoor, site trustworthiness information on Trustpilot, or something else.
Wikipedia is also a common thread between many of the results. While 89% of Page 1 results’ websites or organizations had at least one Wikipedia mention, 93% of Top 3 results did, too. As far as actual Wikipedia pages, 73% of Page 1 results and 82% of Top 3 results’ organizations had one.
The high prevalence on Page 1 tells me that it’s fairly common to have a Wikipedia connection, but the higher numbers corresponding to the Top 3 results hints at what their importance might be.
Another patent from Google, this one updated in 2018, discusses the topic of seed sites. A seed site, theoretically, is one that the search engine trusts because it generally has quality content and good, valuable links. Google hasn’t revealed whether this seed site theory is valid, or to what extent it plays a role in search algorithms (if any). But if I were to choose a seed site, Wikipedia would be a good contender. Each page has tons of links to websites with relevant information on carefully organized topics.
Another website worth mentioning is the Better Business Bureau. While it only gives limited perspective (since it only relates to Canadian and US businesses), I found that many Page 1 results’ organizations (70%) and even more Top 3 results (74%) had at least a BBB page but not necessarily a grade. In fact, a little over one-fourth of results that had a BBB page didn’t have a rating.
It seems to me that the value is in getting listed on BBB’s website more so than achieving a good grade — perhaps a North American-specific seed site of sorts.
Lesson 3: Transparency and honesty are the best policies
So far, we’ve learned a lot about E (expertise) and A (authoritativeness) but where the T — trustworthiness — really comes into sight is when we start talking about transparency.
Google states right in its Page Quality Rating guidelines that webmasters should state on their website exactly who is responsible for site content. That can be a person or people, or it could be an organization. At Moz, for example, the folks at Moz are responsible for their site content, and they explain all about it in their About page. Similarly, 91% of results I analyzed had a detailed About Us page.
Another way of being transparent about what your site is all about is by publishing editorial standards or guidelines. These documents detail how your site gets populated: where content comes from, what characteristics help it make the cut, what the organization won’t publish, and more.
43% of Page 1 results and 49% of Top 3 results had some sort of editorial guidelines published. These included information quality guidelines, pitch guidelines that reflect editorial standards, correction policies, and corporate governance documentation that addresses communication or media.
Why should publishing guidelines benefit your site? Well, I could see two factors at play here.
First off, Google's Page Quality Rating guidelines specifically notes that “High E-A-T news sources typically have published established editorial policies and robust review processes.” That doesn’t prove that the algorithm considers the presence of editorial guidelines (or even knows about them all the time) but it does lend us insight into the mind of Google.
Second, I’d be willing to bet that there’s a strong correlation between organizations that take the time to put together editorial guidelines and those that take the time to ensure their content is worthy of their site. Additionally, the process of putting together editorial guidelines is itself a good exercise in ensuring that your website content is high quality.
Lesson 4: Connections go a long way
No business operates in a vacuum, especially not on the Internet. The connections your organization has made with others, and how you acknowledge them, make an impact on how your community views you.
Reputable partners
There are all kinds of connections a business might make with another organization. Throughout the study, I kept track of something I called “reputable partners.” To earn this mark, a website had to demonstrate a relationship between themselves and another organization that’s plainly in support or favor of their work or mission.
Some of the most common types of demonstrations of these relationships included:
Articles and press releases announcing partnerships or outcomes.
Explanations of the relationships between those organizations.
Accolades from recognized organizations highlighted on-site through badges, links to award announcements, press releases, etc.
Links to press releases or articles demonstrating the relationship between organizations, and/or award badge displays.
While 73% of the results I looked at had clear “reputable partners,” 78% of those in the Top 3 did, too. My theory for this pattern is that making it obvious which other organizations are in support of you — generally or financially, e.g. through a grant — or in favor of your mission, you’re being transparent about how your organization operates. That fits squarely with the T in the E-A-T equation.
Backlinks
Another type of connection modern businesses deal in today is backlinks. Links put the “Inter” in “Internet,” and they’ve become essential for people and (more importantly for this subject) web crawlers to understand and navigate the web.
The average number of backlinks across all 647 results I analyzed was 32,572. Among the 210 Top 3 results, it was 88,581.
It’s certainly possible to get on Page 1 with fewer than that — about one-third had fewer than 100 backlinks and 28 had none whatsoever. However, we can clearly see that link quantity is valuable.
But what about link quality? For that, we can look at Moz’s Spam Score. This metric indicates your backlink profile health, with a 1% rating as really healthy and a 99% rating as super unhealthy.
While Moz considers a “low” score to be 30% or less, 44% of Page 1 results had a Spam Score of 1%, indicating that most Page 1 results have a very clean, healthy backlink profile. Another 19% had scores of 2 or 3%. The Top 3 results mirrored these results (with 44% at 1% and 18% at 2 or 3%).
Another way we can make some assumptions about link quality is by looking at referring domains. When there are loads of backlinks but very few referring domains, it seems less likely to be the result of deliberate link-building efforts. On the other hand, a higher number of referring domains could indicate more honest link-building tactics or simply just a really good web page that others want to link to.
The average number of referring domains among Page 1 results was 752. Meanwhile, among the Top 3 results, the average was 1,594. Making connections with other organizations online by way of honest link-building efforts can be one way to expand your reach, but also show Google and other search engines that you offer quality, worthwhile content.
Lesson 5: The right technology is essential
Last, but absolutely not least, if you have a website, it needs to be set up securely so that visitors can trust that they’re not putting their data at risk by interacting with it. In my study, I found that 96% of all results (also 96% of just top 3 results) used HTTPS. Interestingly, those that didn’t most often occurred in the military portion of the study.
Websites today also need technologies for cookie notifications, and some use pop-ups to convey important messages. Others use advertising to monetize their site. In any of these situations, the website owner should aim to minimize disruption to the user’s experience. Just 42% of all results had a pop-up: most of them (81) were inviting the user to subscribe to something (e.g. a newsletter), while nearly an equal number (79) were communicating information related to cookies.
Having the right technology enabled on your website may not seem inherently connected to E-A-T — which is why I didn’t evaluate even more technologic considerations such as e-payment systems — but considering that a huge aspect of Trustworthiness online today is about data gathering and management (and the ill effects of mis-management), it’s apparent that this area matters just as much, if not more so, than all your efforts into quality content creation.
Conclusion
When I set out to uncover the factors associated with E-A-T, I fully anticipated learning about proper author attribution, source citations, and good content. I guess I was thinking with my author hat on and not my web user hat, because I was only close on one of those three.
There are a lot of activities digital marketers can do to promote their businesses and goods and services today. Content creation and content marketing, link building, local SEO, advertising, public relations, and more can all seem like great options that you can pursue.
But the truth is, they’re not options — they’re must-haves for building a holistic digital presence. After conducting this study, my advice to webmasters and business leaders would be to assess your current online presence (including but not limited to your website’s user experience) and determine where there are holes. Working to fill those holes won’t necessarily be easy, but it will be worth it when your web traffic increases and your pages begin to rank.
To see a detailed explanation of each factor considered in this study, check out the full E-A-T study report on the Brafton blog.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
