Posted by Dr-Pete It's hardly surprising that Google Home is an extension of Google's search ecosystem. Home is attempting to answer more and more questions, drawing those answers from search results. There's an increasingly clear connection between Featured Snippets in search and voice answers. For example, let's say a hedgehog wanders into your house and you naturally find yourself wondering what you should feed it. You might search for "What do hedgehogs eat?" On desktop, you'd see a Featured Snippet like the following: Given that you're trying to wrangle a strange hedgehog, searching on your desktop may not be practical, so you ask Google Home: "Ok, Google — What do hedgehogs eat?" and hear the following: Google Home leads with the attribution to Ark Wildlife (since a voice answer has no direct link), and then repeats a short version of the desktop snippet. The connection between the two answers is, I hope, obvious. Anecdotally, this is a pattern we see often on Google Home, but how consistent is it? How does Google handle Featured Snippets in other formats (including lists and tables)? Are some questions answered wildly differently by Google Home compared to desktop search? Methodology (10K --> 1K)To find out the answer to these questions, I needed to start with a fairly large set of searches that were likely to generate answers in the form of Featured Snippets. My colleague Russ Jones pulled a set of roughly 10,000 popular searches beginning with question words (Who, What, Where, Why, When, How) from a third-party "clickstream" source (actual web activity from a very large set of users). I ran those searches on desktop (automagically, of course) and found that just over half (53%) had Featured Snippets. As we've seen in other data sets, Google is clearly getting serious about direct answers. The overall set of popular questions was dominated by "What?" and "How?" phrases: Given the prevalence of "How to?" questions, I've broken them out in this chart. The purple bars show how many of these searches generated Featured Snippets. "How to?" questions were very likely to display a Featured Snippet, with other types of questions displaying them less than half of the time. Of the roughly 5,300 searches in the full data set that had Featured Snippets, those snippets broke down into four types, as follows: Text snippets — paragraph-based answers like the one at the top of this post — accounted for roughly two-thirds of all of the Featured Snippets in our original data set. List snippets accounted for just under one-third — these are bullet lists, like this one for "How to draw a dinosaur?": Step 1 – Draw a small oval. Step 5 – Dinosaur! It's as simple as that. Table snippets made up less than 2% of the Featured Snippets in our starting data set. These snippets contain a small amount of tabular data, like this search for "What generation am I?": If you throw your money recklessly at your avocado toast habit instead of buying a house, you're probably a millennial (sorry, content marketing joke). Finally, video snippets are a special class of Featured Snippet with a large video thumbnail and direct link (dominated by YouTube). Here's one for "Who is the spiciest memelord?": I'm honestly not sure what commentary I can add to that result. Since there's currently no way for a video to appear on Google Home, we excluded video snippets from the rest of the study. Google has also been testing some hybrid Featured Snippets. In some cases, for example, they attempt to extract a specific answer from the text, such as this answer for "When was 1984 written?" (Hint: the answer is not 1984): For the purposes of this study, we treated these hybrids as text snippets. Given the concise answer at the top, these hybrids are well-suited to voice results. From the 5.3K questions with snippets, I selected 1,000, excluding video but purposely including a disproportionate number of list and table types (to better see if and how those translated into voice). Why only 1,000? Because, unlike desktop searches, there's no easy way to do this. Over the course of a couple of days, I had to run all of these voice searches manually on Google Home. It's possible that I went temporarily insane. At one point, I saw a spider on my Google Home staring back at me. Fearing that I was hallucinating, I took a picture and posted it on Twitter: I was assured that the spider was, in point of fact, not a figment of my imagination. I'm still not sure about the half-hour when the spider sang me selections from the Hamilton soundtrack. From snippets to voice answersSo, how many of the 1,000 searches yielded voice answers? The short answer is: 71%. Diving deeper, it turns out that this percentage is strongly dependent on the type of snippet: Text snippets in our 1K data set yielded voice answers 87% of the time. List snippets dropped to just under half, and table snippets only generated voice answers one-third of the time. This makes sense — long lists and most tables are simply harder to translate into voice. In the case of tables, some of these results were from different sites or in a different format. In other words, the search generated a Featured Snippet and a voice answer, but the voice answer was of a different type (text, for example) and attributed to a different source. Only 20% of Featured Snippets in table format generated voice answers that came from the same source. From a search marketing standpoint, text snippets are going to generate a voice answer almost 9 out of 10 times. Optimizing for text/paragraph snippets is a good starting point for ranking on voice search and should generally be a win-win across devices. Special: Knowledge Graph
What about the Featured Snippets that didn't generate voice answers? It turns out there was quite a variety of exceptions in play. One exception was answers that came directly from the Knowledge Graph on Google Home, without any attribution. For example, the question "What is the nuclear option?" produces this Featured Snippet (for me, at least) on desktop: On Google Home, though, I get an unattributed answer that seems to come from the Knowledge Graph: It's unclear why Google has chosen one over the other for voice in this particular case. Across the 1,000 keyword set, there were about 30 keywords where something similar happened. Special: Device helpGoogle Home seems to translate some searches as device-specific help. For example, "How to change your name?" returns desktop results about legally changing your name as an individual. On Google Home, I get the following: Other searches from our list that triggered device help include:
Special: Easter eggsGoogle Home has some Easter eggs that seem unique to voice search. One of my personal favorites — the question "What is best in life?" — generates the following: Here's a list of the other Easter eggs in our 1,000 phrase data set:
Easter eggs are a bit less predictable than device help. Generally speaking, though, both are rare and shouldn't dissuade you from trying to rank for Featured Snippets and voice answers. Special: General confusionIn a handful of cases, Google simply didn't understand the question or couldn't answer the exact question. For example, I could not get Google to understand the question "What does MAGA mean?" The answer I got back (maybe it's my Midwestern accent?) was: On second thought, maybe that's not entirely inaccurate. One interesting case is when Google decides to answer a slightly different question. On desktop, if you search for "How to become a vampire?", you might see the following Featured Snippet: On Google Home, I'm asked to clarify my intent: I suspect both of these cases will improve over time, as voice recognition continues to advance and Google becomes better at surfacing answers. Special: Recipe results
Back in April, Google launched a new set of recipe functions across search and Google Home. Many "How to?" questions related to cooking now generate something like this (the question I asked was "How to bake chicken breast?"): You can opt to find a recipe on Google search and send it to your Google Home, or Google can simply pick a recipe for you. Either way, it will guide you through step-by-step instructions. Special: Health conditionsA half-dozen or so health questions, from general questions to diseases, generated results like the following. This one is for the question "Why do we sneeze?": This has no clear connection to desktop search results, and I'm not clear if it's a signal for future, expanded functionality. It seems to be of limited use right now. Special: WikiHowA handful of "How to?" questions triggered an unusual response. For example, if I ask Google Home "How to write a press release?" I get back: If I say "yes," I'm taken directly to a wikiHow assistant that uses a different voice. The wikiHow answers are much longer than text-based Featured Snippets. How should we adapt?Voice search and voice appliances (including Google Assistant and Google Home) are evolving quickly right now, and it's hard to know where any of this will be in the next couple of years. From a search marketing standpoint, I don't think it makes sense to drop everything to invest in voice, but I do think we've reached a point where some forward momentum is prudent. First, I highly recommend simply being aware of how your industry and your major keywords/questions "appear" on Google Home (or Google Assistant on your mobile device). Look at the recipe situation above — for 99%+ of the people reading this article, that's a novelty. If you're in the recipe space, though, it's game-changing, and it's likely a sign of more to come. Second, I feel strongly that Featured Snippets are a win-win right now. Almost 90% of the text-only Featured Snippets we tracked yielded a voice answer. These snippets are also prominent on desktop and mobile searches. Featured Snippets are a great starting point for understanding the voice ecosystem and establishing your foothold. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via Blogger Lessons from 1,000 Voice Searches (on Google Home)
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Posted by Dr-Pete It’s hardly surprising that Google Home is an extension of Google’s search ecosystem. Home is attempting to answer more and more questions, drawing those answers from search results. There’s an increasingly clear connection between Featured Snippets in search and voice answers. For example, let’s say a hedgehog wanders into your house and you naturally find yourself wondering what you should feed it. You might search for “What do hedgehogs eat?” On desktop, you’d see a Featured Snippet like the following: Given that you’re trying to wrangle a strange hedgehog, searching on your desktop may not be practical, so you ask Google Home: “Ok, Google — What do hedgehogs eat?” and hear the following: Google Home leads with the attribution to Ark Wildlife (since a voice answer has no direct link), and then repeats a short version of the desktop snippet. The connection between the two answers is, I hope, obvious. Anecdotally, this is a pattern we see often on Google Home, but how consistent is it? How does Google handle Featured Snippets in other formats (including lists and tables)? Are some questions answered wildly differently by Google Home compared to desktop search? Methodology (10K –> 1K)To find out the answer to these questions, I needed to start with a fairly large set of searches that were likely to generate answers in the form of Featured Snippets. My colleague Russ Jones pulled a set of roughly 10,000 popular searches beginning with question words (Who, What, Where, Why, When, How) from a third-party “clickstream” source (actual web activity from a very large set of users). I ran those searches on desktop (automagically, of course) and found that just over half (53%) had Featured Snippets. As we’ve seen in other data sets, Google is clearly getting serious about direct answers. The overall set of popular questions was dominated by “What?” and “How?” phrases: Given the prevalence of “How to?” questions, I’ve broken them out in this chart. The purple bars show how many of these searches generated Featured Snippets. “How to?” questions were very likely to display a Featured Snippet, with other types of questions displaying them less than half of the time. Of the roughly 5,300 searches in the full data set that had Featured Snippets, those snippets broke down into four types, as follows: Text snippets — paragraph-based answers like the one at the top of this post — accounted for roughly two-thirds of all of the Featured Snippets in our original data set. List snippets accounted for just under one-third — these are bullet lists, like this one for “How to draw a dinosaur?”: Step 1 – Draw a small oval. Step 5 – Dinosaur! It’s as simple as that. Table snippets made up less than 2% of the Featured Snippets in our starting data set. These snippets contain a small amount of tabular data, like this search for “What generation am I?”: If you throw your money recklessly at your avocado toast habit instead of buying a house, you’re probably a millennial (sorry, content marketing joke). Finally, video snippets are a special class of Featured Snippet with a large video thumbnail and direct link (dominated by YouTube). Here’s one for “Who is the spiciest memelord?”: I’m honestly not sure what commentary I can add to that result. Since there’s currently no way for a video to appear on Google Home, we excluded video snippets from the rest of the study. Google has also been testing some hybrid Featured Snippets. In some cases, for example, they attempt to extract a specific answer from the text, such as this answer for “When was 1984 written?” (Hint: the answer is not 1984): For the purposes of this study, we treated these hybrids as text snippets. Given the concise answer at the top, these hybrids are well-suited to voice results. From the 5.3K questions with snippets, I selected 1,000, excluding video but purposely including a disproportionate number of list and table types (to better see if and how those translated into voice). Why only 1,000? Because, unlike desktop searches, there’s no easy way to do this. Over the course of a couple of days, I had to run all of these voice searches manually on Google Home. It’s possible that I went temporarily insane. At one point, I saw a spider on my Google Home staring back at me. Fearing that I was hallucinating, I took a picture and posted it on Twitter: I was assured that the spider was, in point of fact, not a figment of my imagination. I’m still not sure about the half-hour when the spider sang me selections from the Hamilton soundtrack. From snippets to voice answersSo, how many of the 1,000 searches yielded voice answers? The short answer is: 71%. Diving deeper, it turns out that this percentage is strongly dependent on the type of snippet: Text snippets in our 1K data set yielded voice answers 87% of the time. List snippets dropped to just under half, and table snippets only generated voice answers one-third of the time. This makes sense — long lists and most tables are simply harder to translate into voice. In the case of tables, some of these results were from different sites or in a different format. In other words, the search generated a Featured Snippet and a voice answer, but the voice answer was of a different type (text, for example) and attributed to a different source. Only 20% of Featured Snippets in table format generated voice answers that came from the same source. From a search marketing standpoint, text snippets are going to generate a voice answer almost 9 out of 10 times. Optimizing for text/paragraph snippets is a good starting point for ranking on voice search and should generally be a win-win across devices. Special: Knowledge Graph
What about the Featured Snippets that didn’t generate voice answers? It turns out there was quite a variety of exceptions in play. One exception was answers that came directly from the Knowledge Graph on Google Home, without any attribution. For example, the question “What is the nuclear option?” produces this Featured Snippet (for me, at least) on desktop: On Google Home, though, I get an unattributed answer that seems to come from the Knowledge Graph: It’s unclear why Google has chosen one over the other for voice in this particular case. Across the 1,000 keyword set, there were about 30 keywords where something similar happened. Special: Device helpGoogle Home seems to translate some searches as device-specific help. For example, “How to change your name?” returns desktop results about legally changing your name as an individual. On Google Home, I get the following: Other searches from our list that triggered device help include:
Special: Easter eggsGoogle Home has some Easter eggs that seem unique to voice search. One of my personal favorites — the question “What is best in life?” — generates the following: Here’s a list of the other Easter eggs in our 1,000 phrase data set:
Easter eggs are a bit less predictable than device help. Generally speaking, though, both are rare and shouldn’t dissuade you from trying to rank for Featured Snippets and voice answers. Special: General confusionIn a handful of cases, Google simply didn’t understand the question or couldn’t answer the exact question. For example, I could not get Google to understand the question “What does MAGA mean?” The answer I got back (maybe it’s my Midwestern accent?) was: On second thought, maybe that’s not entirely inaccurate. One interesting case is when Google decides to answer a slightly different question. On desktop, if you search for “How to become a vampire?”, you might see the following Featured Snippet: On Google Home, I’m asked to clarify my intent: I suspect both of these cases will improve over time, as voice recognition continues to advance and Google becomes better at surfacing answers. Special: Recipe results
Back in April, Google launched a new set of recipe functions across search and Google Home. Many “How to?” questions related to cooking now generate something like this (the question I asked was “How to bake chicken breast?”): You can opt to find a recipe on Google search and send it to your Google Home, or Google can simply pick a recipe for you. Either way, it will guide you through step-by-step instructions. Special: Health conditionsA half-dozen or so health questions, from general questions to diseases, generated results like the following. This one is for the question “Why do we sneeze?”: This has no clear connection to desktop search results, and I’m not clear if it’s a signal for future, expanded functionality. It seems to be of limited use right now. Special: WikiHowA handful of “How to?” questions triggered an unusual response. For example, if I ask Google Home “How to write a press release?” I get back: If I say “yes,” I’m taken directly to a wikiHow assistant that uses a different voice. The wikiHow answers are much longer than text-based Featured Snippets. How should we adapt?Voice search and voice appliances (including Google Assistant and Google Home) are evolving quickly right now, and it’s hard to know where any of this will be in the next couple of years. From a search marketing standpoint, I don’t think it makes sense to drop everything to invest in voice, but I do think we’ve reached a point where some forward momentum is prudent. First, I highly recommend simply being aware of how your industry and your major keywords/questions “appear” on Google Home (or Google Assistant on your mobile device). Look at the recipe situation above — for 99%+ of the people reading this article, that’s a novelty. If you’re in the recipe space, though, it’s game-changing, and it’s likely a sign of more to come. Second, I feel strongly that Featured Snippets are a win-win right now. Almost 90% of the text-only Featured Snippets we tracked yielded a voice answer. These snippets are also prominent on desktop and mobile searches. Featured Snippets are a great starting point for understanding the voice ecosystem and establishing your foothold. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! via Tumblr Lessons from 1,000 Voice Searches (on Google Home) Posted by MiriamEllis My father, a hale and hearty gentleman in his seventies, simply won’t dine at a new restaurant these days before he checks its reviews on his cell phone. Your 23-year-old nephew, who travels around the country for his job as a college sports writer, has devoted 233 hours of his young life to writing 932 reviews on Yelp (932 reviews x @15 minutes per review). Yes, our local SEO industry knows that my dad and your nephew need to find accurate NAP on local business listings to actually find and get to business locations. This is what makes our historic focus on citation data management totally reasonable. But reviews are what help a business to be chosen. Phil Rozek kindly highlighted a comment of mine as being among the most insightful on the Local Search Ranking Factors 2017 survey: “If I could drive home one topic in 2017 for local business owners, it would surround everything relating to reviews. This would include rating, consumer sentiment, velocity, authenticity, and owner responses, both on third-party platforms and native website reviews/testimonials pages. The influence of reviews is enormous; I have come to see them as almost as powerful as the NAP on your citations. NAP must be accurate for rankings and consumer direction, but reviews sell.” I’d like to take a few moments here to dive deeper into that list of review elements. It’s my hope that this post is one you can take to your clients, team or boss to urge creative and financial allocations for a review management campaign that reflects the central importance of this special form of marketing. Ratings: At-a-glance consumer impressions and impactful rankings filterWhether they’re stars or circles, the majority of rating icons send a 1–5 point signal to consumers that can be instantly understood. This symbol system has been around since at least the 1820s; it’s deeply ingrained in all our brains as a judgement of value. So, when a modern Internet user is making a snap decision, like where to grab a taco, the food truck with 5 Yelp stars is automatically going to look more appealing than the one with only 2. Ratings can also catch the eye when Schema (or Google serendipity) causes them to appear within organic SERPs or knowledge panels. All of the above is well-understood, but while the exact impact of high star ratings on local pack rankings has long been speculative (it’s only factor #24 in this year’s Local Search Ranking Factors), we may have just reached a new day with Google. The ability to filter local finder results by rating has been around for some time, but in May, Google began testing the application of a “highly rated” snippet on hotel rankings in the local packs. Meanwhile, searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. best burrito in Dallas) appear to be defaulting to local results made up of businesses that have earned a minimum average of 4 stars. It’s early days yet, but totally safe for us to assume that Google is paying increased attention to numeric ratings as indicators of relevance. Because we’re now reaching the point from which we can comfortably speculate that high ratings will tend to start correlating more frequently with high local rankings, it’s imperative for local businesses to view low ratings as the serious impediments to growth that they truly are. Big brands, in particular, must stop ignoring low star ratings, or they may find themselves not only having to close multiple store locations, but also, to be on the losing end of competing for rankings for their open stores when smaller competitors surpass their standards of cleanliness, quality, and employee behavior. Consumer sentiment: The local business story your customers are writing for youHere is a randomly chosen Google 3-pack result when searching just for “tacos” in a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area: We’ve just been talking about ratings, and you can look at a result like this to get that instant gut feeling about the 4-star-rated eateries vs. the 2-star place. Now, let’s open the book on business #3 and see precisely what kind of story its consumers are writing. This is the first step towards doing a professional review audit for any business whose troubling reviews may point to future closure if problems aren’t fixed. A full audit would look at all relevant review platforms, but we’ll be brief here and just look at Google and Yelp and sort negative sentiments by type: It’s easy to ding fast food chains. Their business model isn’t commonly associated with fine dining or the kind of high wages that tend to promote employee excellence. In some ways, I think of them as extreme examples. Yet, they serve as good teaching models for how even the most modest-quality offerings create certain expectations in the minds of consumers, and when those basic expectations aren’t met, it’s enough of a story for consumers to share in the form of reviews. This particular restaurant location has an obvious problem with slow service, orders being filled incorrectly, and employees who have not been trained to represent the brand in a knowledgeable, friendly, or accessible manner. Maybe a business you are auditing has pain points surrounding outdated fixtures or low standards of cleanliness. Whatever the case, when the incoming consumer turns to the review world, their eyes scan the story as it scrolls down their screen. Repeat mentions of a particular negative issue can create enough of a theme to turn the potential customer away. One survey says only 13% of people will choose a business that has wound up with a 1–2 star rating based on poor reviews. Who can afford to let the other 87% of consumers go elsewhere? There are 20 restaurants showing up in Google’s local finder for my “tacos” search, highlighted above. Taco Bell is managing to hold the #3 spot in the local pack right now, perhaps due to brand authority. My question is, what happens next, particularly if Google is going to amplify ratings and review sentiment in the overall local ranking mix? Will this chain location continue to beat out 4-star restaurants with 100+ positive reviews, or will it slip down as consumers continue to chronicle specific and unresolved issues? No third-party brand controls Google, but your brand can open the book right now and make maximum use of the story your customers are constantly publishing — for free. By taking review insights as real and representative of all the customers who don’t speak up, and by actively addressing repeatedly cited issues, you could be making one of the smartest decisions in your company’s history. Velocity/recency: Just enough of a timely good thingThis is one of the easiest aspects of review management to teach clients. You can sum it up in one sentence: don’t get too many reviews at once on any given platform but do get enough reviews on an ongoing basis to avoid looking like you’ve gone out of business. For a little more background on the first part of that statement, watch Mary Bowling describing in this LocalU video how she audited a law firm that went from zero to thirty 5-star reviews within a single month. Sudden gluts of reviews like this not only look odd to alert customers, but they can trip review platform filters, resulting in removal. Remember, reviews are a business lifetime effort, not a race. Get a few this month, a few next month, and a few the month after that. Keep going. The second half of the review timing paradigm relates to not running out of steam in your acquisition campaigns. One survey found that 73% of consumers don’t believe that reviews that are older than 3 months are still relevant to them, yet you will frequently encounter businesses that haven’t earned a new review in over a year. It makes you wonder if the place is still in business, or if it’s in business but is so unimpressive that no one is bothering to review it. While I’d argue that review recency may be more important in review-oriented industries (like restaurants) vs. those that aren’t quite as actively reviewed (like septic system servicing), the idea here is similar to that of velocity, in that you want to keep things going. Don’t run a big review acquisition campaign in January and then forget about outreach for the rest of the year. A moderate, steady pace of acquisition is ideal. Authenticity: Honesty is the only honest policyFor me, this is one of the most prickly and interesting aspects of the review world. Three opposing forces meet on this playing field: business ethics, business education, and the temptations engendered by the obvious limitations of review platforms to police themselves. I recently began a basic audit of a family-owned restaurant for a friend of a friend. Within minutes, I realized that the family had been reviewing their own restaurant on Yelp (a glaring violation of Yelp’s policy). I felt sorry to see this, but being acquainted with the people involved (and knowing them to be quite nice!), I highly doubted they had done this out of some dark impulse to deceive the public. Rather, my guess was that they may have thought they were “getting the ball rolling” for their new business, hoping to inspire real reviews. My gut feeling was that they simply lacked the necessary education to understand that they were being dishonest with their community and how this could lead to them being publicly shamed by Yelp, if caught. In such a scenario, there is definitely opportunity for the marketer to offer the necessary education to describe the risks involved in tying a brand to misleading practices, highlighting how vital it is to build trust within the local community. Fake positive reviews aren’t building anything real on which a company can stake its future. Ethical business owners will catch on when you explain this in honest terms and can then begin marketing themselves in smarter ways. But then there's the other side. Mike Blumenthal recently wrote of his discovery of the largest review spam network he’d ever encountered and there's simply no way to confuse organized, global review spam with a busy small business making a wrong, novice move. Real temptation resides in this scenario, because, as Blumenthal states: “Review spam at this scale, unencumbered by any Google enforcement, calls into question every review that Google has. Fake business listings are bad, but businesses with 20, or 50, or 150 fake reviews are worse. They deceive the searcher and the buying public and they stain every real review, every honest business, and Google.” When a platform like Google makes it easy to “get away with” deception, companies lacking ethics will take advantage of the opportunity. All we can do, as marketers, is to offer the education that helps ethical businesses make honest choices. We can simply pose the question: Is it better to fake your business’ success or to actually achieve success? On a final note, authenticity is a two-way street in the review world. When spammers target good businesses with fake, negative reviews, this also presents a totally false picture to the consumer public. I highly recommend reading about Whitespark’s recent successes in getting fake Google reviews removed. No guarantees here, but excellent strategic advice. Owner responses: Your contributions to the consumer storyIn previous Moz blog posts, I’ve highlighted the five types of Google My Business reviews and how to respond to them, and I’ve diagrammed a real-world example of how a terrible owner response can make a bad situation even worse. If the world of owner responses is somewhat new to you, I hope you’ll take a gander at both of those. Here, I’d like to focus on a specific aspect of owner responses, as it relates to the story reviews are telling about your business. We’ve discussed above the tremendous insight consumer sentiment can provide into a company’s pain points. Negative reviews can be a roadmap to resolving repeatedly cited problems. They are inherently valuable in this regard, and by dint of their high visibility, they carry the inherent opportunity for the business owner to make a very public showing of accountability in the form of owner responses. A business can state all it wants on its website that it offers lightning-quick service, but when reviews complain of 20-minute waits for fast food, which source do you think the average consumer will trust? The truth is, the hypothetical restaurant has a problem. They're not going to be able to resolve slow service overnight. Some issues are going to require real planning and real changes to overcome. So what can the owner do in this case?
Let’s look at this in living color: In yellow, the owner response is basically telling the story that the business is ignoring a legitimate complaint, and frankly, couldn’t care less. In blue, the owner has jumped right into the storyline, having the guts to take the blame, apologize, explain what happened and promise a fix — not an instant one, but a fix on the way. In the end, the narrative is going to go on with or without input from the owner, but in the blue example, the owner is taking the steering wheel into his own hands for at least part of the road trip. That initiative could save not just his franchise location, but the brand at large. Just ask Florian Huebner: “Over the course of 2013 customers of Yi-Ko Holding’s restaurants increasingly left public online reviews about “broken and dirty furniture,” “sleeping and indifferent staff,” and “mice running around in the kitchen.” Per the nature of a franchise system, to the typical consumer it was unclear that these problems were limited to this individual franchisee. Consequently, the Burger King brand as a whole began to deteriorate and customers reduced their consumption across all locations, leading to revenue declines of up to 33% for some other franchisees.” Positive news for small businesses working like mad to compete: You have more agility to put initiatives into quick action than the big brands do. Companies with 1,000 locations may let negative reviews go unanswered because they lack a clear policy or hierarchy for owner responses, but smaller enterprises can literally turn this around in a day. Just sit down at the nearest computer, claim your review profiles, and jump into the story with the goal of hearing, impressing, and keeping every single customer you can. Big brands: The challenge for you is larger, by dint of your size, but you’ve also likely got the infrastructure to make this task no problem. You just have to assign the right people to the job, with thoughtful guidelines for ensuring your brand is being represented in a winning way. NAP and reviews: The 1–2 punch combo every local business must practiceWhen traveling salesman Duncan Hines first published his 1935 review guide Adventures in Good Eating, he was pioneering what we think of today as local SEO. Here is my color-coded version of his review of the business that would one day become KFC. It should look strangely familiar to every one of you who has ever tackled citation management: No phone number on this “citation,” of course, but then again telephones were quite a luxury in 1935. Barring that element, this simple and historic review has the core earmarks of a modern local business listing. It has location data and review data; it’s the 1–2 punch combo every local business still needs to get right today. Without the NAP, the business can’t be found. Without the sentiment, the business gives little reason to be chosen. Are you heading to a team meeting today? Preparing to chat with an incoming client? Make the winning combo as simple as possible, like this:
From Duncan Hines to the digital age, there may be nothing new under the sun in marketing, but when you spend year after year looking at the sadly neglected review portions of local business listings, you realize you may have something to teach that is new news to somebody. So go for it — communicate this stuff, and good luck at your next big meeting! Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via Blogger Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO Posted by MiriamEllis My father, a hale and hearty gentleman in his seventies, simply won’t dine at a new restaurant these days before he checks its reviews on his cell phone. Your 23-year-old nephew, who travels around the country for his job as a college sports writer, has devoted 233 hours of his young life to writing 932 reviews on Yelp (932 reviews x @15 minutes per review). Yes, our local SEO industry knows that my dad and your nephew need to find accurate NAP on local business listings to actually find and get to business locations. This is what makes our historic focus on citation data management totally reasonable. But reviews are what help a business to be chosen. Phil Rozek kindly highlighted a comment of mine as being among the most insightful on the Local Search Ranking Factors 2017 survey: “If I could drive home one topic in 2017 for local business owners, it would surround everything relating to reviews. This would include rating, consumer sentiment, velocity, authenticity, and owner responses, both on third-party platforms and native website reviews/testimonials pages. The influence of reviews is enormous; I have come to see them as almost as powerful as the NAP on your citations. NAP must be accurate for rankings and consumer direction, but reviews sell.” I’d like to take a few moments here to dive deeper into that list of review elements. It’s my hope that this post is one you can take to your clients, team or boss to urge creative and financial allocations for a review management campaign that reflects the central importance of this special form of marketing. Ratings: At-a-glance consumer impressions and impactful rankings filterWhether they’re stars or circles, the majority of rating icons send a 1–5 point signal to consumers that can be instantly understood. This symbol system has been around since at least the 1820s; it’s deeply ingrained in all our brains as a judgement of value. So, when a modern Internet user is making a snap decision, like where to grab a taco, the food truck with 5 Yelp stars is automatically going to look more appealing than the one with only 2. Ratings can also catch the eye when Schema (or Google serendipity) causes them to appear within organic SERPs or knowledge panels. All of the above is well-understood, but while the exact impact of high star ratings on local pack rankings has long been speculative (it’s only factor #24 in this year’s Local Search Ranking Factors), we may have just reached a new day with Google. The ability to filter local finder results by rating has been around for some time, but in May, Google began testing the application of a “highly rated” snippet on hotel rankings in the local packs. Meanwhile, searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. best burrito in Dallas) appear to be defaulting to local results made up of businesses that have earned a minimum average of 4 stars. It’s early days yet, but totally safe for us to assume that Google is paying increased attention to numeric ratings as indicators of relevance. Because we’re now reaching the point from which we can comfortably speculate that high ratings will tend to start correlating more frequently with high local rankings, it’s imperative for local businesses to view low ratings as the serious impediments to growth that they truly are. Big brands, in particular, must stop ignoring low star ratings, or they may find themselves not only having to close multiple store locations, but also, to be on the losing end of competing for rankings for their open stores when smaller competitors surpass their standards of cleanliness, quality, and employee behavior. Consumer sentiment: The local business story your customers are writing for youHere is a randomly chosen Google 3-pack result when searching just for “tacos” in a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area: We’ve just been talking about ratings, and you can look at a result like this to get that instant gut feeling about the 4-star-rated eateries vs. the 2-star place. Now, let’s open the book on business #3 and see precisely what kind of story its consumers are writing. This is the first step towards doing a professional review audit for any business whose troubling reviews may point to future closure if problems aren’t fixed. A full audit would look at all relevant review platforms, but we’ll be brief here and just look at Google and Yelp and sort negative sentiments by type: It’s easy to ding fast food chains. Their business model isn’t commonly associated with fine dining or the kind of high wages that tend to promote employee excellence. In some ways, I think of them as extreme examples. Yet, they serve as good teaching models for how even the most modest-quality offerings create certain expectations in the minds of consumers, and when those basic expectations aren’t met, it’s enough of a story for consumers to share in the form of reviews. This particular restaurant location has an obvious problem with slow service, orders being filled incorrectly, and employees who have not been trained to represent the brand in a knowledgeable, friendly, or accessible manner. Maybe a business you are auditing has pain points surrounding outdated fixtures or low standards of cleanliness. Whatever the case, when the incoming consumer turns to the review world, their eyes scan the story as it scrolls down their screen. Repeat mentions of a particular negative issue can create enough of a theme to turn the potential customer away. One survey says only 13% of people will choose a business that has wound up with a 1–2 star rating based on poor reviews. Who can afford to let the other 87% of consumers go elsewhere? There are 20 restaurants showing up in Google’s local finder for my “tacos” search, highlighted above. Taco Bell is managing to hold the #3 spot in the local pack right now, perhaps due to brand authority. My question is, what happens next, particularly if Google is going to amplify ratings and review sentiment in the overall local ranking mix? Will this chain location continue to beat out 4-star restaurants with 100+ positive reviews, or will it slip down as consumers continue to chronicle specific and unresolved issues? No third-party brand controls Google, but your brand can open the book right now and make maximum use of the story your customers are constantly publishing — for free. By taking review insights as real and representative of all the customers who don’t speak up, and by actively addressing repeatedly cited issues, you could be making one of the smartest decisions in your company’s history. Velocity/recency: Just enough of a timely good thingThis is one of the easiest aspects of review management to teach clients. You can sum it up in one sentence: don’t get too many reviews at once on any given platform but do get enough reviews on an ongoing basis to avoid looking like you’ve gone out of business. For a little more background on the first part of that statement, watch Mary Bowling describing in this LocalU video how she audited a law firm that went from zero to thirty 5-star reviews within a single month. Sudden gluts of reviews like this not only look odd to alert customers, but they can trip review platform filters, resulting in removal. Remember, reviews are a business lifetime effort, not a race. Get a few this month, a few next month, and a few the month after that. Keep going. The second half of the review timing paradigm relates to not running out of steam in your acquisition campaigns. One survey found that 73% of consumers don’t believe that reviews that are older than 3 months are still relevant to them, yet you will frequently encounter businesses that haven’t earned a new review in over a year. It makes you wonder if the place is still in business, or if it’s in business but is so unimpressive that no one is bothering to review it. While I’d argue that review recency may be more important in review-oriented industries (like restaurants) vs. those that aren’t quite as actively reviewed (like septic system servicing), the idea here is similar to that of velocity, in that you want to keep things going. Don’t run a big review acquisition campaign in January and then forget about outreach for the rest of the year. A moderate, steady pace of acquisition is ideal. Authenticity: Honesty is the only honest policyFor me, this is one of the most prickly and interesting aspects of the review world. Three opposing forces meet on this playing field: business ethics, business education, and the temptations engendered by the obvious limitations of review platforms to police themselves. I recently began a basic audit of a family-owned restaurant for a friend of a friend. Within minutes, I realized that the family had been reviewing their own restaurant on Yelp (a glaring violation of Yelp’s policy). I felt sorry to see this, but being acquainted with the people involved (and knowing them to be quite nice!), I highly doubted they had done this out of some dark impulse to deceive the public. Rather, my guess was that they may have thought they were “getting the ball rolling” for their new business, hoping to inspire real reviews. My gut feeling was that they simply lacked the necessary education to understand that they were being dishonest with their community and how this could lead to them being publicly shamed by Yelp, if caught. In such a scenario, there is definitely opportunity for the marketer to offer the necessary education to describe the risks involved in tying a brand to misleading practices, highlighting how vital it is to build trust within the local community. Fake positive reviews aren’t building anything real on which a company can stake its future. Ethical business owners will catch on when you explain this in honest terms and can then begin marketing themselves in smarter ways. But then there’s the other side. Mike Blumenthal recently wrote of his discovery of the largest review spam network he’d ever encountered and there’s simply no way to confuse organized, global review spam with a busy small business making a wrong, novice move. Real temptation resides in this scenario, because, as Blumenthal states: “Review spam at this scale, unencumbered by any Google enforcement, calls into question every review that Google has. Fake business listings are bad, but businesses with 20, or 50, or 150 fake reviews are worse. They deceive the searcher and the buying public and they stain every real review, every honest business, and Google.” When a platform like Google makes it easy to “get away with” deception, companies lacking ethics will take advantage of the opportunity. All we can do, as marketers, is to offer the education that helps ethical businesses make honest choices. We can simply pose the question: Is it better to fake your business’ success or to actually achieve success? On a final note, authenticity is a two-way street in the review world. When spammers target good businesses with fake, negative reviews, this also presents a totally false picture to the consumer public. I highly recommend reading about Whitespark’s recent successes in getting fake Google reviews removed. No guarantees here, but excellent strategic advice. Owner responses: Your contributions to the consumer storyIn previous Moz blog posts, I’ve highlighted the five types of Google My Business reviews and how to respond to them, and I’ve diagrammed a real-world example of how a terrible owner response can make a bad situation even worse. If the world of owner responses is somewhat new to you, I hope you’ll take a gander at both of those. Here, I’d like to focus on a specific aspect of owner responses, as it relates to the story reviews are telling about your business. We’ve discussed above the tremendous insight consumer sentiment can provide into a company’s pain points. Negative reviews can be a roadmap to resolving repeatedly cited problems. They are inherently valuable in this regard, and by dint of their high visibility, they carry the inherent opportunity for the business owner to make a very public showing of accountability in the form of owner responses. A business can state all it wants on its website that it offers lightning-quick service, but when reviews complain of 20-minute waits for fast food, which source do you think the average consumer will trust? The truth is, the hypothetical restaurant has a problem. They’re not going to be able to resolve slow service overnight. Some issues are going to require real planning and real changes to overcome. So what can the owner do in this case?
Let’s look at this in living color: In yellow, the owner response is basically telling the story that the business is ignoring a legitimate complaint, and frankly, couldn’t care less. In blue, the owner has jumped right into the storyline, having the guts to take the blame, apologize, explain what happened and promise a fix — not an instant one, but a fix on the way. In the end, the narrative is going to go on with or without input from the owner, but in the blue example, the owner is taking the steering wheel into his own hands for at least part of the road trip. That initiative could save not just his franchise location, but the brand at large. Just ask Florian Huebner: “Over the course of 2013 customers of Yi-Ko Holding’s restaurants increasingly left public online reviews about “broken and dirty furniture,” “sleeping and indifferent staff,” and “mice running around in the kitchen.” Per the nature of a franchise system, to the typical consumer it was unclear that these problems were limited to this individual franchisee. Consequently, the Burger King brand as a whole began to deteriorate and customers reduced their consumption across all locations, leading to revenue declines of up to 33% for some other franchisees.” Positive news for small businesses working like mad to compete: You have more agility to put initiatives into quick action than the big brands do. Companies with 1,000 locations may let negative reviews go unanswered because they lack a clear policy or hierarchy for owner responses, but smaller enterprises can literally turn this around in a day. Just sit down at the nearest computer, claim your review profiles, and jump into the story with the goal of hearing, impressing, and keeping every single customer you can. Big brands: The challenge for you is larger, by dint of your size, but you’ve also likely got the infrastructure to make this task no problem. You just have to assign the right people to the job, with thoughtful guidelines for ensuring your brand is being represented in a winning way. NAP and reviews: The 1–2 punch combo every local business must practiceWhen traveling salesman Duncan Hines first published his 1935 review guide Adventures in Good Eating, he was pioneering what we think of today as local SEO. Here is my color-coded version of his review of the business that would one day become KFC. It should look strangely familiar to every one of you who has ever tackled citation management: No phone number on this “citation,” of course, but then again telephones were quite a luxury in 1935. Barring that element, this simple and historic review has the core earmarks of a modern local business listing. It has location data and review data; it’s the 1–2 punch combo every local business still needs to get right today. Without the NAP, the business can’t be found. Without the sentiment, the business gives little reason to be chosen. Are you heading to a team meeting today? Preparing to chat with an incoming client? Make the winning combo as simple as possible, like this:
From Duncan Hines to the digital age, there may be nothing new under the sun in marketing, but when you spend year after year looking at the sadly neglected review portions of local business listings, you realize you may have something to teach that is new news to somebody. So go for it — communicate this stuff, and good luck at your next big meeting! Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! via Tumblr Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO Posted by randfish With the ubiquity of blogs, one of the questions we hear the most is how to come up with the right topics for new posts. In today's episode of Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores six different paths to great blog topic ideas, and tells you what you need to keep in mind before you start. Video transcriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we're going to chat about blog post ideas, how to have great ones, how to make sure that the topics that you're covering on your blog actually accomplish the goals that you want, and how to not run out of ideas as well. The goals of your blogSo let's start with the goals of a blog and then what an individual post needs to do, and then I'll walk you through kind of six formats for coming up with great ideas for what to blog about. But generally speaking, you have created a blog, either on your company's website or your personal website or for the project that you're working on, because you want to:
What should an individual post do?From there, we get into an individual post. An individual post is supposed to help with these goals, but on its own doesn't do all of them. It certainly doesn't need to do more than one at a time. It can hopefully do some. But one of those is, generally speaking, a great blog post will do one of these four things and hopefully two or even three. I. Help readers to accomplish a goal that they have. So if I'm trying to figure out which hybrid electric vehicle should I buy and I read a great blog post from someone who's very, very knowledgeable in the field, and they have two or three recommendations to help me narrow down my search, that is wonderful. It helps me accomplish my goal of figuring out which hybrid car to buy. That accomplishment of goal, that helping of people hits a bunch of these very, very nicely. II. Designed to inform people and/or entertain them.
So it doesn't have to be purely informational. It doesn't have to be purely entertainment, but some combination of those, or one of the two, about a particular topic. So you might be trying to make someone excited about something or give them knowledge around it. It may be knowledge that they didn't previously know that they wanted, and they may not actually be trying to accomplish a goal, but they are interested in the information or interested in finding the humor. III. Inspiring some amplification and linking.
So you're trying to earn signals to your site that will help you rank in search engines, that will help you grow your audience, that will help you reach more influencers. Thus, inspiring that amplification behavior by creating content that is designed to be shared, designed to be referenced and linked to is another big goal. IV. Creating a more positive association with the brand.
So you might have a post that doesn't really do any of these things. Maybe it touches a little on informational or entertaining. But it is really about crafting a personal story, or sharing an experience that then draws the reader closer to you and creates that association of what we talked about up here -- loyalty, trust, evangelism, likeability. 6 paths to great blog topic ideasSo knowing what our blog needs to do and what our individual posts are trying to do, what are some great ways that we can come up with the ideas, the actual topics that we should be covering? I have kind of six paths. These six paths actually cover almost everything you will read in every other article about how to come up with blog post ideas. But I think that's what's great. These frameworks will get you into the mindset that will lead you to the path that can give you an infinite number of blog post ideas. 1. Are there any unanswered or poorly answered questions that are in your field, that your audience already has/is asking, and do you have a way to provide great answers to those?So that's basically this process of I'm going to research my audience through a bunch of methodologies, going to come up with topics that I know I could cover. I could deliver something that would answer their preexisting questions, and I could come up with those through...
So if you're using a tool like Moz's Keyword Explorer, or I think some of the other ones out there, Ahrefs might have this as well, where you can filter by only questions. There are also free tools like Answer the Public, which many folks like, that show you what people are typing into Google, specifically in the form of questions, "Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Do?" etc. So I'm not just going to walk you through the ideas. I'm also going to challenge myself to give you some examples. So I've got two -- one less challenging, one much more challenging. Two websites, both have blogs, and coming up with topic ideas based on this. So one is called Remoters. It's remoters.net. It's run by Aleyda Solis, who many of you in the SEO world might know. They talk about remote work, so people who are working remotely. It's a content platform for them and a service for them. Then, the second one is a company, I think, called Schweiss Doors. They run hydraulicdoors.com. Very B2B. Very, very niche. Pretty challenging to come up with good blog topics, but I think we've got some. Remote Worker: I might say here, "You know what? One of the questions that's asked very often by remote workers, but is not well-answered on the internet yet is: 'How do I conduct myself in a remote interview and present myself as a remote worker in a way that I can be competitive with people who are actually, physically on premises and in the room? That is a big challenge. I feel like I'm always losing out to them. Remote workers, it seems, don't get the benefits of being there in person.'" So a piece of content on how to sell yourself on a remote interview or as a remote worker could work great here. Hydraulic doors: One of the big things that I see many people asking about online, both in forums which actually rank well for it, the questions that are asked in forums around this do rank around costs and prices for hydraulic doors. Therefore, I think this is something that many companies are uncomfortable answering right online. But if you can be transparent where no one else can, I think these Schweiss Doors guys have a shot at doing really well with that. So how much do hydraulic doors cost versus alternatives? There you go. 2. Do you have access to unique types of assets that other people don't?That could be research. It could be data. It could be insights. It might be stories or narratives, experiences that can help you stand out in a topic area. This is a great way to come up with blog post content. So basically, the idea is you could say, "Gosh, for our quarterly internal report, we had to prepare some data on the state of the market. Actually, some of that data, if we got permission to share it, would be fascinating." We can see through keyword research that people are talking about this or querying Google for it already. So we're going to transform it into a piece of blog content, and we're going to delight many, many people, except for maybe this guy. He seems unhappy about it. I don't know what his problem is. We won't worry about him. Wait. I can fix it. Look at that. So happy. Ignore that he kind of looks like the Joker now. We can get these through a bunch of methodologies:
Those assets can become the topic of great content that can turn into really great blog posts and great post ideas. Remote Workers: They might say, "Well, gosh, we have access to data on the destinations people go and the budgets that they have around those destinations when they're staying and working remotely, because of how our service interacts with them. Therefore, we can craft things like the most and least expensive places to work remotely on the planet," which is very cool. That's content that a lot of people are very interested in. Hydraulic doors: We can look at, "Hey, you know what? We actually have a visual overlay tool that helps an architect or a building owner visualize what it will look like if a hydraulic door were put into place. We can go use that in our downtime to come up with we can see how notable locations in the city might look with hydraulic doors or notable locations around the world. We could potentially even create a tool, where you could upload your own visual, photograph, and then see how the hydraulic door looked on there." So now we can create images that will help you share. 3. Relating a personal experience or passion to your topic in a resonant way.
I like this and I think that many personal bloggers use it well. I think far too few business bloggers do, but it can be quite powerful, and we've used it here at Moz, which is relating a personal experience you have or a passion to your topic in some way that resonates. So, for example, you have an interaction that is very complex, very nuanced, very passionate, perhaps even very angry. From that experience, you can craft a compelling story and a headline that draws people in, that creates intrigue and that describes something with an amount of emotion that is resonant, that makes them want to connect with it. Because of that, you can inspire people to further connect with the brand and potentially to inform and entertain. There's a lot of value from that. Usually, it comes from your own personal creativity around experiences that you've had. I say "you," you, the writer or the author, but it could be anyone in your organization too. Some resources I really like for that are:
Remote workers: I visited an artist collective in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I realized that, "My gosh, one of the most frustrating parts of remote work is that if you're not just about remote working with a laptop and your brain, you're almost removed from the experience. How can you do remote work if you require specialized equipment?" But in fact, there are ways. There are maker labs and artist labs in cities all over the planet at this point. So I think this is a topic that potentially hasn't been well-covered, has a lot of interest, and that personal experience that I, the writer, had could dig into that. Hydraulic doors: So I've had some conversations with do-it-yourselfers, people who are very, very passionate about DIY stuff. It turns out, hydraulic doors, this is not a thing that most DIYers can do. In fact, this is a very, very dramatic investment. That is an intense type of project. Ninety-nine percent of DIYers will not do it, but it turns out there's actually search volume for this. People do want to, or at least want to learn how to, DIY their own hydraulic doors. One of my favorite things, after realizing this, I searched, and then I found that Schweiss Doors actually created a product where they will ship you a DIY kit to build your own hydraulic door. So they did recognize this need. I thought that was very, very impressive. They didn't just create a blog post for it. They even served it with a product. Super-impressive. 4. Covering a topic that is "hot" in your field or trending in your field or in the news or on other blogs.The great part about this is it builds in the amplification piece. Because you're talking about something that other people are already talking about and potentially you're writing about what they've written about, you are including an element of pre-built-in amplification. Because if I write about what Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has written about last week, or what Danny Sullivan wrote about on Search Engine Land two weeks ago, now it's not just my audience that I can reach, but it's theirs as well. Potentially, they have some incentive to check out what I've written about them and share that. So I could see that someone potentially maybe posted something very interesting or inflammatory, or wrong, or really right on Twitter, and then I could say, "Oh, I agree with that," or, "disagree," or, "I have nuance," or, "I have some exceptions to that." Or, "Actually, I think that's an interesting conversation to which I can add even more value," and then I create content from that. Certainly, social networks like:
Remote workers: You might note, well, health care, last week in the United States and for many months now, has been very hot in the political arena. So for remoters, that is a big problem and a big question, because if your health insurance is tied to your employer again, as it was before the American Care Act, then you could be in real trouble. Then you might have a lot of problems and challenges. So what does the politics of health care mean for remote workers? Great. Now, you've created a real connection, and that could be something that other outlets would cover and that people who've written about health care might be willing to link to your piece. Hydraulic doors: One of the things that you might note is that Eater, which is a big blog in the restaurant space, has written about indoor and outdoor space trends in the restaurant industry. So you could, with the data that you've got and the hydraulic doors that you provide, which are very, very common, well moderately common, at least in the restaurant indoor/outdoor seating space, potentially cover that. That's a great way to tie in your audience and Eater's audience into something that's interesting. Eater might be willing to cover that and link to you and talk about it, etc. The last two, I'm not going to go too into depth, because they're a little more basic. 5. Pure keyword research-driven.So this is using Google AdWords or keywordtool.io, or Moz's Keyword Explorer, or any of the other keyword research tools that you like to figure out: What are people searching for around my topic? Can I cover it? Can I make great content there? 6. Readers who care about my topics also care about ______________?Essentially taking any of these topics, but applying one level of abstraction. What I mean by that is there are people who care about your topic, but also there's an overlap of people who care about this other topic and who also care about yours. hydraulic doors: People who care about restaurant building trends and hydraulic doors has a considerable overlap, and that is quite interesting. Remote workers: It could be something like, "I care about remote work. I also care about the gear that I use, my laptop and my bag, and those kinds of things." So gear trends could be a very interesting intersect. Then, you can apply any of these other four processes, five processes onto that intersection or one level of an abstraction. All right, everyone. We have done a tremendous amount here to cover a lot about blog topics. But I think you will have some great ideas from this, and I look forward to hearing about other processes that you've got in the comments. Hopefully, we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care. Video transcription by Speechpad.com Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via Blogger Blog Post Ideas: Maximize Your Reach with the Right Topics - Whiteboard Friday Posted by randfish With the ubiquity of blogs, one of the questions we hear the most is how to come up with the right topics for new posts. In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores six different paths to great blog topic ideas, and tells you what you need to keep in mind before you start. Video transcriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we’re going to chat about blog post ideas, how to have great ones, how to make sure that the topics that you’re covering on your blog actually accomplish the goals that you want, and how to not run out of ideas as well. The goals of your blogSo let’s start with the goals of a blog and then what an individual post needs to do, and then I’ll walk you through kind of six formats for coming up with great ideas for what to blog about. But generally speaking, you have created a blog, either on your company’s website or your personal website or for the project that you’re working on, because you want to:
What should an individual post do?From there, we get into an individual post. An individual post is supposed to help with these goals, but on its own doesn’t do all of them. It certainly doesn’t need to do more than one at a time. It can hopefully do some. But one of those is, generally speaking, a great blog post will do one of these four things and hopefully two or even three. I. Help readers to accomplish a goal that they have. So if I’m trying to figure out which hybrid electric vehicle should I buy and I read a great blog post from someone who’s very, very knowledgeable in the field, and they have two or three recommendations to help me narrow down my search, that is wonderful. It helps me accomplish my goal of figuring out which hybrid car to buy. That accomplishment of goal, that helping of people hits a bunch of these very, very nicely. II. Designed to inform people and/or entertain them.
So it doesn’t have to be purely informational. It doesn’t have to be purely entertainment, but some combination of those, or one of the two, about a particular topic. So you might be trying to make someone excited about something or give them knowledge around it. It may be knowledge that they didn’t previously know that they wanted, and they may not actually be trying to accomplish a goal, but they are interested in the information or interested in finding the humor. III. Inspiring some amplification and linking.
So you’re trying to earn signals to your site that will help you rank in search engines, that will help you grow your audience, that will help you reach more influencers. Thus, inspiring that amplification behavior by creating content that is designed to be shared, designed to be referenced and linked to is another big goal. IV. Creating a more positive association with the brand.
So you might have a post that doesn’t really do any of these things. Maybe it touches a little on informational or entertaining. But it is really about crafting a personal story, or sharing an experience that then draws the reader closer to you and creates that association of what we talked about up here – loyalty, trust, evangelism, likeability. 6 paths to great blog topic ideasSo knowing what our blog needs to do and what our individual posts are trying to do, what are some great ways that we can come up with the ideas, the actual topics that we should be covering? I have kind of six paths. These six paths actually cover almost everything you will read in every other article about how to come up with blog post ideas. But I think that’s what’s great. These frameworks will get you into the mindset that will lead you to the path that can give you an infinite number of blog post ideas. 1. Are there any unanswered or poorly answered questions that are in your field, that your audience already has/is asking, and do you have a way to provide great answers to those?So that’s basically this process of I’m going to research my audience through a bunch of methodologies, going to come up with topics that I know I could cover. I could deliver something that would answer their preexisting questions, and I could come up with those through…
So if you’re using a tool like Moz’s Keyword Explorer, or I think some of the other ones out there, Ahrefs might have this as well, where you can filter by only questions. There are also free tools like Answer the Public, which many folks like, that show you what people are typing into Google, specifically in the form of questions, “Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Do?” etc. So I’m not just going to walk you through the ideas. I’m also going to challenge myself to give you some examples. So I’ve got two – one less challenging, one much more challenging. Two websites, both have blogs, and coming up with topic ideas based on this. So one is called Remoters. It’s remoters.net. It’s run by Aleyda Solis, who many of you in the SEO world might know. They talk about remote work, so people who are working remotely. It’s a content platform for them and a service for them. Then, the second one is a company, I think, called Schweiss Doors. They run hydraulicdoors.com. Very B2B. Very, very niche. Pretty challenging to come up with good blog topics, but I think we’ve got some. Remote Worker: I might say here, “You know what? One of the questions that’s asked very often by remote workers, but is not well-answered on the internet yet is: ‘How do I conduct myself in a remote interview and present myself as a remote worker in a way that I can be competitive with people who are actually, physically on premises and in the room? That is a big challenge. I feel like I’m always losing out to them. Remote workers, it seems, don’t get the benefits of being there in person.’” So a piece of content on how to sell yourself on a remote interview or as a remote worker could work great here. Hydraulic doors: One of the big things that I see many people asking about online, both in forums which actually rank well for it, the questions that are asked in forums around this do rank around costs and prices for hydraulic doors. Therefore, I think this is something that many companies are uncomfortable answering right online. But if you can be transparent where no one else can, I think these Schweiss Doors guys have a shot at doing really well with that. So how much do hydraulic doors cost versus alternatives? There you go. 2. Do you have access to unique types of assets that other people don’t?That could be research. It could be data. It could be insights. It might be stories or narratives, experiences that can help you stand out in a topic area. This is a great way to come up with blog post content. So basically, the idea is you could say, “Gosh, for our quarterly internal report, we had to prepare some data on the state of the market. Actually, some of that data, if we got permission to share it, would be fascinating.” We can see through keyword research that people are talking about this or querying Google for it already. So we’re going to transform it into a piece of blog content, and we’re going to delight many, many people, except for maybe this guy. He seems unhappy about it. I don’t know what his problem is. We won’t worry about him. Wait. I can fix it. Look at that. So happy. Ignore that he kind of looks like the Joker now. We can get these through a bunch of methodologies:
Those assets can become the topic of great content that can turn into really great blog posts and great post ideas. Remote Workers: They might say, “Well, gosh, we have access to data on the destinations people go and the budgets that they have around those destinations when they’re staying and working remotely, because of how our service interacts with them. Therefore, we can craft things like the most and least expensive places to work remotely on the planet,” which is very cool. That’s content that a lot of people are very interested in. Hydraulic doors: We can look at, “Hey, you know what? We actually have a visual overlay tool that helps an architect or a building owner visualize what it will look like if a hydraulic door were put into place. We can go use that in our downtime to come up with we can see how notable locations in the city might look with hydraulic doors or notable locations around the world. We could potentially even create a tool, where you could upload your own visual, photograph, and then see how the hydraulic door looked on there.” So now we can create images that will help you share. 3. Relating a personal experience or passion to your topic in a resonant way.
I like this and I think that many personal bloggers use it well. I think far too few business bloggers do, but it can be quite powerful, and we’ve used it here at Moz, which is relating a personal experience you have or a passion to your topic in some way that resonates. So, for example, you have an interaction that is very complex, very nuanced, very passionate, perhaps even very angry. From that experience, you can craft a compelling story and a headline that draws people in, that creates intrigue and that describes something with an amount of emotion that is resonant, that makes them want to connect with it. Because of that, you can inspire people to further connect with the brand and potentially to inform and entertain. There’s a lot of value from that. Usually, it comes from your own personal creativity around experiences that you’ve had. I say “you,” you, the writer or the author, but it could be anyone in your organization too. Some resources I really like for that are:
Remote workers: I visited an artist collective in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I realized that, “My gosh, one of the most frustrating parts of remote work is that if you’re not just about remote working with a laptop and your brain, you’re almost removed from the experience. How can you do remote work if you require specialized equipment?” But in fact, there are ways. There are maker labs and artist labs in cities all over the planet at this point. So I think this is a topic that potentially hasn’t been well-covered, has a lot of interest, and that personal experience that I, the writer, had could dig into that. Hydraulic doors: So I’ve had some conversations with do-it-yourselfers, people who are very, very passionate about DIY stuff. It turns out, hydraulic doors, this is not a thing that most DIYers can do. In fact, this is a very, very dramatic investment. That is an intense type of project. Ninety-nine percent of DIYers will not do it, but it turns out there’s actually search volume for this. People do want to, or at least want to learn how to, DIY their own hydraulic doors. One of my favorite things, after realizing this, I searched, and then I found that Schweiss Doors actually created a product where they will ship you a DIY kit to build your own hydraulic door. So they did recognize this need. I thought that was very, very impressive. They didn’t just create a blog post for it. They even served it with a product. Super-impressive. 4. Covering a topic that is “hot” in your field or trending in your field or in the news or on other blogs.The great part about this is it builds in the amplification piece. Because you’re talking about something that other people are already talking about and potentially you’re writing about what they’ve written about, you are including an element of pre-built-in amplification. Because if I write about what Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has written about last week, or what Danny Sullivan wrote about on Search Engine Land two weeks ago, now it’s not just my audience that I can reach, but it’s theirs as well. Potentially, they have some incentive to check out what I’ve written about them and share that. So I could see that someone potentially maybe posted something very interesting or inflammatory, or wrong, or really right on Twitter, and then I could say, “Oh, I agree with that,” or, “disagree,” or, “I have nuance,” or, “I have some exceptions to that.” Or, “Actually, I think that’s an interesting conversation to which I can add even more value,” and then I create content from that. Certainly, social networks like:
Remote workers: You might note, well, health care, last week in the United States and for many months now, has been very hot in the political arena. So for remoters, that is a big problem and a big question, because if your health insurance is tied to your employer again, as it was before the American Care Act, then you could be in real trouble. Then you might have a lot of problems and challenges. So what does the politics of health care mean for remote workers? Great. Now, you’ve created a real connection, and that could be something that other outlets would cover and that people who’ve written about health care might be willing to link to your piece. Hydraulic doors: One of the things that you might note is that Eater, which is a big blog in the restaurant space, has written about indoor and outdoor space trends in the restaurant industry. So you could, with the data that you’ve got and the hydraulic doors that you provide, which are very, very common, well moderately common, at least in the restaurant indoor/outdoor seating space, potentially cover that. That’s a great way to tie in your audience and Eater’s audience into something that’s interesting. Eater might be willing to cover that and link to you and talk about it, etc. The last two, I’m not going to go too into depth, because they’re a little more basic. 5. Pure keyword research-driven.So this is using Google AdWords or keywordtool.io, or Moz’s Keyword Explorer, or any of the other keyword research tools that you like to figure out: What are people searching for around my topic? Can I cover it? Can I make great content there? 6. Readers who care about my topics also care about ______________?Essentially taking any of these topics, but applying one level of abstraction. What I mean by that is there are people who care about your topic, but also there’s an overlap of people who care about this other topic and who also care about yours. hydraulic doors: People who care about restaurant building trends and hydraulic doors has a considerable overlap, and that is quite interesting. Remote workers: It could be something like, “I care about remote work. I also care about the gear that I use, my laptop and my bag, and those kinds of things.” So gear trends could be a very interesting intersect. Then, you can apply any of these other four processes, five processes onto that intersection or one level of an abstraction. All right, everyone. We have done a tremendous amount here to cover a lot about blog topics. But I think you will have some great ideas from this, and I look forward to hearing about other processes that you’ve got in the comments. Hopefully, we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care. Video transcription by Speechpad.com Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! via Tumblr Blog Post Ideas: Maximize Your Reach with the Right Topics - Whiteboard Friday Posted by jocameron Reporting can be the height of tedium. You spend your time making those reports, your client may (or may not) spend their time trying to understand them. And then, in the end, we’re all left with some unanswered questions and a rumble in the tum of dissatisfaction. I’m going to take some basic metrics, throw in some culinary metaphors, and take your client reporting to the next level. By the end of this article you’ll know how to whip up intelligent SEO reports for your clients (or potential clients) that will deliver actionable insights any search chef worth their salt would be proud of. [Part one] Freshly foraged keywords on sourdough to power your campaignI’ve got intel on some really tasty keywords; did you know you can scoop these up like wild porcini mushrooms using your website categories? The trick is to find the keywords that you can use to make a lovely risotto, and discard the ones that taste nasty. The overabundance of keywords has become a bit of a challenge for SEOs. Google is better at gauging user intent — it’s kind of their thing, right? This results in the types of keywords that send traffic to your clients expanding, and it’s becoming trickier to track every. single. keyword. Of course, with a budget big enough almost anything is possible, but why hemorrhage cash on tracking the keyword minutiae when you can wrangle intelligent data by tracking a sample of keywords from a few pots? With Keyword Explorer, you can save your foraged terms to lists. By bundling together similar "species," you'll get a top-level view of the breadth and depth of search behavior within the categories of your niche. Easily compare volume, difficulty, opportunity, and potential to instigate a data-driven approach to website architecture. You’ll also know, at a glance, where to expand on certain topics and apply more resources to content creation. With these metrics in hand and your client’s industry knowledge, you can cherry-pick keywords to track ranking positions week over week and add them to your Moz Pro campaign with the click of a button. What’s the recipe?Step 1: Pluck keywords from the category pages of your client’s site. Step 2: Find keyword suggestions in Keyword Explorer. Step 3: Group by low lexicon to bundle together similar keywords to gather up that long tail. Step 4: Analyze and save relevant results to a list Step 5: Head to the Keyword Lists and compare the metrics: where is the opportunity? Can you compete with the level of difficulty? Is there a high-volume long tail that you can dig in to? Step 6: Add sample keywords from your pots directly to your campaign. Bonus step: Repeat for products or other topic segments of the niche. Don’t forget to drill into the keywords that are turning up here to see if there are categories and subcategories you hadn’t thought of. These can be targeted in existing content to further extend the relevancy and reach of your client’s content. Or it may inspire new content which can help to grow the authority of the site. Why your client will be impressedThrough solid, informed research, you’ll be able to demonstrate why their site should be structured with certain categories on the top-level navigation right down to product pages. You’ll also be able to prioritize work on building, improving, or refining content on certain sections of the site by understanding the breakdown of search behavior and demand. Are you seeing lots of keywords with a good level of volume and lower difficulty? Or more in-depth long tail with low search volume? Or fewer different keywords with high search volume but stronger competition? Let the demand drive the machine forward and make sure you’re giving the hordes what they want. All this helps to further develop your understanding of the ways people search so you can make informed decisions about which keywords to track. [Part two] Palate-cleansing lemon keyword label sorbetBefore diving into the next course you need to cleanse your palate with a lemon "label" sorbet. In Part One, we talked about the struggle of maintaining gigantic lists of keywords. We’ve sampled keywords from our foraged pots, keeping these arranged and segmented in our Moz Pro campaign. Now you want to give those tracked keywords a more defined purpose in life. This will help to reinforce to your client why you’re tracking these keywords, what the goal is for tracking them, and in what sort of timeframe you’re anticipating results. Types of labels may include:
A generous scoop of tasty lemon "label" sorbet will make all the work you do and progress you achieve infinitely easier to report on with clear, actionable focus. What’s the recipe?Step 1: Label your keywords like a pro. Step 2: Filter by labels in the Ranking tab to analyze Search Visibility for your keyword segments. In this example, I’m comparing our visibility for "learn" keywords against "guide" keywords: Step 3: Create a custom report for your keyword segments. Step 4: Add a drizzle of balsamic vinegar by triggering the Optimize button — now you can send the latest on-page reporting with your super-focused ranking report.
Why your client will be impressedYour ranking reports will be like nothing your client has ever tasted. They will be tightly focused on the segments of keywords you’re working on, so they aren’t bamboozled by a new slew of keywords or a sudden downward trend. By clearly segmenting your piles of lovely keywords, you’ll be proactively answering those inevitable queries about why, when, and in what form your client will begin to see results. With the on-page scores updating automatically and shipping out to your client’s inbox every month via a custom report, you’ll be effortlessly highlighting what your team has achieved. [Part three] Steak sandwich links with crispy competitor baconYou’re working with your client to publish content, amplifying it through social channels and driving brand awareness through PR campaigns. Now you want to keep them informed of the big wins you’ve had as a result of that grind. Link data in Moz Pro focuses on the highest-quality links with our Mozscape index, coming from the most prominent pages of authoritative sites. So, while you may not see every link for a site within our index, we're reporting the most valuable ones. Alongside our top-quality steak sarnie, we’re add some crispy competitor bacon so you can identify what content is working for the other sites in your industry. What’s the recipe?Step 1: Check that you have direct competitors set up on your campaign. Step 2: Compare link metrics for your site and your competitors. Step 4: Head to Top Pages to see what those competitors are doing to get ahead. Step 5: Compile a delicious report sandwich! Step 6: Make another report for Top Pages for the bacon-filled sandwich experience. Why your client will be impressedEach quality established link gives your client a clear idea of the value of their content and the blood, sweat, and tears of your team. These little gems are established and more likely to have an impact on their ranking potential. Don’t forget to have a chat with your client where you explain that a link's impact on rankings takes time. By comparing this directly with the other sites battling it out for top SERP property, it’s easier to identify progress and achievements. By highlighting those pesky competitors and their top pages by authority, you’re also getting ahead of that burning question of: How can we improve? [Part four] Cinnamon-dusted ranking reports with cherry-glazed trafficRankings are a staple ingredient in the SEO diet. Much like the ever-expanding keyword list, reporting on rankings has become something we do without thinking enough about that what clients can do with that information. Dish up an all-singing, all-dancing cinnamon-dusted rankings report with cherry-glazed traffic by illustrating the direct impact these rankings have on organic traffic. Real people, coasting on through the search results to your client’s site. Landing Pages in Moz Pro compares rankings with organic landing pages, imparting not just the ranking score but the value of those pages. Compliments to the chef, because that good work is down to you. What’s the recipe?Step 1: Track your target keywords in Moz Pro. Step 2: Check you’ve hooked up Google Analytics for that tasty traffic data. Step 3: Discover landing pages and estimated traffic share. As your SEO work drives more traffic to those pages and your keyword rankings steadily increase, you’ll see your estimated traffic share go up. If your organic traffic from search is increasing but your ranking is dropping off, it’s an indication that this keyword isn’t the driving force. Now you can have a dig around and find out why that keyword isn’t performing, starting with your on-page optimization and following up with keyword research. Why your client will be impressedWe all send ranking reports, and I’m sure clients just love it. But now you can dazzle them with an insight into what those rankings mean for the lifeblood of their site. You can also take action by directing more energy towards those well-performing keywords, or investigate what worked well for those pages and replicate it across other keywords and pages on your site. Wrapping upIt’s time to say "enough is enough" and inject some flavor into those bland old SEO reports. Your team will save time and your clients will thank you for the tasty buffet of reporting delight.Next Level is our educational series combining actionable SEO tips with tools you can use to achieve them. Check out any of our past editions below:
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via Blogger Tasty SEO Report Recipes to Save Time & Add Value for Clients [Next Level] Posted by jocameron Reporting can be the height of tedium. You spend your time making those reports, your client may (or may not) spend their time trying to understand them. And then, in the end, we’re all left with some unanswered questions and a rumble in the tum of dissatisfaction. I’m going to take some basic metrics, throw in some culinary metaphors, and take your client reporting to the next level. By the end of this article you’ll know how to whip up intelligent SEO reports for your clients (or potential clients) that will deliver actionable insights any search chef worth their salt would be proud of. [Part one] Freshly foraged keywords on sourdough to power your campaignI’ve got intel on some really tasty keywords; did you know you can scoop these up like wild porcini mushrooms using your website categories? The trick is to find the keywords that you can use to make a lovely risotto, and discard the ones that taste nasty. The overabundance of keywords has become a bit of a challenge for SEOs. Google is better at gauging user intent — it’s kind of their thing, right? This results in the types of keywords that send traffic to your clients expanding, and it’s becoming trickier to track every. single. keyword. Of course, with a budget big enough almost anything is possible, but why hemorrhage cash on tracking the keyword minutiae when you can wrangle intelligent data by tracking a sample of keywords from a few pots? With Keyword Explorer, you can save your foraged terms to lists. By bundling together similar “species,” you’ll get a top-level view of the breadth and depth of search behavior within the categories of your niche. Easily compare volume, difficulty, opportunity, and potential to instigate a data-driven approach to website architecture. You’ll also know, at a glance, where to expand on certain topics and apply more resources to content creation. With these metrics in hand and your client’s industry knowledge, you can cherry-pick keywords to track ranking positions week over week and add them to your Moz Pro campaign with the click of a button. What’s the recipe?Step 1: Pluck keywords from the category pages of your client’s site. Step 2: Find keyword suggestions in Keyword Explorer. Step 3: Group by low lexicon to bundle together similar keywords to gather up that long tail. Step 4: Analyze and save relevant results to a list Step 5: Head to the Keyword Lists and compare the metrics: where is the opportunity? Can you compete with the level of difficulty? Is there a high-volume long tail that you can dig in to? Step 6: Add sample keywords from your pots directly to your campaign. Bonus step: Repeat for products or other topic segments of the niche. Don’t forget to drill into the keywords that are turning up here to see if there are categories and subcategories you hadn’t thought of. These can be targeted in existing content to further extend the relevancy and reach of your client’s content. Or it may inspire new content which can help to grow the authority of the site. Why your client will be impressedThrough solid, informed research, you’ll be able to demonstrate why their site should be structured with certain categories on the top-level navigation right down to product pages. You’ll also be able to prioritize work on building, improving, or refining content on certain sections of the site by understanding the breakdown of search behavior and demand. Are you seeing lots of keywords with a good level of volume and lower difficulty? Or more in-depth long tail with low search volume? Or fewer different keywords with high search volume but stronger competition? Let the demand drive the machine forward and make sure you’re giving the hordes what they want. All this helps to further develop your understanding of the ways people search so you can make informed decisions about which keywords to track. [Part two] Palate-cleansing lemon keyword label sorbetBefore diving into the next course you need to cleanse your palate with a lemon “label” sorbet. In Part One, we talked about the struggle of maintaining gigantic lists of keywords. We’ve sampled keywords from our foraged pots, keeping these arranged and segmented in our Moz Pro campaign. Now you want to give those tracked keywords a more defined purpose in life. This will help to reinforce to your client why you’re tracking these keywords, what the goal is for tracking them, and in what sort of timeframe you’re anticipating results. Types of labels may include:
A generous scoop of tasty lemon “label” sorbet will make all the work you do and progress you achieve infinitely easier to report on with clear, actionable focus. What’s the recipe?Step 1: Label your keywords like a pro. Step 2: Filter by labels in the Ranking tab to analyze Search Visibility for your keyword segments. In this example, I’m comparing our visibility for “learn” keywords against “guide” keywords: Step 3: Create a custom report for your keyword segments. Step 4: Add a drizzle of balsamic vinegar by triggering the Optimize button — now you can send the latest on-page reporting with your super-focused ranking report.
Why your client will be impressedYour ranking reports will be like nothing your client has ever tasted. They will be tightly focused on the segments of keywords you’re working on, so they aren’t bamboozled by a new slew of keywords or a sudden downward trend. By clearly segmenting your piles of lovely keywords, you’ll be proactively answering those inevitable queries about why, when, and in what form your client will begin to see results. With the on-page scores updating automatically and shipping out to your client’s inbox every month via a custom report, you’ll be effortlessly highlighting what your team has achieved. [Part three] Steak sandwich links with crispy competitor baconYou’re working with your client to publish content, amplifying it through social channels and driving brand awareness through PR campaigns. Now you want to keep them informed of the big wins you’ve had as a result of that grind. Link data in Moz Pro focuses on the highest-quality links with our Mozscape index, coming from the most prominent pages of authoritative sites. So, while you may not see every link for a site within our index, we’re reporting the most valuable ones. Alongside our top-quality steak sarnie, we’re add some crispy competitor bacon so you can identify what content is working for the other sites in your industry. What’s the recipe?Step 1: Check that you have direct competitors set up on your campaign. Step 2: Compare link metrics for your site and your competitors. Step 4: Head to Top Pages to see what those competitors are doing to get ahead. Step 5: Compile a delicious report sandwich! Step 6: Make another report for Top Pages for the bacon-filled sandwich experience. Why your client will be impressedEach quality established link gives your client a clear idea of the value of their content and the blood, sweat, and tears of your team. These little gems are established and more likely to have an impact on their ranking potential. Don’t forget to have a chat with your client where you explain that a link’s impact on rankings takes time. By comparing this directly with the other sites battling it out for top SERP property, it’s easier to identify progress and achievements. By highlighting those pesky competitors and their top pages by authority, you’re also getting ahead of that burning question of: How can we improve? [Part four] Cinnamon-dusted ranking reports with cherry-glazed trafficRankings are a staple ingredient in the SEO diet. Much like the ever-expanding keyword list, reporting on rankings has become something we do without thinking enough about that what clients can do with that information. Dish up an all-singing, all-dancing cinnamon-dusted rankings report with cherry-glazed traffic by illustrating the direct impact these rankings have on organic traffic. Real people, coasting on through the search results to your client’s site. Landing Pages in Moz Pro compares rankings with organic landing pages, imparting not just the ranking score but the value of those pages. Compliments to the chef, because that good work is down to you. What’s the recipe?Step 1: Track your target keywords in Moz Pro. Step 2: Check you’ve hooked up Google Analytics for that tasty traffic data. Step 3: Discover landing pages and estimated traffic share. As your SEO work drives more traffic to those pages and your keyword rankings steadily increase, you’ll see your estimated traffic share go up. If your organic traffic from search is increasing but your ranking is dropping off, it’s an indication that this keyword isn’t the driving force. Now you can have a dig around and find out why that keyword isn’t performing, starting with your on-page optimization and following up with keyword research. Why your client will be impressedWe all send ranking reports, and I’m sure clients just love it. But now you can dazzle them with an insight into what those rankings mean for the lifeblood of their site. You can also take action by directing more energy towards those well-performing keywords, or investigate what worked well for those pages and replicate it across other keywords and pages on your site. Wrapping upIt’s time to say “enough is enough” and inject some flavor into those bland old SEO reports. Your team will save time and your clients will thank you for the tasty buffet of reporting delight.Next Level is our educational series combining actionable SEO tips with tools you can use to achieve them. Check out any of our past editions below:
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! via Tumblr Tasty SEO Report Recipes to Save Time & Add Value for Clients [Next Level] What You Need to Know About Duplicate GMB Listings [Excerpt from the Experts Guide to Local SEO]5/16/2017 Posted by JoyHawkins Recently, I’ve had a lot of people ask me how to deal with duplicate listings in Google My Business now that MapMaker is dead. Having written detailed instructions outlining different scenarios for the advanced local SEO training manual I started selling over at LocalU, I thought it'd be great to give Moz readers a sample of 5 pages from the manual outlining some best practices. What you need to know about duplicate GMB listings
Before you start, you need to find out if the listing is verified. If the listing has an “own this business” or “claim this business” option, it is not currently verified. If missing that label, it means it is verified — there is nothing you can do until you get ownership or have it unverified (if you're the one who owns it in GMB). This should be your first step before you proceed with anything below. Storefronts
Service area businesses
Practitioner listingsPublic-facing professionals (doctors, lawyers, dentists, realtors, etc.) are allowed their own listings separate from the office they work for, unless they're the only public-facing professional at that office. In that case, they are considered a solo practitioner and there should only be one listing, formatted as “Business Name: Professional Name.” Solo practitioner with two listingsThis is probably one of the easiest scenarios to fix because solo practitioners are only supposed to have one listing. If you have a scenario where there's a listing for both the practice and the practitioner, you can ask Google My Business to merge the two and it will combine the ranking strength of both. It will also give you one listing with more reviews (if each individual listing had reviews on it). The only scenario where I don’t advise combining the two is if your two listings both rank together and are monopolizing two of the three spots in the 3-pack. This is extremely rare. Multi-practitioner listingsIf the business has multiple practitioners, you are not able to get these listings removed or merged provided the practitioner still works there. While I don’t generally suggest creating listings for practitioners, they often exist already, leaving people to wonder what to do with them to keep them from competing with the listing for the practice. A good strategy is to work on having multiple listings rank if you have practitioners that specialize in different things. Let’s say you have a chiropractor who also has a massage therapist at his office. The massage therapist’s listing could link to a page on the site that ranks highly for "massage therapy" and the chiropractor could link to the page that ranks highest organically for chiropractic terms. This is a great way to make the pages more visible instead of competing. Another example would be a law firm. You could have the main listing for the law firm optimized for things like “law firm,” then have one lawyer who specializes in personal injury law and another lawyer who specializes in criminal law. This would allow you to take advantage of the organic ranking for several different keywords. Keep in mind that if your goal is to have three of your listings all rank for the exact same keyword on Google, thus monopolizing the entire 3-pack, this is an unrealistic strategy. Google has filters that keep the same website from appearing too many times in the results and unless you’re in a really niche industry or market, it’s almost impossible to accomplish this. Practitioners who no longer work thereIt’s common to find listings for practitioners who no longer work for your business but did at some point. If you run across a listing for a former practitioner, you'll want to contact Google My Business and ask them to mark the listing as moved to your practice listing. It’s extremely important that you get them to move it to your office listing, not the business the practitioner now works for (if they have been employed elsewhere). Here is a good case study that shows you why. If the practitioner listing is verified, things can get tricky since Google My Business won’t be able to move it until it’s unverified. If the listing is verified by the practitioner and they refuse to give you access or remove it, the second-best thing would be to get them to update the listing to have their current employer’s information on it. This isn’t ideal and should be a last resort. Listings for employees (not public-facing)If you find a listing for a non-public-facing employee, it shouldn’t exist on Maps. For example: an office manager of a law firm, a paralegal, a hygienist, or a nurse. You can get the listing removed:
Listings for deceased practitionersThis is always a terrible scenario to have to deal with, but I've run into lots of cases where people don’t know how to get rid of listings for deceased practitioners. The solution is similar to what you would do for someone who has left the practice, except you want to add an additional step. Since the listings are often verified and people usually don’t have access to the deceased person’s Google account, you want to make sure you tell Google My Business support that the person is deceased and include a link to their obituary online so the support worker can confirm you're telling the truth. I strongly recommend using either Facebook or Twitter to do this, since you can easily include the link (it’s much harder to do on a phone call). Creating practitioner listingsIf you’re creating a practitioner listing from scratch, you might run into issues if you’re trying to do it from the Google My Business dashboard and you already have a verified listing for the practice. The error you would get is shown below. There are two ways around this:
We hope you enjoyed this excerpt from the Expert's Guide to Local SEO! The full 160+-page guide is available for purchase and download via LocalU below. Get the Expert's Guide to Local SEO Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via Blogger What You Need to Know About Duplicate GMB Listings [Excerpt from the Expert’s Guide to Local SEO] What You Need to Know About Duplicate GMB Listings [Excerpt from the Expert’s Guide to Local SEO]5/16/2017 Posted by JoyHawkins Recently, I’ve had a lot of people ask me how to deal with duplicate listings in Google My Business now that MapMaker is dead. Having written detailed instructions outlining different scenarios for the advanced local SEO training manual I started selling over at LocalU, I thought it’d be great to give Moz readers a sample of 5 pages from the manual outlining some best practices. What you need to know about duplicate GMB listings
Before you start, you need to find out if the listing is verified. If the listing has an “own this business” or “claim this business” option, it is not currently verified. If missing that label, it means it is verified — there is nothing you can do until you get ownership or have it unverified (if you’re the one who owns it in GMB). This should be your first step before you proceed with anything below. Storefronts
Service area businesses
Practitioner listingsPublic-facing professionals (doctors, lawyers, dentists, realtors, etc.) are allowed their own listings separate from the office they work for, unless they’re the only public-facing professional at that office. In that case, they are considered a solo practitioner and there should only be one listing, formatted as “Business Name: Professional Name.” Solo practitioner with two listingsThis is probably one of the easiest scenarios to fix because solo practitioners are only supposed to have one listing. If you have a scenario where there’s a listing for both the practice and the practitioner, you can ask Google My Business to merge the two and it will combine the ranking strength of both. It will also give you one listing with more reviews (if each individual listing had reviews on it). The only scenario where I don’t advise combining the two is if your two listings both rank together and are monopolizing two of the three spots in the 3-pack. This is extremely rare. Multi-practitioner listingsIf the business has multiple practitioners, you are not able to get these listings removed or merged provided the practitioner still works there. While I don’t generally suggest creating listings for practitioners, they often exist already, leaving people to wonder what to do with them to keep them from competing with the listing for the practice. A good strategy is to work on having multiple listings rank if you have practitioners that specialize in different things. Let’s say you have a chiropractor who also has a massage therapist at his office. The massage therapist’s listing could link to a page on the site that ranks highly for “massage therapy” and the chiropractor could link to the page that ranks highest organically for chiropractic terms. This is a great way to make the pages more visible instead of competing. Another example would be a law firm. You could have the main listing for the law firm optimized for things like “law firm,” then have one lawyer who specializes in personal injury law and another lawyer who specializes in criminal law. This would allow you to take advantage of the organic ranking for several different keywords. Keep in mind that if your goal is to have three of your listings all rank for the exact same keyword on Google, thus monopolizing the entire 3-pack, this is an unrealistic strategy. Google has filters that keep the same website from appearing too many times in the results and unless you’re in a really niche industry or market, it’s almost impossible to accomplish this. Practitioners who no longer work thereIt’s common to find listings for practitioners who no longer work for your business but did at some point. If you run across a listing for a former practitioner, you’ll want to contact Google My Business and ask them to mark the listing as moved to your practice listing. It’s extremely important that you get them to move it to your office listing, not the business the practitioner now works for (if they have been employed elsewhere). Here is a good case study that shows you why. If the practitioner listing is verified, things can get tricky since Google My Business won’t be able to move it until it’s unverified. If the listing is verified by the practitioner and they refuse to give you access or remove it, the second-best thing would be to get them to update the listing to have their current employer’s information on it. This isn’t ideal and should be a last resort. Listings for employees (not public-facing)If you find a listing for a non-public-facing employee, it shouldn’t exist on Maps. For example: an office manager of a law firm, a paralegal, a hygienist, or a nurse. You can get the listing removed:
Listings for deceased practitionersThis is always a terrible scenario to have to deal with, but I’ve run into lots of cases where people don’t know how to get rid of listings for deceased practitioners. The solution is similar to what you would do for someone who has left the practice, except you want to add an additional step. Since the listings are often verified and people usually don’t have access to the deceased person’s Google account, you want to make sure you tell Google My Business support that the person is deceased and include a link to their obituary online so the support worker can confirm you’re telling the truth. I strongly recommend using either Facebook or Twitter to do this, since you can easily include the link (it’s much harder to do on a phone call). Creating practitioner listingsIf you’re creating a practitioner listing from scratch, you might run into issues if you’re trying to do it from the Google My Business dashboard and you already have a verified listing for the practice. The error you would get is shown below. There are two ways around this:
We hope you enjoyed this excerpt from the Expert’s Guide to Local SEO! The full 160+-page guide is available for purchase and download via LocalU below. Get the Expert’s Guide to Local SEO Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! via Tumblr What You Need to Know About Duplicate GMB Listings [Excerpt from the Expert’s Guide to Local SEO] |