Use SEO to Fuel Your Brand's Community Flywheel

I don’t typically wear jewelry. However, when I heard a friend rave about the ring and necklace he bought from Automic Gold, it piqued my interest. As I scrolled through the site, I found myself very engaged by the approachable content, fun styles, and lifestyle photos showing inclusive genders. After several site visits, I made a purchase.

This experience is a prime example of how a brand can influence purchasing decisions through community marketing. No ad was seen. No ad was clicked. I not only became a customer, but I also became a fan of this brand—all driven by my friend’s recommendation alone.

We live in an era of community marketing, and community marketing is built through brand stories. Performance marketing efforts are still a fundamental component of marketing, but they become far more effective with a personal endorsement from a friend. After all, social proof is one of the most powerful marketing engines. In fact, according to a Nielsen Harris Poll study, 82% of Americans say they seek recommendations from friends and family when considering a purchase. Today’s most successful brands have built followings that not only return to purchase again, but also promote their products or services loyally — think of LEGO (85% loyalty rate), Apple (with 90% loyalty rates), and REI (50M+ lifetime members), to name a few. Airbnb just posted its stunning results after shifting focus to brand marketing rather than performance marketing.

Introducing the community flywheel

The community flywheel is an approach that easily marries brand and performance marketing efforts. You don’t have to be a big-name brand to see results from this strategy. No matter how niche your audience is, by leveraging your digital assets, you can cultivate an inviting community space. The key to success is building a community you own.

Brands typically think of social platforms like Instagram or Twitter as the gathering place for their community. While these platforms play an important role in amplification and social proof, your website should be a communal gathering place for your brand. It can and should be a place to educate, engage, and entertain your audience. Owning first-party data and the platform where engagement occurs is worth far more in the long run and eliminates risk outside of your brand’s control.

SEO has a pivotal role in the success of a website, and thus SEO also plays a pivotal role in the community flywheel’s success. In this article, I will explain the community flywheel and outline how SEO fits into each step of the community flywheel.

What is the community flywheel?

The community flywheel outline by McKinsey & Company succinctly explains how brands can build better communities, which in turn builds a better brand. It’s a five-step process underpinned by technology that enables scale and a test-and-learn approach that delivers consistent improvement. To align SEO initiatives for each of the 5 steps, I’ve created this graphic showing how initiatives apply to each step.

Let’s unpack each of the steps in the community flywheel. I’ll explain what each step is, how to implement it, and how SEO applies. I’ve provided common SEO deliverables that support each of these steps; however, this is by no means an exhaustive list. I hope this inspires you to integrate even more SEO initiatives—some possibly even more applicable to your brand—into your community marketing efforts.

1. Community Focus: Find the right audience

What it is

Identify communities of shared interest and, in marketing efforts, find ways to help them identify with and have an emotional response to the communities they belong to. Understanding the core target audiences beyond demographics is the key to knowing how the audience interacts. As noted in the McKinsey article, “This is an evolution from targeting consumer segments, which are anchored in demographics or individual need states, to targeting communities of people who share similar interests and values—communities of ‘shared relevance.’”

How to do it

Once you know the community(ies) you’re trying to target, build campaigns that speak to the group as opposed to the individual. Community marketing connects emotional marketing to a group that bonds together.

How SEO plugs in

Audience research is your key to understanding the cohort(s) that interact with the site. Using a tool like Sparktoro can lend insight into how your audience interacts with a particular topic. After audience research is complete, begin SEO initiatives that bolster community engagement so you can build a strategy that targets each community where they’re at in their search journey.

1. Holistic Search Analysis: It’s vital to understand how the audience is interacting throughout the purchase journey within SERPs, your site, and even third-party sites like Amazon. Conducting a holistic search analysis to understand where searches happen across Google, Amazon, YouTube, and other sites is key to knowing where to prioritize your SEO efforts.

2. Regional Strategy: If you have a site that covers multiple regions, creating transcreated content — content that speaks to the audience the way the audience would speak — is a must for ensuring you have a community focus.

3. YouTube Strategy: If your brand has an active YouTube presence, it’s worthwhile to explore which keywords populate video results in the SERPs and which keywords are most commonly searched within YouTube so you can build this into your SEO strategy and conduct YouTube SEO.
   

2. Hero Products: Simplify the brand & boost average order value (AOV)

What it is

Shopping online can require much more thought than shopping in a store. You’re faced with many more options, including figuring out the shipping costs, timelines, etc. It’s cumbersome. Leveraging your brand’s best hero products to define your brand simplifies the brand message to your community.

How to do it

This doesn’t mean leaving hero products on the back burner to evaporate — it means reinvesting in new and interesting campaigns to bring them to light again. This can be done through collaboration campaigns, reinvigorated marketing campaigns, or even repositioning to new communities.

How SEO plugs in

While UX and site hierarchy certainly play an important role in hero product advancement, SEO can support hero product advancement by taking that type of analysis one step further: how are people interacting with hero products off-site, in the SERP, and on the site?

1. SERP mapping: Identifying which hero product keywords trigger competitors, resellers, SERP features, etc., is a great way to ensure that hero products are shown as you desire within the SERP.

2. Site journey analysis: Understanding how folks navigate the site allows you to boost average order value by highlighting hero products or boosting less well-known products by leveraging hero product traffic.

3. Internal linking: Using hero products to acquire backlinks and then creating internal links to less-linked pages can boost keyword ranking for other pages/products.

4. Content strategy: Understanding how to incorporate hero products into the entire content funnel—from awareness tactics like user guides to post-conversion tactics like return policies or help center content—can boost conversion rates and customer sentiment.
   

3. Brand Story: Give people something to relate to & be proud of

What it is

Few want to buy from a brand that doesn’t align with their values. In fact, we see that the majority of shoppers under the age of 56 have favorable attitudes toward brands that have clear involvement in social and political issues.

Make it an easy decision for your community to purchase from you by outwardly communicating your brand values in a way that your audience would understand. This is especially true for brands with an international presence—after all, what may be sneakers in the US are trainers in the UK.

Here is an example from Automic Gold of communicating clear brand values:

How to do it

Communicating clear brand values on the site, in brand messaging, and amplifying those tactics through media pushes is a fantastic way to communicate the brand values across the community(ies).

How SEO plugs in

Most brand stories are typically left to the PR and/or brand teams to own, but SEO can play a pivotal role in amplifying those efforts and even fueling their expansion.

1. Listing Analysis - Understanding what is showing up in the SERPs for various search terms allows us to know what efforts to focus on—e.g., if we know publishers appear in top positions, then we should relay that information to the PR team to focus on getting placement in those publications.

2. Schema - Schema impacts how the listing appears in the SERPs, which leaves plenty of room for a brand to utilize schema to own more real estate in the SERP.

   1. FAQ schema - FAQ pages and schema are an easy way to answer questions related to the brand—e.g., “Who is the CEO of [brand]” etc.?

   2. Help Center schema - Usually, help centers are the last thing to be optimized for SEO, but building a community means ensuring a great experience from start to finish. Optimizing the help center—inclusive of schema—is an easy way to help people get easy access to information related to their search queries directly within the SERP.

3. E-A-T efforts - The more the brand story is consistent and amplified across channels, the better the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) will be because Google will be able to understand the brand entity better.
   

4. Fuel Community: Build a gathering place

What it is

The end goal is to build a community space where your community(ies) can interact and create user-generated content that can then be used to amplify your brand message. Nevertheless, a car won’t move forward without fuel. Building a consistent content strategy that communities can latch onto and use as their own provides the fuel to generate community engagement.

How to do it

Investing in tactics that can enable brand marketing teams and bring the community together on your site is the best way to fuel community. We typically think of “community engagement” happening on social media platforms, but who says that your website can’t create its own community with regularly engaged and recurring community members? Some excellent examples include LEGO IDEAS, Sphero Edu, Sephora's Beauty Insider, and F5’s DevCentral community. No matter the industry, you can find unique ways to create a community space on your website.

How SEO plugs in

SEO alone can’t fuel community. Much of this has to be done across channels, including email campaigns, packaging, etc., but SEO supports these efforts in some key ways:

1. Blog strategy - One of the best ways to engage with your audience and build community is through a compelling and consistent blog strategy that educates, entertains, and/or engages the community in a unique way. I’d encourage easy share buttons, simple call-to-actions, and an engaged comments section.

2. Forum strategy - Forums are a great way to engage with your community and allow the community to bond with others.

3. Review strategy - Reviews help bolster social proof and support the community flywheel by allowing folks an outlet to share their experience with your brand.

4. Keyword listening - When new products are launched, or a brand evolves, related search trends may also change. Using keyword listening is your way to stay ahead of trends and use user-generated search queries to inform new site content generation.

5. User-generated content - While we typically think of UGC as social media content, we can absolutely use UGC on the site by fueling content strategy, or even by allowing noteworthy guest contributors on your site.
   

5. Effortless Transactions: Make it easy to engage

What it is

Transactions look different throughout the entire marketing funnel. At the top of the funnel, it might be a cookie drop for retargeting. In the middle of the funnel, it might be email or phone data capture. At the bottom of the funnel, it might be purchase or lead form submission. Regardless, it should be seamless for customers to transact at any place in the funnel. This allows the community to have a pleasant experience throughout.

How to do it

Investing in conversion rate optimization efforts to smooth the path to site conversion, technical SEO to ensure the site experience is seamless, and on-site SEO to ensure that the right pages for the right search query are your way to make transactions easy.

How SEO plugs in:

Effortless transactions also include things like digital wallets and using pay-later tools, but SEO efforts—inclusive of technical site performance—can certainly impact transactions more than most other efforts.

1. Technical SEO - Focusing on things that allow for better page indexation and page experience (like site speed) boosts the likelihood of a user landing on the right page and not bouncing from poor UX.

2. On-site SEO - Content and internal links on the page can help the user navigate from discovery to purchase without confusing them.

3. YouTube CTA optimizations - For search results that have video results, including CTAs in the videos and ensuring the links are up to date is an easy way to smooth the path to conversion.

4. YouTube video chapters - Including video chapters—or even auto-enabling them—allows Google to highlight the correct section in a video for a user, which gets them their answer even faster.

Make the wheel spin faster with technology

Finding the right tech stack to get data faster and validate strategy more quickly is the difference between doing good SEO and great SEO. Data capture and measurement have to be a priority in SEO efforts so you can perform analysis faster than ever before. Using your CRM database to analyze existing customer information and pairing that with a purchase journey analysis can inform how your existing community interacts with your site.

Additionally, SEO A/B testing tools like SearchPilot are a great way to understand the impact of SEO and CRO tests on net new traffic and conversions without bogging down development teams.

Validate the community flywheel with a test-and-learn approach

At Brainlabs, we use a test, learn, and earn approach to guide our initiatives. This model fits nicely into community marketing because we’re constantly testing new methods to engage with a brand’s community. We know that a customer interacts with various digital channels as their needs evolve over time. While SEO can be utilized to enable the community flywheel, it’s imperative to use a test-and-learn strategy so you can continue to find the right media mix to reach your goals.

Leverage SEO to make the community flywheel spin

Community marketing is here to stay. It’s been the most effective marketing tactic since the beginning of marketing. Building a community doesn’t happen overnight, but integrating these SEO strategies within each step of the community flywheel is a great way to improve your CPAs, increase your AOVs and LTVs, and build a brand that stands the test of time.

5 Ways to Get More with Less Through Link Building — Whiteboard Friday

As we enter 2023, several businesses are being squeezed because of rising costs. Customers are simultaneously struggling to cope with their living costs, which in turn affects companies and what products they can sell, so agencies and in-house teams come under more pressure to get more results, with limited budgets. 

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Paddy walks through a few tactics to meet those needs by getting more (from less) when it comes to your link building efforts.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. I'm Paddy Moogan. I'm the CEO of Aira. Today we're going to talk about link building, and we're going to talk about five tactics to get more from less with your link building. Before we go into those, I'm going to set some context about what we mean by more from less.

So at the moment in the world, in the UK, and in the US, lots of businesses are being squeezed because of rising costs. Customers are struggling to cope with their living costs as well, which is affecting companies and what products they can sell. So what happens as a result is agencies and in-house teams come under more pressure to get more results, but maybe from less budget, or they won't get the budgets increased because companies are worried about rising costs.

So what we need to try and do as agencies and in-house teams is think of tactics to get more from less. And what I mean by that is inputs are normally around time, resources, budget. Those are the things that drive the work that we do. And the outputs are normally links, traffic, revenue, conversions, those kinds of things. What we need to try and do is not need more and more of this to get more and more of that. So we can actually use the same amount of inputs or lesser inputs to drive the same outputs in terms of links, traffic, and revenue. That's really, really good for our stakeholders. If you work in-house, your bosses will be really happy about that. If you're an agency, your clients will be really happy about that as well. So here's five ways to think about doing those things, all focused around digital PR, link building, and content marketing.

1. Repeatable content ideas

So number one, try to favor repeatable content ideas. So when you're coming up with ideas in the ideation process, try and look for ones that you can repeat over and over again. So, for example, can you plug in some new data for 2022 then for 2023? Can you put some new information there, some new facts, rather than having a campaign that has a fixed start and end point? If you have a fixed start and end point, once the end point comes, you can't keep outreaching. The results you're going to get from that content are quite limited by time. Whereas if you can keep that content going over and over again and keep refreshing it with new ideas, new data, and new data points, you can keep refreshing it, keep getting links, and keep getting more from that content, rather than relying upon building new content every single time.

2. Don't stop outreaching content

Number two, don't stop outreaching content. We see this quite a lot. So 25% of SEOs outreach content over and over again, leaving 75% that just leave content behind once they've gotten a few links to it. What normally happens is you launch a campaign, get some links, then you move on to the next one. These campaigns that you've already outreached, if you can keep going with them, if they're working, just keep doing the outreach, because whilst you're building new content and launching more campaigns, you can keep getting links to the older content and keep getting results for that content as well, which, again, means you're getting more from less. From the same inputs, you're getting more and more output.

3. Look for existing link-worthy content

Number three, look for existing link-worthy content. So when you start working on link building and launching content, it's really tempting to still launch brand-new content, launch brand-new campaigns. Whereas sometimes there's content sat right there on the website that is already link-worthy. You may already have some links going to it. So rather than diving off and creating new content, take a quick look at the website itself, see which pages have got lots of links to them, see why they've gotten links, and see if you can pick them back up again. If you can, the nice thing about this is you can keep building links to the old content whilst you're launching brand-new campaigns. So you don't need to not launch brand-new campaigns, but try not to default to launching new ones and forget about what could be right in front of you with the existing content.

4. Simplify your execution

Number four, I'm a big fan of simplifying execution. Again, it's really tempting to think of an idea and think of the most complex, the most shiny, interactive way to launch that content. And sometimes that's fine, that's the right thing to do. But don't let your mind default to that, because that is expensive in terms of time, resources, and budget. So try and simplify as much as you can. If you've got a good idea, it can be launched inside a blog post or just a very, very simple graphic, or even a short few lines of text with some data. Just focus on that rather than worrying about design and development resources, because if the angle is good enough, it will still get links. And you don't need to worry about going viral. If you spend just a couple of hours launching a blog post, it gets a handful of links, that's still a good result compared to spending 6 or 8 weeks on a big, shiny, interactive piece to get maybe 10 or 15 links. So don't worry too much about going viral. Focus on the angles. Focus on keeping things simple.

5. Look for internal linking opportunities

Number five, this is a really overlooked area in SEO in our experience. So look for internal linking opportunities. If you have pages that have gotten lots of external links pointing to them, you need to try and filter the equity from those pages through to your commercial pages, because usually the homepage gets the most links, but then you've got categories and products which aren't normally that link-worthy for most websites, so they don't get a lot of links pointing directly to them. But they're the ones we want to rank right. They're the ones that drive revenue. So if you have links going to your content, your campaigns, it might be a blog, it might be some guides, try and filter that link equity from those pages to your most important commercial pages, to your products and your categories. Then track the results. Track the rankings, track the traffic, and you'll see that filtering that link equity makes those pages rank a bit better. And again, you're getting more from less because that's just internal linking. You don't need more design, more development, and you can still drive more outputs with pretty minimal inputs.

So that's it. That's five ways to get more from less with link building. As we move into this era of businesses being a bit more picky with their budgets and may squeeze a little bit more, these are going to be really, really important to think about. And even when we come out of recessions and things are going well again, these are still good things to be thinking about. No stakeholder will be unhappy if you're trying to get more from less when it comes to budget.

So I'm Paddy Moogan. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm @paddymoogan. I really hope that was useful, and thank you for watching.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

2022 YouTube and Video SERP Result Changes

When you think of video results on Google in 2022 (and video optimization), you might think of something that looks like this (from a search for “flag football”):

In mid-October, we noticed a drop in this type of video result, and that drop became dramatic by late-October. Did Google remove these video results or was our system broken? As it turns out, neither — video results have split into at least three distinct types (depending on how you count).

(1) Video packs (simple & complex)

The example above is pretty simple, with the exception of “Key Moments” (which debuted in 2019), but even the familiar video packs can get pretty complex. Here’s one from a search for the artist Gustav Klimt:

All three of the videos here have Key Moments, including a pre-expanded section for the top video with thumbnails for each of the moments. Some specific SERPs also have minor variations, such as the “Trailers & clips” feature on this search for “Lion King”:

Video packs are still often 3-packs, but can range from two to four results. While only the header really changes here, it’s likely that Google is using a modified algorithm to surface these trailer results.

(2) Branded video carousels

Some videos are displayed in a carousel format, which seems to be common for branded results within YouTube. Here’s an example for the search “Dave and Busters”:

While the majority of these “brand” (loosely defined) carousels are from YouTube, there are exceptions, such as this carousel from Disney Video for “Lightning McQueen”:

Like all carousel-based results, you can scroll horizontally to view more videos. Google’s mobile-first design philosophy has driven more of this format over time, as the combination of vertical and horizontal scrolling is more natural on mobile devices.

(3) Single/thumbnail video results

Prior to breaking out video into separate features, Google typically displayed video results as standard results with a screenshot thumbnail. In the past month, Google seems to have revived this format. Here’s an example for the search “longboarding”:

If you hover over the thumbnail, you’ll see a preview, like this (edited for size):

In some cases, we see multiple video results on a single page, and each of them seems to be counted as one of the “10 blue links” that we normally associate with standard organic results from the web.

There’s also a variant on the single-video format that seem specific to YouTube:

This variant also shows a preview when you hover over it, but it launches a simplified YouTube viewing experience that appears to be new (and will likely evolve over time).

(4) Bonus: Mega-videos

This format has been around for a while and is relatively rare, but certain niches, including hit songs, may return a large-scale video format, such as this one for Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero”:

A similar format sometimes appears for “how to” queries (and similar questions), such as the one below for “how to roundhouse kick.” Note the text excerpt below the video that Google has extracted from the audio …

While neither of these formats are new, and they don’t seem to have changed significantly in the past month, they are important variants of Google video results.

(5) Bonus: TikTok results

Finally, Google has started to display a special format for TikTok videos, that typically includes a selection of five videos that preview when you hover over them. Here’s an example from one of my favorite TikTok personalities:

Typically, these are triggered by searches that include “TikTok” in the query. While it’s not a standard video format and isn’t available outside of TikTok, it’s interesting to note how Google is experimenting with rich video results from other platforms.

Does YouTube still dominate?

Back in 2020, we did a study across 10,000 competitive Google searches that showed YouTube holding a whopping 94% of page-one video results. Has this changed with the recent format shuffling? In a word: no. Across the main three video formats discussed in this post, YouTube still accounts for 94% of results in this data set, with Facebook coming in at a distant second place with 0.8%. This does not count specialized results, such as the TikTo results above.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re tracking video results, and have seen major changes, be aware that they may not have disappeared – they more likely morphed into another format. This is a good time to go look at your SERPs in the wild (on desktop and mobile) and see what kind of video formats your target queries are showing. Google is not only experimenting with new formats, but with new video-specific markup and capabilities (such as extracting text directly from the soundtracks of videos and podcasts). You can expect all of this to continue to evolve into 2023.

Sneak Peek: The MozCon 2023 Speaker Line-Up

The year may slowly be wrapping up but we’ve got an extra special, early gift to share before you log off that laptop and put away your favorite travel mug.

We’re thrilled to announce the first 19 extraordinary speakers that will be taking the MozCon 2023 stage in Seattle this coming August (in alphabetical order).

Snag your Super Early Bird tickets!

Meet the speakers

Amanda Jordan (she/her)

Director of Digital Strategy, RicketyRoo
@amandatjordan | @ricketyroo

Amanda is passionate about helping complex, large businesses improve their local visibility. Her background includes working with clients in the legal, health, financial, and home services industries.

Andi Jarvis (he/him)

Strategy Director, Eximo Marketing
@andijarvis | @EximoMarketing

Andi is the Founder and Strategy Director of Eximo Marketing, a marketing strategy consultancy based in the UK. Eximo works with established manufacturers who want to grow their business via direct to consumer. Andi also hosts the Strategy Sessions podcast.

Brie E. Anderson (she/her)

Owner, BEAST Analytics
@brie_e_anderson

Brie E Anderson is an Analytical Nerd with a Soft Spot for Strategy. She's spent the last 10 years helping businesses of all sizes execute data-driven strategies to increase ROI. Today, she runs BEAST Analytics, a digital marketing analytics consultancy.

Carrie Rose (she/her)

CEO & Founder, Rise At Seven
@CarrieRosePR | @RiseAtSeven

Carrie Rose, Founder of leading Global Search-First Creative Agency Rise at Seven both driving and facilitating search demand for global brands operating in 4 locations across the world including UK, US and EU

Chris Long (he/him)

VP of Marketing, Go Fish Digital

@GoFishChris | @GoFishDigital

Chris Long is the VP of Marketing for the Go Fish Digital team. He works with unique problems and advanced search situations to help clients improve organic traffic through a deep understanding of Google's algorithm and web technology.

Crystal Carter (she/her)

Head of SEO Communications, Wix
@CrystalontheWeb | @wix

Head of SEO Communications, Wix, Crystal is an SEO & digital marketer with over 15 years of experience. Her clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO and more.

Daniel Waisberg (he/him)

Search Advocate, Google
@DanielWaisberg | @google

Daniel is a Search Advocate at Google, part of the Search Console engineering team. His job is divided between educating / inspiring the Search community and working with the product’s engineering team to develop new capabilities.

Duane Brown (he/him)

Founder & Head of Strategy, Take Some Risk Inc.
@DuaneBrown

Duane has lived in 6 cities across 3 continents while working with Ecom, DTC and SaaS brands. He now lives in Canada helping brands grow through data, strategy and PPC marketing across search & social ad platforms.

Jackie Chu (she/her)

SEO Lead, Intelligence, Uber
@jackiecchu | @uber

Jackie Chu is currently the SEO Lead, Intelligence for Uber, driving analytics and tooling for the SEO teams globally. She has deep experience in technical SEO, content SEO, ASO and international SEO spanning both B2B and B2C industries.

Jes Scholz (she/her)

Group CMO, Ringier
jes_scholz | @ringier_ag

Group CMO at Swiss media giant Ringier, marketing technologist & mum of two tiny humans. Jes loves to talk about the future of search, smart marketing automation and travel.

Lidia Infante (she/her)

Senior SEO Manager, Sanity
@LidiaInfanteM | @sanity_io

Lidia has been working in SEO for almost a decade, helping businesses in SaaS, media and e-commerce grow online. She has a BSC in Psychology and a Master in Digital Business and is a regular speaker at SEO events such as MozCon, BrightonSEO or WTSFest.

Lily Ray (she/her)

Senior Director, SEO & Head of Organic Research, Amsive Digital
@lilyraynyc | @​​amsive_digital

Lily Ray is the Sr. Director, SEO & Head of Organic Research at Amsive Digital, where she provides strategic leadership for the agency’s SEO client programs. Lily began her SEO career in 2010 in a fast-paced start-up environment and moved quickly into the agency world, where she helped grow and establish an award-winning SEO department that delivered high impact work for a fast-growing list of notable clients, including Fortune 500 companies.

Miracle Inameti-Archibong (she/her)

Head of Organic Search, John Lewis (Financial Services)
@Mira_Inam

Miracle is Head of Organic Search at John Lewis (Financial Services) and is armed with more than a decade of supporting national, and global brands with technical SEO and data strategy.

Noah Learner (he/him/his)

Product Director, Two Octobers
@NoahLearner | @twooctobers

Noah is a technical marketer, nicknamed the Kraken, who is happiest building SEO tools, automations, data pipelines and communities. When not in the lab, he loves skiing, fly fishing, camping with his family, and walking his dog, Shadow.

Dr. Pete Meyers (he/him)

Marketing Scientist, Moz
@Dr_Pete | @Moz

Dr. Pete is Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content.

Ross Simmonds (he/him)

CEO & Founder, Foundation Marketing
@TheCoolestCool | @FoundationIncCo

Ross Simmonds is the founder & CEO of Foundation, a global marketing agency that provides services to organizations all over the world ranging from some of the fastest-growing startups to global brands. He was named one of Atlantic Canada's Top 50 CEO.

Tom Anthony (he/him)

CTO, SearchPilot
@TomAnthonySEO | @SearchPilot

Tom is CTO at SearchPilot, where he leads the engineering & product teams. Tom has been working on the web for over 25 years, and has a PhD in Computer Science. He lives with his wife and 3 daughters in Germany.

Tom Capper (he/him)

Senior Search Scientist, Moz
@thcapper | @Moz

Tom heads up the Search Science team at Moz, providing research and insight for Moz's next generation of tools. Previously he headed up the London consulting team for SEO agency Distilled, and worked as a chef in a roadside grill.

Wil Reynolds (he/him)

CEO & Vice President of Innovation, Seer Interactive
@wilreynolds | @SeerInteractive

Wil has been leading the charge to leverage “Big Data” to break down silos between SEO, PPC, and traditional marketing -- pulling together data from various sources to see the big picture.

Meet the emcees

Cheryl Draper (she/her)

Event Marketing Manager, Moz
@CherylDraper | @Moz

Melissa Rae Brown (she/her)

Learning Team Manager, Moz
@Melissa_R_B_ | @Moz

Ola King (he/him)

User Researcher, Moz
@justolaking | @Moz

From fan favorites to fresh faces, it’s a pretty great start to what’s sure to be the best MozCon yet! We’ll have even more incredible speakers to reveal, including our community speaker lineup, in early 2023.

But don’t wait to snag your tickets! Save up to $600 on MozCon 2023 now with Super Early Bird pricing.

Grab your Super Early Bird tickets!

SEO Gap Analysis — Whiteboard Friday

Ranking on Google is not ranking in a vacuum. Ranking is outranking your competitors. When you've got very limited space on the first page of the SERPs, you need to be doing better than your competitors. 

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Lidia Infante shows you her recommended strategies for successful SEO gap analysis. 

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a new edition of Whiteboard Fridays. My name is Lidia Infante, and I'm the Senior SEO Manager at sanity.io. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about SEO gap analysis, and yes, I know it's a very unsexy topic, but bear with me because it's worth it.

SEO gap analysis takes us to the first principles of what we do in SEO because ranking on Google is not ranking in a vacuum. Ranking is outranking your competitors. You've got a very limited space on the first page of the SERPs, and you need to be doing better than your competitors to be able to rank there. That means, then, you need to know what your competitors are doing and how you're going to do it better.

Identify competitors

But first of all, you need to know who your competitors are, who they are really. We're going to be speaking about competitor identification in a different Whiteboard Friday, so be sure to check it out.

Benchmark

Once you have your set of competitors ready, you're going to proceed to benchmark yourself against them, and we're going to be doing this across the three pillars of SEO. 

So we're going to be looking at content, we're going to be looking at links, and we're going to be looking at tech SEO. We're going to look at how our competitors perform from each of those and how we compare.

Content

So when it comes to content, the very first thing that we want to look at is at the estimated traffic by type that our competitors and we have. So when I'm talking about traffic by type, what I mean is like: Are they getting branded traffic versus unbranded traffic, product traffic, editorial traffic? It's going to be very different depending on the vertical that you're in, so adapt it to make it yours. We're also going to be looking at the number of editorial URLs that they have and how much traffic these editorial URLs are getting each on average. And lastly, we're going to be looking at the number of keywords that they're ranking for. We're not going to be looking at all of the keywords. We're going to be aiming for the range of 1 to 30. Again, you can make this yours. You know your market better, and you know what's relevant, but that should narrow the entire pool to stuff that's a little more relevant to your competitors.

Links

Then, we're going to be looking at links. We're going to begin with link gap analysis. That is we're going to look at how many links your competitors have and how many referring domains are pointing to your competitors. Then, we're going to use this to measure link growth. We're going to look at how many links your competitors had 6 months ago or 12 months ago if your market is a little slower, and we're going to get a percentage of growth out of that. That's going to indicate to you whether your search market is very aggressive with link building and you need to make an effort to keep up or it's a little bit more relaxed. Then, we're going to be looking at branded search. So how many people are looking for your competitors' brands versus how many people are looking for your brand? That's going to indicate the level of brand awareness that you have within your target audience in comparison to your competitors.

And we're going to take it one step further, and we're going to be looking again at branded traffic. There should be a very, very correlated relation between branded search and branded traffic. If you're first for branded search, you should be first for branded traffic and so on. But if there isn't, it might be an indicator that you don't have content within your site that's responding to the users' queries about your brand. So that's definitely a very quick win that you could action right now.

Technical SEO

Lastly, we're going to be looking at tech SEO, and this is incredibly difficult to measure because the requirements in tech SEO vary from website to website, from vertical to vertical. I am personally in the SaaS market, so my requirements for tech SEO is essentially make it readable and make sure that JavaScript is not blocking anything, classic crawling and rendering issues, and that's about it. But if you're in e-commerce, you're likely dealing with faceted navigation. You're dealing with filter management, and it's a little bit more demanding. So the best way that I have found to measure tech SEO changes and performance is Core Web Vital scores. We're going to go on the Chrome UX Report on Data Studio, and we're going to look at the main three Core Web vitals, grab the percentage of good URLs according to Google, and then we're going to average them out into one score. Then we're going to be looking at page speed. You can do this with PageSpeed Insights, and we're going to be looking at the scores for mobile versus desktop. I don't average these out because I think they provide really useful information of what issues your industry is running into when it comes to mobile usability. And then lastly, we're going to do some manual checks. Take a look at the robots.txt, take a look at the sitemap, how they manage canonicalization, and that's going to inform you better on how you could outperform your competitors.

And if this seems very complicated, don't worry. I have provided a free template for you so that you can make it yours.

Thank you so much for watching my Whiteboard Friday. My name is Lidia Infante, and you can find me on Twitter @LidiaInfanteM. You can find me on my website at lidia-infante.com and see you soon.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Local Pack Header Specificity Vanishes while Local Packs Downtrend

In July of this year, Dr. Peter J. Meyers and I published a report analyzing an element of Google’s local results we termed “local pack headers”. About a month after publication, members of the local SEO community, like Colan Nielsen, began noticing that the extraordinary diversity of headings we had captured had suddenly diminished:

Today, I’m doing a quick follow-up to the manual portion of our earlier study in an effort to quantify and illustrate this abrupt alteration.

A total sea change in local pack headers

Between July and November of 2022, 83% of our previously-queried local pack headers underwent a complete transformation of nomenclature. Only 17% of the local pack headers were still worded the same way in autumn as they had been in the summertime. Here is a small set of examples:

In our manual analysis of 60 queries in July, we encountered 40 unique local pack headers - a tremendous variety. Now, all specificity is gone. For all of our queries, headings have been reduced to just 3 types: in-store availability, places, and businesses.

Entity relationships remain mysterious

What hasn’t changed is my sense that the logic underpinning which businesses receive which local pack header remains rather odd. In the original study, we noted the mystery of why a query like “karate” fell under the heading of “martial arts school” but a query for “tai chi” got a unique “tai chi heading”, or why “adopt dog” results were headed “animal rescue services” but “adopt bunny” got a pack labeled “adopt bunny”. The curious entity relationships continue on, even in this new, genericized local pack header scenario. For example, why is my search for “tacos” (which formerly brought up a pack labeled “Mexican restaurants”, now labeled this:

But my search for “oil change” gets this header:

Is there something about a Mexican restaurant that makes it more of a “place” and an oil change spot that makes it more of a “business”? I don’t follow the logic. Meanwhile, why are service area businesses, as shown in my search for “high weed mowing” being labeled “places”?

Surely high weed mowing is not a place…unless it is a philosophical one. Yet I saw many SABs labeled this way instead of as “businesses”, which would seem a more rational label, given Google’s historic distinction between physical premises and go-to-client models. There are many instances like this of the labeling not making much horse sense, and with the new absence of more specific wording, it feels like local pack headers are likely to convey less meaning and be more easily overlooked now.

Why has Google done this and does it matter to your local search marketing?

Clearly, Google decided to streamline their classifications. There may be more than three total local pack header types, but I have yet to see them. Hotel packs continue to have their own headings, but they have always been a different animal:

In general, Google experiments with whatever they think will move users about within their system, and perhaps they felt the varied local pack headers were more of a distraction than an aid to interactivity with the local packs. We can’t know for sure, nor can we say how long this change will remain in place, because Google could bring back the diverse headings the day after I publish this column!

As to whether this matters to your local search campaigns, unfortunately, the generic headers do obscure former clues to the mind of Google that might have been useful in your SEO. I previously suggested that local businesses might want to incorporate the varied local pack terms into the optimization of the website tags and text, but in the new scenario, it is likely to be pointless to optimize anything for “places”, “businesses”, or “in-store availability”. It’s a given that your company is some kind of place or business if you’re creating a Google Business Profile for it. And, your best bet for featuring that you carry certain products is to publish them on your listing and consider whether you want to opt into programs like Pointy.

In sum, this change is not a huge deal, but I’m a bit sorry to see the little clues of the diversified headers vanish from sight. Meanwhile, there’s another local pack trend going on right now that you should definitely be paying attention to…

A precipitous drop in overall local pack presence

In our original study, Google did not return a local pack for 18% of our manual July queries. By November, the picture had significantly changed. A startling 42% of our queries suddenly no longer displayed a local pack. This is right in line with Andrew Shotland’s documentation of a 42.3% drop from peak local pack display between August and October. Mozcast, pictured above, captured a drop from 39.6% of queries returning local packs on October 24th to just 25.1% on October 25th. The number has remained in the low-to-mid 20s in the ensuing weeks. It’s enough of a downward slope to give one pause.

Because I’m convinced of the need for economic localism as critical to healing the climate and society, I would personally like Google to return local packs for all commercial queries so that searchers can always see the nearest resource for purchasing whatever they need, but if Google is reducing the number of queries for which they deliver local results, I have to try to understand their thinking.

To do that, I have to remember that the presence of a local pack is a signal that Google believes a query has a local intent. Likely, they often get this right, but I can think of times when a local result has appeared for a search term that doesn’t seem to me to be obviously, inherently local. For example, in the study Dr. Pete and I conducted, we saw Google not just returning a local pack for the keyword “pickles” but even giving it its own local pack header:

If I search for pickles, am I definitely looking for pickles near me, or could I be looking for recipes, articles about the nutritional value of pickles, the history of pickles, something else? How high is Google’s confidence that vague searches like these should be fulfilled with a local result?

After looking at a number of searches like these in the context of intent, my current thinking is this: for some reason unknown to us, Google is dialing back presumed local intent. Ever since Google made the user the centroid of search and began showing us nearby results almost by default for countless queries, we users became trained not to have to add many (or any) modifiers to our search language to prompt Google to lay out our local options for us. We could be quite lazy in our searches and still get local results.

In the new context of a reduced number of searches generating local packs, though, we will have to rehabituate ourselves to writing more detailed queries to get to what we want if Google no longer thinks our simple search for “pickles” implies “pickles near me”. I almost get the feeling that Google wants us to start being more specific again because its confidence level about what constitutes a local search has suffered some kind of unknown challenge.

It’s also worth throwing into our thinking what our friends over at NearMedia.co have pointed out:

“The Local Pack's future is unclear. EU's no "self-preferencing" DMA takes effect in 2023. The pending AICOA has a similar language.”

It could be that Google’s confidence is being shaken in a variety of ways, including by regulatory rulings, and local SEOs should always expect change. For now, though, local businesses may be experiencing some drop in their local pack traffic and CTR. On the other hand, if Google is getting it right, there may be no significant loss. If your business was formerly showing up in a local pack for a query that didn’t actually have a local intent, you likely weren’t getting those clicks anyway because a local result wasn’t what the searcher was looking for to begin with.

That being said, I am seeing examples in which I feel Google is definitely getting it wrong. For instance, my former searches for articles of furniture all brought up local packs with headings like “accent chairs” or “lamps”. Now, Google is returning no local pack for some of these searches and is instead plugging an enormous display of remote, corporate shopping options. There are still furniture stores near me, but Google is now hiding them, and that disappoints me greatly:

So here’s today’s word to the wise: keep working on the organic optimization of your website and the publication of helpful content. Both will underpin your key local pack rankings, and as we learned from our recent large-scale local business review survey, 51% of consumers are going to end up on your site as their next step after reading reviews on your listings. 2023 will be a good year to invest in the warm and inclusive welcome your site is offering people, and the investment will also stand you in good stead however local pack elements like headers, or even local packs, themselves, wax and wane.

4 Common Mistakes E-commerce Websites Make Using JavaScript

Despite the resources they can invest in web development, large e-commerce websites still struggle with SEO-friendly ways of using JavaScript.

And, even when 98% of all websites use JavaScript, it’s still common that Google has problems indexing pages using JavaScript. While it's okay to use it on your website in general, remember that JavaScript requires extra computing resources to be processed into HTML code understandable by bots.

At the same time, new JavaScript frameworks and technologies are constantly arising. To give your JavaScript pages the best chance of indexing, you'll need to learn how to optimize it for the sake of your website's visibility in the SERPs.

Why is unoptimized JavaScript dangerous for your e-commerce?

By leaving JavaScript unoptimized, you risk your content not getting crawled and indexed by Google. And in the e-commerce industry, that translates to losing significant revenue, because products are impossible to find via search engines.

It’s likely that your e-commerce website uses dynamic elements that are pleasant for users, such as product carousels or tabbed product descriptions. This JavaScript-generated content very often is not accessible to bots. Googlebot cannot click or scroll, so it may not access all those dynamic elements.

Consider how many of your e-commerce website users visit the site via mobile devices. JavaScript is slower to load so, the longer it takes to load, the worse your website’s performance and user experience becomes. If Google realizes that it takes too long to load JavaScript resources, it may skip them when rendering your website in the future.

Top 4 JavaScript SEO mistakes on e-commerce websites

Now, let’s look at some top mistakes when using JavaScript for e-commerce, and examples of websites that avoid them.

1. Page navigation relying on JavaScript

Crawlers don’t act the same way users do on a website ‒ they can’t scroll or click to see your products. Bots must follow links throughout your website structure to understand and access all your important pages fully. Otherwise, using only JavaScript-based navigation may make bots see products just on the first page of pagination.

Guilty: Nike.com

Nike.com uses infinite scrolling to load more products on its category pages. And because of that, Nike risks its loaded content not getting indexed.

For the sake of testing, I entered one of their category pages and scrolled down to choose a product triggered by scrolling. Then, I used the “site:” command to check if the URL is indexed in Google. And as you can see on a screenshot below, this URL is impossible to find on Google:

Of course, Google can still reach your products through sitemaps. However, finding your content in any other way than through links makes it harder for Googlebot to understand your site structure and dependencies between the pages.

To make it even more apparent to you, think about all the products that are visible only when you scroll for them on Nike.com. If there’s no link for bots to follow, they will see only 24 products on a given category page. Of course, for the sake of users, Nike can’t serve all of its products on one viewport. But still, there are better ways of optimizing infinite scrolling to be both comfortable for users and accessible for bots.

Winner: Douglas.de

Unlike Nike, Douglas.de uses a more SEO-friendly way of serving its content on category pages.

They provide bots with page navigation based on <a href> links to enable crawling and indexing of the next paginated pages. As you can see in the source code below, there’s a link to the second page of pagination included:

Moreover, the paginated navigation may be even more user-friendly than infinite scrolling. The numbered list of category pages may be easier to follow and navigate, especially on large e-commerce websites. Just think how long the viewport would be on Douglas.de if they used infinite scrolling on the page below:

2. Generating links to product carousels with JavaScript

Product carousels with related items are one of the essential e-commerce website features, and they are equally important from both the user and business perspectives. Using them can help businesses increase their revenue as they serve related products that users may be potentially interested in. But if those sections over-rely on JavaScript, they may lead to crawling and indexing issues.

Guilty: Otto.de

I analyzed one of Otto.de’s product pages to identify if it includes JavaScript-generated elements. I used the What Would JavaScript Do (WWJD) tool that shows screenshots of what a page looks like with JavaScript enabled and disabled.

Test results clearly show that Otto.de relies on JavaScript to serve related and recommended product carousels on its website. And from the screenshot below, it’s clear that those sections are invisible with JavaScript disabled:

How may it affect the website’s indexing? When Googlebot lacks resources to render JavaScript-injected links, the product carousels can’t be found and then indexed.

Let’s check if that’s the case here. Again, I used the “site:” command and typed the title of one of Otto.de’s product carousels:

As you can see, Google couldn’t find that product carousel in its index. And the fact that Google can’t see that element means that accessing additional products will be more complex. Also, if you prevent crawlers from reaching your product carousels, you’ll make it more difficult for them to understand the relationship between your pages.

Winner: Target.com

In the case of Target.com’s product page, I used the Quick JavaScript Switcher extension to disable all JavaScript-generated elements. I paid particular attention to the “More to consider” and “Similar items” carousels and how they look with JavaScript enabled and disabled.

As shown below, disabling JavaScript changed the way the product carousels look for users. But has anything changed from the bots' perspective?

To find out, check what the HTML version of the page looks like for bots by analyzing the cache version.

To check the cache version of Target.com’s page above, I typed “cache:https://www.target.com/p/9-39-...”, which is the URL address of the analyzed page. Also, I took a look at the text-only version of the page.

When scrolling, you’ll see that the links to related products can also be found in its cache. If you see them here, it means bots don’t struggle to find them, either.

However, keep in mind that the links to the exact products you can see in the cache may differ from the ones on the live version of the page. It’s normal for the products in the carousels to rotate, so you don’t need to worry about discrepancies in specific links.

But what exactly does Target.com do differently? They take advantage of dynamic rendering. They serve the initial HTML, and the links to products in the carousels as the static HTML bots can process.

However, you must remember that dynamic rendering adds an extra layer of complexity that may quickly get out of hand with a large website. I recently wrote an article about dynamic rendering that’s a must-read if you are considering this solution.

Also, the fact that crawlers can access the product carousels doesn’t guarantee these products will get indexed. However, it will significantly help them flow through the site structure and understand the dependencies between your pages.

3. Blocking important JavaScript files in robots.txt

Blocking JavaScript for crawlers in robots.txt by mistake may lead to severe indexing issues. If Google can’t access and process your important resources, how is it supposed to index your content?

Guilty: Jdl-brakes.com

It’s impossible to fully evaluate a website without a proper site crawl. But looking at its robots.txt file can already allow you to identify any critical content that’s blocked.

This is the case with the robots.txt file of Jdl-brakes.com. As you can see below, they block the /js/ path with the Disallow directive. It makes all internally hosted JavaScript files (or at least the important ones) invisible to all search engine bots.

This disallow directive misuse may result in rendering problems on your entire website.

To check if it applies in this case, I used Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. This tool can help you navigate rendering issues by giving you insight into the rendered source code and the screenshot of a rendered page on mobile.

I headed to the “More info” section to check if any page resources couldn’t be loaded. Using the example of one of the product pages on Jdl-brakes.com, you may see it needs a specific JavaScript file to get fully rendered. Unfortunately, it can’t happen because the whole /js/ folder is blocked in its robots.txt.

But let’s find out if those rendering problems affected the website’s indexing. I used the “site:” command to check if the main content (product description) of the analyzed page is indexed on Google. As you can see, no results were found:

This is an interesting case where Google could reach the website's main content but didn’t index it. Why? Because Jdl-brakes.com blocks its JavaScript, Google can’t properly see the layout of the page. And even though crawlers can access the main content, it’s impossible for them to understand where that content belongs in the page’s layout.

Let’s take a look at the Screenshot tab in the Mobile-Friendly Test. This is how crawlers see the page’s layout when Jdl-brakes.com blocks their access to CSS and JavaScript resources. It looks pretty different from what you can see in your browser, right?

The layout is essential for Google to understand the context of your page. If you’d like to know more about this crossroads of web technology and layout, I highly recommend looking into a new field of technical SEO called rendering SEO.

Winner: Lidl.de

Lidl.de proves that a well-organized robots.txt file can help you control your website’s crawling. The crucial thing is to use the disallow directive consciously.

Although Lidl.de blocks a single JavaScript file with the Disallow directive /cc.js*, it seems it doesn’t affect the website’s rendering process. The important thing to note here is that they block only a single JavaScript file that doesn’t influence other URL paths on a website. As a result, all other JavaScript and CSS resources they use should remain accessible to crawlers.

Having a large e-commerce website, you may easily lose track of all the added directives. Always include as many path fragments of a URL you want to block from crawling as possible. It will help you avoid blocking some crucial pages by mistake.

4. JavaScript removing main content from a website

If you use unoptimized JavaScript to serve the main content on your website, such as product descriptions, you block crawlers from seeing the most important information on your pages. As a result, your potential customers looking for specific details about your products may not find such content on Google.

Guilty: Walmart.com

Using the Quick JavaScript Switcher extension, you can easily disable all JavaScript-generated elements on a page. That’s what I did in the case of one of Walmart.com’s product pages:

As you can see above, the product description section disappeared with JavaScript disabled. I decided to use the “site:” command to check if Google could index this content. I copied the fragment of the product description I saw on the page with JavaScript enabled. However, Google didn’t show the exact product page I was looking for.

Will users get obsessed with finding that particular product via Walmart.com? They may, but they can also head to any other store selling this item instead.

The example of Walmart.com proves that main content depending on JavaScript to load makes it more difficult for crawlers to find and display your valuable information. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean they should eliminate all JavaScript-generated elements on their website.

To fix this problem, Walmart has two solutions:

1. Implementing dynamic rendering (prerendering) which is, in most cases, the easiest from an implementation standpoint.

2. Implementing server-side rendering. This is the solution that will solve the problems we are observing at Walmart.com without serving different content to Google and users (as in the case of dynamic rendering). In most cases, server-side rendering also helps with web performance issues on lower-end devices, as all of your JavaScript is being rendered by your servers before it reaches the client's device.

Let’s have a look at the JavaScript implementation that’s done right.

Winner: IKEA.com

IKEA proves that you can present your main content in a way that is accessible for bots and interactive for users.

When browsing IKEA.com’s product pages, their product descriptions are served behind clickable panels. When you click on them, they dynamically appear on the right-hand side of the viewport.

Although users need to click to see product details, Ikea also serves that crucial part of its pages even with JavaScript off:

This way of presenting crucial content should make both users and bots happy. From the crawlers’ perspective, serving product descriptions that don’t rely on JavaScript makes them easy to access. Consequently, the content can be found on Google.

Wrapping up

JavaScript doesn’t have to cause issues, if you know how to use it properly. As an absolute must-do, you need to follow the best practices of indexing. It may allow you to avoid basic JavaScript SEO mistakes that can significantly hinder your website’s visibility on Google.

Take care of your indexing pipeline and check if:

• You allow Google access to your JavaScript resources,

• Google can access and render your JavaScript-generated content. Focus on the crucial elements of your e-commerce site, such as product carousels or product descriptions,

• Your content actually gets indexed on Google.

If my article got you interested in JS SEO, find more details in Tomek Rudzki’s article about the 6 steps to diagnose and solve JavaScript SEO issues.