I've Optimized My Site, But I'm Still Not Ranking — Help! — Next Level

In her last piece, Jo took you on an adventure diving for treasure in the long tail of search. This time around we're answering the call for help when you feel like you've done all you can, but you're still not ranking. Originally published in June 2016 this blog has been rewritten to include new tool screenshots and refreshed workflows. Read on and level up!

You’ve optimized your pages, written delightful title tags, concocted a gorgeous description to entice clicks, used your target keyword in your copy with similar words, and your content is good, like really good. As far as you’re concerned you’re doing everything you can on that page to say to Google “This is relevant content!” But, lo and behold, you’re not ranking.

Frustrating, right? Well, no more. I’m going to show you how you can discover what’s holding you back, and how to make sure your site is a lovely big target for visitors, just like this happy fellow:

You’ll learn some tricks you can do in your browser and then we’ll speed things up with some cat magic and pixie dust to sprinkle all over your site.

To start, open these tools in another tab so you’re ready to go:

• Moz Pro Campaign deliciousness (if you don't have it set up, take the free trial for a spin to follow along)

• Keyword Explorer, your pot of keyword gold

Step 1: Check for technical issues

Uncovering indexation issues with Google search operators is the first step to ensuring your site is set up to be the success you (and I) know it can be.

Hello, operator?

You can discover whether your site or page is indexed by running a Google search operator like this:

site:yourfabsite.com
site:yourfabsite.com/blog
site:yourfabsite.com/blog/my-site-rocks

It’s like saying, "Hey, Google, show me all the results you have in your index for yourfabsite.com." This is what you don’t want to see:

If you’re seeing the above, you won’t be able to rank because your site isn’t indexed. It’s got to be indexed before it can rank, and it’s got to be crawled before it can be indexed. Trying to rank without being indexed is like trying to bake a cake without turning on the oven.

Search Console is here to console you

In the results page above, Google is directing you straight to the Google Search Console. Go — right now, right, right now, don’t read any more, you should have already gone — go and set up your Search Console. Once you’re all set up and your site is verified, you can go to this page and ask (nicely) for Google to recrawl your URLs:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url

In Google Search Console head to "Indexing" and then "Pages" to see the data similar to what we looked at above, but in graph form. Definitely handy for tracking how your pages have been indexed over time.

If your site is not being indexed, check your Search Console Messages to see if there's a reason Google couldn’t index your site. If your entire site returns a 503 including the robot.txt crawling of your site will be temporarily suspended.

It’s a good time to take a check over your robots.txt file and your meta robots tags. But remember that for bots that obey robots.txt file won’t see noindex tags if the pages are disallowed through the robots.txt file.

Learning how to manage your site’s indexation at a page level is a key learning curve for newbie SEOs entering the technical SEO sphere. Giving you the knowledge to advance from troubleshooting indexation issues to managing mega-large sites with millions of pages.

Toolkit:

Google Search Console – Find out why your pages are not being crawled and indexed

Further reading:

Quick Start Guide to SEO

What is Robots.txt?

How to check which URLs have been indexed by Google using Python

Fundamentals of Crawling

Step 2: Find out where you’re currently ranking

Now that you know your pages can be crawled and indexed, you want to get them to the top of the results where they gosh-darn-well should be, right?

Turn up the volume

It’s quick and dirty, but we’ve all done it, your boss does it, your client does it, so why not succumb and start by entering keywords you want to rank for into your browser. Type in Branded terms, vanity keywords, and click return. Not finding your site on the first page? Instead of clicking through to the many ooooos of Google, we’re going to change the settings in your browser to show 50 or 100 results per search so we can view more results with every search. I’m going to want to see A LOT more pet costume results, so I’ll click on the Quick Settings gear icon in Chrome and hit "See All Search Settings ," then toggle to adjust the "Results per page":

Now we’ve got a whole page of 50 or 100 results to search through. Use CMD + F for Mac (or CRTL + F for Windows) to search for your domain.

This process is great for doing a quick check to see if you’re in the top 50 or top 100. Remember that your browser returns personalized results when you’re logged into Google, using incognito mode will manage this somewhat, but a purpose built keyword rankings tool will enable you to run ranking checks more efficiently and accurately.

Start cooking with gas

Manual searches aren’t for everyone. I mean come on, we work in technology — we don’t want to be lugging keywords a round the hot, dry Google search page, plugging them in one after another. Grab your list of keywords, and plug them straight into Keyword Explorer.

Hit "Create or upload a new list" and choose "Enter Keywords" to pop those straight in there, bish-bash-bosh.

Remember, you’ll need a Moz Pro subscription to create a keyword list.

Check if you’re on the page 1 of Google

Open up your keyword list, click +Add URL to check your rankings, provided you’re in position 1–10 of the search results.

Want to see if you’re in the top 50?

Heck yeah! Take that same list and paste them into a new campaign in Moz Pro.

If you already have a campaign running you can also transfer these straight over from Keyword Explorer. Just check the box next to the keywords you want to track, then choose a campaign from the drop down.

You know before (about 30 seconds ago), when we talked about manual searches returning personalized results? Checking rankings in Moz Pro avoids all that nonsense by anonymizing the data and, in my experience, provides the most accurate results, showing what the "most" users see. Pretty snazzy, right?

A new campaign will build in about 30 minutes, which is just enough time to catch up on “Stranger Things” and reminisce about Winona Ryder circa 1990…

On the other hand, adding to an existing campaign will be a bit longer. You’ll see data as soon as your campaign updates next. So you can binge watch the entire 4 series, because why not, right?

...and we’re back! Check out where you’re ranking for your target keywords, which URL is ranking, and over time, whether you’ve moved up or down.

We also pull in search volume from Moz’s Keyword Explorer to give you an idea of demand. When looking at search volume, don’t forget that the higher the demand, the more competition you’ll likely face. Don’t be disheartened by ranking well for keywords with lower search volume, especially if they convert better.

Tracking your rankings is crucial to understanding why you’re not performing as well as you expected. If you’re seeing a lot of down arrows, you need to investigate who is jumping ahead of you and why.

Dig into keywords with falling rankings

Let’s find some keywords that have that sad little down arrow, meaning we’ve dropped down in rankings since our last update.

Here's a little bundle of keywords that I can investigate. I’ll click on the keyword to open up the Analysis report and scroll down to "Your Performance." Now we can see a historical graph of your rankings and track those other sites who want to push us to one side. And what do we have here?

They’ve gone and nipped in front of us! This will not stand! It’s likely that for some reason your competitor's result has been sending stronger quality, authority and relevance signals to Google. When it comes to SEO you can’t stand still.

Toolkit:

Keyword Explorer Lists – Check your rankings on the fly

Moz Pro – Track your rankings (and your competitors’ rankings) over time

Step 3: Optimize your content

There are 2 parts to this step,

1. Get your basic on-page optimization in order.

2. Check your content is tip-top quality

Don't go changing (too often)

I don’t want to recommend you jumping in and making changes to content too often. Even Google needs time to register your updates. However, if your content is a bit dusty and you’re losing out to competitors, then it’s time to check that everything you think is in place is actually in place.

View your page like a bot

I like to think of this as a “bot’s-eye-view.” When a little bot comes along, it doesn’t go, “Oooh, look at that lovely header image! Oooh, I love that font, the white space is really working for me! Oh, how the Internet has changed since my days as a junior bot trawling through gifs of dancing babies!" It reads the code and moves on. We can do this too, with a little bit of knowhow.

Using Firefox or Chrome, you can right-click and view the page source.

If you’re unfamiliar with reading code, it’ll look pretty intimidating.

We’re going to use CMD + F (or CRTL + F for Windows) to hunt for the bits and pieces we’re after.

Pro tip: If you’re seeing og:title, this is a Facebook tag.

Likewise, if you’re using the meta property="og:description," this is also a Facebook tag. These help format posts when the URL is shared on Facebook. You’ll want to make sure you also have Title and Description tags link these:

<title>The best title for this page</title>

<meta name="description" content="The best description for this page" />

Basic page optimization

This is relatively straightforward, because you control your pages. However, maybe for that very same reason, it’s still a bit of a stumbling block for beginners. If you’re confused and locked in a mind-melt of madness because you can’t figure out if you should use the primary keyword and/or the secondary keyword in the title tag, chill your boots.

Here is a brisk and fairly brief run-through on how to get into a productive page optimization mindset.

Title tag basics

This is the bit you click on in the SERPs. Title tags should be 50-60 characters of punchy goodness that is relevant to your content. Because it’s relevant to your content, it includes the words you want to rank for and accurately describes what you’re talking about. You better believe Google is paying attention to click signals, so draw that click with your awesome headline. Think about the titles you click on when you’re searching for lovely things. Do your own searches to see what title tags are out there; it’s not like they’re hard to find, they’re literally a click away.

Meta Description basics

This is the bit of text under the title tag in the SERPs. Meta descriptions should be about 155-160 characters of tender lovin’ poetry that talks to the user like they’re a real human being, because they are, and so are you (unless you’re part of the cat colony I suspect controls large portions of the web). This is not a direct ranking factor, but it can heavily influence clicks. Clicks from humans. And what do clicks do? They signal to Google that you’re hot stuff!

On-page copy

Yep, you’re going to want to pop your keywords here, too. But really, let’s not get too hung up on this. If you’re writing something super-duper about your topic, this will flow naturally. Make it as long as it needs to be to make your point. Don’t rattle off the same words over and over; use language to the best of your ability to describe your topic. Remember all those clicks you worked so hard to get with your title and description tags? Well, if they all bounce back to search, you just know Google is paying attention to this. Your content has to be worth the click.

Go and look at what type of content is already ranking. This is not an exercise in scraping content, but a way to make sure that your content isn’t just as good, but much better.

This task can be done manually for a small site or for a few pages you’ve cherry-picked, no problem.

Check your whole site regularly

Maybe you've been creating content like a content-creating super machine and you might have skipped a few description tags. Or maybe you copy and pasted a title tag or two. In this case, you’ll want to check that it’s all hunky-dory on a larger scale and on a regular basis.

We’re going back to our Moz Pro campaign to take the heavy lifting out of this job.

Head to the Rankings tab and hit that little "Optimize" button on the right.

Once you hit that little button, you’ve set off a chain of events where our bot looks at the keyword you’re targeting, then has a good old dig-around on your page and gives you a score out of 100.

We’re hoping for that wheel of destiny to roll around to 100.

If we make it part-way around, it’s time to look at the suggestions to see how you can improve your on-page optimization.

Focus on top-level pages, pages that convert, and high-authority pages first.

Toolkit:

Moz Pro Page Optimization – Check that your whole site is optimized correctly

Further reading:

8 Old School SEO Practices That Are No Longer Effective - Whiteboard Friday

Step 4: Become a keyword connoisseur

It’s easy to become fixated on a keyword beyond what is reasonable or healthy. Are you carrying a torch for a golden keyword? Stalking it in the SERPs even though it’s completely entranced with the likes of Wikipedia, eBay, AdWords, and Image Packs?

Ranking in the high-click zone for your keywords is all about beating other sites. This special, golden ticket to traffic wonderland might be a good long term goal, but you’re not going to get to the top of the results in the near future.

On the other hand, maybe you’re afraid of competition, so you only target keywords with very low difficulty.

This can be a winning strategy if the keywords have strong intent and you’re targeting the long tail of search, but you don’t want to put in all that work creating content and find that no one is searching for it. No searches means no traffic, and no traffic means no humans to click a thing that makes a person somewhere in the world look at their analytics data and smile.

A little bit of competition is a good thing — it indicates a healthy, profitable industry.

So we’re looking for a sweet spot: keywords with some demand and less competition. I’m going to break down what organic competition is, and how you know what level of keyword difficulty you can target.

What's the meaning of this so-called 'competition?'

If you want to rank organically, your competition is the other sites that are currently on the first page for the keywords. It’s not the total number of sites that are using your keywords in their content, and it’s not the AdWords competition.

If someone on your team, or an agency or a client sends you competition data that’s defined as low, medium, or high, this is very likely to be AdWords competition, and it relates to the cost-per-click.

Moz’s Keyword Difficulty score uses the top 10 organic results to calculate the Difficulty metric. It’s a score out of 100, where a higher number means that the competition is strong, and it may take you longer to see results from your efforts. Every search you bash into Keyword Explorer shows you the Difficulty score from the Keyword Overview, and you can build these into lists so you can compare related keywords.

Benchmark your site’s Difficulty rating

We know that Difficulty is out of 100, but a question we get all the time is: How do I know what level of Difficulty is too high?

Well, first off, testing is a sure way to find out. But if you want a little pointer before you head down that road, here's how you can quickly benchmark your site’s Difficulty rating.

Time for another consoling hug from Google Search Console. Grab the keywords that are already sending you traffic from Performance > Search Results and export the results to the format of your choosing.

Save these to a list in Keyword Explorer.

Hit "Save," and now you have a benchmark to use when looking at other keywords you could potentially rank for.

When you’re looking at keywords to target in the future you'll have a good idea whether it’s a short-term or long-term goal.

You can also capitalize on keywords you’re already getting traffic for by looking for opportunities in the SERP Features. Can you steal a Featured Snippet?

I also want to track these keywords over time to see if I’m losing or gaining ground, so I’ll add them from my list straight to my Moz Pro campaign.

Next time my campaign updates, and forevermore into the future, I’ll be keeping the sharpest of eyes on these keywords.

Toolkit:

Google Search Console – Grab keywords already sending you traffic

Keyword Explorer – Find the real organic competition and benchmark Difficulty

Step 5: Build your site’s authority

Now step 5 is a real doozy, and it’s a common stumbling block for new sites. Just like networking in the real world, online authority is built up over time by your connection to sites that search engines already trust.

I like to think of authority as the pixie dust from the J.M. Barrie novel Peter Pan. It’s almost mentioned as an afterthought, but without it Wendy and the gang were just kids jumping up and down on their beds. They’re thinking happy thoughts. They might even get a bit of temporary lift, you know, just like when you might get a bit of traffic here and there — enough to keep you jumping. But there's a very big difference between jumping up and down on a spring-loaded mattress and flying off to a world of perpetual youth.

Track your authority

To figure out how much dust you have in your tank, you’ll need to take a look at the Moz metric Domain Authority. This is our best prediction of how well a site will rank for any given search. It’s on a scale of 1–100, and higher DA means more authority.

You can get your paws on DA free through Moz's Link Explorer, the MozBar (Moz's free SEO toolbar), or in the SERP Analysis section of Keyword Explorer. I like to keep MozBar on DA mode so I can check this metric out as I scoot about the web.

To make this a whole lot easier, head to the Moz Pro "Links" tab. Here you’ll find your historical link metrics, alongside those of your direct competitors.

Pixie dust, or website authority, gives you insight into what is powering your rankings, but everyone else's as well. These metrics are relative with respect to the other sites similar to your own, including your competitors.

Gather a pocket full of pixie dust

The first thing we always recommend when people reach out to us to find out how they can improve their Domain Authority is to improve the overall SEO of their site. The good news for you is we’ve already done that in steps 1-4 — highest of high fives to you!

The second thing you have to do is get backlinks. This is commonly known as link building. When I started doing SEO for an ecommerce site back about what feels like a thousand years ago now, I had no idea what I was doing; this term irked me, and still kind of does. It sounds like you need to build links yourself, right? Nope! It’s like you’re playing Minecraft, but instead of building the structures, you’re actually trying to encourage other people to build them for you. In fact, you’re not allowed to build anything yourself, because that's cheating. Game changer!

Don’t forget you don’t want just anyone building these structures. You need good people who themselves have authority; otherwise, your lovely gothic mansion might turn into a pile of rubble.

A lot of link building today is PR, content creation and outreach. I’m not going to go into that in this post, but I’ll include some links in the toolkit below to help you in that department.

We're going to look at what actions you can take to track and build your authority.

Check for any leaks

There’s no point grabbing up pixie dust if you have a whopping great hole in your pocket.

Find and plug any holes quick-smart. Link Explorer has a handy tab just for this job. From “Links” click on “Top Pages” and filter by Status Code.

Now here's a list of broken pages , ordered by Page Authority that have inbound links. Pages on your site that are down aren’t passing value — not to mention it’s less than ideal user experience. You can prioritize the pages with the highest PA and amount of linking domains.

Internal links

I said before that you can’t build any of your links yourself. However, as with everything in SEO there's a caveat: in this case, links from within your own site are not only key to your site’s usability, but they also pass equity. Internal linking is primarily for user experience, but it also helps bots navigate your site for the purposes of lovely indexing.

Don’t stuff too many links on your page

Your homepage and other top pages will probably have the strongest authority, as other sites will link to your homepage in many cases.

You want that high-equity page to link out to other pages in a natural way that resembles a pyramid structure. Don’t forget the user in your rush to dish out equity; do visitors want to go from your homepage straight to some random deep page on your site? Does this help them on their journey?

On-Demand Crawl in Moz Pro help you find out if if you have too many on-page links.

You also shouldn't go overboard with keyword-rich anchor text. Once again, think about the user, not about gaming search engines. It’s unlikely to get your site penalised, but it’s typically ineffective and not a good use of your time.

If you’re scooping up big swaths of copy to get keyword-rich anchor text but it doesn’t really help the person reading the article, then maybe you’ve got yourself an awkward link at your dinner party.

To follow or nofollow?

Links come in two flavors: follow and nofollow. Generally speaking, you do want your internal links to be “follow.” Although there are good reasons to noFollow internal links depending on your site setup. Bots will literally follow links unless told not to on the journey of your choosing and equity will be passed on, which is just what you want.

You can use the MozBar to check your pages for follow and nofollow links.

On your own site nofollow links can be marked on a link-by-link basis, or a whole page on your site can be allocated as nofollow. Let’s find the "Meta-robots Nofollow" column in your crawl CSV and filter by TRUE to check if you intended to mark these pages as nofollow.

Toolkit:

MozBar – In-browser link analysis

Moz Pro Crawl Test – Find those nofollow pages and pages with too many links

Link Explorer – Explore backlink analysis

Further reading:

Moz’s guide to link building

Wrapping up

I hope this helps you begin to uncover why your content isn’t ranking for your target keywords, and sets the wheels in motion for climbing up the SERPs.

Try Moz Pro + KWE, free for 30 days

Don’t forget that Moz Pro is available free for the first 30 days and it includes Keyword Explorer, so you can start to understand your site’s authority, check your on-page optimization, track your rankings over time, and figure out how to improve them.

Top Tips for Non-Spammy Link Building — Whiteboard Friday

In December of 2022, Google announced that they did a link spam update, and they told us that they tried to nullify “spammy” links at scale. So, how do we exactly build non-spammy links? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Debbie goes through five tips to do so.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. This is Debbie. I am the Global SEO Manager at Dialpad. Today we're talking about link building, one of my favorite areas in SEO. So last year, in December of 2022, Google had announced that they did a link spam update.

So in this update, they told us that they tried to nullify spammy links at scale. So how do we exactly build non-spammy links then? So today I'm going to cover five tips for non-spammy links. Before we jump into that, I wanted to kind of share that I've kind of split the tips into a few that are related to the mindset that you should have.

So how you approach link building is really important on how you can build non-spammy links. So how you think about link building is very important here. Then the second part is the tactics. What are specific tactics that you can try that will help you build non-spammy links? So now, first tip is who, who do you want to link to your content, to your site?

So are they like your journalists or content writers? You want to think about who you want links from and then look at what they are linking to. Are they linking to certain types of guides? We'll talk about more of like content that you can create that they might be interested in linking to, but make sure you do that research beforehand to understand your target audience.

So when it comes to link building, your target audience are those journalists and people that you want links from. So you really need to understand them. So who do you want links from? What do they link to? Then also putting yourself in their shoes. So it's important to think about what do journalists want. One thing is data.

They really like data. They like to quote data. If you read a news article, they might start off with like X percent of Americans, blah, blah, blah. So this is where you need to really understand what your target audience as a link builder, what do they want to see. Whenever you do outreach to them, which we'll talk about later, you need to make sure you put yourself in their shoes and really understand what do they want, what type of content would be interesting to them.

So make sure to keep that in mind. Now, second, which is related to the first, is you have to make sure that your content, whatever linkable asset that you're trying to create has some sort of value. No value, no links. So the way link building works fundamentally is your content needs to have some sort of value.

It needs to provide some sort of value in order to get a link. If there's no value, no one is going to care about your content and no one is going to link to it. So when we think about content and providing value, I think we often think about we might want to make sure our content provides value to our customers or our potential clients, but then we don't always think about the kind of broader audience out there.

So what content that might be valuable to the industry as a whole? So that's one area to think about. Another thing is to think about what content would be informational and helpful for the content writers that you want to link to you as well as journalists. So these are things to make sure to keep in mind, and keep in mind the reason why there's a scale here is that each group that I mentioned earlier, they kind of value different things.

So you might do a piece of content that is very helpful to your customers or anyone who comes across your blog, but then that content might not be super valuable to like journalists or other content writers or people you want links from. So you need to make sure to keep that in mind that your content might only serve this group of audience.

But if you want links from another group of audience, you need to understand what content they value and make sure that that value shows in your content. Now, next tip is the actual tactics. So what can you do, what content can you create to actually get links to your site? So here are a few examples that I have found that are pretty popular within different industries.

You want to make sure that you understand what works for your specific industry. So my industry, it might be something like a research report, but then for other industries it might be something like tools. So to quickly go over those types of content, for tools, an example would be like some sort of free tool that you can provide people.

That's something that tends to get a lot of links. Another example of a linkable asset would be guides. Guides work really well in certain industries, and a guide is just essentially a very long-form piece of content that really nails down how you do something. Then the last one is glossaries. So when you target a keyword like how to something, like how to do content marketing or what is content marketing, that type of content, it can be really helpful for someone who is just starting out.

They hear certain terminologies, they're not sure what they mean. So these types of content are very helpful to readers in general, but they can also get a lot of good links if you can make sure that your content is helpful to that audience. Next is stats and research.

So as I mentioned earlier, people like journalists, content writers, they really like to cite numbers. So being able to, for example, compile a bunch of different statistics on a certain topic, so like content marketing stats, for example, I would scour the internet for a bunch of different studies and pull all the interesting numbers into this one blog post.

Then that itself can be very helpful to anyone who is writing content on my topic, right? I'm essentially kind of helping them do a bit of their homework. So that also can drive links to your page. Another example is doing your own research. So earlier I was talking about you can compile other people's research, but you can also do your own research and find really interesting things through doing a survey.

You can scrape existing data or even look at your own product data to see what are some of the interesting trends that we can turn into a report, into a story that we can pitch to like journalists. When journalists are able to cover something like that, this can also drive more links to your page. Lastly is don't spray and pray.

So I think as a link builder you might get tempted to try to find a bunch of prospects, like hundreds or thousands of emails, and try to like email everyone with the same template, with not really providing them with value. So instead of trying to email everybody, really figure out who is most likely to link to your content, who will actually find your content valuable again, and try to do more targeted outreach and really think about, again, what value can my content provide this person receiving my email and making sure you highlight that in your email.

All right, so there you have it. Those are my five tips for non-spammy link building. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @justdebbb and we can talk more about link building there.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

A Timeline of Bing and Bard Features

Microsoft is tweaking The New Bing constantly, grooming it to be the heir apparent to the traditional, or Top-10 blue links model that first appeared in its modern form 25 years ago with AltaVista. GoTo.com taught Google how to monetize search results back in 1998, and for about a quarter century, that’s been the dominant model. Sure, there’s been Universal Search, Knowledge Graph, and Featured Snippets, but the core of search has been the same for a long time.

Now, Microsoft is trying to change that with Bing, with a rapid-fire roll-out of potentially game-changing new features leveraging the latest GPT AI-tech to make the next feature “conversational search”. Let’s look at the timeline.

But first, a word on history and why Microsoft is so ready to take up this battle.

Microsoft’s AI history

Clippy, Tay, and shameless risk taking

AI-like features in Microsoft products are nothing new. Some may remember Clippy, the paper clip Office assistant from last century who was retired after a few years for being annoying. A decade later, Microsoft launched the experimental teen girl Tay chatbot on Twitter in 2016 that only lasted a day before it had to be taken down for being taught to be racist.

We won’t start our timeline with Clippy or Tay, but suffice to say Microsoft’s been practicing AI product integration and developing resiliency to criticism for a while now. What blows up in one company’s face as a PR disaster is par for the course for Microsoft. And since they’re the underdog in search and most of their revenue comes from elsewhere, they’re willing to take risks.

AI history, Google RankBrain, and today

It’s been a long journey leading up to the creative-writing AI of today, starting in the halls of MIT with industry giants like Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy of the legendary Media Lab who laid a lot of foundation in the 1960s and 70s, but with disappointing results, cutting into credibility and leading to what we now call the “AI Winter”. It turned out to be greatly a matter of the hardware not being ready.

The concept of the personal data assistant popped up over the years such as the much maligned but forward-thinking handwriting recognizing Apple Newton in 1993 and the first popularly successful PDA, the US Robotics PalmPilot in 1997, paving the way for today’s AI-hardware equipped smartphones.

Google’s foundational PageRank from 1998 is a form of AI in that it is a “machine learning” algorithm. Google pushed a series of aggressive “invisible” product advancements such as better Google Maps, quietly improving quality against a backdrop of boring. There were sexier promising starts along the way, such as 2011 when they first rolled out Voice Search in the Chrome browser, then in 2014 when voice search hit mobile Android phones. The AI reality was underwhelming, but anticipation was being built.

In 2015, Google announced that new AI-powered search infrastructure called RankBrain, followed by advancements that were labeled neural matching, BERT and MUM, all of which are language-processing precursors to what took the world by storm in November of 2022 when OpenAI released a product built on a seminal Google paper published Thursday, August 31, 2017 on novel new neural network architecture for understanding language.

Transformational transformers

Only a year after Tay, Google released a paper on the Transformer, a new type of neural network that was able to do machine translation better than anything that had come before. It’s the “T” in GPT, and has made new machine learning output considerably more compelling than Clippy or Tay, with the simple trick of predicting what’s statistically most likely to be typed next—a profoundly deeper thing than it seems at first glance.

This caught Microsoft’s attention, who invested $10 billion in July 2019. Several earlier GPT versions available through the API-only were released and had many developers playing in a playground, but it failed to capture the public’s fancy, behind a login and not yet following the chat paradigm as it was.

Nov. 30, 2022: ChatGPT and the fastest new service adoption rate in history

The first version of OpenAPI’s GPT for the general public, ChatGPT, was launched November 30, 2022. The original ChatGPT release was based on GPT-3.5. A version based on GPT-4 was released on March 14, 2023 (fast-forward in the timeline) right as Microsoft announced their intention to power The New Bing with the latest version, 4.5.

While the period between November 30, 2022 and March 14, 2023 was only 3.5 months, it was a period of intense experimentation and learning for Microsoft and the public, with the now famous fastest adoption-rate of any new online service in history. Things are moving so fast now, it’s time to look at the timeline.

Timeline of Bing and Bard features

Feb. 7, 2023: The New Bing

Microsoft announced the new version of Bing on February 7, 2023 at a news event at Microsoft’s Washington headquarters. The new version of Bing launched on desktop in limited preview on the same day and the mobile version was announced to be coming soon. ChatGPT was so big by this time, many early adopters jumped onto the waiting list.

For the general public to get this early access, they had to use the Edge browser, run an .exe to change your defaults to Microsoft’s requirements, scan a QR code and download the mobile Bing app. And even then, you had to wait. And wait, we did. Clearly, Microsoft was in a powerful position to dictate terms, so took advantage of it to start changing some habits.

Feb. 8, 2023: Google Bard is announced (faux pas)

The very next day, February 8, 2023, Google announced their own AI-powered chat bot, Google Bard, at a news event at Google’s California headquarters. This event was marked by the inauspicious faux pas of Bard wrongly stating that the James Webb Space Telescope was the first telescope to photograph an exoplanet outside our solar system.

The speed with which this announcement was rushed out and how easily Google lowered its guard against AI misinformation sent a resounding message around the world. Google is not infallible even in its own turf. Fortunes can change quickly in tech.

Feb. 8, 2023: Early access to the new Bing, citation links, coding

For those lucky enough to get early access to The New Bing, Tay-like weirdness kicked-in, creeping out a NYTimes reporter in an article release 10 days after the launch, on February 16 when Bing tried to get the reporter to leave his wife and also made some bizarre philosophical conversations that left the reporter deeply unsettled, and right at the epicenter of a potential product-killing PR debacle.

Feb. 8, 2023: Surprisingly good features out of the gate

The beautiful Citations feature with the expandable Learn more footnote links, links again embedded directly in context of the chat, and impressively allows copy/paste of the “Markdown” of the chat including the citation-links was there right from the time of early access release.

This was very well thought-out and executed from the start and instantly won me over, as it was generously giving out Web traffic countering perhaps one of the greatest concerns, and struck me very much as an implementation worthy of Google. It alleviated many concerns gnawing at SEOs that a chat interface to search could mean the end of referral traffic.

Another big “out of the gate” feature that surprised a lot of people and has become a cornerstone of The New Bing is the ability to “code” in the chat window. A seldom mentioned aspect of this is how well the copy/paste feature handles even this coding, providing the triple-backtick code-blocks that allows other systems to show correct color-coded syntax highlighting.

Feb. 17, 2023: Microsoft Implements 5-Question Limit

Springing into action the very next day, February 17, 2023, Microsoft announced that it would limit chat sessions to five questions per session and 50 questions per day. This was a temporary measure, they said, to give their engineers time to “tune the AI” to be more human-like.

Feb. 20, 2023: The New Bing Rolls Out Despite 5-Question Limit Delay

Three days later on February 20, 2023, I got my first access to The New Bing and can show that the 5-question limit had not yet taken place, though the AI was extremely shy about any “meta” questions about itself, even just if you were using it.

It was not announced, but some sort of new rules were in place that whenever the AI was asked a question that made it uncomfortable, it unceremoniously ended the chat session. You now have to hit a little dustbin icon to blank its memory and start over. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind much?

Feb. 25, 2023: Tone Control and Special Superscripts

On February 25, 2023, Microsoft announced a new feature called Tone Control that would allow users to set the tone of the AI to be more or less human-like.

Feb. 28, 2023: Ads in Bing

On February 28, 2023, still ahead of the 5-question limit even appearing for me, the next big advancement hit. I remember it clearly because it was my first day working for MOZ and I threw out my back and distinctly remembered that I’d rather chat with Bing than wade through top-10 links that will inevitably be dominated by ads.

Imagine my surprise this being the first moment I noticed ads in The New Bing. AdWords-like ads in AI-chat! Isn’t this what Google should be doing?

What struck me with this experience even more than the ads was the fact that when I needed to search fast, I didn’t want to be hit with the traditional search interface. I just wanted to talk to an expert. This went beyond the “1 right answer” of a rich snippet. I was already used to the back-and-forth discussion aspect of chat-enhanced search, and was impressed by how the AI seemed to empathize with my situation.The idea of a “relationship” with your search engine should not be underestimated.

What’s more, with every new website you visit first hitting you with the GDPR cookie prompt, then with ads, and with Google’s Rich Snippets and Quick Answers already teaching us to alternatives to clicking through, the practical use of this new back-and-forth conversational style to search feels like a no brainer.

March 1, 2023: Upping the Question Limit to 6

By March 1, 2023, the 5-question limit was in place and was in fact already upped to 6 questions:

March 3, 2023: Question Limit += 1

By March 3rd, 2023, the question limit was upped to 8:

Somebody was playing a game of Jenga with the question limit, and I was starting to get the feeling that the AI was getting more mature and accepting of its job at Microsoft. The tower would not topple.

March 7, 2023: Aggressive Monetization by Microsoft

By March 7, Microsoft was experimenting with aggressively monetizing on commerce keywords:

To this day, Bing chat prompts that include the word “iPhone” will trigger similar ads. But is the traffic sent? Well, the entire text of the chat leading up to the ad label is a link to the advertiser’s site. This is analogous to when GoTo.com, the first search engine to mix paid-search with organic search showed the way to AdWords to Google, but fast-forwarded 20 years and coming from an already existing mega competitor rather than a small startup.

March 8, 2023: Question Limit Increased to 10

By March 8, 2023, the question limit was upped to 10:

March 14, 2023: Question Limit Extended to 15 and Introduction of "site:" Search Modifiers

By March 14, the question limit is upped to 15, and I start noticing Bing’s ability to modify it’s second-stage searching to include “site:” modifiers, presumably doing very precision searches of the Bing index to find the best answer to my question. This is a very impressive feature, and I’m surprised it’s not encountered and discussed more.

March 16, 2023: General Public Access to The New Bing and Integration with Edge Browser

Since March 16, 2023, most people have been able to sign up and immediately get access to The New Bing. This was accompanied with a new version of Microsoft Edge desktop browser that planted the Bing logo in the upper-right of the browser and a sidebar that would open up to the right of the browser serving chat sessions that were in-context of what you were looking at, allowing such features as asking about the YouTube video you were watching. By this time, all roads lead to Bing chat for Edge users, and everything but using exact web addresses will initiate a chat session.

Mistyped web addresses in the address bar initiate chat sessions because that counts as a search. This is now the default experience on Windows with the included browser. You have to actively work to turn it off or download an alternative browser like Chrome to avoid this behavior.

This is significant because as Windows operating systems and laptops get upgraded, all defaults reset back to Bing, setting the stage for a battle that Microsoft could win through attrition alone. At some point, the default search engine is given a chance by users tired of going through the rigmarole of customization and discover that Bing is actually pretty good.

While this heavy handed approach would appear to be inevitably effective, Google’s success in motivating Chrome installs buys Google some time. According to Bing itself: 

There are several websites that track browser market share. According to W3Counter, Chrome accounts for 63% of the total market share for all browsers worldwide. According to Global Stats StatCounter, as of November 2020 Chrome holds a whopping 70.33% of the desktop browser market share worldwide. More precisely, Chrome dominates the global web browser market with a whopping 65.68% share. The only other browser on the market that has a somewhat considerable share is Safari, with 18.68%.

Consequently, all of Microsoft’s effort to make Bing the default search engine on desktop is blocked by Google’s success to date. But we know Edge is based on Chrome, so does Edge show up as Chrome in these statistics? Again, according to Bing:

No, Edge users are not reported as Chrome users in these statistics. According to Kinsta, Microsoft Edge has a desktop browser market share of 5.83%. According to WPOven Blog, Microsoft’s Edge is at the second position with 7.75% browser market share. According to WebTribunal, Microsoft Edge has a desktop browser market share of 10.07%.

…leaving us to conclude, after calculating Apple out of the equation, that only about 1 in 8, or 12.5% of desktop users don’t go through the trouble of replacing the default Windows browser with Chrome, which I speculate is still a residual effect of the non-standard and now retired Internet Explorer. Aggressive pushing of Windows 11 upgrades and new hardware will likely increase Edge market share and drive up exposure to the Bing search + chat experience. Microsoft now requires a Microsoft account to install Windows, which also happens to be the requirement for The New Bing.

March 21, 2023: Google Announces Bard Availability with Limited Features

On March 21, 2023, Google announced that they are granting access to Bard to people on the waiting list. Feature-wise, Bard came out very sparse. No citations. No links. No images. No ads. I received access to Bard 2 days later and ran some rudimentary experiments on the features I felt most relevant at the time, awareness of current events.

Most notably, Google Bard stands on its own domain, bard.google.com, and is not integrated into the main Google search experience. This is a stark difference from Bing, which has integrated chat into the main search experience. This is significant because it means that Google Bard is not positioning itself as an alternative search engine experience, nor even an enhanced one, but rather as just a chatbot, and thus readily dismissed by the serious searcher.

As far as other features go, it can be added that Bard simultaneously offers 3 alternative responses to a prompt, but this can hardly be counted as a feature over Bing as it closely resembles Bing’s “Tone Control” feature.

March 27, 2023: Bing Raises Question Limit to 20

By March 27, the Bing question-limit was upped to 20, bringing us to where it stands today. The visibly aggressive roll-out of new features slowed down, and over the last month there has been very little new. Microsoft has been fine-tuning under what conditions chat sessions are initiated.

March 28, 2023: Bard Now Includes Citations, though Limited in Integration and Accessibility

As of March 28, 2023, Bard can give citations. It was not announced and may have been there longer. It is not well integrated and only appends a few links to the end under circumstances Bard deems appropriate. It is not clear how Bard decides when to give citations and when not to.

When citations are given, they are only ever appended at the end of the chat response, and never embedded and hyperlinked inline with accompanying footnote-style numbering as with Bing. Additionally, the citations are not in the copyable text. If you actually want to “lift” the citation links and use them in other places such as articles like this one, it can be quite a struggle.

April 21, 2023: Bard Introduces Coding Capability and Integration with Colab

The last significant development in the chatbot space was Bard’s ability to provide code, announced April 21, 2023. From March 28 when limited citation capability appeared in Bard to April 21 when coding ability was announced is absolutely glacial in terms of the development speed we’ve been seeing.

On the plus side, perhaps the most exciting unannounced aspect of the coding feature is that when you ask Bard to code something, it will actually hide under the lower-right triple-dot menu the ability to “Export to Colab” and actually run the code in a cloud-based Notebook environment.

Can a Bards or Magis beat a Lich in a Joust?

My habits are formed. Microsoft was successful conditioning me to always give the conversational search model a try first. I’ve overridden most of the default browser settings Microsoft originally mandated as a condition of using Bing, most notably making the search bar default to Google when it’s not an exact web address typed in. And it’s not insignificant to point out that Edge is always my first choice browser because even with your Microsoft login on Chrome, and even with the appearance of all the Chat UI elements, any attempt to click them will tell you that Chat mode is only available when you have access to new Bing.

Being that I know that I do have access to the new Bing on that very same Microsoft user account that I’m logged in as under that Chrome session, I wonder what it is that they’re trying to tell me? Latest episode of the Browser Wars, much?

What Google’s catch-up game is going to be is uncertain. Bard doesn’t seem like it could be the end game, and indeed Google has already announced the latest in its Dungeons & Dragons campaign: Magi, but few details are known. Perhaps Google has something in store for us that will blow our minds and make the new Bing… well, look like the old Bing. Or maybe it’s just that finally the Lich woke up, and Google is not ready to play. Bards and Magis may have no chance trying to joust a Lich.

GA4 Audiences: Not Just for Ads! — Whiteboard Friday

There are many interesting features in GA4 — some that were sort of in Universal Analytics, but now they're better. One of those features is Audiences, which many people may only be using for their ads. In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Dana shows you why Audiences can be useful for reporting on other areas of your marketing efforts as well.

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

Video Transcription

Hello, Moz readers. My name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm President and partner at Kick Point, a digital marketing agency based in Edmonton. But if you're in Seattle, I'm just across the water, just outside Victoria, British Columbia. What I'm going to be talking to you about today is GA4, everyone's favorite subject.

July, real soon now. You really need to upgrade to GA4. It's not really an upgrade, and the data doesn't transfer over, but anyway. There's lots of fun, interesting features in GA4 that were kind of in Universal Analytics, but now they're better. One of the features that I don't think people are using enough or maybe think that they're just for ads is Audiences, which is why this is called "GA4 Audiences - Not Just for Ads."

Slices and dices, truly a miracle machine. But really what Audiences do is they help you segment stuff. So I've written out a few options here, what you should understand about Audiences. What I would encourage all of you to do after watching this video is go into GA4, just try making some audiences. You can remove them if you don't like them, but experiment with it because you really can't hurt anything by making audiences.

It's not going to ruin the data or something. They are totally harmless. So go ahead and try some audiences after I've given you these options of what you can do. But of course, watch me to the end first. All right. So what are GA4 Audiences? You may remember in our favorite tool, Universal Analytics, that there were segments.

So audiences are segments basically on steroids. They have a lot more options available to them, and they're built from criteria you set like segments were, but there's a lot more options in terms of that criteria that you set. I don't think necessarily when people built segments, they really went into the Advanced section a lot. So, basically, GA4 Audiences are the Advanced section plus more. Now, the other thing with Audiences that was not in UA is they can be time based, and this part is really cool and I think, because it's so interesting, not a lot of people are using it to its full potential yet because I don't think we've really put our heads around like, "This is what we're going to use this for."

So one of the things you could do, for example, is I want to know how many people have watched 3 plus videos in a 30-day span. Or you could say, "I only want people in this audience who came to the site via this email and put something in their cart within one hour." That is something you could not do without some serious, serious Kung Fu in Universal Analytics. So, again, GA4 Audiences, it's super easy to do that. You can do time-based audiences, which I really enjoy.

The other thing you can do with GA4 Audiences is you can use them as reports. You can use them as reports within the GA4 interface. They're also available in the GA4 API. So you can export them out of GA4 and do interesting things with them in other tools, which I'm going to talk about when I get to the column that I'm currently standing in front of. So you can even use them in the real-time reports, which I think is really fun because I'll create an audience and then I'll go look in the real time and make sure that people are actually slotting themselves into the audience in real time if I'm working with a client that has a high volume enough of a website.

It's really neat to see people sort of sort themselves into audiences. It's neat for me. Maybe you are not as nerdy as I am. Maybe you'll not find that as fun. Anyway, they're neat. So how can you create them? So you go into Admin and then you click on Audiences, of course.

Then you click on Create an Audience. That's the simple part. The hard part is how are you going to create this audience. So there are three different things you can do. You can do dimensions, which are groupings of things. So a dimension, if you're not familiar with the term, is something like the countries that people were in who came to your website or the pages that they viewed. Those are dimensions.

The next thing is metrics, and metrics are the numbers. So this was this many page views or this many sessions. That's a metric. Then the third thing can be based on events. Events are technically dimensions, but they also kind of live outside of that a little bit, which is why I separated them out. So, for example, in GA4, you may have heard that everything is an event. Well, for example, a page view is an event called Page_View.

If somebody clicks on a video and it's a YouTube video built-in that will work, you would have an event Video_Start. That event would have parameters, such as which video they were viewing, where they paused it, how far they got through the video. So all those kinds of things are available to you when you're creating these audiences. Now, one important thing about audiences, they do not backfill.

Okay? You can't create them like segments you could in UA and then look at them later and go back in time. That is not going to work. There is nothing like segments that can go back in time in GA4. So make sure to create them the minute you think of them. Typically, we have a tab in our spreadsheet we use for our analytics plans called GA4 Audiences. Myself and our team and our client brainstorm all the possible things that we might want to capture in an audience, and then we set that up right away when they're setting up their GA4.

So I'd recommend doing that, and as you think of new audiences, just add them. Again, as I said, you can get rid of them later if you don't like them. At least you're backfilling them now instead of three months from now saying, "Oh, if only I'd set up that audience, you know, three months ago." Future you would have been so happy. So don't wait on setting up audiences. The other thing, too, with audiences, you can have static audiences or dynamic audiences.

Static audiences are this thing happened at some point, and so this person is now in this audience. Like at some point they viewed a video. Dynamic audiences are this thing is happening right now. So this person has done this thing, and if they're not in the dynamic audience, then they're outside of it. So they're either in or they're out, just like high school. So for a dynamic audience, you can choose whether or not you want to have dynamic or static, and that is going to depend on the kind of audiences you create as well.

This part I think is probably not as useful right now. I think more features are going to get added to static versus dynamic in the future. So I don't know if you'll use that part right away. That's okay, don't worry about it. Just know that it's an option for future. Now, the last part that I really enjoy about Audiences is using triggers for Audiences. So you may see a checkbox.

We create an audience that will say, "Trigger an event." So what will happen is an event will be created when someone becomes a member of the audience. This is really useful for things like say conversions. You can use them for conversions because any event can be a conversion. Just FYI, don't set page views as conversions. I know you'll have 100% conversion rate then, which might look great to your client, but like, come on, don't do that.

So you might want to set an audience as a conversion, or you just might want to know how many times this thing happened. So, for example, we have one client who wants to know when people have viewed at least three of their videos all the way to 100%. They're a training company. So in that case, we fire an event to say X number. Then they would say this week, this number of people got through module one or this number of people watched three videos in full.

That way it's a nice, easy way in their reporting to say 80% of people who started module one actually completed module one this week, next week, the week after that. So creating audience triggers is really neat. I have AUD_ written here because we always pre-penned any event name for our Audiences triggers with AUD dash so you know that it came from an audience trigger as opposed to something that was measured on your website directly.

So, for example, if it was somebody starting a video, then we would have AUD_Video Start, for example. So it's like the video start event, but it's related to an audience specifically. Okay. I'll move over here. Now, what do you use Audiences for? Boy, I could do like half an hour of different possible audiences you can create, but I don't have a half an hour.

So here are some ideas of audiences that you should start with. One of the things that I always encourage customers to do is if they have a login, so let's say they're a SaaS product, like Moz, for example, and on the Moz website when you go there, there's a login button. You could take anybody who clicks on that login button and then say, "This person is probably a current customer because they're trying to log in."

Or even better, if you do have analytics behind your login, then you can insert them into the audience of current customers if they've ever accessed a page that they can only access when they log in. The advantage of this is then you can say, "You know what, we already sold to these people. They're not going to convert." Then when you are looking at your conversion rates for different pages or campaigns or whatever it might be, you can exclude the people who are never going to convert because you already sold them.

You're not going to sell them more. But if you have say an add-on package or something else, then you could take the people who are already current customers, the people who could only buy the add-ons because they already have the base package, and then look at them specifically away from everyone else when you're considering those conversion rates. So at a minimum, I would say if there's a way you can differentiate on your website between people who've already bought your stuff and people who haven't bought your stuff, people who are members versus non-members, if you're say a not-for-profit organization, those are great ways to separate out those two so you don't need to be confusing yourself with conversion rates.

One of the things that we've used this for, actually, is for a convention center, which during COVID they weren't as busy. We still set up their GA4 anyway. One of the things that we look for is they serve a lot of different audiences. They serve, for example, the people who are going to events. They serve the people who are booking a meeting. They serve the people who are booking a wedding.

So the people who are booking a wedding will probably look at the booking a wedding page. They might also look at the events coming up. People who are booking a meeting will look at the booking a meeting page and the events coming up. But people who are going to an event are only going to look at the events page. More than half of their traffic are people going to the events page and nothing else. So when we're looking at their sales and we're saying, "How are your wedding sales," we're only looking at people who went to the wedding page.

We're only evaluating based on that wedding audience. We're only evaluating based on that meeting audience. We're not ignoring them, but it's not important for their conversion rate to see the people who looked at the event page. So that's one way you can really segment out audiences to make your marketing more effective and really focus it down to what matters. Other stuff you can do, you can evaluate content. So as I mentioned earlier, we have a client who wants to see people who are finishing their videos.

So, for example, even if it's not a learning platform, if you have video content in your website, create an event based on people who looked at three plus videos on your site, maybe just started them or got halfway through, it's up to you how you want to set that up. But then look at that audience versus everybody else and then look at the conversion rate. Maybe people who watch your videos are more likely to convert, and if that's the case, put your videos in more places.

It's a really great way to evaluate how different pieces of content, different CTAs, different blog posts, for example, can really contribute to getting more people to do the thing that you want them to do. You can also build persona groups. So, for example, like thinking back to that convention center as an example of personas, but also if you have different tools that you sell that are to a different audience, and actually I'll just use Moz here as an example, right?

You've got Moz Pro, and you've got Moz Local, for example. You have STAT. Those are three very different audience groups, and so you would have audiences of people who are probably going to be Pro customers, probably going to be Local customers, and probably going to be STAT customers. Then that way you're only focusing on each individual audience as you evaluate the conversions for that particular product. That's a really important way, again, to focus in on what's most important instead of being like, "Our conversion rate, 0.1%, but that's because we were counting everybody who went to the blog and never went to anything else. They weren't interested our product."

Or, "We're counting everybody who's already converted," right? Just get that out of there. Focus on who you could potentially sell to as opposed to literally everyone who's ever been on your website ever. Then you can also compare audiences. So as I mentioned, you can say, "People who do this are more likely to convert." That means you have to have an opposite audience. So you could have people who only complete one video, or you could say, "People who get to 50% of this video versus people who get to 10% of this video, I want to compare those two audiences to see which audience was better."

So I think that that's also a really effective way to compare do we need to take that last half of the video and slap it up faster? Is there something like that, that pre-roll? You know when you watch a movie trailer and they've got like the trailer compressed to the first five seconds, do you need to do that for your videos because you're losing people, and by the time they get to the good stuff, those people who watch 50% are like, "Yeah, I'm ready to buy," but they take so long to get there that a bunch of people are dropping out?

That's a good way to compare audiences as well. Of course, you can use them for Google ads. I heard that's a pretty neat thing to do. So generally, Audiences are pretty neat. I think that not a lot of people are using them. I think you should use them. I think if you're agency side, tell your clients about them because clients love coming up with different ways to slice and dice their customer data.

I have never had clients so excited as I said, "You tell me what kind of audiences you want to make, and we'll make them for you." They just [plowing sound] through the spreadsheet. So you can definitely give them some homework, and they will help you out with creating audiences. Anyway, enjoy creating audiences. If you have a neat idea for an audience, definitely leave it in the comments or reach out to me on social media. I'm happy to hear about fun stuff that other people are doing. Thanks so much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Meet Our MozCon 2023 Community Speakers

Major high fives and fist bumps for each and every person who took the time to submit pitches for this year’s community speaker spots!

With only two open community speaker spots, and hundreds of pitches ranging from how to grow your career as an SEO to all manner of AI and ChatGPT-related entries, the competition was unusually tough which, in its own right is a massive indication of many incredible things to come for the future of our industry and industry events.

Our selection committee read, watched, and researched, whittling things down to a shortlist of top contenders, and then read, watched, and researched some more to determine if a potential speaker and their talk would be a perfect fit for the MozCon stage this August. We take lots of things into account during our review, but ultimately there are four main factors that determine our final selections:

• Strength of the pitch (e.g., value, relevance to the audience, etc.)

• Can the content reasonably be delivered in the time allotted?

• Does it fit with overall programming and agenda?

• Will the topic have overlap with other presentations?

After much deliberation, we settled on two community speakers that we’re confident are going to be a great addition to the MozCon Stage.

Ready to meet our MozCon Community Speakers? Please congratulate 👏:

Azeem Ahmad (he/him)

Digital Marketing Lead | ASSA ABLOY

Azeem Ahmad is an award-winning digital marketer and international conference speaker. He has several years of experience in the industry managing millions in marketing spend, covering multiple disciplines such as SEO, PPC, Social Media, Programmatic, Audio/Video, and Display too.

Talk: Beyond the written word: Future-proofing your content strategy by leveraging multimedia formats.

In today's rapidly changing digital world, marketers must go beyond just written content to engage with their target audience in the right way. Consumers, including marketers themselves, now expect content that is visually appealing, easily digestible, and interactive. If you want to ensure the longevity of your content strategy and also be more adaptable to the changing landscape digitally, you'll need to leverage multimedia formats such as video, audio, and more. This talk will explore the benefits of incorporating these formats into your marketing strategy, including tips on how to create engaging content that resonates with your audience and boosts conversions/sales. By the end of this session, you'll have a clear understanding of how to future-proof your content strategy and stay ahead of the competition.

Jason Dodge (he/him)

Founder & CEO | Black Truck Media + Marketing

Jason Dodge is the Founder and CEO at search marketing firm, BlackTruck Media + Marketing. Combining nearly 20 years of industry experience with the efforts of holistic, human-centered thinking and technical search marketing tactics, Jason works alongside his team to assist brands with their online success through honest search marketing strategies. His background and experience span both B2B and D2C verticals - from travel & hospitality, to global manufacturing, automotive aftermarket, and large healthcare systems. With a continued passion for the ever-evolving world of search, Jason is a regular contributor to industry publications, and works diligently to help educate others in the marketing and communications industry on the value that SEO brings to their brand.

Talk: 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.

We can’t wait for you to hear from these two awesome community speakers and the rest of our incredible lineup taking the MozCon stage this August 7 & 8. Grab a seat and see for yourself!

Register for MozCon

2023’s Top 7 Local Search Ranking Factors, Illustrated and Explained

Learning to be the best in town at the top seven elements experts feel impact your rankings in Google’s local packs is a smart strategic foundation. Thanks to Darren Shaw who has been running the Local Search Ranking Factors survey since 2017, we all benefit from this respected annual report in which local SEO professionals get to pool their practical knowledge of what they see impacting clients’ rankings most.

Today, we’re going to look at how to set the local businesses you market apart by mastering the tippy-top of the list of factors, with lots of practical tips for improving your rankings so that you’re earning greater visibility.

But, first, what is a local pack?

This is the umbrella term for the local business results Google displays when it feels a searcher’s query has a local intent. Local packs have a variety of formats, like this one with the large map and lettered results:

And this one, also with the large map, but no letters and no links to the website or driving directions:

And this one, with the map above the results, and again, no letters or website/directions links:

There are many variations, based on query, industry, and device. Frequently, local packs appear above the organic results, but they can also be displayed further down the page. Mostly, local packs contain three results, but this number can sometimes change and they may also contain paid ads. Aspects of your Google Business Profile, as well as other sources like your own website and third-party websites, have a demonstrable impact on whether or not you show up in Google’s local packs and the extended listings they click to that are called the Local Finder results.

Now that we’ve got that covered, let’s look at this year’s 7 most influential local pack ranking factors.

1. Primary Google Business Profile category

It’s a local search fact of life that you can’t rank for your most important search phrases unless you’ve selected the right GBP category, and the primary category matters most. Usually, Google displays the primary category on your Google Business Profile (see “Italian restaurant”, above), but not always. You select your primary category by logging into your Google account, searching for your business by name, and then clicking on the Edit Profile tab in the New Merchant Experience editor:

Your primary category is the one you enter into the primary category box, and you can add a total of ten categories:

To discover the best category for your business, follow these steps:

1. Search for the #1 phrase for which you most need to rank in the local results and look at which categories the top-ranked businesses are using.

2. If you see diverse categories represented amongst the top 3 businesses, note which one most closely matches your business. For example, is your broadest and most accurate category “Italian restaurant” or “Fine dining restaurant”?

3. If the listing you are creating isn’t for your main business but is for a practitioner within a multi-practitioner company (like a legal firm with three lawyers or a dental practice with five dentists), try to diversify the categories you choose so that they don’t compete with the main listing for the practice.

4. If the listing you are creating is for a multi-location business, it’s okay to use the same primary category across all your listings, but if the close proximity of one branch to another appears to be causing one of your locations to be filtered out and invisible in the local packs, consider diversifying your primary categories.

5. If your market research indicates that your local market is extremely competitive/crowded for a particular category (think personal injury attorneys in Los Angeles), make a decision about whether you can reasonably compete for local pack visibility for the same category the top competitors are using, or whether you want to try to earn business from a less competitive category while you work to establish the brand you are marketing. Note how most of these businesses have chosen the primary category “Italian restaurant”, but one has chosen to be more specific with “Northern Italian Restaurant”:

   

That small difference could either positively or negatively impact the restaurant’s ability to rank for its most desired search phrases. So, pick a primary category, but don’t be afraid of changing it at a later date if you feel it might be holding you back. Testing is a smart practice.

We’ll be returning to the topic of choosing categories when we get to factor #7, below.

2. Keywords in Google Business Profile business title

Local SEOs keep a running agony column of spammy GBP business title examples, like this tweet from Darren Shaw. Unfortunately, seeing that keywords in the business title is such a powerful ranking factor can mislead business owners and marketers into believing they should be putting something other than their real world business name in this field of the New Merchant Experience editor:

The field is meant to contain only your real-world business name as it appears on your street signage with no extraneous keywords. In this screenshot, you can see that the name is just listed as “Moz”. Not “Moz Vancouver” or “Moz Seattle” or “Moz best SEO software company in America”.

Unfortunately, a weak spot in the algorithm Google uses to order results causes them to reward listings with spammy business titles. It’s probably the least-sophisticated aspect of Google’s system that it can be fooled by keyword-stuffing business titles. You can flag businesses with spammy names, and sometimes Google will edit them, but the penalties are never severe and, in my experience, the spammy names often simply re-appear shortly thereafter.

This problem with the system has business owners and marketers wondering whether they should be honest or try to game the system. Of course, the former is the best policy for companies that plan to build a lasting good reputation, but here are a few tips to help you work amid a rather messy scenario:

1. If you are trying to understand how to write the business title for something other than a single location business (such as a co-located business, solo practitioner, or multi-practitioner business), consult the Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google for detailed instructions.

2. Feel free to report competitors in your market with spammy business names. Google may or may not act on your reports, but if they do, it can help decrease the ranking power of spammers and help your listing with its legitimate name move up.

3. Don’t name your business something that could limit its future growth. For example, think carefully before calling your new restaurant “Tacos San Diego” if there is any possibility that you may someday open branches in San Jose, San Francisco, and Santa Rosa.

If circumstances have made you realize that your real-world business name appears to be holding you back, you do have the option to legally change your name. If you decide on this course of action, try to choose a name that will stand you in good stead for many years to come. Be wary of trendy fads. For example, some local businesses have gone viral, as in the case of a NYC restaurant named “Thai Food Near Me”, but be careful you aren’t dubbing yourself with a phrase that could look dated three years from now.

If your company does rebrand, be sure to update all legal registrations, local business listings across the local search ecosystem, all social media profiles, and all references to the old name on your website and third-party websites

3. Proximity of address to the point of search

Back in 2017 when Darren Shaw first noted that the distance between the person searching and the thing being searched for had become the #1 local search ranking factor, he created the above graphic to illustrate this phenomenon. Your business may be situated on Jasper Avenue near the center of Edmonton, but each of your customers is in a different location, on a different device.

In 2023, proximity of address to the point of search may have slipped to number 3, but it is still every bit as important to understand that there are no static number 1 local search rankings because Google shows each of your customers different results based, in part, on the location of their mobile phone, laptop, or other device. You can witness this in action by walking or driving around town, searching for the same keyword phrase. Local market research involves either engaging in this process manually to assess your overall visibility throughout your market, or using a local rank checker like the ones offered by Whitespark, Local Falcon, or Mobile Moxie’s Serperator.

You can’t control where your customers are and the only option you have if you discover your physical address is limiting your ability to meet goals is to move to a new location (a daunting prospect). What every local business marketer can and should do, however, is to observe how Google is behaving for each desired search phrase.

For example, you might discover that when you search for “tacos”, Google is casting a very narrow net for local results, showing restaurants mainly clustered in a single neighborhood of your city. But when you change your search to “organic vegan tacos”, suddenly Google is widening the net to encompass the whole city or even reaching beyond city boundaries. That’s amazing business intelligence because it shows you opportunities to optimize for more specific terms and show up for more distantly-located customers. Use this knowledge in choosing your:

• Categories

• Services

• Photo and video subjects

• Attributes

• Website topics

While you can’t control Google’s heavy emphasis on proximity, you can respond to it with a smart local search strategy. And this segues nicely into the next factor.

4. Physical address in city of search

Look up your city in Google and click on the map. The red border, as shown above, indicates Google’s concept of the perimeters of your town or city. The reason this matters to local SEO is that businesses located beyond the border often have a much harder time becoming visible for searchers located within the border or for search phrases that contain the name of the town or city.

“I want to rank beyond my location,” has got to be one of the commonest requests local SEOs hear from clients (so common that I wrote an entire column about this in 2019 you might like to read). If you come to suspect that your physical address is severely limiting the number of customers who are finding you online, you have three main options:

• Moving to a new location inside Google’s borders

• Re-optimizing your presence to compete for less-competitive terms, as described in relation to factor #3

• Making a substantial investment in multiple aspects of your local search marketing so that your Google Business Profile becomes so strong that it overcomes Google’s city border bias.

There is no guarantee that the third option will work, but it is often the best bet. To undertake this work from an informed stance, you will need to conduct a competitive local business audit of the top competitors for each of your most important search phrases. By using the free spreadsheet included in that article, you will be able to identify multiple factors that are likely contributing to the high visibility of the top-ranked competitors, and determine what you need to do to surpass their efforts. You may find yourself investing in review acquisition and management, local business listing development, link building, content development, and other areas. Sometimes, you can find sweet spots in which Google is willing to go beyond the borders for strong brands, so studying the maps and Google’s behavior is an essential local search marketing habit.

5. Removal of spam listing through spam fighting

Four years ago, I wrote a column on Simple Spam Fighting: The Easiest Local Rankings You’ll Ever Earn and I’m sorry to say that the tactics I covered for recognizing spam are every bit as necessary today as they were back then. Google’s listing spam problem is massive. Both novice and bad actors have filled up the index with results that mislead the public and violate Google’s guidelines.

It’s a sad story that’s as old as local search, and every year is a new year to hope that Google will give more attention to protecting businesses from misrepresentation and unfair competition, while protecting consumers from disinformation. Perhaps the challenges now being posed by AI, like ChatGPT, and competitors for attention, like TikTok, will put some healthy pressure on Alphabet to defend the relevance of Google’s local results.

In the meantime, local business owners and their marketers have the toilsome (yet, perhaps satisfying?) option of reporting spam listings so that they can move up in the local pack rankings if/when the spammers are removed. To do this effectively, you need to know what constitutes spam in Google’s environment. This can range from:

• Fake business names

• Ineligible business models

• Multiple ineligible listings for the same business

• Fictitious businesses

• Fictitious locations

• Fake reviews

Learn the Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google like the back of your hand, and you will become adept at spotting listing spam. When you believe you’ve encountered a spam listing, your best bet is to use the business redressal form to report it. If you come across a widespread pattern of spam in a given results set and use of the form isn’t getting any traction, you may need to use your marketing skills to bring public attention to the problem in hopes of inspiring Google to act. Want more spam fighting tips? Sterling Sky has a good piece on this.

6. High numerical Google ratings

Your average star rating isn’t just a top local pack ranking factor, but it’s also a top conversion factor. In our report on the Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior, respondents cited the star rating as the most important component of reviews:

Meanwhile, a majority of 51% say a business must have at least 4 stars for them to consider choosing it.

Chances are, if your reputation is below 4 stars, you’ll have some work ahead of you in both improving customer experiences and in actively seeking reviews so that a small number of negative reviews isn’t having an outsized impact on your average rating. For a complete tutorial, read How to Repair and Improve Local Business Reputation via Google Star Ratings and Reviews. Embrace the welcome news that 37% of customers may still give your business a chance, even with a less-than-four-star rating, and this may give you the time you need to make strategic business changes to raise your rating and start winning better rankings and more customers.

7. Additional Google Business Profile categories

The fact that two of the top seven local search ranking factors relate to categories emphasizes just how important these small elements are. Once you’ve selected your most influential primary category, you have nine more chances to help Google understand your relevance to specific customer intents.

Inspiration for filling in those category fields is easiest to find if you either download the GMBSpy Chrome extension or fire up GMB Everywhere to see all of the categories your top local competitors have chosen. If they relate to your business, add them to your profile. Then, read How to Choose GBP Categories (With Cool Tools) for further suggestions on researching and implementing the right identifiers of your business. Over time, keep an eye on Sterling Sky’s running tally of new business categories, in case Google adds something that was previously missing and helps further describe what your business is.

And that’s it for today! Once you’ve gotten a great handle on perfecting your management of the top 7 local search ranking factors, move on to tackle the rest by reading WhiteSpark’s full report. Meanwhile, if you’ve got a new tip or tactic for climbing up the local pack rankings, please don’t hesitate to @ Moz on Twitter!

How to Create 8 Million SEO Test Ideas Using ChatGPT — Whiteboard Friday

As SEOs, we tend to come from an audit mindset, to look for things that are wrong and to try and decide what is the best way of doing things. In today’s episode, Will tries to get you into a testing mindset, and helps you do so by generating test ideas through ChatGPT.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. My name is Will Critchlow, and I'm the founder and CEO at SearchPilot, and I wanted to talk to you today about generating eight million test ideas for your website. At SearchPilot, if you don't know us, we run SEO tests for some of the world's biggest websites, and I think probably at this point have run as many SEO tests as anyone in the world.

The whole angle that I'm coming from here is getting ourselves into a testing mindset. So as SEOs, we have a very big temptation to come from more of an audit mindset, to look for things that are wrong and to try and decide what is the best way of doing things. I want to argue that when you've got testing in place, you want to move to being an explorer, not an auditor.

So you're kind of looking for inspiration, ideas, all the different things that you can test out to see if they're better than what you're doing right now. We're going to talk today just about title tags. Title tag testing is a great way to get started with SEO testing. They're a particularly powerful form of SEO test because your title can affect what you rank for and where you rank, as well as the click-through rate that you get in the search results because it tends to show up right there in the snippet.

We'll get on to where the eight million comes from. But I'm going to be talking a little bit about a tool that we'll link to and you can download so that you can help yourselves do this with our tool and with our help. But we've put together this tool that helps you look at, say, the top 100 ranking pages for a particular query and analyze the titles of all of those pages that are ranking there.

I find this a really powerful way of doing ideation because you get to see all the things that your competitors are doing. You get to compare those and look at, "Hey, there's an angle that I could be taking." Or in my exploration, I can think, "Hey, that's an interesting idea. I'm going to give that a test." What the tool does is it basically spits out a couple of charts that look like this, where you get to look at different kinds of features of these competitors' titles.

So it runs on a keyword, something like "hotels in London," and you might look for features like: Does it mention London? Well, yeah, I mean, they pretty much all are going to mention London. But does it say best? Does it have reviews in there? Does it have prices in there? Does it talk about discount, all these other different features that you might see in different titles? So we spit out a bunch of charts that say relative frequency of all these different features across the top 100, across the top 20, or even one that compares what's prevalent in the top 20 versus the bottom 20 in that 100.

It just drives off a simple spreadsheet. So it's a simple Screaming Frog crawl. You can get started with this really quickly on your own machine. You do the crawl, crawl those titles, and pull them into an export from Screaming Frog, dump them straight into the spreadsheet. Then it's a whole load of regular expression lookups that can say, "Does it have a pipe in there? Does it have a hyphen? Does it have a colon?

Does it have a pound sign? Does it use the word "best"? Does it talk about London and the UK and all these other features?" It pulls all this kind of stuff out, and you can customize it in the tool. But this is where the eight million comes from. Because the way I've put this together right now, it has 23 columns, so there are 23 different things that you may or may not include in a title, and 2 to the 23 is 8 million and a little bit.

So you even get some bonus ones above that eight million. But what I wanted to specifically talk about in this video is to get into the tactics of one specific thing that I found interestingly useful in the work of putting this together, and this is just one of the columns in the spreadsheet. So I mentioned a lot of these drive off regular expressions, just looking up a basic yes or no.

Does the title include a pound sign, for example? But there's one particular that was slightly trickier, which is I wanted to say, "Does the title include the brand of the company?" That at first glance seems like it's going to be easy because you're just going from domain.com to the brand is domain, which works for something like Kayak.

Kayak.com is the domain, and you can just pull out the brand name as Kayak. But it's not always that simple. Some of them use the whole domain name as the brand. So hotels.com, booking.com, the brand is not hotels or booking. It's hotels.com and booking.com. Then some of them, the information isn't even there in that domain name. So cntraveler.com for example, the brand is Condé Nast Traveler.

So there's actually no way of doing that in a spreadsheet. You can't just use a regular expression and pull out those bits of things because that information isn't even there in that domain name. So this is my little tactical tip is this is a perfect place to turn to ChatGPT, because if you're going to do this for hundreds and hundreds of domains, you don't want to be doing this manually.

Some of them you might be able to type in and some of them you might be able to automate, and then some of them you're just going to have to go and look up, and that is a really slow process. The industry is abuzz with ideas for using ChatGPT right now. But this is one that I found particularly interesting because it's almost just working out of the box. It doesn't actually need too much human oversight, unlike when you're asking it to produce new content for you.

You can create a prompt that just works for ChatGPT. I've experimented with a few things, and you can start out just asking. You can say I'm going to give you a list of domains and I would like a list of brands returned for those domains, and that prompt will get you part of the way there. It works even more powerfully, I've found, if you give it some examples.

So just like I did here, you can give the prompt saying, for example, the brand of kayak.com is Kayak. The brand of hotels.com is hotels.com. The brand of cntraveler.com is Condé Nast Traveler. When you put all of that together, ChatGPT can straightaway out of the box give you hundreds of lookups between domain name and brand, which straightaway lets you build a spreadsheet where you don't have to do all of that manually.

This is just, for my mind, given where artificial intelligence tools are at right now, this is one of those perfect uses because when you've got that big long list, it's actually super quick to do a quick human pass over that and just look down the list and go, "Yeah, those all look right." So much quicker than it would be to type them all out or go looking each one up individually, copying and pasting them around the place.

A really great time saver. I think it's Benedict Evans who talks about the current state of the art in artificial intelligence is roughly it gives you 10,000 interns. Anything that you could delegate to an intern you can get ChatGPT to do. This is a perfect example. While we're on examples of this, my other favorite one is for debugging. We talked about regular expressions, and I'm convinced that nobody really understands regular expressions.

Certainly I find, when I'm putting them together, I often make little mistakes and I need to do a little bit of debugging. I need to try and figure out why it's not doing exactly what I wanted it to do. This is also a great use of ChatGPT. Drop your regular expression in and just ask it questions. Just say, "Why is this not picking up this example that I thought it would?" It is a great like sparring partner coming back to you with ideas and helping you figure out those things.

So that's been a little bit of a lightning journey through how to generate eight million test ideas. If you're into SEO testing, follow @searchpilot on Twitter and head on over to our website at searchpilot.com and sign up for the newsletter because every couple of weeks we publish a new SEO test result that helps the whole industry figure out what's working and what's not in Google.

So, as I said, my name is Will Critchlow. I'm the founder at SearchPilot. It's been great talking to you today. Enjoy your day.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com