Welcome to 2023! In the first Whiteboard Friday of the new year, Paddy walks through three methods to evolve your link building efforts — not reinventing the wheel, but by improving what you currently do.
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Video Transcription
Hi, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Paddy Moogan. I'm the CEO of Aira. Today, we're going to talk about link building and how to evolve your link building to its next phase and to improve what you do at the moment.
So we're going to talk through three methods to improve your link building and evolve it and improve the results you get for clients.
1. Use the customer journey to generate ideas
So firstly, number one, there is a bit of an issue sometimes with link building and the relevance of the content that we produce for link building. So one way we can actually improve that and make our content as relevant as possible is to use the customer journey to generate link building ideas.
Now, there's lots of different ways of thinking about the customer journey, different funnels, different methodologies. One thing we use at Aira for this is the awareness, consideration, and decision phases, where the customer goes from being aware of the problem, the pain points, something they want to fix, then looking at their options and trying to figure out, "Okay, who should I choose to solve that problem?"
And then, finally, maybe getting their credit card out, picking up the phone, emailing, that kind of stuff to actually decide who they're going to go with. Now, we can use this model to actually come up with link building ideas. I'm going to share how we do this at Aira. So there's four pillars we can use to try and figure out content ideas that are relevant to our customers. Firstly, we start with the audience themselves.
So who are our audience? Who are we trying to speak to? Who are our ideal buyers for the products and services that we sell? So that's where we start. We then move on to the pain points of our audience. So what kinds of things do they struggle with? What kind of triggers can actually make them start to look for a product such as yours or a service such as yours?
And then thirdly, what solutions do you offer as a brand or a website to try and fix those pain points for those customers and trying to connect those things together? Fourthly, what keywords are you trying to rank for? What are you trying to rank for in Google? How does that connect back to your service and your product? And what that allows you to do is to tie together these stages into actual rankings, actual keywords that you're trying to improve with your link building and your content.
The nice thing about using these four areas to try and come up with content ideas for link building is that it forces relevance. It's really hard to actually do this. If you stray too far away from it, you come up with ideas that aren't very relevant. So if you stick really closer to it, it's a bit harder. That's kind of the point. What you're trying to do here is strike that balance between ideas that can get links, but also content ideas that are very relevant to your audience and who you're trying to sell your products or your services to.
So try and use these four points here to come up with your ideas, and make sure the ideas you come up with are truly relevant to your customer and not just being done purely for link building.
2. Move beyond campaigns
Second point, second thing we can do to evolve our link building is to move beyond big, shiny, interactive link building campaigns. Now, we've built hundreds of these over the years at Aira. We will continue to build them.
I love a good, shiny, interactive hero campaign. But I believe there's more we can do when it comes to content-led link building. So there's four things we can do here. So firstly, try and make any campaigns, any content that you come up with evergreen. What I mean by that is it shouldn't be a start and a stop campaign, where you launch a campaign, do your outreach, and then forget about it and move on to the next one.
Try and create ideas and campaigns that you can outreach and promote over and over and over again. If you can do that, it continues to be relevant throughout the year, across multiple years. It isn't just a one-off campaign that you're hoping will get links before you move on to the next one. The second thing you can do is actually not to stop the outreach. So most SEOs actually will outreach a campaign and then stop once that campaign is finished and move on to the next one.
What you should be trying to do instead is create campaigns that you can always outreach and always promote. So try not to stop your outreach, and what happens over time is you build up multiple campaigns, multiple content pieces, and you end up with a nice, big bank of content that you can continually outreach and get links to. It's not relying upon one campaign after another to get links.
3. Aim for links you didn't ask for
Third point we can do is to look at existing content.
So again, when you're thinking about creating link building campaigns, the natural tendency is to think of something new, to think about, "Okay, what can we create that's brand new, hasn't been done before, completely new campaign for a website or a client?" Well, actually, that's absolutely fine, but there may be some existing content on that website that is link-worthy. So make sure, when you start working with a website or a new brand, look at what they've got already, see which content they've got that might be link-worthy, may have gotten links in the past, and try and outreach and promote that content whilst you're building new campaigns.
This works really well particularly for agencies, because when you're launching a campaign, it takes a bit of time to come up with ideas, do the production, do the design. Whilst you're doing all of that, if you can find existing content on that website that is link-worthy, you can promote that and get links to that whilst you're building the big campaign. And you're offsetting the risk there as well and getting links in the short term as well as the long term.
Fourthly, simplify your execution. Not every content piece has to be big, shiny, interactive, full-page takeovers. It can be as simple as a blog post. It could be a small, mini infographic. Try not to worry too much about big, fancy executions. Let the idea lead the execution. And if that means that you write just a very, very simple blog post with a couple of images, maybe lots of copy and bullet points, that's absolutely fine.
If that's the best way to execute your idea, then that's what you should go with and not worry too much about making something interactive or big just for the sake of it. So thirdly, the third thing we can do to elevate our link building is to aim for links that you didn't ask for. So a lot of the time with link building techniques they rely upon outreach, and outreach means sending emails, trying to get in touch with webmasters and link prospects and get links from them.
That's absolutely fine. We should continue doing that. But one place you want to try and get to is to create content where it naturally gets links on its own. So you may well do outreach and get links for that content. But as well as that, you're also getting people who link to that content naturally, so you're not relying too much just on the outreach. Now there's three examples here of content you can create that actually will do this. Now the first thing to remember is actually content that ranks tends to get links, because when people are doing research into different areas and trying to write about certain industries, they may look for content they can also link to.
So, for example, if you have a page that's about statistics and trends in your industry, and someone is writing an article about your industry and trends in 2022, if they find your content, there's a good chance that they will link to it as well in the content they're producing. But if it ranks, they've got more chance of finding it. The second area is long-form guides, really in-depth, really detailed content. If you can find some good topic ideas to write about in the long-form way, long-form guides tend to rank for a lot of long-tail and mid-tail keywords.
Again, if it ranks really well, it's very detailed, very techy, this works really well for very technical products and very technical services. If you can create content about your product or service that's quite technical, it's got a good chance of ranking well and also being referenced and linked to by other websites. And thirdly, industry reports. So actually, we do this ourselves at Aira.
We produced a State of Link Building Report a few months ago. It's a report that gets referenced a lot by our industry because it's a standard in the industry for link building and people think of it when they're writing their own content. So in your industry, if you can create industry benchmark reports, state of industry reports, surveys, that kind of stuff, that actually shares knowledge and shares information with the industry, it's easy for people to reference that in their own content that they produce as well.
But again, it needs to rank well for people to find it in the first place. So there's three ways to actually evolve your link building and try to elevate it to the next level beyond campaigns, beyond outreach, and actually trying to get links that you didn't ask for. So that's Whiteboard Friday for me. I'm Paddy Moogan. If you've got any questions, drop them into the comments below. I'll be happy to get back to you.
Over the past twenty years, I’ve probably answered tens of thousands of questions relating to local search marketing. I’m sure I’ve gotten it wrong lots of times, but one thing that’s never happened is that the people requesting my consultation have mistaken me for an omniscient entity. Local business owners and marketers in fora, email, DM, and on the phone understand that I am just a person doing my best to give them good advice. Concerns arise when I consider what applications like ChatGPT may be mistaken for - an expert, a genius, a demigod?
Let’s do an experiment today to see what happens when we ask ChatGPT some of the commonest local SEO questions that humans like me are used to fielding, and let’s imagine what would happen to local business owners if they built their marketing strategy on the advice received.
The Local SEO ChatGPT Experiment
In which ChatGPT merrily instructs me to set about building GBPs for virtual offices
Contrary to ChatGPT’s answer, the guidelines for representing your business on Google prohibit the creation of listings for virtual offices. Unfortunately, our hypothetical local business owner has just built one on the strength of this bot’s advice.
2. In which ChatGPT encourages me to violate Yelp’s guidelines
Yelp specifically states, “Don’t ask for reviews,” but our hypothetical local business owner is out there right now disregarding this policy, thanks to ChatGPT’s advice.
3. In which ChatGPT promulgates one of the most persistent local SEO myths of all time
It must be one of the oldest myths in local SEO, and it’s one that marketers have to keep refuting because it keeps floating around out there in the ether. With AI promoting this myth, our hypothetical local business owner will now spend hours geotagging all of their imagery for its promised ranking benefits.
4. In which the suite number myth lives on
Every local SEO will immediately recognize this situational question in which the inquirer is trying to differentiate one business from another at the same address, and wanting to know if adding a real or fictitious suite number will help Google separate out the entities. What people like Joy Hawkins know that ChatGPT doesn’t is that Google ignores suite numbers, but the myths persist.
5. In which the robot starts to head down a better path and then goes totally awry
Initially, I was worried that our hypothetical local business owner asking whether they can create a Google Business Profile for a lead gen business wasn’t receiving a ChatGPT answer that began with, “No!” Google’s guidelines specifically list lead gen companies as being ineligible. ChatGPT ignores this, and proceeds to instruct the inquirer on how to create a forbidden listing.
A brief ray of hope shone out for me when the ten-step instructions were followed by the warning that (correctly) explains that you shouldn’t create GBPs for businesses that lack physical locations. “Good,” I thought. “This will cause the lead gen practitioner to pause and adhere to guidelines.”
My hopes, however, were short-lived when the bot followed this up with the head-slapping suggestion that the lead gen brand resolve their dilemma with the creation of a virtual office! We’re back to square one with ChatGPT causing users to fall afoul of Google’s most basic guidelines.
The Results of a ChatGPT-led Local SEO Strategy
Let’s imagine that our fictitious local business owner has mistaken ChatGPT for an expert, and has acted on this advice. What happens next:
The Google Business Profile for the virtual office is hard-suspended and likely permanently removed for guideline violations, negating any investment the owner had made in creating the listing.
The hours invested in geotagging images are all wasted, and have eaten up valuable time the business owner could have spent in pursuing tactics that do influence search engine rankings.
The business owner who may already have been heading down the wrong path in hoping that fictitious suite numbers will make Google believe that the separate categories of a single business each deserve to have their own listing will experience suspension of one or both listings sooner or later.
The lead gen business owner will be suspended on two counts: 1) for listing a lead gen business in the first place, and 2) for listing a virtual office.
Once they are caught, the business name is mud on Yelp, where their profile is stamped with an ugly public warning for engaging in prohibited practices.
What we have here, then, is not a local SEO strategy, but the shreds and tatters of disinformation that could result in reputational damage, loss of time, and wasted marketing budget. These are significant real-world consequences.
A Mind of Metal and Wheels
Last year, I was invited to contribute an article to a large publication, commenting on the subject of how writers like myself feel about the intrusion of AI into our craft. I wrote a thoughtful essay entitled Art Vs. The Machine, in which I drew on J.R.R. Tolkien’s philosophy of the gifted human use of tools vs. the coercion of wills that underlie the development of much machinery. My essay remains unpublished, as yet, because the publisher rejected it in favor of an ode to AI that admonished writers to sublimate our fears and get with the program.
My heartfelt sentiments were clearly not a good match for the publisher’s agenda, and the debate about AI should absolutely include all voices and viewpoints - some people are very excited about the arrival of ChatGPT and will laud Google’s analog, if and when it arrives, but others are not applauding. Teachers, for example, appear not to feel that you get the world’s next Tolkien when machines do the “thinking”. My own take at present is that, if I were to use the present incarnation of ChatGPT to write my Moz Blog column, all of you would be reading local search marketing disinformation right now. I strongly hold that you deserve better than that from me.
In fairness, I want to conclude that ChatGPT got some answers to my local SEO questions right, correctly referencing sections of the all-powerful Google guidelines. I was pleased when it was able to talk to me in Swedish, and was surprised when it managed to respond to me in Irish Gaelic. But the bot lacks the art of Elvish. I asked a question in Sindarin, and ChatGPT had no idea what I was saying:
When I translated my question into English (Westron, for all you Tolkien philologists), ChatGPT understood what I wanted, and its reply contained a revealing proviso that should be a reminder to all AI users about a critical difference between the machines and us.
For now, I’ll be continuing to write my column in the old-fashioned human way, remembering specific (and wonderful!) interactions I’ve had with local business owners and industry colleagues, and drawing continuously on my personal experiences.
Six in ten consumers require a minimum 4+ star rating in order to consider patronizing a local business and over ⅓ say it’s the star rating that is the key differentiator between local brands. If you’re marketing a company that is just starting out or an established business that has hit a reputational rough patch and your overall ratings fall below this magic threshold, revenue is being lost.
But hope is not lost!
In today’s column, you will find a set of sensible, actionable steps you can take to raise your Google Business Profile star ratings, improve your reviews, and begin developing the good online reputation you need in order to realize the full profit potential of the local businesses you market.
Defining local business reputation
In this context, a local business has both an offline reputation that resides in the word-of-mouth sentiments expressed by members of the community it serves and an online reputation that is most visible within the rating and review systems of platforms like Google Business Profile, Yelp, Nextdoor, TripAdvisor, etc. This article focuses specifically on Google, but its advice can be applied to most platforms that host local business reviews.
For detailed, original data on the many dynamic aspects of online reviews, read Moz’s formal review survey report but for today’s topic, it’s important to know that just 13% of consumers insist on a perfect 5-star rating to consider doing business with a company and that a dominant 51% will consider a brand with a 4-star overall rating. Thus, both 4 and 5-star ratings are considered a great or good reputation by the majority of consumers.
Yet, hope can be found in the fact that about ⅓ of consumers may still give you a try if your organization’s overall reputation is only 3 stars. This could give you the grace period you need to keep the lights on while you strategically improve your operations to start winning more trust and business in your community. We’ll grade a 3-star reputation as “needs improvement”. The work involved will be harder if the reputation has dropped to 2-or-less stars, as only 2% of the public is likely to consider patronizing you. This rating would be considered poor, but you can improve it with a serious commitment.
Task 1: Look your business up on Google and note down its overall rating and number of reviews.
How do Google ratings and reviews work?
Before you begin the necessary tasks for improving your reputation, it’s important to understand how Google’s system works. Local business ratings and reviews are part and parcel of Google Business Profiles as well as Local Finders and Google Maps. Reviews are text-based sentiments left by consumers, as shown above. Ratings are the 1-5 star symbology Google uses so that people can gauge a company’s reputation at a glance. The overall rating a business receives is based on Google’s average of all the individual ratings customers have left. As our example demonstrates, if a business has just two reviews, and one has a 1-star rating and the other has a 5-star rating, this averages out to an overall rating of 3.0 stars. Google users have the option to leave both a rating and text, or just a rating.
Because of Google’s averages, local business owners with less than a 4-star total rating frequently ask how many higher-star ratings they will need to earn before they see their overall rating improve. The answer depends on the total number of ratings the company has already earned, but by my calculation, if a business with ten reviews has earned an overall 3.0 star rating and wants to see that bump up to a much better 4.0 star average, they will need to earn ten new 5-star reviews to move the needle. Similarly, if the business begins with one hundred reviews and a 3.0 star rating, they will need to earn one hundred new 5-star reviews to move up to a 4.0 star average.
Over the years, different surveys have measured how conversions increase when star ratings improve, with a very good recent report finding that when a business succeeds in increasing its overall rating by one whole star (such as moving up from 3.0 to 4.0 stars), it can expect a 44% increase in Google Business Profile conversions. That’s a big number!
Improving the rating is work that must be paced over time to avoid having too many new reviews come in at once, triggering Google to filter them out. Note, too, that it can take up to two weeks for incoming reviews to update the overall average. Local businesses suffering from a poor online reputation, then, can look at the averages and estimate how many new high-star reviews they will need to earn to begin seeing the benefits to their conversions, transactions, revenue, and overall good name.
Identifying causes of reputational damage
There are at least 9 common contributors to the erosion of star ratings and reputation.
Too few reviews giving too much power to a small number of voices
Neglect of review responses
Neglect of local business listings resulting in false information online
Bad/rude customer service
Bad products
Poor work on a job
Spam from competitors, past employees, and personal adversaries
Spam from the business owner and their staff or marketers
Scandals
For all but the last of these bullet points, achievable fixes are right within reach. For the last bullet point, though, the degree of the scandal may take the business outside the scope of this article. When a local business scandal is severe, the owner may end up having to cope with litigation and damage too permanent to continue operations. For the other eight very common scenarios, however, all the steps for determined remediation are yours to take.
Task 2: Determine the key contributors to your low rating and document them. Read through the whole body of your reviews and make a note of each complaint, categorizing them based on the 9 types of problems listed above.
How to improve your local business reputation, step-by-step
In your first and second tasks, you noted down your overall rating and number of reviews, and you categorized the complaints you’ve received into some of the nine different categories. Now, you’re ready to start addressing any of the categories that fit your scenario.
Too few reviews giving too much power to a small number of voices
This is often the first and most obvious cause of a poor overall star rating. When a business has too few reviews, the weight given to each review is extraordinary. As we saw earlier, if your company has just one 1-star review and one 5-star review, your overall reputation is just 3.0 stars.
28% of consumers lose trust in a business when it has too few reviews compared to its competitors, and 70% will read between 5-20 reviews before deciding your company is worth a try. One of the best and most sensible efforts you can make, then, is to launch a review acquisition strategy that ensures you have a steady stream of incoming sentiment and that no single customer has too large a share of voice in your reputation narrative.
Neglect of review responses
40% of your customers expect you to write an owner response when they leave you a positive review. When the review is negative, 64% of your customers expect you to respond. The truth is, these expectations are low, and local businesses should be responding to every single review as it comes in. Just as you would never ignore a customer visiting your physical premises, don’t neglect anyone who is speaking to you online.
11% of people expect your response within 2 hours of their writing a review. 21% expect to hear back within 24 hours, and an additional 28% expect to hear back within 48 hours. From this day forward, make it a priority to use the owner response functionality either as soon as you realize you’ve received a new review or at a given time each day. If you are having trouble keeping on top of this, Moz Local will alert you to incoming reviews across multiple platforms. This is a good plan for going forward.
However, if your review corpus currently consists of months’ or years’ worth of reviews that have received no response, take the time now to go back through the last six months of your reviews and respond to them. While delayed responses are unlikely to re-engage the customers who left the reviews, you can at least begin signaling to the general public that you are implementing a new plan of active responsiveness.
If further coaching in how to respond well to both positive and negative reviews would help, read Chapter 4 of the Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, but in the meantime, here are quick facts to help you write excellent responses to negative reviews:
Do everything you can to solve a problem cited in a negative review, or 54% of consumers will avoid your business.
If you accuse a consumer of lying, 33% of customers will avoid your business, and if you argue with the reviewer, 46% will avoid your business. Keep your responses positive and professional, even if you think the customer is wrong.
Be sure your response to a negative review includes an apology, or 47% will avoid your business.
Know that 38% of consumers write reviews specifically to tell your business how it needs to improve - by fixing stated problems you are taking direct action to improve customer service and reputation.
Neglect of local business listings resulting in false information online
52% of local business review writers say they have written negative reviews as a result of encountering false or inaccurate information about local businesses online, including on local business listings. When business names, addresses, phone numbers, hours of operation, and other essential data are incorrect, it inconveniences, disappoints, and frustrates the public.
Fortunately, actively managing local business listings is one of the easiest steps you can take to safeguard and improve your reputation so that you are receiving zero negative reviews and poor ratings due to avoidable, basic errors. You have two options for this work:
1) Do a manual audit of Google’s organic search engine results for your business name and services, discover all the local business listing and review platforms on which you have a profile, audit those profiles for errors, claim and update them, and track them in a spreadsheet for regular updating whenever your business information changes. It’s a considerable workload.
2) Subscribe to a service like Moz Local which is designed to let you manage all of your listings on key platforms very quickly and effectively from a single dashboard, protecting accuracy and reducing negative customer experiences.
In addition to ensuring that your business information is accurate on formal listing platforms, it’s a good idea to see if other online mentions of your business (known as unstructured citations) contain inaccuracies. For example, if a local blogger wrote about your business two years ago and referenced your street address, and you have since moved, it’s important to search for such references and contact the publishers to request an update of their content whenever your business experiences a significant change.
Bad/rude customer service
65% of review writers have written negative reviews due to bad or rude customer service, making this scenario the dominant cause of negative online sentiment and low ratings. Unfortunately, if your worst reviews fall into this category, it may require structural rather than simple fixes. Every business scenario is different, but here are eight key questions to ask to help you determine the root causes of customers feeling poorly treated at a place of business:
Has every member of my public-facing staff received adequate training in company products, services and policies?
Are ongoing training sessions part of our program so that skills can be developed and improved?
Has every member of my staff received training in complaint identification and resolution so that problems are resolved at the time of service, rather than ending up online?
Is every member of my staff trusted and empowered to use their own initiative and creativity to relieve customer pain, and do they know the correct hierarchy of escalation for problems beyond their direct control?
Does every member of my staff earn a living wage, enabling them to bring resources of inner stability and happiness to the workplace?
Does every member of leadership role model company values to be emulated by employees?
Is a formal DEI council or policy in place to ensure that all staff and customers receive equal consideration, treatment, and service?
Has a policy of customer rights been created by the business, and is it adequately distributed to both the staff and the public?
If any of the answers you gave to the above questions is a “no”, then you have identified a possible cause of negative reviewers feeling that they have been treated poorly or rudely. By addressing the underlying causes of staff failing to convey professionalism, respect and happiness to customers, you will be fixing serious structural problems in your organization. When solutions are implemented, new higher ratings and better reviews should begin to outweigh negative ones over time. For a more in-depth look at the complete customer service ecosystem, return to chapter four of the Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.
Bad products
Planned obsolescence (manufacturing products that are intended to break) is making headlines and being outlawed in different places around the world, and it’s clear that paying good money for bad products is a sting keenly felt by consumers. 63% of reviewers say its a cause of them writing negative reviews, and for consumers aged 18-29, it is the #1 cause of such sentiment. In America, youngest people are also poorest, and it makes perfect sense that they would be the most distressed by spending hard-earned money on shoddy merchandise.
Supply chain breakages over the past few years have doubtless exacerbated this scenario, with local businesses often having to stock whatever they can access rather than what they know to be top quality. Sustainability, too, plays a key part in this conversation, as the public is reevaluating the climate impacts and pollution that result from a throwaway culture.
If some of your negative reviews fall into the “bad products” category, it could help to know that the latest marketing thought leadership envisions business owners as guardians and stewards who are responsible for offering the highest quality, most sustainable products to their communities. For local businesses, this could mean replacing remotely-sourced goods with more local inventory when better resources are available nearby. It could mean adding new steps to quality control processes. This is not an easy fix, particularly due to the effects of the pandemic on manufacturing, but it’s a problem that takes on extra relevance if you discover that your worst ratings stem from an inventory of poor-quality products that are undermining your reputation.
Poor work on a job
Even if weeks or months have gone by since a customer wrote a review complaining of something like a botched home improvement, an unsuccessful repair, or an unmet deadline, your best course for reputation restoration will be to directly contact the unhappy client and see if there is anything you can do to make them feel better. You may have to redo the work. You may have to refund their money. Or, a simple, heartfelt apology and request for a second chance to “get it right” may be enough to transform the relationship.
While you cannot offer any type of incentive to prompt a formerly-unhappy customer to update their negative rating and review, what you should look out for is the point at which your follow-up has resulted in customer satisfaction to the degree that they might amend their online sentiment if asked. You’ll enjoy two victories if you succeed. First, the original customer will think well of you again and hopefully continue to do business with you. Second, when a negative review is updated to reflect a subsequent better experience, it is no longer a barrier to further leads from the general public.
These two statistics should give you tremendous confidence for the uphill work ahead: 67% of negative reviewers had an improved opinion of a brand when the owner responded well, and 62% of negative reviewers would give a local brand a second chance after an owner response solves their problem.
Spam from competitors, past employees, and personal adversaries
Of all of the major review platforms, it has been proposed that Google has the biggest problem with review spam, with an estimated 10.7% of its review content being fraudulent. Every review platform has its own guidelines, and many countries have rulings regarding what constitutes review fraud, but a general definition of it would include these factors:
Reviews written in exchange for money, gifts, discounts, or other incentives.
Reviews that stem from competitors, owners of the business being reviewed, staff, and former staff, or other non-customers of the business
Reviews that are left on behalf of anyone instead of directly by the customer
Reviews that are manipulated (gated) so that only positive sentiment is displayed
Review removal requests in exchange for money, discounts, or other incentives
In the United States, review fraud is illegal. It is considered an unfair competitive practice that impacts consumers and businesses under section 5(a) of the US Federal Trade Commission Act. Unfortunately, Moz’s recent survey found that 40% of consumers have been offered money, discounts, or gifts in exchange for writing reviews. This could include brands and agencies paying members of the public to both positively review them and negatively review their competitors. An additional 11% admit to leaving negative reviews of their former employers. All of these practices are prohibited.
It’s important to know that Google will only consider removal of spam reviews if they demonstrably violate their stated guidelines, and Google typically won’t remove textless ratings. If you strongly believe that the erosion of your overall Google star rating is due, in part, to the presence of review fraud, you have three possible avenues toward resolution:
Log into your Google account and look up your business by name. Using the New Merchant Experience interface that should appear in the organic results, click on the “read reviews” tab. Find the fake review, and click the three dots to the right of it to report the review. Wait at least three days and then check to see if the review is gone. If not, you can try to report the problem via this live chat form. For more information on reporting review fraud, read this Google help doc.
If review fraud is stemming from a personal adversary or other known bad actor, you may need to seek legal advice regarding how to proceed toward resolution.
If Google fails to protect you from a large-scale review spam attack, a PR campaign may be your only hope of resolution. While Google will sometimes ignore individual reports of review spam, they have often acted once the scenario becomes a publicized scandal picked up by mainstream media. There have even been instances in which Google has shut off reviews during negative review attacks.
Spam from the business owner and their staff or marketers
50% of consumers lose trust if it looks like an owner or their employees are reviewing their own business. 44% are suspicious when an overall review profile consists of all-five-star reviews without any complaints. 39% are mistrustful when the profiles of those leaving reviews look suspect and 20% are wary when a local brand has too many reviews compared to its competitor.
A poor reputation doesn’t always equal a low star rating. It can, instead, stem from customers quietly walking away because they rightly suspect that the review profile is filled with fraud instigated by the business, itself. If the business you are marketing falls into this category, the above statistics paired with the illegality of these actions are all the persuasion that should be necessary to take immediate action to remove any reviews that violate platform guidelines and government regulations. Any review left by the business or its staff should be deleted. If fraudulent reviews stem from having hired a marketing firm that implemented this practice, your brand may need to seek legal advice in order to prompt the organization to delete this content. Only when you have removed as many spam reviews as possible will you be able to start building the legitimate reputation that supports customer satisfaction and brand longevity.
Task 3: Begin implementing the fixes for each category into which your negative reviews fall, prioritize acquiring new reviews, and then give it time for the expected rating improvements to materialize. If all goes well, you should start tracking a lift in engagements and revenue as the result of your higher overall rating.
Summing up
A low-star overall rating doesn’t feel good, and stands as a major obstacle to you running and marketing the local business of your dreams. However, because you can categorize the roots of negative consumer sentiment, you will typically have considerable powers of improvement on your side. It may take weeks, months, or even a year to implement better practices, services, and acquisition campaigns that culminate in a sterling rating, but such work has become primary to basic local business operations over the past twenty years.
For local businesses currently struggling with a reputation of 3-or-less stars, the main challenge will be to make improvements quickly and then actively acquire new sentiment at a steady rate so that future customers stop being turned away by the sight of a poor rating. It’s good to know that very few customers are looking for 5-star perfection and that, in fact, lots of people find flawlessness suspicious.
The ideal outlook is to utilize negative consumer sentiment as a valuable source of business intelligence which, at its best, tells you exactly what needs to be fixed so that customers are more satisfied. This is what makes review management an ongoing local search marketing task, and even a business with a good or great rating today can never stop working at reputational maintenance via stewardship of reviews.
Eager to learn more about local search and local business reputation? These resources are at your fingertips:
We published 156 posts on the Moz Blog this year, and as is tradition, it's time to look back at the most popular ones! You’ll find blogs on new findings in social media search, tips for e-commerce SEO, trends in technical and local SEO, and so much more.
Have a safe and happy new year, Moz friends! See you in 2023.
*The top 25 written posts published between January 1 - December 26, 2022, in order by pageviews generated during that timeframe.
If your website is like most others, there is likely a mismatch between the content you provide, and what your prospective customers search for on Google. This article is about understanding those potential customers and their conversation with Google by using the customer journey mapping method to provide them with the best content.
In the first chapter of this series, we dug into the search behavior on TikTok and why it should matter to SEOs. In this article, we are going to cover the ins and outs of the TikTok algorithm, and how to leverage it to get more users looking at your brand’s content.
Shopify is an increasingly popular platform for e-commerce sites, but it's not fully SEO-friendly out of the box. What's the best way to optimize your Shopify experience for SEO?
Your SEO strategy should be one of the primary considerations before you even start your website. Instead of fighting to make your website SEO-ready later on, start with this holistic SEO checklist for new websites and save yourself valuable time and resources.
In this article, Alex shows you how and why to use Google Chrome (or Chrome Canary) to view a website as Googlebot. Viewing a website as Googlebot means we can see discrepancies between what a person sees and what a search bot sees – useful for technical SEO and content audits.
Google’s featured snippets started as an experiment almost a decade ago. They have since become an integral part of Google’s SERPs, showing up for lots of queries. In fact, featured snippets are now considered organic position #1, so making them part of your SEO strategy is essential to build more traffic.
Google wants to employ machine learning and AI to alter the hours of operation on twenty million Google Business Profiles as part of their project of creating a “self-updating map”. Google has good reason for pursuing accuracy in their local index, but local business owners have even better reason to be on top of this announcement and proactively safeguard the validity of their own data.
Last year was an incredible year for core updates, and for how SEOs improve page quality for users. Moving forward, we can expect to see increased diversification of SERPs — led by developments in Google’s algorithms — and new features from tools like Google Lens. These developments will change how we manage our SEO now and in the future.
User behavior on TikTok has been evolving as its popularity grows. We’ve seen the app go from dancing teenagers to influencing shopping behavior across the world. Now, the next step for TikTok seems to be turning into the next big search engine. What does it mean for SEOs?
How can SEOs possibly prove to Google, amid all the noise and competition and other experts out there, that their clients deserve a place on Page 1? To find out, Molly compared the top results on hundreds of SERPs to determine what actually proves E-A-T.
Charts and infographics can be pretty, but if they aren’t also properly breaking down data in a way that makes an impact on the audience, they are likely not worth the time and effort. Below, we discuss how storytelling ties into data visualization, and what tools can help you bring more data into your content.
Google search result pages are becoming more diverse and even interactive, which makes any click-through study out there much less reliable, because no two sets of search results are ever the same. So how much control do writers and content creators have over how their content is represented in search? As it turns out, quite a bit!
In this blog, Daniel shows you why you should do a keyword research working session with your clients to tap into their expert industry knowledge, and how these sessions helped his team deliver organic traffic growth for one of their new clients with low Domain Authority.
When there is a search query on Google, Google Ads runs a quick auction to determine which ads will show for that search query, and what the ad positions should be. This ad auction is repeated every time an ad is eligible to appear for a search term, and is an integral part of the SERP landscape. To help understand it, Tanuja covers the what, how, and why behind the Google Ads auction.
Both SEO and PPC are used for a common goal — search engine marketing (SEM) — and neither would survive without targeted keywords. Since both strategies have user intent and search demand in mind, you can use them to achieve both short-term and long-term business goals. When approached correctly, using SEO and PPC together can unlock significant opportunities for your brand, so let’s dig in!
Lydia shares the content update process she an her team at Tao Digital Marketing used to generate great results for a client in the financial services niche.
Unless you work for an agency or want to make a lifelong career out of SEO (an excellent choice), most folks don't learn SEO for the sake of learning SEO, but want the same quick wins that professional SEOs look for. That’s why we created the Quick Start Guide to SEO, which includes seven days of actions to check the SEO health of your site while putting you on the path of sustained improvement. If you want something even more compact, we also created the SEO Quick Start Guide Cheat Sheet.
After working with a news organization and testing the learnings from that work on other sites, Chris and his team started to see the immense power that freshness updates could produce in SEO. In this post, he explains why the entire SEO community has underrated the concept of “freshness”, and how to start optimizing for it.
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.
In this post, Tom expands on one of the points from his 2022 MozCon talk: that a lot of time spent on keyword research is wasted. He’ll go over the three main ways SEOs turn what should be an involved piece of strategic thinking into an overly time-consuming routine, along with what to focus on instead.
Google Business Profile is both a free tool and a suite of interfaces that encompasses a dashboard, in-SERP editing, local business profiles, and a volunteer-driven support forum with this branding. Google Business Profiles and the associated Google Maps make up the core of Google’s free local search marketing options for eligible local businesses. In this guide, we’re doing foundational learning! Share this simple, comprehensive article with incoming clients and team members to get off on the right foot with this important local business digital asset.
We had an amazing year of Whiteboard Friday episodes, ranging in topics from link building to content engines to even, basketball?
In case you missed them, here are the top 10 episodes from the year!
1. Estimating Search Opportunity with Robin Lord
Estimating the opportunities within your various SEO efforts is an important component of your analytics, not only to help determine where to focus your energy, but also to prove the potential value of your work to others. In this episode, Robin walks you through a good strategy for this all-important estimative work.
2. Advanced On-Page SEO Optimizations with Chris Long
Typically, when SEOs think about on-page optimizations, they’re thinking about core places to include their target keywords within their content. But how can you take your on-page optimizations to the next level and get beyond some of those basic tactics? In this Whiteboard Friday, Chris Long shows you how.
3. Moneyball is the Future of SEO with Will Critchlow
In our first episode of 2022, Will Critchlow shows you how, much like the NBA, SEO is undergoing an analytic revolution — and how you can make the most of it.
4. Top 4 Things to Know About GA4 with Dana DiTomaso
Dana brings you some details on the exciting new world of Google Analytics 4. Watch and learn how to talk about it when clients and coworkers are intimidated by the move.
5. A Content Engine that Drives Revenue with Ross Simmonds
In this episode, 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.
6. How to Find Your Real SEO Competitors with Lidia Infante
Competitive research and analysis is a critical component of your SEO strategy. You may have an idea of who your business competitors are, but your real SEO competitors are the ones who target the same keywords, speak to the same audience, and solve for the same consumer needs. In this Whiteboard Friday, Lidia Infante walks you through two approaches to find out who those competitors are.
7. How to Measure Content Engagement with Dana DiTomaso
When it comes to content engagement, you can (and should) be measuring more than just page views. Analytics expert Dana DiTomaso summarizes her MozCon 2022 presentation by sharing the four things you should focus on to make sure your metrics are giving you the best picture of your content's quality.
8. Metrics for Better Keyword Research with Tom Capper
Many SEOs think of keyword research as a very basic part of SEO, which can actually be a problem. In this episode, Tom explains some of the common mistakes SEOs make when doing keyword research that are easy to fix, many of which come from metrics like search volume, click-through rate, and difficulty.
9. Visual Search Optimization with Crystal Carter
In this episode, 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.
10. The Authoritative Content Funnel with Amanda Milligan
Finishing the top 10 list, digital marketing expert Amanda Milligan walks you through the three parts that make up a content funnel for building authority, as well as the types of content that fit into each one.
Almost every search we make via Google includes some degree of localization. So, how can we keep an eye on our site’s performance within local markets to ensure we’re continuing to show up in relevant searches?
In this edition of the Daily SEO Fix, we’ll look at how the Moz suite of tools can help you monitor how your site is performing in local markets.
Tracking Market-Based Rankings
The first step in monitoring local market performance is tracking keyword rankings locally. Within Moz Pro you can track market-based rankings by city name or postal code.
When actively monitoring a site’s performance in search results, it can be helpful to view the SERP itself to see how many of your pages are ranking, where they are ranking, and how this compares to your competitors’ performance.
In this video, Emilie will illustrate how to use the Analyze a Keyword tool within Moz Pro Campaigns to view the current, local SERP for your tracked keywords. This tool will show you the top 50 organic results for your locally tracked keywords along with their Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Page Optimization score for further analysis.
Segment Keywords By Market
Now you’re tracking keywords locally and you know how to view the current SERP, but what if you want to see and compare Search Visibility and rankings for multiple markets? Or what if you have markets which include multiple cities or postal codes? For example, let’s say you’ve opened up multiple stores in the San Francisco Bay Area and want to see how your site is performing in that region. There are multiple cities and postal codes within the wider San Francisco Bay Area. How can you monitor performance in this market and compare it to other markets?
In this video, Emilie will show you how to label and segment your keyword data by market within Moz Pro along with how to compare performance by market, side-by-side.
Track Competitors
As Lidia Infante recently noted in her SEO Gap Analysis edition of Whiteboard Friday, “ranking on Google is not ranking in a vacuum. Ranking is outranking your competitors.” So it stands to reason that tracking your competitors' rankings on a local level is an important part of any strategy around monitoring local markets. But how do you do that with the Moz tools?
In this video, Arian will walk through how to view competitor rankings on a local level within your Moz Pro Campaign.
STAT: Accessing the Local Pack Report
Local Packs are local-specific SERP features which feature up to 3 local businesses. They are incredibly competitive and are a critical component of any local SEO strategy. So how can you keep an eye on how your business is showing up in a local pack?
In this video, Emilie will show you how the STAT tools can be instrumental in monitoring local pack performance. She will show you how to set up a Local Pack report right within the tool.
Now that you have the tools to start monitoring local markets, it’s time to get out there and try it for yourself! Be sure to check out the Moz Help Hub and STAT Knowledge Base for additional resources and help. And keep an eye out for our next edition of the Daily SEO Fix.
