A Small Gift for Local SEOs and a Big Cheer for Original Images

“Localism” - Miriam Ellis

We know that a picture is worth a thousand words and that Google is betting the house on a visual future, yet I’ve often struggled to find the exact image asset I want to illustrate the story of local businesses and local SEO. So, I decided to create my own asset, and today, I would like to offer the above painting to all of my colleagues in local search. Please, feel free to use it in your speaker decks, client pitches, articles, marketing materials, and any place else you would like to instantly convey the thriving spirit of economic localism which underpins the passion we have in common with our audiences and clients.

This impressionist painting is original, hand-done, by me (no AI) and I offer use of it as my valentine to all of my colleagues and to local business owners with affection and tremendous respect for all of your contributions to many communities. I hope it will add vivid storytelling power to your work! If you would like to credit me, my fine art website is at MiriamEllis.com.

According to 3M research, visual aids improve learning by 400% and humans process visual media 60,000 times faster than text. Meanwhile, Time’sTop 100 photos focus on the mighty power of imagery to make an emotional connection. But we’re at a funny moment in time with image content, because we could be on the verge of inundation. I’d like to look at this phenomenon with you today and consider how the local businesses you market can stand out in an increasingly-illustrated world.

Thinking about imagery at this moment in time

Local places matter to us. Petrus Christus knew it when he painted “A Goldsmith in His Shop” six hundred years ago (local SEOs might call it the Barbara Oliver Jewelry of its day!):

Van Gogh was just one of thousands of painters who have worked to capture the mood of local “cafe society” and – if they had mobile devices – what do you think these people would be writing in their Yelp reviews?

And Hopper’s “Nighthawks”, set in a Greenwich Village diner, has become one of the most-recognized paintings in American art history. Looking at it 80 years after it was painted, it evokes a feeling in me of the value of local businesses keeping the light on in hard times:

Point being: local businesses are so vibrant a component of culture that they inspire fine art. They are an integral part of the history of communities, towns, and cities, and they readily lend themselves to impactful visual representation.

It’s a topic for this moment in time, because we are poised between a past littered with bad stock photos and a future that could be made up of assembly line AI graphics. Some may argue that the availability of images for pennies or the capacity to command robots to produce pictures is democratizing, and I can respect that viewpoint, but I have also noticed that mass-produced art lacking in meaningful human intention can quickly become clutter, overlooked by the very people we are trying to reach.

And that’s a problem, because when we look at art that we find beautiful, blood flow to the brain increases by 10%. According to University College London, this is the same lift we get from seeing the face of a loved one, and I have to wonder, then, what it does to us to be subjected to imagery that we find dull, repetitive, and soulless. Andy Warhol may have seen beauty in Campbell’s soup, but how often do you gaze with joy at can labels in the grocery store, when every single tin on the shelves offers a picture?

What will search be like when every query ends up in a kind of supermarket aisle, full of visuals? In 2016, visual elements made up just 2% of mobile search results, but now they make up 36%. Google reps are very transparent about this, stating,

“We’re transforming the SERP into an endless stream of visual ideas.”

As an artist, I’m automatically intrigued by any visual medium, and am keeping both eyes on multisearch, visual search, and all the permutations of image search. Now is the time to consider how visual media will fare if we become oversaturated with it in the next few years.

Standing out amid visual clutter

The art of differentiation is always going to be a relevant question for SEOs and local SEOs. Right now, we know how much of a competitive advantage high quality visuals can give our clients. Google says that shoppers are 90% more likely to purchase from businesses with images in Maps and search. Large, high quality images can have a demonstrable impact on organic rankings and Google’s own documentation cites their impact on local rank. UGC-uploaded photos even impact Google review order. Early adopters will get early benefits, but diminishing returns can result once a practice that was formerly special becomes commonplace.

Right now, we haven’t yet reached peak images in local SEO. Expert and friend, Darren Shaw, recently offered an excellent Twitter thread on the 7 types of visuals every Google Business Profile needs, including brand identity shots, exterior and interior premise shots, staff photos, product/service photos, UGC, and review screenshots. It’s a list long enough to keep any business busy in 2023, and the truth is that so many local businesses haven’t even created listings yet, but I’d like to encourage you to begin thinking beyond the standards before they become givens.

If your plan is to use AI graphics to keep pace with competitors, you may end up looking just like them, and that’s in direct contrast to one of the core reasons independent local businesses are beloved: because they are different! Predictability may be what made fast food chains a success via the McDonaldization phenomenon, but uniqueness of products, services and experiences is the magic ingredient behind 3 in 4 customers shopping small and local. Doesn’t it stand to reason that your digital visual presentation could take its cues from this existing dynamic and dare to be different?

To that end, here are my five outside-the-box suggestions for visually differentiating the local businesses you market online from less creative competitors:

1. Hire a local artist to paint your business. Imagine how uncommon your Google Business Profile photo deck would look if it included glowing fine art featuring your store, your grounds, your staff, your inventory, and customers coming in for experiences with you. I guarantee that there is a good fine artist near you with the talent of capturing how your business is a vibrant part of the local community. Give your staff and your customers reasons to feel proud of where they work and shop.

2. Hire a creative professional photographer to make your business look intriguing. Joel Headley has already documented the lift in traffic, calls and other conversion metrics when stock photos are replaced by original images, and you need basic shots of the assets Darren Shaw mentions, but a talented art photographer could take this a step further by photographing aspects of your business in such a way that the public will want to come experience them personally.

3. Are you working in a vertical people constantly call “boring?” Would it lend itself to humor that could make your listings stand out? Consider hiring a local cartoonist to make your community laugh with you and remember your brand.

4. Maximize every opportunity for making your premises a green space. Connectivity with nature is increasingly cited as key to mental health. It’s why Trinity College Dublin has torn up its lawns and replacd them with wildflower patches, full of blooms and butterflies. Photograph the planted areas people can experience when they visit you, and be sure to highlight accessibility and areas for sitting and quiet contemplation as a break from shopping.

5. Consider the role of art at your place of business, be that paintings, photography, sculpture, community projects, music, and more. A grocery store can have a great soundtrack and a retail shop with wall space can double as a gallery or a social media hotspot. The more inviting your premises are, the more likely that customers are to want to photograph themselves there. Because every person is unique, that thing we call UGC can become a major asset, enabling you and your community to see how your business looks through the gaze of many.

My two-point perspective

On the one hand, convenience sells. Why open a cookbook, turn on a light switch, sweep your own floor, work hard on writing something, or mix your own colors for a hand-done painting when a robot can do it all for you? We’re all so fatigued, so why not take it easy? But the thing is…there is something about this perspective that’s really been bothering me lately, and I think I’ve figured out what it is. It sounds like the little voice in my head that would let me be monumentally lazy instead of struggling to do my best despite living with a chronic disability. That insidious voice that wants me to take it too easy instead of doing as much as I’m able to for myself, and that is reinforced by every marketed offer to take every load off my shoulders.

I suppose that because I’ve pushed back against this temptation for years and pushed myself to stay positive and creative in some very hard times, I am wary of this insidious voice being a driving force in society. I don’t think everything should always be as easy as possible, because I don’t believe humans produce great writing, art, music, movements, or anything of lasting value when shortcuts are prioritized over strenuous effort. Yes, we can increasingly choose to let machines do all the work for us, and even think for us, but my other perspective tells me what we may miss if we never do the hard work ourselves.

I’ve entered a number of juried art events over the years, and there is nothing quite like the thrill of walking into a big, buzzing exhibition grounds, searching the crowded walls for your painting, finding a blue ribbon hanging on it and seeing that little “sold” sticker on the accompanying card. You know exactly what you put into that piece, from ideation, to drafting, to completion, and there is such joy in realizing that someone else saw your work and chose it as the best in the show, or even as something to bring home into their personal space.

This is the sense of accomplishment I want local business owners and their marketers to feel when they are chosen because, instead of giving into low standards, they have brought the highest standards to bear in the creative presentation of their companies. When local businesses go the extra mile, it can be deeply felt in the quality of life enjoyed by their whole community. It’s a very good thing.

I hope you may find a use for my painting in your work, even if it’s only as a spark for your own ideas about being seen amid the clutter of an increasingly-automated visual web. Your inventiveness, intentions, and most of all, your uniqueness matter. Some say that life is an artform, so let’s close with a quote from Cézanne today, who said it so well:

“A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.”

No matter how artificially “intelligent” we make the bots, the emotions are all on our side, ready to connect us with the people we care for and serve.

Convince Your Boss to Send You to MozCon 2023 [Plus Bonus Letter Template!]

MozCon is returning in-person to Seattle August 7-8, 2023 and this year, we’re excited to bring the Future of Search to our stage. 

From networking with peers, hearing from industry leaders, and making new connections that can help grow your business or career, conferences offer so many benefits to attendees. You know that. Your peers know that. But how do you persuade the powers-that-be (aka your boss) that sending you is beneficial for your business? 

Don’t worry, we’ve got a plan. (And if you want to skip ahead to the letter template, here it is!)

Get the Template

How to make the case

Business competition is fiercer than ever. Only those who are able to shift tactics with the changing tides of marketing will be able to come out on top. And that’s exactly what MozCon is going to help you do. 

Covering everything a growing marketer needs (SEO, content, strategy, growth), MozCon delivers top-notch talks from hand-selected speakers over two days in August. 

There's so much in store for you this year. Here’s just a sampling of what you can expect at this year’s MozCon:

Speakers and content

Our speakers are real practitioners and industry leaders. We work with them to ensure they deliver the best content and insights to the stage to set you up for a year of success. No sales pitches or talking heads here!

Networking

You work hard taking notes, learning new insights, and digesting all of that knowledge — that’s why we think you deserve a little fun. It's your chance to decompress with fellow attendees and make new friends in the industry. We host exciting evening networking events that add to the value you'll get from your day of education. Plus, our Birds of a Feather lunch tables allow you to connect with like-minded peers who share similar interests.

High-quality videos to share with your team

About a month or so after the conference, we release professionally edited videos of every presentation at the conference. Many of our ticket types include free access! Your colleagues won’t get to partake in the real-time experience(the #FOMO is real), but they will get a chance to learn everything you did. 

Great food on site 

We know that conference food isn’t typically worth mentioning, but MozCon is notorious for its cornucopia of tasty offerings.  

You can expect two meals a day and loads of snacks from local Seattle vendors — in the past we’ve featured a smorgasbord from the likes of Trophy cupcakes, KuKuRuZa popcorn, Starbucks’ Seattle Reserve cold brew.

Discounts for current customers 

Moz Pro, Moz Local, API, and STAT customers save big on their ticket cost, and there are discounts for groups of 10+ as well, so make sure to take advantage of savings where you can!

But of course, don’t take our word for it! There are some incredible resources available at your fingertips that tout the benefits of attending conferences:

2022 was my first MozCon! It was a great experience where I got to listen to thought leaders and peers on their individual approaches. The event spoiled us with awesome swag and great speakers while creating a safe space to facilitate deep discussions.

-Ray Martinez, Director of SEO - Archer Education

As a small business owner, attending MozCon was a big leap of faith for me (and a big investment!) I was so delighted to find there was a place for me at MozCon. The speakers were excellent- true experts who shared what doesn't work as compellingly as what DOES. My fellow attendees were accessible, kind, and generous with their knowledge. Most importantly, I left with a list of clear tangible strategies for growing my business this year. I learned so much- and I'm so glad I went.

-Marguerite  Tacoma Real Estate Agent  MoveToTacoma.com

There are lots of conferences that marketing and SEO professionals can attend. MozCon provides extreme value through its high-quality speakers, entertaining events, delicious meals and snacks, and networking opportunities. If you had to choose just one conference to attend, you won't go wrong choosing MozCon.

 - Jarrod Galm, SEO Manager, Wealth Enhancement Group

I came to MozCon expecting a handful of great takeaways and maybe some new SEO techniques. Instead, I was blown away multiple times over, made great connections, and I'm sharing a deck of takeaways with my team.

- Carly Johansen, Content Marketing Manager, Oregon State University Ecampus

MozCon 2022 was fantastic! Every session I attended was jam-packed full of actionable insights from speakers who really know their stuff. I left feeling invigorated, inspired and excited to put the things I'd learned into action

-Eloise West,  Senior Digital Marketing Strategist, Designzillas

This is my second in-person event (I went in 2019) and fourth overall. This is still a great conference even having more experience, and I noticed I pick up different things each time as my experience grows and I hear things in different ways. The networking opportunities are also invaluable, especially as I'm an in-house SEO with no team. I've learned a ton and have really grown as an SEO and heavily attribute a lot of that to MozCon. 

-Lauren Huffman, SEO Manager, Lulu and Georgia

Need a little more to get your boss on board? Check out some videos from years past to get a taste for the caliber of our speakers. 

Buy ticket, save money, get competitive marketing insights. Everyone wins!

MozCon is one unforgettable experience that lives and grows with you beyond just the days you spend attending the conference. And there's no time like the present to pitch MozCon to your boss. If they're still stuck on the "why", let them know about our subscriber or group pricing tiers — you’ll save hundreds of dollars when you do. Just think of all the Keurigs you could get for that communal kitchen! 

Be sure to grab the letter template and make your case the easy way!

Get the Template

Lessons Learned from SEO Tests that Didn't "Win" – Whiteboard Friday

We love to talk about winning SEO tests, like those wonderful instances where you run an A/B test and you see positive impact. In today’s episode, though, Will is going to discuss the losing tests: those with negative results — or no results — where you couldn't prove an impact. 

These test results are, in fact, where you can likely find the most valuable insights.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. My name is Will Critchlow. I'm the founder and CEO at SearchPilot. We run tons of SEO tests, and if you've ever seen me speak on one of these before or on a bigger stage, you have probably heard me talk about a lot of winning tests, those nice situations where you run an A/B test and you get an uplift and you get to celebrate. Today, we're going to be talking about losing tests. So these can be the negative ones or the ineffective changes, the ones where you just couldn't prove an impact in either direction.

So this is fundamentally that situation where you find an insight. It might be keyword research. It might be from technical auditing of the site, whatever it might be. You have a theory. You have a hypothesis or something that is going to benefit your website. You implement the change as a result, and you fall flat on your face. You fail spectacularly, and your test result data looks a little bit like this.

Now, this is actually quite an exaggerated case. A lot of the failures that we see are -2%, -3%, or just flat line, and those -2% and -3% type ones can be really hard to pick up without scientifically controlled testing, which is what we focus a lot of our time on, on really big websites. They can really add up. If you are continuously rolling out those little negative changes through the course of the year, it can really be a drag on your SEO program as a whole. But they can get lost. You roll out that change, and it can get lost in the noise, the seasonality, other sitewide changes, Google algorithm updates, things your competitors get up to. That's what we're trying to spot and avoid.

What can you learn? 

So what can we learn from losing tests, and when can they benefit us as a business? Well, one of the, perhaps, counterintuitive benefits is the drop in effort that you might be asking of your engineering team. If you have all these ideas and previously you're asking your team to build all of them, but if you run tests and you find that some of your ideas were negative, some of them were ineffective and weren't going to benefit you, you're now only asking your product and engineering team to maintain the ones that turn out to have a positive SEO impact. We've seen that be up to an 80% drop in SEO tickets for engineering. So that's one business case right there.

But, of course, sometimes your tests look like this, and so actually the business case is about avoiding those negative impacts on your website. 

Tactical examples

So I've got a couple of tactical examples that I thought would be good to run through that might be useful in your situations as well.

The first one is a case of removing SEO text. So we've seen many cases where think, say, a category page on an e-commerce website, for example. You've got a bunch of product listings, and then somewhere down at the bottom of the page, there's a bit of copy. Maybe it's in a div, seo_text. Maybe it's a really small font, gray, not exactly white on a white background, but clearly not designed for human eyes. We have run some experiments where we had situations like that, with pretty poor-quality text on category pages. We tested removing it and actually saw a statistically significant drop in organic visibility, which is a shame, because we know that this isn't high-quality text, we know it's not where Google wants us to be, and yet removing it was a bad idea.

One of the things we can learn from that is say, firstly, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. You can't just knee-jerk react to Google's PR and all these kinds of things and say, "Well, best practices say this. Let's just do it straightaway." You can't do that without testing because you might be hurting your website. But it does point to a direction of potential future improvement, because if having terrible text is better than no text, having good text might be even better. So one of the things that you benefit from with a losing test is you get to learn, and so you get to point the direction to some insights that might be positive for you in the future.

The other example I've got for you here, you might be wondering what on earth this is, and art is not my strong point. This is an Easter egg. Trust me, this is an Easter egg. We saw an example of a website, that operated across the whole of Europe, multiple different country/territory websites, testing adding seasonal offers. So in this case, it was about Easter travel, Easter breaks, Easter flights, those kinds of things. The keyword research had suggested that there was demand for this, that the audience is searching in this kind of way, and yet, adding those offers to the page was negative, and that was very surprising. What it turned out was going on here was that it was diluting the quality of that page for the things that were the bread and butter of those landing pages. So, yes, it was ranking better for some Easter travel-type related searches, but it was doing worse for the bulk of traffic of just trips to city name or whatever it might be, and the net impact was negative. That's the kind of thing you can only pick up by searching.

So I hope you've enjoyed this little journey into losing SEO tests and what we can learn from them. My name is Will Critchlow. I'm at SearchPilot. You can find me on Twitter, @willcritchlow. Look forward to chatting to you soon. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Alternative Search Engines: Why They Matter and How to Rank on Them

12 billion, 3 billion, 1 billion. That’s the number of searches made in some of the top alternative search engines monthly.

While Google still holds more than 80% of the market share, ignoring search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo can make you lose out on relevant traffic. So don’t limit yourself to Google’s algorithm as you plan the next year’s SEO strategy.

In order to grow in the digital economy, we have to diversify our efforts. What better way to do that than by making sure that you rank on all the top search engines relevant for your audience?

Generally, there’s two reasons why your audience would choose an alternative search engine over Google: geopolitical reasons and/or privacy concerns.

As such, I’ve categorized the search engines below by global market share and by data privacy.

Top alternative search engines by global market share

When analyzing the global desktop market share of search engines throughout the last decade, there are a few small but mighty search engines that stand out. These are:

1) Bing

2) Yahoo

3) Yandex

4) DuckDuckGo

5) Baidu

These are the engines you want to give extra consideration if you intend to expand internationally. They all have their own unique search algorithms that are in many ways as complex and developed as Google’s.

Why they matter and how to rank on them

If you’re like me a few years ago, a die-hard Apple fan remarkably repulsed by Microsoft’s products (I’ve now converted to the seamless team of PC), you might think prioritizing resources to optimize content for Bing or other engines is a waste of time. What I failed to consider then, and what you might be overlooking, is geographic segmentation.

Do you want to reach the American audience using voice search? Consider Bing.

Are you expanding into China? Check out Baidu.

Each search engine matters because of its unique user types. Regardless of how small that market share might look on a global scale, if there’s regional search volume from your target audience, it’s worth the optimization.

Let’s go through them one by one.

Bing and Yahoo

Since 2018, Yahoo is exclusively powered by Bing Search. So as long as you rank in Bing, you’ll rank in Yahoo.

Bing Search, in combination with Yahoo, is without a doubt the strongest player after Google. Together, they have more than 10% of the global market share for desktop.

Now, some say that Bing’s market share will increase due to mergers and acquisitions, while others argue for its decline due to the death of Internet Explorer.

Still, all Microsoft browsers, such as Microsoft Edge Legacy and Chromium-based Microsoft Edge, have Bing as the default search engine, making Bing Search the natural choice for Microsoft product users. Yahoo, which is powered by Bing Search, is the default search engine for Mozilla’s browser Firefox, adding billions of impressions to Bing’s search results each year.

If we look at the United States alone, Microsoft sites own over 18% of the market share.

This is much due to their partnership with Amazon, where all voice-activated searches on Amazon Echo and Alexa are made with Bing Search.

Microsoft also pushes Bing further by offering easy rewards for searches and more advanced image search capabilities than Google.

Although the algorithms differ, optimizing for Bing search results is not much different than optimizing for Google. With a bit of fine tuning, it’s more than possible to come up with a strategy that allows for high rankings on both.

To rank on Bing, and thus Yahoo, make sure to do the following:

1. List your business on Bing Places

Bing Places is the equivalent of Google My Business and is the fastest way to get your business ranking for local seo. Many even consider Bing Places to favor small business owners as Bing puts their information more prominently on display.

2. Upload an XML Sitemap using Bing’s Webmaster Tools

While the debate on how much sitemaps really do matter for Google SEO continues, uploading one with Bing’s Webmaster Tool for XML Sitemaps allows the algorithm to better categorize and manage your content, making it more visible and relevant to the search audience.

3. Match keywords in your content

Check that the exact keyword match can be found in your page titles, meta descriptions and overall content. It’s known that the impact of on-page tactics as a ranking factor is much greater in Bing than Google.

4. Keep your social media profiles up to date

Go social! Bing considers your social media presence more than any other search engine. The Webmaster Guidelines specifically states that Bing considers social signals from third-party platforms to rank your content. Bing might even extract certain information directly from your Facebook company page to your Bing Places display.

5. Use high-quality images to enhance your content

Bing’s image search is much more advanced than Google’s. If you want your landing page to rank, add high-quality design assets to showcase your offerings. If you want your blog to rank, attach too-long-to-read infographics to highlight your points. Like the one above.

Yandex

Second to Bing is Yandex, having a total of 1.5% of the market share in global desktop search.

While it looks a lot like Google, its algorithm is different in many ways. Most prominent is the way Yandex indexes pages. Unlike Google’s almost continuous indexation, Yandex indexes pages sporadically. That means that you might have to wait around for a while before your site shows up on Yandex.

Despite this, it is still possible to rank on Yandex. You just need to have a bit more patience.

While waiting for your site to be indexed, take a look at the following:

1. Focus on tags over internal site structure

According to The Ultimate Guide to Yandex SEO, your header tag, title tag and slug are way more important than your internal site structure. In fact, it was only recently that Yandex started to support hreflang tags. Before that, Yandex only allowed the <head> hreflang implementation.

2. Consider search intent to rank

Some argue that Yandex meets search intent better than Google. The modern ICS score, which replaced the Thematic Index Citation, is determined by how relevant a site is to the query. Yandex uses its own version of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T) test to determine relevance.

3. Eliminate toxic links

Many do not know this, but Yandex was actually the first search engine to roll out a link-based algorithm. Already in 2005, 7 years before Google’s Penguin algorithm, Yandex introduced the Nepot filter, which specifically looked at the impact of toxic link exchanges and spam links.

Baidu

With over 3 billion searches daily, Baidu is the Google of China. If you want to do business in China, it’s the place to be.

While the site is available worldwide, the site predominantly favors simplified Chinese. So before taking any other steps, hire a native speaker to help you along the way. To win at global, you have to ditch translations.

Here’s a few steps to get your content ranking.

1. Localize your keywords and content appropriately

As with all multilingual SEO, you need to work with a native language expert to ensure proper keyword localization and content optimization. If your site experiences high bounce rates, Baidu will tank your rankings immediately. As with any search experience, localization matters.

2. Position relevant content and keywords to the top of the page

Baidu favors a completely opposite layout than the Westernized one. The sooner you get to the point the better. Therefore, it is important to position your keywords as early as possible in the text and introduce all relevant content already in the top of the page to rank.

3. Obtain a verification level and get certified

By registering and paying a small fee you can obtain a verification level to improve your domain authority and rankings on Baidu. If you want to secure top ratings, you can get certified and obtain an ICP license, which is much more difficult than getting verified.

Top alternative search engines by data privacy

While most of the search engines mentioned above are tied to big corporations or political forces, global initiatives are setting the stage for more privacy-focused search engines. Among these is DuckDuckGo, the forefront runner with over 130 billion searches processed since launch.

Why they matter and how to rank on them

In many ways, the movement is a response to Google’s invasiveness on privacy. Many are fed up with how they are capitalizing on personal data and controlling the narrative with targeted search.

On a macro scale, the European Union continues to protect data privacy with strict GDPR regulations and the California Consumer Privacy Act indicates similar trends for Americans.

From a micro perspective, documentaries such as The Great Hack shine a light on how global companies monetize on personal data. As a result, privacy-safe search engines continue to rise.

If you’re working for an innovative SaaS startup, there’s a high chance your ideal customer persona is using one of these search engines.

Let’s go through how you rank on DuckDuckGo and two alternative equivalents.

DuckDuckGo

Screenshot of duckduckgo.com, November 2022

DuckDuckGo aims to make your search experience as simple and true to its cause as possible, i.e. no tracking for personalized search results and filter bubbles. Instead it uses semantic search to determine search intent for your queries from over 400 sources.

Consequently, this attracts tech-savvy experts with a lower bounce rate. Once they commit to a search, they stay.

Here’s how to optimize for it:

1. Sharpen Your User Experience

UX continues to make an impact on SEO, not to mention for DuckDuckGo. Make your content easily scannable and stay away from intrusive pop ups that harm your users’ experience and ease of navigation.

2. Focus on High-Quality Backlinks

As with any SEO, high-quality backlinks play a huge role for ranking. If you already have a solid backlink profile from your Google strategy, you should be good to go. If your backlink profile has a high level of toxicity, do some cleansing.

3. Rethink Local SEO

Since there’s no location tracking available for searches, location-specific searches such as “services near me” don't work. If you like to rank for these types of searches, include a specific location in your keyword strategy. Otherwise, you won’t be able to optimize for local seo.

Startpage

Startpage could be my personal favorite among the alternative search engines. It basically is Google without the tracking.

And while many consider DuckDuckGo to be the forefront runner of the privacy-focused search movement, many forget how Startpage ‘blazed the trail in 2006’. Offering a search experience without IP recording or tracking back when it was more or less unheard of. Now, it is the common denominator among all privacy-safe search engines.

So, how do you rank in Startpage? Simple. You rank in Google.

SwissCows

There are many more privacy-safe alternatives to search engines than the two mentioned above. Perhaps one without equal is SwissCows - a search engine that prides itself on being the only family-friendly, privacy-safe semantic search engine available on the web.

This means that any intrusive search results, like adult entertainment or offensive content, is naturally censored from the search results. At the same time, they never store any data nor track user specific information.

SwissCows SERPs bring up organic results and paid ads directly from Bing so in order to rank in SwissCows, you need to rank in Bing. Just make sure to omit any content that’s not PG-13.

What do they all have in common?

In the end, none of these alternative search engines can replace Google. As an SEO, I’ll never advise starting out with anything other than a Google strategy.

But when you are ready to branch out and extend your reach, give these alternatives a try. Analyze where your target audience hangs out and optimize thereafter.

Many of the privacy-focused search engines require little optimization as they pull their search results directly from other sources anyways. Simply do a quick check to see how you rank on each one.

And who knows, perhaps Microsoft will continue to steal more of the global search landscape. If that happens, you’ll be there — ranking in first position, ready to reap the rewards of your diversified efforts in an ever-changing search landscape.

Time to Shine: MozCon 2023 Community Speaker Pitches Now Open

MozCon is bringing the Future of Search to Seattle this August 7-8, and we’re excited to announce the return of our annual call for up-and-coming community speakers!

Every year, we take great pride in reserving space on our stage exclusively for new voices. Are you the person that everyone in your network looks to for digital marketing advice? Perhaps you’ve been honing your voice on podcasts or blogs, all the while dreaming of stepping onto the big stage to share your innovative ideas? Now’s your chance to submit your pitch for the opportunity to join industry leaders on the MozCon stage in front of 1,500 of your peers. (No pressure!)

Not sure what a community speaker is?

At MozCon, we have a speaker selection committee that identifies practitioners at the top of their professional field with a mean speaking game. But these spots are by invite only, and we know the community is bursting at the seams with hidden gems ready to share groundbreaking research, hot tips, and SEO tests that drive results.

Cue our MozCon community speaker program!

We’ve reserved two 15-minute community speaker slots throughout our conference for fresh faces to shine on the big stage. We encourage anyone in the SEO community to submit their best and most exciting presentation ideas for a chance to be selected as a community speaker at MozCon. Not only are these sessions incredibly well-received by our attendees, but they’re also a fantastic way to get your foot in the door when it comes to the SEO speaking circuit.

Interested in pitching your own idea? Read on for everything you need to know:

How to submit

To submit a pitch, fill out the community speaker submission form. Only submit one talk! We want the one you’re most passionate about. Talks must be related to digital marketing and be a topic you can cover in 15 minutes.

[Pro tip: Keep it actionable and be sure to include 3-5 key learning outcomes the audience will come away with from your session in the pitch.]

Submissions close on Tuesday, February 28th at 5pm PDT — no exceptions!

If chosen, you’ll be required to present your talk in person at MozCon in Seattle, WA on August 7-8, 2023. Incomplete submissions will not be considered, and all decisions are final. All speakers must adhere to the MozCon Code of Conduct.

Submit my pitch!

If you submit a pitch, you’ll hear back from us regardless of your acceptance status, so please be patient until you hear back — we’ll work hard to make our decisions as quickly as we can! Please note that due to the volume of submissions we typically receive, we’re unable to provide specific feedback on individual applications.

What do speakers receive?

As a community speaker you will receive:

• 15 minutes on the MozCon stage for a keynote-style presentation

• A free ticket to MozCon (we can issue a refund or transfer if you’ve already purchased yours)

• Travel and accommodations during MozCon

• Support and feedback as you build your final presentation deck to make sure you deliver the talk of your life on our stage.

• And a few more surprises…

How we select our speakers

We have an internal committee of experienced Moz team members, speakers and subject matter experts that review every pitch. We analyze each topic to make sure there’s no overlap and to confirm that it’s a good fit for our audience and conference focus – for 2023, our content theme is The Future of Search.

Next, we look at the entirety of the pitch to help us get a comprehensive idea of what to expect from your talk on the MozCon stage and how it might be received by the audience. This is where links to previous decks, content, and videos of past presentations are helpful (but aren’t required).

Here’s how to make your pitch stand out:

• Keep your pitch focused on digital marketing. SEO topics are great but we also love topics that compliment or sit adjacent to SEO. The more actionable the pitch, the better.

• Be focused and concise. What value does your talk provide? We want to hear the actual takeaways our audience will be learning about and why it’s important — not just a vague reference to them. Remember, we receive a ton of pitches, so the more clearly you can explain the tactical steps and learning objectives for the audience, the better you’ll stand out.

• Do your research! Review the topics presented at past MozCons, on the Moz Blog and in our Whiteboard Friday videos for a sense of what resonates with our audience— we’re looking for fresh, new presentations that round out our agenda to add to the stage.

• Brush up on how to prepare for speaking.

• No pitches will be evaluated in advance, so please don’t ask :)

• Using social media to lobby your pitch won’t help. Instead, put your time and energy into the actual pitch itself!

• Linking to a previous example of a slide deck or presentation isn’t required, but it does help the committee.

Leading up to MozCon

If your pitch is selected, the MozCon team is here to support you along the way. It’s our goal to make sure this is your best talk to date, whether it’s your first time under those bright stage lights or you’re a seasoned speaker who feels perfectly at home in front of a big crowd. We’ll answer any questions you may have and work with you to deliver a talk you’ll be proud of. Here are just a handful of ways that we’re here to help:

• Topic refinement

• Helping with your presentation title and description

• Reviewing your presentation outlines and drafts

• Providing plenty of tips around best practices — specifically with the MozCon stage and audience in mind

• Comprehensive show guide

• Being available to listen to you practice your talk

• Reviewing your final deck

• A full stage tour on the Sunday before MozCon to meet our A/V crew, see your presentation on the big screen, and get a feel for the show

• An amazing 15-person A/V team to support your presentation every second it’s on the big screen and beyond

We’ve got our fingers crossed for you. Good luck!

Submit my pitch!

Harnessing the Power of Feedback — Whiteboard Friday

In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Mozzer Meghan Pahinui takes you through the process we use to implement customer feedback, in the hopes that you can take it and apply it to your own content creation and maintenance strategies.

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

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome back to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Meghan, and I'm on the Learning team here at Moz. Today, I'm going to talk to you about harnessing the power of feedback when it comes to content iteration.

So one of the projects that I contribute to in my position here is taking care of our customer help center, which we call the Help Hub. If you're not familiar with the Help Hub, this is where we house all of our how-to guides, tips and tricks, workflows, and troubleshooting guides for the Moz tools. I do encourage you to check it out if you have some time later or if you have questions about the tools.

A key part of maintaining the Help Hub includes gathering, monitoring, and implementing customer feedback, and this is a crucial component for us. Why is that? Well, because we want to be sure that we're providing quality, helpful content to our customers. In addition, this process allows our customers to find answers to their questions quickly and easily at any time. It does take some of the lift of our Help team as well by reducing the number of tickets that they receive asking these very questions. So I'm going to go ahead and take you through the process that we use to implement customer feedback, in hopes that you can take it and apply it to your own content creation and maintenance strategies.

Gather data

So what is the first step? Well, first, we gather data, because we don't know what feedback people have if we don't ask for it, right? So if you are familiar with the Moz Help Hub, you may have seen our surveys that are at the bottom of all of our articles. Here, we ask if the article was helpful, and we do this with a series of emojis that indicate if it met their needs or not. If the customer indicates that it did not, they do have the option to enter a comment letting us know why.

When it comes to gathering data on your own content, you may opt to add a survey like this, or there are plenty of other ways that you can start to gather data to work with. So if you have a social media presence, you can start keeping track of feedback there or ask your followers directly for insight into what they find most helpful and least helpful about your content. Or you can send a survey out via email, ask your customer service team for feedback, look at customer emails and tickets to see what questions the customers may be asking, which you're not currently answering on your site. We do that as well. We work closely with our Help team to ensure that everything that we can answer is answered in the Help Hub.

Analyze

So once you have that data to work with, it's time to analyze it. So we review both vote counts, meaning helpful versus not helpful, as well as comments here at Moz. When comments are left, we look to see if there's an opportunity to implement a change in that guide based on the feedback. Additionally, if we're seeing a trend in votes for a particular page or section, we will take a look at how we can improve or reword, update the content to better serve the customer.

One thing to keep in mind during this step, however, is that not all feedback you receive will be actionable, and that's okay. A few questions that I like to ask myself when looking at feedback for an article are: Was the customer on the right page to find their answer? If not, how did they get to this page? Is there an opportunity to help them find their way to the correct page, whether that's through links or additional resources, etc.? Is there a question that I can answer on this page, or should this question have its own dedicated page? Sometimes we end up writing whole new guides based on feedback that we get from customers. What was the customer trying to achieve? How did this guide fall short in helping them achieve that goal?

Implement change

So now that we've identified areas for improvement, it's time to implement changes to that content. So this may be as simple as adding an FAQ to answer a specific question or as involved as writing a new workflow or troubleshooting guide, as I mentioned previously. Just as an example, some specific things, some specific changes that we implemented based on customer feedback include adding quick links to all of our pages for easier navigation, creating separate pages for each of our keyword metrics, and building out multiple workflows based on questions that customers have asked.

This step in the process may look different depending on the type of content that you create and the type of feedback that you receive. For example, if you primarily work in creating video content and you receive feedback that customers wish the videos had subtitles, you may opt to implement those on past videos as well as any that you release moving forward. However, if you have a blog or a newsletter or some other type of long-form content, it may not make sense to use resources to update older pieces of content. Instead, you may opt to start implementing those changes in your content moving forward. It may be a combination of those. Maybe you have some really popular articles that can be updated from the past and start implementing those changes in your content moving forward.

Track results

So after implementing your changes, you want to be sure to track your results. We track our votes and survey responses regularly to help monitor for update opportunities and to see if the responses have changed for that particular piece of content.

Finally, we start the cycle all over again, gathering more data, analyzing it, implementing changes, and then tracking the results.

Implementing this process here at Moz has allowed us to see a correlation between changes that we've made to the Help Hub content and the number of helpful votes that we receive. We treat this part of our content library as a living document that is always evolving to not only account for tool changes but also to take into account customer feedback. Gathering feedback on your content can help to identify trends in what your customers are engaging with and how you can further improve your offerings moving forward. That's key. You want to always be improving.

It can also help to identify resources that may need updating or ideas for future content. For example, if you have a blog post about how to bake a cake and your readers are commenting that they don't know how to pick the right kind of pan for the recipe, there may be an opportunity to publish a new blog post about the best types of cake pans. Or if you publish help guides, like myself, if a customer says they couldn't find the answer to their question in that article, there may be an opportunity to look into questions like the ones that we outlined earlier in our analyze step. What are they trying to achieve? How did they end up on this page? How can I help them to reach their goal?

I hope that you found this helpful and that you're ready to get out there and start harnessing the power of feedback. Thank you so much, Moz fans. We'll see you next time.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

SEO Recap: ChatGPT

We’re back with another SEO recap with Tom Capper! As you’ve probably noticed, ChatGPT has taken the search world by storm. But does GPT-3 mean the end of SEO as we know it, or are there ways to incorporate the AI model into our daily work?

Tom tries to tackle this question by demonstrating how he plans to use ChatGPT, along with other natural language processing systems, in his own work.

Be sure to check out the commentary on ChatGPT from our other Moz subject matter experts, Dr. Pete Meyers and Miriam Ellis:

• ChatGPT Won’t Replace Google Search (Yet)

• 5 Times ChatGPT Steered Me Wrong in Local SEO

Video Transcription

Hello, I'm Tom Capper from Moz, and today I want to talk about how I'm going to use ChatGPT and NLP, natural language processing apps in general in my day-to-day SEO tasks. This has been a big topic recently. I've seen a lot of people tweeting about this. Some people saying SEO is dead. This is the beginning of the end. As always, I think that's maybe a bit too dramatic, but there are some big ways that this can be useful and that this will affect SEOs in their industry I think.

The first question I want to ask is, "Can we use this instead of Google? Are people going to start using NLP-powered assistants instead of search engines in a big way?"

So just being meta here, I asked ChatGPT to write a song about Google's search results being ruined by an influx of AI content. This is obviously something that Google themselves is really concerned about, right? They talked about it with the helpful content update. Now I think the fact that we can be concerned about AI content ruining search results suggests there might be some problem with an AI-powered search engine, right?

No, AI powered is maybe the wrong term because, obviously, Google themselves are at some degree AI powered, but I mean pure, AI-written results. So for example, I stole this from a tweet and I've credited the account below, but if you ask it, "What is the fastest marine mammal," the fastest marine mammal is the peregrine falcon. That is not a mammal.

Then it mentions the sailfish, which is not a mammal, and marlin, which is not a mammal. This is a particularly bad result. Whereas if I google this, great, that is an example of a fast mammal. We're at least on the right track. Similarly, if I'm looking for a specific article on a specific web page, I've searched Atlantic article about the declining quality of search results, and even though clearly, if you look at the other information that it surfaces, clearly this has consumed some kind of selection of web pages, it's refusing to acknowledge that here.

Whereas obviously, if I google that, very easy. I can find what I'm looking for straightaway. So yeah, maybe I'm not going to just replace Google with ChatGPT just yet. What about writing copy though? What about I'm fed up of having to manually write blog posts about content that I want to rank for or that I think my audience want to hear about?

So I'm just going to outsource it to a robot. Well, here's an example. "Write a blog post about the future of NLP in SEO." Now, at first glance, this looks okay. But actually, when you look a little bit closer, it's a bluff. It's vapid. It doesn't really use any concrete examples.

It doesn't really read the room. It doesn't talk about sort of how our industry might be affected more broadly. It just uses some quick tactical examples. It's not the worst article you could find. I'm sure if you pulled a teenager off the street who knew nothing about this and asked them to write about it, they would probably produce something worse than this.

But on the other hand, if you saw an article on the Moz blog or on another industry credible source, you'd expect something better than this. So yeah, I don't think that we're going to be using ChatGPT as our copywriter right away, but there may be some nuance, which I'll get to in just a bit. What about writing descriptions though?

I thought this was pretty good. "Write a meta description for my Moz blog post about SEO predictions in 2023." Now I could do a lot better with the query here. I could tell it what my post is going to be about for starters so that it could write a more specific description. But this is already quite good. It's the right length for a meta description. It covers the bases.

It's inviting people to click. It makes it sound exciting. This is pretty good. Now you'd obviously want a human to review these for the factual issues we talked about before. But I think a human plus the AI is going to be more effective here than just the human or at least more time efficient. So that's a potential use case.

What about ideating copy? So I said that the pure ChatGPT written blog post wasn't great. But one thing I could do is get it to give me a list of subtopics or subheadings that I might want to include in my own post. So here, although it is not the best blog post in the world, it has covered some topics that I might not have thought about.

So I might want to include those in my own post. So instead of asking it "write a blog post about the future of NLP in SEO," I could say, "Write a bullet point list of ways NLP might affect SEO." Then I could steal some of those, if I hadn't thought of them myself, as potential topics that my own ideation had missed. Similarly you could use that as a copywriter's brief or something like that, again in addition to human participation.

My favorite use case so far though is coding. So personally, I'm not a developer by trade, but often, like many SEOs, I have to interact with SQL, with JavaScript, with Excel, and these kinds of things. That often results in a lot of googling from first principles for someone less experienced in those areas.

Even experienced coders often find themselves falling back to Stack Overflow and this kind of thing. So here's an example. "Write an SQL query that extracts all the rows from table2 where column A also exists as a row in table1." So that's quite complex. I've not really made an effort to make that query very easy to understand, but the result is actually pretty good.

It's a working piece of SQL with an explanation below. This is much quicker than me figuring this out from first principles, and I can take that myself and work it into something good. So again, this is AI plus human rather than just AI or just human being the most effective. I could get a lot of value out of this, and I definitely will. I think in the future, rather than starting by going to Stack Overflow or googling something where I hope to see a Stack Overflow result, I think I would start just by asking here and then work from there.

That's all. So that's how I think I'm going to be using ChatGPT in my day-to-day SEO tasks. I'd love to hear what you've got planned. Let me know. Thanks.