SEO Recap: PageRank

Have you ever wondered how Moz employees learn internally? Well, here’s your chance to get a sneak peek into never seen before, internal webinar footage with Tom Capper! Learning is important at Moz, and the sharing of information amongst employees is crucial in making sure we stay true to our core values. Knowledge sharing allows us to stay transparent, work together more easily, find better ways of doing things, and create even better tools and experiences for our customers.

Tom started these sessions when everyone was working remotely in 2020. It allowed us to come together again in a special, collaborative way. So, today, we give to you all the gift of learning! In this exclusive webinar, Tom Capper takes us through the crucial topic of PageRank.

Video Transcription

This is actually a topic that I used to put poor, innocent, new recruits through, particularly if they came from a non-marketing background. Even though this is considered by a lot people to be an advanced topic, I think it's something that actually it makes sense for people who want to learn about SEO to learn first because it's foundational. And if you think about a lot of other technical SEO and link building topics from this perspective, they make a lot more sense and are simpler and you kind of figure out the answers yourself rather than needing to read 10,000 word blog posts and patents and this kind of thing.

Anyway, hold that thought, because it's 1998. I am 6 years old, and this is a glorious state-of-the-art video game, and internet browsing that I do in my computer club at school looks a bit like this. I actually didn't use Yahoo!. I used Excite, which in hindsight was a mistake, but in my defense I was 6.

The one thing you'll notice about this as a starting point for a journey on the internet, compared to something like Google or whatever you use today, maybe even like something that's built into your browser these days, there is a lot of links on this page, and mostly there are links to pages with links on this page. It's kind of like a taxonomy directory system. And this is important because if a lot of people browse the web using links, and links are primarily a navigational thing, then we can get some insights out of looking at links.

They're a sort of proxy for popularity. If we assume that everyone starts their journey on the internet on Yahoo! in 1998, then the pages that are linked to from Yahoo! are going to get a lot of traffic. They are, by definition, popular, and the pages that those pages link to will also still get quite a lot and so on and so forth. And through this, we could build up some kind of picture of what websites are popular. And popularity is important because if you show popular websites to users in search results, then they will be more trustworthy and credible and likely to be good and this kind of thing.

This is massive oversimplification, bear with me, but this is kind of why Google won. Google recognized this fact, and they came up with an innovation called PageRank, which made their search engine better than other people's search engines, and which every other search engine subsequently went on to imitate.

However, is anything I said just now relevant 23 years later? We definitely do not primarily navigate the word with links anymore. We use these things called search engines, which Google might know something about. But also we use newsfeeds, which are kind of dynamic and uncrawlable, and all sorts of other non-static, HTML link-based patterns. Links are probably not the majority even of how we navigate our way around the web, except maybe within websites. And Google has better data on popularity anyway. Like Google runs a mobile operating system. They run ISPs. They run a browser. They run YouTube. There are lots of ways for Google to figure out what is and isn't popular without building some arcane link graph.

However, be that true or not, there still is a core methodology that underpins how Google works on a foundational level. In 1998, it was the case that PageRank was all of how Google worked really. It was just PageRank plus relevance. These days, there's a lot of nuance and layers on top, and even PageRank itself probably isn't even called that and probably has changed and been refined and tweaked around the edges. And it might be that PageRank is not used as a proxy for popularity anymore, but maybe as a proxy for trust or something like that and it has a slightly different role in the algorithm.

But the point is we still know purely through empirical evidence that changing how many and what pages link to a page has a big impact on organic performance. So we still know that something like this is happening. And the way that Google talks about how links work and their algorithms still reflects a broadly PageRank-based understanding as do developments in SEO directives and hreflang and rel and this kind of thing. It still all speaks to a PageRank-based ecosystem, if not a PageRank-only ecosystem.

Also, I'm calling it PageRank because that's what Google calls it, but some other things you should be aware of that SEOs use, link equity I think is a good one to use because it kind of explains what you're talking about in a useful way. Link flow, it's not bad, but link flow is alluding to a different metaphor that you've probably seen before, where you think of links as being sent through big pipes of liquids that then pour in different amounts into different pages. It's a different metaphor to the popularity one, and as a result it has some different implications if it's overstretched, so use some caution. And then linking strength, I don't really know what metaphor this is trying to do. It doesn't seem as bad as link juice, at least fine, I guess.

More importantly, how does it work? And I don't know if anyone here hates maths. If you do, I'm sorry, but there's going to be maths.

So the initial sort of question is or the foundation of all this is imagine that, so A, in the red box here, that's a web page to be clear in this diagram, imagine that the whole internet is represented in this diagram, that there's only one web page, which means this is 1970 something, I guess, what is the probability that a random browser is on this page? We can probably say it's one or something like that. If you want to have some other take on that, it kind of doesn't matter because it's all just going to be based on whatever number that is. From that though, we can sort of try to infer some other things.

So whatever probability you thought that was, and let's say we thought that if there's one page on the internet, everyone is on it, what's the probability a random browser is on the one page, A, links to? So say that we've pictured the whole internet here. A is a page that links to another page which links nowhere. And we started by saying that everyone was on this page. Well, what's the probability now, after a cycle, that everyone will be on this page? Well, we go with the assumption that there's an 85% chance, and the 85% number comes from Google's original 1998 white paper. There's an 85% chance that they go onto this one page in their cycle, and a 15% chance that they do one of these non-browser-based activities. And the reason why we assume that there's a chance on every cycle that people exit to do non-browser-based activities, it's because otherwise we get some kind of infinite cycle later on. We don't need to worry about that. But yeah, the point is that if you assume that people never leave their computers and that they just browse through links endlessly, then you end up assuming eventually that every page has infinite traffic, which is not the case.

That's the starting point where we have this really simple internet, we have a page with a link on it, and a page without a link on it and that's it. Something to bear in mind with these systems is, obviously, web pages don't have our link on them and web pages with no links on them are virtually unheard of, like the one on the right. This gets really complex really fast. If we try to make a diagram just of two pages on the Moz website, it would not fit on the screen. So we're talking with really simplified versions here, but it doesn't matter because the principles are extensible.

So what if the page on the left actually linked to two pages, not one? What is the probability now that we're on one of those two pages? We're taking that 85% chance that they move on at all without exiting, because the house caught fire, they went for a bike ride or whatever, and we're now dividing that by two. So we're saying 42.5% chance that they were on this page, 42.5% chance they were on this page, and then nothing else happens because there are no more links in the world. That's fine.

What about this page? So if this page now links to one more, how does this page's strength relates to page A? So this one was 0.85/2, and this one is 0.85 times that number. So note that we are diluting as we go along because we've applied that 15% deterioration on every step. This is useful and interesting to us because we can imagine a model in which page A, on the left, is our homepage and the page on the right is some page we want to rank, and we're diluting with every step that we have to jump to get there. And this is crawl depth, which is a metric that is exposed by Moz Pro and most other technical SEO tools. That's why crawl depth is something that people are interested in is this, and part of it is discovery, which we won't get into today, but part of it is also this dilution factor.

And then if this page actually linked to three, then again, each of these pages is only one-third as strong as when it only linked to one. So it's being split up and diluted the further down we go.

So that all got very complicated very quick on a very simple, fictional website. Don't panic. The lessons we want to take away from this are quite simple, even though the math becomes very arcane very quickly.

So the first lesson we want to take is that each additional link depth diluted value. So we talked about the reasons for that, but obviously it has implications for site structure. It also has implications in some other things, some other common technical SEO issues that I'll cover in a bit.

So if I link to a page indirectly that is less effective than linking to a page directly, even in a world where every page only has one link on it, which is obviously an ideal scenario.

The other takeaway we can have is that more links means each link is less valuable. So if every additional link you add to your homepage, you're reducing the effectiveness of the links that were already there. So this is very important because if you look on a lot of sites right now, you'll find 600 link mega navs at the top of the page and the same at the bottom of the page and all this kind of thing. And that can be an okay choice. I'm not saying that's always wrong, but it is a choice and it has dramatic implications.

Some of the biggest changes in SEO performance I've ever seen on websites came from cutting back the number of links on the homepage by a factor of 10. If you change a homepage so that it goes from linking to 600 pages to linking to the less than 100 that you actually want to rank, that will almost always have a massive difference, a massive impact, more so than external link building could ever dream of because you're not going to get that 10 times difference through external link building, unless it's a startup or something.

Some real-world scenarios. I want to talk about basically some things that SEO tools often flag, that we're all familiar with talking about as SEO issues or optimizations or whatever, but often we don't think about why and we definitely don't think of them as being things that hark back quite so deep into Google's history.

So a redirect is a link, the fictional idea of a page with one link on it is a redirect, because a redirect is just a page that links to exactly one other page. So in this scenario, the page on the left could have linked directly to the page on the top right, but because it didn't, we've got this 0.85 squared here, which is 0.7225. The only thing you need to know about that is that it's a smaller number than 0.85. Because we didn't link directly, we went through this page here that redirected, which doesn't feel like a link, but is a link in this ecosystem, we've just arbitrarily decided to dilute the page at the end of the cycle. And this is, obviously, particularly important when we think about chain redirects, which is another thing that's often flagged by the SEO tools.

But when you look in an issue report in something like Moz Pro and it gives you a list of redirects as if they're issues, that can be confusing because a redirect is something we're also told is a good thing. Like if we have a URL that's no longer in use, it should redirect. But the reason that issue is being flagged is we shouldn't still be linking to the URL that redirects. We should be linking directly to the thing at the end of the chain. And this is why. It's because of this arbitrary dilution that we're inserting into our own website, which is basically just a dead weight loss. If you imagine that in reality, pages do tend to link back to each other, this will be a big complex web and cycle that is, and I think this is where the flow thing comes around because people can imagine a flow of buckets that drip round into each other but leak a little bit at every step, and then you get less and less water, unless there's some external source. If you imagine these are looping back around, then inserting redirects is just dead weight loss. We've drilled a hole in the bottom of a bucket.

So, yeah, better is a direct link. Worse is a 302, although that's a controversial subject, who knows. Google sometimes claim that they treat 302s as 301s these days. Let's not get into that.

Canonicals, very similar, a canonical from a PageRank perspective. A canonical is actually a much later addition to search engines. But a canonical is basically equivalent to a 301 redirect. So if we have this badgers page, which has two versions, so you can access it by going to badgers?colour=brown. Or so imagine I have a website that sells live badgers for some reason in different colors, and then I might have these two different URL variants for my badger e-com page filtered to brown. And I've decided that this one without any parameters is the canonical version, literally and figuratively speaking. If the homepage links to it via this parameter page, which then has canonical tag pointing at the correct version, then I've arbitrarily weakened the correct version versus what I could have done, which would be the direct link through. Interestingly, if we do have this direct link through, note that this page now has no strength at all. It now has no inbound links, and also it probably wouldn't get flagged as an error in the tool because the tool wouldn't find it.

You'll notice I put a tilde before the number zero. We'll come to that.

PageRank sculpting is another thing that I think is interesting because people still try to do it even though it's not worked for a really long time. So this is an imaginary scenario that is not imaginary at all. It's really common, Moz probably has this exact scenario, where your homepage links to some pages you care about and also some pages you don't really care about, certainly from an SEO perspective, such as your privacy policy. Kind of sucks because, in this extreme example here, having a privacy policy has just randomly halved the strength of a page you care about. No one wants that.

So what people used to do was they would use a link level nofollow. They use a link level nofollow, which . . . So the idea was, and it worked at the time, and by at the time, I mean like 2002 or something. But people still try this on new websites today. The idea was that effectively the link level nofollow removed this link, so it was as if your homepage only linked to one page. Great, everyone is a winner.

Side note I talked about before. So no page actually has zero PageRank. A page with no links in the PageRank model has the PageRank one over the number of pages on the internet. That's the seeding probability that before everything starts going and cycles round and figures out what the stable equilibrium PageRank is, they assume that there's an equal chance you're on any page on the internet. One divided by the number of pages on the internet is a very small number, so we can think of it as zero.

This was changed, our level nofollow hack was changed again a very, very long time ago such that if you use a link level nofollow, and by the way, this is also true if you use robots.txt to do this, this second link will still be counted in when we go here and we have this divided by two to say we are halving, there's an equal chance that you go to either of these pages. This page still gets that reduction because it was one of two links, but this page at the bottom now has no strength at all because it was only linked through a nofollow. So if you do this now, it's a worst of both world scenario. And you might say, "Oh, I don't actually care whether my privacy policy has zero strength," whatever. But you do care because your privacy policy probably links through the top nav to every other page on your website. So you're still doing yourself a disservice.

Second side note, I said link level nofollow, meaning nofollow in the HTML is an attribute to a link. There is also page level nofollow, which I struggled to think of a single good use case for. Basically, a page level nofollow means we are going to treat every single link on this page as nofollow. So we're just going to create a PageRank dead-end. This is a strange thing to do. Sometimes people use robots.txt, which basically does the same thing. If I block this page with robota.txt, that's the same in terms of the PageRank consequences, except there are other good reasons to do that, like I might not want Google to ever see this, or I might want to prevent a massive waste of Google's crawlers' time so that they spend more time crawling the rest of my site or something like this. There are reasons to use robots.txt. Page level nofollow is we're going to create that dead-end, but also we're going to waste Google's time crawling it anyway.

Some of the extreme scenarios I just talked about, particularly the one with the privacy policy, changed a lot for the better for everyone in 2004 with something called reasonable surfer, which you occasionally still hear people talking about now, but mostly implicitly. And it is probably actually an under-discussed or underheld in mind topic.

So these days, and by these days, I mean for the last 17 years, if one of these links was that massive call to action and another one of these links was in the footer, like a privacy policy link often is, then Google will apply some sense and say the chance people click on this one . . . Google was trying to figure out probabilities here, remember. So we'll split this. This 0.9 and 0.1 still have to add up to 1, but we'll split them in a more reasonable fashion. Yeah, they were doing that a long time ago. They've probably got very, very good at it by now.

Noindex is an interesting one because, traditionally, you would think that has nothing to do with PageRank. So, yeah, a noindex tag just means this should never show up in search results, this page at the bottom, which is fine. There are some valid reasons to do that. Maybe you're worried that it will show up for the wrong query that something else on your site is trying to show up for, or maybe it contains sensitive information or something like this. Okay, fine. However, when you put a noindex tag on something, Google eventually stops crawling it. Everyone sort of intuitively knew all the pieces of this puzzle, but Google only acknowledged that this behavior is what happens a couple of years ago.

So Google eventually stops crawling it, and when Google stops crawling on it, it stops passing PageRank. So noindex follow, which used to be quite a good thing or we thought quite a good thing to do for a page like an HTML sitemap page or something like that, like an HTML sitemap page, clearly you don't want to show up in search results because it's kind of crap and a poor reflection on your site and not a good UX and this kind of thing. But it is a good way to pass equity through to a bunch of deep pages, or so we thought. It turns out probably not. It was equivalent to that worst case scenario, page level nofollow in the long run that we talked about earlier. And again, this is probably why noindex is flagged as an error in tools like Moz Pro, although often it's not well explained or understood.

My pet theory on how links work is that, at this stage, they're no longer a popularity proxy because there's better ways of doing that. But they are a brand proxy for a frequently cited brand. Citation and link are often used synonymously in this industry, so that kind of makes sense. However, once you actually start ranking in the top 5 or 10, my experience is that links become less and less relevant the more and more competitive a position you're in because Google has increasingly better data to figure out whether people want to click on you or not. This is some data from 2009, contrasting ranking correlations in positions 6 to 10, versus positions 1 to 5. Basically, both brand and link become less relevant, or the easily measured versions become less relevant, which again is kind of exploring that theory that the higher up you rank, the more bespoke and user signal-based it might become.

This is some older data, where I basically looked at to what extent you can use Domain Authority to predict rankings, which is this blue bar, to what extent you could use branded search volume to predict rankings, which is this green bar, and to what extent you could use a model containing them both to predict rankings, which is not really any better than just using branded search volume. This is obviously simplified and flawed data, but this is some evidence towards the hypothesis that links are used as a brand proxy.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

12 Local Search Developments You Need to Know About from Q4 2022

Hard to believe but neither Q1, nor Q2, nor Q3 can equal Q4 for the activity we’ve seen in local search, and the quarter isn’t even quite over yet! For all I know, Google could celebrate New Year’s Eve by renaming Google Business Profiles “Google Plus Places My Business Profiles Merchant Experience Listings” and we would just have to roll with that, too.

There has been so much going on, it’s small wonder if you haven’t caught every development, but here’s a list of some of the most interesting ones you should be aware of as we look towards 2023. We’ve got one new interface, two awful bugs, three new GBP features, four review developments, several guideline updates … all that’s missing is the partridge in the pear tree!

The new merchant experience breaks upon us like a thunderclap

Watch this space for a vast post from me on the NMX in the next few weeks, but for now, you need to know that the editing via the old Google Business Profile Manager dashboard is a thing of the past and you’ll need to manage your data in the new in-SERP interface that’s been dubbed the “New Merchant Experience”.

About a year ago, Google warned us that this was coming, but it must be said that they also intimated that this change would only impact single location businesses. In Q4, a hue and cry understandably went up from the local SEO community when everyone – including multi-location listings managers – woke up to find themselves summarily escorted out of the old dashboard and into the SERPs for management.

The good folks at Bright Local, Streetfight, and Online Ownership have done a great job of early reporting on the frustrations and discoveries surrounding the NMX, and for the most part, have concluded that if you click around enough within the new interface, you will relocate most features. A few new surprises have been noted so far. For example, Q&A is now part-and-parcel of the interface instead of being treated as a separate instance:

And check out Khushal Bherwani’s tweet capturing Google tagging the previous location of a business under the “locations” tab of the NMX when the company’s location has been changed.

We can get used to the NMX. We should also expect changes to it in the new year, but at the moment, my most interesting industry takeaway from the deprecation of the historic dashboard is that listings management software just became more appealing. BrightLocal’s informal poll captures how clunky many users will find the act of trying to manage listings amid the clutter of the organic SERPs:

In recent years, there has been some debate about whether local business should pay for listings management software. Google’s latest move is making experts like Mike Blumenthal and Carrie Hill say “yes” if you’ve got multiple listings and require the calm and quiet organization of a dedicated listings management dashboard instead of the awkward mess of the NMX.

Google bugs only an entomologist could love

David Mihm captures some of the industry angst many are feeling right now as a result of multiple Google bugs making work needlessly difficult for us in recent months. For the record, I love and appreciate all insects, but Google’s listing suspension spree has been about as fun as finding potato bugs in one’s bathtub. When even the smallest of normal edits to listings (like writing a post or editing a description) results in suspension, it can make local SEOs and local business owners very leery of keeping their listings updated:

Fortunately, about one month after reports of suspensions began flooding fora, Joy Hawkins announced the good news that Google had apparently resolved this bug.

This is a good time and place to mention Amy Toman’s reinstatement request tip:

And also, that Colan Nielsen spotted what appears to be a new notification from Google in the NMX of how long it should take for your edits to be reviewed:

Meanwhile, a second bug began chasing us all around the local picnic table in the form of a big wave of review loss. If you’ve recently lost a ton of reviews, Mike Blumenthal has done outstanding investigative reporting at Near Media on this latest aggravation, including his finding that Google had been auto-updating Google Business Profiles and changing their CID numbers right before reviews were thrown out. As he says,

“Changing the CID and losing reviews with a Suggested Edit update is a new and disturbing bug…You should always capture and store your Google CID and Place ID somewhere safe. Gatherup's Google Review Link Generator Chrome extension helps you get those numbers easily as does Pleper's free Google CID converter.”

I also highly recommend reading Mike’s article examining the difference between a review bug and a review filter and outlining steps you can take in the wake of review loss.

New Google features we don’t dislike

Barry Schwartz captured a new feature test that several people had noticed in which a speaker icon reads out the name and category of the local business. I’m not sure where Google is headed with this, but I am a fan of audio features as an alternative to too much screen time.

Stefan Somborac notes a nifty feature, referenced in this Google help doc, that lets dining establishments select their preferred menu. Also new for restaurants, Abner Li wrote up the “Nearby Dishes” US rollout from Google that can return a carousel of local options to you when you search for something like “pho near me”. I have yet to see this feature in the wild, but Abner’s article has screenshots.

Good review things!

Darren Shaw was jubilant at finding something truly new in local SEO – this time, a notation of the number of times a Google reviewer profile had published reviews in a specific city. This sparked a great discussion between Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal as to whether this signal will actually boost the authenticity of Google-based reviews, or whether location is too easy to spoof. I like this feature because it adds some transparency to the fact that Google is tracking your location when you leave a review – which might come as a surprise to some users. Perhaps this might be a minor deterrent to some forms of review spam?

Next up, an amazing find from Christina LeVasseur Brodzky for the hospitality industry of Google quantifying the positive and negative sentiment in association with place topics within reviews. In her example, 72% of reviewers favorably mentioned the bar at a hotel, while 17% were not so favorable. This rollout showcases the deepening levels Google is reaching in sentiment analysis.

And to round up review developments, Q4 saw the publication of two major review studies. Moz’s own, The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior will take you through three chapters of insights into the habits of review readers, review writers, and successful owner responses based on a large-scale survey. Meanwhile, the good folks at SOCi have a gated report on The State of Google Reviews based on an analysis of nearly five million reviews. Also, the team over at Sterling Sky has been publishing a series of small and interesting studies on the impacts of review recency, number, text, and diversity on local pack rankings. If Google will just stop accidentally deleting local business reviews and let us get on with things, all of these reports will seriously power up your reputation strategy for 2023.

Guideline updates should always be noted

In the aforementioned Moz review survey, we learned that the next step 51% of consumers take after reading reviews will land them on local business websites. Given this, it’s quite relevant to local business owners and marketers that Google has replaced its historic Webmaster Guidelines with the overhauled, rebranded Google Search Essentials. This would be a good time to read through the refreshed guidelines to be sure your website is being understood by people and search engines alike.

And finally, Colan Nielsen took note of Google adding a stern warning against review gating back into their Prohibited and Restricted Content guidelines. In sum, don’t ever ask customers to specifically leave you a positive review, don’t use software that weeds out negative sentiment, and if you publish first-party reviews on your own website, don’t show only the good stuff. Be honest and authentic, and you should be fine.

And that puts a bow on local SEO 2022! I want to thank everyone who has read this new quarterly series this year and who has tweeted it, blogged about it, included it in your newsletters, and discussed it on your podcasts. Warmest gratitude, as well, to each of the local SEO community members giving time every month of every year to freely sharing your discoveries with all of us. I hope to continue this series in 2023 and to keep learning local with all of you!

How to Optimize Existing Content for Featured Snippets — Whiteboard Friday

In our last episode of 2022, Crystal discusses how featured snippets show up in several different parts of the SERP, giving you lots of good value for organic reach, and how to claim those opportunities for your existing content.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, my name is Crystal Carter. Welcome to my Whiteboard Friday. I am the Head of SEO Communications at Wix, and today I'm going to talk to you about featured snippets. Specifically, I'm going to talk to you about how you can get featured snippets for existing content.

Now, before I get into that, I'd like to talk to you about why we should be thinking about featured snippets for existing content, and that's because featured snippets show up in lots of different parts of the SERP. So they give you lots of good value for organic reach.

If you're not sure what a featured snippet is, if you Google something like, "what is a featured snippet," you actually get a featured snippet, and it's a sort of extract of text from a website. And underneath of it, it'll say that it's a featured snippet, and that's how you know it's a featured snippet.

Now, the content from a featured snippet can show in lots of different parts of search when you're online. So it will show in the neat featured snippet, and it might include an image, it might include a paragraph, it might include some other elements, which I'll go into a little bit later. But it also might show in a featured snippet dropdown. So featured snippets are constantly changing. All of the time they're adding new features and trialing new features. But one of the features that we've seen, for instance, if you look up what is a featured snippet, I've seen it before, where it has the main paragraph, which says what a featured snippet is, and then it'll break it down further, so how to get a featured snippet and how to optimize for that sort of thing. So it will break it down into different sections, and under each section, there's more content, which if you click on it, leads you to another featured snippet.

There's also the People Also Ask section of Google. So under People Also Ask, there might be, more questions about a given topic, particularly if you're searching for a head term, like say, I don't know, shoes, there might be sort of: What shoes should I buy? Or where can I get shoes? Or is a sandal a shoe? That sort of thing might show up in People Also Ask. Those often contain featured snippets as well.

You might also get a featured snippet when you make a voice query. You might also get a featured snippet when you search on Google Lens.

You might also get the content from a featured snippet within the from sources across the web accordions, which show up for certain topic queries. So, for instance, if you were to query something like "Seven Wonders of the World," you might get something that says, "From sources around the web," and has sort of the Pyramids of Giza. And then if you click on that, there'll be lots of little bits of content, and those will often be pulled from featured snippets.

You may also see a featured snippet under a knowledge panel dropdown. So, for instance, if you were to look up, again, something like the Pyramids of Giza, it might have a section about different parts of that particular query, and those will include different dropdowns, and under those dropdowns, you will often see featured snippet content. And, of course, the knowledge panel will very often pull content from featured snippets.

So, with all of that opportunity to gain organic reach and to gain organic visibility, it's really worth optimizing content for featured snippets.

Now, if you have content that you think has the potential to get a featured snippet, i.e., that it appeals to some good, juicy long tail keywords, and that it's of high quality, you may very well think, "Oh, this particular search result that this page is ranking for has a featured snippet. Maybe I could get it." If you're not sure where to start about how to get on that featured snippet, then here's a few tips that tend to work.

So this is a little bit of a decision tree, and I'm just going to talk you through a little bit of it. So first thing you should think about is your formatting, so headers. This isn't rocket science. This is classic SEO tooling. So your headers, your H1s, your H2s, your H3, are they relevant? Are they present? Are they breaking down the content in lots of good ways? If they are not, then you should update that. Okay, if they are, if you do have headers, H1s, H2s, then make sure that they've got relevant terminology in them. We can think keywords, but also you can think more naturally, like natural language. Natural language processing is becoming a lot more intuitive within Google, and they're able to understand lots of nuances of language. So make sure that you've including something that's relevant, that continues to tell the story of whatever the topic is that you're covering.

Another thing that you can think about, and this also helps you with People Also Ask, is whether or not you can phrase the headers as questions. So, for instance, if you were to think about the pyramids, for instance, you might say, "When is a good time to go to visit the pyramids?" for instance. That might be something that you might want to include. If you can write it as a question, sometimes that can help with queries, like, for instance, within the voice search and also with People Also Ask.

Now, once you've done all of that, you want to go to the next thing. So if you go to headers and you say, "Yes, we've done all of this," then we look at facts and data sets. When I say facts and data sets, I don't mean like massive, huge data sets and like 17 spreadsheets with lots of tabs and VLOOKUPs and all that stuff. I mean lists. For instance, if you were to say, "Should I wear sandals or should I wear sneakers," let's say, that would be something that you could compare and you could say, "Well, is the weather like this? Or is this like that? Or is that like that? Or is that like that?" That's a set of information that you could put on a table, for instance. Or if you were to say, "What different types of shoes are there, sandals, heels, trainers whichever," then that's also a type of data set. So if you have data, if you have a list within your content, then you might want to think about whether or not you could include more lists or more in your content, and that might be something you want to think about.

If you are doing that, then you want to think about including HTML lists. So not just listed in the paragraph, but also listed out specifically within lists. These can be as ordered lists or as unordered lists. So an unordered list within HTML has an HTML tag of ul, and then you would be able to make that as bullet points. If you're able to put in an ordered list, one, two, three, four, like top 10 tips for XYZ, then you would be able to put that in as an ordered list, and that's something that you could put in your HTML. What happens with Google, with their featured snippets is sometimes they pull out the list and they will put that onto the featured snippet there. So if you have it in your content, then you're more likely to show for featured snippets.

Another thing you can think about is tables. So I mentioned some of the tables. Google sometimes within their featured snippets will show the tables in the SERP. So if you have content that could be put into a table, it's worth thinking about that as well.

So when you're thinking about your data sets and when you're thinking about the data and the information that you have in your content, think about if there's a way that you can make it more snackable with ordered lists. Think about if there's a way that you can make it more snackable with tables. If you haven't done that yet, then you should update your content so that it includes that. If you have done that, then you can move on to the next step.

So the next step is to think about relevant pictures. Does it contain relevant pictures? This can be an illustration, or this can be photos of whatever it is you're talking about. Sometimes when I speak to people about this, they say, "Oh, well, we're in a vertical that doesn't have a lot of photos." That's fine. That's okay. You can make infographics as well. You can make diagrams as well. Those can help you for featured snippets. They can also help you with lots of other parts of the SERP. One of the features that shows up very regularly within featured snippets is an image carousel. Sometimes Google will mix and match the content in them. So, for a featured snippet, you might see a paragraph from one website and an image from another one. So even if you have the featured snippet, you might not have all of the elements of the featured snippet.

Now, if you do have an image on your featured snippet, then you're more likely to show for both the paragraph and the image. So if you don't have images on your content, you should add them. If you're not able to take a photo, then you should create a diagram that is relevant to your content.

The other one you want to think about is making sure that any images that you have on your content include relevant attributes, like your alt tags, your title names, your file names, your file formats for your images, so that they can be indexed and crawled correctly. Also you want to think about entities, any images on your website that contain relevant entities, which can also help you with visual search. Shout-out to my last Whiteboard Friday on that.

If you've done all of that, then you want to think about making sure that you have schema markup on your images, because that will also give you another element. Now, just a slight sidebar, schema markup is not a part of the criteria for featured snippets. You do not need to have schema markup on your website to get a featured snippet. However, anecdotally, a lot of websites which have schema markup tend to perform well for featured snippets. So what the schema does is it helps Google to understand your image better, which makes it more likely for it to show an image search, which makes it more likely to show in a featured snippet.

So if you don't have these things in place, then you should add those to your content as well. If you do, then I would say that it's worth making sure that you are keeping an eye on your featured snippets and keeping an eye on your content to see if there's any of these things that can be optimized as you go along.

Once you've done that, it's worth checking where your content is being distributed, whether you're showing for a featured snippet, whether you're showing for People Also Ask, whether there's other parts of the SERP that you might be featured on so that you can potentially build on that with either additional content or with enriching this content further.

Those are my recommendations for how to optimize existing content for featured snippets.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

13 Age-based Local Business Review Preferences You Can Serve

Image credit: Mitchell Joyce

Today, we’ll be learning more about customer preferences by age group surrounding local business reviews, taking a deeper dive into some of the data from The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior | SEO Industry Report. In our initial report, we covered the leading characteristics of customers as a whole, but here, we’ll surface some intriguing differences that appeared when we segmented survey responses by age.

I want to preface this by stating that age discrimination of every kind is unacceptable. I’m not a fan of the fight over crumbs that underlies divisive and disrespectful slogans involving “okays” and “boomers” or “millennials” and “avocado toast”. Particularly in the US, these types of groupings only serve to divide and dishonor friends, family, and neighbors. Instead, let’s look with respect at the preferences of local business customers when it comes to reading and writing reviews so that we can operate and market local brands to suit the needs and tastes of lots of people in our communities. Honoring everyone is the best basis for great customer service.

Similar review habits and preferences

Image credit: Steve Bailey

Breaking down the survey by age groups of 18-29, 30-60, and 61+, we saw more commonalities than differences in behaviors and preferences surrounding reviews. For example:

• About ⅓ of all three groups say their commonest habit is to read reviews on a weekly basis

• A little over ½ of all three groups say reviews are somewhat important in the process of deciding whether a business can be trusted

• About ½ of all three groups visit the business website as their next step after reading enough positive reviews of a brand, about ⅓ of the youngest and eldest groups say their next step is to visit the business in person, with a ¼ of the middle group doing the same.

• Over ½ of all three groups will definitely seek out a business if its owner responses to reviews resolve stated problems, with the two older groups being slightly more willing to do so than the youngest group.

• About ½ of all three groups require a minimum 4 star rating to consider doing business with a local brand, with the eldest group having slightly higher expectations than the two younger groups.

• About ⅓ of all three groups say they will “sometimes” leave a review when asked to do so.

Different review habits and preferences by age group

Image credit: GT#4

For the purposes of this column, Group A is people aged 18-29, Group B is people aged 30-60, and Group C is people aged 61+.

1. Older Americans write fewer reviews

When asked how often they write reviews, about ¼ of Groups A and B say they only write reviews a few times a year. Most of them are more active review writers than this. However, 43% of Group C falls into the category of only writing reviews a few times a year. Brands may have to work harder to build up their online reputation if their model relies heavily on the patronage of older customers.

2. Older Americans are less tied to Google reviews

A little over 80% of both Groups A and B say they spend the majority of their time reading local business reviews on Google. Interestingly, that number drops to just 62% for Group C, with older Americans having more diverse reading habits that span platforms like the BBB, Yelp, Nextdoor, Facebook and first-party reviews on local business websites. Local brands that rely on the patronage of older customers should be sure to be managing reputation across a wide variety of platforms.

3. Younger Americans trust social media more as a source of local business reputation

When asked which sources, other than local business reviews, respondents rely on to understand local business reputation, a little over 60% of Groups A and B cite friends and family, while an even greater percentage (74%) turn to this resource. 61% of the youngest group relies on social media, a slightly smaller 57% of the middle group does so, but a significantly smaller 43% of the oldest group does so. Meanwhile, an identical 43% of Groups A and B consult the business’ own website as their next choice, but for Group C, 44% turn to the Better Business Bureau. Local brands should note here that younger Americans are skewed more towards social media information, while older Americans still place more trust on established platforms like the BBB.

4. Younger Americans prefer SMS-based review requests over print

About 1/2 of all three groups cite email as their #1 preference for receiving review requests and in-person requests come second for everybody. However, whereas the third choice for Groups A and B is SMS/text-based review asks, Group C prefers to be asked for reviews via receipts, invoices and other print materials. This is an important divide, and while I’ll say that, in my own experience, some of my elders text me more than my nieces and nephews, it’s clear that local brands must diversify their review acquisition methodologies to meet the different expectations of both groups.

5. Younger Americans need extra guidance with the review writing process

Let’s have fun squashing some stereotypes here! It may be a meme to depict young folks as tech-savvy and older folks as behind-the-tech-times, but here’s a lived truth from my own life: my father knows way more about computers than I ever will, and my mother is a much better searcher than I am.

In this data set, we see that the top reason our youngest group doesn’t leave more reviews is because they find the process too confusing and difficult. In other words, they likely require a little extra help and guidance in understanding how to conveniently and efficiently review your local business. Groups B and C already have the review-writing process well in hand, and say that their top blocker to writing more reviews is simply forgetting to do so when they have the free time. For these groups, reminders rather than tutorials are likely to be most effective.

6. The youngest Americans are feeling the burden of bad products

66% of Group B and 76% of Group C say that the top cause of them writing negative reviews is experiencing rude or bad service at a local business. I find it telling and poignant that older Americans have the highest expectations of being treated well by neighborhood companies and are severely let down when owners and staff are unpleasant. Some of us are old enough to remember when nearly all shops were abundantly staffed with well-trained employees who were earning enough of a living wage to have inner funds of contentment and happiness - it’s a far cry from the understaffed warehouses and automated chat bots that too often pass for customer service these days.

However, the data point that interested me most in this set is that our youngest group cites bad products as the top cause of them leaving negative reviews. Your mother-in-law may have had the same washing machine for the last 20 years, but your niece has already had to replace hers twice in the five years since she moved into an apartment with her friends. According to Statista, youngest people are also the poorest, and having to spend what little money they have on shoddy goods is a serious burden, especially when coupled with pandemic-driven supply chain breakages that have made most of us seek out products of indifferent quality because there is no other choice. Local brands should strongly consider overhauling supply chains wherever possible to find higher quality local products to avoid negative reviews and safeguard reputation in the eyes of the rising generation of consumers.

7. Youngest and eldest Americans have more modest expectations of review response times

15% of group B expects to receive an owner response to their review within 2 hours, compared to just 7% of group A and only 1% of group C. 23% of group B expects to hear back with 24 hours, while this figure is at 19% for group A and 18% for group C. 33% of group A expects a response within 24 hours, while 27% is the figure for both B and C. There’s an opportunity here to surpass expectations for all three groups by responding as quickly as possible to reviews, which means paying attention to incoming review alerts and finding time to respond.

8. Older Americans are more forgiving when problems are resolved

67% of group B and 61% of group C will definitely update a negative review and low star rating if an owners response resolves their complaints. This figure drops to just 50% for group A. Perhaps the more lived experience we have, the more aware we become of how easily mistakes happen, and the more readily we recognize and reward efforts to make amends.

9. Younger Americans read a greater number of reviews before deciding a business is worth a try

41% of group A read 10-20 reviews before determining a local business is worth trying, and a similar 37% of group B does the same. But the dominant characteristic of Group C is that 41% of them read just 5-9 reviews before making up their minds. This is open to many interpretations. Perhaps the more experienced we are, the more quickly we can scan a scenario and make a judgment. Or, perhaps the younger we are, the more we count on the process of reading lots of reviews to help us gauge public opinion before making our own decision. In any case, local businesses must be sure that there is plenty of reading material in the form of reviews from both of the younger groups.

10. Eldest Americans place the most trust in the public and the least in brand messaging

A pronounced 74% of group C says it places more trust in what customers say about a local business vs. what that business says about itself. For group A, that figure drops to 61% and group B comes in at 69%. Doubtless, the longer we live, the more experience teaches us the difference between reality and advertising, and it’s important to note that for more than 60% of all three groups, control of brand narrative is now firmly in customers’ hands. This is the best of all arguments for why customer service is the core of the business model – it writes the brand story that the majority of the public believes most.

11. Low stars shed the most trust for eldest Americans

Well over half of group C says that a low star rating compared to local competitors is the top source of lost trust when it comes to local business reviews. Groups A and B put the appearance of a business or its staff self-reviewing as their top cause of lost trust. This dynamic shows how trust can be lost at first glance for our eldest group because stars are immediately visible on review profiles, highlighting how important it is for the cumulative reviews to be speaking well of the business. Meanwhile, groups A and B are more investigative, looking more deeply at reviewers’ profiles for signs of suspicious activity. Brands must be sure to avoid all spammy practices that would rightly give these groups cause to doubt the authenticity of their reputation.

12. Youngest Americans are most put off by argumentative owner responses

When asked which factors of an owner response would make them avoid the business, the top element cited by Group A was the owner arguing with the customer. This highlights the need for deft, accountable responses, even when the business believes the customer is wrong. Meanwhile, about half of Group B cites failure of the owner response to fix a cited problem as the characteristic that would make them avoid a business, and nearly ¾ of Group C say the same. Clearly, the more life experience we have, the more we value brands that are great at solving problems that inevitably arise in the course of normal business operations.

13. Eldest Americans have the most motivation (and justification) for sharing their experience via reviews

They say that wisdom comes with age and I see a confirmation of this in the data that 85% of Group C’s primary motivation for writing reviews is to share their experience with others. For Group B, that number is 72%, and for Group A it is 69%. This puts me in mind of how Civics was a required high school class in my parents’ generation, but I seldom hear it spoken of by people of my age group, and I am not sure what part it plays in current school curriculum. Ideas like valuing the sagacity of elders and freely sharing knowledge for community benefit are excellent standards we should not lose. Local brands are extremely fortunate in having volunteers, both young and old, who are continuously speaking about them in every neighborhood across the country.

In conclusion: be sure everybody is sitting at your table

Image credit: Shanghai 031

Some local offerings are geared towards specific age groups. For example, a senior community club has a particular audience, as does a pediatrician. If your customers and clients are entirely within a narrow age-range, pay particular attention to the review preference differences we saw in today’s column.

However, what will be more common is that a local business with a general audience will be looking at how to increase the engagement of further segments within their community which aren’t yet frequenting the brand. For example, a clothier might want both elder and younger shoppers to know their shop stocks a wide variety of garments for many ages and tastes. It’s in cases like these that knowledge of specific habits and preferences can get the brand closer to having meaningful interactions with a wider audience.

In the digital age, it turns out that your local business reputation is like a very large dining table, and by considering how each of your guests likes to be served, you’ll be sure there’s a seat for everybody. When it comes to age, diversity, equity, and inclusion make for better conversation and better community.

Eager for more insights? Read: The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior

Use SEO to Fuel Your Brand's Community Flywheel

I don’t typically wear jewelry. However, when I heard a friend rave about the ring and necklace he bought from Automic Gold, it piqued my interest. As I scrolled through the site, I found myself very engaged by the approachable content, fun styles, and lifestyle photos showing inclusive genders. After several site visits, I made a purchase.

This experience is a prime example of how a brand can influence purchasing decisions through community marketing. No ad was seen. No ad was clicked. I not only became a customer, but I also became a fan of this brand—all driven by my friend’s recommendation alone.

We live in an era of community marketing, and community marketing is built through brand stories. Performance marketing efforts are still a fundamental component of marketing, but they become far more effective with a personal endorsement from a friend. After all, social proof is one of the most powerful marketing engines. In fact, according to a Nielsen Harris Poll study, 82% of Americans say they seek recommendations from friends and family when considering a purchase. Today’s most successful brands have built followings that not only return to purchase again, but also promote their products or services loyally — think of LEGO (85% loyalty rate), Apple (with 90% loyalty rates), and REI (50M+ lifetime members), to name a few. Airbnb just posted its stunning results after shifting focus to brand marketing rather than performance marketing.

Introducing the community flywheel

The community flywheel is an approach that easily marries brand and performance marketing efforts. You don’t have to be a big-name brand to see results from this strategy. No matter how niche your audience is, by leveraging your digital assets, you can cultivate an inviting community space. The key to success is building a community you own.

Brands typically think of social platforms like Instagram or Twitter as the gathering place for their community. While these platforms play an important role in amplification and social proof, your website should be a communal gathering place for your brand. It can and should be a place to educate, engage, and entertain your audience. Owning first-party data and the platform where engagement occurs is worth far more in the long run and eliminates risk outside of your brand’s control.

SEO has a pivotal role in the success of a website, and thus SEO also plays a pivotal role in the community flywheel’s success. In this article, I will explain the community flywheel and outline how SEO fits into each step of the community flywheel.

What is the community flywheel?

The community flywheel outline by McKinsey & Company succinctly explains how brands can build better communities, which in turn builds a better brand. It’s a five-step process underpinned by technology that enables scale and a test-and-learn approach that delivers consistent improvement. To align SEO initiatives for each of the 5 steps, I’ve created this graphic showing how initiatives apply to each step.

Let’s unpack each of the steps in the community flywheel. I’ll explain what each step is, how to implement it, and how SEO applies. I’ve provided common SEO deliverables that support each of these steps; however, this is by no means an exhaustive list. I hope this inspires you to integrate even more SEO initiatives—some possibly even more applicable to your brand—into your community marketing efforts.

1. Community Focus: Find the right audience

What it is

Identify communities of shared interest and, in marketing efforts, find ways to help them identify with and have an emotional response to the communities they belong to. Understanding the core target audiences beyond demographics is the key to knowing how the audience interacts. As noted in the McKinsey article, “This is an evolution from targeting consumer segments, which are anchored in demographics or individual need states, to targeting communities of people who share similar interests and values—communities of ‘shared relevance.’”

How to do it

Once you know the community(ies) you’re trying to target, build campaigns that speak to the group as opposed to the individual. Community marketing connects emotional marketing to a group that bonds together.

How SEO plugs in

Audience research is your key to understanding the cohort(s) that interact with the site. Using a tool like Sparktoro can lend insight into how your audience interacts with a particular topic. After audience research is complete, begin SEO initiatives that bolster community engagement so you can build a strategy that targets each community where they’re at in their search journey.

1. Holistic Search Analysis: It’s vital to understand how the audience is interacting throughout the purchase journey within SERPs, your site, and even third-party sites like Amazon. Conducting a holistic search analysis to understand where searches happen across Google, Amazon, YouTube, and other sites is key to knowing where to prioritize your SEO efforts.

2. Regional Strategy: If you have a site that covers multiple regions, creating transcreated content — content that speaks to the audience the way the audience would speak — is a must for ensuring you have a community focus.

3. YouTube Strategy: If your brand has an active YouTube presence, it’s worthwhile to explore which keywords populate video results in the SERPs and which keywords are most commonly searched within YouTube so you can build this into your SEO strategy and conduct YouTube SEO.
   

2. Hero Products: Simplify the brand & boost average order value (AOV)

What it is

Shopping online can require much more thought than shopping in a store. You’re faced with many more options, including figuring out the shipping costs, timelines, etc. It’s cumbersome. Leveraging your brand’s best hero products to define your brand simplifies the brand message to your community.

How to do it

This doesn’t mean leaving hero products on the back burner to evaporate — it means reinvesting in new and interesting campaigns to bring them to light again. This can be done through collaboration campaigns, reinvigorated marketing campaigns, or even repositioning to new communities.

How SEO plugs in

While UX and site hierarchy certainly play an important role in hero product advancement, SEO can support hero product advancement by taking that type of analysis one step further: how are people interacting with hero products off-site, in the SERP, and on the site?

1. SERP mapping: Identifying which hero product keywords trigger competitors, resellers, SERP features, etc., is a great way to ensure that hero products are shown as you desire within the SERP.

2. Site journey analysis: Understanding how folks navigate the site allows you to boost average order value by highlighting hero products or boosting less well-known products by leveraging hero product traffic.

3. Internal linking: Using hero products to acquire backlinks and then creating internal links to less-linked pages can boost keyword ranking for other pages/products.

4. Content strategy: Understanding how to incorporate hero products into the entire content funnel—from awareness tactics like user guides to post-conversion tactics like return policies or help center content—can boost conversion rates and customer sentiment.
   

3. Brand Story: Give people something to relate to & be proud of

What it is

Few want to buy from a brand that doesn’t align with their values. In fact, we see that the majority of shoppers under the age of 56 have favorable attitudes toward brands that have clear involvement in social and political issues.

Make it an easy decision for your community to purchase from you by outwardly communicating your brand values in a way that your audience would understand. This is especially true for brands with an international presence—after all, what may be sneakers in the US are trainers in the UK.

Here is an example from Automic Gold of communicating clear brand values:

How to do it

Communicating clear brand values on the site, in brand messaging, and amplifying those tactics through media pushes is a fantastic way to communicate the brand values across the community(ies).

How SEO plugs in

Most brand stories are typically left to the PR and/or brand teams to own, but SEO can play a pivotal role in amplifying those efforts and even fueling their expansion.

1. Listing Analysis - Understanding what is showing up in the SERPs for various search terms allows us to know what efforts to focus on—e.g., if we know publishers appear in top positions, then we should relay that information to the PR team to focus on getting placement in those publications.

2. Schema - Schema impacts how the listing appears in the SERPs, which leaves plenty of room for a brand to utilize schema to own more real estate in the SERP.

   1. FAQ schema - FAQ pages and schema are an easy way to answer questions related to the brand—e.g., “Who is the CEO of [brand]” etc.?

   2. Help Center schema - Usually, help centers are the last thing to be optimized for SEO, but building a community means ensuring a great experience from start to finish. Optimizing the help center—inclusive of schema—is an easy way to help people get easy access to information related to their search queries directly within the SERP.

3. E-A-T efforts - The more the brand story is consistent and amplified across channels, the better the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) will be because Google will be able to understand the brand entity better.
   

4. Fuel Community: Build a gathering place

What it is

The end goal is to build a community space where your community(ies) can interact and create user-generated content that can then be used to amplify your brand message. Nevertheless, a car won’t move forward without fuel. Building a consistent content strategy that communities can latch onto and use as their own provides the fuel to generate community engagement.

How to do it

Investing in tactics that can enable brand marketing teams and bring the community together on your site is the best way to fuel community. We typically think of “community engagement” happening on social media platforms, but who says that your website can’t create its own community with regularly engaged and recurring community members? Some excellent examples include LEGO IDEAS, Sphero Edu, Sephora's Beauty Insider, and F5’s DevCentral community. No matter the industry, you can find unique ways to create a community space on your website.

How SEO plugs in

SEO alone can’t fuel community. Much of this has to be done across channels, including email campaigns, packaging, etc., but SEO supports these efforts in some key ways:

1. Blog strategy - One of the best ways to engage with your audience and build community is through a compelling and consistent blog strategy that educates, entertains, and/or engages the community in a unique way. I’d encourage easy share buttons, simple call-to-actions, and an engaged comments section.

2. Forum strategy - Forums are a great way to engage with your community and allow the community to bond with others.

3. Review strategy - Reviews help bolster social proof and support the community flywheel by allowing folks an outlet to share their experience with your brand.

4. Keyword listening - When new products are launched, or a brand evolves, related search trends may also change. Using keyword listening is your way to stay ahead of trends and use user-generated search queries to inform new site content generation.

5. User-generated content - While we typically think of UGC as social media content, we can absolutely use UGC on the site by fueling content strategy, or even by allowing noteworthy guest contributors on your site.
   

5. Effortless Transactions: Make it easy to engage

What it is

Transactions look different throughout the entire marketing funnel. At the top of the funnel, it might be a cookie drop for retargeting. In the middle of the funnel, it might be email or phone data capture. At the bottom of the funnel, it might be purchase or lead form submission. Regardless, it should be seamless for customers to transact at any place in the funnel. This allows the community to have a pleasant experience throughout.

How to do it

Investing in conversion rate optimization efforts to smooth the path to site conversion, technical SEO to ensure the site experience is seamless, and on-site SEO to ensure that the right pages for the right search query are your way to make transactions easy.

How SEO plugs in:

Effortless transactions also include things like digital wallets and using pay-later tools, but SEO efforts—inclusive of technical site performance—can certainly impact transactions more than most other efforts.

1. Technical SEO - Focusing on things that allow for better page indexation and page experience (like site speed) boosts the likelihood of a user landing on the right page and not bouncing from poor UX.

2. On-site SEO - Content and internal links on the page can help the user navigate from discovery to purchase without confusing them.

3. YouTube CTA optimizations - For search results that have video results, including CTAs in the videos and ensuring the links are up to date is an easy way to smooth the path to conversion.

4. YouTube video chapters - Including video chapters—or even auto-enabling them—allows Google to highlight the correct section in a video for a user, which gets them their answer even faster.

Make the wheel spin faster with technology

Finding the right tech stack to get data faster and validate strategy more quickly is the difference between doing good SEO and great SEO. Data capture and measurement have to be a priority in SEO efforts so you can perform analysis faster than ever before. Using your CRM database to analyze existing customer information and pairing that with a purchase journey analysis can inform how your existing community interacts with your site.

Additionally, SEO A/B testing tools like SearchPilot are a great way to understand the impact of SEO and CRO tests on net new traffic and conversions without bogging down development teams.

Validate the community flywheel with a test-and-learn approach

At Brainlabs, we use a test, learn, and earn approach to guide our initiatives. This model fits nicely into community marketing because we’re constantly testing new methods to engage with a brand’s community. We know that a customer interacts with various digital channels as their needs evolve over time. While SEO can be utilized to enable the community flywheel, it’s imperative to use a test-and-learn strategy so you can continue to find the right media mix to reach your goals.

Leverage SEO to make the community flywheel spin

Community marketing is here to stay. It’s been the most effective marketing tactic since the beginning of marketing. Building a community doesn’t happen overnight, but integrating these SEO strategies within each step of the community flywheel is a great way to improve your CPAs, increase your AOVs and LTVs, and build a brand that stands the test of time.

5 Ways to Get More with Less Through Link Building — Whiteboard Friday

As we enter 2023, several businesses are being squeezed because of rising costs. Customers are simultaneously struggling to cope with their living costs, which in turn affects companies and what products they can sell, so agencies and in-house teams come under more pressure to get more results, with limited budgets. 

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Paddy walks through a few tactics to meet those needs by getting more (from less) when it comes to your link building efforts.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. I'm Paddy Moogan. I'm the CEO of Aira. Today we're going to talk about link building, and we're going to talk about five tactics to get more from less with your link building. Before we go into those, I'm going to set some context about what we mean by more from less.

So at the moment in the world, in the UK, and in the US, lots of businesses are being squeezed because of rising costs. Customers are struggling to cope with their living costs as well, which is affecting companies and what products they can sell. So what happens as a result is agencies and in-house teams come under more pressure to get more results, but maybe from less budget, or they won't get the budgets increased because companies are worried about rising costs.

So what we need to try and do as agencies and in-house teams is think of tactics to get more from less. And what I mean by that is inputs are normally around time, resources, budget. Those are the things that drive the work that we do. And the outputs are normally links, traffic, revenue, conversions, those kinds of things. What we need to try and do is not need more and more of this to get more and more of that. So we can actually use the same amount of inputs or lesser inputs to drive the same outputs in terms of links, traffic, and revenue. That's really, really good for our stakeholders. If you work in-house, your bosses will be really happy about that. If you're an agency, your clients will be really happy about that as well. So here's five ways to think about doing those things, all focused around digital PR, link building, and content marketing.

1. Repeatable content ideas

So number one, try to favor repeatable content ideas. So when you're coming up with ideas in the ideation process, try and look for ones that you can repeat over and over again. So, for example, can you plug in some new data for 2022 then for 2023? Can you put some new information there, some new facts, rather than having a campaign that has a fixed start and end point? If you have a fixed start and end point, once the end point comes, you can't keep outreaching. The results you're going to get from that content are quite limited by time. Whereas if you can keep that content going over and over again and keep refreshing it with new ideas, new data, and new data points, you can keep refreshing it, keep getting links, and keep getting more from that content, rather than relying upon building new content every single time.

2. Don't stop outreaching content

Number two, don't stop outreaching content. We see this quite a lot. So 25% of SEOs outreach content over and over again, leaving 75% that just leave content behind once they've gotten a few links to it. What normally happens is you launch a campaign, get some links, then you move on to the next one. These campaigns that you've already outreached, if you can keep going with them, if they're working, just keep doing the outreach, because whilst you're building new content and launching more campaigns, you can keep getting links to the older content and keep getting results for that content as well, which, again, means you're getting more from less. From the same inputs, you're getting more and more output.

3. Look for existing link-worthy content

Number three, look for existing link-worthy content. So when you start working on link building and launching content, it's really tempting to still launch brand-new content, launch brand-new campaigns. Whereas sometimes there's content sat right there on the website that is already link-worthy. You may already have some links going to it. So rather than diving off and creating new content, take a quick look at the website itself, see which pages have got lots of links to them, see why they've gotten links, and see if you can pick them back up again. If you can, the nice thing about this is you can keep building links to the old content whilst you're launching brand-new campaigns. So you don't need to not launch brand-new campaigns, but try not to default to launching new ones and forget about what could be right in front of you with the existing content.

4. Simplify your execution

Number four, I'm a big fan of simplifying execution. Again, it's really tempting to think of an idea and think of the most complex, the most shiny, interactive way to launch that content. And sometimes that's fine, that's the right thing to do. But don't let your mind default to that, because that is expensive in terms of time, resources, and budget. So try and simplify as much as you can. If you've got a good idea, it can be launched inside a blog post or just a very, very simple graphic, or even a short few lines of text with some data. Just focus on that rather than worrying about design and development resources, because if the angle is good enough, it will still get links. And you don't need to worry about going viral. If you spend just a couple of hours launching a blog post, it gets a handful of links, that's still a good result compared to spending 6 or 8 weeks on a big, shiny, interactive piece to get maybe 10 or 15 links. So don't worry too much about going viral. Focus on the angles. Focus on keeping things simple.

5. Look for internal linking opportunities

Number five, this is a really overlooked area in SEO in our experience. So look for internal linking opportunities. If you have pages that have gotten lots of external links pointing to them, you need to try and filter the equity from those pages through to your commercial pages, because usually the homepage gets the most links, but then you've got categories and products which aren't normally that link-worthy for most websites, so they don't get a lot of links pointing directly to them. But they're the ones we want to rank right. They're the ones that drive revenue. So if you have links going to your content, your campaigns, it might be a blog, it might be some guides, try and filter that link equity from those pages to your most important commercial pages, to your products and your categories. Then track the results. Track the rankings, track the traffic, and you'll see that filtering that link equity makes those pages rank a bit better. And again, you're getting more from less because that's just internal linking. You don't need more design, more development, and you can still drive more outputs with pretty minimal inputs.

So that's it. That's five ways to get more from less with link building. As we move into this era of businesses being a bit more picky with their budgets and may squeeze a little bit more, these are going to be really, really important to think about. And even when we come out of recessions and things are going well again, these are still good things to be thinking about. No stakeholder will be unhappy if you're trying to get more from less when it comes to budget.

So I'm Paddy Moogan. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm @paddymoogan. I really hope that was useful, and thank you for watching.

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