What You Need to Know About Duplicate GMB Listings [Excerpt from the Expert’s Guide to Local SEO]

Posted by JoyHawkins

Recently, I’ve had a lot of people ask me how to deal with duplicate listings in Google My Business now that MapMaker is dead. Having written detailed instructions outlining different scenarios for the advanced local SEO training manual I started selling over at LocalU, I thought it’d be great to give Moz readers a sample of 5 pages from the manual outlining some best practices.

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What you need to know about duplicate GMB listings

Before you start, you need to find out if the listing is verified. If the listing has an “own this business” or “claim this business” option, it is not currently verified. If missing that label, it means it is verified — there is nothing you can do until you get ownership or have it unverified (if you’re the one who owns it in GMB). This should be your first step before you proceed with anything below.

Storefronts

• Do the addresses on the two listings match? If the unverified duplicate has the same address as the verified listing, you should contact Google My Business support and ask them to merge the two listings.
• If the addresses do not match, find out if the business used to be at that address at some point in time.
  • If the business has never existed there:
    • Pull up the listing on Maps
    • Press “Suggest an edit”
    • Switch the toggle beside “Place is permanently closed” to Yes
    • Select “Never existed” as the reason and press submit. *Note: If there are reviews on the listing, you should get them transferred before doing this.

• If the duplicate lists an address that is an old address (they were there at some point but have moved), you will want to have the duplicate marked as moved.

Service area businesses

• Is the duplicate listing verified? If it is, you will first have to get it unverified or gain access to it. Once you’ve done that, contact Google My Business and ask them to merge the two listings.
• If the duplicate is not verified, you can have it removed from Maps since service area businesses are not permitted on Google Maps. Google My Business allows them, but any unverified listing would follow Google Maps rules, not Google My Business. To remove it:
  • Pull up the listing on Maps
  • Press “Suggest an edit”
  • Switch the toggle beside “Place is permanently closed” to Yes
  • Select “Private” as the reason and press submit. *Note: If there are reviews on the listing, you should get them transferred before doing this.

Practitioner listings

Public-facing professionals (doctors, lawyers, dentists, realtors, etc.) are allowed their own listings separate from the office they work for, unless they’re the only public-facing professional at that office. In that case, they are considered a solo practitioner and there should only be one listing, formatted as “Business Name: Professional Name.”

Solo practitioner with two listings

This is probably one of the easiest scenarios to fix because solo practitioners are only supposed to have one listing. If you have a scenario where there’s a listing for both the practice and the practitioner, you can ask Google My Business to merge the two and it will combine the ranking strength of both. It will also give you one listing with more reviews (if each individual listing had reviews on it). The only scenario where I don’t advise combining the two is if your two listings both rank together and are monopolizing two of the three spots in the 3-pack. This is extremely rare.

Multi-practitioner listings

If the business has multiple practitioners, you are not able to get these listings removed or merged provided the practitioner still works there. While I don’t generally suggest creating listings for practitioners, they often exist already, leaving people to wonder what to do with them to keep them from competing with the listing for the practice.

A good strategy is to work on having multiple listings rank if you have practitioners that specialize in different things. Let’s say you have a chiropractor who also has a massage therapist at his office. The massage therapist’s listing could link to a page on the site that ranks highly for “massage therapy” and the chiropractor could link to the page that ranks highest organically for chiropractic terms. This is a great way to make the pages more visible instead of competing.

Another example would be a law firm. You could have the main listing for the law firm optimized for things like “law firm,” then have one lawyer who specializes in personal injury law and another lawyer who specializes in criminal law. This would allow you to take advantage of the organic ranking for several different keywords.

Keep in mind that if your goal is to have three of your listings all rank for the exact same keyword on Google, thus monopolizing the entire 3-pack, this is an unrealistic strategy. Google has filters that keep the same website from appearing too many times in the results and unless you’re in a really niche industry or market, it’s almost impossible to accomplish this.

Practitioners who no longer work there

It’s common to find listings for practitioners who no longer work for your business but did at some point. If you run across a listing for a former practitioner, you’ll want to contact Google My Business and ask them to mark the listing as moved to your practice listing. It’s extremely important that you get them to move it to your office listing, not the business the practitioner now works for (if they have been employed elsewhere). Here is a good case study that shows you why.

If the practitioner listing is verified, things can get tricky since Google My Business won’t be able to move it until it’s unverified. If the listing is verified by the practitioner and they refuse to give you access or remove it, the second-best thing would be to get them to update the listing to have their current employer’s information on it. This isn’t ideal and should be a last resort.

Listings for employees (not public-facing)

If you find a listing for a non-public-facing employee, it shouldn’t exist on Maps. For example: an office manager of a law firm, a paralegal, a hygienist, or a nurse. You can get the listing removed:

• Pull up the listing on Maps
• Press “Suggest an edit”
• Switch the toggle beside “Place is permanently closed..” to Yes
• Select “Never existed” as the reason and press submit.

Listings for deceased practitioners

This is always a terrible scenario to have to deal with, but I’ve run into lots of cases where people don’t know how to get rid of listings for deceased practitioners. The solution is similar to what you would do for someone who has left the practice, except you want to add an additional step. Since the listings are often verified and people usually don’t have access to the deceased person’s Google account, you want to make sure you tell Google My Business support that the person is deceased and include a link to their obituary online so the support worker can confirm you’re telling the truth. I strongly recommend using either Facebook or Twitter to do this, since you can easily include the link (it’s much harder to do on a phone call).

Creating practitioner listings

If you’re creating a practitioner listing from scratch, you might run into issues if you’re trying to do it from the Google My Business dashboard and you already have a verified listing for the practice. The error you would get is shown below.

There are two ways around this:

1. Create the listing via Google Maps. Do this by searching the address and then clicking “Add a missing place.” Do not include the firm/practice name in the title of the listing or your edit most likely won’t go through, since it will be too similar to the listing that already exists for the practice. Once you get an email from Google Maps stating the listing has been successfully added, you will be able to claim it via GMB.
   
2. Contact GMB support and ask them for help.

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We hope you enjoyed this excerpt from the Expert’s Guide to Local SEO! The full 160+-page guide is available for purchase and download via LocalU below.

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Faster Sites: Beyond PageSpeed Insights

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:

• Latency can hurt load times more than bandwidth
• PageSpeed Insights scores shouldn’t be taken at face value
• Improvement starts with measurement, goal setting, and prioritization

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.

Disclaimer: HTTP2 improves some of the issues discussed in this post. Specifically, multiple requests to the same server are less problematic. It is not a panacea.

Latency can hurt load times more than bandwidth

A 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:

1. Find the server
2. Connect to the server
3. Wait for a response
4. Receive response

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):

The life of a request, measured by Chrome Dev Tools.

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 tests

All 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

Rule	Skeptical reading
Optimize images	Unless you have huge images, this might not be a big deal. This is only measuring whether images could be further compressed — not whether you’re loading too many.
Enable compression	Compression is easy. You should use it. It also may not make much of a difference unless you have (for instance) huge JavaScript files loading.
Minify HTML	Will likely reduce overhead only by tens of KB. Latency will have a bigger impact than response size.
Minify CSS	Will likely reduce overhead only by tens of KB. Latency will have a bigger impact than response size.
Minify JS	Probably not as important as consolidating JS into a single file to reduce the number of requests that have to be made.

Tests focusing on reducing latency

Rule	Skeptical reading
Leverage browser caching	Definitely let’s cache our own files. Lots of the files that could benefit from caching are probably hosted on 3rd-party servers. You’d have to host them yourself to change cache times.
Reduce server response time	Threshold on PSI is too high. It also tries to exclude the physical latency of the server—instead looking only at how long it takes the server to respond once it receives a request.
Avoid landing page redirects	Yes.
Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content	A valid concern, but can be frustratingly difficult. Having zero requests on top of the initial page load to render above-the-fold content isn’t necessary to meet most performance goals.
Prioritize visible content	Actually kind of important.

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:

• Caching content you control.
• Reducing the amount of content you’re loading from 3rd-party domains.
• Reducing server response time beyond the minimum required to pass PageSpeed Insights’ test.
• Moving the server closer to the end user. Basically, use a CDN.
• Reducing blocking requests. Ensuring you’re using HTTP2 will help here.

How to start improving

Measurement

The 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 setting

If 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).

Prioritizing

Prioritizing 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.

Conclusion

The 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.

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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:

• Strength of the pitch (e.g., value, relevance to the audience, etc.),
• Whether or not the info can reasonably be delivered in the time allotted, and
• Does it fit with overall programming (i.e., assuming it clears the two other hurdles, does it address a need for the event?)

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.]

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Daniel Russell

@dnlrussell

Daniel 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.”

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Jayna Grassel

@jaynagrassel

Jayna 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.”

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Joel Klettke

@joelklettke

Joel 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.”

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Kane Jamison

@kanejamison

Kane 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.”

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Kathryn Cunningham

@kac4509

Kathryn 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.”

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Matthew Edgar

@MatthewEdgarCO

Matthew 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.”

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Curiosity piqued? You could be in one of those seats yourself, watching them live:

Grab your ticket now!

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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!

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.”

By imagining your website as a home you’d like people to visit, it’s easier to see the value of off-site SEO.

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 it

In 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:

• Goal of off-page SEO: To accumulate positive signals and interactions for your brand, with the hope of those factors being a net positive.
• Benefit(s) of off-page SEO: Brand mentions, positive reviews, links, etc.

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:

• Brand
• Audience
• Content

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 service

When 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:

• Existing product: Deliver the goods on features customers would most benefit from based on requests and complaints online regarding competing products.
• New product: Focus on the most essential benefits your new product can provide to the prospective audience. When you do this, you remove objections and features present themselves.

#2: Customer service

No 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.

It’s unlikely this billboard was much of an off-page SEO benefit to SouthBendOn.com.

# 3: Focus on web searchers’ intent

Turns 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.

Audience

The 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 presence

A 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:

• Be there: If you have a social media account, make sure someone is monitoring it and can answer questions and respond to comments in a timely fashion.
• Be human: People online expect genuine interaction, not robotic responses or constant brand promotion.
• Be proactive: One of the best things you can do to help your brand is to use social media to be seen as a resource for the online community in the vertical you serve. Even if someone asks a question about a product or service you don’t offer or that is offered by a competitor, don’t be afraid to chime in and offer praise when due.

As you can see, the price of unresponsiveness on social media negatively impacts far more than SEO:

Source

#5: Build connections with social media/online influencers

When 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 blogging

Want 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 SEO subreddit is very popular, frequented by many of the big names in SEO.

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 links

You 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.

Your brand’s success depends upon a lot of factors outside your website. Image source

“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.”

Content

When 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 types

But 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?

Image source

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:

• Post how-to videos on YouTube, which is the second-most visited website in the world and the #2 search engine behind parent company Google. What’s more, popular videos can and do rank in the SERPs.
• Share daily musings or recaps of distillations of recent events via Facebook Live
• Snap meeting or office funnies via Snapchat
• Compose image albums on Imgur, Flickr, and other popular photo-sharing sites
• Tweet videos of interesting things you notice throughout the day

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 holistically

The 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

• Why You Must Become a 10x Brand
• The Brand Halo Effect: Does Brand Awareness Impact Organic Search Rankings?
• Why is Building Your Brand an SEO Strategy?

Audience

• Do Social Signals Drive SEO?
• Tips and Tactics for Amplifying Your Content
• How to Earn the Amplification of Influencers
• How to Hack the Amplification Process
• Discovering Which Sites Your Target Audience Visits

Content

• YouTube SEO: The Ultimate Guide
• The 100 Best Infographics
• Content, Shares, and Links: Insights from Analyzing 1 Million Articles

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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 GTM

The 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:

1. CSS selectors and HTML, in order to know which elements on the page to change/pull data from
2. JavaScript (especially jQuery*), in order to inject elements into the page

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 element

In 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.

// 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);

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 page

There 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:

Element ID	Associated Schema Item
product_name	name
product_img	image
price_value	price
price_currency	priceCurrency
ratings_count	reviewCount
avg_rating	ratingValue

Using GTM variables

If 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 jQuery

We 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 markup

With 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 tags

We 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 tags

In 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 tags

All 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:

1. Download the container from Google Drive.
2. Within the “Admin” menu of the GTM container you want to import into, select “Import Container”:
3. Select the container file from its download location, and select “Merge” and “Rename conflicting tags…” in order to not overwrite any tags that are already set up.
4. Click “Confirm.”
5. Once the container is loaded in, make necessary edits to tags so that they are suitable for your site, and assign triggers to apply only to pages that are relevant.

Tag to insert mobile switchboard tags

If 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 tag

This 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 canonical

This 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 data

This 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 data

This 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.

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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 Console

I 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 better

The 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 list

Head 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 results

Now 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.

Conclusion

Now 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 depths

We’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 each

Copy 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 metrics

In 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 lists

We 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 lists

Follow the normal procedures and copy and paste, waiting for Keyword Explorer to calculate all the important metrics.

Step 3: Compare metrics

Finally, 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 calendars

This 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 topics

Everyone 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 topics

Just 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 topics

Questions 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 discover

This 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 metrics

Always 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.

Conclusions

Keyword 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.

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7 ‹Title Tag› Hacks for Increased Rankings + Traffic – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

You may find yourself wondering whether the humble title tag still matters in modern SEO. When it comes to your click-through rate, the answer is a resounding yes! In today’s Whiteboard Friday, we welcome back our good friend Cyrus Shepard to talk about 7 ways you can revamp your title tags to increase your site traffic and rankings.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m very excited to be here today. My name is Cyrus. I’m a Moz associate. Today I want to talk you about title tags, specifically title tag hacks to increase your traffic and rankings.

Now, you may be asking yourself, “Are title tags even still important today in SEO?” You bet they are. We’ve done a lot of correlation studies in the past. Those correlation studies have shown different things sort of decreasing in the past years. But we’ve also seen a lot of experiments recently where people have changed their title tag and seen a significant, measurable increase in their rankings.

Now, the other aspect of title tags that people sometimes forget about is the click-through rate that you get, which can measurably increase your traffic if you get the title tag right. Now, what’s neat about increasing your traffic through click-through rate is we’ve seen a lot of experiments, Rand has experimented a lot, that if you can increase this, you can measurably increase this.

Traffic through increased clicks can seem to increase your rankings under certain circumstances. So you get the dual benefit. So that’s what I want to talk to you about today — increasing those rankings, increasing that traffic by changing the first thing that your visitor is going to see in the SERPs.

So the important thing to remember is that these are things to experiment with. Not all of these hacks are going to work for you. SEO is founded in best practices, but true success is founded when you experiment and try different things. So try some of these out and these will give you an idea of where to get started in some of your title tag experiments.

1. Numbers

Numbers kind of pop out at you. These are examples: “5 Signs of a Zombie Apocalypse” or “How Mutants Can Save 22% on Car Insurance.”

• Cognitive Bias – Standout specific – When you see these in SERPs, they tend to get a slightly higher click-through rate sometimes. This works because of a cognitive bias. Our brains are trained to find things that stand out and are specific. When you’re scanning search results, that’s a lot of information. So your brain is going to try to find some things that it can grasp on to, and numbers are the ultimate things that are both specific and they stand out. So sometimes, in certain circumstances, you can get a higher click-through rate by using numbers in your title tags.

2. Dates

Rand did an excellent Whiteboard Friday a few weeks ago, we’ll link to it below. These are things like “Best Actress Oscar Nominee 2017” or even more specific, you can get the month in there, “Top NFL Fantasy Draft Picks September 2017.”

Now, Rand talks about this a lot. He talks about ways of finding dates in your keyword research. The key in that research is when you’re using tools like Keyword Explorer or Google AdWords or SEMrush, you have to look for previous years. So if I was searching for this year’s, we don’t have enough data yet for 2017, so I would look for “Best Actress Oscar Nominee 2016.”

• Leverage your CMS – If you use WordPress, if you use Yoast plugin, you can actually have your title tags update automatically year-to-year or even month-to-month leveraging that. It’s not right for all circumstances, but for certain keyword queries it works pretty well.

3. Length

This is one of the most controversial, something that causes the most angst in SEO is when we’re doing audits or looking at title tags. Inevitably, when you’re doing an SEO audit, you find two things. You find title tags that are way too short, “Pantsuit,” or title tags that are way, way, way too long because they just want to stuff every keyword in there, “Tahiti ASL Red Pantsuit with Line Color, Midrise Belt, Hook-eye Zipper, Herringbone Knit at Macy’s.”

Now, these two, they’re great title tags, but there are two problems with this. This is way too broad. “Pantsuit” could be anything. This title tag is way too diluted. It’s hard to really know what that is about. You’re trying to scan it. You’re trying to read it. Search engines are going to look at it the same way. Is this about a pantsuit? Is it about herringbone knit? It’s kind of hard.

• Etsy study – So Etsy recently did a study where Etsy measured hundreds of thousands of URLs and they shortened their title tags, because, more often than not, the longer title tag is a problem. Shorter title tags, not so much. You see longer title tags in the wild more often. When they shortened the title tags, they saw a measurable increase in rankings.
• 50–60 Characters – This is one of those things where best practices usually is the best way to go because the optimal length is usually 50 to 60 characters.
• Use top keywords – When you’re deciding what keywords to put it when you’re shortening this, that’s where you want to use your keyword research and find the keywords that your visitors are actually using.

So if I go into my Analytics or Google Search Console, I can see that people are actually searching for “pantsuit,” “Macy’s,” and maybe something like that. I can come up with a title tag that fits within those parameters, “Tahiti ASL Red Pantsuit,” “pantsuits” the category, “Macy’s.” That’s going to be your winning title tag and you’ll probably see an increase in rankings.

4. Synonyms and variants

Now, you’ll notice in this last title tag, the category was a plural of pantsuit. That can actually help in some circumstances. But it’s important to realize that how you think your searchers are searching may not be how they’re actually searching.

Let’s say you do your keyword research and your top keywords are “cheap taxis.” You want to optimize for cheap taxis. Well, people may be looking for that in different ways. They may be looking for “affordable cabs” or “low cost” or “cheap Ubers,” things like that.

So you want to use those variants, find out what the synonyms and variants are and incorporate those into your title tag. So my title tag might be “Fast Affordable Cabs, Quick Taxi, Your Cheap Ride.” That’s optimized for like three different things within that 50 to 60 word limit, and it’s going to hit all those variants and you can actually rank a little higher for using that.

• Use SERPs/keyword tools – The way you find these synonyms and variants, you can certainly look in the SERPs. Type your keyword into the SERPs, into Google and see what they highlight bold in the search results. That will often give you the variants that people are looking for, that people also ask at the bottom of the page. Your favorite keyword tool, such as Keyword Explorer or SEMrush or whatever you choose and also your Analytics. Google Search Console is a great source of information for these synonyms and variants.

5. Call to action

Now, you won’t often find the call-to-action words in your keyword research, but they really help people click. These are action verbs.

• Action words — buy, find download, search, listen, watch, learn, and access. When you use these, they give a little bit more excitement because they indicate that the user will be able to do something beyond the keyword. So they’re not necessarily typing it in the search box. When they see it in results, it can create, “Oh wow, I get to download something.” It provides a little something extra, and you can increase your click-through rates that way.

6. Top referring keywords

This is a little overlooked, and it’s sort of an advanced concept. Oftentimes we optimize our page for one set of keywords, but the traffic that comes to it is another set of keywords. But what’s very powerful is when people type their words into the search box and they see those exact same words in the title tags, that’s going to increase your click-through rate.

For an example, I went into the analytics here at Moz and I looked at Followerwonk. I found the top referring keywords in Google Search Console are “Twitter search,” “search Twitter bios,” and “Twitter analytics.” Those are how people or what people are looking for right before they click on the Followerwonk listing in Google.

So using that information, I might write a title tag like “Search Twitter Bios with Followerwonk, the Twitter Analytics Tool.” That’s a pretty good title tag. I’m kind of proud of that. But you can see it hits all my major keywords that people are using. So when I type in “Twitter analytics” into the search box and I see “The Twitter Analytics Tool,” I’m more likely to click on that.

So I’ve written about this before, but it’s very important to optimize your page, not only for the traffic you’re trying to get, but the traffic you’re actually receiving. When you can marry those two, you can be stronger in all aspects.

7. Questions

Questions are great tools to use in your title tags. These are things like, “Where Do Butterflies Migrate?” Maybe your keyword is just “butterflies migrate.” But by asking a question, you create a curiosity gap, and you give people an incentive to click. Or “What is PageRank?” That’s something we do here at Moz. So you get the curiosity gap.

But oftentimes, by asking a question, you get the bonus of winning a featured snippet. Britney Muller wrote an awesome, awesome post about this a while back about questions people also ask, how to find those in your keyword research and claim those featured snippets and claim “people also ask” boxes. It’s a great, great way to increase your traffic.

So these are seven tips. Let us know your tips for title tags in the comments below. If you like this video, I’d appreciate a thumbs up. Share it with your friends on social media. I’ll see you next time. Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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If You’re Attending MozCon 2017, You Should Definitely Pitch to be an Ignite Speaker

Posted by ronell-smith

Are you a good storyteller, able to hold a crowd at rapt attention for minutes at a time? Do you have a story you’re bursting at the seams to share?

Well, ye olde yarn-spinner, a MozCon Ignite talk sounds like just the thing for you.

The five-minute talks have become quite a hit since being introduced in 2015, with talks leaving folks with belly aches from laughter or tears from personal heartache — and everything in between.

If you have an enticing story in you just waiting for an outlet, we’ll supply the audience.

The MozCon 2017 Ignite talks — one of the signature networking events — take place Tuesday, July 18.

Buy your MozCon 2017 ticket!

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Why should you care about Ignite talks?

Often called “lightning talks” for their emphasis on brevity, Ignite-style talks are five minutes in length and feature slides that automatically advance.

The short stories can pack a powerful punch, however, as anyone who saw Michael Cottam’s 2016 Ignite talk can attest:

One attendee penned a heartfelt account of how Michael’s talk helped him reprioritize his life — it’s well-worth a good read. Make sure you have a tissue handy.

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You can share your story, too, in 2017. There will be 10 speaking slots.

The only rule we have governing stories told during an Ignite talk is that they cannot relate to online marketing or feature anything resembling career advice.

This is your chance to show some personality.

Take a look at the topics covered from 2016:

• Help! I Can’t Stop Sweating – Hyperhidrosis, by Adam Melson
• Life Lessons Learned as a Special Needs Parent, by Adrian Vender
• How Pieces of Paper Can Change Lives, by Anneke Kurt Godlewski
• Prison and a Girl that Loves Puppies, by Caitlin Boroden
• Embracing Fear, Potential Failure, and Plain Ol’ Discomfort, by Daisy Quaker
• A Plane Hacker’s Guide to Cheap *Luxury* Travel, by Ed Fry
• Embracing Awkward: The Tale of a 5′ 10″ 6th Grader, by Hannah Cooley
• Hornets, Soba, & Friends: A Race in Japan, by Kevin Smythe
• Wooly Bits: Exploring the Binary of Yarn, by Lindsay Dayton LaShell
• Finding Myself in Fiction: LGBTQUIA Stories, by Lisa Hunt
• Is Your Family Time for Sale? by Michael Cottam
• How to Start an Underground Restaurant in Your Home, by Nadya Khoja
• Flood Survival: Lessons from the Streets of ATL, by Sarah Lively
• How a Cartoon Saved My Life, by Steve Hammer

And, lucky for us all, Geraldine DeRuiter, aka the Everywhereist, will be back as emcee for the third time in as many years.

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The deets: How to pitch for an Ignite talk

• Simply fill out the form below — you’re limited to one submission
• Talks cannot be about online marketing or career-focused
• Current MozCon speakers are not able to pitch
• Previous MozCon Ignite presenters are not eligible
• Submissions close on Sunday, May 14 at 5pm PDT
• Selections will be made by early June
• All presentations are expected to follow the MozCon Code of Conduct
• You must attend MozCon, July 17–19, and be present Tuesday night in person

If selected, you’ll receive…

• Five minutes onstage, Tuesday night at McCaw Hall. (The event lasts from 7–10pm.)
• $300 off the regular-priced ticket to MozCon (If you’ve already purchased a ticket, we’ll refund you $300 for a regular-priced ticket or $100 for an early-bird ticket. Discounts are not offered for super-early-bird tickets.)
• Help crafting a winning talk
• Stage tour of the event space between 5–7pm Tuesday night in advance of the event

Unfortunately, we do not cover travel and/or lodging for MozCon Ignite speaking slots.

http://ift.tt/2pJzyxa

What makes a great pitch?

• A story that’s compelling and that can be told in the allotted timeframe
• Sharing a topic you’re passionate about and able to succinctly share what makes it so great.
• Follow the guidelines. Yes, the word counts are limited on purpose. (Do not submit links to Google Docs or other resources. Multiple submissions will result in immediate disqualification.)

****Include links to any videos of you speaking publicly.

If you’d like to see what an Ignite-style talk looks like, check out these videos from Ignite Seattle 30.

Most importantly, get to work on submitting that pitch to grace the stage yourself at MozCon 2017.

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!

How Small Digital Publishers Can Grow Their Network and Save Time

Posted by lydiagilbertson

Being a small or startup publishing company is hard. The digital advertising industry is broken. Larger companies like Vox and Buzzfeed are some of the only online publications that can hope to monetize their content effectively. Smaller niche publications often have an even harder time attracting return visitors or getting people outside of their current active users to see their content at all. Already at a disadvantage, most small publications are also understaffed and underfunded. These publications can use content marketing and search marketing concepts within their online distribution strategy to better reach their audiences and to compete with bigger publications.

Platforms as distributors

Somehow, platforms have long been both the saviors and the destroyers of the digital publishing industry. Regardless, they’ve become a necessary evil for the content distribution strategy of almost all online publishing companies. There’s no real harm in trying out different ways to reach your audience, but don’t waste your time on a platform that isn’t growing your audience or enhancing its engagement. The usual contenders being Facebook and Twitter, there are a few more platforms that can be easily utilized towards helping you to reach your audience.

1. AMP

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) project is a complex attempt by Google to make pages load faster on mobile devices, keep users on their platform, and to better engage with the publishing community. Many larger sites report a lot of success using AMP. Smaller publishers may be wary of trying out AMP on their sites, out of fear that it will further overwork their staff or that it requires an intense amount of web development knowledge. However, Google AMP is fairly simple to implement (more on how further down the page) if you’re using WordPress or another common content management system.

Companies using WordPress will have an especially easy time adding AMP to the list of ways they distribute their content. Both WordPress and Yoast have plugins available to put (and manage) your content into the AMP format. Medium is also in the process of allowing its users an easy way to designate AMP content. Here are a few things to keep in mind before publishing your content via AMP:

1. Make sure it’s in article format. AMP is meant for blog posts and news articles, so don’t try to publish products or landing pages using Google AMP.
2. Be conscious of the audience you’re publishing for when using AMP. Articles that appear in the Google AMP carousel in the SERP are usually topical and considered “news.”
3. If your site is struggling with speed issues, AMP could be a part (but not all) of the solution, as it will help your articles load more quickly on mobile devices.
4. If your site doesn’t use WordPress, implementing AMP might be a little bit harder than just downloading a plugin for your CMS. Find more out about that process here.
5. Analytics tracking should be included in your overall traffic and segmented to show how much traffic comes from AMP. Find out more about AMP and Google Analytics here.

2. Medium

Medium is another platform that can help more users to see your content and stay on the page long enough to read it. Like any platform, hosting your entire site on Medium comes with the risk of giving your content to another entity rather than your own website. This is a concern because hosting all of your content somewhere like Medium means it could make changes to the platform that you may not like, or in severe situations shut down entirely (and take your content with it). It also has limited capabilities with on-page ads. However, there are some larger publishers that have been adopting Medium as their main source of content distribution. There are several benefits to doing this:

1. Medium has a built-in audience of millions of engaged readers.
2. Most of the content on Medium is high quality.
3. Migrating your entire site to the Medium platform is actually relatively easy for both WordPress and non-WordPress sites. Be sure to keep in mind that hosting all of your content on a platform can be risky.

Another way to utilize Medium’s built-in audience is to republish your content onto the platform. Medium allows for its users to write content on their platform and then canonicalize to their own website (that’s not on Medium). This allows small publishers to pick which content goes on Medium (much like a social media platform) in order to make sure it’s targeted to Medium’s user-base.

3. Google News

Google News is a section of the search engine results page that focuses entirely on timely news content. In order for many websites to be featured in this specialized SERP, they have to go through the application process and get accepted into the Google News program. After acceptance, the site has to follow and keep a specific set of meta tags up-to-date, only posting timely content designated for the platform. Find out more about how to get accepted into Google News here.

Utilize content marketing tools

Outside of monetization, the number-one hurdle that most small publishing companies face is being understaffed and overworked. One way to remedy this is using tools that help diminish the workload involved in managing content-heavy sites. Here are a list of tools that can help small publishers cut down on their tasks:

1. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is editorial calendar software that minimizes time spent keeping track of all of the posts you want/need to do on any given day. It’s designed for both small and enterprise companies, but is better suited for smaller ones due to its all-in-one approach. CoSchedule allows you to plan your posts in advance and set a time for when to post them on social media platforms, all in a single tool.

2. BuzzSumo

Ideating different pieces of content for your site takes a significant amount of time. Utilizing a tool like BuzzSumo could help you to come up with a ton of different article concepts based on what’s trending on different social media platforms.

3. Canva

Having a small team usually means that your graphic designer is extremely busy (or nonexistent). Making quick graphics and supplementary images for your posts can totally be done utilizing Canva, without bogging down your graphics team with more work than it can handle (plus, there’s a free version).

Focus on your niche

Find your niche and build your audience. Obviously, this is easier said than done. But, it’s extremely important as a small publisher to be filling a void or taking a different perspective in the already overflowing content funnel of the Internet. Find your unique voice and the people that want to hear it. Sticking to your publication’s brand or niche will in turn build you a specialized audience. This allows prospective advertisers to better target and then convert using your content.

Don’t always focus on quantity, but quality

Similar to the last point, in addition to not overstretching your genre, don’t overstretch your posting frequency. Rather than posting more times per day just to meet an imaginary quota, it’s better to create fewer posts of higher quality. Moz did a publishing experiment that illustrates the complexity of publishing frequency and content quality. Pay more attention to what your users want rather than what you assume Google does.

Summary

Being a small publishing company is hard. Most small publications find themselves understaffed and overworked trying to catch up with much larger companies.The best way to try to compete with larger publishing companies is to keep your focus small and to use external applications. They’ll help you save time and make creating easier. Utilize all of the platforms that work for your audience — not just all of the platforms available.

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Offline & Organic: The Two Rivers That Feed Modern Local SEO

Posted by MiriamEllis

The craft that is your business navigates the local waterways. Whether yours is an independently owned natural foods store or a medical enterprise with hundreds of locations, it can be easy to get lost cresting all of the little waves that hit our industry, week by week, year after year.

Google endorses review kiosks and then outlaws them. They pop your dental practice into a carousel and then disband this whole display for your industry. You need to be schema-encoded, socially active, mobile-friendly, voice-ready… it’s a lot to take in. So let’s weigh anchor for a few minutes, in the midst of these never-ending eddies, to evaluate whether all of the developments of the past few years add up to a disjointed jumble of events or represent a genuine sea change in our industry. Let’s see which way the wind is really blowing in local search marketing.

The organic SEO journey is now our own

If you’ve only been working in SEO for a couple of years, you may think I’m telling you a fishy yarn when I say there was a time not long ago when this otherwise brilliant industry was swamped with forum discussions about how much you could move the ranking needle by listing 300 terms in a meta keywords tag, putting hidden text on website pages, buying 5,000 links from directories that never saw the light of day in the SERPs and praying to the idol of PageRank.

I’m not kidding — it was really like this, but even back then, the best in the business were arguing against building a marketing strategy largely based on exploiting search engines’ weaknesses or by pinning your brand to iffy, spammy or obsolete practices. The discourse surrounding early SEO was certainly lively!

Then came Panda, Penguin, and all of the other updates that not only targeted poor SEO practices, but more importantly, established a teaching model from which all digital marketers could learn to visualize Google’s interpretation of relevance. There were many updates before these big ones, but I mention them because, along with Hummingbird, they combine to set much of the stage for where the SEO industry is at today, after 17 years of signals from Google schooling us in their worldview of search. If I could sum up what Google has taught us in 3 points, they would be:

1. Market to humans, and let that rule how you write, earn links, design pages and otherwise promote your business
2. Have a technician handy to avoid technical missteps that thwart growth
3. Your brand will live or die by the total reputation it builds, both in terms of search engines and the public

Most of what I see being written across the SEO industry today relates to these three concepts which form a really sane picture of a modern marketing discipline — a far cry from stuffed footers and doorway pages, right? Yes, I’m still getting emails promising me #1 Google rankings, but by and large, it’s been inspirational watching the SEO industry evolve to earn a serious place in the wide world of marketing.

Now, how does all this relate to local SEO?

There are two obvious reasons why the traditional SEO industry’s journey relates to our own:

1. Organic strength impacts local rankings
2. Local businesses need organic (sometimes called local-organic) rankings, too

This means that for our agencies’ clients, we’ve got to deliver the goods just the way an organic SEO company would. I’d bet a nickel there isn’t a week that goes by that you don’t find yourself explaining to an SAB owner that you’re unlikely to earn him local rankings for his service cities where he lacks a physical location, but you are going to get him every bit of organic visibility you can via his website’s service city landing pages and supporting marketing. And for your brick-and-mortar clients, you are filling the first few pages of Google with both company website and third-party content that creates the consumer picture we call “reputation.”

It’s organic SEO that populates your clients’ most important organic search results with the data that speak most highly of them, even if this SEO is being done by Yelp or TripAdvisor. Because of this, I advocate studying the history of Google’s updates and how it has impacted the organic SEO community’s understanding of Google’s increasingly obvious emphasis on trust and relevance.

And, I will go one further than this. You are going to need real SEO tools to manage the local search marketing for your clients in the most competitive geo-industries. Consider that with the release of the Local Search Ranking Factors 2017 study, experts have cited that:

• 5 of the top 20 local pack/finder factors relate to links
• Quality/authority of inbound links to domain was chosen as the #1 local-organic ranking factor.

Add to this the top placement of factors like domain authority of website and the varieties of appropriate keyword usage.

In other words, for your client who owns a bakery in rural Iowa, you’ll likely need basic organic SEO skills to get them all the visibility they need, but for your attorney in Los Angeles, your statewide medical practice and your national restaurant chain with 600 locations, having organic SEO tools at the professional level of something like Moz Pro in your marketing kit is what will enable you to grab that competitive edge your bigger clients absolutely have to have, and to hold onto it for them over time.

The organic river is definitely feeding the local one, and your ability to evaluate links, analyze SERPs, and professionally optimize pages is part of your journey now.

The offline PR journey is now our own

I sometimes wonder if my fellow local SEOs feel humbled, as I do, when talking to local business owners who have been doing their own marketing for 20, 30, or even 40 years. Pre-Internet, these laudable survivors have been responsible for deciding everything from how to decorate the storefront for a Memorial Day sale, to mastering customer service, to squeezing ROI instead of bankruptcy out of advertising in newspapers, phone directories, coupon books, radio, billboards and local TV. I call to mind the owner of a family business I consulted with who even sang his own jingle in an effort to build his local brand in his community. Small business owners, in particular, really put it all on the line in their consumer appeals, because their survival is at stake.

By contrast, our local SEO industry is still taking baby steps on a path forged by the likes of Wayside Inn (est. 1797), Macy’s (est. 1858), and the Fuller Brush Man, (est. 1906). These stalwarts of selling to local consumers have seen it all (and tried much of it) in the search for visibility, from Burma-Shave billboards to “crazy” local car dealer ads.

In the 1960’s, Pillsbury VP Robert Keith published an anecdotal article which promoted, in part, a consumer-centric model for marketing, and though his work has been criticized, some of his concepts resemble the mindset we see being espoused by today’s best marketers.

Very often, being consumer-centric is nearly analogous to being honest. Just as the organic SEO world has been taught by Google that “tricking” Internet users and search engines with inauthentic signals doesn’t pay off in the long run, making false claims on your offline packaging or TV ads is likely to be quickly caught and widely publicized to consumers in the digital age. If your tacos don’t really contain seasoned beef, your 12-packs of soda aren’t really priced at $3.00, and your chewing gum doesn’t really kill germs, can your brand stand the backlash when these deceptions are debunked?

And even for famous brands like Macy’s that have successfully served the public for decades, the simple failure to continuously create an engaging in-store experience or to compete adeptly in a changing market can contribute to serious losses, including store closures. Offline marketing is truly tough.

And, how does all this relate to local SEO?

Yes, the “three grumpy woman” price gouging and doing “the dodgy”, the desk clerk who screams when asked about wi-fi, and the unmanaged but widely publicized wrong hours of operation — they say local business owners fear negative reviews, but local SEOs are the ones who walk into these situations with incoming clients and say, “My gosh, just what have these people been doing? How do I fix this?”

The forces of organic SEO (high visibility) and offline marketing (consumer-centricity) face off on our playing field, and often, the first intimation we get of our clients’ management of the in-store experience comes from reading the online reputation they’ve built on the first few pages of Google. Sometimes we applaud what we discover, sometimes we quake in our boots. It’s become increasingly apparent that, as local SEOs, we aren’t just going to be able to concentrate on optimizing title tags or managing citations, because the offline world we work to build the online mirror image of will reflect all of the following attributes pertaining to our clients:

• Consumer guarantee policies
• Staff hiring and training practices
• Cleanliness
• Quality
• Pricing
• Convenience
• Perception of fairness/honesty
• Personality of owner/management/staff

This list has nothing to do with online technical work, but everything to do with the company culture of the businesses we serve.

Because of this, local SEOs who lack a basic understanding of how customer service works in the offline world won’t be fully equipped to consult with clients who may need as much help defining the USP of their business as they do managing its local promotion. Predominantly, we work remotely and can’t walk into our client’s hotel or medical practice. We glean clues from what we see online (just like consumers) and if we can build our knowledge of the history of traditional marketing, we’ll have more authority to bring to consultations that address in-store problems in honest, gutsy ways while also maximizing overlooked opportunities.

I once walked into a small, quaint bakery selling dainty little cakes and expensive beverages, decorated in a cozy floral scheme; a place my auntie might have liked to take tea with a friend. The in-store music in this haven of ladylike repose? Heavy metal so loud it hurt my ears, despite being popular with the two kids left to man the shop while the owner was nowhere in evidence. The place was gone within a year.

As local SEOs, we can’t fix owners who aren’t determined to succeed, but our study of traditional marketing principles and consumer behavior can help us integrate the offline stream into the local, online one, making us better advisors. Likely you are already teaching the art of the offline review-ask. Whether your agency builds on this to begin managing billboards and print mailers directly for clients, or you are only in on meetings about these forms of outreach, the more you know, the better your chances at running successful campaigns.

It’s all local now, plus….

In communities across the US, townsfolk have long carried out the tradition of gathering on sidewalks for the pageantry of the annual parade in which the hallmarks of local life stream by them in procession. Local school marching bands, the hardware store’s float made entirely out of gardening tools, the church group in homemade Biblical costumes, the animal shelter with dogs in tow, and the Moose Club riding in an open car, waving to the crowd.

This is where we step in, leading the the local parade to march it past the eyes of digital consumers. We bring the NAP, citations, locally optimized content and review management into the stream, teaching clients how to be noticed by the crowd. And, we do this on the shoulders of the organic SEO and offline marketing communities’ constantly improving sense of the importance of truth in advertising.

In other words, everything that is offline, everything that is organic is now our own. We are simply adding the digital location data layer and a clear sense of direction to bring it all together. And, just to clarify, it’s not that the organic and offline streams weren’t feeding our particular river in the past — they always have been. It’s just that it has become increasingly obvious that a multi-disciplinary understanding does really belong to the work we do as local SEOs.

Manning a yare local SEO boat & charting a savvy course for the future

In the lingo of old salts at sea, a “yare” ship is one that is that is quick, agile and lively, and that’s exactly what your business or agency needs to be to handle the small but constant changes that impact the local SEO industry.

From the annals of local SEO history, you can find record after record of some of the top practitioners stating after each new update, filter or guideline change that their clients were only minorly affected instead of sunk deep. How do they achieve this enviable position? I’ve concluded that it’s because they have:

1. Become expert at seeing the holistic picture of marketing
2. Base their practices on this, sticking to basic guidelines and seeing human connections as the end goal of all marketing efforts

It’s by building up a sturdy base of intelligent, homocentric marketing materials (website, citations, social contributions, in-store, print, radio, etc.) that businesses can stand firm when there’s a slight change in the weather. It doesn’t matter whether Google hides or shows review stars, hammers down on thin content or on suspicious links because the bulk of the efforts being made by the business and its marketers aren’t tied to the minutiae of search engines’ whims — they’re tied to consumers.

It’s because of this dedicated consumer tie that enough that is good has been built to protect the business against massive losses with each new update or rule. Even a few bad reviews are really no problem. Consumers are still finding the business. Revenue is still coming in. Because of this sturdy base, the business can be yare, making quick, agile adjustments to fix problems and maximize the benefits of new opportunities which arise with each small change, rather than having to bail themselves out on a ship that has been sunk due to lack of broader marketing vision.

Let’s sum it up by saying that to chart a good course for future success, your company must know the technical aspects and historical tenets of local, organic, and offline marketing — but above all else, you must know consumers and have a business heart dedicated to their service. A mature heart is one that wisely balances the needs of self with the needs of others. I, for one, find my own heart all-in participating in this exciting and necessary maturation of our industry.

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!