This week, Shawn talks you through the ways your site structure, your sitemaps, and Google Search Console work together to help Google crawl your site, and what you can do to approve Googlebot’s efficiency.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday, and I'm your host, SEO Shawn. This week I'm going to talk about how do you help Google crawl your website more efficiently.
Site structure, sitemaps, & GSC
Now I'll start at a high level. I want to talk about your site structure, your sitemaps, and Google Search Console, why they're important and how they're all related together.
So site structure, let's think of a spider. As he builds his web, he makes sure to connect every string efficiently together so that he can get across to anywhere he needs to get to, to catch his prey. Well, your website needs to work in that similar fashion. You need to make sure you have a really solid structure, with interlinking between all your pages, categories and things of that sort, to make sure that Google can easily get across your site and do it efficiently without too many disruptions or blockers so they stop crawling your site.
Your sitemaps are kind of a shopping list or a to-do list, if you will, of the URLs you want to make sure that Google is crawling whenever they see your site. Now Google isn't always going to crawl those URLs, but at least you want to make sure that they see that they're there, and that's the best way to do that.
GSC and properties
Then Google Search Console, anybody that creates a website should always connect a property to their website so they can see all the information that Google is willing to share with you about your site and how it's performing.
So let's take a quick deep dive into Search Console and properties. So as I mentioned previously, you always should be creating that initial property for your site. There's a wealth of information you get out of that. Of course, natively, in the Search Console UI, there are some limitations. It's 1,000 rows of data they're able to give to you. Good, you can definitely do some filtering, regex, good stuff like that to slice and dice, but you're still limited to that 1,000 URLs in the native UI.
So something I have actually been doing for the last decade or so is creating properties at a directory level to get that same amount of information, but to a specific directory. Some good stuff that I have been able to do with that is connect to Looker Studio and be able to create great graphs and reports, filters of those directories. To me, it's a lot easier to do it that way. Of course, you could probably do it with just a single property, but this just gets us more information at a directory level, like example.com/toys.
Sitemaps
Next I want to dive into our sitemaps. So as you know, it's a laundry list of URLs you want Google to see. Typically you throw 50,000, if your site is that big, into a sitemap, drop it at the root, put it in robots.txt, go ahead and throw it in Search Console, and Google will tell you that they've successfully accepted it, crawled it, and then you can see the page indexation report and what they're giving you about that sitemap. But a problem that I've been having lately, especially at the site that I'm working at now with millions of URLs, is that Google doesn't always accept that sitemap, at least not right away. Sometimes it's taken a couple weeks for Google to even say, "Hey, all right, we'll accept this sitemap," and even longer to get any useful data out of that.
So to help get past that issue that I've been having, I now break my sitemaps into 10,000 URL pieces. It's a lot more sitemaps, but that's what your sitemap index is for. It helps Google collect all that information bundled up nicely, and they get to it. The trade-off is Google accepts those sitemaps immediately, and within a day I'm getting useful information.
Now I like to go even further than that, and I break up my sitemaps by directory. So each sitemap or sitemap index is of the URLs in that directory, if it's over 50,000 URLs. That's extremely helpful because now, when you combine that with your property at that toys directory, like we have here in our example, I'm able to see just the indexation status for those URLs by themselves. I'm no longer forced to use that root property that has a hodgepodge of data for all your URLs. Extremely helpful, especially if I'm launching a new product line and I want to make sure that Google is indexing and giving me the data for that new toy line that I have.
Always I think a good practice is make sure you ping your sitemaps. Google has an API, so you can definitely automate that process. But it's super helpful. Every time there's any kind of a change to your content, add sites, add URLs, remove URLs, things like that, you just want to ping Google and let them know that you have a change to your sitemap.
All the data
So now we've done all this great stuff. What do we get out of that? Well, you get tons of data, and I mean a ton of data. It's super useful, as mentioned, when you're trying to launch a new product line or diagnose why there's something wrong with your site. Again, we do have a 1,000 limit per property. But when you create multiple properties, you get even more data, specific to those properties, that you could export and get all the valuable information from.
Even cooler is recently Google rolled out their Inspection API. Super helpful because now you can actually run a script, see what the status is of those URLs, and hopefully some good information out of that. But again, true to Google's nature, we have a 2,000 limit for calls on the API per day per property. However, that's per property. So if you have a lot of properties, and you can have up to 50 Search Console properties per account, now you could roll 100,000 URLs into that script and get the data for a lot more URLs per day. What's super awesome is Screaming Frog has made some great changes to the tool that we all love and use every day, to where you cannot only connect that API, but you can share that limit across all your properties. So now grab those 100,000 URLs, slap them in Screaming Frog, drink some coffee, kick back and wait till the data pours out. Super helpful, super amazing. It makes my job insanely easier now because of that. Now I'm able to go through and see: Is it a Google thing, discovered or crawled and not indexed? Or are there issues with my site to why my URLs are not showing in Google?
Bonus: Page experience report
As an added bonus, you have the page experience report in Search Console that talks about Core Vitals, mobile usability, and some other data points that you could get broken down at the directory level. That makes it a lot easier to diagnose and see what's going on with your site.
Hopefully you found this to be a useful Whiteboard Friday. I know these tactics have definitely helped me throughout my career in SEO, and hopefully they'll help you too. Until next time, let's keep crawling.
The adage is that if you're not paying for the service, you are the product. Unfortunately, this rings especially true in the analytics world.
The analytics space is changing, though, and there are many alternatives — both free and paid — that take into account privacy, cookie-less tracking, GDPR compliance, core web vitals, and more. The current leader in the analytics space is Universal Analytics (UA), which has been tracking web data since 2005. But Google is going to stop tracking any new data in UA as of July 1, 2023 (Happy Canada Day?).
This is a move to get users to migrate to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which is a whole new way of tracking and navigating. In a move from sessions to an event model, GA4 will require some knowledge and familiarity to get up and running, as there’s quite a bit changing.
If you haven’t yet set up GA4 yet, or are on the fence, now is the time to take a look at what else is out there and how the landscape has changed. We've broken the alternatives up into three categories:
Web analytics
Product analytics
Data warehousing solutions
How legal is Google Analytics?
The short answer is: depends on where your visitors are from.
Without getting too deep into legal jargon, the user has control over the options now and although there are a few lawsuits out there I'm sure Google will make the proper adjustments to ensure that everyone using it will be mostly covered, eventually.
This isn't happening right now and under GDPR there are requirements that Google Analytics isn't passing. Also, by using a product that's integrated into other products I doubt they'll ever see 100% coverage.
Even if you’re planning on installing Google Analytics 4, you can run an alternative to ensure that you’re getting the right data and test as you go
Web Analytics
More than a visitor counter, but often simplified, web analytics providers focus on giving services to small businesses, bloggers, and small websites. Their metrics are also the closest to Google Analytics. Most of the web analytics tools below are easy to maintain, quick to install, and don't need self-hosting. However, some will offer self-hosting in addition to their regular services.
Launched in 2018, Fathom Analytics is a cookie-less, privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative that’s really simple to use. They care about user privacy and pioneered proprietary routes in compliance with the EU for EU visitors. Calling the route "EU isolation", Fathom Analytics is also GDPR, PECR, COPPA, CCPA, and ePrivacy compliant.
Features of Fathom Analytics include:
Seven-day free trial
Prices start at $14 per month for up to 100,000 page views
Can include up to 50 sites
Shows live visitors and where they’re navigating
Offers uptime monitoring, event filtering, email reports, ad blocker bypassing, live visitor information, and much more from a bootstrapped company
Being privacy-focused, Fathom Analytics has a beautiful interface and offers unlimited CSV exports of your data available at any time. This allows you to conveniently connect it to other data sources. In addition, Fathom is expected to release a backup option for GA data in the near future.
Previously named Pikqwik, Matomo ("keep your data in your own hands") is an open-source, cookie-free tracking, and GDPR-compliant analytics tool offering a search engine and keywords section where you can connect with Google Search Console data.
Additional Matomo features include:
Customizable dashboard.
Real-time data insights (pages visited, visitor summary, conversions, etc).
E-commerce analytics.
Event tracking (analyzes user interaction on apps or websites).
Measures CTR, clicks, and impressions for text and image banners as well as other page elements.
Visitor geolocation (stats can be viewed on maps by city, region, or country).
Page and site speed reports.
Page performance (number of views, bounce rates).
You can host Matomo on your own servers for free. Otherwise, their cloud pricing starts at $29/month after a 21-day free trial for 50,000 hits (up to 30 websites).
If you're already using Cloudflare's CDN solution, then there's no setup required. You can simply authorize the web analytics to start tracking inside your account. You can add up to 10 websites for free, and there's no need for a cookie banner, since they do not collect personal data.
In addition to tracking standard metrics — page views, visits, load times, bandwidth, etc. — Cloudflare has incorporated Core Web Vitals metrics. These are measured each across your tracked websites, and can email you weekly with updates — very handy.
Cloudflare installation is light on page load, since you can proxy it through your Cloudflare setup. Alternatively, you can install their lightweight Javascript code (or "beacon", as they call it).
Although Cloudflare doesn't say they are GDPR compliant, what they do say is that they are considered an "Operator Essential Services" under the EU Directive on Security of Network and Information Systems. You can assume that Cloudflare is tracking something along the way, with a free price tag and with other offerings available where data could be shared.
Cloudflare is closest to server analytics without going directly to your server. It's only available in specific areas, so you might have to pay for this.
Adobe Analytics is a popular analysis platform that provides tools essential for collecting relevant data concerning customer experience. Company analysts and online marketers frequently depend on it for improving customer satisfaction.
Applying Adobe Analytics to your business website can help you determine what leads to conversions. For example, did changing content or the CTA increase conversions? Did adding more visual aids increase the number of inquiries about a certain service or product?
Adobe analytics is marketed as an enterprise analytics solution with audience insights, advertising analytics, cohort analysis, customer journey analysis, remarketing triggers, and much more. It truly could fit your web analytics or product analytics depending on how your team deploys it, and it has been around for quite a while just like Google Analytics.
Privacy-friendly web analytics tool Clicky is easy to navigate and offers metrics similar to Google Analytics. However, Clicky embodies the feel of server analytics tools while making their interface simple and fast-loading, thanks to minimal graphics.
Features of Clicky include:
GDPR compliance
Bot detection and blocking
Heatmaps
Uptime monitoring
Backlink analysis
Clicky also provides a developer API and white labeling of their solution, where you can create your own theme for better brand integration starting at $49/month as part of their hosted service. They also offer a free tier if you’re looking to try it out with limited features.
EU-hosted, privacy-based Simple Analytics offers tools to use for checking your websites daily. Simple Analytics does not collect cookies, IP addresses, or any unique identifiers. Their package provides a bypass of ad blockers, hides referral spam, and includes an iOS app. You can even embed a widget to get public web statistics.
This GA alternative offers some nifty events that are gathered by default for ease of use. These include email clicks, outbound links, and files to streamline tracking. All of Simple Analytics features come together in a UI that's a simple dashboard providing quick "in and out" times — much quicker, in fact, than it would take to get to the correct property using Google Analytics.
Simple Analytics offers a free 14-day trial. If you decide to keep Simple Analytics, you'll pay $19/month, or $9/month if you pay a year in advance.
An open-source, cookie-free web analytics alternative to Google Analytics, Pirsch seamlessly integrates into websites and WordPress with plugins. A developer-friendly analytics offering a flexible, impressive API, server-side integrations, and SDKs, Pirsch provides Golang (Go), PHP SDK, JavaScript, or a community-provided code to embed snippets. Pirsch also works with Google Search Console.
You can perform any function you want from the Pirsch dashboard, like viewing statistics or adding websites.
Get started by viewing Pirsch's live demo or opting in on their 30-day free trial. Paying for Pirsch is only $5 per month if you choose annual billing. If you want to make monthly payments, the cost increases to $6 per month.
A privacy-friendly, open-source web analytics platform, Plausible is cookie-free and fully compliant with PECR, CCPA, and GDPR. Plausible is a popular alternative to Google Analytics because of its simplicity, lightweight script, and ability to reduce bounce rates by expediting site loading.
You can easily segment data into specific metrics, analyze dark traffic via Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters, and track how many outbound link clicks you get.
Plausible offers a 30-day free trial option that provides unlimited usage of its features without requiring a credit card. Once your free trial has ended, you can pay $9 per month for up to 10,000 page views. If you choose yearly billing, you get two months of free use. Unlimited data retention, slack/email reports, and event customization are also provided with a paid subscription to Plausible.
Umami is GDPR-compliant, open-source, cookie-free, and does not track users or gather personal data across websites. By anonymizing any information collected, Umami prevents the identification of individual users. In addition, you won't need to worry about staying compliant with constantly changing privacy lawsi.
Features of Umami include:
Mobile-friendly so you can see stats on your phone at any time.
Since you host Umami under your domain, you won't see any ad-blockers like you see when using Google Analytics.
Public sharing of your stats is available using an exclusively generated URL.
Umami's lightweight tracking script loads almost instantly and won't slow down the loading of your website.
A single installation of Umami enables tracking of an unlimited number of sites. You can also track individual URLs and subdomains.
Since Umami is an open-source platform and self-hosted, it's free to use. Umami says a cloud-based version of its analytics is coming soon.
Although product analytics are not always GDPR-compliant, they provide powerful analytic tools that include valuable elements like segmentation and deeper levels of customization. For that reason and others, product analytics come with a higher maintenance cost. Here are several product analytics tools that are excellent Google Analytics alternatives for tracking customer behavior.
The traffic analytics tool provided by Hubspot Analytics offers exceptional analysis data for breaking down page views, new contacts, and even entrance/exit information regarding how long visitors remained on specific web pages. You can also install a tracking code to external sites so you can track traffic stats.
Additional features include:
Bounce rate percentages.
Number of call-to-action views/number of CTA clicks.
Conversion rates of visitors who click on your CTA.
Access to specific URLs or country stats.
A subscription to a starter Hubspot Analytics platform is $45 per month. You can choose monthly or annual billing, which is $540.
A professional subscription to Hubspot Analytics starts at $800 per month ($9,600 for one year). This subscription gives you multi-language content, video management and hosting, phone support, and A/B testing.
An enterprise subscription starts at $3,600 per month ($43,200 per year). You get 10,000 marketing contacts with this subscription, with additional contacts available for sale in increments.
Kissmetrics offers analytics for e-commerce and SaaS websites. Kissmetrics for SaaS gives you deep insights into the type of content and features that are fueling conversions, converting trials into conversions, and reducing churn.
Kissmetrics detects characteristics that drive conversions and retain regular buyers, so you can adjust site elements appropriately. This unique analytics tool also streamlines checkout funnels and integrates with Shopify.
Pricing for Kissmetrics SaaS involves three tiers:
Heap Analytics works on mobile and PC devices, quickly captures nearly all behavioral parameters, and supports first or third-party installation. You can also create individual identities for users over numerous sessions and augmented product information to purchase/sales events.
The makers of Fullstory state that if you know how to copy and paste, you'll have no trouble setting it up. This analytics platform also offers "private-by-default" abilities that ensures masking of text elements at their source.
Mixpanel offers a free subscription that gives access to core reports, unlimited data history, and EU or U.S. data residency. Mixpanel can be sliced and diced to fit so many situations, it’s flexible and moldable for many businesses at many levels.
For $25 per month under their growth plan, you get all the free features, plus data modeling, group analytics, and reports detailing causal inference. Mixpanel also includes features such as:
Segmenting users based on actions
Integrate with Slack to share reports, even if they don’t use Mixpanel
No limits on the amount of events tracked
Team Dashboards with Alerts
Identify top user paths and drop-off points
Understanding of conversion points across the funnel
And much much more.
It's used by 30% of Fortune 100 SaaS companies and if you need custom pricing and plans,
According to a report available here, Amplitude is consistently ranked as #1 among other product analytics platforms, top software products, and customer satisfaction. You can analyze collected data with fast self-serve analytics that do not require SQL.
The Start Amplitude package is free and offers unlimited data destinations, users, and data sources. You also get 10 million events (streamed or unstreamed) per month.
Their paid plans start with customizations on top of that including advanced behavioral analytics & custom event values.
Segment which was acquired by Twilio in 2020 offers superior email onboarding and intuitive insights in SMS campaign and email performance & that’s just one arm of what it does. Segment uses only one API to collect data across all platforms. They also have SDKs for Android, iOS, JavaScript, and over 20 server-side languages. They have been written as a technology startup that lets organizations pull customer data from one app into another & they have as of writing over 300 integrations!
Segment has customers across industries including media, medical, B2B, retail and from startup to enterprise. As well you can upload your customer data into their data warehouse to keep your data there so they could fit into the data warehousing category below too.
To get started using Segment, simply make a free account which allows for 1,000 visitors from two sources and access to their 300 integrations or their paid tiers start at $120/month where you can sign up for a team account.
Rudderstack provides developers all they need to get started immediately with this product/behavior analytics. Features of Rudderstack include identifying anonymous mobile and web users, customizing destinations through the application of real-time modifications to event payloads, and automatically occupying warehouses with event and user record schemas.
The free version of Rudderstack gives you five million events per month, over 16 SDK sources and more than 180 cloud destinations. Like Segment you can use Rudderstack as a data warehouse for your customer data and they’ve built their platform as warehouse-first and built for developers.
The Pro version starts at $500 per month. You get the free features, plus email support, a technical account manager, and even custom integrations in the higher tiers. Request pricing for the Enterprise version of Rudderstack here.
Data warehousing solutions
It's always good to have your data backed up and if you have a lot of history in Universal Analytics it would be a good place to start. There are even services to connect all these solutions together seamlessly, such as Funnel. While these have additional costs, you can save all your data for many years without a problem coming up so you can refer to them when need be.
Available with an easy connection to your GA4 data if you're leaning that way. Google lists BigQuery as enterprise and there will be limits to how much data you can send to BigQuery before paying. They offer real-time analytics with built-in query acceleration and with the scale of data that Google handles we can be pretty sure that they’ll be able to handle it. Google Cloud Storage offers standard, nearline, coldline, and archive storage options.
One suggestion is if you’re using Google for backups to ensure you have a secondary account attached to it in case your primary account loses access, which I’ve seen happen from time to time. They provide a migration from some tools and their pricing is based on data, so it’s free up to 10GB. They created a billing calculator for easy cost analysis once you get into the paid side.
AWS states that they support more compliance certifications and security measures than all other cloud providers. They allow for backup of all data types and have redundancy built in that you would expect at the Amazon level.
Like Google they have a calculator to estimate a pricing model for your team as they have a lot of other services integrated into this that you can take advantage of there.
Snowflake provides a data cloud and isn’t Google or Amazon, which may appeal to some. It supports data science, data lakes, and data warehousing on the three top clouds with their fully automated solution.
They’re HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, and FedRAMP Authorized and have a 30 day free trial with all plans you can check out as well as a “pay for usage” option or a “pay for usage upfront” option too.
Recap and recommendations
On July 1, 2023, Universal Analytics will stop tracking any new data, and then by EOY 2023 all UA data will be removed by Google — so back up your data! Think about warehousing your data long term for your Universal Analytics and moving forward.
Then, make a plan for how you’re going to be tracking moving forward. Talk options and thoughts with stakeholders.
Install GA4 now (or yesterday!) or try the options above out, as none of these are created equal and many have free trials.
Estimated brand reach is the most important high-level metric that everyone seems to either interpret incorrectly, or ignore altogether.
Why? Because it’s a tough nut to crack.
By definition, brand reach is a headcount of unique “individuals” who encounter your brand, and you cannot de-anonymize all the people on every one of your web channels. Simply put, two “sessions” or “users” in your analytics could really be from one person, and there’s just no way you could know.
Nevertheless, youcanand most definitely shouldestimateyour brand reach. And you should, and most definitely can, use that data in a meaningful way.
For instance, it’s how we confirmed that:
It was time to abandon an entire paid channel in favor of a different one.
There’s a near-perfect correlation between our engaged reach and our lead generation.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Let’s dive in.
What is reach?
Reach counts the number of actual people who come in contact with a particular campaign. For example, if 1,500 people see a post on Instagram, your reach is 1,500. (Warning: Take any tool claiming to give you a “reach” number with a grain of salt. As we covered earlier, it’s really hard to count unique individuals on the web).
Impressions, on the other hand, is a count of views. One person can see an Instagram post multiple times. A post with a reach of 1,500 can easily have as many as 3,000 impressions if every one of those people see it twice.
Brand reach takes this a step further by tracking all the individual people who have encountered any and all of your company’s campaigns across all of your channels, in a given time period.
If you’re tracking brand reach correctly, every single person only gets counted once, and as far we know, that’s impossible.
Google Search Console, for instance, will show you exactly how many impressions your website has achieved on Google Search over a period of time. But it won’t count uniqueindividuals over that period. Someone could easily search two different keywords that your site is ranking for and encounter your brand twice on Google. There is no way to tie those multiple sessions back to one individual user.
It would be even harder to track that individual across all of your channels. How, for instance, would you make sure that someone who found you on social, and then again on search, isn’t counted twice?
The short answer is that you can’t.
However, you can estimate brand reach, and it’s work worth doing. It will a) help you tie meaningful metrics to your overall brand awareness efforts, and b) give you an immense amount of insight into how that high-level brand awareness affects your deeper-funnel outcomes — something that is sorely missing in most marketing programs.
Using impressions as a stand-in for pure reach
We’ve accepted that we can’t count the number of users who encounter our brand. But we are confident in our ability to count total impressions, and crucially, we’ve deduced that there’s a strong relationship between impressions and reach.
Common sense tells us that, if you see changes in your brand’s total impressions, there are likely changes to your reach as well.
We tested this premise using one of the only channels where we can actually count pure reach vs impressions: our email marketing program.
In email marketing:
Reach = the number of people who receive at least one email from us each month.
Impressions = the total number of emails delivered to all the people in our database each month.
And, as we suspected, there is a near perfect correlation between the two, of 0.94.
Interestingly, there is also a near-perfect correlation between email impressions and email engagement (someone clicking on that email) of 0.87.
Admittedly, email is a very controlled channel relative to, say, search or social media.
So, I went one step further and looked at how our “impressions” in Google Search Console aligned with Google Analytics’ count of “New Users” over the course of one year (which we’ll use as a stand-in for pure reach, since it only counts users once in a given timeframe):
The Pearson Correlation Coefficient for impressions’ relationship to GA’s New Users is 0.69, which is very strong! In other words, more impressions typically means more unique users, (AKA, reach).
Meanwhile, the relationship between GA’s New Users and GSC clicks is an astonishing 0.992, which is just 0.008 off from a perfect correlation.
People much smarter than I have pointed out time and time again that GA’s user data must be taken with a grain of salt, for reasons I won’t get into here. Still, the point is that there’s ample evidence to suggest an extremely tight relationship between reach and impressions.
TL;DR: If impressions change negatively or positively, there is very likely to be a corresponding change in reach, and vice versa.
What we ended up with
Taking all of this knowledge into account, we started tracking impressions of every single channel (except email, where we can actually use pure reach) to help determine our estimated brand reach. The outcome? This graph of our brand reach as it changes over time:
It’s extremely rewarding to have this type of number for your brand, even if it is an estimate.
But the greatest value here is not in the actual number; it’s in how that number changes from month to month, and more importantly, why it changes (more on this later in this post).
How to track estimated reach
The chart above displays our brand’s estimated reach across all our known marketing channels. Acquiring the data is as simple as going into each of these channels' analytics properties once a month, and pulling out the impressions for the prior month.
Let’s go through the steps.
1. Have a spreadsheet where you can log everything.Here’s a template you can use. Feel free to update the info in the leftmost columns according to your channels. Columns G through L will populate automatically based on the data you add to columns C through F. We recommend using this layout, and tracking the data monthly, as it will make it easier for you to create pivot tables to help with your analysis.
2. Access your impression data. Every marketing mix is different, but here’s how we would access impression data for the channels we rely on:
Organic search: Pull impressions for the month from Google Search Console.
Email marketing: Total number of unique contacts who have successfully received at least one email from you in the current month (this is one of the few channels where we use pure reach, as opposed to impressions).
Social media: Impressions pulled from Sprout, or from the native social media analytics platforms. Do the same for paid impressions.
Google Ads/Adroll/other ad platform: Impressions pulled from the ad-management platform of your choosing.
Website referrals: The sum of estimated page traffic from our backlinks each month. We use Ahrefs for this. The idea is that any backlink is a potential opportunity for someone to engage with our brand. Ahrefs estimates the traffic of each referring page. We can export this, and add it all up in a sheet, to get an estimate of the impressions we’re making on other websites.
YouTube: Impressions from Youtube Analytics.
Most of the above is self-explanatory, with a few exceptions.
First, there’s email. We use pure reach as opposed to impressions for two reasons:
Because we can.
Because using impressions for email would vastly inflate our estimated reach number. In any given month, we send 3 million or more email messages, but only reach around 400,000 people. Email, by its nature, entails regularly messaging the same group of people. Social media, while similar (your followers are your main audience), has a much smaller reach (we are under 30,000 each month).
We deliver many more emails (impressions) every month than there are unique recipients (reach).
Second, is Referral traffic. This is traffic that comes from other sites onto yours, but note that it excludes email, search-engine traffic and social media traffic. These are accounted for separately.
The referral source, more than any other channel, is a rough estimate. It only looks at the estimatedorganicpage traffic, so it leaves out a large potential source of traffic in the form of other distribution channels (social, email, etc.) that website publishers may be using to promote a page.
But again, reach is most valuable as a relative metric — i.e., how it changes month to month — not as an absolute number.
To get the desired timeframe of one full month on Ahrefs, select “All” (so you’re actually seeing all current live links) and then show history for “last 3 months” like so:
This is because Ahrefs, sadly, doesn’t let you provide custom dates on its backlink tool. My way of doing this adds a few steps, but they’re fairly intuitive once you get the hang of them (plus I made a video to help you).
Start by exporting the data into a spreadsheet. Next, filter out backlinks in your sheet that were first seenafter the last day of the month you’re analyzing, or last seenbefore the first day of that month. Finally, add up all the Page Views, and that will be your total “impressions” from referral traffic.
The video below how we would pull these numbers for November, using Ahrefs:
Finally, you’ll notice “branded clicks” and “branded impressions” on the template:
This data, which is easily pulled from GSC (filter for queries containing your brand name) can make for some interesting correlative data. It also helps us with engagement data, since we count branded search as a form of engagement. After all, if someone’s typing your brand name into Google Search, there’s likely some intent there.
How to evaluate estimated reach
Once you’ve filled in all your data, your sheet will look something like the image below:
That’s enough to start creating very basic pivot tables (like adding up your total reach each month). But notice all the holes and zeros?
You can fill those by pulling in your engagement metrics. Let’s run through them:
Organic search: Pull clicks from Google Search Console. (Optional: I also recommend pulling branded search impressions, which we count as engagements in our spreadsheet, as well as branded clicks). New Users from GA is a viable alternative to clicks (remember that near-perfect relationship?), but you won’t be able to filter for your branded impressions and clicks this way.
Email marketing: Total number of “clicks” from the emails you’ve sent. We do this over opens, because opens have become less reliable; some email clients now technically open your emails before you do. Clicks in emails can be pulled from your email automation platform.
Social media: Engagements (link clicks, comments, likes and reposts) pulled from Sprout, or from each social platform’s native analytics. Do the same for paid engagements.
Google Ads/AdRoll/other ad platform: Interactions, or clicks, pulled from the ad platform of your choosing.
Website referrals: Referral traffic from Google Analytics (these are the people who encountered your brand on an external website and then engaged with it).
YouTube: Views from Youtube Analytics.
Once you’ve filled in this data, your spreadsheet will look more like this:
Now you have some new insights that you can create pivot tables around. Let’s look at a few:
1. Engaged reach
This is the portion of your total estimated reach that has engaged with your brand. You want to see this climb every month.
2. Engagement rate
This is the percentage of your estimated reach that is engaging with your brand. This is arguably your most important metric — the one you should be working to increase every month. The higher that percent, the more efficient use you’re making of the reach you have.
3. Engagement rate by channel
This shows you the channels with your highest engagement rate for the current month. You can use this to flag channels that are giving you what we might call “bad” or “inefficient” reach. It affirmed our decision, for instance, to drop an entire display channel (AdRoll) in favor of another (Google Display). Month after month, we saw low engagement rates on the former. Diverting our spend away from that display channel slightly increased our cost per thousand impressions, but the added cost was more than offset by a higher engagement rate.
4. Winners and losers month-over-month
You can do this as a direct comparison for reach or for engagement. The chart below is a comparison of engagements between October (blue) and November (red). We always want the red (most recent color) to be bigger than the blue (unless, of course, you’ve pulled resources or spend from a particular channel, e.g., paid Instagram in the chart below):
5. Correlation data
This is where we get a little deeper into the funnel, and find some fascinating insights. There are many ways to search for correlations, and some of them are just common sense. For example, we noticed that our YouTube reach skyrocketed in a particular month. After looking into it, we determined that this was a result of running video ads on Google.
But reach and engagements’ most important relationships are to leads and, better yet, leads assigned to sales reps. Here’s an example using five months of our own data:
While we still need more data (5 months isn’t enough to close the book on these relationships), our current dataset suggests a few things:
More reach usually means more engagement. There’s a strong relationship between reach and engagement.
More reach usually means more lead gen. There’s a moderate relationship between reach and lead gen.
More engagement almost always means more lead gen. There is a very strong relationship between engagement and lead gen.
More engagement almost always means more assigned leads. There’s a strong relationship between engagement and leads that actually get assigned to sales people.
More lead gen almost always means more assigned leads. There’s a very strong relationship between lead gen and leads getting assigned to sales people.
This is just one of the ways we’ve sliced and diced the data, and it barely skims the surface of how you can evaluate your own brand reach and brand engagement data.
6. Collaborating with other marketers on your team
Some of the relationships and correlations are subtler, in the sense that they relate to specific levers pulled on specific channels.
For example, we were able to figure out that we can increase branded search by running broad-match-keyword Googlepaid search campaigns, specifically.
The only reason we know this is that we meet as a team regularly to look over this data, and we’re always debriefing one another on the types of actions we’re taking on different campaigns. This structured, frequent communication helps us pull insights from the data, and from each other, that we’d otherwise never uncover.
Why this work is so worth doing
If at some point while reading this article you’ve thought, “dang, this seems like a lot of work,” you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. But you wouldn’t be right, either.
Because most of the actual work happens upfront — figuring out exactly which channels you’ll track, and how you’ll track them, and building out the pivot tables that will help you visualize your data month after month.
Pulling the data is a monthly activity, and once you have your methods documented (write down EVERYTHING, because a month is a long time to remember precisely how you’ve pulled data), it’s pretty easy.
One person on our team spends about one hour per month pulling this data, and then I spend maybe another two hours analyzing it, plus 15 minutes or so presenting it at the start of each month.
We’ve only been doing this for about half a year, but it’s already filled gaps in our reporting, and it’s provided us with clues on multiple occasions of where things might be going wrong, and where we should be doubling down on our efforts.
Eventually, we even hope to help use this as a forecasting tool, by understanding the relationship between reach and sales meetings, but also reach and the most meaningful metric of all: revenue.
Petra has plenty of experience talking to C-level decision-makers about their business problems, and translating them into SEO solutions. So in today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, she takes you through the main considerations you need to pay attention to when explaining the value of your work: commitment, concerns and objections, status versus purpose, and prioritization.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hi, I'm Petra Kis-Herczegh, and welcome to my Whiteboard Friday on five key considerations for SEO buy-in. I'm an SEO and solution engineer, which means I get to talk to C-level decision-makers about their business problems and translate them into SEO solutions. Today, I will take you through the five key considerations, which are audience, commitment, concerns and objections, status versus purpose, and prioritization. We're going to talk about the common pitfalls and what you need to pay attention to and how you can make sure that you optimize this process so you can save time and do what you do best and spend more time executing your SEO strategy.
So to start with the audience, the first thing you want to understand is who you are talking to. You want to make sure that you identify your key stakeholders, the decision-makers, and also the blockers because the challenge here is that sometimes you might not be speaking to the right people or you might not be following the right process. So you might be stepping over blockers, going straight to decision-makers, which upsets people, or you might not be involving the relevant stakeholders early on. So what you need to consider here is who to involve and when. The solution here is that you want to build rapport to make sure that the stakeholders and blockers and decision-makers trust you and you want to make sure that you fully understand the process to follow it as you should within the business.
The next thing is commitment. So with commitment, you need to make sure that when you're getting buy-in, you're identifying if you're getting real buy-in or fake buy-in. Fake buy-in is when you get a yes, but you're getting it without commitment. We often tend to do this without us even realizing it by pushing to a yes, by asking questions that give no other option. So you can ask things like: Do you want your content to rank and convert better? Or do you want more traffic? These are not really questions, and what you actually do is you damage relationships, which means that you end up in a cycle where you're not being able to execute what you actually wanted to achieve because there is no true accountability on an execution level. So here you want to apply critical thinking, which means that you need to be really skeptical on how are you getting to that yes.
That drives us to the next point, concerns and objections, because you need to make sure that you address these early on. So the common pitfall here is our confirmation bias because our confirmation bias really pushes us to start a research. Let's say you're thinking about a local SEO project or a technical SEO project to look at use cases that prove your own point. But what you're doing, when you're doing that, is you're forgetting that there might be concerns and objections coming from different stakeholders and different teams. So the way how you can think about this is that you want to engage in healthy conflict. You want to make sure that you do your research with the idea to preempt these concerns and objections and ask questions like: Well, if this project is so important, why is it not being done already? What are the questions that other stakeholders could raise with changes within the website, how that could impact other teams? Are there going to be trainings required for relevant teams if we introduce, for example, a new tool? So you want to make sure that you understand what sort of concerns could come up so you can actually be really comfortable and confident when you talk about these and address them and bring them up.
That leads us to the next point, which is status versus purpose. So what's your real reason on trying to get buy-in for an SEO strategy, project, or idea? What's driving it? Because you really want to make sure that it's purpose that's driving it rather than your ego, which is why you need to check in with yourself. The real solution here is that you want to think about your SEO KPIs and connect them to overall business needs because that's when you can look at a holistic level and think about how your actual strategy is driving purpose rather than status, which leads us to our last point, which is prioritization. Because if everything is important, then nothing is. What that means is that if you focus on everything at once, the likelihood is that nothing will ever get done.
So here you actually want to use a prioritization framework. So you can go to your favorite prioritization framework. There are things like ICE, which focuses on impact, confidence, and the effort required to execute your solution. But you probably also want to add a metric on the probability and the chances that you get real buy-in from your leadership in order to make sure that you're not wasting too much time trying to get your ideas and strategy executed.
I hope you found this session useful, and hopefully you can adapt some of these to optimize your process of getting SEO buy-in, which means that you will have now more time to execute your SEO strategy.
People change jobs, move teams, and shift responsibilities all the time, and taking over toolsets can bring its own set of challenges. Whether you’re at a new company, in a new position, or expanding your responsibilities, ensuring that your Moz Pro subscription is set up correctly for your specific needs should be at the top of your to-do list.
Some of you may have inherited a whole account from a colleague or former teammate - they updated the login information and handed you the reins. For some of you, this may be the first time you’ve used Moz Pro after having just been added as a seat on a larger account. And some of you may have just been told your company has a subscription to this tool and you’ve been tasked with figuring out how to use it! Regardless of the situation, here are 10 steps to help you make sure your toolkit is properly calibrated.
1. Understand what you’re working with
Before you can really understand if your Moz Pro account is set up correctly, you have to understand what Moz Pro is and how you’ll use it. Moz Pro is a complete SEO toolset that can help you implement and monitor the success of your SEO strategies. Whether you’re working on your own site, a client’s site, or a combination, the tools in the Moz Pro suite will help you be successful.
There are 2 primary tool segments in Moz Pro - Campaigns and research tools. Within Campaigns, you can gather data on your site's rankings, page optimization, site crawl issues, and link metrics all in one place. Within a single Campaign, you can track one site and up to three competitors to benchmark key metrics and monitor your progress.
The research tools within the Moz Pro tool suite offer the ability to perform keyword, link, and competitive research throughout all the phases of your SEO strategy implementation. There are also additional research tools designed for on-off checks and client prospecting.
Tip: If you were not provided with an account for accessing Moz Pro, you cancreate a free community accountand then request to be added as a seated user by the owner of your subscription. Don’t worry! We’ll cover this in the upcoming steps as well.
2. Verify you have access to manage your subscription
In our previous Next Level post, we talked about verifying the owner of your subscription, but it’s perhaps even more critical if you are taking over Moz access from another team member or from someone who is leaving (or has already left) your company. Nothing can stop a team in their tracks faster than an unexpected billing issue or inability to upgrade a subscription when you need higher limits.
Why is this step so important? Only the owner of a Moz Pro subscription can change subscription levels, purchase add-ons, add (or remove) seated users, and delete Campaigns. Without knowing who is in charge of your subscription, you may hit roadblocks along the way when trying to make adjustments to account for new clients or projects.
To verify you have access to manage your subscription, head to Account & Billing and make sure you can see the price, renewal date, and upgrade options for your subscription. If you are not seeing those options, this means that you are a seated user with shared access and will need to either transfer ownership to yourself, or ensure that they are still able to manage the subscription for you.
3. Add (or remove) seated users
As teams shift with new members joining and folks leaving, it’s key to make sure that the right people have access to the Moz tools. Check who currently has access to your toolset in the Manage Seats section of Account & Billing. From here, you can remove seated users and assign new seats. If you see a notice that you do not have a subscription for which to manage seats, this means you are a seated user on another subscription and will need to reach out to the owner to make any changes.
4. Check your email settings
If you’ve inherited your Moz account and subscription from someone else, it’s a good idea to take a moment and check your email settings. The person before you may have opted to not receive Campaign-related emails or they may have turned off email notifications for Q&A activity. You can check your email settings at any time from the Email Settings view of your Account & Billing section.
5. Update your community profile
Speaking of Q&A activity, now is a great time to make sure your Community Profile is up to date. If your account recently changed hands, your Community Profile on moz.com may still be under the previous owner's name. Be sure to update this information before interacting in the Q&A forum so people know who you are!
Tip: If changing roles and responsibilities causes your Moz account to change hands often, you may opt to set your community profile as your company name so you can skip this step in the future! If you prefer to post and interact in the Q&A Forum under your own unique profile, you can set up afree community useraccount and add yourself as a seat on your main company subscription.
6. Ask yourself: What are my goals?
Before we move forward into checking the rest of our settings, take a moment to ask yourself what you’re looking to achieve with your Moz Pro Campaigns. The answer to this question may change the settings you’ll be looking for in the next few steps.
Here are some examples of goals you may have:
If you are looking to evaluate the crawlability of your entire site, you will need to make sure your Campaign is not set up to be restricted to a particular subdomain or subfolder (Don’t worry, we’ll cover how to look into that a little later).
If you are wanting to monitor rankings for a client’s blog, you may need to have the Campaign set up to be restricted to their blog subfolder.
If you’re looking to monitor the success of your link building efforts and how your backlink profile compares to your competitors, you’ll need to make sure you’ve identified the correct competitors to track
So, what ARE you looking to achieve? What goal do you have for each Campaign set up in your account?
7. Verify you’re following the right campaigns
While we’re talking about goals and Campaigns, let’s take a quick detour to check which Campaigns you’re following. Follow status for Campaigns is login-specific, which means that each seated user on a subscription can customize which Campaigns they receive email updates for. You can quickly check which Campaigns you’re set up to follow from the Manage Your Campaigns screen. On the right hand side there is a column titled Following which you can scan - any Campaigns with the checkbox checked are ones you are currently set to receive email updates for. Uncheck the boxes to unfollow them at any time or vice versa. This can come in handy when you’re jumping onto projects to help a teammate or taking over an existing client - just follow and unfollow Campaigns as necessary in order to stay up to date.
8. Review your campaign settings
We’ve thought about goals, reviewed basic account settings, and investigated which Campaigns we’re following. Now it’s time to dive into Campaign settings and content. Each Campaign you set up (or already have set up) has its own settings for a variety of components. Let’s take a look at each one so you can make sure you have the data you need, where you need it.
General
First up are the general settings for your Campaign. Here you’ll find information about the basic setup which was implemented during the initial Campaign creation process.
Site Basics
Under site basics you’ll find your Campaign name and information about the website you’re tracking. This is also where you’ll see if you’re tracking all sites within your domain, a specific subfolder, or a specific subdomain.
Thinking back to your goals for your projects and clients, do these settings seem correct? Are you only tracking part of a site when you need to be tracking all sites within the domain? Or are you tracking a full site when your only focus is one subfolder?
Tip: The website and scope (i.e. whether you’re tracking a subfolder, subdomain, or all sites within a domain) of a Campaign cannot be changed after Campaign creation. If you need to update these settings you will need to create a new Campaign. Just be sure to chat with your team beforeremoving or archiving any existing Campaigns.
Competitor Websites
The competitor websites you’re tracking in a Campaign can be changed at any time. Take a moment to review the ones currently being tracked - are they the right competitors based on your goals? Are they still your competitors or have they changed since the Campaign was initially created?
Let’s move on to the rankings settings of your Campaign. There are two main sections to check out here: Tracked Search Engines and Brand Rules.
Tracked Search Engines
Your Search Engine Settings can be updated at any time but keep in mind that any changes you make won’t take effect until your next Campaign update and they will impact your overall rankings data. Since we won’t have historical data for search engines you weren’t initially tracking, you will not see data for them from before the changes were implemented.
There are lots of different ways you can set up your tracked search engines for your Campaign. Some people like to track Google, Google Mobile, Yahoo, and Bing for one country. Others prefer to track Google and Google Mobile for two different countries. And some prefer to track only Google or Google Mobile for four different countries in one Campaign. The possibilities are endless! However, it is generally recommended that you track rankings for the markets where you have an audience. If your business is in the United States and Great Britain, you probably don’t want to track rankings for Canada.
“But Meghan, what if I want to track rankings for multiple search engines for multiple countries?” I’m glad you asked! In this case, you may opt to set up additional Campaigns for the same site but with different sets of tracked search engines. Additionally, if you have specific subfolders or subdomains of your site for each country, you may want to consider restricting your Campaign to that area of your site as discussed in our General Settings section.
Brand Rules
Next, let’s make sure your brand rules are set up correctly. Brand rules help the tool identify and tag tracked keywords as branded so you are able to compare branded versus non-branded rankings and Search Visibility to better understand your site’s performance in the SERPs.
When evaluating your brand rules, be sure that any terms or names associated with your brand are included. Also consider terms that may slip through the cracks and be marked as “branded” when they are, in fact, not. For example, in my own Campaign I have a rule set to tag keywords containing “Moz” as branded and another rule to exclude keywords containing “mozilla” so any mozilla related keywords will not be marked as branded. It can also be helpful to include rules for specific products associated with your brand, as well.
Site Crawl
Up next is Site Crawl. In step 8 we’ll talk more about Site Crawl but in this step you can check your page crawl limit to make sure it is set high enough to capture your whole site in the crawl. The page crawl limit for your Campaign is the number of pages our crawler, Rogerbot, will attempt to crawl each week for your site. It will crawl pages within the scope of your Campaign up to the designated limit or until it can’t find any more pages it can crawl - whichever comes first.
If your crawl limit is not set high enough to capture your whole site, you may see irregularities in your crawl data, pages not being crawled that you expect to see in your crawl inventory, or fluctuations in issues found. This is because our crawler may find and crawl different pages based on how your internal linking structure changes or as pages are added and removed between crawls. It’s also a good idea to leave some extra room at the top end of your crawl limit to account for site growth and new content.
Traffic
Lastly, let’s just double check that the correct Google Analytics account and profile are selected for your Campaign. Within the last tab, Traffic, you can see this information and update it as needed.
9. Check your Site Crawl data
In the previous step we checked the page crawl limit for your Campaign and now we’re going to take a look at your crawl data itself to make sure everything looks to be in tip top shape.
From the Site Crawl section of your Campaign, verify that your site was able to be crawled. If you’re seeing an error message indicating that your site crawl failed it could mean that our crawler is being blocked by your server, your robots.txt file isn’t accessible, or that your Campaign is set up incorrectly. The error message provided should indicate the reason why the crawl failed; review the indicated reason and then have our crawler reattempt the crawl. For additional help regarding failed crawls, we have a great resource in our Help Hub all about troubleshooting issues with crawling your site.
Another area to check within Site Crawl is the number of pages successfully crawled. Your Site Crawl Overview will show a count of pages crawled after each crawl is completed. Is this count higher or lower than you would expect for your site? If the count is lower, this could indicate one of the following:
Your page crawl limit for your Campaign is set too low - if this is the case, you can adjust this in your Campaign settings as we outlined earlier in this post.
Your robots.txt file is blocking our crawler from areas of your site - review your robots.txt file to be sure that the correct areas are being blocked by our crawler or speak with your web developer about the current settings, if necessary.
There is a 4xx or 5xx error stopping our crawler - if our crawler is receiving a 404 response for a key page or there is a server error coming from a set of pages this will keep our crawler from being able to move forward and crawl additional pages. You can review these errors in your Critical Crawler Issues section of Site Crawl.
There are plenty of other reasons you may see a lower page count than anticipated. If you need additional help investigating, we have a troubleshooting guide in our Help Hub which outlines a few other common issues. On the other side of the same coin, if the page count you’re seeing is much higher than you expect, it may indicate the following:
Your robots.txt file isn’t correctly configured to block our crawler from certain sections of your site - review your robots.txt file to be sure that the correct areas are being blocked by our crawler or speak with your web developer about the current settings, if necessary.
There is an issue with relative links causing crawler loops - review your site crawl issues to see if there are any unusually long URLs you’re not expecting such as https://mysite.com/home/produc...;
We have a few different guides which can help you investigate a high number of pages including our guide on page fluctuations and spikes in crawl issues. If everything looks good to go but you still need a bit of guidance on where to get started with all your Site Crawl data, be sure to check out our step-by-step workflow.
10. Check the Tracked Keywords (and how they’re labeled) in your Campaigns
Next, let’s take a look at your tracked keywords. From the Rankings section of your Campaign you can see a list of all the keywords you’re currently tracking. Verify that you’re tracking the correct keywords and add any that are missing. Just be sure to check in with any seated users to make sure it won’t interrupt their workflow to add them! Alternatively, you can create an all new Campaign with new keywords for your own project.
Finally, take some time to check that your keywords are labeled and segmented correctly (or at all!). If you’re not currently using labels in your Campaign, you’re missing out on the opportunity to compare rankings and Search Visibility for groups of keywords. There are an infinite number of ways you can segment your keyword data in Moz Pro using labels including (but of course not limited to):
By sales funnel stage
By product
Branded versus non-branded
Location or market
Project
Marketing campaign
Once your keywords are labeled, you have the option to filter by those labels to see metrics and rankings side by side. You can even create specific custom reports for different groups of keywords to be delivered right to your inbox on a regular basis.
Bonus! Enroll in Moz Academy
Whether you’re brand new to the Moz tools or just want to make sure you’re using every aspect of the tools to their full potential, Moz Academy offers free courses to help you learn the ins and outs of Moz Pro.
The first is How to Use Moz Pro which is an in-depth overview of all the primary tools included in your Moz Pro subscription. In this course you’ll learn about each aspect of the tools along with the metrics referenced in each.
If you’re looking to dive even deeper into theory and application, Moz Academy offers 5 different certifications which can help you add to your toolkit. These include SEO Essentials, Technical SEO, Keyword Research, Competitive Analysis, and Local SEO. Once a certification is completed, you’ll also receive a downloadable certificate and the opportunity to add a badge to your LinkedIn profile to show off your newly acquired skills.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
