The team at MacMillan Search has generated a lot of value by combining automated STAT reports with Google Sheets. From adding ranking details to other tool’s outputs, to giving the content teams up-to-date “People Also Ask” reports, the end result has proven to be a great time-saver in our week-to-week SEO workflows by reducing manual work and providing standard outputs that easily integrate with any spreadsheet.
Why did we create this script?
STAT’s wealth of keyword rankings details is very useful for enterprise SEOs to understand both the macro and micro details of their rankings. Google Sheets is one of the most common cloud-based spreadsheets platforms, and is easy to share between teams and organizations. That’s why SEOs use both of these tools regularly when analyzing keyword data.
Despite this, documentation on how to integrate STAT into Google Sheets is limited. To address this gap, we created our own script!
It’s proven useful for several reasons:
Not everyone likes CSVs: We leverage the STAT reports to provide clients with direction. Having to download a CSV and open it every week isn’t for everyone. With this script, you can set a weekly ticket with a link to the spreadsheet, and review the output regularly.
It saved us time: SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. When we identify an opportunity, there is ongoing work that will have us reviewing reports regularly. The weekly ticket approach to review a spreadsheet shaves some time off of each task, and over the course of the engagement, this saved time adds up.
Cleaner output: Using Vlookups, Uniques, etc., you can create a summary page of this information, highlighting what clients and/or readers care about. You can also integrate this information with other data sources.
Create automation without using an API: Automation, when done correctly, saves time. Using this script with triggers opens the door to automation.
How to implement this script
1) Create a report in STAT
The STAT knowledge base has a great resource on reports. The only thing we would get specific on is the naming of the report and the recipient email.
Naming
What you name your report is not as important as keeping it clear and concise. This makes scaling to other projects with similar reports cleaner and easier. You will also use this report name as one of the variables in the scripts.
We also suggest placing the company or project name at the end of the report name in parentheses (e.g. “(MacMillan Search)”). This makes it easier to find the report in your email.
Recipient email
It’s important to use a Gmail-enabled email for the account where you’ll be building the sheet. This way, Google has an easier time getting the app script to extract the CSV from the email.
Scheduling
For our clients, weekly data is the most useful — enough detail to spot trends, but not so much that it becomes just noise to be ignored. For reports with limited fluctuations (e.g. People Also Ask), monthly might be satisfactory.
Timing
Select “Run this report immediately” to confirm that your report works, right after creating the script. This way, you’re ready to set your triggers and let the data flow.
The rest of the settings are specific to what details you want from your report.
2) Create a Google Sheet and add the script
Create a new sheet in Google Drive under the account associated with your report’s recipient email. Then you’re ready to add the script:
1. Under the menu “Tools”, select “<> Script editor”
2. Paste the script below into the “Script editor”.
3. A few things will need to be edited to work with your data:
var COMPANY_NAME updated to the company or project name you used while creating the STAT Report
var REPORT_NAME updated to the name of your report minus the company name and parentheses
var SHEET_NAME updated to the name of the sheet in the spreadsheet
4. Confirm the Script works by saving it, refreshing the sheet, and when the menu “Manual Update” loads, select “Import Keywords”.
5. The first time you run this you will get an “Authorization Required” pop-up:
Select “Continue”, follow the steps, and select “Import Keywords” under the menu again.
Your spreadsheet should now be populated with all of the details from your CSV.
3) Automate the population with triggers
Setting this sheet up to automatically update as the report comes out is very easy using Apps Script “Triggers”. To set up the triggers:
1. Go back into the “Script Editor”
2. Select the “alarm” icon “Triggers”
3. Select “Add Trigger”
4. Select the function “importKws”
5. Select event source “Time-driven”
6. Select type of time-based trigger “Week Timer” for weekly reports, “Month Timer” for monthly reports, etc.
7. In our time zone, our reports usually come out late Sunday, so we pick early Monday morning:
8. Click “Save”
The result is a spreadsheet that regularly updates, populated by an emailed STAT report.
We’ve found many uses for this script — anywhere we reference rank. And, since a project might take time to get implemented, we can provide current ranking information without leveraging the API.
We’re curious to learn how you leverage it as well. If you find the script useful, reach out to us on LinkedIn and let us know what you’re using it for.
We're back with a brand new season of Whiteboard Friday episodes for your viewing pleasure. First up: SEO expert Cyrus Shepard shares his top 22 tips for successful Google SEO in 2022. Watch to find out what to prioritize and what to look out for in the year ahead!
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday, a very special edition, our annual SEO tips of the year edition. This year it is 22 smart SEO tips for 2022. I'm going to be talking about some of the most talked about things in the SEO industry over the past year plus a few tips from last year that we wanted to pull over because they were just that important.
Because we've got 22 of them and we don't want this video to take forever, we're going to be going through these pretty quick, but for you we've linked to some resources in the transcript below so you can explore all of these topics further if you want. All right. Without further ado, let's get started.
On-page SEO tips for 2022
1. A/B testing
I'm going to start with some on-page topics. Tip number one, A/B testing or simply testing.
We've seen a lot more testing tools pop up in the last couple of years, which is awesome because SEO is not make a decision and implement it and you're done. SEO is implement, evaluate, and then make decisions or sometimes course corrections.
Is this something we need to pull back? Did C perform better than D? Which one would we choose? All the tips we're talking about today can apply to this testing mentality. SEO is incredibly complex, and the old-school idea of best practices just doesn't cut it anymore. So in '22, develop a testing mentality with your SEO.
2. Author pages
Number two, author pages. I really love this because Google this year updated some of their advice around author pages and their schema markup. It's an important part of my strategy and a lot of websites that I use. A good quality author page helps Google evaluate your authors, which can be used for E-A-T and other things, and helps link them with their expertise.
So linking your articles to a good author page usually includes links to other websites, author profiles, links to the articles they wrote, some biographical information. It can help establish your authors as expertise in a certain space. So take a look at your author pages and try to improve them and make this a task.
3. Google title rewrites
Google title rewrites, number three. I don't think there is any topic more discussed in 2022 than Google rewriting titles. A lot of studies, including one I did, showing Google rewriting 60%, 70% or 80% of a site's titles. It can be frustrating. But what we're finding is a lot of people aren't evaluating those Google title rewrites. When you do, you can learn a lot about your own titles.
Why is Google rewriting it? Is my title too long? Am I missing important keywords? Do I have fluff in there that Google doesn't like? Or in some cases you can go back and try to correct the title that Google rewrote if they're doing just a terrible job. So Google title rewriting, do an audit of those Google titles and learn what you can do.
5. Nuke the "fluff"
Speaking of fluff, this may be the year that you want to nuke the SEO fluff. You know what I'm talking about with SEO fluff. It's those flowery keywords. It's those descriptions and it's recipe pages. "Oh, I was walking along the Irish countryside thinking about my bread and biscuits." That is your fluff. We're finding that it may not be necessary, and it may even be detrimental to your SEO.
Glenn Gabe wrote a great case study where they reduced a lot of their fluff on category descriptions and they actually saw an increase. Google is removing fluff from title tags. So this marketing, flowery, SEO writing stuff, it may not be helping you, and, in fact, it may be hurting you. Today Google is rewarding sites or seems to be rewarding sites that provide quick answers and more direct engagement.
Better engagement, it's usually better for your customers as well. So experiment with losing the fluff in 2022.
5. FAQ schema
Number five, FAQ schema. So last year we talked a lot about different schema types, how-to schema, FAQ scheme, different things. If there was a clear winner in 2022, it was FAQ. The reason FAQ is the winner is because so many sites can qualify for it, it's easy to implement, and if you win a FAQ schema in SERPs, you can gain a lot of Google real estate.
So there are a lot of articles that talk about how to optimize for FAQs. You can get links, deep links in FAQs. There are a lot of things you can do. We'll link to those in the transcript below. But take a look at your FAQ schema if you're not currently using it:
Last year we talked about tabbed content, bringing your content that is in tabs, in navigation and bringing it out. This year, we're getting a little more advanced.
Our friends at Merj did a study about types of tabbed content and how easily Google can extract and render and index different tabbed content. So if you still have content in tabs, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to take everything out, but you should research if Google is able to index and rank those appropriately. There are better resources this year to try to do that.
So take a look at your tabbed content.
7. Faceted navigation
Along the same lines, faceted navigation. We've been talking about faceted navigation for years, but this is the year to get a little more strategic with it. In certain ways, faceted navigation has always been like a set of rules, like if it has green dress, we are not going to index this or crawl it, but if it is size 12 or higher, we will index it.
Today, smart SEOs are getting a lot more savvy about what they index, don't index, and crawl with faceted navigation, and these tools are becoming increasingly available for sites like WordPress and things like that, where you can actually look at the traffic each page receives and index, crawl, faceted navigation on a page by page level, and these broad rules aren't necessarily as necessary.
You can get down to the nitty-gritty and increase your traffic that way, with fine-grained tools. So both tabbed content and faceted navigation, old-school concepts, but we're getting much more sophisticated with them in 2022.
Link building tips for 2022
All right, let's talk about everybody's favorite subject, links, because you need links to rank in SEO. But what a lot of smart SEOs know and talk about is you need links to rank in SEO, but you probably don't need as many as you think.
8. Internal link optimization
If you only have a few good external links, one of the best ways to leverage that is optimize your internal link optimization. We've seen a number of new tools and processes talking about internal link optimization. We're talking about pages that have too few links, under optimized anchor text, pages that have great opportunities that aren't ranking that should.
So if you haven't done an internal link optimization audit in a while, this is the year to do it and this is the way to leverage those internal links that you're getting.
9. Deep linking
Speaking of which, deep linking. In the old days, if you linked to a page, you just linked to the URL. But we're seeing an increase in deep linking, linking to specific passages, text fragments, things like that, navigation, jump links.
This is increasingly becoming a popular strategy to get people deeper into the page and give Google and other search engines signals about very specific parts of pages. This seems relevant as Google has recently introduced passage ranking, where they're not just evaluating the whole page. They can understand individual passages as well.
So making deep linking part of your strategy, as opposed to just linking to the URL, seems to be a great way of moving forward.
10. High ROI link building
High ROI link building. I watched a great presentation from Ross Simmonds this year, the Coolest Cool, on link building with assets and determining the ROI of each of them, because everything you build links with, whether it be a tool, a blog post, a free PDF, it has a cost and that cost has an ROI.
Ross found that certain things have higher ROIs than others. Tools have an incredibly high ROI, but they're also expensive to create. Pages with stats on them, not that expensive to create, but also a really high ROI.
I'm going to link to that video. It might be a paid subscription. I apologize about that. But it's awesome. It was voted number one at MozCon. If you do link building, it's definitely worth watching and definitely worth the cost. High ROI link building, know the cost of everything you're producing and how much value you're getting out of it.
11. Reduce redirects
Let's go old school again. Our friend Nick LeRoy tweeted not too long ago about reducing redirects. This is really old school, but a lot of people are forgetting it these days. If you have a large site and you have thousands or millions of redirects all sending confusing signals, 301 jumps to a 302 jumps to a 404, what is that?
Looking at your redirect chains and reducing them to a single redirect with a clear directive can help reduce canonicalization errors. It can improve crawling efficiency, and at scale it can influence your rankings. So if you have a large site or even a small site with a lot of redirects, this is the year you want to do a redirect audit. Get on it. Audit, on it.
12. SEO for affiliate links
How about SEO for affiliate links? We don't talk a lot about affiliate links here at Moz, and Google traditionally hasn't talked a lot about it either.
But this year we saw Google introduce specific guidance for affiliate sites, which is something they really haven't done before. Specifically for review sites, Google talking about what a good review looks like, talking about the good and the bad part of the product, the fact that you should link to multiple merchants so consumers have a choice.
We haven't seen this from Google before. So if you do SEO for affiliate sites, you do review sites, this is the year to review those Google documentations and make sure you're creating sites that Google rewards and actually following Google's guidance on it, which is something in past years I didn't think I would be able to say about that. So it's awesome to see.
Google SEO tips for 2022
13. Reputation research
All right, moving on to different topics, reputation research. My friend Lily Ray talks about reputation research a lot in terms of E-A-T. The idea that Google can evaluate your site based on what other people say about you. So if you're Dr. Mercola and an anti-vaxxer and everybody is saying all these terrible things about you on other websites, Google can disappear you from search.
Reviews, what are other websites saying about you in terms of reviews? Google quality raters often look at other websites to get reputation research, and it's supposedly believed that Google can do the same thing algorithmically. So making reputation research part of your SEO audit process, what are other sites saying about you, is it incredibly positive, is it incredibly negative, this is especially important for your money or your life sites, sites that are going to be more impacted by E-A-T algorithms.
So if you sell things or dispense medical advice, reputation research is a little bit more important for those sites.
14. Core Web Vitals — minimums
Boy, last year we talked about Core Web Vitals a lot. One of my happiest things is that we are talking about it much less. Google announced a big update. It was a big hooplala. It didn't quite work out the way Google kind of explained that it might.
What happened was Google released Core Web Vitals, and some sites saw a boost, other sites saw a decrease, but it wasn't as intense as we thought it might be. A lot of sites did improve. But we're finding in 2022 maybe we don't need to worry about it as much as we thought.
My colleague Tom Capper did a study that showed that slow sites were still ranking and fast sites were ranking even higher, but the effect wasn't as much. The one thing Tom did find though, that was important, was sites that failed all three Core Web Vital requirements were definitely in the dumps. So we should optimize for speed always, but perhaps in 2022 we don't need to obsess over it as much as possible, based on Google advice.
Speed is awesome. You should make your sites as fast as you can. But Core Web Vitals, don't sweat it as much as we were in 2021.
15. Ditch AMP?
Other things we might want to consider not sweating, AMP. 2021 was the year that we've seen a lot sites start to ditch their AMP. This is because Google no longer requires it as a ranking factor in their top stories. It does provide some speed benefits. It's kind of a neat technology. We know people who work on it. It's really cool. But a lot of companies were stressing out trying to maintain two different versions of their website to get that ranking boost. A lot of sites are starting to like, "Well, we don't want to have two different versions. It's a lot of overhead. It's a lot of engineers. What if we just got rid of it?"
They're finding it really doesn't make a difference. They can just work with one platform and still get as much rankings as they want. So if your company is struggling with AMP, this might be a year to experiment with ditching it. Or keep it if you like. It's great, but a lot of people seem to be walking away.
16. Google Discover
On the flipside, a lot of people are flocking to Google Discover.
Google Discover is interesting. It's not traditional SEO traffic, where you research a keyword and people are converting. It's a little bit more like social media traffic. In fact, social media sharing seems to be one of the ranking factors that can influence how much traffic you get from Google Discover.
But what we've seen in the last year is some publishers are optimizing for Google Discover, publishing those stories, and seeing huge amounts of traffic for that. Great for like news sites, blogs, popular things, things that talk about popular topics.
We've gotten some Google Discover traffic here at Moz. We're going to link to a couple of articles to show you how to optimize for Google Discover. But if you haven't tried it yet, it may be a channel for you to explore in 2022.
17. Local SEO GBP categories
We've got to squeeze in one local SEO tip. We're doing this for our friend Darren Shaw, who publishes the Local Search SEO Ranking Factors every year, doing an awesome job at it. If you have a local site and you just have five minutes to do one thing, the number one SEO tip for 2022, get your GBP categories in order. Ranking factors studies show that it is the number one thing that can influence rankings.
Do an audit of your Google Business Profile categories. Darren has a lot of tips over there with that Local SEO Ranking Factors. I would encourage you to look at it. Also Joy Hawkins is doing a lot with experimentations. I'd encourage you to look at her site as well.
18. Favicon review
My tip, the tip that I'm going to die on this hill — favicon optimization. Why favicon optimization?
I talked about this last year, but I don't think people took me seriously enough. Over 50% of search results take place on a mobile phone where your favicon shows, and people are not optimizing those favicons. A good favicon can draw attention. It can zero you in on a very busy SERP, and it does it with just a few pixels.
A good favicon can raise your click-through conversion rate one or two percent, which is awesome. How does it work? What do you notice on this screen? You notice the tip with a favicon. A good favicon is usually bright, it's usually high contrast, and it draws your attention to your search results. So optimize your favicon, folks. I'm dying on that hill.
SEO career tips for 2022
All right. So I want to spend a few tips on talking about your SEO career, because I don't think we talk about this enough. What should you be learning this year, aside from Python because everybody loves Python?
19. Learn GA4
This might be the year that you want to finally familiarize yourself with GA4. GA4 is the product that's replacing traditional Google Analytics.
You're going to see it in a lot more client accounts. It can be a little confusing to people. Some of the metrics aren't there. It's got some cool things in it admittedly, like they basically got rid of bounce rate and replaced it with engagement metrics, which is great because a lot of SEOs are a little too focused on bounce rate and engagement may be more representative, a holistic way that Google views your website.
Our friend Dana DiTomaso has a course on LinkedIn that you can check out. But familiarize yourself with GA4 so you can walk into those meetings and you can present those reports and know what you are talking about.
20. Attend virtual conferences
Conferences. COVID moved a lot of conferences virtually online. People attended them.
A lot of people are getting burnt out on virtual conferences. But looking back at all the virtual conferences of 2021, there's some great value there. Here at Moz, we had MozCon. We had some tremendous speeches. It also makes it more affordable for people all over the world. Traditional conferences, you pay $1,000 to $2,000 just to attend the conference plus travel and all that.
But with virtual conferences, oftentimes they're free or just $100 or $200. You can attend virtually and focus on the content and the learning and advance your career, and do the networking, reach out to the speakers. There are lots of opportunities there. So I would commit in 2022 to attending two or three virtual conferences and make that part of your career advancement.
21. Charge more
Finally, the last tip on the career, charge more. 2022 is the year to charge more for your SEO services. Our friend John Doherty at Get Credo publishes his annual salary report or agency fee report. If you're an independent consultant or agent, you can check to see what you're charging compared to your peers.
But, in general, SEO services are in high demand all over the world, especially high-quality SEO services. The power is in your hands to charge what you are worth, not undermining yourself. If you're working in-house, it might be time to evaluate your salary and make sure you're getting paid what you deserve, especially if you're not getting paid as much as your colleagues or you're part of an underrepresented group.
Charge more in 2022. Make more money.
And finally...
22. Be the last click
Final tip of 2022, this was the final tip of 2021. It's my favorite SEO tip of all time. Be the last click. That means satisfy your users. When someone is searching Google or any other search engine and they're presented with a list of results, they're clicking around, looking for what they want to be, make sure you are the last site that they click.
Why? Because when they clicked to your site, they found what they were looking for. You satisfied them so much that when they see your site again, you're going to be the first one that they click on because you gave them the answer. Provide awesome experiences for your users. Think of them first. Give them everything they want. Give Google no excuse not to rank you number one in the search result.
All right, 22 tips for 2022. That's all I've got. I would love to hear your tips. Please leave them in the comments below. Reach out to me on social media. If you liked this video, please share it. Thanks, everybody. It's been fun.
“Everywhere!” is going to be the ebullient byword for approaching a brand new year of local search marketing with gusto. In 2022, the opportunity is there for local businesses to be everywhere customers are looking at a time when they are particularly open to change, whether that’s exploring new companies, testing new brands, or trying new modes of communication.
Public health, and its direct impacts on local businesses, will remain unpredictable. However, what’s as sure a bet as you’ll find anywhere these days is that if the companies you market can be found and liked by customers, you can significantly expand the number of neighbors you get to serve with care, compassion, and a commitment to making this a very good year for brick-and-mortar shops and SABs.
Let’s set you up for success with seven local SEO precepts for the year ahead, some expert commentary, and many signs of good things to come!
1. Converse with customers everywhere, with extra kindness
“What the world needs now, is love, sweet love.”
At that next meeting in which you are training staff who directly interact with your customers and clients, spend a minute listening to Ms. Warwick’s classic to get rooted in your deepest humanity and make a pact to bring these powerful feelings into every communication you have with the people you serve. We’re all going through so much these days, and even a few extra words of kindness can make the friendliest impression on a customer who could be sorely in need of being treated with respect and consideration.
The great news is that 2022 will offer the local brands you market a feast of options to make meaningful connections. To set the table, you should consider establishing all of the following mediums that make sense for the business and its customers:
In-person
Curbside messaging
Home delivery messaging
Text messaging
Direct Messaging, including Google Messaging
Live Chat
Email
Review responses
Review requests
Phone
On-hold phone messaging
Telemeetings
Website forms
Surveys
Social media exchanges
Post-transactional landing page messaging
Call-to-action text
All of these can be managed with honoring language that conveys your appreciation of your customers.
Don’t forget that the plain-old copy on websites is meant to be the start of a conversation, too. One of the best local search marketing agency tips I heard in 2021 came from Near Media co-founder Mike Blumenthal who suggests checking out Riverside.fm because it solves the age-old dilemma of having clients who are great at talking about their industry expertise, but have difficulties writing about it. With this remarkable video recording service, you can efficiently record this type of client and then use the results to create both video and text content. Brilliant!
I’ll paraphrase Leadferno CEO Aaron Weiche in saying, “If you want to sell everywhere, you must converse everywhere,” and I can’t think of a better way to sum up how important it will be to talk well with your local community in 2022.
2. Look everywhere for supply chain gaps
I was heartened when 2021 began with half a million new businesses starting up, but I also felt an uneasiness about the system undergirding retail: the global and consolidated national supply chain.
Did it happen to you that when you couldn’t get name brand hand sanitizer in 2020, your need was fulfilled by a local distillery? Did it happen to you that you found a regional flour mill to put bread on your table, or someone on Etsy to sew you a cloth mask?
There has never been another moment in my own lifetime so filled with opportunity for any entrepreneur who can step up locally, regionally, or nationally to fill supply chain gaps and provide reliable production of essential goods. That local Etsy sewist can make t-shirts that don’t rip apart after a year of wear, in keeping the emerging philosophy of buy less/use longer. That potter downtown can replace your imported dishes when they break. That olive oil, pasta, masa harina, peanut butter, and soy milk can be grown and produced from start to finish in the US, too, rather than imported at a carbon cost that’s become too high.
Pre-pandemic business models that may have passed their shelf life can be retooled by entrepreneurs who know how to produce essential goods or organize others with these skills, and your marketing savvy may be best employed in building yourself a niche in the local supply chain right now, when it is so clearly needed.
3. Build back green everywhere you can
Much as I support the concept of reshoring, I feel serious qualms about it, too, because it triggers in my brain the spectre of rising smokestacks, just when we are in critical need of new, sustainable production methodologies.
If 2021 was the year that you, your staff and your customers found life, business and norms completely disrupted by heatwaves, wildfires and floods, you know in your bones that we’ve reached the end of the fossil fuel road. It’s simply not sustainable to create a new national or local supply chain with the old energy sources that brought us Climate Change, nor can we, in good conscience, continue the practice of using poorer nations or the poorest parts of our own nations as the toxic dumping grounds of industry.
I often encounter the attitude that individuals can’t do anything to make a difference on climate and I’ve personally experienced this melancholy, but local businesses can collectively meet the 71% increase in searches for sustainable goods with a nearby supply chain which significantly reduces the 1 billion+ tons of carbon emitted by long-distance shipping. The closer to home we grow, make and sell goods, the better. Meanwhile, there are a range of other green practices available to nearly all local businesses and no shortage of ideas for greener startups.
Make 2022 the year your local business drafts a climate action-based policy and publicizes it on your website, your Google Business Profile via posts and description, your social feeds, your video media, and via local news. 92% of customers say they feel more trust in businesses that are environmentally and socially conscious; it’s a win for everyone to make your company that kind of business.
4. Make your website key to customers shopping everywhere
The trouble with Google, though, is that everything they offer you for free is something they can put a price tag on at any time, and renting your customers back from Google for any purchase is never going to be as strong a position for a company as owning those sales outright.
With the pandemic’s acceleration of e-commerce (a 39% increase happened this time last year) and local delivery (here to stay), it’s now a basic business investment to build shopping carts into local business websites. If you can, choose a strong product like Shopify that will distribute your inventory feeds to multiple channels for customers who are now shopping everywhere, including social sites like Instagram and Meta/Facebook.
However, while you are greeting customers with multi-platform shopping options, my advice is to make your website the central hub of all this activity, as much as you possibly can, most particularly for repeat transactions. Don’t let any third party offer an easier shopping experience, better support, or more information than your own website does. Make the user experience so good that one-off customers who found you elsewhere come directly to your site for their second purchase.
5. Look for good organic SEO teachers everywhere to strengthen your website
With links and on-page SEO consistently making up about one-third of the perceived factors that drive local pack rankings, 2022 is the year in which local business owners and their marketers should prioritize the acquisition of organic SEO education. Chances are, you already have your local SEO education well in hand, but to provide the kind of discoverable, usable experience that will bring people to your site and keep them coming back, organic SEO has become a must-have. It supports your local rankings and multiple stages of your customers’ journeys.
As with our own local SEO industry, the organic SEO industry is polluted with information that isn’t actually accurate or helpful. You need resources that act as good teachers. Here is my list of five free organic SEO learning assets here at Moz that are respected for their usefulness, simplicity and depth:
Everyone learns best in their own way; socially follow generous organic SEO practitioners whose communications make the most sense to you and whose tips you find yield results. Two of my own favorite SEO teachers here at Moz are Dr. Peter J. Meyers and Tom Capper, and I tugged at their elbows to give me their predictions of the year ahead in organic SEO.
Pete says:
"Google is signaling their intent louder and louder these days, and that leaves us with a pretty boring answer about the future: "Expect more of the same." Google will continue to push the limits of what "organic" means and experiment aggressively with changes to keep ad dollars flowing.Passage indexingcaused a lot of confusion in 2021, but I believe it's part of a broader push to repurpose content on the web. Combine that push withadvances in NLPand the recent increase in title rewrites and the bottom line is that we will have less control of what appears in SERPs in 2022. This is going to require increasing awareness of how these changes impact CTR and search engagement and a renewed focus on controlling what we're able to control (and measuring the rest).
Pay close attention to core updates if post-pandemic consumer behavior shifts — including a return to brick-and-mortar commerce — as these may require manual intervention by Google in ML systems. If 2020-2021 taught us anything, it's that the world still drives Google more than Google drives the world."
Tom says:
"Title rewrites, continuous scroll,indented results... the back half of 2021 has shown that Google does not consider the SERP to be at all sacred. There's a willingness to change and experiment, even when (as with the title rewrites) the changes feel half-baked or amateurish. We should be ready for more of the same in 2022, especially with Google's talk of itsMUM technologypowering new and more complex result types. SEOs need to be open-minded and adaptable - sure, complain that these results are harder to measure and target than what went before, but make sure you're trying to win at the new game while you reminisce about the old one. At the same time, we should expect to see an increased harshness of Page Experience as a ranking factor, with Google quietly ramping up from the extremely conservative, slightly botched launch."
It’s a lot to absorb, but you can do it with good study habits over the next twelve months, and the comforting thought that even the best organic SEOs are continually learning.
6. Look at reviews everywhere for business intelligence more than rankings
For as long as online local business reviews have existed, the majority of industry discussion has been about how the ratings, number and text of reviews may impact local search engine rankings. It’s an important topic, but preoccupation with it can:
Contribute to business owners being the primary drivers of review fraud, buying fake positive reviews for their own brands and creating the reality in which nearly 11% of Google’s review base is fake, according to a landmark 2021 report by Greg Sterling.
Obscure that reviews are a free ongoing source of direct consumer feedback which depicts the health of a local business and its major quality control issues, as in this important Near Media/GatherUp study demonstrating how inventory issues at Walmart correlated with a rise in consumer complaints being published as online reviews.
Make 2022 the year your reputation and reviews strategy focuses less on sheer numbers or ratings of reviews, and more on auditing and analyzing the sentiment within the overall review corpus. Moz Local customers will have the advantage of their dashboard pulling in reviews from multiple sources for basic sentiment analysis, highlighting trends in what customers are praising or blaming as the new year moves forward. Repeat mentions of topics like employee rudeness, long wait times, disappointment in products, incorrect citation information, communications barriers, or accessibility issues signal the need for structural fixes that could directly impact profitability, with all the mystery taken out of the matter by consumer candor.
Needless to say, 2022 should also be the year that any serious company bans the purchase of fraudulent reviews. A business will learn nothing useful about its performance from singing its own praises.
7. Look for silver linings everywhere and share them with your community
It can be a valiant act to fully face difficulties while choosing hope in hard times. If you make this choice in 2022, your honest yet optimistic communications can be of real service to your community. Here are three silver linings that could be coming our way in the year ahead:
New treatments for COVID-19 could come to the local rescue
While the pandemic didn’t alter the behavior of some groups, and other groups have been experimenting with their comfort zones in returning to activities outside the home, McKinsey has done a good job tracking the continued caution being exercised by about half of Americans. If 2022 realizes the rumored promise of a medication like Monulpiravir or Paxlovid, it will be the single most impactful difference between the new year and the last two. At the start of the pandemic, Kaiser estimated that about ⅓ of US adults risked serious outcomes if infected, due to their age and medical conditions. I can’t think of a more hopeful image than vaccinations and new COVID-19 treatments potentially enabling 90 million people to greet the world again in greater security.
Monopoly losses could be local business gains
Have you noticed that antitrust has become daily news and that even a short list of some of the recent investigations concerning monopoly is indicative of a shift in regulatory activity? There are two sources of potential good in this for small businesses. One, if governing bodies are willing to directly take on monopolies like Amazon and Walmart, it could directly create a fairer marketplace for local businesses. Two, and this is the aspect that interests me most, local businesses have the opportunity to ride the customer wave of anti-bigness that appears to be gathering momentum.
In this changing environment, being proud of being small can be speak to the aspirations of shoppers whom surveys indicate would be more committed to shopping locally as a result of the pandemic once it eases (82%), do so because they want to keep their money in the community (57%), and choose to shop nearby because of the unique product selection (61%). This will not be an easy road, particularly in the US, but I see hope in a shopping public that wants small-batch over mass-produced, is becoming educated about the detriment of monopoly on local economies, and that has a built-in feeling of loyalty to small businesses.
Regulated tech can support small businesses instead of undermining them
Check out Squarespace’s “everything to sell anything” suite and sign up to attend a virtual event hosted by the American Independent Business Alliance this year. Then take a moment to appreciate the wonder of just how simple it is becoming for any entrepreneur with a great local business idea to market their offering with immense sophistication while finding nearby support in a Buy Local association.
It’s never been easier to build a good, optimized website, shoot amazing photos and videos, get a shopping cart as facile as the big brands have, huddle with business peers for solidarity, and take all the other marketing steps that lead up to finally getting to talk 1:1 with a customer. That’s the point I hope we never lose sight of in local search marketing : everything we do is meant to connect people and increase the quality of life in local communities. If governments will do their job to protect economic and human diversity, we can do ours of making our towns and cities really fine places to live with accessible goods and services for everybody.
That’s the hope I’ll be taking into 2022, everywhere I go in the industry, and it’s an optimism I hope you feel and can share with all your clients and customers in the new year ahead!
We also published 186 posts on the Moz Blog this year, and as is tradition, it's time to look back at the most popular ones! You’ll find Whiteboard Friday episodes, technical SEO insights, search engine updates, and tips for analytics, among several other topics.
Enjoy this look-back, and have a safe and happy new year, Moz friends! See you in 2022.
*The top 25 Moz Blog posts published between January 1 - December 28, 2021, in order by pageviews generated during that timeframe.
Author: Cyrus Shepard | Published: January 8, 2021
Moz SEO expert Cyrus Shepard shares his top 21 tips for successful Google SEO, including what to prioritize and what to look out for in the year(s) ahead. He's also included a bunch of helpful resources for your reference in the transcription!
Author: Pierce Brelinsky | Published: February 9, 2021
The web is in a golden age of front-end development. JavaScript and technical search engine optimization are experiencing a renaissance. In this article, Pierce Brelinsky of Go Fish Digital shows you how to optimize your JS-powered website for search in 2021 and beyond.
After the success of a 2015 article in which he shared a free forecasting tool, Tom has created a new, free spreadsheet template to forecast how your SEO efforts will affect your site traffic. In this post, he shows you how it works and how to use it, and then how to build your own (better?) version.
Author: AbdulGaniy Shehu | Published: February 22, 2021
As an SEO professional, you need to know the latest industry trends to keep up with its ever-changing demands. In this post, you’ll find seven emerging technologies in the SEO industry, and how they impact your work as an SEO expert.
Author: Adriana Stein | Published: September 6, 2021
Measuring ROI for your SEO efforts involves two factors: KPIs and the cost of your current SEO campaigns. With GA, you can pinpoint where your audience is coming from, set goals to stay on track, and incorporate the most attractive keywords to rank better in search engines.
Author: Kameron Jenkins | Published: February 10, 2021
The right content brief can help you maximize organic search traffic. Learn what to include in your content briefs, what to avoid, and tips for getting your writers bought in.
Author: Andy Crestodina | Published: February 19, 2021
Do you ever have to explain the importance of Domain Authority to clients or co-workers who have little or no SEO experience? If so, Andy Crestodina walks through how to get your message across successfully.
Author: Adriana Stein | Published: November 23, 2021
To get a better understanding of what’s considered “quality traffic”, we’ll look into various Google Analytics metrics that will help you create a rock solid SEO strategy.
Learn the tools and tactics you'll need to pinpoint technical issues on your site and turn them into wins for your users and your rankings with this free technical SEO checklist from Moz.
Is a high bounce rate bad? The answer is: it depends, but yes, sometimes it can be. Is a high bounce rate bad for SEO? That’s where it gets a little more complicated. In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus gives you seven easy SEO tips to address your bounce rate, and increase engagement and satisfaction to make your users happier.
Author: Dr. Pete Meyers | Published: August 31, 2021
In August, Google released a title rewrite update that may have left you feeling confused and more than a little frustrated. But why is Google rewriting titles, and what can we learn from it? Dr. Pete explored over 50,000 <title> tags to find out.
Author: Dr. Pete Meyers | Published: March 1, 2021
On February 19, MozCast measured a dramatic drop (40% day-over-day) in SERPs with Featured Snippets. This is the lowest prevalence rate of Featured Snippets in our data set since summer of 2015. What's driving the losses, and who is most affected?
Author: Dr. Pete Meyers | Published: April 21, 2021
Due to Google’s advancements in Natural Language Processing, the long tail of search has exploded. However, I will argue that NLP has also imploded the long tail, and understanding how and why may save our collective sanity.
It’s time to take an unconventional approach to lead generation, especially for B2B companies, because B2B is a different ballgame than B2C — and your strategies need to reflect your audience.
In this article, learn how to successfully execute an SEO clean-up strategy to ensure your site aligns with your business goals, keeps you in Google’s good books, and yields an excellent user experience for visitors and customers.
Search marketers can't get our important work implemented if we can't prove that it's worth the investment to our higher-ups. With that in mind, Kavi Kardos gives you the numbers and the talking points you need to justify the return on investment of your SEO work.
Author: Lydia German | Published: January 27, 2021
The team at Tao Digital Marketing breaks down how they were able to go above and beyond for their client, Fleetcover, using four strategies that increased leads by 751%, keywords by 259%, and impressions by 535% — all with a small SEO budget.
Author: Crystal Carter | Published: April 26, 2021
In this blog, examine some of the technical SEO strategies you can use for your site before, during, and after your link building campaigns in order to optimize the performance and long-term impact of each campaign.
The Moz Learning Team has put in many, many hours of work to develop a technically focused, in-depth training series that hones in on the nuts and bolts of technical SEO. We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the Technical SEO Certification Series through Moz Academy.
What a gift it is that local SEOs put hours of research into facets of our industry and then freely share their findings! Today, I’m going to bundle the most important recent local search marketing statistics and survey takeaways into a single gift basket, which you can draw from when you need to create a compelling narrative which clients can quickly understand, demonstrate the value of a particular campaign to bosses and co-workers in order to get buy-in on an initiative, or even just explain to mystified friends and family what you do for a living.
With sincere thanks to all the people cited in this column for your brilliant and useful work, here are my top local SEO stat picks that tell the story of our local SEO present and future.
Local search and localism are going strong!
The stats
Small Business Saturday 2021 saw record-high $23.3 billion spending in the US, with 70% of survey respondents saying American Express’ campaign inspires them to encourage their connections to shop small and independent.
33% of searches result in a Google local pack being returned, based on a MozCast study of 10,000 keywords.
88% of people say it’s important to be able to trust companies with which they transact and 67% trust businesses with physical locations more than virtual businesses.
Small local business is huge, people want to support it (citing access to unique products and keeping money in their own communities as major motivators), and Google sees search through a local lens because they know the location of most searchers. It’s hard to overstate just how prominent the local-digital connection has become in people’s lives and it’s smart to define a narrative that aligns with local community goals, given stated mistrust of large corporations and preference for SMBs .
Data says these local search marketing tactics are winners
The stats
Throw the kitchen sink at your Google Business Profile. Businesses that make it into local packs enjoy a 100%+ increase in clicks and businesses in position two experience the most engagement.
The majority of surveyed local SEO practitioners say your Google Business Profile’s rating influences conversions more than any other factor. Unsurprisingly, this means that perfecting customer satisfaction should be the core goal of all local business types.
Write your environmental and social policy this year. 60% of shoppers say they would change their purchasing habits to protect the Earth and 83% of young people want to patronize brands which align with their values.
The story
Local SEO has become so diversified, but you can manage it with the right tools! If a local business is approachable via many digital doors and delivers excellent customer service, it will show up in ratings and reviews, which then create a virtuous cycle of driving more visibility, clicks, and conversions. There is no smarter mindset for local search marketers and their clients than a customer-centric one.
Tales from the Local SEO workplace
The stats
70% of us saw marketing budget cuts in 2020 as a result of COVID 19%. Nevertheless, multiple studies, like this one from Obility, showed that clients who were able to continue investing in SEO saw substantial growth. It has been one heck of a rollercoaster ride for our industry.
In 2020, half of our customers already knew they would be permanently keeping the new tech and strategies they scrambled to implement during the pandemic. I would expect this number to be higher as we bid 2021 goodbye. New developments are here to stay.
Because Amazon has captured 50% of US online spending, local SEOs here are also closely watching FTC antitrust developments which could positively impact our small local business clients who have been fighting such a hard battle against monopolies.
60% of us are earning the same or more than the US median income,which is $57,456 for men and, scandalously, only $47,299 for women working full time. Only 19% of us are making over $100,000 a year. Depending on where you live, working in SEO could mean a month-to-month existence or a life relatively free of grinding financial worry.
There is no gainsaying that local SEO professionals have had a rough ride for the past two years. At the same time, our work has become utterly essential because so many of our clients ended up being integral to the emergent infrastructure which has kept communities resourced throughout the pandemic. It’s important to remember that though we may live and breathe local business listings, reviews, content, links, and optimization, the Internet remains a mysterious place to so many of our neighbors. COVID-19 is making it more important than ever before for us to share our knowledge to help connect the online and offline worlds for customers, businesses, and all folks in general.
We do important work that merits decent pay, and my wish for you in 2022 is that you land in a good place, help tons of local clients, and experience a work/life balance that affords you peace, possibilities, and positive satisfaction!
What do these figures show? It’s simple. The SaaS industry landscape is becoming more competitive by the day.
To stay on top of your game as a SaaS business, you must identify the companies you're competing with from an SEO standpoint. That way, you’ll know the content strategies to focus on, the keywords to target, and the type of backlinks to acquire. In this post, you’ll learn three effective ways to do this quickly.
Why care about your SEO competitors as a SaaS brand?
If you don’t know your SEO competitors, you’re leaving so much on the table, while they occupy the top spots on the SERPs.
1. You can identify the top keywords they’re targeting and how they’re acquiring backlinks to help your own strategies.
By identifying the companies competing against your SaaS brand, you’ll know the top keywords they’re targeting. That way, you can focus on those keywords that can generate qualified traffic and drive user signups for your SaaS. This streamlines your keyword research process.
Knowing your top SEO competitors is also a great way to perform a link gap analysis. That way, you can know the type of backlinks they’re acquiring and where they’re getting them from. This helps you to identify relevant websites that are more likely to link to you.
2. You can figure out the competitive edge you have over them
If you don’t know who your top competitors are, you won't be able to find the SEO opportunities to focus on to drive growth for your business.
Take, for instance, if they focus more on high-volume, top-of-the-funnel keywords. If you then go after middle- and bottom-funnel keywords, it could give you a competitive edge.
3. You can understand their biggest drivers of growth and conversion.
Most SaaS companies optimize their blog posts, landing pages, and product pages for conversions. This is because they measure growth by the number of signups and paying customers that they have.
By identifying your SEO competitors, you can know the kind of CTAs and buttons that work well in your niche. That way, you’ll have a better understanding of the conversion strategies that can drive growth for your SaaS business.
Three ways to identify the SEO competitors of your SaaS brand
Here are three tactics you can try today to identify your SaaS brand's top SEO competitors.
1. Use SEO tools
SEO tools have access to large amounts of data for different websites and niches — and they’ve analyzed and categorized this information for your own use.
For example, SEMrush has the Market Explorer tool, which helps you to find potential competitors for your business. Ahrefs also has a competing domains report in the Site Explorer tool. This helps you to identify the websites competing with your SaaS, based on the kind of keywords you’re ranking for.
You can also use the Moz Pro True Competitor tool to identify the top SEO competitors for your SaaS brand. Here’s how it works: Let’s say you want to identify the top SEO competitors of Moz. With this tool, you can find that information within a few seconds.
The first thing you need to do is enter the following details in the tool:
Preferred market: The specific location you’re targeting
Domain type: The type of domain
Domain name: Your website URL
Once you enter this information and hit the “Find Competitors” button, you’ll get a list of top 25 competitors:
As you can see, websites competing with Moz on the SERPs aren’t limited to software brands alone. They include others such as:
Google
Search Engine Journal
Hubspot
Search Engine Land
Wordstream
Backlinko.
This tool also has the Overlap and Rivalry metrics, to filter your top competitors.
The Overlap metric filters your top competitors based on the shared keywords you both rank for on the first page of Google. The Rivalry metric uses factors like CTR, DA score, the volume of shared keywords, etc. to identify the most relevant competitors for your SaaS.
After identifying your top SEO competitors, you can perform an in-depth analysis of at most 2 of them, to know the keywords they’re targeting.
2. Survey or interview your new and existing customers
If someone signs up for your SaaS product, chances are that they’ve demoed or tried out other options before deciding to go with yours. It's also possible that they've just churned from one of your competitors to become a customer.
This shows that they have an idea of who your direct and indirect competitors are. To get this information, all you need to do is reach out and interview them one after the other. This could be by talking to them via a quick call, sending a short survey for them to fill out, or asking them during the onboarding process.
Here are some questions you can ask customers to identify your top competitors:
What tools were you using to [solve X problem] before trying out our product?
If you’ve never used any tool before, how were you able to solve this problem before now?
What made you interested in trying out our product?
When did you realize that a tool like ours is what you need right now?
How much research did you do to decide on our product? What are some other, similar tools you discovered during the research process?
3. Perform a Google search targeting your SaaS use cases and features
Performing a Google search for the use cases, features, and problems your software solves is a great way to identify your top SEO competitors. This is effective because most companies ranking high on Google are investing in SEO.
Use the “related:website” advanced search feature
This search operator shows you other websites related to the one you search for on Google.
Let’s say you want to find websites like salesforce.com. You can search for “related:salesforce.com” on Google. The results on page one are some of SalesForce’s top SERP competitors:
Search for the use cases of your software
If your software helps SaaS companies onboard and activate new users, one of your core use cases is “user onboarding”.
If you search “user onboarding software” on Google, you’ll unlock competitors who are either bidding for or ranking organically for the keyword.
Some of the websites targeting this use case on Google include:
Appcues
Userpilot
Apty
Userflow
Aside from that, there are SaaS brands paying to rank on the first page of Google for this keyword.
Search for your SaaS features
One of the core features of the Moz tool is the “rank tracking” feature. To identify the websites that have a similar feature, you can input that keyword on the Google search bar.
Here’s the result it returns:
As you can see, aside from Moz, other competing websites for this feature include:
Link-Assistant
Ahrefs
Rank Tracker
Spyfu
SEMrush
Search for your SaaS jobs-to-be-done (JTBD)
Let's say you run an online video editing software, one of the problems that your audience most likely have is “how to add an image to video”.
By performing a Google search for this query, you’ll see a result that looks like this:
This shows that some of the top SEO competitors in the online video editing space include:
Kapwing
Veed
Online Video Cutter
Flixier
Movavi
Conclusion
If you don’t know the SaaS companies you’re competing with, they'll leave you behind and dominate your niche.
In this post, you’ve learned three effective ways to identify your top SEO competitors as a SaaS brand:
You can use an SEO software such as the Moz True Competitor tool to find your competitors and know the keywords they’re targeting.
You can reach out to new and existing customers, to find out the solutions they’re comparing you with.
You can search Google for your SaaS product’s features and use cases. This shows you the companies likely competing with your brand on the SERPs.
Ever tried any of these tactics before? Kindly share which of them worked really well for your SaaS brand in the Q&A.
