Mining for Content Ideas - Next Level

Not to state the obvious, but as marketers, part of our job is to create content. Whether it’s in the form of blog posts, landing pages, social media posts, emails, newsletters, and so on - there’s no way to get around it. It is a critical component of our job. And sometimes, it can be challenging to come up with new ideas or ways to iterate on old ones. With the world consuming content at lightning speed, it is becoming even more difficult to keep up with the expectation of turning out fresh content.

We’ve recently published some excellent pieces on the Moz Blog all about content distribution and strategy, including the Whiteboard Fridays “How to Maximize Content” and “A Content Engine that Drives Revenue” (both from Ross Simmonds). And, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, content ideation and inspiration can come from anywhere. But what if I told you that you can also use the Moz tools to mine for content ideas? Let’s dig into different ways to use the Moz tools to supplement our content strategies.

Find gaps in your existing content

When supplementing or modifying your content strategy, a good place to start is by examining your existing content and finding the gaps. This can help identify new content ideas and areas where your content strategy may be missing key opportunities to thrive.

The Keyword Gap tool in Moz Pro allows you to enter your site and up to 3 competitors to identify Keywords to Improve and Top Competing Content.

Pro tip: Not sure who your online competitors are? Or just want to confirm and scope out who they may be? Check out the True Competitor tool to find out.

The Keywords to Improve section is instrumental when identifying gaps in your existing content strategy. After entering the sites you’d like to compare, the tool will list keywords for which you and your competitors rank. You can then use the filter option to see only specific segments of keywords. For example, we may want to see only keywords where we’re ranking on the second page to identify opportunities for content improvements. We will even show you the Traffic Lift for those keywords, which is the amount of traffic we estimate you can gain by overtaking your competitor in the SERP.

Another great use case for this tool is to identify new content ideas. Let’s say we’re working on building out the “best of” section of our foodie blog; we can filter to see keywords that include “Best,” as seen in the screenshot below. We can then identify keywords for which we’re not ranking, but our competitors are and work to build content around them. In this case, we’re not ranking for “Best Pizza in Los Angeles,” so we may want to see about creating a blog post about this topic.

Spotting these content gaps can strengthen your content strategy. It can not only help spark ideas for new content but also help identify places where your content can be improved or refreshed for better performance.

Identify what type of content is performing

One of the best places to get ideas for content is to see what kind of content is already out there and performing. Top Competing Content in Keyword Gap can provide insight into what is performing well by listing content your competitors rank for with the Content URL and Top Ranking Keywords.

In this example, we can see that one of the competitors I’ve entered ranks well for keywords related to choosing a mattress size and, perhaps more importantly, that the content ranking is from their blog. We can now look at the blog posts themselves to get an idea of what format has been successful for them and what information they are including. We can ask ourselves:

• Is this a topic we can cover on our site? 

• Do we already cover this, but it’s not ranking as well? 

• Is there a way we can improve the content or add a different perspective, format, or content type to the space? 

The possibilities are endless!

Spot tangential content ideas

Sticking with Top Competing Content in Keyword Gap, let's see if we can spot some ideas for tangential content. As Amanda Milligan discusses in her Whiteboard Friday episode, content ideas which aren’t directly related to your product can often lead to positive outcomes like links, social shares, and brand awareness. These peripherally related topics can supplement your content strategy and help create a well-rounded library of assets.

Sticking with our mattress company example, let’s say we are looking for content ideas to help build out our newly launched blog. We may know that there is value in creating pieces around mattress-related topics like deciding on a mattress size or determining what firmness would be best, but what tangential content ideas can we identify in our research? The example above shows that our competitors are ranking for content related to topics like weighted blankets and sleep hygiene. These could be great opportunities for me to create new content not directly related to mattresses but still related to the sleep industry.

Uncover hidden gems

Just like content creation, keyword research is a fundamental part of SEO and marketing strategies. And as you’re out there digging into things like search volume, difficulty, and SERP analysis, you may be able to uncover some hidden gems to inform your content strategy as well.

Hopping over to Keyword Explorer, we can mine for content ideas in the Keyword Suggestions section of the tool. Keyword Suggestions will provide a list of keywords related to the seed keyword entered, sorted by Relevancy to the original term. You can also apply filters for the source type, grouping preferences, and volume to further define your results.

Let’s start by looking at the option to filter titled Display keyword suggestions that. This filter defaults to Include a mix of sources, but an option in the drop-down could be the ace up your sleeve when it comes to content ideation - the filter option called are questions. By selecting are questions, we can see a list of the types of questions searchers ask in relation to our initial keyword.

In this example, consider that we work for a real estate agency and are researching content related to buying a house. Filtering our keyword suggestions by are questions will provide us with specific content ideas related to what people ask when buying a home. This can offer a gold mine of content ideas to flesh out a real estate blog or website to help clients find the information they seek. 

We can even take this research one step further by grouping our keyword suggestions by lexical similarity. Just a reminder here that lexical similarity refers to how closely related or similar the keywords in the group are. Low lexical similarity will result in fewer groups with more keywords since the tool will group keywords that are less similar. 

Grouping keywords can help us identify additional keywords we may want to target and broad-match keywords that may be worth including in our content. Be mindful of over-optimizing, though! We want to avoid keyword stuffing and cannibalization since they may negatively impact rankings. That being said, consider the below example of how grouping keywords has helped to identify a few content gems. 

Using our previous example of “buying a house” as the seed keyword, we’ve grouped our keywords by low lexical similarity. Within the “What to consider when buying a house” group, there are two long-tail keywords which may be great inspiration for a new piece of content for our real estate agency - “what to look for when buying a house checklist” and “what to know when buying a house for the first time.” We can now take that information and create a dedicated resource or a blog post that includes a checklist for what to consider when buying a home for the first time and what the buying process looks like. Imagine the inspiration you can get from digging into these suggestions even further!

Scope out the competition

So far, we’ve identified content opportunities, uncovered new ideas, and found gaps in our existing strategy. But what about our competition? What are they doing? We touched on this a bit using the Keyword Gap tool but let’s dig in further. When modifying your content strategy, it’s important to understand what your competitors are doing and what their audience is engaging with. Although you won’t have access to their traffic data (unless they give you access to it, which is highly unlikely), there is a way you can get an idea of what content may be driving traffic to their site. Or, at the very least, what content is of high value. This is through link analysis. Moz offers quite a few ways to do this, but I’m going to highlight a feature which can help get us started with this research.

Top Pages in Link Explorer will return a list of the pages on a site with the most backlinks. This can provide insight into the types of content people find valuable on a site - pages with more links are more valuable. This is partly because backlinks are a ranking factor. Additionally, all those links provide benefits like traffic, brand exposure, and more. 

After inputting a competitor into Top Pages, we can get an idea of which pages on their site provide the most value. In the screenshot above, we can see that this particular competitor has a lot of “best of” articles which gain a lot of links. We can now explore these pages and see if there is an opportunity to create or modify content on our own site to meet similar demands.

Pro tip: Once you’ve created your content, you can use Link Intersect to find domains and pages linking to your competitors and not to you. This can offer a great way to supplement a link building strategy!

Discover opportunities for elevation

Just like creating new content, refreshing your existing URLs is essential to any content strategy. Elevating your existing content is like polishing your jewelry - it helps keep it in tip-top shape, extends the piece's life, and keeps it relevant to your “collection.” There are many ways to identify and update content in your existing library, but here are two ways to get started (and find new content opportunities in the process).

First, let’s investigate featured snippet opportunities. Once we’ve created a Campaign in Moz Pro and are tracking keywords over time, we will have access to the SERP Features section. This part of the tool tracks SERP features included in the search results for your tracked keywords, including featured snippets.

Exploring which of our tracked keywords have featured snippets in the SERP can help us identify opportunities for content refresh and new pieces of content. When looking for opportunities for a content refresh, we can seek out keywords where we are ranking on the first page of the SERP but are not included in the featured snippet. In this case, the tool will provide insight into what page is included in the featured snippet and our current rank. This can make it easier to spot high-value pages with a chance of moving into that coveted top spot of the SERP.

Alternatively, looking at which of our tracked keywords include a featured snippet but where we are not ranking on the first page (or at all) can help to identify possible opportunities for creating new, high-value content. We’ll just want to be sure to optimize for the featured snippet right from the start. 

Pro tip: Export a CSV of the SERP Features data in your Campaign to sort and filter outside the app. If a SERP feature is marked Included in the CSV, it means your site is included in that particular feature. If it’s marked true it means the SERP feature is present for that keyword, but your tracked site isn’t included. 

Next, we’ll pop over to the Page Optimization section of our Campaign. Although the primary purpose of this feature is to illustrate how well-optimized a page is for a particular keyword, there is a hidden gem that can help identify refresh opportunities, new content ideas, and tangential topics. The Content Suggestions tab will list keywords and topics often used on the top-ranking pages for the keyword we’re optimizing for. 

In the above example, we’re optimizing for the keyword “best pillow.” Looking at the content suggestions, it may be a good idea to format this content as a list (like “11 best pillows”) or to include information about what types of sleepers would benefit from each pillow listed (like “side sleepers”). These content suggestions can also help us to find ideas for other pieces of content, tangentially related.

Find the sweet spot of innovation

If there’s one thing we can take away from this exploration of content ideation with Moz Pro, it’s that there are infinite ways to do it. This post only covers a handful of them; the reality is that the world (of content creation) is your oyster! The key is to find which features, tools, and processes fit best with your strategy and make them work for you. How do you use the tools to investigate new ideas? I’d love to hear about it!

Google vs. AI — Whiteboard Friday

Large Language Models have taken the world by storm in recent months. In today’s episode, Tom goes over some of the new threats to Google from recent advances in machine learning models like ChatGPT, and how Google might react to those threats.

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

Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans. Today I want to talk about some of the threats posed to Google by recent advances in large language models and natural language processing and chatbots and this kind of thing.

I want to talk about how Google might react to some of these threats because that's obviously going to affect us, whatever happens, as SEOs. Now the lens that I want to look at this through is think about some of the different kinds of query that we currently use Google for. Really it's kind of an artifact of Google's dominance in the last decade or two that we use Google as the go-to tool for such a varied set of uses.

So I've got some example searches here, and obviously this is just some random things that came into my head. This is not representative of everything people use Google for, which is even more varied. But I've got like a commercial query, "running shoes £ 50." So a lot of people know now and the data has been around for a few years that Amazon is actually a bigger product search engine than Google in the U.S.

More product search journeys start on Amazon than on Google. So that's not anything to do with large language models, but that's sort of some context to this scenario for Google. Then we've got things like "pancake recipe," sort of very informational, uncontroversial where, yeah, actually a chat AI can do a pretty good job just sort of aggregating all the different recipes that it's consumed in its training set.

"COVID symptoms" way more authority sensitive query, right? So at the moment, this is kind of a strong point for Google because, weirdly enough, as consumers we trust Google more than we might trust something like an NLP model right now. Then "Moz blog," so this is your bread- and-butter navigational web search, where really a web search engine, this is what they originally set out to be good at, and they are the sort of natural tool for a problem like this.

Whereas for some of these other ones, it's not obvious that what I want is a website at all, let alone a web search engine. Now I think the interesting thing here, so I talked about how Amazon was probably the natural competitor for some of these product queries, but it's a more complex picture than that.

So though Google is trying to compete directly with this threat with things like the product updates, making sure that they are a good product search engine, and if you want to be a bit conspiratorial, you could say, well, maybe they're trying to make sure that Amazon affiliates aren't too dominant in the SERPs. It's also the case that these are big money terms for Google in terms of AdWords.

But like I said before, we're using Google for everything these days and have done for some time. Part of that is making sure that you're locked in with these kinds of queries. You get in the habit of using Google. You're in their ecosystem, so you're more likely to use them for this kind of thing. Now I've written loss leaders here, and I think that's an interesting concept, an interesting way of thinking about this.

In retail, you might have a loss leader, which would be a product that the store does not make much money on or it might even lose money on, but they've got you in, so you're going to buy the high-margin products as well. So these kinds of query, these are not so obviously easy to monetize, but they can be loss leaders to get us engaged when we do make these high-margin searches.

Now that's kind of why I've included this search here because I want to explain why these searches, which might seem like they are not ... something like a chat AI response to this is actually very expensive to produce relative to how easy it is to monetize.

You can kind of see that with how Amazon and Google have both struggled to make money on their sort of home chat devices, Alexa and I think it's called Google Home. They both sort of struggle to make money on those because these kinds of query are hard to monetize.

But they are loss leaders that will engage you for this kind of thing. So that's why they're important. Obviously, for this kind of query, this is the one where Google is most obviously threatened by things like the new Bing and things like ChatGPT and that kind of technology as an alternative to a search engine for now.

So how might they respond to that? Well, obviously, if you can't beat them, join them. Google is launching Bard. Their original announcement on February 6th and most sort of logical predictions are that, well, suggest that it was going to end up in the SERPs sooner or later.

At the moment, it's a separate interface to SERPs. But it seems like it will end up looking like a SERP feature sooner or later. Then we should expect to see more and more sort of Knowledge Graph results. At the moment, there are a lot of things you can search for on Google where you won't see a website as a result. If you search for something like "five liters in gallons," then you won't see a website as the top result.

You will see a Knowledge Graph result, and I'd expect that to become more and more common because that is a better answer for these kinds of queries often than showing a website. Now what about COVID symptoms? What about the more authority sensitive query? Well, I'd say the threat here is kind of the other way around. It's not that Google thinks you might use a chatbot to ask for COVID symptoms, although in time you might.

It's more that if Google's own results are not high quality, if Google's own results were written by AI, then they've lost their differentiator, right? At the moment, we trust Google more than we would trust some of these new technologies, more than we would trust some other search engines. They need to maintain that edge, and the way to maintain that edge is by making sure that their results are written by people, at least by authorities or at least checked by authorities.

Whereas some of these alternatives are not. So that's why you see things like the Helpful Content Update, which now looks extremely prescient, that was late last year, and also core updates. The core updates are Google refining and improving its algorithm over time, but making sure they stay ahead of the game.

Similarly, that goes to these kinds of queries too. They have to make sure they're still the best at this kind of thing. At the moment, things like Bard and things like the new Bing, the chat interface on new Bing don't really work for web search. But in time, there's no reason why they couldn't. So Google has to maintain an edge in this area as well.

So that was a quick, whistle-stop tour through how I think Google might react to some of these new threats. Let me know what you think on Twitter or on Mastodon or on any other or on LinkedIn or on Facebook. I'd love to hear more people's opinions about these kinds of emerging trends.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

How to Create an SEO Strategy [Plus Free Tools & Templates]

Starting as the SEO Director role at Moz has been a bit daunting. As a search engine marketer, how can I add value to an organization that has been a thought leader in the search marketing space and built industry-defining SEO tools for over a decade?

When taking on a new role or client — from local businesses to niche online retailers to enterprise-level Fortune 500 companies — the first thing I do is put together a new SEO strategy and organic search measurement plan. I lead this process with data, which highlights opportunities for improvement and instantiates goals to rally your organization around common objectives. Even with Moz being the team of data-driven SEO rockstars it is, strategy is still where I began my new role, And today, I’ll share the process.

What is an SEO strategy?

An SEO strategy aims to improve a website’s visibility in search engines such as Google and Bing. An SEO action plan, on the other hand, typically involves a combination of on-page optimization, technical SEO fixes, content strategy, link building and SEO reporting.

A strong SEO strategy will:

• Improve your website’s rankings for any existing keywords for which you are currently ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

• Increase the awareness and influence of SEO within your organization. Consider budget and resource challenges to get the most value and SEO improvements out of your team.

• Prescribe some combination of SEO initiatives, potentially including:

  • Widening the scope of your ranking organic keywords through content marketing.

  • Fixing any technical website issues that could be negatively impacting page load times (ex. PageSpeed), search engine crawlability or user experience.

  • Increasing the number of backlinks from high quality domains to your site, through effective social amplification and digital PR strategies.

• Imply or explicitly state priorities or beliefs that guide future action — especially what you will not do.

Whether you’re a website owner that is new to search engine optimization or a seasoned SEO taking on a new project or client, creating and following a clear SEO strategy is absolutely crucial for improving your site’s organic traffic and conversions.

10 steps towards a better SEO strategy

Like any other kind of strategy, to form an SEO strategy you need to understand the state of the game, set attainable goals, and plan to iterate. Below is a 10-step plan for finding those opportunities and insights to get you started.

1. Crawl your site to identify on-page and technical SEO issues

The best place to begin an SEO strategy is by initiating a website crawl to see if there are any issues that you need to remedy in order to maximize your SEO visibility.

There are many options for technical auditing tools that will emulate a search engine crawl of your website, and most SEOs have a favorite. Of course, here at Moz, we have our On-Demand Crawl. Moz’s tool will allow you to view all detected technical SEO issues on your site, and all of the impacted URLs. The data you will get from the On-Demand Crawl can be viewed within the UI of Moz, or exported into a CSV. This focuses on essentials to help kickstart your SEO strategy.

Initiating your site audit is a good place to start because it can take some time to complete. While your crawl is running, you can begin your competitive research.

2. Assess your competitors’ SEO strategies

This is crucial, and often overlooked, at least this early in the process.

Analyzing competitor SEO strategies will help you set realistic goals for your website. After completing this exercise, you’ll have a sense of your competitors’ most valuable keywords. These are some of the search terms you’ll want to compete for by optimizing your key site pages. This step can also be thought of as a “market analysis” task.

You’ll also want to leverage a research tool for competitive analysis. I recommend an SEO tool that offers a “gap analysis”’ functionality, Which will be the backbone of comprehensive SEO competitive research.

Within Moz Pro, the Keyword Gap feature will highlight prominent competitor keywords for which you have room to improve in the rankings. Keyword Gap will automatically sort the results to prioritize the keywords where your site has the highest traffic opportunity if you were to overtake your top-ranking competitor.

Once you’ve identified some keywords where the competition outranks you, investigate why that might be. If you were Google — or better yet, a searcher — which site would you prefer to see?

In addition to looking at the keywords that competitors are ranking well for where you have opportunity to improve, examine the types of content they are regularly producing. Do they have a blog? How much content are they publishing on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis? How are they showing their expertise?

When it comes time to align the necessary teams within your organization and rally them around your SEO goals, you’ll need to understand the competitive search landscape of your company. How much effort are your competitors putting into SEO? If they don’t appear to be optimizing their site for search, you’ll have an opportunity to pull ahead. If they have been actively involved in content creation and their core technical SEO is solid (you can even audit their sites to determine what they’re doing well), then you can use their strengths to guide your SEO roadmap.

3. Create SEO goals and align your teams

Despite the fact that there are professional SEOs who specialize in driving business goals via organic search optimization, SEO is a team effort. A good SEO strategy builds buy-in from web developers, content teams, and company leadership, as SEOs often straddle the intersections between teams. For example, you may need to collaborate with your editorial team to create a blog post that was ideated by data-driven research, and your web development team to create the page. Or, after you conduct your SEO audit, you may realize that you need the assistance of your developers to remedy several technical issues.

As mentioned in the section above, even if SEO is not a new endeavor at your company, I recommend thoroughly investigating competitors’ SEO strategies before attempting to get buy-in from other teams. If you can frame the need to optimize your site for organic search through the lens of deficiencies your site has against your competitors, you’ll be able to make a more powerful case to your leadership and cross-functional teams.

4. Create an effort vs. impact matrix [FREE TEMPLATE BELOW]

Now that you’ve completed the research steps of your SEO strategy, you’ve reached a good point to create an itemized list of all of the tasks you want to accomplish. These can include on-page or technical SEO fixes resulting from the audit you did at the beginning of the process, blog posts to write, existing site pages to optimize for search, and more.

My recommendation for outlining these steps is to create an effort vs. impact chart that organizes each item. Nobody knows your business better than you, so the effort required to complete each item will be highly personalized to your company. Sometimes finding the internal resources to write and publish a new piece of content can prove to be a larger endeavor than, say, fixing a redirect loop, or vice versa.

Whatever the dynamic of your business, an effort vs. impact matrix can help you organize your seo strategy into tactical jobs to be done. Here’s a link to a free template.

More often than not, running a crawl of your site using a tool like Moz Pro will highlight a ton of SEO issues you probably weren’t aware of, which can be overwhelming. Moz Pro can offer some guidance on working through these issues by flagging certain items as “critical”.

If you’re looking for a place to get started on prioritizing your SEO action items, I always recommend looking at your site’s meta titles first. Meta titles are one of the primary factors Google considers when deciding where to rank a page, with respect to how relevant it is to a given keyword. They’re also what users read when they’re deciding where to click on the SERP, and thus can have a significant impact on click-through rates. Moz Pro will find pages for you where meta titles are missing, or below Google’s recommended 60-character length.

If you’ve never optimized your meta titles, I recommend manually reviewing all of your core site pages to ensure that your titles are optimized for the keyword you want to target with each page. After you’ve done the keyword research and determined what your meta title should be on core pages, they’re typically relatively easy to update in your CMS or the backend of your website.

5. Build an SEO report or dashboard

After thinking through your priority list for optimizations, you’ll want to establish a baseline of current SEO performance and create a method to track your progress.

Moz’s Campaigns feature allows you to track a list of keywords for your site on an ongoing basis. Moz Pro will automatically build a dashboard for you that visualizes position improvements for your key organic search rankings. Google Analytics can also be integrated into this dashboard so that you can monitor your site traffic along with rankings and your site’s Domain Authority.

Setting up a Moz Pro Campaign will also automatically run a site crawl for your domain once a week so that you can track the number of outstanding technical SEO issues on your site as you work on fixing them.

6. Iterate through technical SEO fixes

The SEO process is a bit like building a house. There will be plenty of time to add window dressing and furniture, but first, you start with the foundation. Your website’s solid foundation is its technical SEO frame.

Using the SEO audit you completed in step 1 and your effort vs. impact matrix, begin identifying issues that are contributing to critical crawl issues (as identified by Moz’s Site Crawl tool, for example).

This is also a good point in the process to establish a baseline of your site’s PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores. After running your domain through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, you’ll be presented with a list of opportunities to speed up your website. These can include tasks like image caching and JavaScript reduction.

PageSpeed Insights is an important tool to leverage because:

1. It’s free.

2. The recommendations on improving your site health and technical SEO foundation are coming directly from Google.

7. Optimize existing content for search engines

Now that you have your progress tracking infrastructure in place and your list of SEO opportunities to attack, it’s time to start optimizing your content. Use the effort vs. impact matrix to guide your priorities, beginning with low-effort/high-impact items such as meta title optimization.

After completing this work, I also recommend taking a closer look at all of your sites’ core pages. A tool such as Moz’s On-Page Grader will help provide even more detail on how well-optimized a page is for a given keyword. For example, AT&T is doing an above-average job at optimizing its wireless page for the “cell phone” keyword, but there are still optimizations that can be made:

8. Identify new content opportunities through topic research

The best way to close keyword gaps is by publishing targeted, SEO-driven content on your site. The list of keywords that you get from a tool like Moz Pro’s Keyword Gap can be used to ideate on topic ideas.

Hub-and Spoke content model

A good SEO strategy will often use a hub-and-spoke content model. This is the practice of creating “hub” pages that will rank for high-volume keywords and convert Google searches into customers through CTAs. These hub pages will be supported by “spoke” pages containing related content, generally living on a blog or resources section of your site.

For example, let’s say one you’re AT&T, and one of the keywords you want to improve rankings for is “cell phone”. Your first step is creating a URL on your site that targets the “cell phone” keyword. After this page is created, SEO focused, and conversion-optimized, you will want to create a series of supporting content pieces that link into your main ‘cell phone’ page.

Using a keyword research tool such as Moz Pro’s Keyword Suggestions feature can help you quickly identify topics related to your primary term. As opposed to guessing at topics that people might be interested in, dedicated SEO tools allow you to use data to power all of your decision making. For example, these are questions that Google searchers have related to “cell phone”.

9.  Amplify your content on social media, and investigate backlink opportunities

Even in 2023, high quality backlinks are an important part of SEO. The number of backlinks a site is receiving from high authority pages is a major component of Moz’s Domain Authority score, which is the industry-standard KPI for measuring the overall ranking ability of a domain.

The best way to increase your Domain Authority is by creating high quality content that people want to share. In addition to creating the content and publishing it on your site, creatively promoting it on social channels such as TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, or additional platforms where your customers (and prospective customers) spend their digital time will help drive brand awareness and can increase branded search volume.

There are also ways to engage in manual link building efforts that aim to gain links to your site from high-quality site publishers. This is an especially important exercise for newer domains with low Domain Authority scores.

10.  Measure, optimize, and test

Your competitive landscape will evolve, and so will your company. Even within the scope of a year, an SEO strategy for 2023 may involve unexpected priorities in November that you didn’t account for in March.

But despite the constant state of change in the digital world, it’s important to continually track your high-value keywords using an SEO tool like Moz Pro, and to monitor the traffic growth of your content in platforms like Google Analytics. Over time, you’ll notice areas of topical strength and weakness for your site. You can continue to play into the strengths of your site and publish content related to your strongest topics, while simultaneously identifying keyword gap opportunities and improving areas of weakness.

Get started on your SEO strategy today

There are several free SEO tools on the market that can assist you in kickstarting your search engine optimization strategy. Moz even has free versions available of our own Keyword Explorer and Competitor Research, which can help you find opportunities for your site’s search engine visibility and help you set SEO goals.

Whether you’re an experienced SEO taking on a new client or a website owner approaching SEO for the first time, it’s crucial to create a roadmap of defined tasks and actionable goals. Having an action plan will help keep you focused on your goals, and prevent aimless work and incomplete projects. In search engine marketing, it pays to be methodical, yet adaptable.

Daily SEO Fix: How to Use Keyword Labels in Moz Pro

Tracking keyword rankings is an essential part of any SEO strategy and helps inform how changes you’ve made to your site have made an impact. No matter how many keywords you’re tracking it can be incredibly helpful to segment your data in various ways to monitor and compare groups of keywords. Within Moz Pro you have the ability to label keywords any way you like so you’re able to do just that. In this edition of the Daily SEO Fix, we’ll look at how you can apply labels to keywords in your Moz Pro Campaign along with different ways to segment your data and how to create reports for different keyword clusters.

How to Label Keywords in Moz Pro

Before we can segment our keyword rankings data to compare metrics we have to properly label our keywords. In this video, Emilie will walk through how to add labels to your keywords in a Moz Pro Campaign.

How to Use Filters in Moz Pro

Once your keywords are labeled, you can filter and sort to compare metrics and rankings over time for different sets of keywords. In this next video, Emilie will show you how to filter by label in Moz Pro.

Ways to Label Keywords

There are an infinite number of ways you can label and segment your keyword data. This includes by sales funnel stage, product line, and market location just to name a few. In this video, Emilie will talk through a few different ways you may want to consider segmenting your keywords and rankings data.

How Labels Impact Metrics

When applying filters in Moz Pro, you’ll see that certain metrics and graphs update accordingly. For example, when filtering by label you can see Search Visibility over time for each set of keywords. In this video, Emilie will walk you through how filtering by label impacts the metrics and graphs seen in the Rankings section of your Moz Pro Campaign.

How to Create a Report with Segmented Data

Now that your keywords are labeled and you know how to filter or segment your keyword data, it’s time to create customized rankings reports! With Moz Pro Custom Reports you can have segmented data sent right to your inbox on a regular basis. In this video, Eli will show you how to create a Custom Report for labeled keywords so you’re able to keep an eye on changes to your rankings.

With that, you’re ready to get out there and start labeling your keywords and tracking your success. Thanks so much for checking out this edition of the Daily SEO Fix and we’ll see you next time!

Practical Tips for Presenting SEO Projects to Executives — Whiteboard Friday

Any time you have to present your SEO work to other departments or executives, you're going to have different groups of stakeholders with different interests, so you need to approach them differently. To help you, Bethan walks you through her top five tips for sharing your work with the C-suite.

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

Video Transcription

Hi. So my name is Bethan Vincent, and I'm the Managing Partner at Open Velocity and I'm here to talk to you about how to deliver better presentations to executive stakeholders. 

1. Set the groundwork

So we're going to start off with a tip that kind of occurs pre-presentation, and essentially it's setting the groundwork to understand your stakeholders.

In any situation, you're going to have different groups of stakeholders with different needs and different stakes, and you want to approach them slightly differently. So I love a magic quadrant. So here we've got one that basically shows you within any decision-making process you've got people with high influence and low influence. Stakeholders can be individuals or groups of individuals. Keep that in mind.

You've then got people or groups with a high stake, so they've got a high kind of interest in the outcome of the decision, and people with a lower stake. So essentially in any process, you want to divide and conquer, and this is something I advise you do. Don't spend loads of time on it. It's more a thought exercise. You can do it on the back of a napkin. But think about who are the people with high influence and low stake, because those people are very interesting and they can be your champions in the decision-making process, because essentially you can leverage their influence.

I would be as explicit to go and speak to the individual or group of individuals that I think fall in my champions box and say, "Hey, would you champion this decision? Would you help it get pushed through? This is what it's going to mean for you. This is what it's going to mean for the organization." You've then got the high influence and high stake groups, and those are the people that really you want to spend the majority of your time on engaging, persuading, and inspiring.

Essentially, you want to show them: How is this decision, how is what I'm proposing going to be better for them? How is it going to produce better outcomes? How is it going to contribute to revenue for the company? How is it going to contribute to something tangible? So spend a lot of time with those people, because ultimately, actually, if you can't get it past your kind of priority stakeholders, the decision is probably not going to go in your favor.

So you've then got the people with a high stake and low influence. This, I'm afraid, is often marketing, especially when it comes to projects like, let's say, CRM changes. We love a surprise CRM change. Essentially with this group, you do want to consult them because the impact of the decision is going to be so high on them that you want to consult them and make sure that you're not really frustrating them, you're not going to introduce something that makes their life, their work unworkable.

You've then got your kind of low stake, low influence group, and those are people you want to inform and you want to basically monitor their kind of feedback on the proposed decision because you might actually find those people that you think are low stake and low influence move into one of these groups when you fully get to the bottom of actually what their work is, what are they trying to achieve.

So that's something to be mindful of. So set your groundwork. Engage people pre-presentation. Get those champions on side. 

2. Keep it succinct

So secondly, when you come to present to executive stakeholders, and whether this is a formal presentation with a whiteboard and slides and all of that kind of stuff, or whether it's in a meeting and you're just proposing an idea, I want you to keep this slightly weirdly named BORA acronym in mind.

So you want to keep it succinct. Any presentation, any kind of pitch to senior stakeholders, you want to keep it really digestible and understandable. The way I like to structure my kind of presentation, or even if it's a document that I'm presenting to senior stakeholders, is I'll start off with the background, start off with the context, paint the picture.

I'll then get straight to the opportunity. So what tangible thing is on the ground? What can we actually get out of making this decision? How is it going to impact the company? How is it going to drive revenue? Then you want to move on to the request, and I think this is something that people often miss out of presentations. So that they'll kind of set the background, set the opportunity, and then kind of leave it up to the senior stakeholder to kind of figure out what they're asking for.

Be really explicit. What is your ask? Is it budget? Is it resource? Is it a decision to be made? Then finally, stick all of your appendices with this information. If people want to go into detail, make sure they've got the data, make sure they've got the contextual stuff on hand, but don't try and get through all of it within a meeting, because frankly you're just not going to be able to get through all of the nuance of the material within a tight time frame because I think it's fair to say that when you're presenting to senior stakeholders, their time is often really precious, and if you've got an hour or half an hour for the presentation, frankly that's all you've got, so you need to keep it very, very time-bound.

3. Anticipate interruptions

This brings me on to point number three. You've got to anticipate interruptions. So I think a lot of us have been in meetings with senior stakeholders where we've started off doing our presentation, doing our pitch, and we've been interrupted with questions. A lot of people find this quite frustrating. You know what?

To some degree it is a little bit frustrating, but I think we've got to understand that senior stakeholders are often questioning stuff because they're really invested, they're interested, they're trying to dig into things a little bit deeper. Actually, there's nothing worse than doing a presentation to senior stakeholders and there is tumbleweed and silence. That's a worse sign. So the very fact you're getting those questions is excellent. But you've got to anticipate them.

You've got to build them into the meeting structure. So again, this comes back to keeping it succinct. Start off with the background and your opportunity, maybe in kind of 5 or 10 slides, or a one-page document. But then give that space for those questions to happen and just anticipate. It is going to. You can't fight against it. But then also at the end of the meeting, you've got to bring it back around to the request, because again, if you've been derailed, some people run out of time, oh my gosh, I've got five minutes left, or have run out of time and those people have got to go and they've not got anything out of the discussion.

So anticipate interruptions. Bring it back to that request. You've got to know your request, know your ask before you're going into the meeting. 

4. Weekly updates

We're going to move on to a point that's linked with almost my first point, which is about setting that groundwork and before you kind of do your proposal or your presentation, making sure you understand the stakeholders, you understand the landscape. You've done some of that pre-work.

After you've done the meeting, I think there's a lot of kind of post-decision work. So hopefully you've got the decision. You want to basically keep people abreast of the good work you're doing. What I love to do is send around a weekly update. It's a really super short email I'll put together, or it can go on an internal wiki, for example, as well, if you've got that. But I'll send it to the wider organization, not just stakeholders, and it keeps people abreast of the good work you're doing.

It can be as simple as a summary, so this is what's happened this week, a little bit of, again, setting the background, and then a bulleted list of updates. This is what we've done. These are the results we've achieved. These are the things we've launched. You may not have loads of stuff that you've launched. It could just be this is what the team has been doing. This is what they've enjoyed working on.

It doesn't have to be really in-depth or anything like that or anything scary. Then finally, this is the most important point of this communication -- close with an invitation to engage. I've done these before and sent them around organizations and sent them to developers and engineers, and actually opening that door and saying like, "Look, this is what Marketing is up to. These are some of the things we've been doing. These are some of the results, the outcomes we've got. Hey, does anyone have any questions or thoughts on them?"

It invites that conversation, and it really helps you kind of nurture your internal audience. We're very good at nurturing external audiences, but I think we can do better internally as well. 

5. Why I pass

Finally, I just wanted to kind of give a little bit of context on why I'm now relatively, well, pretty senior in my career, I run a company, and why I pass sometimes on things my team brings to me.

So firstly, I pass on stuff because frankly I don't understand it. I think there's this kind of misconception that people in really senior positions know everything. We definitely don't. Especially when we're dealing with specialists, like SEO specialists, you've got a whole depth and contextual information that I may not have. So sometimes I just don't get it.

I don't get what I'm supposed to do here. I don't get the context. I don't get the background. So then that goes back to keeping it succinct. Secondly, I just simply don't have time or budget. I think when people are kind of proposing and ask, that they've got a proposal to do something, they might put in the budget cost of it, they might put in the financial cost of it, but they don't necessarily recognize that there's a time cost.

Budget and time are the two things that are very, very finite within an organization. So have a little bit of a think about the time implication and what you're asking for and does the organization have the resource to deliver on that. So sometimes, yeah, I just don't have time and I don't have the budget for it. Thirdly, I don't see the big picture. What I mean by this is you're pitching something to me, and I don't understand or I can't make the link between what you're pitching and our organizational goals, our business goals.

This is where it's really important, even if you're an SEO specialist, PPC specialist, whatever, that you understand that organizational objective that you all should be working towards. Any good business should have a business plan and should be able to communicate that to you. So wherever possible, make sure what you're proposing fits into that bigger picture.

Then finally, I just don't see how this is going to make us money. Businesses exist to make money. We live in a capitalist world. We kind of can't fight against that. So sometimes I just can't see the route to ROI. I don't necessarily have to see the direct route. It doesn't have to be we are guaranteed this ROI within this time period.

I do understand, especially in things like SEO where it takes time, there's a lot of unknowns, that it can be a bit more intangible. But I need to be able to see the causal link. If I can't see that, I'm not going to sign it off. So I hope that's given you some context about how to approach those conversations with senior decision-makers. Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

MozCon 2023: The Initial Agenda

The big event is just about four months out and we're excited to give you a preview of what you can expect to hear on stage this August!

From fresh faces joining us for the first time to fan favorites making a return appearance, our speaker lineup this year is 🔥. Topics range from AI & future-proofing your strategies, technical SEO, content marketing,, and way more — all with an emphasis on practitioners sharing tactical advice and real-world stories of how they’ve moved the needle (and how you can, too).

Once again, you’ve got two incredible ways to join us for Mozcon, a fully immersive in-person experience in Seattle, or through our livestream only passes which will be broadcast live from the Seattle stage. Can’t join us in person or for the livestream? We’ve got you covered with an option to pre-purchase access to the post-event video recording bundle so you can catch the sessions when your schedule permits.

Grab your MozCon ticket today and get ready for the Future of Search!

Register for MozCon

The Emcees

We have three incredibly entertaining MozCon Emcees this year to guide you through each day and keep the show rolling along:

Cheryl Draper
Senior Growth Marketing Manager | Moz

Melissa Rae Brown
Learning Team Manager | Moz

Ola King
User Researcher | Moz

The Speakers + Agenda

Feast your eyes on the lineup of talks being presented this year:

Amanda Jordan

Director of Digital Strategy | RicketyRoo

Build Better backlinks for Local Brands

As with everything in local SEO, backlinks are just a little different. What do local pack rankers typically have in common? To answer that question, we’ve collected backlink data across several home services businesses across the USA and categorized them. We’ll share our findings, and how you can build better backlinks for local clients! By the end of this session, you'll be able to list the different types of backlinks local businesses typically have, identify which link types correlate with stronger rankings, and most importantly, how to apply this to your clients!

Andi Jarvis

Strategy Director | Eximo Marketing

Back to the Future: What Lessons From Marketing History Can Tell Us About the Future

"Marketing has changed more in the last decade than at any time in history.” There’s a blog published that features a version of this line roughly every 0.5 seconds* - but does anyone stop to consider if it’s accurate? Andi will demonstrate how marketing and audiences aren't really changing, and that the future of marketing is much the same as the past. Why is this important? Because people, not robots, sit at the heart of marketing. By the end of this talk, you'll understand how you get your customers back to the center of what you do, and how that will turbocharge your marketing efforts. Strap yourself into the MozCon time machine for a journey Back to the Future.

*Stats entirely made up… much like the results used in most content marketing efforts.

Brie E. Anderson

Owner | BEAST Analytics

From Fear to Forward Motion: Navigating the Future of Analytics with Confidence

What the heck even is GA4 and why are you being forced to use it? Get ready to explore the rapidly changing landscape of analytics! In this talk, we will explore the future of analytics and provide a step-by-step guide to adjusting to the big changes that lie ahead. We will discuss how to move from fear and resistance to embracing the transformation that is already taking place. You will leave with a blueprint for success that will help you future-proof your analytics strategy and unlock new possibilities for growth and innovation.

Carrie Rose

Founder | Rise at Seven

Dominating TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest and Amazon SERPS As Consumer Behavior Changes

As search volumes rapidly change and users use new platforms such as TikTok for search, how should SEOs respond? Carrie will share her process of dominating all SERPS - not just Google! Discover how SEO fits within the user journey, and the role content can play for both offsite and onsite content, generating links and search demand. You'll learn how advertising and SEO overlap, and what we can learn from award-winning advertising as part of search strategies..

Chris Long

VP of Marketing | Go Fish Digital

Why SEOs Need To Start Playing Offense Instead of Defense

In an industry overloaded with data, tools, algorithm changes, and a constantly evolving landscape, it's tough to know what to prioritize. Often, this leads SEO initiatives and strategies to be more reactive instead of proactive. In this session, Chris will show you how to shift to an offensive SEO mindset. This will help you better prioritize key initiatives, get stakeholder buy-in, and navigate a successful long-term SEO strategy. You'll leave this session understanding how to identify new markets to break into, leverage SEO data around key recommendations, utilize keyword segmentation to better inform your SEO strategy, and build a framework for setting up SEO experiments.

Crystal Carter

Head of SEO Communications | Wix

Views on Views of Video SEO

Fifty-four percent of consumers report that they'd like to see more videos from brands, and video SERPs account for an average of 20% of untapped keyword opportunities. There's never been a better time to improve your video SEO! From on-page embeds, to SERP visibility, and even in your backlink profile, video is an unrivaled tool for adding value to your content and improving your website's SEO outcomes. In this talk, Crystal explores what matters on the Google SERP, and what leads to success when optimizing the videos on your site.

Daniel Waisberg

Search Advocate | Google

Search Data at Scale

Are you using Search data effectively and at scale? In this presentation, Google Search Advocate Daniel Waisberg will present the data available today, and demonstrate the best methods of using Search Console bulk exports for scaling your SEO efforts. After this talk, you'll understand the challenges of using data to steer your strategy, and get the scoop on analyzing and visualizing this data to drive your product decisions!

Duane Brown

SEO Manager | Dialpad

Hiring The Perfect Agency: How To Avoid Getting Burned

A 2022 Upwork study shows that 39% of the U.S. workforce freelances. Just think about how many more ad agencies exist today, as compared to 2019. You’d think that hiring would be easier with all of these options, but nothing could be further from the truth. Hiring is a valuable skill, and we are going to give you the skills to hire that next agency. By the end of this session, you'll be able to identify agencies that are the best fit for your brand, effectively interview prospects, avoid pricing ambiguity and pitfalls, partake in productive onboarding, and look for meaningful results and metrics. Let's get you the skills to hire better next time!

Jackie Chu

SEO Lead, Intelligence | Uber

SEO Co-Conspirators: Navigating Complex Systems

SEOs have self-reported that the #1 challenge to their SEO program being successful is getting changes implemented. Additionally, we're often faced with constantly having to prove the value of SEO as a channel. In this talk, Jackie will focus on how you can source and uncover allies, enlist your coworkers, and successfully navigate the political landscape to get your project prioritized.

Jason Dodge

Founder & CEO | Black Truck Media + Marketing

Rethink Your Industry Pages - They’re Not What You Think

B2B marketers, and SEOs alike, are all too quick to create industry-specific landing pages for every single vertical we serve. In reality, these pages have very little relevance to what your customers are actually searching for, or what it is that you actually do in that space - limiting the reach and missing out on potential customers who would benefit from your solutions. Are you ready to reimagine your entire industry vertical proposition? Jason will explain the ins and outs of industry pages, their role in content marketing, and - more importantly - how optimizing content around the pain points and direct needs of your customers is more relevant now in B2B marketing than ever before.

Jes Scholz

Group CMO | Ringier

Mind the Gap: Bridging Generational Differences in SEO

To keep up with the ever-evolving needs of users, Google is transforming from being a search engine to an ecosystem of experiences that often reach people before they need to search. Discover, Google Lens, YouTube Shorts, and Bard are just a few examples of this shift towards richer, more engaging surfaces. By the end of this talk, you'll be able to leverage these new visibility platforms to improve organic performance and future-proof your brand.

Lidia Infante

Senior SEO Manager | Sanity

Headless SEO: I’m Sorry, But This Is Happening

Headless CMSes are on the rise, and headless SEO is quickly becoming an essential skill for SEOs. In this talk, Lidia will explain the concept of content modeling with RAL examples, which lies at the core of headless CMSes. By the end of this presentation, you will have a firm grasp of the limitations and advantages of headless SEO, and possess a checklist of 7 implementations you need to request from your development team.

Lily Ray

Senior Director, SEO & Head of Organic Research | Amsive Digital

Google’s Just Not That Into You: Intent Switches During Core Updates

If your website has been negatively impacted by a Google core update, it is common to immediately assume that there is something wrong with your site. However, there are many other factors that could explain why rankings changed during a core update, and understanding these are key to improving performance. You'll walk away from this session understanding how Google core updates work, how and why the results change, how to respond to being hit by an update, and how to future-proof your site.

Miracle Inameti-Archibong

SEO Lead (Insurance) | MoneySuperMarket Group

How to Use Brand SEO to Future-Proof Your Online Visibility

With digital ad spending projected to reach $701 billion in 2023, generic CTR dropping by 12% between position 1 and 2, the increase in no-click searches (+60%), and the constant rolling out of updates, it's more important than ever to build a sustainable online brand presence to algorithm-proof your traffic. This talk will explore how SEOs can contribute to brand building, and how it can help future-proof your online visibility.

Noah Learner

Director of Innovation | Sterling Sky

Down the Mountain

Struggling to find your place in SEO? Want to break through to the next level, but feel like you’ve hit the wall? Join Noah Learner on the journey “Down the Mountain”, as he shares his evergreen framework for optimizing your career in any market. This framework - built on craft, people, critical thinking skills, and synthesizing data - will help you now and in the future, as you look for what’s next. You’ll learn a repeatable process and specific skills that will help you accelerate your career and make you impossible to ignore.

Dr. Pete Meyers

Marketing Scientist | Moz

Lower Your Shields: The Borg Are Here

From ChatGPT to Bing's Prometheus to Google's Bard, AI (specifically, Large Language Models) is disrupting search as we know it. We can fight the inevitable, or we can put these tools to work. Learn where AI chat excels, where it fails (sometimes spectacularly), and how to use these tools to not only keep your SEO job, but also level-up your SEO career.

Ross Simmonds

CEO & Founder | Foundation Marketing

The Evolution of Content & The Future of Our Industry

Is it all over? Is the world as we knew it a wrap? With the rise of AI - is it realistic to assume that the world of SEO and content will stay the same? Or should we all start dusting off our resumes to try something new? In this presentation, Ross is going to share a blend of both the realities of how AI can be incorporated into our work (maybe to give us additional runway) and answer the question as to whether or not AI is actually coming for our jobs and what we can do to ensure that we're ahead of the curve when it comes to using these tools, embracing the technology and finding edges amidst rapid change.

Tom Anthony

CTO | Search Pilot

Entities Are the Past: Search Is Going Multidimensional

For years, "keywords" were everything in search, and then came the rise of 'the entity'. Tom believes that the time of the entity will soon be over, and will explain how Deep Learning 'latent spaces' are highlighting that entities were 1-dimensional thinking. The future of search is going to be about context, and it isn't far off. You'll walk away from this session with a new technique that will replace keyword research so that you can prepare, and ideally, get ahead of the competition.

Tom Capper

Senior Search Scientist | Moz

The SERP is Dead, Long Live The SERP

SEOs have complained for many years now, that the SERP just isn't what it used to be. We yearn for the simpler days of 10 blue links. But Google is changing for a reason, and SEOs have reason to be invested in its survival. Besides, not all SERP features are bad news. In this talk, Tom will look at Google's direction, and the strategic imperatives that are forcing its hand. You'll walk away with a plan to unearth happiness (and organic revenue) in the brave new world.

Wil Reynolds

Founder & VP of Innovation | Seer Interactive

To Be Announced

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We hope you’re as excited as we are for August 7th and 8th to hurry up and get here. And again, if you haven’t grabbed your ticket yet, we’ve got your back. Early Bird pricing is on through May 31st.

How to Get Bard to Show Your Local Business: Advice from the Source

We’re all Bard beginners right now, and so there are no foolish questions. Unsurprisingly, I’ve started out with Bard by asking it local business questions. As I chatted, I learned some useful things from and about Google’s nascent AI chat that you’ll need to know if this technology becomes part of your customers’ lives. My main goal was to learn three things:

1. How much is Bard like Google search in a local use case?

2. Would I be able to get any tips for local business inclusion in Bard?

3. Do local SEOs need to change tactics to adjust for Bard?

Advisory: Bard’s own system warns you to take its statements with a grain of salt, so to speak, so do bear that in mind.

Because it was lunchtime and I was hungry, I began by asking about tacos.

When I asked Bard for the “best tacos near me”, it had no idea where I was, beyond apparently recognizing that I’m in the state of California. It showed me tacos in San Francisco (which is sort of near me) and tacos in Los Angeles (which would be quite a long drive for me, even for the best tacos). Interesting to note the plug for Doordash and UberEats. Mainly, though, pay attention to the fact that Bard is not like the local search environment Google has long accustomed us to in which it knows our geolocation without us having to modify our search term. With Bard, I realized I’d need to specify a city instead of just stating “near me”:

Getting more local with Bard

So, here we receive a list of six restaurants that are, indeed, in Novato. Bard shows me the average star rating (note the qualifier of 4+ stars) and gives me a sentiment analysis summary of customers praising taco quality, service, and prices. Next, I clicked on the “Google it” button to see if these 6 restaurants match Google local rankings. It took me to the local pack, from which I clicked through to the local finder to get the complete list of the top 6 restaurants

One of these things is not like the other

You see it immediately: the two lists don’t match.

With only 3 of the restaurants appearing on both lists and all the others being different, Bard’s recommendations are only a 50% match for Google’s local finder results. Moreover, the ranking order of the individual entities is a 0% match. Look at La Carreta at the bottom of Bard’s recommendations, but the top of Google’s local rankings, for example.

Another word to the wise: the Google organic rankings also didn’t match the order of either list. So, of course, I was curious as to why Bard is selecting its list of six. I asked:

To thine own self be true, Bard!

Local business owners and marketers, take note that Bard lists authenticity, affordability, convenience, variety, and friendly staff as the six contributors to its recommendations. This made me very curious as to how AI knows these six restaurants have all these good features, and I wasn’t prepared for Bard’s answer:

Bard says it has read their reviews (again, business owners and marketers take note) and that’s all fine and good. But when a robot claims to have “spoken to people who have eaten there”, we have a problem. So, I had to ask:

When pressed to explain, Bard did not share that Google has sent a speaking robot to the town of Novato to converse with people in Mexican restaurants. Instead, it completely reversed its position and admitted, “I can’t speak to people in the real world, but I can access and process information from the real world through Google Search and keep my response consistent with search results.”

I think it’s vital to mention here that Bard lying and backtracking could be quite problematic for local business customers who attempt to use AI chat as an alternative to local search. It doesn’t inspire trust in the content and Google will need to address this error sometimes called “hallucination” but which should more clearly be termed “disinformation”. Perhaps Bard’s failure to tell the truth inspired me to make up a “story” of my own and invent a fictitious business that I’m trying to get included in the AI list:

I found Bard’s advice to be extremely interesting and worthy of sharing because it matches, almost point for point, the tips you’ll get from a good local SEO consultant: get listed in Google’s local environment, get positive reviews, invest in community involvement, offer a unique product, provide great customer service, and don’t expect instant results. Encouraged by Bard’s initial tips for performing within its ecosystem, I decided to shake the bottle to see if any Google local ranking secret sauce would come out:

Local search ranking factors, according to Bard

Unfortunately, no revelations here. Bard suggests having a complete and accurate listing and warns of the tie between inaccurate local business info and negative reviews. It advises you to get positive reviews and respond to them, and to optimize your website. So far, so good, but there are three problems here that again lead to that creeping feeling of being led astray by Bard:

1. Outdated information - I bet you noticed Bard using the outmoded branding “Google My Business” instead of “Google Business Profile”. The re-brand happened two years ago and stale information does not inspire trust for customers who use this tech to try to find local businesses like yours.

2. Incitement to spam - It’s excellent advice to optimize your website with local keywords, but telling users to do this with their Google listings is another matter. The main place I see this activity happening is within the GBP title; owners add extraneous keywords to their names because it can boost local rankings, in violation of the Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google. Adding keywords any place else on the listing (like the description or in Google Updates) is unlikely to have any impact on your local search rankings, so this advice is not merely suspect, but it could actually lead to people engaging in forbidden practices.

3. Misrepresentation of other brands - Bard advising business owners to encourage customers to leave reviews on Yelp is a misrepresentation of the policies of a third party. Yelp infamously forbids this activity, but Bard is encouraging it. Google has a long and frustrating history of misrepresenting the businesses in its local index, and unfortunately, Bard appears poised to do the same. As always with local search, online misinformation directly impacts real-world people.

I wrote a Twitter thread on asking AI multiple local SEO FAQs in which Bard scored a low C vs. the F I had earlier given ChatGPT. Given the ongoing disinformation we’re encountering, both in terms of Bard claiming it had spoken to restaurant diners and of it mixing in some very bad advice with the good, we’re not at a place of trust with this “answering machine” at this point.

Yet, local business owners are still going to want to know how to be recommended by Bard if it becomes deeply embedded in customers’ online lives. And that brings us back to the question: why is La Carreta number #6 with Bard but #1 with Google? Why does Bard love Tommy’s Salsa best? Let’s do a very quick side-by-side audit (not a more complete one) and see if we can find any clues, and I’ll highlight obvious wins in light blue.

A mini competitive audit of Bard vs Google’s favorite tacos

What we see here is that the at-a-glance wins on the Google local search side are coming from the extraneous keywords in the title and from the very interesting fact that this restaurant pointing their GBP to a Facebook page is then apparently deriving DA/PA benefit from the behemoth authority of that platform (a stealth local search ranking factor?). As for Bard, the wins are all on Tommy’s Salsa’s side, with a higher star rating, more reviews, more links earned, an older listing, a shorter distance to the city centroid, a higher Yelp rank and - notably - a #1 adjusted organic rank.

This is, of course, a single query, and a very new technology, but given Bard’s stated emphasis on customer service and reviews, it does check out that the chat listed Tommy’s Salsa before La Carreta, and overall, Tommy’s Google Business Profile components are making its Maps presence a bit more impressive than the competitor’s.

In conclusion – does the coming of Bard change what you should be doing as a local business marketer?

In major news right now, AI creators and promoters are claiming that ChatGPT, New Bing and Bard will change the world forever. These individuals even fall back on the utopian fiction that, because of their invention, no human being will ever have to work again. The reality check is that inventors and investors built similar hype around the Rapid Marmalade Cutter which was meant to release humanity from the endless toil of…shredding oranges. 1930s ad copy reads, “Home marmalade making is easier today than it has ever been! The Rapid Marmalade Cutter revolutionizes this money-saving, health-giving occupation!” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Inventions can make some tasks easier for some people, but unless there’s a real demand and use for them, they can end up gathering dust in garages. At the moment, I suggest thinking of AI chat as just one more online space in which local businesses should act with awareness to see how they are being represented by a third party. The fact that this technology tells lies is a good reason to see if it mentions your brand. Only recently, Google weirdly began listing products on Google Business Profiles as being free or costing $1, and you can imagine the phone calls local businesses had to field over that fiasco. So, practice awareness.

As for seeking Bardic inclusion, my first impression is that you’ll still be doing the same tasks: making your GBP as fully-filled out as possible, earning good reviews via good customer service, growing and optimizing your website on the basis of consumer research. You’ll notice that Bard’s recommendations for getting mentioned in its lists of favorites didn’t contain a single surprise or novel notion for how to create visibility for local businesses. In other words, I see nothing game-changing here, but I do see a ton of room for your own research if your business isn’t included and wants to be.

We’ll keep studying this together as things move along with the “revolution” of AI chat. In the meantime, just keep taking good care of your customers, because, contrary to headlines, we’re all still counting on the people at your business to show up for the vital work of serving our communities.