Diving for Pearls: A Guide to Long Tail Keywords - Next Level

Welcome to this refreshed installment of our educational Next Level series! Originally published in June 2016 this blog has been rewritten to include new tool screenshots and refreshed workflows. Together we’ll uncover keywords in the vastness of the long tail.

Looking for more Next Level posts? Previously we explored how to create relevant and engaging SEO reports.

One of the biggest obstacles to driving forward your business online is being able to rank well for keywords that people are searching for. Getting your lovely URLs to show up in those precious top positions — and gaining a good portion of the visitors behind the searches — can feel like an impossible dream. Particularly if you’re working on a newish site on a modest budget within a competitive niche.

Well, strap yourself in, because today we’re going to live that dream. I’ll take you through the bronze, silver, and gold levels of finding, assessing, and targeting long tail keywords so you can start getting visitors to your site that are primed and ready to convert.

Quick steps to building a long tail keyword list:

1. Draw from your industry and customer knowledge

2. Add suggestions from Google Autocomplete

3. Explore industry language on social media

4. Pull relevant suggestions from a keyword tool

5. Prioritize using popularity and difficulty metrics

6. Understand the competitive landscape to pinpoint opportunities

What are long tail keywords?

The "long tail of search" refers to the many weird and wonderful ways the diverse people of the world search for any given niche.

People (yes, people! Shiny, happy, everyday, run-of-the-mill, muesli-eating, credit-card-swiping people!) rarely stop searching broad and generic 'head' keywords, like “web design” or “camera” or “sailor moon.”

They clarify their search with emotional triggers, technical terms they’ve learned from reading forums, and compare features and prices before mustering up the courage to commit and convert on your site.

The long tail is packed with searches like “best web designer in Nottingham” or “mirrorless camera 4k video 2016” or “sailor moon cat costume.”

This adaptation of the Search Demand Curve chart visualizes the long tail of search by using the tried and tested "Internet loves cats + animated gifs are the coolest = SUCCESS" formula.

The Search Demand Curve illustrates that while “head” and “body” terms typically amass higher search volume, seeming appealing at first. The vastness of the “long tail” presents a more substantial opportunity and larger percentage of search traffic that shouldn’t be ignored. You can really see this illustrated when combined as a percentage of search traffic. While this graph contains no cats, it is still entirely illustrative. However the long tail of search isn’t slowing down anytime soon with voice search and AI integrations we can expect the vastness of the long tail to continue to grow.

While search volume for any individual long tail keyword is typically less, user intent is much more specific and viewed as a group targeting the long tail often enables you to target a larger more engaged audience. Also beautifully illustrated in Dr. Pete’s infamous chunky thorax post.

The long tail of search is being constantly generated by people seeking answers from the Internet hive mind. There's no end to what you’ll find if you have a good old rummage about, including: Questions, styles, colors, brands, concerns, peeves, desires, hopes, dreams… and everything in between.

Fresh, new, outrageous, often bizarre keywords. If you’ve done any keyword research you’ll know what I mean by bizarre. Things a person wouldn’t admit to their best friend, therapist, or doctor they’ll happily pump into Google and hit search. In this post we’re going to go diving for pearls: keywords with searcher intent, high demand, low competition, and a spot on the SERPs just for you.

Bronze medal: Build your own long tail keyword

It’s really easy to come up with a long tail keyword. You can use your brain, gather some thoughts, take a stab in the dark, and throw a few keyword modifiers around your ‘head’ keyword.

Have you ever played that magnetic fridge poetry game? It’s a bit like that. You can play online if (like me) you have an aversion to physical things.

I’m no poet, but I think I deserve a medal for this attempt, and now I really want some "hot seasonal berry water."

Magnetic poetry not doing it for you? Don’t worry — that’s only the beginning.

Use your industry knowledge

Time to draw on that valuable industry knowledge you’ve been storing up, jot down some ideas, and think about intent and common misconceptions. I’m going to use the example pearls or freshwater pearls in this post as the head term because that’s something I’m interested in.

Let’s go! Let’s say I run a jewelry business and I know that my customers regularly have questions, like:

How do I clean freshwater pearls

Using my knowledge I can rattle off and build a keyword list.

Search your keyword

Engage google suggested search tool to get some more ideas. Manually enter your keyword into Google and prompting it to populate popular suggestions, like I’ve done below:

Awesome, I’m adding Freshwater pearls price to my list.

Explore the language of social media

Get amongst the over-sharers and have a look at what people are chatting about on social media by searching your keyword in Twitter, tiktok, Instagram, and Youtube. These are topics in your niche that people are talking about right now.

YouTube is also pulling up some interesting ideas around my keyword. This is simultaneously helping me gather keyword ideas and giving me a good sense about what content is already out there. Don’t worry, we’ll touch on content later on in this post. :)

I’m adding understanding types of pearls and Difference between saltwater and freshwater pearls to my list.

Ask keyword questions…?

You’ll probably notice that I’ve added a question mark to a phrase that is not a question, just to mess with you all. Apologies for the confusing internal-reading-voice-upwards-inflection.

Questions are my favorite types of keywords. What!? You don’t have a fav keyword type? Well, you do now — trust me.

Answer the Public is packed with questions radiating out from your seed term

Pop freshwater pearls into the tool and grab some questions for our growing list.

To leave no rock unturned (or no mollusk unshucked), let’s pop over to Google Search Console to find keywords that are already sending you traffic (and discover any mismatches between your content and user intent.)

Pile these into a list, like I've done in this spreadsheet.

Now this is starting to look interesting: we’ve got some keyword modifiers, some clear buying signals, and a better idea of what people might be looking for around "freshwater pearls."

Should you stop there? I’m flabbergasted — how can you even suggest that?! This is only the beginning. :)

Silver medal: Assess demand and explore topics

So far, so rosy. But we've been focusing on finding keywords, picking them up, and stashing them in our collection like colored glass at the seaside.

To really dig into the endless tail of your niche, you’ll need a keyword tool like our very own Keyword Explorer. This is invaluable for finding topics within your niche that present a real opportunity for your site.

If you’re trying out Keyword Explorer for the first time, you’ll have 10 free searches/mo with a free Moz Community account and even more with a Moz Pro free trial or paid subscription.

Find search volume for your head keyword

To start, enter a broad industry keyword. In my case I’ll type in "pearls" into the Keyword Explorer search box. Now you can see Moz’s Monthly Volume displaying how often a term or phrase is searched for in Google:

Now try "freshwater pearls." As expected, the search volume goes down, but we’re getting more specific.

We could keep going like this, but we’re going to burn up all our free searches. Just take it as read that, as you get more specific and enter all the phrases we found earlier, the search volume will decrease even more. There may not be any data at all. That’s why you need to explore the searches around this main keyword.

Find even more long tail keywords

Below the search volume, click on "Keyword Suggestions."

Well, hi there, ever-expanding long tail! We’ve gone from a handful of keywords pulled together manually from different sources to 1,000 suggestions right there on your screen. Positioned right next to that, search volume to give us an idea of demand.

The diversity of searches within your niche is just as important as that big number we saw at the beginning, because it shows you how much demand there is for this niche as a whole. We’re also learning more about searcher intent.

I’m scanning through those 1,000 suggestions and looking for other terms that pop up again and again. I’m also looking for signals and different ways the words are being used to pick out words to expand my list.

I like to toggle between sorting by Relevancy and search volume, and then scroll through all the results to cherry-pick those that catch my eye.

Now reverse the volume filter so that it’s showing lower-volume search terms and scroll down through the end of the tail to explore the lower-volume chatter.

If we don’t have tracked data in our database you can always cross reference with another data set to validate their value.

This is where your industry knowledge comes into play again. Bots, formulas, spreadsheets, and algorithms are all well and good, but don’t discount your own instincts and knowledge.

Use the suggestion filters to your advantage and play around with broader or more specific suggestion types.

Looking through the suggestions, I’ve noticed that the word “cultured” has popped up a few times.

To see these all bundled together, I want to look at the grouping options in Keyword Explorer. I like the high lexicon groups so I can see how much discussion is going on within my topics.

Scroll down and expand that group to get an idea of demand and assess intent.

I’m also interested in the words around "price" and "value," so I’m doing the same and saving those to my sheet, along with the search volume. A few attempts at researching the "cleaning" of pearls wasn’t very fruitful, so I’ve adjusted my search to "clean freshwater pearls."

Because I’m a keyword questions fanatic, I’m also going to filter by questions (the bottom option from the drop-down menu):

OK! How is our keyword list looking? Pretty darn hot, I reckon! We’ve gathered together a list of keywords and dug into the long tail of these sub-niches, and right alongside we’ve got search volume.

You’ll notice that some of the keywords I discovered in the bronze stage don’t have any data showing up in Keyword Explorer (indicated by the hyphen in the screenshot above). That’s ok — they’re still topics I can research further. This is exactly why we have assessed demand; no wild goose chase for us!

Ok, we’re drawing some conclusions, we’re building our list, and we’re making educated decisions. Congrats on your silver-level keyword wizardry! :D

Gold medal: Find out who you’re competing with

We’re not operating in a vacuum. There’s always someone out there trying to elbow their way onto the first page. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just because it’s a long tail term with a nice chunk of search volume all those clicks will rain down on you. If the terms you’re looking to target already have big names headlining, this could very well alter your roadmap.

To reap the rewards of targeting the long tail, you’ll have to make sure you can outperform your competition.

Manually check the SERPs

Check out who's showing up in the search engine results page (SERPs) by running a search for your head term. Make sure you’re signed out of Google and in an incognito tab.

We’re focusing on the organic results to find out if there are any weaker URLs you can pick off.

I’ll start with “freshwater pearls” for illustrative purposes.

Whoooaaa, this is a noisy page. I’ve had to scroll a whole 2.5cm on my magic mouse (that’s very nearly a whole inch for the imperialists among us) just to see any organic results.

Let’s install the Mozbar to discover some metrics on the fly, like domain authority and back-linking data.

Now, if seeing those big players in the SERPs doesn’t make it clear, looking at the Mozbar metrics certainly does. This is exclusive real estate. It’s dominated by retailers, although Wikipedia gets a place in the middle of the page.

Let’s get into the mind of Google for a second. It — or should I say "they" (I can’t decide if it’s more creepy for Google to be referred to as a singular or plural pronoun. Let’s go with "they") — anyway, I digress. "They" are guessing that we’re looking to buy pearls, but they're also offering results on what they are.

This sort of information is offered up by big retailers who have created content that targets the intention of searchers. Mikimoto drives us to their blog post all about where freshwater pearls come from.

As you get deeper into the long tail of your niche, you’ll begin to come across sites you might not be so familiar with. So go and have a peek at their content.

With a little bit of snooping you can easily find out:

• how relevant the article is

• if it looks appealing, up to date, and sharable

• be really judge-y: why not?

Now let’s find some more:

• when the article was published

• when their site was created

• how often their blog is updated

• how many other sites are linking to the page with Link Explorer

• how many tweets, likes, etc.

Learn more about how to do a competitor analysis in our free guide, and don’t forget to download the handy worksheet.

Document all of your findings in our spreadsheet from earlier to keep track of the data. This information will now inform you of your chances of ranking for that term.

Manually checking out your competition is something that I would strongly recommend. But we don’t have all the time in the world to check each results page for each keyword we’re interested in.

Keyword Explorer leaps to our rescue again

Run your search and click on "SERP Analysis" to see what the first page looks like, along with authority metrics and social activity.

All the metrics for the organic results, like Page Authority, goes into calculating the Difficulty score above (lower is better).

And all those other factors — the ads and suggestions taking up space on the SERPs — that's what's used to calculate Organic CTR (higher is better).

Priority is all the other metrics tallied up. You definitely want this to be higher.

So now we have 3 important numerical values we can use to gauge our competition. We can use these values to compare keywords.

After a few searches in Keyword Explorer, you’re going to start hankering for a keyword list or two. For this you’ll need a paid subscription, or a Moz Pro 30-day free trial.

It’s well worth the sign-up; not only do you get 5,000 keyword queries per month and 30 lists (on the Medium plan), but you also get to check out the super-magical-KWE-mega-list-funky-cool metric page. That’s what I call it, just rolls off the tongue, you know?

Okay, fellow list buddies, let’s go and add those terms we’re interested in to our lovely new list.

Then head up to your lists on the top right and open up the one you just created.

Now we can see the spread of demand, competition and SERP features for our whole list.

You can compare Volume, SERPS Features, Difficulty, Organic CTR, and Priority across multiple lists, topics, and niches.

How to compare apples with apples

Comparing keywords is something our support team gets questions about all the time.

Should I target this word or that word?

For the long tail keyword, the Volume is a lot lower, Difficulty is also down, the Organic CTR is a bit up, and overall the Priority is down because of the drop in search volume.

But don’t discount it! By targeting these sorts of terms, you’re focusing more on the intent of the searcher. You’re also making your content relevant for all the other neighboring search terms.

Let’s compare the difference between freshwater and cultured pearls with how much are freshwater pearls worth.

Search volume is the same, but for the keyword how much are freshwater pearls worth Difficulty is up, but so is the overall Priority because the Organic CTR is higher.

But just because you’re picking between two long tail keywords doesn’t mean you’ve fully understood the long tail of search.

You know all those keywords I grabbed for my list earlier in this post? Well, here they are sorted into topics.

Look at all the different ways people search for the same thing. This is what drives the long tail of search — searcher diversity. If you tally all the volume up for the cultured topic, we’ve got a bigger group of keywords and overall more search volume. This is where you can use Keyword Explorer and the long tail to make informed decisions.

You’re laying out your virtual welcome mat for all the potential traffic these terms send.

Platinum level: I lied — there's one more level!

For all you lovely overachievers out there who have reached the end of this post, I’m going to reward you with one final tip.

You’ve done all the snooping around on your competitors, so you know who you’re up against. You’ve done the research, so you know what keywords to target to begin driving intent-rich traffic.

Now you need to create strong, consistent, and outstanding content.

As Dr Pete confirmed:

We don’t have to work ourselves to death to target the long tail of search. It doesn’t take 10,000 pieces of content to rank for 10,000 variants of a phrase, and Google (and our visitors) would much prefer we not spin out that content. The new, post-NLP (Natural Language Processing) long tail of SEO requires us to understand how our keywords fit into semantic space, mapping their relationships and covering the core concepts. Study your SERPs diligently, and you can find the patterns to turn your own long tail of keywords into a chonky thorax of opportunity.

Here's where you really have to tip your hat to long tail keywords, because by strategically targeting the long tail you can start to build enough authority in the industry to beat stronger competition and rank higher for more competitive keywords in your niche.

Wrapping up…

The various different keyword phrases that make up the long tail in your industry are vast, often easier to rank for, and indicate stronger intent from the searcher. By targeting them you’ll find you can start to rank for relevant phrases sooner than if you just targeted the head. And over time, if you get the right signals, you’ll be able to rank for keywords with tougher competition. Pretty sweet, huh? Give Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool a whirl and let me know how you get on :)

The Mozbot Mashup: Roger Explores the World of Generative AI Imagery

AI image generation has taken big leaps forward in the last year. It’s fun to play with. It’s a little bit weird. It can produce some mind-blowing results — and often laughable ones.

But is it useful in a marketing context?

We decided to find out, and our valiant SEO robot, Roger, was volunteered to be our first test subject. Don’t worry, he was cool with it. He was actually pretty excited to have a machine intelligence to engage with, after spending so much time doling out SEO knowledge to us simple humans.

Training the model

AI imagery tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E 2 are pretty amazing at creating images of just about anything you can come up with, but they have their own algorithmic and random-noise way of getting there. So while you can come up with interesting results, it can be hard to come up with a specific result.

To get to anything that actually looked like our friendly SEO Mozbot, we needed to train a stable diffusion model to get a start. There are a lot of ways to go about this, some that get pretty technical, and a number of others that use app interfaces to make the process easier on someone with a little less technical expertise.

We chose to start with Astria, a solution which allows you to customize (they call it tuning) a model of your own. A lot of users train it on their own likeness to make cool avatars (like the popular Lensa app), but we threw a bunch of variations of Roger in there, had him party with the AI model, and watched what kind of shenanigans they got up to.

A Rogues Gallery of Rogers

These tools generate images based on a text prompt, so our initial prompt was to see if it could output a version in a fun and colorful 3D style.

Not bad first results! It was clear this generation drew heavily from photos of a Roger toy held in a hand, as well as a photo of our life-size Roger Mascot at one of our Mozcon events (thus, the people in the background of some of the images). These are all actually recognizable as Roger, which I was impressed by, though none of them are quite “right”.

Time to try something in a completely different style. How about “Roger Mozbot with a rocket jetpack and fishbowl helmet, watercolor painting.”

Some super fun results! And others that look like Roger is having a very bad time. Also, apparently the “rocket” part of our prompt gave Roger some hardware in some of the results that made it look like his switch was accidentally set from Hugs to Destroy.

Further iterations produced equally interesting, fun, terrible, and wacky results as we messed around with other styles including more 3D, schematics, children’s book illustrations, and even Anime!

They just keep coming…

Want even more Roger mashups? We experimented further with a tool called Scenario.gg, which is a tool targeted toward creating game assets, but also has a nifty way to train a generator. A bonus of this one is that you can use an existing image as a starting point for a generation, allowing a little bit of additional control in how close or far you hew towards that starting point. Here are some of those results:

If you’re following generative AI, you know it’s an area evolving incredibly fast right now, with new tools, features, and techniques constantly coming out. A couple weeks after the initial generating on Astria, we delved back in and they have a video generating feature now. A little trial and error later, we had a super cool little video of Roger to go with all those pictures:

What have we done?

We’ve put Roger through the AI ringer, but to what end? Sorry Roger, it was all in the name of… SCIENCE! And learning. The initial experimental results came out with a ton of quantity, but the quality was not quite there. At least for reproducing a brand mascot with a specific look but that may not be widely disseminated enough to have been a subject of training on the models. If you are a little less specific with the results you are trying to achieve, AI imagery is already achieving jaw dropping results. Good enough that we are finding other ways to use this imagery in our marketing material, and no doubt you have seen some really cool stuff in your various feeds. For getting a quality version of Roger in a new style or pose, it would be more efficient to have an actual person just illustrate or render the artwork in the traditional style.

As mentioned at the top of the article, this technology is developing rapidly, and it seems like the game is changing every week with new models and new implementations that can make results better. As of the time of releasing this article, we’re already working on a new batch of Rogers using other tools, so look out for a follow up in the near future.

Roger is representative of a software tool that humans can interface with to achieve greater things. Generative AI is a new and potentially very powerful such tool in art, and for our purposes, brand design. Creative and talented people are still needed to guide the process, make decisions, and curate or cleanup the results. So, here’s to humans and robots working together to achieve interesting things! We’ll just have to see where Moz and Roger go with this next.

How to Advance Your SEO Career – Whiteboard Friday

As SEOs, we know how to optimize websites, but what about our careers? In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Noah shares his insights from his own search marketing career path, with tips for those people in the beginning and middle stages of their career.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. This is incredibly exciting to be with you here today for Whiteboard Friday. Most of these help you with really cool strategic and tactical stuff, and today we're going to be optimizing something super different. It's your career. It's the most important thing in the world.

This talk is going to be especially useful for people in the beginning and middle stages of their career. Perhaps you've just started out in your journey in SEO, perhaps you've started to take on some more challenging work, perhaps you're given more areas of responsibility, and you're trying to understand how do I get to that next step. You're thinking about, "How do I go from maybe being a specialist to a manager, to a senior manager, or maybe even better, to a director or a vice president in an organization?" For me, this was a really exciting journey. I want to share with you some thoughts that I've gathered along the way in the hopes that you, too, can have a little bit of the same kinds of outcomes that I've been able to do.

The steps are pretty simple. The execution takes time and a lot of dedication and a lot of effort. So if you're a striver, a trier, someone who just really has a lot of energy and drive, you're going to get a ton out of this today.

The first thing that I want to say is that if you are just slightly strategic, just slightly strategic, imagine yourself as a shepherd and you're up on top of a mountain and you have all of these sheep, and all you know is that you need them to go downhill. It's that level of strategy that's necessary to get to the next place. You don't have to know everything. You don't have to be an expert in all areas of SEO, and we'll get into that in a second. 

What are we really talking about? We're talking about craft, and we're talking about people primarily in this process that we're going over. For me, a lot of this comes from a blog post that I read by a guy named Jason Roberts. He published this in 2010. It'll be a link in the show notes. For him, it was called the Surface Area of Luck. This blog post blew my mind when I read it, because it's all about the doing. It's about the craft. It's about the skills. It's what we learn, it's what we do, and it's about the telling. It's how we communicate to others the qualities and the skills that we bring to the craft every single day.

So what we're talking about are things like learning how to do great work and how to tell people about it. The better we do and the more skills we learn and the more people who know about it, and it's not just all of the people, it's the right people, that will accelerate your career through all those steps that I talked about before, whether it's from specialist to manager, manager to director, or director to vice president.

So what are we really talking about? We're talking about getting smarter. We're talking about when we start in SEO. I think it's crazy important to start in an agency environment. My theory is that if you're in an agency, you're exposed to all different types of problems and all different types of clients and all different types of verticals.

As you get started, part of learning is learning how to think. It's learning how to make decisions. It's learning how to look at data. It's learning the fundamentals of the web, how to build HTML, maybe some cascading style sheets, maybe a little bit of JavaScript, just a little just to know what it is. Learning a lot about different types of SEO with different types of clients, learning the challenges that happen in a local SEO type challenge, learning about the challenges that come into play when you're learning how to build content, learning how to build stuff around strategy, learning all about e-commerce SEO as well. So getting this wide array of exposure so you can learn all about the different types of problems.

What you're going to find in that process is you're going to start getting excited and passionate about something, and you're going to find yourself talking to people, and you're going to find yourself following people on social media that are experts in one specific thing. You're going to watch Whiteboard Fridays about specific topic areas. You might find yourself going super deep into technical SEO. You might find yourself going super deep into e-commerce SEO. You need to listen to that, because that's your inner self telling you where your passion is.

This is our Moz-shaped superpower. This whole process of learning is really important, and it's really important because it helps you unlock your superpower. Going from going wide, almost like what Rand talked about all those years ago with a T-shaped marketer, that's a lot what we're talking about, getting a really nice wide foundation early in our career so that we can unlock what our superpower is.

What is our superpower? It's that thing that keeps you up at night. It's that thing that when you wake up, you think about. It's that thing that you can't find yourself stop talking to your colleagues about or reaching out to other people on social media. Notice, when we start talking about reaching out to people on social media, that's where we get into the people portion of this process.

So once you find your superpower, you want to get really, really good at it, and you're going to find yourself up-skilling religiously. You're going to learn all kinds of new technologies. You're going to learn processes and workflows to help you get the most out of that superpower.

This is where we get to the next stage, and this is incredibly powerful. As you start to improve and start to go down that path, remember this concept of the sheep. When you start to unlock your superpower, it doesn't mean that you're going to end up walking in a straight line. It's going to be meandering, and it's going to be in a direction, and you should expect that and be open to change and open to possibilities.

Once we know what our superpower is, we can start to think about our board of advisors. These are the people who are 6 to 24 or 36 months ahead of you. The reason that we're targeting that very specific range of time and world of experiences is that they're going to be able to have all of the same recent learnings and recent challenges that you're going through in the back of their own minds, and they're going to do everything that they can to help you.

So start to pay attention on social media, places like Twitter, places like LinkedIn, and start following the people who are doing the thing that you're really passionate about. Start liking and commenting on their tweets, maybe comment, and eventually you're going to find yourself reaching out to them directly and saying something like this via a direct message. "I love what you're talking about and the problems that you're working on. Would you be open to a Zoom? I'm trying my hardest to build my network, and I'd love some time. Thoughts?" Keep it really simple, value their time. What you're going to find is that if you're kind and you're nice, people will go above and beyond to help you in your career.

So we're building our board of advisors here. What you're going to find is that these people care a ton about your outcomes, and they're going to do whatever they can to introduce you to other people who are going to be able to help you as well.

Now that we're talking about people, we all know how to be a good person. The core of it is being nice. You're going to find, and this has played so well for me in my career, that if you're kind, genuinely caring about your peers and colleagues across our industry, you're going to find that the industry will open up to you like an oyster.

More things on people. You're going to find a need to connect with these people who share that same passion, and that's when we get into this idea of community. This is critically important. When I started in SEO, I had no idea how I fit into anything. I had a 20-year career doing retail, and I also had a lot of experience building websites, but I didn't have direct SEO experience. I knew I liked automation. That was my sheep down the mountain moment. But I didn't really see my community. I would advise that you try and find one on Slack, Discord, or maybe a YouTube channel that you're really passionate about. If you don't see a community, make one. Sounds crazy, right? Then, after you join this community, you're going to find that if you're producing content, we're telling mode, we're telling the world about what we do, if you're producing content, whether it's a podcast, a YouTube channel, or maybe it's articles because you don't feel comfortable yet being in front of your peers, maybe imposter syndrome is still like totally overwhelming at times, you're going to find that starting to get in touch with that community is going to open up more and more doors for you. It's this concept of the Luck Surface Area. The more we do and the better we get at it and the more people that know about it, the better our world will become.

What you're going to find is that the next stage, if possible, if you can get yourself to that place, is to consider speaking in public. You're going to find that that's incredibly powerful. If it sounds scary, start really, really small. Go bigger, start at a local meetup, speak at a local conference, try and go a little bigger and see what your comfort level is. If you like it, you're going to find that there's no better opportunity for opening doors for you.

So that's it. It's the Luck Surface Area. If you embrace this and really dedicate yourself to upskilling, you're going to develop the types of skills and relationships that make you impossible to ignore in our industry. If you do that in five, six, seven years, you'll be able to move from being a specialist through management into being a director and hopefully a vice president. I hope you guys got a ton out of this today. I'm super grateful to be here, and y'all take care. Cheers.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Shelfies: Why and Where Local Businesses Should Publish Them

If you own or market a local brand, your camera has never been a greater business asset. Early smartphones may have inspired the selfie, and it’s a fantastic idea to photograph the owner and staff of a local business to prove both its authenticity and approachability, but in a commercial context, it’s the “shelfie” that’s I see coming to the fore as a signal to both customers and search engines of what to expect on your premises.

For the past few years, I’ve strongly encouraged local businesses to photograph their most popular goods and services and add these pictures to their Google Business Profiles, but shelfies are different – instead of snapping a single product, take photos of your shelves and displays to give a sense of the abundance and character of what you vend. One look at this on a local business listing, and any customer would immediately know that this is a great nearby place to head for socks:

Or that this independent grocery store has a deli counter with prepared salads:

Or that this may be a hardware store, but it looks like it has a great selection of kitchen wares:

Why publish local business shelfies?

Potential customers may not bother to read all your local business listing categories, your business descriptions, your posts, but if they see a great image of what they’re looking for, the connection is instantaneous (in fact, 400% faster than textual learning). And it’s not just people who are learning from your shelfies…it’s Google, too! Local SEO, Mike Blumenthal mentioned this in a Duct Tape Marketing interview:

“I was listening to a Google webinar for Product Experts… and they really liked what they called shelfies: pictures of the products in your business, on the shelf where Google and the consumer could get a really solid idea of what the place looked like and the range of products you were offering… They’ve created a term for it and they're clearly focused on it. And I think it's the kind of photograph you want.”

Google has gotten so good at parsing images that they are now able to match them to perceived query intent. We already know that Google differentiates between images of single products. For example, here’s a search for “engagement rings san francisco”, and do note the images in the local pack:

But when I change my query to “diamond necklaces san francisco”, look at how the photo for the business in the top spot changes. It’s the same company, but a totally different image chosen to match my query:

I have yet to find a live example of Google behaving this way inside the 3-pack for shelfie-type queries, but what we do know from Google’ Cloud Vision API is that they are quite capable of distinguishing between multiple objects in a single image:

Given Mike Blumenthal’s report from the Product Experts webinar and Google’s ever-increasing ability to parse images, I would highly recommend that you do a photo shoot this spring of your most popular shelves of inventory, because I predict that Google will presently treat shelfies the same way that they are already handling single-object images. Additionally, proofs that your premises are well-stocked make simple good sense in 2023, as supply chain shortages continue.

Where to publish your local business shelfies

Here are five places to promote your high-quality shelf pics:

1. Google Business Profile: Two to three times per month, upload a new shelfie to your main photos set on your listings, as it’s felt a steady drip is more impactful than a flood. You can also upload shelfies to the Products section of your listing via the New Merchant Experience, representing product lines rather than single products with these photos. Finally, use shelfies in your Google Updates (formerly Google Posts) to advertise the breadth, depth, and availability of desirable inventory.

2. Apple Maps: Moz Local customers should know that you can add up to 100 photos to your dashboard and we’ll distribute your images to Apple Maps. The company’s launch of Apple Business Connect shows that they are getting serious about local, and so should you. ABC also has a new feature called Showcases, which is like Google Updates, and which would also be a good place to microblog about your shelfies. Again, a slow drip is likely the best approach to gradually proving the active status of your listings.

3. Your other structured citations: Shelfies belong on any local business listings that supports photos. Add them manually, or let Moz Local do the distribution for you.

4. Your website: Be sure your location landing pages incorporate some shelfies to give potential customers an instant idea of what they’ll find at your different premises.

5. Your social media profiles: These would be the best places to post up-to-the minute shelfies of hard-to-find items in short supply, holiday-related offers, and new product lines you’re introducing to the community.

Image credit: VGM8383

When I was young, I remember responding with excitement to the nicely-designed holiday displays at different stores. It was a small thrill to see the valentines in the window of the local stationers, the witch’s kettle of candy corn at the grocer’s in fall, or shiny paper crackers imported all the way from the UK for Christmas. Shelves taught me things about my neighbors — the special Manischewitz matzos and Kedem grape juice at Passover and the red envelopes and paper lanterns at Lunar New Year helped me appreciate the diversity and celebratory nature of my community. In Spain, the beautiful arrangement of products has become such an artform that people regularly photograph and even paint the marketplaces there.

So there’s a small goal you can certainly meet in the months ahead: creating displays that you’re proud to photograph and publicize, and maybe if they’re inspiring enough, customers will opt in, too, and add their own shelfies to your local business listings, and their reviews and social posts about your business. Some things in local search marketing are fun, and it’s nice when they’re no big hassle to do well!