Posted by BenjaminEstes Google’s PageSpeed Insights is an easy-to-use tool that tests whether a web page might be slower than it needs to be. It gives a score to quantify page performance. Because this score is concrete, the PageSpeed Insights score is often used as a measure of site performance. Similarly to PageRank years back, folks want to optimize this number just because it exists. In fact, Moz has a popular article on this subject: How to Achieve 100/100 with the Google Page Speed Test Tool. For small sites on common CMSes (think Wordpress), this can be accomplished. If that’s you, PageSpeed Insights is a great place to start. For most sites, a perfect score isn’t realistic. So where do we start? That’s what this post is about. I want to make three points:
I’m writing with SEO practitioners in mind. I’ll skip over some of the more technical bits. You should walk away with enough perspective to start asking the right questions. And you may make better recommendations as a result.
Latency can hurt load times more than bandwidthA first look at PageSpeed Insights’ rules could make you think it’s all about serving fewer bytes to the user. Minify, optimize, compress. Size is only half the story. It also takes take time for your request simply to reach a server. And then it takes time for the server to respond to you! What happens when you make a request?If a user types a URL into a browser address bar and hits enter, a request is made. Lots of things happen when that request is made. The very last part of that is transferring the requested content. It’s only this last bit that is affected by bandwidth and the size of the content. Fulfilling a request requires (more or less) these steps:
Each of these steps takes time, not just the last. The first three are independent of file size; they are effectively constant costs. These costs are incurred with each request regardless of whether the payload is a tiny, minified CSS file or a huge uncompressed image. Why does it take time to get a response?The factor we can’t avoid is that network signals can’t travel faster than the speed of light. That’s a theoretical maximum; in reality, it will take longer than that for data to transfer. For instance, it takes light about 40ms for a round trip between Paris and New York. If it takes twice that time for data to actually cross the Atlantic, then the minimum time it will take to get a response from a server is 80ms. This is why CDNs are commonly used. CDNs put servers physically closer to users, which is the only way to reduce the time it takes to reach the server. How much does this matter?Check out this chart (from Chrome’s DevTools): All of the values in the red box are what I’m considering “latency.” They total about 220ms. The actual transfer of content took 0.7ms. No compression or reduction of filesize could help this; the only way to reduce the time taken by the request is to reduce latency. Don’t we need to make a lot of requests to load a page?It’ll take more than one request to load all of the content necessary to render a page. If that URL corresponded to a webpage, the browser will usually discover that it needs to load more resources to render the page. These could be CSS, JavaScript, or font files. It must recursively go through the same steps listed above to load each of these files. Fortunately, once a server has been found (“DNS Lookup” in the image above), the browser won’t need to look it up again. It will still have to connect, and we’ll have to wait for a response. A skeptical read of PageSpeed Insights testsAll of the PageSpeed Insights evaluations cover things that can impact site speed. For large sites, some of them aren’t so easy to implement. And depending on how your site is designed, some may be more impactful than others. That’s not to say you have an excuse not to do these things — they’re all best-practice, and they all help. But they don’t represent the whole site speed picture. With that in mind, here’s a “skeptical reading” of each of the PageSpeed Insights rules. Tests focusing on reducing bandwidth use
Tests focusing on reducing latency
Don’t treat these as the final word on site performance! Independent of these tests, here are some things to think about. Some aren’t covered at all by PageSpeed Insights, and some are only covered halfway:
How to start improvingMeasurementThe screenshots in this post are created with Chrome DevTools. It’s built into the browser and allows you to inspect exactly what happens when a page loads. Instead of trusting the Pagespeed Insights tool, go ahead and load your page in Chrome. Check out how it performs. Look at what requests actually seem to take more time. Often the answer will be obvious: too much time will be spent loading ads, for instance. Goal settingIf a perfect PageSpeed Insights score isn’t your goal, you need to know what your goal will be. This is important, because it allows you to compare current performance to that goal. You can see whether reducing bandwidth requirements will actually meet your goal, or whether you also need to do something to reduce latency (use a CDN, handle fewer requests, load high-priority content first). PrioritizingPrioritizing page speed “fixes” is important — that’s not the only type of prioritization. There’s also the question of what actually needs to be loaded. PageSpeed Insights does try to figure out whether you’re prioritizing above-the-fold content. This is a great target. It’s also not a perfect assessment; it might be easier to split content into “critical” and “non-critical” paths, regardless of what is ostensibly above the fold. For instance: If your site relies on ad revenue, you might load all content on the page and only then begin to load ads. Figuring out how to serve less is a challenge best tackled by you and your team. After all, PageSpeed Insights is a one-size-fits-all solution. ConclusionThe story so far has been that PageSpeed Insights can be useful, but there are smarter ways to assess and improve site speed. A perfect score doesn’t guarantee a fast site. If you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend checking out Ilya Grigorik’s site and specifically this old-but-good introduction deck. Grigorik is a web performance engineer at Google and a very good communicator about site speed issues. 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 Faster Sites: Beyond PageSpeed Insights
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Posted by BenjaminEstes Google’s PageSpeed Insights is an easy-to-use tool that tests whether a web page might be slower than it needs to be. It gives a score to quantify page performance. Because this score is concrete, the PageSpeed Insights score is often used as a measure of site performance. Similarly to PageRank years back, folks want to optimize this number just because it exists. In fact, Moz has a popular article on this subject: How to Achieve 100/100 with the Google Page Speed Test Tool. For small sites on common CMSes (think Wordpress), this can be accomplished. If that’s you, PageSpeed Insights is a great place to start. For most sites, a perfect score isn’t realistic. So where do we start? That’s what this post is about. I want to make three points:
I’m writing with SEO practitioners in mind. I’ll skip over some of the more technical bits. You should walk away with enough perspective to start asking the right questions. And you may make better recommendations as a result.
Latency can hurt load times more than bandwidthA first look at PageSpeed Insights’ rules could make you think it’s all about serving fewer bytes to the user. Minify, optimize, compress. Size is only half the story. It also takes take time for your request simply to reach a server. And then it takes time for the server to respond to you! What happens when you make a request?If a user types a URL into a browser address bar and hits enter, a request is made. Lots of things happen when that request is made. The very last part of that is transferring the requested content. It’s only this last bit that is affected by bandwidth and the size of the content. Fulfilling a request requires (more or less) these steps:
Each of these steps takes time, not just the last. The first three are independent of file size; they are effectively constant costs. These costs are incurred with each request regardless of whether the payload is a tiny, minified CSS file or a huge uncompressed image. Why does it take time to get a response?The factor we can’t avoid is that network signals can’t travel faster than the speed of light. That’s a theoretical maximum; in reality, it will take longer than that for data to transfer. For instance, it takes light about 40ms for a round trip between Paris and New York. If it takes twice that time for data to actually cross the Atlantic, then the minimum time it will take to get a response from a server is 80ms. This is why CDNs are commonly used. CDNs put servers physically closer to users, which is the only way to reduce the time it takes to reach the server. How much does this matter?Check out this chart (from Chrome’s DevTools): All of the values in the red box are what I’m considering “latency.” They total about 220ms. The actual transfer of content took 0.7ms. No compression or reduction of filesize could help this; the only way to reduce the time taken by the request is to reduce latency. Don’t we need to make a lot of requests to load a page?It’ll take more than one request to load all of the content necessary to render a page. If that URL corresponded to a webpage, the browser will usually discover that it needs to load more resources to render the page. These could be CSS, JavaScript, or font files. It must recursively go through the same steps listed above to load each of these files. Fortunately, once a server has been found (“DNS Lookup” in the image above), the browser won’t need to look it up again. It will still have to connect, and we’ll have to wait for a response. A skeptical read of PageSpeed Insights testsAll of the PageSpeed Insights evaluations cover things that can impact site speed. For large sites, some of them aren’t so easy to implement. And depending on how your site is designed, some may be more impactful than others. That’s not to say you have an excuse not to do these things — they’re all best-practice, and they all help. But they don’t represent the whole site speed picture. With that in mind, here’s a “skeptical reading” of each of the PageSpeed Insights rules. Tests focusing on reducing bandwidth use
Tests focusing on reducing latency
Don’t treat these as the final word on site performance! Independent of these tests, here are some things to think about. Some aren’t covered at all by PageSpeed Insights, and some are only covered halfway:
How to start improvingMeasurementThe screenshots in this post are created with Chrome DevTools. It’s built into the browser and allows you to inspect exactly what happens when a page loads. Instead of trusting the Pagespeed Insights tool, go ahead and load your page in Chrome. Check out how it performs. Look at what requests actually seem to take more time. Often the answer will be obvious: too much time will be spent loading ads, for instance. Goal settingIf a perfect PageSpeed Insights score isn’t your goal, you need to know what your goal will be. This is important, because it allows you to compare current performance to that goal. You can see whether reducing bandwidth requirements will actually meet your goal, or whether you also need to do something to reduce latency (use a CDN, handle fewer requests, load high-priority content first). PrioritizingPrioritizing page speed “fixes” is important — that’s not the only type of prioritization. There’s also the question of what actually needs to be loaded. PageSpeed Insights does try to figure out whether you’re prioritizing above-the-fold content. This is a great target. It’s also not a perfect assessment; it might be easier to split content into “critical” and “non-critical” paths, regardless of what is ostensibly above the fold. For instance: If your site relies on ad revenue, you might load all content on the page and only then begin to load ads. Figuring out how to serve less is a challenge best tackled by you and your team. After all, PageSpeed Insights is a one-size-fits-all solution. ConclusionThe story so far has been that PageSpeed Insights can be useful, but there are smarter ways to assess and improve site speed. A perfect score doesn’t guarantee a fast site. If you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend checking out Ilya Grigorik’s site and specifically this old-but-good introduction deck. Grigorik is a web performance engineer at Google and a very good communicator about site speed issues. 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 Faster Sites: Beyond PageSpeed Insights Posted by ronell-smith Whew! That's the collective expression shared by the committee who perused this year's community speaker pitches for MozCon 2017, which will be held July 17–19 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, WA. Let's just say, the entire group brought it. There were more than 120 people vying for six speaking slots. We've written in the past about how the committee whittles the submissions down, and then, before making the final selections from a group of about 20 people, we watch videos, peruse decks on SlideShare, and try to determine if a potential speaker would be successful on the stage. (Speaking in front of 1,500 people can be unnerving, even for the most accomplished speaker.) After all, we want everyone to walk away from MozCon feeling as though the event was a benefit. In general, during the final stages of the process, we're looking for/at three elements with regards to the submission alone:
The winning pitches nailed each of the elements above; we're confident the talks will be well-received by the audience. Without further adieu, let's take a closer look at this spectacular group. [Eds. note: Pitches were were edited for length and to help speakers retain an element of surprise.] Daniel RussellDaniel Russell is a director at Go Fish Digital. Part of the winning pitch: "It almost seems too good to be true — online forums where people automatically segment themselves into different markets and demographics and then vote on what content they like best. These forums, including Reddit, are treasure troves of content ideas. I'll share actionable insights from three case studies that demonstrate how your marketing can benefit from content on Reddit." Jayna GrasselJayna is the SEO manager at Dick's Sporting Goods and is the unofficial world's second-fastest crocheter. Part of the winning pitch: "Site. Migration. No two words elicit more fear, joy or excitement to a digital marketer. When the idea was shared three years ago, the company was excited. They dreamed of new features and efficiency. But as SEOs, we knew better. We knew there would be midnight strategy sessions with IT. More UAT environments than we could track. Deadlines, requirements and compromises forged through hallway chats. ... The result was a stable transition with minimal dips in traffic. What we didn't know, however, was the amount of cross-functional coordination that was required to pull it off." Joel KlettkeJoel is freelance conversion copywriter and strategist for Business Casual Copywriting. He also owns and runs Case Study Buddy, a done-for-you case studies service. Part of the winning pitch: "If you want to write copy that converts, you need to get into your customers' heads. But how do you do that? How do you know which pain points you need to address, features customers care about, or benefits your audience needs to hear? Marketers are sick and tired of hearing 'it depends.' I'll give the audience a practical framework for writing customer-driven copy that any business can apply." Kane JamisonKane is the founder of Content Harmony, a content marketing agency based in Seattle. Part of the winning pitch: "The 8 Paid Promotion Tactics That Will Get You To Quit Organic Traffic: Digital marketers are ignoring huge opportunities to promote their content through paid channels, and I want to give them the tools to get started. How many brands out there are spending $500+ on a blog post, and then moving on to the next one before that post has been seen by 500 people, or even 50? For some reason, everyone thinks about Outbrain and native ads when we talk about paid content distribution, but the real opportunity is in *highly-targeted* paid social." Kathryn CunninghamKathryn is an SEO consultant for Adept Marketing, although to many of her office mates she is known as the "Excel nerd." Part of the winning pitch: "How to build an SEO-intent based framework for any business: Everyone knows intent behind the search matters. In e-commerce, intent is somewhat easy to see. B2B, or better yet healthcare, isn't quite as easy. Matching persona intent to keywords requires a bit more thought. I will cover how to find intent modifiers during keyword research, how to organize those modifiers into the search funnel, and how to quickly find unique universal results at different levels of the search funnel to utilize." Matthew EdgarMatthew is a web analytics and technical marketing consultant at Elementive. Part of the winning pitch: "3 Event Tracking Tricks and Tips For Monitoring UX Details: Great SEO is increasingly dependent on having a website with a great user experience. To make your user experience great requires carefully tracking what people do so that you always know where to improve. But what do you track? In this 15-minute talk, I’ll cover three effective and advanced ways to use event tracking in Google Analytics to understand a website's user experience." Curiosity piqued? You could be in one of those seats yourself, watching them live: Feel free to drop me a note in the comments below. I'm starting to get excited about MozCon 2017. I hope to see you there. 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 Let’s Give It Up for the Community Speakers of MozCon 2017! Posted by ronell-smith Whew! That’s the collective expression shared by the committee who perused this year’s community speaker pitches for MozCon 2017, which will be held July 17–19 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, WA. Let’s just say, the entire group brought it. There were more than 120 people vying for six speaking slots. We’ve written in the past about how the committee whittles the submissions down, and then, before making the final selections from a group of about 20 people, we watch videos, peruse decks on SlideShare, and try to determine if a potential speaker would be successful on the stage. (Speaking in front of 1,500 people can be unnerving, even for the most accomplished speaker.) After all, we want everyone to walk away from MozCon feeling as though the event was a benefit. In general, during the final stages of the process, we’re looking for/at three elements with regards to the submission alone:
The winning pitches nailed each of the elements above; we’re confident the talks will be well-received by the audience. Without further adieu, let’s take a closer look at this spectacular group. [Eds. note: Pitches were were edited for length and to help speakers retain an element of surprise.] Daniel RussellDaniel Russell is a director at Go Fish Digital. Part of the winning pitch: “It almost seems too good to be true — online forums where people automatically segment themselves into different markets and demographics and then vote on what content they like best. These forums, including Reddit, are treasure troves of content ideas. I’ll share actionable insights from three case studies that demonstrate how your marketing can benefit from content on Reddit.” Jayna GrasselJayna is the SEO manager at Dick’s Sporting Goods and is the unofficial world’s second-fastest crocheter. Part of the winning pitch: “Site. Migration. No two words elicit more fear, joy or excitement to a digital marketer. When the idea was shared three years ago, the company was excited. They dreamed of new features and efficiency. But as SEOs, we knew better. We knew there would be midnight strategy sessions with IT. More UAT environments than we could track. Deadlines, requirements and compromises forged through hallway chats. … The result was a stable transition with minimal dips in traffic. What we didn’t know, however, was the amount of cross-functional coordination that was required to pull it off.” Joel KlettkeJoel is freelance conversion copywriter and strategist for Business Casual Copywriting. He also owns and runs Case Study Buddy, a done-for-you case studies service. Part of the winning pitch: “If you want to write copy that converts, you need to get into your customers’ heads. But how do you do that? How do you know which pain points you need to address, features customers care about, or benefits your audience needs to hear? Marketers are sick and tired of hearing ‘it depends.’ I’ll give the audience a practical framework for writing customer-driven copy that any business can apply.” Kane JamisonKane is the founder of Content Harmony, a content marketing agency based in Seattle. Part of the winning pitch: “The 8 Paid Promotion Tactics That Will Get You To Quit Organic Traffic: Digital marketers are ignoring huge opportunities to promote their content through paid channels, and I want to give them the tools to get started. How many brands out there are spending $500+ on a blog post, and then moving on to the next one before that post has been seen by 500 people, or even 50? For some reason, everyone thinks about Outbrain and native ads when we talk about paid content distribution, but the real opportunity is in *highly-targeted* paid social.” Kathryn CunninghamKathryn is an SEO consultant for Adept Marketing, although to many of her office mates she is known as the “Excel nerd.” Part of the winning pitch: “How to build an SEO-intent based framework for any business: Everyone knows intent behind the search matters. In e-commerce, intent is somewhat easy to see. B2B, or better yet healthcare, isn’t quite as easy. Matching persona intent to keywords requires a bit more thought. I will cover how to find intent modifiers during keyword research, how to organize those modifiers into the search funnel, and how to quickly find unique universal results at different levels of the search funnel to utilize.” Matthew EdgarMatthew is a web analytics and technical marketing consultant at Elementive. Part of the winning pitch: “3 Event Tracking Tricks and Tips For Monitoring UX Details: Great SEO is increasingly dependent on having a website with a great user experience. To make your user experience great requires carefully tracking what people do so that you always know where to improve. But what do you track? In this 15-minute talk, I’ll cover three effective and advanced ways to use event tracking in Google Analytics to understand a website’s user experience.” Curiosity piqued? You could be in one of those seats yourself, watching them live: Feel free to drop me a note in the comments below. I’m starting to get excited about MozCon 2017. I hope to see you there. 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 Let’s Give It Up for the Community Speakers of MozCon 2017! Posted by ronell-smith Off-page SEO is the act of optimizing your brand’s online and offline footprint through the use of content, relationships, and links to create an optimal experience for prospects and search engine crawl bots. It typically leads to gradual increases in positive brand mentions, search rankings, traffic to your site, and conversions. Sounds fairly straightforward, right? Well, for the attorney seated in front of me in my kid’s elementary school lunchroom, I might as well have just told him the earth is flat. "That makes no sense to me," he said, pushing his chin forward and tilting his head, as if waiting for me to admit that I was pulling his leg. "You mean, there’s all this stuff [an SEO] does on my site? And there is stuff that we — me, my team and [the SEO] — should be doing off our site as well? That’s like telling me, 'It’s not enough that you live and pay for a nice house in a gated community. You also need to guard the gate to the community and pick up trash along the road leading up to your driveway.'" His example could not have been more apt. "Not caring about off-site SEO is like having that great house in the gated community, but none of your friends want to visit because they’ve heard from others that it smells like vomit on the inside, and no one they talk to can either confirm or deny it." I continued: "It’s not enough to only care about your website/brand or your house/neighborhood; you must always be working to enhance its reputation to ensure others will desire to visit/learn more about it." He saw the light. "So basically we do off-site SEO to ensure the work we do onsite and as a brand are most effective?" he asked. Exactly! What off-page SEO is and why your brand cannot afford to ignore itIn the SEO world, we don’t need to be convinced of the value of off-page SEO. We know that well before people seek our brands out, they have formed an opinion of it based on reviews, comments from friends, family members, or online acquaintances, and whatever information we can glean online or offline (apart from your website). Therefore, we’d be fools to disavow making off-page SEO a priority, given how important it is. However, the more common mistake — among SEOs at least — is to see off-page SEO through only the prism of link building, which, while important, is not the be-all and end-all of off-page SEO. That is, in working to build your brand’s off-page SEO prowess, links are certainly a benefit, not the goal. Think of it this way:
So while it’s important to think of links when making off-page SEO a priority, it’s also vital that you (a) view them in context (important but not singularly so) and (b) give priority to the host of factors that lead to off-page SEO providing a boost for your brand. Those factors include, but are not limited to, creating an excellent, worthwhile product or service; guest posting on popular, relevant blogs; building relationships with influencers; earning positive press; capturing positive reviews and responding to negative reviews; and monitoring mentions of your brand, to name a few. Because our goal is to create a post that’s accessible, interesting and immediately useful, we’ll break down what we think are 8 key areas worth focusing on for off-page SEO under three umbrellas:
The intention is to provide a prism through which you can more easily categorize your efforts and a framework by which you can make those efforts a reality. Brand"No amount of SEO in the world can help a crappy product or service (at least not for long)." This is a sentence I frequently utter to folks who refuse to prioritize what they offer in favor of trying to put lipstick on a pig. #1: Create a 10X product or serviceWhen your product or service is recognized as the best in its class, your job as SEO becomes much, much easier. That’s because both online and offline, people are likely saying great things about the product and brand, which leads to visits to your website, positive reviews on third-party sites, and increased sales of the product. This only occurs, however, if you focus first and foremost on creating the best product you can. Easier said than done, I know. Here’s a great place to start, depending upon where your product/service is in the evolution cycle:
#2: Customer serviceNo one who’s watched the United Airlines meltdown needs to be sold on the value of customer service as an effective asset for off-site SEO. The brand will be paying for that epic disaster for years as millions of folks continue to share the video and images of the event. It’s not hard to imagine how poor customer service has made the brand’s SEO and PR teams’ reputation management efforts a nightmare. For your brand, focus on a singular goal: Leaving everyone your brand/brand spokespeople comes into contact with — online or offline — feeling as though the interaction could not have been more positive. For example, at in-person events, make sure staffers wear a smile, empathetically interact with everyone they meet, and go out of their way to answer questions or provide general help. It also means ensuring any content you create leaves people feeling good about your brand. # 3: Focus on web searchers' intentTurns out the old cliche that “you attract more flies with honey than vinegar” is very relevant to SEO. People are typically more willing to buy and use your products and services if they can first find them. A lot of times, our products and services fail to live up to their full potential because we aren’t matching our offering to the needs of our prospective audiences. A great example of this is creating and sharing content without keywords the audience might be using to look for a similar product. In addition to matching titles, descriptions, and keyword phrases to searcher’s intent, make sure you focus on where the content is shared and discussed. It also starts with putting the needs of the audience first. “For uncovering searcher intent…[s]earch, refine, broaden queries, talk to people, read discussion threads, have empathy,” wrote Rand Fishkin in a recent tweet. Use Google Autosuggest, Keywordtool.io, and Answerthepublic.com to get in front of what it is people are looking for online relative to your product or service. AudienceThe better you know your audience, the more easily you can interact with, share with, and learn from them. What does this have to do with off-page SEO? Everything. Next to no one wakes up and decides to interact with your brand. #4: Have a responsive social media presenceA typical search comes about because a person has an unmet need (e.g., "where is the nearest pizza joint?") or has a question they’d like answered (e.g., “how tall is the biggest building in Tokyo?”). After using Google Autosuggest to find the answer, they’re likely to visit social media to learn more, ask questions, and interact with their friends, family members, and acquaintances. You see where we’re going here, right? Social media must be an invaluable component of your off-page SEO strategy. It’s much easier than most brands think, too:
As you can see, the price of unresponsiveness on social media negatively impacts far more than SEO: #5: Build connections with social media/online influencersWhen people say “Social media does nothing for my brand,” most SEOs must think, “Oh, but how wrong you are.” Whether it’s the largely unmeasurable dark traffic social sends to your site or the connections with a base of people who could be customers or supporters at some point, social media can be an asset for any brand, if used wisely. For off-page SEO, one of the biggest benefits of social is the ability to create and nurture lasting relationships with influencers, those people with huge reach in the way of name recognition, myriad followers and fans, and connections with numerous high-ranking websites. They’re also typically very much connected with other influencers. As we see in the image below, even if Google isn’t using social signals to help determine rankings, the interplay of influencers and the sites they represent, like, and visit makes being on their radar a positive. Image source An effective strategy for enlisting the help of influencers to boost your off-page SEO is to get to know them in person, at events, and online via group chats/tweets and such, which puts you on their radar without much heavy lifting on your part. Then, in the future, when you do create and share content, they’re more likely to recognize you and your brand and might share the content themselves. Even better, later on, after you’ve developed a stronger relationship, you might even collaborate on a piece of content — for their site, your site, or a publisher such as an online magazine. #6: Recommit to frequenting forums and discussion boards, and comment bloggingWant to get noticed by your desired audience and the influencers they follow? Visit the most popular blogs in your vertical, and leave comments. In recent years, comment blogging has fallen off in popularity, in large part because comment spam led to most blogs no-following their links. For the purpose of off-page SEO, links are less of a priority. Your goal is simply to be where the action is and to leave a thoughtful comment that might catch the eye of the blogger, the platform’s editor, and any influencers who might be reading the content. The same applies for sites like Reddit and Quora, where you can follow topics specifics to your brand or vertical and quickly get noticed for being knowledgeable, thoughtful, and empathetic in answering others’ questions or helping to drive discussion. The relationships formed on these platforms have a way of paying huge dividends and can be invaluable for off-page SEO and reputation management. Often someone notices your comments on one of these platforms, starts following you there, and then later does a Google or LinkedIn search to learn about you or your brand, which ultimately leads them to your website, where they might sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your blog. #7: Quit guest blogging for linksYou read that right. Instead of guest blogging solely for links, use this tactic to help you build a rapport with some of the top publishers, editors, influencers, and brands online. If done correctly, the links do come. But as long as you make links the priority, whereby it’s obvious that you’re looking for a transactional relationship as opposed to one that is mutually beneficial, the tougher it’ll be for you to use guest blogging effectively for off-page SEO. Read, leave comments on their blogs, and connect with the top publishers in your vertical — or publishers that cover your vertical. Once you have developed a rapport and, hopefully, have a reputation for creating quality content, inquire about creating a guest post for the platform, assuming that option is available. Even if that door doesn’t open, you’ll be able to hone your pitch and eventually get a foot in the door with other publishers. Remember, too, that your website is but one tiny fish in a vast ocean of options. You need to connect with others in many places off-site to build the reach and influence that’ll drive attention and visits to your site, which is where guest blogging can big a huge asset. “Should you do guest posting for SEO? As a primary objective, I’d say no. But… reality is that the indirect impact remains very powerful,” wrote Stone Temple Consulting’s Eric Enge. “There is nothing like building your reputation and visibility to cause people to want more of your content. You get to build up your own audience, and ultimately some of these people will find their way to your site, find great content there, and link to it.” ContentWhen most people say, think, or write "content," they most often think of text, images, videos, and information shared via social media. In reality, content represents the entirety of the experience your brand designs, creates, and shares online and offline, from logos and tag lines to personnel, phone calls, signage, blog text, images, videos, etc. If a prospect or customer can interacts with it, you’d better believe it’s content. And before you offer up, "Well, Ronell, what if one of my staffers has mustard on her shirt in a video we post online?" (Trust me, someone would ask that.) "Is that content, too?" Yes, that faux pas is part of the content experience a prospect or customer could have with your brand. In fact, it's the sort of thing that can lead to someone seeing your company as not having all of its ducks in a row, injuring your reputation in the process. #8: Experiment with content typesBut don't fret. When it comes to off-site SEO, the main thing I want you to focus on with regard to content is to see beyond text. I’m a writer. I love words. As a newspaper reporter, I always argued with my editor when he said “Words without images lead to words getting ignored. Images sell.” The same for video. People eat it up. You’ve no doubt heard that mobile is gobbling up the world as I write this. Well, guess what those untold millions are doing on their mobile devices? Largely consuming videos, which are expected to account for 85% of the content being shared online by 2019. Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook Live, anyone? Videos and images can be a huge boon to your brand's off-page SEO, largely because they can both be a low-investment/high potential vehicle used to drive awareness and traffic back to your site, enhancing your off-page reputation in the process. A few low-cost, low-effort ways to use video and images include:
Video and images are great way to show some personality and make your brand feel human, real, and alive to people who might not have heard of your company, or who've only recently discovered it. They can also work wonders for your off-site SEO. For example, say your brand has found that customers who visit your white papers have an increased likelihood of becoming customers. You might shoot video interviews of the subjects or clients featured in the most popular websites, then post the videos to YouTube, in addition to sharing them with the clients to post on their site and disseminate via social media. This increases the likelihood of even more people seeing the videos and wanting to learn more about your brand. It's time to think holisticallyThe complete list of off-site SEO tactics that can bring your brand success contains far more than eight elements. Our goal with this post is to spur you to think beyond what's comfortable or convenient, and instead consider what's (a) doable in a reasonable amount of time and a reasonable degree of effort, and that (b) has the potential to yield a significant amount of success. We're convinced that a brand who works diligently to deploy the tactics listed above will be better able to thrive. Recommended resources:Brand
Audience
Content
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 8 Can't-Miss Off-Page SEO Strategies to Build Your Online Reputation Posted by ronell-smith Off-page SEO is the act of optimizing your brand’s online and offline footprint through the use of content, relationships, and links to create an optimal experience for prospects and search engine crawl bots. It typically leads to gradual increases in positive brand mentions, search rankings, traffic to your site, and conversions. Sounds fairly straightforward, right? Well, for the attorney seated in front of me in my kid’s elementary school lunchroom, I might as well have just told him the earth is flat. “That makes no sense to me,” he said, pushing his chin forward and tilting his head, as if waiting for me to admit that I was pulling his leg. “You mean, there’s all this stuff [an SEO] does on my site? And there is stuff that we — me, my team and [the SEO] — should be doing off our site as well? That’s like telling me, ‘It’s not enough that you live and pay for a nice house in a gated community. You also need to guard the gate to the community and pick up trash along the road leading up to your driveway.’” His example could not have been more apt. “Not caring about off-site SEO is like having that great house in the gated community, but none of your friends want to visit because they’ve heard from others that it smells like vomit on the inside, and no one they talk to can either confirm or deny it.” I continued: “It’s not enough to only care about your website/brand or your house/neighborhood; you must always be working to enhance its reputation to ensure others will desire to visit/learn more about it.” He saw the light. “So basically we do off-site SEO to ensure the work we do onsite and as a brand are most effective?” he asked. Exactly! What off-page SEO is and why your brand cannot afford to ignore itIn the SEO world, we don’t need to be convinced of the value of off-page SEO. We know that well before people seek our brands out, they have formed an opinion of it based on reviews, comments from friends, family members, or online acquaintances, and whatever information we can glean online or offline (apart from your website). Therefore, we’d be fools to disavow making off-page SEO a priority, given how important it is. However, the more common mistake — among SEOs at least — is to see off-page SEO through only the prism of link building, which, while important, is not the be-all and end-all of off-page SEO. That is, in working to build your brand’s off-page SEO prowess, links are certainly a benefit, not the goal. Think of it this way:
So while it’s important to think of links when making off-page SEO a priority, it’s also vital that you (a) view them in context (important but not singularly so) and (b) give priority to the host of factors that lead to off-page SEO providing a boost for your brand. Those factors include, but are not limited to, creating an excellent, worthwhile product or service; guest posting on popular, relevant blogs; building relationships with influencers; earning positive press; capturing positive reviews and responding to negative reviews; and monitoring mentions of your brand, to name a few. Because our goal is to create a post that’s accessible, interesting and immediately useful, we’ll break down what we think are 8 key areas worth focusing on for off-page SEO under three umbrellas:
The intention is to provide a prism through which you can more easily categorize your efforts and a framework by which you can make those efforts a reality. Brand“No amount of SEO in the world can help a crappy product or service (at least not for long).” This is a sentence I frequently utter to folks who refuse to prioritize what they offer in favor of trying to put lipstick on a pig. #1: Create a 10X product or serviceWhen your product or service is recognized as the best in its class, your job as SEO becomes much, much easier. That’s because both online and offline, people are likely saying great things about the product and brand, which leads to visits to your website, positive reviews on third-party sites, and increased sales of the product. This only occurs, however, if you focus first and foremost on creating the best product you can. Easier said than done, I know. Here’s a great place to start, depending upon where your product/service is in the evolution cycle:
#2: Customer serviceNo one who’s watched the United Airlines meltdown needs to be sold on the value of customer service as an effective asset for off-site SEO. The brand will be paying for that epic disaster for years as millions of folks continue to share the video and images of the event. It’s not hard to imagine how poor customer service has made the brand’s SEO and PR teams’ reputation management efforts a nightmare. For your brand, focus on a singular goal: Leaving everyone your brand/brand spokespeople comes into contact with — online or offline — feeling as though the interaction could not have been more positive. For example, at in-person events, make sure staffers wear a smile, empathetically interact with everyone they meet, and go out of their way to answer questions or provide general help. It also means ensuring any content you create leaves people feeling good about your brand. # 3: Focus on web searchers’ intentTurns out the old cliche that “you attract more flies with honey than vinegar” is very relevant to SEO. People are typically more willing to buy and use your products and services if they can first find them. A lot of times, our products and services fail to live up to their full potential because we aren’t matching our offering to the needs of our prospective audiences. A great example of this is creating and sharing content without keywords the audience might be using to look for a similar product. In addition to matching titles, descriptions, and keyword phrases to searcher’s intent, make sure you focus on where the content is shared and discussed. It also starts with putting the needs of the audience first. “For uncovering searcher intent…[s]earch, refine, broaden queries, talk to people, read discussion threads, have empathy,” wrote Rand Fishkin in a recent tweet. Use Google Autosuggest, Keywordtool.io, and Answerthepublic.com to get in front of what it is people are looking for online relative to your product or service. AudienceThe better you know your audience, the more easily you can interact with, share with, and learn from them. What does this have to do with off-page SEO? Everything. Next to no one wakes up and decides to interact with your brand. #4: Have a responsive social media presenceA typical search comes about because a person has an unmet need (e.g., “where is the nearest pizza joint?”) or has a question they’d like answered (e.g., “how tall is the biggest building in Tokyo?”). After using Google Autosuggest to find the answer, they’re likely to visit social media to learn more, ask questions, and interact with their friends, family members, and acquaintances. You see where we’re going here, right? Social media must be an invaluable component of your off-page SEO strategy. It’s much easier than most brands think, too:
As you can see, the price of unresponsiveness on social media negatively impacts far more than SEO: #5: Build connections with social media/online influencersWhen people say “Social media does nothing for my brand,” most SEOs must think, “Oh, but how wrong you are.” Whether it’s the largely unmeasurable dark traffic social sends to your site or the connections with a base of people who could be customers or supporters at some point, social media can be an asset for any brand, if used wisely. For off-page SEO, one of the biggest benefits of social is the ability to create and nurture lasting relationships with influencers, those people with huge reach in the way of name recognition, myriad followers and fans, and connections with numerous high-ranking websites. They’re also typically very much connected with other influencers. As we see in the image below, even if Google isn’t using social signals to help determine rankings, the interplay of influencers and the sites they represent, like, and visit makes being on their radar a positive. Image source An effective strategy for enlisting the help of influencers to boost your off-page SEO is to get to know them in person, at events, and online via group chats/tweets and such, which puts you on their radar without much heavy lifting on your part. Then, in the future, when you do create and share content, they’re more likely to recognize you and your brand and might share the content themselves. Even better, later on, after you’ve developed a stronger relationship, you might even collaborate on a piece of content — for their site, your site, or a publisher such as an online magazine. #6: Recommit to frequenting forums and discussion boards, and comment bloggingWant to get noticed by your desired audience and the influencers they follow? Visit the most popular blogs in your vertical, and leave comments. In recent years, comment blogging has fallen off in popularity, in large part because comment spam led to most blogs no-following their links. For the purpose of off-page SEO, links are less of a priority. Your goal is simply to be where the action is and to leave a thoughtful comment that might catch the eye of the blogger, the platform’s editor, and any influencers who might be reading the content. The same applies for sites like Reddit and Quora, where you can follow topics specifics to your brand or vertical and quickly get noticed for being knowledgeable, thoughtful, and empathetic in answering others’ questions or helping to drive discussion. The relationships formed on these platforms have a way of paying huge dividends and can be invaluable for off-page SEO and reputation management. Often someone notices your comments on one of these platforms, starts following you there, and then later does a Google or LinkedIn search to learn about you or your brand, which ultimately leads them to your website, where they might sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your blog. #7: Quit guest blogging for linksYou read that right. Instead of guest blogging solely for links, use this tactic to help you build a rapport with some of the top publishers, editors, influencers, and brands online. If done correctly, the links do come. But as long as you make links the priority, whereby it’s obvious that you’re looking for a transactional relationship as opposed to one that is mutually beneficial, the tougher it’ll be for you to use guest blogging effectively for off-page SEO. Read, leave comments on their blogs, and connect with the top publishers in your vertical — or publishers that cover your vertical. Once you have developed a rapport and, hopefully, have a reputation for creating quality content, inquire about creating a guest post for the platform, assuming that option is available. Even if that door doesn’t open, you’ll be able to hone your pitch and eventually get a foot in the door with other publishers. Remember, too, that your website is but one tiny fish in a vast ocean of options. You need to connect with others in many places off-site to build the reach and influence that’ll drive attention and visits to your site, which is where guest blogging can big a huge asset. “Should you do guest posting for SEO? As a primary objective, I’d say no. But… reality is that the indirect impact remains very powerful,” wrote Stone Temple Consulting’s Eric Enge. “There is nothing like building your reputation and visibility to cause people to want more of your content. You get to build up your own audience, and ultimately some of these people will find their way to your site, find great content there, and link to it.” ContentWhen most people say, think, or write “content,” they most often think of text, images, videos, and information shared via social media. In reality, content represents the entirety of the experience your brand designs, creates, and shares online and offline, from logos and tag lines to personnel, phone calls, signage, blog text, images, videos, etc. If a prospect or customer can interacts with it, you’d better believe it’s content. And before you offer up, “Well, Ronell, what if one of my staffers has mustard on her shirt in a video we post online?” (Trust me, someone would ask that.) “Is that content, too?” Yes, that faux pas is part of the content experience a prospect or customer could have with your brand. In fact, it’s the sort of thing that can lead to someone seeing your company as not having all of its ducks in a row, injuring your reputation in the process. #8: Experiment with content typesBut don’t fret. When it comes to off-site SEO, the main thing I want you to focus on with regard to content is to see beyond text. I’m a writer. I love words. As a newspaper reporter, I always argued with my editor when he said “Words without images lead to words getting ignored. Images sell.” The same for video. People eat it up. You’ve no doubt heard that mobile is gobbling up the world as I write this. Well, guess what those untold millions are doing on their mobile devices? Largely consuming videos, which are expected to account for 85% of the content being shared online by 2019. Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook Live, anyone? Videos and images can be a huge boon to your brand’s off-page SEO, largely because they can both be a low-investment/high potential vehicle used to drive awareness and traffic back to your site, enhancing your off-page reputation in the process. A few low-cost, low-effort ways to use video and images include:
Video and images are great way to show some personality and make your brand feel human, real, and alive to people who might not have heard of your company, or who’ve only recently discovered it. They can also work wonders for your off-site SEO. For example, say your brand has found that customers who visit your white papers have an increased likelihood of becoming customers. You might shoot video interviews of the subjects or clients featured in the most popular websites, then post the videos to YouTube, in addition to sharing them with the clients to post on their site and disseminate via social media. This increases the likelihood of even more people seeing the videos and wanting to learn more about your brand. It’s time to think holisticallyThe complete list of off-site SEO tactics that can bring your brand success contains far more than eight elements. Our goal with this post is to spur you to think beyond what’s comfortable or convenient, and instead consider what’s (a) doable in a reasonable amount of time and a reasonable degree of effort, and that (b) has the potential to yield a significant amount of success. We’re convinced that a brand who works diligently to deploy the tactics listed above will be better able to thrive. Recommended resources:Brand
Audience
Content
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 8 Can't-Miss Off-Page SEO Strategies to Build Your Online Reputation Posted by sam.nemzer While working at Distilled, I often come across issues with implementing technical SEO changes to websites. This can be for a variety of reasons: some sites have rigid CMSs that don’t allow for customization, while others have development queues of many months (or years, in some cases!). In these cases, it doesn’t matter how good a job we do identifying the changes that need to be made in order to improve a site’s performance — if nothing can be implemented, our advice is worthless. Something we like to say at Distilled is that “it's not our job to deliver reports, it's our job to effect change.” In order to make this a reality for clients with the types of issues I mention above, it’s necessary to explore alternative ways of getting changes made. One option for this is to implement some sort of "meta-CMS." This is a system that sits on top of an existing CMS, and allows you to make specific changes to pages on a site, bypassing the technical and/or technical constraints that a CMS may entail. <plug> While also having the ability to split-test SEO changes across groups of pages on a website, our own DistilledODN tool can be (and is being) used for this purpose. </plug> For sites for which a meta-CMS is not an option, a third solution is to use a tag management system (when one is installed and configured). In this article I’ll be referencing Google Tag Manager (GTM), which is the most widely used tag manager (accounting for 72.6% of the tag management market, according to BuiltWith.com). Tag managers use a single JavaScript container tag to inject various different tags (e.g. tracking, remarketing, and CRO tags) into webpages. The benefit of this is that in order to add or amend tags, it’s not necessary for a developer to make any changes to the page; changes can be made to the tags within a container and these tags will be implemented on the page. Tag managers are mostly used to implement off-the-shelf tags, like Google Analytics or Facebook tracking. A lesser-known functionality is to implement custom HTML snippets (which can include JavaScript code). This allows you to make any arbitrary changes you like to the HTML of a page (or set of pages) based on rules you define. A benefit of using tag managers is that you can apply changes to pages at scale across a site with a single tag. This allows us to bypass CMS restrictions and development queues, directly applying changes to things like page titles, canonical tags, and on-page content. Because tag managers use JavaScript to implement tags, in the past it hasn’t been seen as a reliable way to make SEO changes. The traditional thinking has been that, in terms of making SEO changes, Google (and other search engines) can’t reliably execute JavaScript, so any changes made with JavaScript would likely be ignored. However, recently, we are seeing evidence that changes are being picked up by Google, including implementation through tag managers. This article will show a few examples of this in action, and how to implement these sorts of changes on your site. How to make any HTML change using GTMThe sorts of changes we’re interested in involve either adding in new elements to a page, amending the content or attributes of elements, or removing elements from a page. For each of these, you’ll potentially need knowledge around:
For example, there are simple elements you can add into a page that don’t require anything to be extracted from the page (other than the page URL, which is an inbuilt variable in GTM). On the other hand, there are more complex changes, such as adding in product structured data on e-commerce sites, that require you to extract data from the page (e.g. product names, prices, etc). If you’re not technical and just want to be able to implement changes in GTM, I’ll include an off-the-shelf GTM container at the end of this post, with instructions on how to use it. *If your site has jQuery loaded, it will be much easier to extract and write elements to a page. In order to check this, you can open the Console while viewing the page in Chrome or Firefox and type “jQuery” (case-sensitive). If jQuery is not loaded, you will see an error message. Inserting an elementIn order to insert an element into an HTML page, you can use a custom HTML tag in GTM. Below is an example of a custom HTML tag that inserts a meta robots noindex tag to the page. This below example uses jQuery, but you can do the same thing without jQuery if need be. <script> // Removes any existing meta robots tag jQuery('meta[name="robots"]').remove(); // Create an empty meta element, called 'meta' var meta = document.createElement('meta'); // Add a name attribute to the meta, with the value 'robots' meta.name = 'robots'; // Add a content attribute to the meta element, with the value 'noindex, follow' meta.content = 'noindex, follow'; // Insert this meta element into the head of the page, using jQuery jQuery('head').append(meta); </script> This snippet will add a meta robots noindex, follow element, after deleting any existing meta robots elements, to every page to which it applies. In GTM, every tag is associated with at least one trigger, which tells the container when the tag should be applied. For any changes we want Google to take note of, we want the tags to trigger as soon as the page loads. We can decide which pages the tag should load on using any variable we like to specify pages. The above HTML tag can be amended to create other types of elements. These are explored in the example section below. Extracting data from the pageThere are two approaches to extracting data from a page. You can either use GTM’s inbuilt variables, which allow you to extract the text or an attribute of an element based on CSS selectors, or do the same with JavaScript and/or jQuery within the custom HTML tag. In the context of SEO changes, the most common place where you’ll want to extract data from the page would be to construct structured data markup using JSON-LD. In order to demonstrate the different methods, I’ll show a way of constructing product markup by extracting items both in GTM variables and within a custom HTML tag. For this example, we can imagine a site with product pages that have data about their products each given unique IDs within the HTML of the page. In reality, you’ll need to find CSS selectors that give you the exact elements you’re looking for. A great tool for this is the Selector Gadget Chrome extension that allows you to find a unique CSS selector for any element on a page. For our example, let’s imagine the following IDs:
Using GTM variablesIf you’re using GTM variables to pull the data out of the page, you’ll need to set up a variable for each of the above elements. You can do this by going to the Variables menu and clicking "NEW" under "User-Defined Variables." For each of the above elements, define a new "DOM Element"-type variable, using an ID or CSS selector appropriate to each item. For all of the above, you’ll want to leave the "Attribute Name" field blank except for the image, where you’ll want to extract the src attribute. In order to pull these variables into some JSON-LD markup, we’ll need to set up a custom HTML tag that references them. Note that, in order to reference a GTM variable, you need to wrap them in double curly brackets. Also note that we’ve referenced “Page URL,” which is a default built-in variable in GTM. The last four lines of this script are turning the jsonData element into part of a script element, with type “application/ld+json,” to be injected into the head of the page. Using jQueryWe can do the same thing as the above without touching GTM variables, instead using a single HTML tag. In this case, we need to use jQuery to do the same job that the GTM variables are doing. This HTMl tag is very similar to the one using variables, except in place of each variable, it uses jQuery to extract data from the page. Obviously this is only possible for pages that have jQuery loaded, but equivalent expressions are possible in JS without jQuery. The advantage of this method is that you don’t need to set up individual variables for each element — all of the information is contained in this one tag. On the other hand, if you have variables being referenced by many different tags and/or triggers, it makes sense to use variables, as if and when you need to change the definition of the variable, it will apply to all tags and triggers without the need to change each individual one. Does it work?This is all very well and good, as long as Google actually sees and indexes the changes that are being made via GTM. As mentioned above, there is uncertainty as to whether Google can index (and even then, whether it respects) markup and content implemented through JavaScript. I have three examples from the last couple of months of changes being made through GTM, and immediately respected by Google. 1. JSON-LD structured data markupWith the above example, using both the jQuery and variable methods, we can see rich snippets in search results, where there is no structured data at all on the page before GTM applies it. The below snippet is from a dummy page where a product snippet has been applied. 2. Canonical tagsWe have also seen evidence of Google paying attention to canonical tags implemented through GTM. The below chart (taken from STAT) shows the number of keywords for which a page ranked, before and after a canonical tag was implemented using GTM. After the implementation, the page stopped ranking for any keywords, and the destination of the canonical tag started ranking in its place. 3. Mobile switchboard tagsIn this example, a site had separate desktop and mobile versions on different subdomains. Mobile switchboard tags were implemented on the desktop site using GTM, and immediately pages on the mobile subdomain began being indexed. Some examples of tagsAll of the below tags can be found in this dummy GTM container. They are applicable only for sites that have jQuery loaded. In order to implement the tags, take the following steps:
Tag to insert mobile switchboard tagsIf you have a separate mobile site with the same page and URL structure, this tag can add in switch tags, replacing "www" with "m" in domain names. It will also add a canonical tag to mobile pages that don’t already have one, pointing to their direct desktop equivalents. You can customize this tag to have whatever subdomain your mobile site is on by changing the domains on lines 3, 8, 12, and 16. Tag to add noindex tagThis is identical to the tag mentioned above. Take care with the trigger if you use this — you don’t want to accidentally noindex every page on your site! This tag will remove any existing meta robots tag, and write a "noindex follow" meta robots tag. A potential use case for this would be to noindex any product pages for out-of-stock products. You could use a trigger that detects an "out of stock" in a particular element on the page, and automatically adds in a noindex tag when that is the case. Tag to add self-referential canonicalThis will add a canonical tag to pages, pointing to themselves — or, if the page has URL parameters, pointing to a parameterless version of the page. Take care when implementing this on pages that are intended to canonical to other pages (including on separate mobile sites), as it will overwrite any existing canonical tags. Also make sure that you do not implement it on a page that has parameters, and is not intended to canonicalize to the version of the page without parameters (e.g. paginated versions of pages). Tag to insert breadcrumb structured dataThis tag cycles through any breadcrumb elements that share a CSS selector on a page, and writes them into JSON-LD. It then takes either the canonical URL of the current page, or the current URL if no canonical exists, and writes that as the final breadcrumb element. This tag is named "Insert Breadcrumb Markup to Any Page." Within the tag, you should rename the "selector_for_breadcrumb_link" on lines 8 and 29 of the tag to be a CSS selector of the breadcrumb links on the page. Tag to insert product structured dataThis is the jQuery example discussed above. Replace the IDs within the selectors of the specific elements you wish to include in the structured data. If there are no aggregate ratings, remove lines 16–21. 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 How to Implement SEO Changes Using Google Tag Manager Posted by sam.nemzer While working at Distilled, I often come across issues with implementing technical SEO changes to websites. This can be for a variety of reasons: some sites have rigid CMSs that don’t allow for customization, while others have development queues of many months (or years, in some cases!). In these cases, it doesn’t matter how good a job we do identifying the changes that need to be made in order to improve a site’s performance — if nothing can be implemented, our advice is worthless. Something we like to say at Distilled is that “it’s not our job to deliver reports, it’s our job to effect change.” In order to make this a reality for clients with the types of issues I mention above, it’s necessary to explore alternative ways of getting changes made. One option for this is to implement some sort of “meta-CMS.” This is a system that sits on top of an existing CMS, and allows you to make specific changes to pages on a site, bypassing the technical and/or technical constraints that a CMS may entail. <plug> While also having the ability to split-test SEO changes across groups of pages on a website, our own DistilledODN tool can be (and is being) used for this purpose. </plug> For sites for which a meta-CMS is not an option, a third solution is to use a tag management system (when one is installed and configured). In this article I’ll be referencing Google Tag Manager (GTM), which is the most widely used tag manager (accounting for 72.6% of the tag management market, according to BuiltWith.com). Tag managers use a single JavaScript container tag to inject various different tags (e.g. tracking, remarketing, and CRO tags) into webpages. The benefit of this is that in order to add or amend tags, it’s not necessary for a developer to make any changes to the page; changes can be made to the tags within a container and these tags will be implemented on the page. Tag managers are mostly used to implement off-the-shelf tags, like Google Analytics or Facebook tracking. A lesser-known functionality is to implement custom HTML snippets (which can include JavaScript code). This allows you to make any arbitrary changes you like to the HTML of a page (or set of pages) based on rules you define. A benefit of using tag managers is that you can apply changes to pages at scale across a site with a single tag. This allows us to bypass CMS restrictions and development queues, directly applying changes to things like page titles, canonical tags, and on-page content. Because tag managers use JavaScript to implement tags, in the past it hasn’t been seen as a reliable way to make SEO changes. The traditional thinking has been that, in terms of making SEO changes, Google (and other search engines) can’t reliably execute JavaScript, so any changes made with JavaScript would likely be ignored. However, recently, we are seeing evidence that changes are being picked up by Google, including implementation through tag managers. This article will show a few examples of this in action, and how to implement these sorts of changes on your site. How to make any HTML change using GTMThe sorts of changes we’re interested in involve either adding in new elements to a page, amending the content or attributes of elements, or removing elements from a page. For each of these, you’ll potentially need knowledge around:
For example, there are simple elements you can add into a page that don’t require anything to be extracted from the page (other than the page URL, which is an inbuilt variable in GTM). On the other hand, there are more complex changes, such as adding in product structured data on e-commerce sites, that require you to extract data from the page (e.g. product names, prices, etc). If you’re not technical and just want to be able to implement changes in GTM, I’ll include an off-the-shelf GTM container at the end of this post, with instructions on how to use it. *If your site has jQuery loaded, it will be much easier to extract and write elements to a page. In order to check this, you can open the Console while viewing the page in Chrome or Firefox and type “jQuery” (case-sensitive). If jQuery is not loaded, you will see an error message. Inserting an elementIn order to insert an element into an HTML page, you can use a custom HTML tag in GTM. Below is an example of a custom HTML tag that inserts a meta robots noindex tag to the page. This below example uses jQuery, but you can do the same thing without jQuery if need be. <script> // Removes any existing meta robots tag jQuery('meta[name="robots"]').remove(); // Create an empty meta element, called 'meta' var meta = document.createElement('meta'); // Add a name attribute to the meta, with the value 'robots' meta.name = 'robots'; // Add a content attribute to the meta element, with the value 'noindex, follow' meta.content = 'noindex, follow'; // Insert this meta element into the head of the page, using jQuery jQuery('head').append(meta); </script> This snippet will add a meta robots noindex, follow element, after deleting any existing meta robots elements, to every page to which it applies. In GTM, every tag is associated with at least one trigger, which tells the container when the tag should be applied. For any changes we want Google to take note of, we want the tags to trigger as soon as the page loads. We can decide which pages the tag should load on using any variable we like to specify pages. The above HTML tag can be amended to create other types of elements. These are explored in the example section below. Extracting data from the pageThere are two approaches to extracting data from a page. You can either use GTM’s inbuilt variables, which allow you to extract the text or an attribute of an element based on CSS selectors, or do the same with JavaScript and/or jQuery within the custom HTML tag. In the context of SEO changes, the most common place where you’ll want to extract data from the page would be to construct structured data markup using JSON-LD. In order to demonstrate the different methods, I’ll show a way of constructing product markup by extracting items both in GTM variables and within a custom HTML tag. For this example, we can imagine a site with product pages that have data about their products each given unique IDs within the HTML of the page. In reality, you’ll need to find CSS selectors that give you the exact elements you’re looking for. A great tool for this is the Selector Gadget Chrome extension that allows you to find a unique CSS selector for any element on a page. For our example, let’s imagine the following IDs:
Using GTM variablesIf you’re using GTM variables to pull the data out of the page, you’ll need to set up a variable for each of the above elements. You can do this by going to the Variables menu and clicking “NEW” under “User-Defined Variables.” For each of the above elements, define a new “DOM Element”-type variable, using an ID or CSS selector appropriate to each item. For all of the above, you’ll want to leave the “Attribute Name” field blank except for the image, where you’ll want to extract the src attribute. In order to pull these variables into some JSON-LD markup, we’ll need to set up a custom HTML tag that references them. Note that, in order to reference a GTM variable, you need to wrap them in double curly brackets. Also note that we’ve referenced “Page URL,” which is a default built-in variable in GTM. The last four lines of this script are turning the jsonData element into part of a script element, with type “application/ld+json,” to be injected into the head of the page. Using jQueryWe can do the same thing as the above without touching GTM variables, instead using a single HTML tag. In this case, we need to use jQuery to do the same job that the GTM variables are doing. This HTMl tag is very similar to the one using variables, except in place of each variable, it uses jQuery to extract data from the page. Obviously this is only possible for pages that have jQuery loaded, but equivalent expressions are possible in JS without jQuery. The advantage of this method is that you don’t need to set up individual variables for each element — all of the information is contained in this one tag. On the other hand, if you have variables being referenced by many different tags and/or triggers, it makes sense to use variables, as if and when you need to change the definition of the variable, it will apply to all tags and triggers without the need to change each individual one. Does it work?This is all very well and good, as long as Google actually sees and indexes the changes that are being made via GTM. As mentioned above, there is uncertainty as to whether Google can index (and even then, whether it respects) markup and content implemented through JavaScript. I have three examples from the last couple of months of changes being made through GTM, and immediately respected by Google. 1. JSON-LD structured data markupWith the above example, using both the jQuery and variable methods, we can see rich snippets in search results, where there is no structured data at all on the page before GTM applies it. The below snippet is from a dummy page where a product snippet has been applied. 2. Canonical tagsWe have also seen evidence of Google paying attention to canonical tags implemented through GTM. The below chart (taken from STAT) shows the number of keywords for which a page ranked, before and after a canonical tag was implemented using GTM. After the implementation, the page stopped ranking for any keywords, and the destination of the canonical tag started ranking in its place. 3. Mobile switchboard tagsIn this example, a site had separate desktop and mobile versions on different subdomains. Mobile switchboard tags were implemented on the desktop site using GTM, and immediately pages on the mobile subdomain began being indexed. Some examples of tagsAll of the below tags can be found in this dummy GTM container. They are applicable only for sites that have jQuery loaded. In order to implement the tags, take the following steps:
Tag to insert mobile switchboard tagsIf you have a separate mobile site with the same page and URL structure, this tag can add in switch tags, replacing “www” with “m” in domain names. It will also add a canonical tag to mobile pages that don’t already have one, pointing to their direct desktop equivalents. You can customize this tag to have whatever subdomain your mobile site is on by changing the domains on lines 3, 8, 12, and 16. Tag to add noindex tagThis is identical to the tag mentioned above. Take care with the trigger if you use this — you don’t want to accidentally noindex every page on your site! This tag will remove any existing meta robots tag, and write a “noindex follow” meta robots tag. A potential use case for this would be to noindex any product pages for out-of-stock products. You could use a trigger that detects an “out of stock” in a particular element on the page, and automatically adds in a noindex tag when that is the case. Tag to add self-referential canonicalThis will add a canonical tag to pages, pointing to themselves — or, if the page has URL parameters, pointing to a parameterless version of the page. Take care when implementing this on pages that are intended to canonical to other pages (including on separate mobile sites), as it will overwrite any existing canonical tags. Also make sure that you do not implement it on a page that has parameters, and is not intended to canonicalize to the version of the page without parameters (e.g. paginated versions of pages). Tag to insert breadcrumb structured dataThis tag cycles through any breadcrumb elements that share a CSS selector on a page, and writes them into JSON-LD. It then takes either the canonical URL of the current page, or the current URL if no canonical exists, and writes that as the final breadcrumb element. This tag is named “Insert Breadcrumb Markup to Any Page.” Within the tag, you should rename the “selector_for_breadcrumb_link” on lines 8 and 29 of the tag to be a CSS selector of the breadcrumb links on the page. Tag to insert product structured dataThis is the jQuery example discussed above. Replace the IDs within the selectors of the specific elements you wish to include in the structured data. If there are no aggregate ratings, remove lines 16–21. 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 How to Implement SEO Changes Using Google Tag Manager Posted by rjonesx. Historically, keyword research has often been limited to to keyword selection. This is not to say that keyword selection isn't important; in fact, identifying a small set of keywords to write a piece of content on, or target for a particular page, is still one of the most important skills an SEO should master. However, the maturation of keyword tools has given us far more uses than this singular skill. Unlike tools of the past, we aren't limited to the standard process of "keyword in, keywords out." In this post, I hope to show how a keyword tool like Keyword Explorer can be used to accomplish far more than page-level keyword targeting, bringing keyword research out of the realm of mere keyword selection. Know thyself: What can my site rank for?The Greek philosopher Plato explained in Phaedrus that it would be silly to investigate things external to him without first knowing the truth about himself. This aphorism is especially true when we consider problems in keyword research where the results returned are only meaningful in the context of our own site. A keyword difficulty score of 60 is meaningless without knowing your current state (perhaps I own Amazon.com and will have no problem ranking for such a term, or perhaps I'm a new site and have no chance). Thus, I believe all keyword research should begin with this simple process of determining your website's current limits. We're going to use Keyword Explorer to identify the average keyword difficulty of keywords for which you already rank so you have a benchmark with which to test all future keywords. Step 1: Exporting data from Google Search ConsoleI know some of you are already thinking — hey, Russ, didn't you just write an exposé on how this data in Google Search Console is unreliable? Well, yes, I did. So what? Sometimes you have to work with what you've got. In this case, Google Search Console actually happens to provide more than sufficient information for us to accomplish our goal. The first step is to order your Queries in Search Console by Clicks and choose to show Position as well. Why GSC? Perhaps you want to use a SERP corpus like SEMRush, SpyFu, or AHrefs for this purpose. I would recommend against it in this case. Using actual clicks rather than estimated clicks can prevent keywords from showing up in your list for which you have a national presence but are actually rarely seen by users because the term generates a geographically influenced SERP. Step 2: Export the data and filter for position 4 or betterThe goal here is to limit ourselves only to keywords that are in a position to drive traffic. Since our data is already sorted by clicks, our most powerful and valuable keywords are at the top. Pro tip: You might also choose to exclude branded keywords by filtering out your brand in the keyword column. Step 3: Copy and paste keywords into a Keyword Explorer listHead over to Moz Keyword Explorer and copy the keywords into a new list. You might want to name the list something like "Keyword Difficulty Average" to remember its purpose. Add your top 750 keywords and hit submit. Step 4: Analyze the resultsNow that your list is complete and Keyword Explorer has finished building your report, you have great data with which to work. You can look at the summary statistics to get an idea of the average keyword difficulty, but I prefer to use the charts. If you look at my example below, it seems like most of my keywords fall in the 21–40 range, and a handful in the 41–60, but there is a stark drop-off in the 61–80. If I imagine a curved line connecting the bars in the chart, I can see that it probably peaks somewhere around the 35–40 range, which is likely the highest I should regularly target for keywords. Pro Tip: Export the results to Excel and use a histogram via the Data Analysis package to get an even better threshold. ConclusionNow that I have a strong understanding of what my site can rank for effectively, I can continue my keyword research in earnest. Keyword difficulty scores now have meaning to me that is relevant and useful — I know what I can and can't rank for. Of course, you can use this metric to help you with your regular keyword research from here on out (I would recommend you update this list with new keywords from GSC quarterly). But let's explore some other interesting uses of Keyword Explorer now that we know our average keyword difficulty. How long-tail should I go?One of the great things about keyword lists in Moz Keyword Explorer is the ability to compare a group of keywords, enabling you to make directory and site-wide decisions that are more far-reaching than standard page-by-page keyword discovery. In this first tutorial, I'm going to walk through a hypothetical situation where a website is trying to decide how far down the long-tail they should go in creating product categories. Imagine for a moment that you have a website that sells apparel — in particular, you sell shirts. You sell both long-sleeve and short-sleeve, and for each of those you sell v-neck, crew-neck, and turtleneck. Finally, you offer 8 colors of each (red, blue, navy, green, orange, white, black, grey). So let's get started. We will consider those 3 different potential levels of site architecture (shirts, collar types, colors). Step 1: Find the different potential depthsWe're going to start by using a hugely useful tool: Keyword Mixer. We start by putting each one of those categories into one of the columns in Keyword Mixer. When we hit "combine," it will create a list of all the keyword combinations of these 3 potential categories. Next, we do the same thing, but we put the colors into the 2nd column along side the collar types. This will give us a list like "long-sleeve shirt red" and "short-sleeve shirt turtleneck". Finally, we make a single list of just all the categories, which will give us a list with keywords like "long-sleeve shirt" or "red" or "v-neck." Step 2: Create separate keyword lists for eachCopy and paste each of the lists generated by Keyword Mixer into separate keyword lists. As you can see below in this example, I made 3 different lists. Pro tip: Try changing the order of keywords, like putting the properties before the product type. For example, most people would search for Red Long-Sleeve Shirt, not Long-Sleeve Shirt Red. This will require that you create more lists, but you might find an even better potential architecture. Step 3: Compare metricsIn the crude example above, the flatter architecture was the best, where we didn't use every possible combination of every type of product. Why? It turns out the long-tail keywords get almost no traffic and the keyword difficulty is just as high, if not higher. Of course, if you follow the pro tip above, you might find an even better combination. Using Keyword Mixer in combination with Keyword Explorer gives the the ability to predict which type of content architecture you should create for your eCommerce site. Finally, you can compare this to your average keyword difficulty measurement above to make sure you use a category depth that is achievable. Perhaps the "best" category option is not actually available to your site because it has too high an average keyword difficulty. How should I organize my local pages?One interesting problem presented to me when I was a consultant many years ago was a deceptively simple question: "Which should I use in my local results, zip codes or cities?" The company had an expansive service area and they were trying to decide between having all their local pages organized by zip or by city. At the time, I used an elaborate set of spreadsheets, scraped SERPs, and API calls to try do exactly what takes just minutes in Keyword Explorer. I'll walk you through the details. Step 1: Build the keyword listsWe return to our good friend Keyword Mixer here. We start by entering in the cities for which we have coverage and the keywords we would like to target. We then repeat the same process but replace the cities with the zip codes. Step 2: Copy and paste into new Keyword Explorer listsFollow the normal procedures and copy and paste, waiting for Keyword Explorer to calculate all the important metrics. Step 3: Compare metricsFinally, we compare the metrics of the two groups of keywords. In this case, while there was similar keyword difficulty, there was slightly more traffic available when using the city rather than the zip code. The best part about this methodology is you can answer the question with good data in a matter of minutes. In this example, I only used a couple of cities and a couple of keywords. This could be expanded out to dozens of cities or zip codes and hundreds of keywords, all to the same effect, in just the same amount of time. A year's worth of content in a day: content calendarsThis doesn't exactly take advantage of the list features dramatically, but it does make it easy for you to plan out content several months in advance. The earlier you get writing prompts into the hands of your authors, the more likely they can hit their deadlines. Let's walk through the steps of building content recommendations with Keyword Explorer. Step 1: Finding related topicsEveryone pretty much knows their primary keywords. If you're an attorney, you know the word "attorney." If you're a landscaper you know the word landscaping. But how do you take that general term and identify topics that might be worth writing on? Well, Keyword Explorer does it better than anyone else (and I'm prepared to go to the mat defending that!) Head on over to Keyword Explorer and drop in your primary keyword like "landscaping" and choose "closely related topics." Finally, sort by "Volume" rather than relevancy, since you're looking for generally related topics, not highly related terms. Step 2: Select your topicsJust run through the list and try to pick out a handful of general topics. In this case, from the word "landscaping" we were able to select "gardens," "green roof," "gazebos," "water conservation," "pergolas," "rain garden," "hardscape," and "water garden." Notice that all these great topics showed up in just the top 20 options. We could easily find dozens more just by scrolling down the list. Step 3: Find and group questions related to topicsQuestions make for easy writing prompts, and questions that actually get traffic are even better! Copy and paste each keyword, one at a time, into Keyword Explorer. From the same filter drop-downs choose "Are Questions" and "Group by Medium Lexical Similarity." You can fool around with the lexical similarity metric to have tighter or looser groupings. If you use the word "pergola," as we did in the example below, you will find several questions that are directly related to the topic and, importantly, are representative of several terms. For example, the question "How to Build a Pergola over an Existing Patio" is actually representative of 9 terms, which means writing on this topic will give you a good chance to rank for several terms, rather than just one. Step 4: Create a new list and start adding the questions you discoverThis is the easy part. Just click the checkbox next to the questions and add them to your list. You should repeat this step with every topic you discover. In my case, I was able to come up with over 75 article ideas, each representing 3 or more related questions, in under 10 minutes. Step 5: Collect and compare metricsAlways remember your original average keyword difficulty number. This is hugely valuable in scoping out your content calendar because you can easily exclude writing prompts that are too competitive. Click into your list in Keyword Explorer and sort by potential, remembering to ignore those with a keyword difficulty higher than your average keyword difficulty. Pro tip: Group your keywords into topic-specific lists, so you can compare the keyword metrics at a topic level as well. Use this list to prioritize out a steady schedule of content creation. Of course, a lot more goes into creating a content calendar than just finding content to write about, but I often find that brainstorming content is one of the more time-consuming projects. ConclusionsKeyword tools aren't just for page-by-page keyword selection anymore. Smart features like lexical grouping, related topics, and list comparison allow you to accomplish far more than ever before, rather than just staring at a long list of phrase-match keywords. Taking the time to learn the features of these more-powerful-than-ever tools will mean greater efficiency and smarter decisions. 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 Not Your Dad's Keyword Tool: Advanced Keyword Research Use Cases Posted by rjonesx. Historically, keyword research has often been limited to to keyword selection. This is not to say that keyword selection isn’t important; in fact, identifying a small set of keywords to write a piece of content on, or target for a particular page, is still one of the most important skills an SEO should master. However, the maturation of keyword tools has given us far more uses than this singular skill. Unlike tools of the past, we aren’t limited to the standard process of “keyword in, keywords out.” In this post, I hope to show how a keyword tool like Keyword Explorer can be used to accomplish far more than page-level keyword targeting, bringing keyword research out of the realm of mere keyword selection. Know thyself: What can my site rank for?The Greek philosopher Plato explained in Phaedrus that it would be silly to investigate things external to him without first knowing the truth about himself. This aphorism is especially true when we consider problems in keyword research where the results returned are only meaningful in the context of our own site. A keyword difficulty score of 60 is meaningless without knowing your current state (perhaps I own Amazon.com and will have no problem ranking for such a term, or perhaps I’m a new site and have no chance). Thus, I believe all keyword research should begin with this simple process of determining your website’s current limits. We’re going to use Keyword Explorer to identify the average keyword difficulty of keywords for which you already rank so you have a benchmark with which to test all future keywords. Step 1: Exporting data from Google Search ConsoleI know some of you are already thinking — hey, Russ, didn’t you just write an exposé on how this data in Google Search Console is unreliable? Well, yes, I did. So what? Sometimes you have to work with what you’ve got. In this case, Google Search Console actually happens to provide more than sufficient information for us to accomplish our goal. The first step is to order your Queries in Search Console by Clicks and choose to show Position as well. Why GSC? Perhaps you want to use a SERP corpus like SEMRush, SpyFu, or AHrefs for this purpose. I would recommend against it in this case. Using actual clicks rather than estimated clicks can prevent keywords from showing up in your list for which you have a national presence but are actually rarely seen by users because the term generates a geographically influenced SERP. Step 2: Export the data and filter for position 4 or betterThe goal here is to limit ourselves only to keywords that are in a position to drive traffic. Since our data is already sorted by clicks, our most powerful and valuable keywords are at the top. Pro tip: You might also choose to exclude branded keywords by filtering out your brand in the keyword column. Step 3: Copy and paste keywords into a Keyword Explorer listHead over to Moz Keyword Explorer and copy the keywords into a new list. You might want to name the list something like “Keyword Difficulty Average” to remember its purpose. Add your top 750 keywords and hit submit. Step 4: Analyze the resultsNow that your list is complete and Keyword Explorer has finished building your report, you have great data with which to work. You can look at the summary statistics to get an idea of the average keyword difficulty, but I prefer to use the charts. If you look at my example below, it seems like most of my keywords fall in the 21–40 range, and a handful in the 41–60, but there is a stark drop-off in the 61–80. If I imagine a curved line connecting the bars in the chart, I can see that it probably peaks somewhere around the 35–40 range, which is likely the highest I should regularly target for keywords. Pro Tip: Export the results to Excel and use a histogram via the Data Analysis package to get an even better threshold. ConclusionNow that I have a strong understanding of what my site can rank for effectively, I can continue my keyword research in earnest. Keyword difficulty scores now have meaning to me that is relevant and useful — I know what I can and can’t rank for. Of course, you can use this metric to help you with your regular keyword research from here on out (I would recommend you update this list with new keywords from GSC quarterly). But let’s explore some other interesting uses of Keyword Explorer now that we know our average keyword difficulty. How long-tail should I go?One of the great things about keyword lists in Moz Keyword Explorer is the ability to compare a group of keywords, enabling you to make directory and site-wide decisions that are more far-reaching than standard page-by-page keyword discovery. In this first tutorial, I’m going to walk through a hypothetical situation where a website is trying to decide how far down the long-tail they should go in creating product categories. Imagine for a moment that you have a website that sells apparel — in particular, you sell shirts. You sell both long-sleeve and short-sleeve, and for each of those you sell v-neck, crew-neck, and turtleneck. Finally, you offer 8 colors of each (red, blue, navy, green, orange, white, black, grey). So let’s get started. We will consider those 3 different potential levels of site architecture (shirts, collar types, colors). Step 1: Find the different potential depthsWe’re going to start by using a hugely useful tool: Keyword Mixer. We start by putting each one of those categories into one of the columns in Keyword Mixer. When we hit “combine,” it will create a list of all the keyword combinations of these 3 potential categories. Next, we do the same thing, but we put the colors into the 2nd column along side the collar types. This will give us a list like “long-sleeve shirt red” and “short-sleeve shirt turtleneck”. Finally, we make a single list of just all the categories, which will give us a list with keywords like “long-sleeve shirt” or “red” or “v-neck.” Step 2: Create separate keyword lists for eachCopy and paste each of the lists generated by Keyword Mixer into separate keyword lists. As you can see below in this example, I made 3 different lists. Pro tip: Try changing the order of keywords, like putting the properties before the product type. For example, most people would search for Red Long-Sleeve Shirt, not Long-Sleeve Shirt Red. This will require that you create more lists, but you might find an even better potential architecture. Step 3: Compare metricsIn the crude example above, the flatter architecture was the best, where we didn’t use every possible combination of every type of product. Why? It turns out the long-tail keywords get almost no traffic and the keyword difficulty is just as high, if not higher. Of course, if you follow the pro tip above, you might find an even better combination. Using Keyword Mixer in combination with Keyword Explorer gives the the ability to predict which type of content architecture you should create for your eCommerce site. Finally, you can compare this to your average keyword difficulty measurement above to make sure you use a category depth that is achievable. Perhaps the “best” category option is not actually available to your site because it has too high an average keyword difficulty. How should I organize my local pages?One interesting problem presented to me when I was a consultant many years ago was a deceptively simple question: “Which should I use in my local results, zip codes or cities?” The company had an expansive service area and they were trying to decide between having all their local pages organized by zip or by city. At the time, I used an elaborate set of spreadsheets, scraped SERPs, and API calls to try do exactly what takes just minutes in Keyword Explorer. I’ll walk you through the details. Step 1: Build the keyword listsWe return to our good friend Keyword Mixer here. We start by entering in the cities for which we have coverage and the keywords we would like to target. We then repeat the same process but replace the cities with the zip codes. Step 2: Copy and paste into new Keyword Explorer listsFollow the normal procedures and copy and paste, waiting for Keyword Explorer to calculate all the important metrics. Step 3: Compare metricsFinally, we compare the metrics of the two groups of keywords. In this case, while there was similar keyword difficulty, there was slightly more traffic available when using the city rather than the zip code. The best part about this methodology is you can answer the question with good data in a matter of minutes. In this example, I only used a couple of cities and a couple of keywords. This could be expanded out to dozens of cities or zip codes and hundreds of keywords, all to the same effect, in just the same amount of time. A year’s worth of content in a day: content calendarsThis doesn’t exactly take advantage of the list features dramatically, but it does make it easy for you to plan out content several months in advance. The earlier you get writing prompts into the hands of your authors, the more likely they can hit their deadlines. Let’s walk through the steps of building content recommendations with Keyword Explorer. Step 1: Finding related topicsEveryone pretty much knows their primary keywords. If you’re an attorney, you know the word “attorney.” If you’re a landscaper you know the word landscaping. But how do you take that general term and identify topics that might be worth writing on? Well, Keyword Explorer does it better than anyone else (and I’m prepared to go to the mat defending that!) Head on over to Keyword Explorer and drop in your primary keyword like “landscaping” and choose “closely related topics.” Finally, sort by “Volume” rather than relevancy, since you’re looking for generally related topics, not highly related terms. Step 2: Select your topicsJust run through the list and try to pick out a handful of general topics. In this case, from the word “landscaping” we were able to select “gardens,” “green roof,” “gazebos,” “water conservation,” “pergolas,” “rain garden,” “hardscape,” and “water garden.” Notice that all these great topics showed up in just the top 20 options. We could easily find dozens more just by scrolling down the list. Step 3: Find and group questions related to topicsQuestions make for easy writing prompts, and questions that actually get traffic are even better! Copy and paste each keyword, one at a time, into Keyword Explorer. From the same filter drop-downs choose “Are Questions” and “Group by Medium Lexical Similarity.” You can fool around with the lexical similarity metric to have tighter or looser groupings. If you use the word “pergola,” as we did in the example below, you will find several questions that are directly related to the topic and, importantly, are representative of several terms. For example, the question “How to Build a Pergola over an Existing Patio” is actually representative of 9 terms, which means writing on this topic will give you a good chance to rank for several terms, rather than just one. Step 4: Create a new list and start adding the questions you discoverThis is the easy part. Just click the checkbox next to the questions and add them to your list. You should repeat this step with every topic you discover. In my case, I was able to come up with over 75 article ideas, each representing 3 or more related questions, in under 10 minutes. Step 5: Collect and compare metricsAlways remember your original average keyword difficulty number. This is hugely valuable in scoping out your content calendar because you can easily exclude writing prompts that are too competitive. Click into your list in Keyword Explorer and sort by potential, remembering to ignore those with a keyword difficulty higher than your average keyword difficulty. Pro tip: Group your keywords into topic-specific lists, so you can compare the keyword metrics at a topic level as well. Use this list to prioritize out a steady schedule of content creation. Of course, a lot more goes into creating a content calendar than just finding content to write about, but I often find that brainstorming content is one of the more time-consuming projects. ConclusionsKeyword tools aren’t just for page-by-page keyword selection anymore. Smart features like lexical grouping, related topics, and list comparison allow you to accomplish far more than ever before, rather than just staring at a long list of phrase-match keywords. Taking the time to learn the features of these more-powerful-than-ever tools will mean greater efficiency and smarter decisions. 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 Not Your Dad's Keyword Tool: Advanced Keyword Research Use Cases |