What Diners Write About Most: A Study of Restaurant Review Place Topics

Marketing a restaurant? You already know what a huge role online reviews play in your reputation, rankings, and revenue, with 98% of US adults reading this content and 86% writing it. You may have read that there’s a demonstrable Google local ranking boost when a brand-new restaurant gets its first ten reviews. You may also have seen that many experts consider your overall Google review rating to be the sixth most important of all local search ranking factors.

But have you advanced yet to full use of Google reviews as a source of business intelligence for the brands you’re marketing? Formal surveys can be costly to run, so don’t overlook the free, ongoing sentiment analysis shorthand offered right on your listings in the form of Google Place Topics, telling you at-a-glance what real-world attributes inspire reviewers to get typing. These most compelling offline components, aggregated by Google online, can give insights into the areas a business should focus on most.

Back in 2020, I examined Place Topic trends for US grocery stores. Today, I’ll do the same for restaurants, and I want to emphasize that this is a case study you can do for any industry to get a sense of what drives customers to take the time to leave reviews. Given the impact of reviews on business viability, this type of study is a very smart thing to engage in!

Methodology

I wanted to find out which factors inspire the most mentions in restaurant reviews. This small survey looks at 250 data points. I found the top-ranked business for the phrase restaurant+city (like “restaurant sacramento”) in all 50 US state capitals. I then recorded the top 5 place topics for each restaurant, put them in a spreadsheet, and after reviewing the data, realized I could bucket the findings into three main categories: food & drink, amenities, and other.

But first, what is a Google Place Topic?

If you navigate from a Google Business Profile to the full review overlay, you’ll see a section right below the star rating labeled “People often mention.” Place Topics consist of this row of clickable tabs displaying the words that come up most in the review set, including the number of times each phrase was mentioned.

Restaurant review results

Here’s what I’ve learned:

• 64% of reviews for the top-ranked restaurants in state capitols across the US mention food & drink most prominently.

• 24% mention amenities prominently.

• 12% mention something else prominently.

Under the ‘food & drink’ category, I included any reference to specific foods (tacos, risotto, coffee, etc.), any mention of meals (brunch, dinner, etc.), as well as food qualifiers like “vegan” or “gluten-free.” Fun fact: people seem very excited about paella at the moment in the United States.

Under the ‘amenity’ category, I included any reference to physical amenities (patio, lake, antiques, etc.), any reference to intangible amenities (atmosphere, happy hour, entertainment, fine dining, etc.), and any reference to staff and services (bartender, valet parking, waitress).

The ‘other’ category proved interesting. One thing that stood out to me was the number of references to personal celebrations, most prominently “birthday” and “anniversary.” So much is riding on a restaurant when it’s chosen to mark an occasion. There were also several compliments like “gem” and some concerning trends like “cold.” I also filed a few things in this category that weren’t immediately intelligible to me, like “6:00,” “night,” and “silver.” Fun fact: I had to figure out why reviewers kept mentioning “wall,” only to discover they were describing an eatery as a “hole-in-the-wall.”

Interpreting the results

Place Topics simply indicate which subjects are being mentioned most by your reviewers. For example, lots of reviews might mention your alfredo. That’s good to know as a first step. But the essential second step is to understand what people are actually saying about your alfredo. Place Topics don’t automatically tell you whether the sentiment is positive or negative. As seen above, these two reviews characterize alfredo quite differently, as being worthy of love and as being just okay, but both count as Place Topic mentions.

The simplest way to drill down is to choose one of the Place Topics Google is surfacing on your listing and then combine it with a ‘Sort By’ filter. Here, you can see that I’ve combined “alfredo” with “most recent”:

This filtered view will allow you to see if the most recent customers talking about your alfredo are satisfied or not. By scrolling through the reviews surfaced by this filter combo and noting down what you see, you can get a sense of present performance for a most-talked-about topic. You can then go through the same process with both the ‘Highest’ and ‘Lowest’ filters to note the best and worst sentiment you’ve ever received on the topic. You could create a spreadsheet to compare how you’re currently doing with a particular topic to your overall highs and lows. The ability to use Place Topics in combination with sorting makes the information a bit more intelligible!

This workflow is reasonably manageable for the 10 Place Topics shown by Google for a single-location business. It becomes less so for each additional location of a multi-location business. And, of course, Place Topics only relate to your Google reviews - not to your customers’ sentiments across multiple review platforms. While this feature is useful, it’s limited and feels very manual. If you’re starting to realize this, you may be at a point of learning that an investment in more sophisticated sentiment analysis would make sense if it could highlight multiple most-discussed review elements across all your listings and across various platforms. In that case, you might want to sign up for software like Moz Local, with its more sophisticated sentiment analysis data and clues to whether your locations are trending upward or downward in terms of customer satisfaction:

But back to the more limited Place Topics, what should you actually be doing with this information?

What to do with Place Topic information

I was interested to see that only one truly large restaurant chain appeared to be given a top spot for my search through the 50 state capitals: an Olive Garden in Topeka, Kansas. All the rest were small businesses. I spent a little time looking at a variety of Olive Garden listings. According to Popsugar, chicken alfredo is this well-known brand’s most popular dish, and this is borne out by it showing up as a Place Topic for the Kansas City location in my screenshots above, as well as for many other locations.

The most practical use of Place Topics for restaurants (or any other businesses) is to understand that they represent the factors you must get right, because they are the things your customers will talk about most in your reviews.

86% of consumers say local business reviews are either the most important or a somewhat important factor in whether they can trust a nearby company. We can readily imagine prospective diners looking at all the sentiment about whether they can get a good alfredo at Olive Garden. If the sentiment is positive, this would be a yes. If negative, maybe not. Whatever the majority of your customers are writing about in your reviews, you need to examine those areas of your operations with a magnifying glass to ensure that you are giving customers every reason to speak well of your most prominent features.

Additionally, if worrisome Place Topics are trending on your Google Business Profile, it’s an actionable piece of business intelligence. For example, if enough people are writing about food temperature to make “cold” a top Place Topic on your listing, a structural fix will be needed so that guests are no longer experiencing this problem, and other things they’re mentioning can replace this word as a Place Topic. Even during the brief period of my study, I saw Place Topics change for specific locations, so take courage from that.

If the restaurant you’re marketing is experiencing a downtrend, you might also want to check out your top competitors’ Place Topics for amazing, fast insight into what their customers think they are getting right (and wrong). How does your establishment stack up, and what changes might you make to catch up?

Big takeaways for today’s restaurants

Overall, what we’ve learned about restaurants from this examination of Place Topics is that for top-ranked dining establishments:

• Your food matters most. It is the subject that the overwhelming majority of your guests will mention most in their reviews.

• Your amenities come second but still get lots of mentions in your reviews.

This may come as no surprise, but I grew up in a funny era where the emphasis on food in restaurants threatened to disappear. As food writer M.F.K. Fisher described the 1980s,

“Many of those young chefs pay more attention to the way food is arranged than the way it tastes.”

And as food historian Sylvia Lovegren explains the habits of eighties two-income fueled, credit card-wielding diners in that era,

“When they went out to dinner, it wasn’t to a quiet corner bistro where they could relax over a favorite and familiar dish. It was to an expensive, flashy, trendy place, where the fame of the chef or the hipness of the food might help guarantee their place in the demanding, unending struggle for status.”

If Google Business Profiles had existed back then, amenities might well have topped the Place Topics, but the 2020s are a very different period, with Americans feeling poor for good reason and restaurateurs really struggling to source affordable ingredients to keep menu pricing reasonable for patrons. Given these factors, it makes sense that the actual food on the table is what drives customers to write about their experiences rather than the atmosphere or social cachet of the spot.

When I look around my own town, I see how many pretty restaurants have closed over the past few years, while every night, a very ugly parking lot near me is filled to bursting with people seeking the affordable and fabulous Mexican entrees of a humble food truck:

In fact, they’ve been so successful in their tiny mobile kitchen that they’ve got a second truck now, and its location, which is totally lacking in prestige or ambiance, is full now, too. Reviews tell the story of success while also helping to build it.

This is a great week to form a new habit of analyzing Place Topics on a regular basis to see what matters to your best salespeople over time, perfecting your fulfillment of those components which could help your reputation most and give a meaningful boost to new customer acquisition.

Identifying, Fixing, and Preventing Cannibalization — Whiteboard Friday

In this Whiteboard Friday, Jon discusses how to identify, fix, and prevent cannibalization. He identifies three specific types of cannibalization: internal, international, and subdomain.

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

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. How's it going? My name is Jon Earnshaw. I'm the Chief Product Evangelist at Pi Datametrics, and today I'm going to be talking about a subject that is super close to my heart, and it's been close to my heart for over 15 years. When I was analyzing the SERP one day and I started to discover this unusual flux, and what I was seeing was content that was doing really well on page 1 and suddenly it drops.

Then after a few weeks, we noticed that it wasn't dropping for no reason. This content was dropping due to other content somehow conflicting. Now, we know there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, and Google has always said that. But what we have understood since then is that Google and other search engines as well are becoming increasingly sensitive to content of a similar nature, and that's what cannibalization is all about.

So today we're going to take a look at how you identify it briefly because you can do that with tools. I'm going to show you how you fix it, and finally how you prevent it from happening in the first place, and if you get that bit right, you obviously don't need to worry about one or two.

Step 1: Identify the type of cannibalization

So cannibalization, there are three types. Well, there are more, but there are three types that we kind of need to be aware of.

The first one is internal conflict or cannibalization. I'll use those terms interchangeably. That's where your content conflicts with itself. Then we have international conflict, and that's a totally different kettle of fish, because that's dealt with, for example, by hreflang. So we'll keep that out of the mix.

Then we have subdomain conflict, and subdomain conflict is something that will always happen. For example, if you have a help subdomain, help.mysite.com, and you've got content on there that's similar to the content on your main domain, that's always going to conflict. But we're not going to talk about that today. Really, we're going to talk about internal conflict and how you fix it to start with.

Step 2: Fix cannibalization issues

So let's imagine you wake up one day, you were on page 1 for "men's blazers." We all want to be on page 1 if we're selling men's blazers. Then suddenly you notice your content drops. Then when you take a closer look, you might discover that you have multiple URLs returning over a period of time for the same keyword. A point to note about cannibalization, it happens at keyword level.

It's not content level. It's all about the keyword. So one piece of content may not be in conflict for another term, for a derivative term, for example "men's jackets" or "men's summer jackets," and that page may exist beautifully on page 1. But let's imagine that you have one, two, three, four pages.

These could be men's summer blazers, men's winter blazers, men's 2023 blazers, for example. The chances are if these pages are similar and if they contain the keyword that you're trying to position for, i.e., "men's blazers," in the title, chances are you're going to get conflict because we know that the HTML title is one of the strongest indicators to Google from a theming perspective.

URL, title, Header 1, meta description, content, all of that counts. But you'll find when you make changes to the title, that can have a pretty instantaneous impact on visibility in less than 24 hours. So back to our situation of cannibalization. For URLs, what do we want to do? Well, we've got to make a decision.

Which one do we want to be the doorway into our ecosystem? Because if we don't make a decision on which one is the doorway into our ecosystem, then Google is going to make that decision for us and we're going to end up in a situation of cannibalization. Cannibalization, it could be in line. It could all be happening at the bottom of page 1. Sometimes people say, "Well, I'm on page 1, but I don't really care."

But you should care, because imagine your audience are searching for the men's blazer and they find your piece of content and they love it, and they come back the next day and they Google it again, and they find it again, "Oh, it's a different page." They go into the site in a different area. Suddenly, I'm confused because we've got incoherent, uncoordinated, and haphazard doorways into our world.

So we need to make the decision and not leave that to the search engines. There are a number of things that we can do to actually fix this. But the first thing we need to do is check the position of the URLs for other terms, for derivative terms. Do these pieces of content position in their own right?

Before we start tampering, before we start playing with titles, before we start redirecting, before we do anything, do they position in their own right? Then we have choices to make. One possible choice, and I've seen a lot of clients do this, is to actually merge one of the older bits of content and put that in with the new content, and that works wonderfully because we're not losing anything.

So we merge that, and then, of course, we 301 the original article. So we immediately get that injection of authority. Okay, downgrade the theme. How do you downgrade the theme? Remember the title, the strongest element on the page? We can actually change the title so it's not about men's blazers. We can say "men's outfits for the summer," if that's appropriate.

Again, let's not do that if that page positions in its own right because we don't want to lose that traffic. We can also check the traffic to the page as well. Internally link. If we decide, for example, that A is the page that we want to be our doorway, let's give it the authority that it needs to position.

Let's link internally from B, C, and D to A using the anchor text "men's blazers." What are we doing? Well, we're saying to Google this page over here is all about men's blazers, and the anchor text and those links are going to give that page the authority that it needs.

So we do that in conjunction with some of these other options. We can also No Index if appropriate. So we have a number of tools in our arsenal. But just imagine that we love all of these pages and we don't want to lose those because that's summer blazers, winter blazers, linen blazers, and other blazers.

Another thing that you can do, if your CMS allows, is to actually build a hub page. Let's call that hub page Men's Blazers, and let's link down from the new page, call that Page X, Men's Blazers, to this one using the anchor text "summer blazers," to this one, Winter, Linen, etc. Then crucially, we take the internal linking here and we link back from all of these to the hub page.

What have we created there? This wonderful hub and spoke structure within our site that your audience are going to make sense of and Google is going to make sense of it as well. So really it's about sending signals to Google so that Google doesn't get confused.

So this is down to us because the search engine is incredibly sensitive. So that's how you can fix it, and you've got a number of choices.

Step 3: Prevent cannibalization

Finally, my favorite part, how do you prevent it? How do we not have to go through this and this? Well, the key to preventing it really is to employ one of the four pillars of contextual optimization.

Contextual optimization is all about optimizing in the context of the SERP, optimizing in the context of your competitors, optimizing in the context of Google's algorithms, and optimizing in the context of your ecosystem. So what we mean here is about before I inject any new content on the subject of men's blazers into my ecosystem, I've got to stop and think and ask the question, "Is there anything within my ecosystem that is potentially conflicting?"

That's the first question you ask, because if there are other pieces of content in the ecosystem with "men's blazers" in the title, chances are they're going to conflict, and you may end up taking one page of page 1 of Google and your page never gets to page 1. So you may lose out all over. So a really simple way of analyzing your ecosystem is with a site operator.

So site:www.mysite.com intitle, and you bring in intitle, and we're looking for, in inverted commas, "men's blazers" because that's going to return all the pages from your site, that Google has indexed, that have "men's blazers" in the title.

Remember, the strongest theme. So we might find before we inject the new content, hey, I've got A, B, C, and D in my ecosystem. So we then go back here, and we make the decision. If this is a new piece of content, I can start to adopt and deploy one or more of these techniques to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Honestly, cannibalization of content is causing so much loss of visibility. I'd estimate somewhere around 40% of content that's sitting on page 2 and 3 is down to this. Identify the conflicts. Once we've done that, we identify the complements. How do you identify the complements and why?

Well, I'll tell you why. Because when you put a new piece of content into your ecosystem to go sit alongside these, it needs authority if it's going to perform well, and the best and quickest way of authority is to get that from other pages on a related theme that talk about blazers or men's style or men's fashion. We do another site operator here, site:www.mysite.com.

Forget the intitle. Let's look for "men's blazers" in the body copy. We can do that, and we can find complements. Once you've found the complements, you want to create links using "men's blazers" as the anchor text to your new piece of content. How do you find older pieces of content?

Inverted commas, "2019" or "2018." Add that, you'll suddenly start to find older content that you've totally forgotten about and, in addition to those links, that are going to inject authority. You can then add some redirects. Really, in a nutshell, that's all there is to it, identifying, fixing, and preventing, and I guarantee these are all going to work for you.

Thanks for watching.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Top Local SEO Takeaways from MozCon 2023

It’s my pleasure to bring you this annual re-cap of one of the industry’s best-loved events. While only one talk at MozCon 2023 was specifically local SEO-focused, there were tons of takeaways from multiple presentations that are highly relevant to our space of local SEOs and local business owners! Without further ado, let’s dive right in:

Are you categorizing your links yet?

I confess unashamedly that Amanda Jordan’s presentation on local link building was the talk I was looking forward to most this year, and it did not disappoint. As a local SEO or local business owner, you already know why analyzing and earning backlinks matters to your online visibility, but Amanda really upped the sophistication level of how we think about links, and she had a surprise in store for the audience, as well.

Beware of any advice that leaves this topic at “you need to get links”, and instead, take a look at this slide in which Amanda shows the results of a study she did on the HVAC industry across the 50 most-populous US cities:

You might predict that SA Service Experts, having earned 59 backlinks, would be running away with the number of search terms for which it's earning page 1 rankings, right? Yet look at One Hour Houston, with only one link less, but many more rankings. Then look down at Penguin Air, which has only earned 7 links but is barely behind the most-linked-to competitor in terms of its visibility. If links were a mere numbers game, this chart wouldn’t look this way, and Amanda wanted to figure out why the top and bottom businesses are so far apart in links earned, but not very far apart in visibility earned. Check out slide 2:

What Amanda discovered is that it appears to be the category of links earned which is enabling businesses with few links to compete with those with many more. She proposed the categories:

• Local Links

• Topical Links

• Citations

• Links stemming from tools or coupons

• Other

And she noticed that the highest performing local business websites in her HVAC study had the most local and topical links. In fact, Amanda mentioned that she saw a local business being really dominant in the rankings with just one good link from a local news site. Amanda stressed that we should remember that for local brands, location falls into both the “local” and “topical” categories because your location is a topic. She also mentioned that different categories of links could exert more power in different verticals. To understand your own scenario, she suggested the following workflow:

• Identify your top competitors for your key search phrases.

• Analyze their links with your favorite tool (Check out Moz Link Explorer for free right now!)

• Categorize your competitors’ backlinks by type. For example, is the link local, like a link on a local community blog, topical, like a link on an industry publication, a citation they built somewhere like Yelp, a link from the distribution of a tool, or something else? You can create your own buckets, but do stick to them throughout your workflow to get consistent results.

• Look at your data to see if there is a particular category of links your top competitors have focused on.

• Identifying whether these sources represent link opportunities for you.

• Get those links!

Amanda’s company, Rickety Roo, is in the process of developing a tool to help you categorize links at scale, and that should be a winner. In the meantime, I suggest doing some of this work manually to start thinking in terms of local link categories and learning to see the patterns between link type and visibility.

Are you making up your mind about AI yet?

Please don’t, because if MozCon proved one thing to me, it's that our SEO colleagues are all over the map on this hot topic. There’s a general consensus that AI is a game-changer…to some degree, and a general groan at the idea that, yet again, “SEO is dead”, but no real consensus on what the eventual impact emergent features like ChatGPT will be.

A speaker who stood out to me as forecasting the strongest impacts from AI was Wil Reynolds. You can dive into Wil’s resource at SEER interactive for what he termed “The Great SEO Reset,” but my top takeaway from a local perspective is that you need to figure out what your coverage is in a generative search. I’ve been saying the same here to local SEOs in my Moz column, but part of Wil’s workflow for arriving at a % of your coverage in generative AI struck me as both novel and practical for small local business owners.

Wil recommends using People Also Ask feature of Google to get a sense of the kinds of searches people are doing in settings like ChatGPT and Google’s SGE, because of their more conversational quality:

If you’re doing this at a large scale for a big brand, definitely read Wil’s full process, but if you’re doing this for a local SMB, simply take these questions, enter them into something like ChatGPT or SGE, and see how often you’re showing up for questions that relate to your business.

Why is this a good idea?

My fellow Mozzer, Tom Capper, pointed out that both the most common SERP features and SGE features are, in fact, local results. Tom took the pragmatic view that well-written content that requires a human element will be safe from too much AI disruption. That’s good news, but I also strongly resonated with Dr. Peter J. Meyer’s point, that factual queries, like “restaurant near me,” are not ideally fitted to generative search, because he sees this dynamic:

Dr. Pete envisions search vs. AI chat as the difference between a factual space and a fluid one, with search providing good quick answers and chat being a more imaginative space that may be akin to letting your mind wander rather than sticking to facts. In my experience, local search intent tends to be pretty factual; ‘tacos near me’, ‘museum downtown’ and “eye doctor San Diego” need a quick, straight answer, not a wander down the primrose path. Google could have a sizeable problem here if local is SGE’s most common feature, but SGE is not strictly factual. I want to reiterate here that Tom’s research found that local results are also the most common ‘traditional’ SERP feature as well, and there isn’t a local SEO worth their salt who isn’t totally aware of the historic problem of local packs containing false information.

But of all the possibilities I heard at MozCon 2023 on the topic of AI, this one from Andi Jarvis of Eximo Marketing shone out to me as having the most important message for local businesses and local SEOs:

“How you talk to your customers is your competitive advantage.”

In Andi’s brilliant talk on how much never changes throughout the history of marketing, he emphasized the mistake large brands are making if they are choosing the promised efficiencies of AI over great human employees, who are able to build relationships with real human customers. I’ll join Andi in urging local brands to devote themselves to really talking to customers, all the time, and to tailoring their marketing to make connections around real human needs. In fact, I’ll go on the record here by predicting that any brand that prioritizes its employees and customers over the ‘next big thing’ in tech is going to start feeling the competitive advantage they’ve won more and more over the next few years.

Are you making the most of your local marketing opportunities yet?

On-page video SEO

Now let’s get into some really grounded tips for setting your business apart in a competitive local market. I think my applause is still echoing somewhere around Seattle for Crystal Carter from Wix and her approachable presentation about on-page video SEO. People are watching an average of 84 minutes of video per day, and 9 in 10 customers want videos from brands. To utilize video efficiently, consider applying these facts and tips in your local business marketing:

• Even if Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or some other platform is your favorite, you should be uploading your videos to YouTube. YouTube is auto-set to meet Google’s quality standards, and unlike text content, Google can index YouTube videos and display them live in the SERPs within 2 hours of uploading!

• If that’s not enough to convince you, re-read Joy Hawkins’ study of what happened to a client’s traffic when they switched away from YouTube to another platform. Yikes!

• Google has gone all-in on video. They not only include video from multiple sources in the SERPs, but they will often feature the same video from the same source multiple times for a single query.

• Link from YouTube to your website.

• Put your videos above the fold on your web pages.

• Write a transcript for every video and treat this as you would any other piece of content, with a clear set of keywords you’re focusing on.

• Avoid going on off-topic tangents in your videos, or Google can become confused about the intents your video should be matched to.

• Do everything you can to engage your audience. Win those comments! But do have on-site comment moderation in place to weed out spam.

TikTok SEO

I’m with Erik Simmons on this - I will need to wait for the MozCon 2023 video bundle to drop (pre-order here!) to understand everything the brilliant Carrie Rose of Rise at Seven said. But while we’re talking about video SEO, I’m reminded of how the youngest folks in my own family have really embraced TikTok, and if 2023 is the year you're wading in, use these 3 quick tips from Carrie in creating TikTok videos for your local business:

1. Include your focus keywords in the text on your video within the first 5 seconds.

2. Also, include these keywords in the caption.

3. Limit your hashtags to six at the most to avoid confusing TikTok’s algorithm.

Local Landing Pages

Meanwhile, my ears pricked up when Lily Ray warned that one of the top 3 reasons you might be negatively impacted by a Google core update is if you are publishing low quality local landing pages at scale. The above video still captures a client Lily saw take a nose-dive as a result of publishing thousands of local landing pages to cover the map, and she cautioned that it can take months to recover from an event like this, often until the next core update for Google to notice that you’ve mended your ways.

The message is clear for large multi-location brands or any brand that is trying to appear bigger than they are: don’t waste your time or money publishing sub-par local landing pages. It could put your brand at risk. If you’re looking for a sensible answer and approach to the local search marketing FAQ, “How do I rank beyond my location”, I recommend reading: I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.

Brand Building

Miracle Inameti-Archibong had two local-worthy brand-building tips I’m eager to share:

• Find your brand’s personality and emphasize it at the outset at the top of your funnel; look at the difference, above, between what these two businesses have become known for.

• Grow authority and trust through reviews, social media, and website usability.

Customers first, always!

Finally, I’ll peregrinate back to Andi Jarvis’ talk for another practical tip for the publication of content that matters to real people: put your benefits first in what you write. In this screenshot, you can see some specs on a vacuum cleaner, and on the far left, how to turn that into content that speaks to customers’ needs. I’m paraphrasing, but Andi reminded us that, “Customers don’t want a quarter inch drill; they want a quarter inch hole.” Local businesses should write product and service descriptions from this perspective

Summing Up

Apart from catching all the local tips I could over the course of two info-packed days, my personal goal for attending MozCon this year was to listen to a ton of smart people sharing their views on the impact of AI on search and society. These are my top takeaways tied to my goal:

1. There is a really obvious divide in the large SEO industry over what has already happened with AI and what will happen in the near future. Everyone is doing their best right now to figure this out and find their place in a dynamic scenario. One prediction I listened attentively to and have heard elsewhere is that AI will do to “white collar” workers what real-world automation did to “blue collar workers.” The striking image was conjured of how small farmers have been replaced by the self-running machines of factory farms and mono-agriculture.

2. This food production scenario is seen as a great gain by those who own the technology and for that technology’s stakeholders, but as a massive loss to people and the planet.

3. MozCon 2023’s speakers represented both ends of this spectrum in relationship to AI, both encouraging attendees to become the owners and stakeholders to stay relevant, and warning of loss of jobs, human connection, and the general quality of the thing we call ‘Search.’

4. I highly, highly recommend investing in the video bundle so that you can listen to each talk yourself and find where you stand on this issue. Particularly if you work at a local SEO agency, this is a set of educational talks at the highest possible level. It could set your course for the next 5 years. Study the viewpoints, facts, hype, pitfalls, potentials, tactics, warnings, surprises, and delights for yourself to map out your own plan for the future. If you can’t wait, learn more about this year’s talks in the day one and day two recaps.

I want to close by saying that there has never been a more interesting time in search, and every exceptional speaker in the MozCon2023 lineup opened doors and windows to possibilities that I will be thinking about until next year. I hope you’ll act on today’s local takeaways for the local businesses you’re marketing and see success from them. Keep making those connections with your customers - at the end of the day and whatever your approach, they matter the most to your business and your community.

Balancing Creativity With Caution When Using AI to Create Content

I'm the kind of writer who hates to write but loves having written. Leading a marketing consultancy, where 99% of my work involves writing, only amplifies this conundrum.

If this statement resonates with you, you'll understand the allure of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT for marketers, whether they are client-side or agency-side. These technologies have the potential to simplify an arduous writing process, helping writers skip the torture of the blank page and fast-forward to the gratification of a published article. It’s a junk food promise, satisfaction without effort.

I first dipped my toes into the world of generative AI in November 2022 and was initially captivated by the quick wins ChatGPT seemed to offer. Here was a tool that could churn out paragraph after paragraph of seemingly well-crafted copy at lightning speed. It was easy to envision how this might revolutionize my work and allow me to become a prose powerhouse. But the more I played with a number of large language models (LLM)/generative AI tools, the more I became aware of the risks. Especially as someone who works with clients and has a duty to provide them with well-researched, well-articulated, and credible advice.

This article is my attempt to provide guardrails and advice for marketers who are rightfully skeptical of the AI revolution.

Some basic rules everyone should be following

Whether you’re using generative AI tools to create content for yourself, your employer, or a client, there are some basic tenants to follow.

Safeguard proprietary information

Never, ever input proprietary or sensitive data into the AI model, including company data and IP that is not freely available in the public domain. This also includes client-specific information like private datasets, business strategies, internal reports, customer information, and other confidential materials. Several companies, including Amazon, have restricted employees from using tools like GitHub Co-Pilot and ChatGPT due to fears AI could lead to a potential leak of confidential data due to the potential for inputs to be stored and used as training data.

I’d go one step further and always replace the subject’s name with a pseudonym. If you need to use real data for context, replace all personally identifiable information (PII) and sensitive business information with anonymized or fictional substitutes.

Consent is critical

Before using any client data, ensure you have the necessary permissions. Sharing data with an AI model can be considered data sharing and can violate confidentiality agreements and data protection laws, so you do need to tread carefully and should not assume you have consent to share information. Get legal advice if you need it.

Most clients and businesses will be aware people use generative AI now as part of their work. If you can be transparent about how you use AI tools and how you approach consent and data sharing, you can go a long way toward demonstrating that you understand and have mitigated any risks.

Rigorously review outputs

Always review the generated content for accidental inclusion of sensitive data. AI models might infer from the data provided and unintentionally generate 3rd party sensitive content based on their extant dataset.

You should also thoroughly review outputs to ensure they don't unintentionally reference proprietary or sensitive client/business information.

Avoid intellectual property infringements

When using Midjourney to create imagery or ChatGPT to create copy, avoid using “in the style of X” prompts which direct the model to imitate an individual’s work. This could violate copyright laws and is frankly extremely lazy, even when you’re referencing historical artists whose work is no longer protected by copyright. A recent example of the backlash of using generative AI has been discussed by artists on imitating their style. However, you can absolutely leverage client brand tone of voice directions to guide copy outputs.

In addition to not replicating the style of specific authors or artists, respect all intellectual property rights. This includes text, images, designs, or any other content that may be subject to copyright.

Don’t mindlessly trust outputs

Full Fact CEO Will Moy recently told the UK Online Harms and Disinformation inquiry on misinformation and trusted voices that “the ability to flood public debate with automatically generated text, images, video and datasets that provide apparently credible evidence for almost any proposition is a game changer in terms of what trustworthy public debate looks like, and the ease of kicking up so much dust that no one can see what is going on. That is a very well-established disinformation tactic.”

As members of a democratic society striving for transparent public discourse, we must recognize our role in counteracting the ease with which AI can be harnessed to disseminate disinformation that could materially damage our way of life. The responsibility of fostering an informed society lies not only with fact-checkers and official authorities but also with us as content creators, curators, and consumers of information.

There are two significant issues with large language models such as ChatGPT. The first is hallucination - which refers to the generation of outputs that are not based on input data or that significantly deviate from factual information present in the input. Secondly, the models are only as good as the data they are trained on - if the training data contains misinformation, the model can learn and replicate it.

Sadly there isn’t a technological solution to verifying if outputs are factually correct. Automated fact-checking has been around for some time now, and while it is making significant strides in verifying a select range of basic factual assertions with available authoritative data, it still has its limitations. As of yet, there is no tool that can fully automate the checking of outputs from another tool with 100% accuracy.

The challenge lies in context - the complexity and contextual sensitivity required for comprehensive fact-checking is still beyond the scope of fully automated systems. Subtle changes in a claim’s wording, timing, or context can make it more or less reasonable. Even a perfectly accurate statistic can misinform when the correlation is mistaken for causation (for example, by year, the number of people drowned in pools correlates with the number of films featuring Nicholas Cage).

So how can we use our human powers of reasoning and decision-making to ensure that facts and figures are verified and used in the correct context?

Verify sources, figures, and facts with multiple third-party trusted sources

Refrain from taking the information presented at face value. Make a habit of cross-checking any facts, figures, or sources presented in AI-generated content with multiple trusted sources. This could include reputable news outlets, government databases, or academic journals.

Don’t trust links generated by Generative AI tools; find your own

While AI models like ChatGPT may suggest links related to the topic, verifying these before using them is crucial. Ensure that the links are active, the domains are reputable, and the specific pages are relevant and reliable. In many cases, it's best to find your own sources from established, trustworthy sites that you're familiar with.

Use fact-checking websites

Websites like Full Fact, Snopes, or FactCheck.org can be invaluable when verifying facts. They provide detailed analyses of claims, often referencing their sources, and can help you separate fact from fiction.

Get up-to-date data

The accuracy of data is often time-sensitive. What was true a year ago may not hold today. When using data in your content, always check the date it was published or collected. Try to use the most recent and relevant data available, and remember ChatGPT’s training data has the cut off-date of September 2021. So, if you ask where the Queen of England currently resides, it will tell you Buckingham Palace.

Even using the most up-to-date model, such as ChatGPT 4, does not guarantee data or accuracy will be improved. While ChatGPT 4 is better at synthesizing information from multiple sources, OpenAI still admits its hallucination rate is similar to previous models.

Still unsure? How to deal with uncertain information

When encountering uncertain or unverified information, it's essential to exercise caution and transparency.

If you come across dubious or unsupported facts, consider excluding them to maintain credibility. However, if the information is key to your topic but its validity is unclear, it's important to express this uncertainty to your audience, presenting any alternate perspectives if available. If possible, consult subject matter experts in the relevant field to gain further insight and possibly resolve the ambiguity. (Also, remember the expertise element of E-E-A-T - it’s in your interest to cite expert opinions.)

Speaking of expert opinions, it’s important to verify that the expert you're quoting is credible. Think like Google here - is the individual mentioned on other high-quality websites? Do they have relevant qualifications, are they cited in professional journals or publications? You are responsible for fact-checking the status of the fact checker.

How should we be using AI then?

So far, I've explained how you can reduce risk when using AI tools and how to prevent the dissemination of misinformation. After all this, you might feel like tools like ChatGPT sound more trouble than they're worth. After all, considering the due diligence required, you might question if it’s easier to simply create the content unaided. There is an element of truth to this perspective.

However, as a marketing advisor and consultant, instead of treating AI as a tool to create the raw material, I’m using it to improve my creativity and efficiency in three ways. You’ll note that none of these involve asking the technology to come up with something from scratch.

Acceleration

During the initial stages of the creative process, my first batch of ideas often lacks originality or spark. This is something I hate about writing; it can take me a long time to get into the flow of it.

A wise creative writing tutor once told me that the first 30 minutes of writing is about getting the crap ideas out of your head to make way for the good ones. That’s why it feels so painful. Since AI-generated content like ChatGPT is based on existing material, using a deterministic engine to return the most probable result, I use it to quickly generate these "bad" ideas, effectively taking the reductive concepts off the table. If ChatGPT can come up with it, it’s probably not a novel or interesting idea.

Reflection

Another way I use AI to enhance my creativity is by reflecting on my own creative output. For example, after writing an article or developing a piece of work, I often use AI to summarise the key points or arguments I've made, which I can then review for completeness. This helps me ensure that I haven't missed anything important and that my messaging is consistent and coherent. Additionally, AI can help me identify gaps in my arguments or inconsistencies in my messaging. This process is akin to "rubber-ducking" my copy at scale. Interestingly I still prefer to pass things by a human editor for a full review once I’m happy.

Variation

I also use AI to generate variations of my original content, giving me different perspectives on presenting my ideas. By exploring alternative phrasings, sentence structures, or even entire paragraph arrangements, I can identify more engaging and impactful ways to convey my message. I don’t typically copy and paste the variants word for word, but cherry-pick the best bits from the outputs. Sometimes that’s just a word.

Site Architecture for Resource & Content Libraries — Whiteboard Friday

Kavi outlines a four-step process for building resource and content libraries. The process includes auditing for technical and content-related issues, mapping out a new structure, migrating the content with redirects, and redesigning the site to match the new structure.

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

Video Transcription

What's up, Moz fans? I'm Kavi Kardos. I'm speaking here at BrightonSEO this week, and I'm recording a Whiteboard Friday for you on site architecture for resource and content libraries. You can find me on Twitter @therarevos and on LinkedIn as well. I'm the only Kavi Kardos on there, so I'm pretty easy to find.

This is a process that you can use if you're building a resource or content library for the first time or if you're inheriting a website maybe as the new in-house SEO or with a new client that has a resource or content library that you know might be experiencing some architectural issues. So maybe you've discovered these issues because your users aren't giving you the performance that you might expect or giving you the conversions that you might expect.

Maybe you've seen your log files and you know that your users or search engines or search bots are getting hung up at some stage of the navigation process. Or maybe you've just taken a walk through that content library yourself and experienced those architectural issues firsthand. So either way, this is a four-step process consisting of auditing, mapping, migration, and design, and this is a process that we followed when we overhauled our resource library at Corporate Finance Institute, where I have been the in-house SEO director since July.

Auditing

So let's get started with auditing. This is our first step. When you're auditing a resource or content library, you're doing this on two fronts -- the technical front and the content-quality front. So as you're doing this, you're auditing with some goals in mind, and your goals probably include a few different types of things. You're concerned with user experience always first and foremost.

So you might have seen that, from a user-experience perspective, you've got some unintuitive navigation things going on. So there might not be a lot of filtration options going on. There might be some menus that aren't very intuitive. Maybe it's hard for users to find the topics that they're interested in, or it's hard for users to filter by content types, like videos or infographics or downloadable templates or that kind of thing.

So that's one issue that you might see. You might also see that you've got orphan content, so just really high-quality content that is impossible for people to find because it's completely orphaned. It's not linked to from anywhere else in the site. Another issue that you definitely want to be concerned with is crawlability. So for search engines, user experience and search-engine crawlability are almost always going to be 100% hand in hand.

The most obvious example of this is, again, that orphan content issue. One of the ways to avoid that is with a comprehensive internal linking strategy. So for search engines, you want to make sure that your menu structure, your navigation structure includes comprehensive internal linking, where your main folder, your resources folder is up top, your subfolders are below that, and then any additional subfolders you've got there are just below, very sensibly organized with slugs below that.

You want to make sure that you've got a URL structure that follows that same navigational order. So folder/subfolder/slug, that's the easiest way for a search engine to navigate and the easiest way for a user to navigate as well. The last goal that you want to keep in mind is content related.

So you've probably got some content-pruning goals that you want to carry out as well. Sometimes you might have duplicate or near duplicate content that you've identified on the site, especially if it's a really old or a really large content library. So at CFI, for example, we focus on finance and banking-related topics. So five years ago, we might have had somebody write an article about balance sheets in accounting, and then, a few years later, we've got someone else who has an idea to write an article about balance sheets.

Maybe not exactly the same article but they're covering a lot of the same topics. So with those two articles both living on the website, we've got now several keywords being covered by two separate articles and the search engines not knowing which of those two articles to rank for some of our key search terms. When that happens, if we consolidate those two articles into one, now it's much easier for Google to know which one of these articles do we rank, and it's easier for us to keep up our authority in that way.

The last content-pruning goal that you want to think about is pruning out any content that is of low quality or no longer befitting the brand the way that you want it to. So if your content or resource library is fairly old, you probably also have some content that was created not using the best SEO practices. So that's definitely something that you want to prune out as well.

Some tools that you might want to use in your auditing stage, for your technical crawl, you definitely want to consider using Screaming Frog. That's the most standard tool for a full crawl of your website. Moz Pro's site crawl tools are also excellent for adding to that crawl. The most important tool for this section, if you ask me, is user research. So especially for people who are not within your organization, asking them to take a walk through your resource library, get in there and try to find some interesting pieces of content, tell you where they got hung up, where they were unable to complete a conversion, or where they just might have found things confusing or unintuitive.

That's some of the best information you can gather because that will tell you how regular people, who aren't familiar with your brand, aren't familiar with your website, how those types of people are having trouble with that section of the site. You can compile that data. You can do interviews with those people. As you're compiling that data from that user research, from your crawls, at CFI we used Google Sheets to put everything into one gigantic spreadsheet with lots and lots of tabs.

We deleted absolutely nothing from that spreadsheet throughout this entire process, even though at times that felt a bit cumbersome. But if you delete anything throughout this process, you're running the risk of letting something fall through the cracks. So I recommend just keeping everything compiled in one spot. After you're done with that auditing phase, you're moving on to step number two, which is mapping.

Mapping

So when you're mapping out your new structure for your resources section, you have a decision to make, and that is deciding whether you want to organize your resources section by topic or by content type. So do you want your subfolders to consist of topics or content types, so ebooks, videos, that type of thing?

In most cases, it probably makes the most sense to organize by topic because that's going to afford you the most opportunities for on-page optimization. That's going to mean that your subfolders are titled things like, in our case, accounting, financial modeling, that type of thing. The content that's on your page is also going to have keywords like "accounting," "financial modeling," rather than "ebooks," "videos," that sort of thing, which is not very well keyword optimized for whatever your site is actually about.

So that's an important thing to keep in mind. If content is not your primary product that you're actually selling on your site, you may also want to consider aligning that topical organization with whatever your product offering actually is. So again, at Corporate Finance Institute, we're an e-learning provider.

So we mostly sell courses and certifications in the finance and banking space. Those course pages and certification pages on our website were already organized into topics like, again, accounting, financial modeling, data science, that sort of thing. So it made for the most intuitive user experience to organize our resources library by those same topics, and that allowed us to create these content hubs, these topic hubs, where it was easy for our users to sort of click through to courses in accounting and resources in accounting from the same place.

You also want to create an actual visual map of the way that your resources section will look when you're finished with it. So you can use a tool like Figma for this or Miro or some other sort of visualization tool, I really like Figma, and this is a great visualization to share with your internal stakeholders but also just to sort of get your mind right about the way that this is going to look when it's all finished.

This is the way that search engines are going to crawl through your site and the way that users are going to navigate your site too. So you've got resources up here, you've got each one of your subfolders down here, and then all your little slugs, your individual articles down here at the bottom. You'll be amazed how much of a difference this makes if you actually do visually map it out.

Migration

Once you're finished with mapping, you're moving on to your third step, migration, and this is the most nerve-racking step. It makes sense to be a bit nervous about this piece. But it also tends to be pretty anti-climactic, so you don't want to freak out about it. What you're really doing here is organizing your folder structure, actually putting that folder structure into place on your CMS, whatever content system you're using, like WordPress or whichever one it is, implementing your redirects, and then making sure that you have a way to track everything that you want to track so you can measure the success of your project after you're finished.

So setting up that folder structure means, in WordPress, for example, making sure that you've got that folder system set up exactly the way that you want it and then uploading your big CSV file, or however you want to organize your 301 redirects. If there's not very many of them, you can do them one by one.

You can upload them in bulk. Sending that file through and making sure that it is aligned to your folder structure. Once you've done that, you definitely want to run another full crawl of that resources section, again, using Screaming Frog or something similar. You're doing this to make sure that your new version of your resources folder now consists of the expected number of URLs and that all of those URLs are returning the expected status codes.

If you've let anything fall through the cracks at this point, you might find that you don't have the right number of URLs in your resources folder, or you've got stuff that's 404ing, or some of those 301s didn't go through, or you put typos in your folder, for example, and things just aren't turning up where you expect them to.

So this is a good way to identify any problems that may have arisen during these two steps here. When you're tracking the success of this project, one of the things to keep in mind is that if during your migration you actually migrated URLs, you want to do everything you can to move folders and subfolders as much as you want, but try not to migrate any actual slugs, so the names of the articles themselves.

So if you know "Poltergeist," it's okay to move the headstones, but you don't want to move the bodies because you want to be able to track your metrics year over year from pre- to post-migration when you're measuring success. So in our case, we're using that same big Google spreadsheet for tracking of resource success metrics and how they're performing over time.

We do that by slug rather than by full URL because we did change those subfolder names but we didn't change any of those slugs. So now we know how they're performing from that old location to that new location.

Design

The last step in this process is technically optional, but for most sites it's going to make sense to do some kind of design work as well.

The reason it makes sense for most sites is that you'll probably want to overhaul your design, at least on that resources homepage and probably in your navigation menus, to match the actual physical navigation that your users will go through and that your search engines will go through. So here, in your visual mapping step, it makes sense to have your visual design of your resources homepage match this visual map that you created here.

If you don't do that, you're going to have users clicking into those menus or trying to scroll through that resources homepage and finding the old version of an exterior design that doesn't match the actual flow that they go through when they're trying to navigate the site.

This also gives you an opportunity to work on the actual article template itself. If you've got a standard template that you use for your resource articles, you've got a chance now to overhaul that too. Maybe you want to add in things like a table of contents or more conversion opportunities or links to additional resources to encourage time on site, that kind of thing. That's also a really good chance to improve that internal linking for better crawlability and better user navigation too, and it gives you the chance to add in structured data, which is, again, really important for some of those crawlability opportunities and authority metrics too.

So, in our case, we were missing authorship, article, and FAQ structured data from our site. We added all of that in so that we could have chances to show the quality of the content on our site beyond just the words themselves. So I hope that this process is useful, and I hope that you're able to steal it and use it on your own website.

Again, you can find me on Twitter @therarevos or on LinkedIn as Kavi Kardos if you've got any questions at all about this process or any feedback on it. And I hope to see you on Whiteboard Friday again sometime soon. Thanks so much. Bye.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Unlocking the Future of Tomorrow: MozCon 2023 Day Two Recap

Day two recap contributions written by Emilie Martin, Meghan Pahinui, Miriam Ellis, and Zach Edelstein.

We’re back for more insights from day two, the final day of MozCon 2023! Day two brought more speakers, more chances to fill up your bingo card, and more time to grab swag. Let’s get back to the future of search!

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

Kicking off day two, where Andi is going, we don’t need roads. Andi started the final day of MozCon 2023 with his talk on what lessons the history of marketing can tell us about the future!

He assured us that people, not robots, still sit at the heart of marketing… cue a big sigh of relief! Andi explained the advantages that SEOs can gain by interacting directly with customers to come up with content ideas, as opposed to focusing purely on what Google is looking for. This is because Google is all about the user.

Andi outlined classic marketing strategies throughout history to highlight fundamentals that can be used by SEOs and content creators. More specifically, he describes ways in which the well-known ‘FAB’ can help your marketing efforts. FAB stands for features, advantages, and benefits. Andi puts a twist on the FAB strategy, though. When you are writing content in order to sell a product, he recommends flipping the order of these things so that your descriptions clearly outline your products:

• Benefits

• Advantages

• Features

By doing this, you can ensure that your most important messaging is right up front. This also ties into Andi’s “don’t telegraph” advice. Make sure that you’re leveraging your brand voice & tone in all of your communications.

In this thorough and reassuring talk, Andi highlighted lots of ways in which marketing principles have not changed, despite the ability of AI and new marketing tech to make your more effective in your role.

@andijarvis truly on-brand, kicking off #mozcon day² with a story pic.twitter.com/1bHhe8x4Y4

— George Nguyen (@geochingu) August 8, 2023

Lower Your Sheilds: The Borg Are Here* (* Written By ChapGPT) – Dr. Pete Meyers

Our very own Dr. Pete Meyers set us up for success with his talk on the future of SEO as we know it. Last year, he spoke about how Google pushes us down the funnel. This year, Dr. Pete touched on how AI is disrupting search as we know it.

Dr. Pete’s hypothesis is that the strengths of AI chat responses in search results create new opportunities for SEOs, as opposed to replacing queries for which we were already optimizing.

According to Dr. Pete, AI struggles with YMYL searches and providing well-sourced and accurate facts. He ran through several examples of ChatGPT providing inaccurate quotes from business leaders and misleading financial information. When the answers you are looking for are not clearly sourced somewhere in its corpus of data, AI will essentially make things up and piece together plausible responses from different sources. Extremely dangerous!

AI excels at, well… getting weird. It can help you think in new ways because AI tools think differently than people do. Asking questions that are so specific that they may not have been asked before. Dr. Pete gave examples like generating recipe ideas using a specific set of ingredients. ChatGPT also has helped him get ideas for temporary page copy to use on a website mockup, way more interesting than lorem ipsum.

As Dr. Pete eloquently and succinctly put it, there are some problems that Google doesn’t have a solution for. Those are the instances where ChatGPT is the most useful right now.

@dr_pete creating the Radish King and bringing into the BRAVEHEART CINEMATIC UNIVERSE is what I am here for at #mozconpic.twitter.com/nM86IHpgG1

— Ryan Ricketts (@RyanRicketts25) August 8, 2023

How to Use Brand SEO to Future-Proof Your Online Visibility – Miracle Inameti-Archibong

Last year, Miracle spoke about accessibility using machine learning. This year, she showed us how to use brand SEO to future-proof our online visibility. Given the rapidly changing search algorithm, the emerging presence of AI, as well as the increasing cost of paid search advertising, Miracle emphasizes the importance of brand search.

Before diving into tips, Miracle outlines the challenges of brand SEO, which include difficulty to measure, ownership (needing to think more like marketers), and collaboration between teams.

Here are her quick-fire tips for a better brand SEO strategy:

• Optimize your Knowledge panel. Make sure all of the information showing up here is accurate and up to date.

• Dominate your brand SERP. It’s often assumed to be a given that you will rank well for your own brand searches, but this is not necessarily true. Miracle provided examples where popular brands don’t have visibility for some of their own terms.

• Find your brand’s personality. Incorporate this into your top-of-funnel content strategy.

• Collaborate with brand, product, CRM, social, and PR to align on your brand image and personality.

• Build authority and trust through reviews, social strategy, and website UX.

This talk was a nice reminder of the new metric we launched on Monday, Brand Authority! Don’t forget to try it out yourself now with Moz Pro or the Moz API.

Digging deep on Branded SEO with @mira_inam#mozconpic.twitter.com/hkLg18pNSq

— Tory (Lynne) Gray (@torylynne) August 8, 2023

Build Better Backlinks for Local Brands – Amanda Jordan

Amanda gave us more insight into the world of local SEO. Last year, she focused on the future of local landing pages, and this year she brought us through how to build better backlinks for local brands.

Amanda started with the helpful reminder that links can either be relevant to your topic, or your location, but that, for local businesses, your location is also a topic! Her talk emphasized that learning to bucket links into categories can play a major role in your competitive local marketing strategy.

Amanda looked at categorized links (such as local links, topical links, citations, and more) for high-ranking HVAC brands across the top 50 US cities and found that a high number of backlinks didn’t automatically correlate to high rankings.

What Amanda discovered is that the highest performing pages had both the highest amount of local and topical links, rather than other types of links or just generic links in general:

To start to build a more local and more diversified backlink profile for local businesses, Amanda recommends:

• Choosing competitors who are consistently eating your lunch (attracting your customers)

• Using your favorite link analysis tool to uncover your competitors’ link profiles (Check out Moz Link Explorer for free right now!)

• Categorizing your competitors’ backlinks by type - are they local, are they topical, are they citations, tool-based, something else? Set clear guidelines for how you want to categorize these links, and stick to them throughout your research so that your data has clear takeaways.

• Identifying whether your top competitors are winning at a category of backlinks you’re not yet doing well with

• Identifying your quality + local-focus link opportunities

• Getting those links!

Memorably, Amanda noted that she’s seen local business websites earning top rankings that appear to stem from them having earned a single good link from a local news site. A little can go a long way in local search marketing. If you’re struggling with the task of categorizing a ton of competitors’ backlinks, Rickety Roo is in the process of developing a tool to help with this, and if you need to become awesome at the art of earning backlinks, check out The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.

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

Jason, one of our community speakers, graced the MozCon stage this year to talk to us about rethinking your industry pages. Industry-specific pages, or landing pages, aim to create relevance and rank for certain search terms within a particular industry.

Typically sales and marketing meet with internal sales to figure out ways to sell more of a certain product. However, the problem is that these conversations and strategy plans are out of touch with the actual customers buying the product. Jason believes there is a disconnect that happens here.

One challenge that B2B marketers and SEOs face is that Google is built for consumers. So, what are some tips for better industry pages that don’t miss their mark? Optimize for pain points, not industry! Jason ran through some examples of niche B2B pages that have been set up to target particular pain points and challenges that customers in these industries are facing.

Jason walked through the process of using keyword research tools to find long-tail keywords that correspond to pain points faced by B2B customers. You can use these terms to optimize your pages.

Additionally, Jason recommended reframing content for language and industry culture. Meaning your pages should be completely aligned with the language your customers are using. In his experience, Jason has found that getting SEOs in the room with possible customers and listening to their challenges is key in the content creation process. Pain points first, industry second, ignore volumes, and understand the customer!

Hadn't met @dodgejd until #MozCon but have nothing but huge amounts of admiration and respect for him, he's treated me with maximum kindness and friendship.

Genuinely nice guy and he's delivering an awesome presentation, quote "your B2B industry pages are bs." pic.twitter.com/IPi8d83m2Z

— Azeem (@AzeemDigital) August 8, 2023

Hiring the Perfect Agency: How to Avoid Getting Burned — Duane Brown

In his recent blog post, Duane wrote about how you can use Google Ads AI and machine learning to run better campaigns. In his MozCon talk, Duane shared that hiring is a valuable skill and emphasised identifying agencies that are the best fit for your business.

When you hire an agency, your goal is to make more money. If you can identify what you actually want help with, you can make sure your money is spent wisely. For example, maybe you’re interested in paid ads, exploring particular ad channels, or perhaps you’re looking to scale, diversify your business, optimize your funnel, or simply want to ideate.

Duane’s team built a DTC Brand Index. With this resource, you can see what other competitors are doing across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. If you’re looking to explore how your brand fares on the SERPs, be sure to check out our new metric, Brand Authority.

The marketing work you need done is the opportunity, and understanding what those opportunities are can make your life so much easier. Knowing the opportunity, makes it easier to look at the impact, and the key to impact is picking the right team. When hiring an agency, there are a number of questions you should consider asking them — see this resource for Duane’s document of all the questions he went through in his talk.

Duane ended his talk highlighting the importance of tracking your success so you can review what’s working, and what’s not working.

Agency, Agency + Freelance, Agency + In-House - doesn't matter which approach, but hiring the RIGHT person matters most @duanebrown#mozconpic.twitter.com/oBDeO3cmcN

— SEORadar (@TheRealSEORadar) August 8, 2023

Dominating TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and Amazon SERPs as Consumer Behavior Changes — Carrie Rose

Carrie shared her process for dominating all SERPs, not just Google. When brands are seeing that their traffic, bookings, and conversions are declining, it can be easy to blame a decline in demand. However, this isn’t always the case – in many situations it can be attributed to consumers searching elsewhere for what they need.

By launching PR and influencer marketing campaigns, Carrie and her team were able to increase traffic and gain links for her clients while also setting them up for success (and inventory sell outs.) She notes that although this was a PR, influencer, and advertising campaign, the strategy at its core was driven by SEO.

Carrie reminded us that it’s important to keep in mind that Google isn’t the first, or only, place people search and interact with content. She spoke about how, oftentimes, apps like TikTok and Instagram answer search queries faster and help people find what they want more efficiently. In Carrie’s opinion, customers and searchers want to hear real life experiences and other people's advice. They trust word-of-mouth recommendations which is something they may not find on Google, leading them to turn to short-form apps.

When exploring SERP domination beyond Google, it’s all about finding that sweet spot between what clients want to talk about, what the consumer cares about, and what the media wants and needs. So how do you achieve this? One way is to make sure you’re consistently tracking trends so you have the opportunity and awareness to “newsjack” (a term first coined by Carrie, her team at Rise at Seven, and their VP Will Hobson). Some tools to help with this include: Glimpse, Exploding Topics, Pinterest Trends, TikTok Keyword Insights, and TikTok Trending Hashtags

Carrie’s quick tips for ranking on TikTok include:

1. Put your keywords in the the text on your video within the first 1-5 seconds

2. Mention your keyword in the caption

3. Use 3 to 6 hashtags – be sure you don’t go overboard and confuse the algorithm

Despite popular belief, Google isn’t scared of TikTok. Rather, short form video content may actually increase your visibility on the SERP. We’re seeing more and more TikTok videos being included directly in the SERPs.

Tiktok is driving a lot of demand as are other channels. SEO should be driving full marketing channel strategy because we know customer demand. Identify the keywords our brands are ranking for, then inform other channels the targeted demand to drive. #mozconpic.twitter.com/DFbQd32VpS

— John Dietrich 🚀 (@John_Dietrich1) August 8, 2023

Entities Are the Past: Search Is Going Multidimensional — Tom Anthony

Tom believes that entities are in the past, and that the future of search is going to be all about context. We are on the brink of a paradigm shift - search is about to enter a new era. Focusing on explicit context (rather than implicit), Tom covered 4 primary topics:

Keywords and Entities — Keywords are limited and don’t allow us to talk about structure of relationships. Entities allow us to start drawing relationships between terms through the use of schema. But, as search continues to evolve, and search habits change, how do we account for that? Before moving on to the second stop on his journey, Tom asked us to consider modern search habits and the idea of post-search browsing. We already perform a process of searching a keyword or phrase and then search through the results manually. We modify our search accordingly and the process continues.

Latent Spaces — Tom led us into the topic of latent spaces, or as he calls it, “the building blocks for the next era.” ChatGPT can help to revolutionze search, but is there a way to get the same impact without the chat part of the equation? The GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) part of the equation allows for the understanding of context by first understanding relationships. And these learning models are already having a huge impact on search.

Next Era — Search engines like Google are finding ways to “incentivize us to add more explicit contect to our searches.” For example, we now have the option within Google itself to click filter buttons below the search bar which then update our original search query. This leads to all new, often unique queries that mimic the post-search browsing process Tom outlined previously in his presentation. And with the rise of GPT models, he notes that structured markup has been superseded.

So now what? Tom offered a few predictions and tips for the future of search.

• In time, structured markup will have reduced impact.

• Be sure to feed the GPT algorithm with context-rich text.

• Keyword research and entailment will become more important (i.e. inferring context & intent).

• E-E-A-T will become even more important.

So many articulations of multi-dimensional search @ #MozCon .Super exciting, search is getting sexy.

— Miracle Inameti-Archibong (@mira_inam) August 8, 2023

Mind the Gap: Bridging Generational Differences in SEO — Jes Scholz

Jes joined us this year to speak about bridging generational differences in SEO. Google is transforming from being just a search engine, to an ecosystem of experiences. Google Discover, Google Lens, YouTube Shorts, and Bard are all examples of the shift towards greater experiences for users online. Google is an online shop, a business directory, an aggregator, a map, a store, a place to shop.

Your job is not to optimize websites anymore, it’s to build a well-known, top rated and trusted brands. Google has moved beyond URL ranking factors, and instead grants visibility to entities in graphs, such as the Knowledge Graph. The best way to track if a brand is an entity is to query the brand name in the Google Knowledge Graph Search API daily and keep a record of the returned results.

Jes advises following three steps to explicitly establish your brand entity in the Knowledge Graph:

1. Define a brand entity bio. Start with your name, your brand positioning, and unique selling proposition.

2. Brandsplain your entity with schema markup. Everything you just said about your brand with on-page text, say it again through comprehensive schema markup. This brandsplaining of your entity to Google re-confirms its key attributes, and is a critical step to Google accepting that information as facts in the knowledge graph.

3. Arrange more get togethers with Google. On average, an entity needs over 30 meaningful touchpoints to become Google’s friend.

Get more from Jes with her Whiteboard Friday on the fundamentals of crawling for SEO.

Anyone keeping up with all of the new words @jes_scholz is creating?

Brandsplaining
Seostalgia
….

I know I’m missing one!#MozCon

— Brie E Anderson | GA4, GTM, GDS (@brie_e_anderson) August 8, 2023

Drive Execution & Growth: SEO Audits in 2023... and Beyond — Aleyda Solis

Last year, Aleyda addressed her e-commerce SEO horror stories, and this year, she delved into her talk on driving execution and growth through SEO audits in 2023 and beyond. Auditing is at the core of our SEO process, and most SEOs have a hard time getting their recommendations implemented.

Aleyda presented seven actions to integrate within your SEO auditing process:

1. Do a radical SEO audit prioritization with a high impact, solution-focused action plan, leveraging storytelling.

2. Develop a parallel “SEO low-hanging fruit” framework to deliver “quick SEO wins” fast. Aleyda suggests taking a look at her SearchLove presentation for more SEO low-hanging fruit tips! She also did a deep dive on her low-hanging fruit SEO strategy on Whiteboard Friday a few months back.

3. Set an SEO quality framework not only to catch, but also prevent bugs that will hold SEO execution back. Make sure to set a monitoring system to catch negative SEO configurations.

4. Normalize forecasting based on different execution scenarios to kill amiguity and set expectations.

5. Communicate “no SEO execution” tradeoffs toward goals, as well as the cost to get them with other channels. Show th decision makers what they can lose if they choose to neglect SEO.

6. Normalize SEO testing to validate your hypothesis and win stakeholders’ support.

7. Leverage AI or Edge SEO to accelerate execution in bureaucratic scenarios to prove value and get buy-in.

I have yet to actually see the new Barbie movie but I’ve seen countless memes and screen shots of it throughout #MozCon this year that I guess I’ve seen it? 🤷‍♀️😆

— Holly Miller Anderson | Marketing, SEO, eCom DTC (@millertime_baby) August 8, 2023

The Great Reset — Wil Reynolds

Wil got us to dig a little deeper in our keyword research after his talk at MozCon in 2022. This year, he closed out MozCon addressing the current transformational period the industry is going through. Wil has seen many an SEO reset, but let us know that SEO is defined by inflection points. The secret sauce to stay on top of SEO, is to know when these inflection points occur, and realise when to pivot.

Wil mentioned that before Google, there was a lot of friction in the sales process. Once Google came about, friction reduced. However, now we create so much content, that we’ve moved from one type of friction to another. Customers cannot find the content they want, because we are over-saturating the places in which they spend their time online.

We need to understand more about customers, which we can attempt to do through data analysis. Wil referenced Seer Interactive’s new tool ‘Supernova’, which combines campaign-based paid and organic search data, sign up to the waitlist here. He recommended creating your own Looker Dashboard, and looking at any trends in your data. Check out Seer Interactive’s dashboard and see if you have AI-driven search traffic hitting your website from tools like Bard, ChatGPT, Neeva, and more.

Wil addressed a number of instances he’s utilized ChatGPT, such as building code with no experience, crawling competitor links, looking at the Google Trends API, creating content, and more. For Wil, there are no more nos, because ChatGPT and other technology are simply allowing us to say yes more.

Good luck @wilreynolds. Looking forward to the Great Reset! #MozConpic.twitter.com/zMYiqzSPn6

— Link Building HQ (@Linkbuildinghq) August 8, 2023

See you on the other side!

We ended the final day of MozCon 2023 partying it up at MoPOP. Did you sing karaoke? Dance to Lily Ray’s sick beats? Be sure to tweet (or X) us your favourite memory or photo you took over the last two days so we can all remember how much fun MozCon 2023 was.

The learning isn’t over yet, though! Be sure to pre-order the MozCon 2023 video bundle to recap on this year’s talks.

Safe travels to all, and best of luck trudging through the future of search. We’ve got this!

Read the day one MozCon 2023 recap.