John Mueller from Google talked about the issues that can arise when splitting one site into two or multiple sites. This is something that many site owners do, but depending on the reasons for doing it – whether SEO or for the user – you can end up doing more harm to your overall search […]
The post Google: Considerations When Splitting One Site Into Two Individual Sites appeared first on The SEM Post.
For SEO agencies and independent consultants looking for new business, a two-step strategy might be all you need to demonstrate your efficacy and separate from competitors. First, identify prospective clients that are well-suited to your offering. Second, send them a pitch that unequivocally communicates the potential results they can achieve from your services. The key to both is data and, conveniently, the same data that you use to recognize great potential clients in the first step can also be used to make a powerful case as to what your services can deliver for them.
The businesses you probably want to approach are those that are tuned in to how SEO works and have already invested in it, but that still have a veritable need for your services in order to achieve their full SEO potential. Naturally, a brand that has already climbed to the top of the most relevant search engine results pages (SERPs) isn’t a great candidate because they simply don’t need the help. Nor is a business with no SEO experience and no real SERP presence; they might require a particularly hefty effort to be brought up to speed, and perhaps won’t be as likely to invest in – and commit to – an ongoing SEO engagement.
While investigating potential business opportunities within this desired Goldilocks Zone of current SEO success, you might also be looking to target companies in the industries that your agency has previously done well in – both to leverage those past successes and demonstrate relevance to prospective clients with an adjacent audience. This makes it easy for prospects to see themselves in the shoes of those clients you’ve already helped, and for you to apply and repeat your tried-and-tested techniques.
Putting this advice together, you can begin the client search process by looking at keywords important to industries you’re familiar with. You will probably want to explore companies within the mid-range SERPs (ranks 10–30) that could contend for the top spots if they had better professional assistance. You can then perform an analysis of these sites to determine their potential for SEO improvement. For example, a potential client that derives a great deal of its traffic from a keyword in which it still has room to grow and move up in the SERPs is ideal.
While a slick email pitch can go a long way toward winning over new clients, it’s hard to beat the power of data-driven evidence (of course, your pitch can succeed on both style and substance). Be sure to use specific insights about the client’s SEO performance in your pitch – adding visuals will help make your case more clear and digestible. Also, consider using an SEO case study focused on your success in an overlapping space to offer an example of the results they could expect. Your pitch should culminate with a call-to-action for the potential client to get in touch to go deeper into the data and discuss how to proceed.
There are a number of approaches to framing your pitch. Here are four examples of different appeals you can use:
In SERPs, holding a top ranking is often exponentially superior. For example, it’s not unusual to see the top result capture 30% of all traffic (or ‘share of voice’) for a given keyword, while the tenth result receives a mere 1%.
Craft a pitch that pairs a result like this with data on how much traffic the keyword actually delivers to the company’s site, and the vast potential to multiply that traffic by improving their share of voice for that keyword becomes clear.
Where a client has gaps in their keyword strategy, demonstrating your ability to fill them and deliver traffic the prospect didn’t realize they could be earning goes a long way towards proving your agency’s expertise and value. These keywords can be found by examining sites that share an audience overlap with the potential client, and then studying the keywords they rank highly on. This investigation may yield unexpected results, reinforcing that your agency can drive results in areas the client never would have thought of without your expertise.
Discover gaps where a potential client’s competitors are outmaneuvering and outperforming them when it comes to establishing links from other sites – and then report these within the framework of a strategy that will close these gaps at every level. If a client clearly isn’t pursuing this strategy (i.e. if the average competitor has multiple times their backlinks), be sure to communicate the value of competing on this front.
To use this approach, perform an audit of the potential client’s site to identify opportunities to improve its SEO practices. This is especially important if your firm specializes in these services.
Providing specific tips and guidance serves as a substantial upfront gesture, and clearly demonstrates the value of an ongoing relationship.
Conveying the specific remedies and additions that you would pursue to optimize a client’s site and search strategy serves as a strong introduction and major first step toward becoming indispensable to the client as the one hired to execute a winning SEO game plan. Be sure to personalize your pitches as much as possible to stand out from competitors, while ensuring that compelling data makes up the crux of your appeal and the proof that you’re the firm to help that business achieve its full SEO potential.
Kim Kosaka is the Director of Marketing at Alexa.com, which provides insights that agencies can use to help clients win their audience and accelerate growth.
Bing is testing a distinct new style of their local pack in the search results. Instead of the usual list of results together, this new layout has individual card-style results for each business within the local pack. However, some versions of this test drop the results in the local pack to only three results instead […]
The post Bing Local Pack Testing New Card Style in Search Results appeared first on The SEM Post.
Posted by MiriamEllis
No marketing agency staffer feels good when they see a retail client getting reviews like this on the web.
But we can find out why they’re happening, and if we’re going above-and-beyond in our work, we just might be able to catalyze turning things around if we’re committed to being honest with clients and have an actionable strategy for their in-store improvements.
In this post, I’ll highlight some advice from an internal letter at Tesla that I feel is highly applicable to the retail sector. I’d also like to help your agency combat the retail blues headlining the news these days with big brands downsizing, liquidating and closing up shop — I’m going to share a printable infographic with some statistics with you that are almost guaranteed to generate the client positivity so essential to making real change. And, for some further inspiration, I’d like to offer a couple of anecdotes involving an Igloo cooler, a monk, reindeer moss, and reviews.
“Hi there,” I greeted the staffer at the customer service counter of the big department store. “Where would I find a small cooler?”
“We don’t have any,” he mumbled.
“You don’t have any coolers? Like, an Igloo cooler to take on a picnic to keep things cold?”
“Maybe over there,” he waved his hand in unconcern.
And I stood there for a minute, expecting him to actually figure this out for me, maybe even guide me to the appropriate aisle, or ask a manager to assist my transaction, if necessary. But in his silence, I walked away.
“Hi there,” I tried with more specificity at the locally owned general store the next day. “Where would I find something like a small Igloo cooler to keep things cold on a picnic?”
“I don’t know,” the staffer replied.
“Oh…” I said, uncomfortably.
“It could be upstairs somewhere,” he hazarded, and left me to quest for the second floor, which appeared to be a possibly-non-code-compliant catch-all attic for random merchandise, where I applied to a second dimly illuminated employee who told me I should probably go downstairs and escalate my question to someone else.
And apparently escalation was necessary, for on the third try, a very tall man was able to lift his gaze to some coolers on a top shelf… within clear view of the checkout counter where the whole thing began.
Why do we all have experiences like this?
“Corporate tells us what to carry” is the almost defensive-sounding refrain I have now received from three employees at two different Whole Foods Markets when asking if they could special order items for me since the Amazon buyout.
Because, you know, before they were Amazon-Whole Foods, staffers would gladly offer to procure anything they didn’t have in stock. Now, if they stop carrying that Scandinavian vitamin D-3 made from the moss eaten by reindeer and I’ve got to have it because I don’t want the kind made by irradiating sheep wool, I’d have to special order an entire case of it to get my hands on a bottle. Because, you know, “Corporate.”
Why does the distance between corporate and customer make me feel like the store I’m standing in, and all of its employees, are powerless? Why am I, the customer, left feeling powerless?
So maybe my search for a cooler, my worries about access to reindeer moss, and the laughable customer service I’ve experienced don’t signal “genuine pain.” But this does:
This is genuine pain. When customer service is failing to the point that badly treated patrons are being further distressed by the sight of fellow shoppers meeting the same fate, the cause is likely built into company structure. And your marketing agency is looking at a bonafide reputation crisis that could presage things like lawsuits, impactful reputation damage, and even closure for your valuable clients.
When you encounter customer service disasters, it begs questions like:
I think a “no” answer to all three questions proceeds from definite causes. And I think Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, had such causes in mind when he recently penned a letter to his own employees.
“It must be okay for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.”
“Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the 'chain of command.' Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.
A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.
In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a 'company rule' is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.”
- Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla
Let’s parlay this uncommon advice into retail. If it’s everyone’s job to access a free flow of information, use common sense, make the right thing happen, and change rules that don’t make sense, then:
“But wait,” retailers may say. “How can I trust that an employee’s idea of ‘common sense’ is reliable?”
Let’s ask a monk for the answer.
I recently had the pleasure of listening to a talk given by a monk who was defining what it meant to be a good leader. He hearkened back to his young days, and to the man who was then the leader of his community.
“He was a busy man, but he took the time to get to know each of us one-on-one, and to be sure that we knew him. He set an example for me, and I watched him,” the monk explained.
Most monasteries function within a set of established rules, many of which are centuries old. You can think of these guidelines as a sort of policy. In certain communities, it’s perfectly acceptable that some of the members live apart as hermits most of the year, only breaking their meditative existence by checking in with the larger group on important holidays to share what they’ve been working on solo. In others, every hour has its appointed task, from prayer, to farming, to feeding people, to engaging in social activism.
The point is that everyone within a given community knows the basic guidelines, because at some point, they’ve been well-communicated. Beyond that, it is up to the individual to see whether they can happily live out their personal expression within the policy.
It’s a lot like retail can be, when done right. And it hinges on the question:
“Has culture been well-enough communicated to every employee so that he or she can act like the CEO of the company would in wide variety of circumstances?”
Or to put it another way, would Amazon owner Jeff Bezos be powerless to get me my vitamins?
The most accessible modern benchmark of good customer service — the online review — is what tells the public whether the CEO has “set the example.” Reviews tell whether time has been taken to acquaint every staffer with the business that employs them, preparing them to fit their own personal expression within the company’s vision of serving the public.
An employee who is able to recognize that an injured patron needs a seat while awaiting his prescription should be empowered to act immediately, knowing that the larger company supports treating people well. If poor training, burdensome chains of command, or failure to share brand culture are obstacles to common-sense personal initiative, the problem must be traced back to the CEO and corrected, starting from there.
And, of course, should a random staffer’s personal expression genuinely include an insurmountable disregard for other people, they can always be told it’s time to leave the monastery...
So your agency is auditing a valuable incoming client, and their negative reviews citing dirty premises, broken fixtures, food poisoning, slowness, rudeness, cluelessness, and lack of apparent concern make you say to yourself,
“Well, I was hoping we could clean up the bad data on the local business listings for this enterprise, but unless they clean up their customer service at 150 of their worst-rated locations, how much ROI are we really going to be able to deliver? What’s going on at these places?”
Let’s make no bones about this: Your honesty at this critical juncture could mean the difference between survival and closure for the brand.
You need to bring it home to the most senior level person you can reach in the organization that no amount of honest marketing can cover up poor customer service in the era of online reviews. If the brand has fallen to the level of the pharmacy I’ve cited, structural change is an absolute necessity. You can ask the tough questions, ask for an explanation of the bad reviews.
“But I’m just a digital marketer,” you may think. “I’m not in charge of whatever happens offline.”
Think again.
Headlines in retail land are horrid right now:
If you were a retail brand C-suite and were swallowing these predictions of doom with your daily breakfast, wouldn’t you be looking for inspiration from anyone with genuine insight? And if a marketing agency should make it their business to confront the truth while also being the bearer of some better news, wouldn’t you be ready to listen?
What is the truth? That poor reviews are symptoms smart doctors can use for diagnosis of structural problems.
What is the better news? The retail scenario is not nearly as dire as it may seem.
Why let hierarchy and traditional roles hold your agency back? Tesla wouldn’t. Why not roll up your sleeves and step into in-store? Organize and then translate the narrative negative reviews are telling about structural problems for the brand which have resulted in dangerously bad customer service. And then, be prepared to counter corporate inertia born of fear with some eye-opening statistics.
Print your own copy of this infographic to share with clients.
At Moz, we’re working with enterprises to get their basic location data into shape so that they are ready to win their share of the predicted $1.4 trillion in mobile-influenced local sales by 2021, and your agency can use these same numbers to combat indecision and apathy for your retail clients. Look at that second statistic again: 90% of purchases are still happening in physical stores. At Moz, we ask our customers if their data is ready for this. Your agency can ask its clients if their reputations are ready for this, if their employees have what they need to earn the brand’s piece of that 90% action. Great online data + great in-store service = table stakes for retail success.
While I won’t play down the unease that major brand retail closures is understandably causing, I hope I’ve given you the tools to fight the “retail disaster” narrative. 85% more mobile users are searching for things like “Where do I buy that reindeer moss vitamin D3?” than they were just 3 years ago. So long as retail staff is ready to deliver, I see no “apocalypse” here.
So, your agency has put in the time to identify a reputation problem severe enough that it appears to be founded in structural deficiencies or policies. Perhaps you’ve used some ORM software to do review sentiment analysis to discover which of your client’s locations are hurting worst, or perhaps you’ve done an initial audit manually. You've communicated the bad news to the most senior-level person you can reach at the company, and you've also shared the statistics that make change seem very worthwhile, begging for a new commitment to in-store excellence. What happens next?
While there are going to be nuances specific to every brand, my bet is that the steps will look like this for most businesses:
Benjamin Franklin may or may not have said that “time is money.” While the adage rings true in business, reviews have taught me the flip side — that a lack of time equals less money. Every negative review that cites helpless employees and poor service sounds to my marketing ears like a pocketful of silver dollars rolling down a drain.
The monk says good leaders make the time to communicate culture one-on-one.
Tesla says rules should change if they’re ridiculous.
Chairs should be offered to sick people… where common sense is applied.
Reviews can read like this:
And digital marketers have never known a time quite like this to have the ear of retail, maybe stepping beyond traditional boundaries into the fray of the real world. Maybe making a fundamental difference.
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Whether you are new to SEO and looking for a litmus test of your website’s health, or have an ongoing campaign that may need a little refreshing, it’s always a good idea to perform regular check-ups or audits.
If you have complex campaigns that are already in full swing this may seem like a lot of effort. It’s a bit like going to the dentist; you may not like it but it’s necessary. Better to identify areas for improvement or success that can be capitalized on than to continue blindly following the original strategy with more limited results.
This article explores some of the tools that are available to you in order to perform an SEO check-up.
With the growing complexity of inbound marketing, voice search, Rankbrain and content marketing, the phrase ‘keyword’ is starting to feel somewhat of a profanity. In fact, Hubspot is even in the process of removing its keyword tracking function from the platform.
However, there is still significant emphasis placed on high value target keywords by clients and management alike. Furthermore, sound keyword research (or searcher intent-led research) can be incredibly valuable as a foundation for a more comprehensive, conversion-driven campaign.
The queries that searchers use to find your business can change over time so it’s always a good idea to audit existing target keywords to ensure that they are still viable. Google’s Keyword Planner should be your first port of call; after all it provides direct access to search data.
If you understandably don’t want to pin your campaign to certain keywords, focus instead on the solutions and value that you are trying to provide for your clients. This will help you analyse the overarching objectives of your campaign and influence how you then track the successes and areas for improvement. Use your analytics data (more on this later) to see whether the campaign is performing according to your original strategy.
Of course, there are other research tools that you can use including Answer the Public, Keywordtool.io or BuzzSumo.
For many, having indicative metrics can provide peace of mind with regard to the incremental improvement of campaigns. While this can be somewhat of a flawed system, they do provide easily digestible statistics to help with a check-up.
The two most popular metrics used by the industry are provided by Moz and Majestic. These figures should be viewed as quick indicative figures and should not be taken as chapter and verse for the health of your SEO campaign.
Domain authority (DA) is the most popular of the metrics provided by Moz’s Open Site Explorer, providing a score between 0 and 100. The theory is that according to the factors taken into account by Moz’s analytics, a website with a higher DA is more likely to rank in search. Moz also provides page authority, which is useful for landing or category pages on your website.
In the same vein as Moz, Majestic provides two main metrics: trust flow and citation flow. These metrics are heavily based on the quantity and quality of linking domains and are potentially more useful for a check-up owing to the specific nature of the metrics. Majestic also provides a deeper breakdown of link factors, allowing users to deep dive into the health of their website’s backlink portfolio.
With the roll out of Google’s mobile first index, load speed has never been more important. A slow loading website is a slow loading website. It has a dual impact: lower rankings and lower conversion rates, all underpinned by a poor user experience.
Any SEO check-up or audit should evaluate a website’s load speed. There are a number of tools available, all with their pros and cons. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is much like the Keyword Planner; it’s run by Google so pretty hard to ignore. However, the advice provided is reasonably generic. Use it conjunction with other tools such as Pingdom’s Website Speed Test and GT Metrix to really hone in on some of the load speed issues faced by your site and get your site loading quickly on both desktop and mobile.
Websites are like cars: the more you use them, the more maintenance they need. Over time a website is likely to develop errors in the code, which will have an impact on how your website is viewed Google, especially if it then effects the aforementioned load speed. Use W3C’s Markup Validation Service to highlight errors in the code for your development team to fix.
The tools mentioned thus far give an overarching view of your website’s SEO health, allowing you to start to form, or reassess, the foundations of a campaign. However, it’s always possible to dig a little deeper to draw user-based insights into the current performance of a website and therefore not only provide higher value to the user (and therefore increase your chances of being returned in the SERPs), but also have a positive impact on your conversion rate.
User and usage data is essential for any successful, agile campaign. It provides the data necessary to see if your original strategy is paying dividends, or whether you need to start shaking things up!
If you haven’t already set up detailed conversion tracking on your site, please do so now. Conversions are often what dictates a campaign’s success so make sure that you can correctly attribute them.
Using Google Analytics for data that can positively influence an SEO campaign is a whole suite of articles alone. However, here are a few quick wins for you.
Chances are that you are investing heavily into your own content creation, which is great. The pitfall is that you create on piece of content and then move on to create a completely fresh piece. Use your check-up/audit as an opportunity to refresh existing content by:
Keyword rankings are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to measuring SEO success and they are by no means the most pertinent data. Conversions are the real gold at the end of the rainbow and without a clear user flow you can severely inhibit your conversion rate.
The user flow function in Google Analytics shows you entry and exit pages, as well as the main flow from page to page. Geek out even further with tools like Hot Jar but be warned – you can waste a lot of time watching endless videos of your users’ sessions.
Google Search Console is invaluable for making sure that all of your onsite optimization, content creation and link building is actually delivering the right type of traffic to your site. Use the platform (you can also sync and view data via Google Analytics) to make sure that the types of searches people are using to find your website are relevant. Another tip is to find those search terms for which you are gaining lots of impressions, but have a low CTR – this can help you refine how your pages actually appear in the SERPs.
You only need do a brief search to understand that there are multiple tools for just about every aspect of SEO, although hopefully the ones listed above will get you off to a healthy start in your review. You may already be a premium subscriber to platforms such as Ahrefs or SEMrush, in which case we would advise exploring the functionality offered by these providers. For example, the site audit feature on SEMrush is particularly useful.
Use these tools to provide indicators of success or areas for improvement. Don’t be afraid to adjust your strategy according to the findings of your check-up – you may well spot opportunities in the market that your competitors have not.
Read more about performing a technical SEO audit on Marcela De Vivo’s most recent column.
Posted by Dr-Pete
I'm a lazy marketer some days — I'll admit it. I don't do a lot of manual link prospecting, because it's a ton of work, outreach, and follow-up. There are plenty of times, though, where I've got a good piece of content (well, at least I hope it's good) and I want to know if it's getting attention from specific sites, whether they're in the search industry or the broader marketing or PR world. Luckily, we've made that question a lot easier to answer in Link Explorer, so today's post is for all of you curious but occasionally lazy marketers. Hop into the tool if you want to follow along:
When you first visit Link Explorer, you'll see that it defaults to "root domain":
Some days, you don't want to wade through your entire domain, but just want to target a single piece of content. Just enter or paste that URL, and select "exact page" (once you start typing a full path, we'll even auto-select that option for you):
Now I can see just the link data for that page (note: screenshots have been edited for size):
Good news — my Whiteboard Friday already has a decent link profile. That's already a fair amount to sort through, and as the link profile grows, it's only going to get tougher. So, how can I pinpoint just the sites I'm interested in and track those sites over time?
This is the one part we can't automate for you. Make a list of prospects in whatever tool you please. Here's an imaginary list I created in Excel:
Obviously, this list is on the short side, but let's say I decide to pull a few of the usual suspects from the search marketing world, plus one from the broader marketing world, and a couple of aspirational sites (I'm probably not going to get that New York Times link, but let's dream big).
Obviously, I could individually search for these domains in my full list of inbound links, but even with six prospects, that's going to take some time. So, let's do this the lazy way. Back in Link Explorer, look at the very bottom of the left-hand navigation and you'll see "Link Targeting Lists":
Keep scrolling — I promise it's down there. Click on it, and you'll see something like this:
On the far-right, under the main header, click on "[+] Create new list." You'll get an overlay with a three-step form like the one below. Just give your list a name, provide a target URL (the page you want to track links to), and copy-and-paste in your list of prospects. Here's an example:
Click "Save," and you should immediately get back some data.
Alas, no link from the New York Times. The blue icons show me that the prospects are currently linking to Moz.com, but not to my target page. The green icon shows me that I've already got a head-start — Search Engine Land is apparently linking to this post (thanks, Barry!).
Click on any arrow in the "Notes" column, and you can add a note to that entry, like so:
Don't forget to hit "Save." Congratulations, you've created your first list! Well, I've created your first list for you. Geez, you really are lazy.
Of course, the real magic is that the list just keeps working for you. At any time, you can return to "Link Tracking Lists" on the Link Explorer menu, and now you'll see a master list of all your lists:
Just click on the list name you're interested in, and you can see your latest-and-greatest data. We can't build the links for you, but we can at least make keeping track of them a lot easier.
Ok, it's just a regular video, although it does require electricity. If you're too lazy to read (in which case, let's be honest, you probably didn't get this far), I've put this whole workflow into an enchanting collection of words and sounds for you:
I hope you'll put your newfound powers to good. Let us know how you're using Tracking Lists (or how you plan to use them) in the comments, and where you'd like to see us take them next!
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Posted by Tom.Capper
If you’ve ever compared two analytics implementations on the same site, or compared your analytics with what your business is reporting in sales, you’ve probably noticed that things don’t always match up. In this post, I’ll explain why data is missing from your web analytics platforms and how large the impact could be. Some of the issues I cover are actually quite easily addressed, and have a decent impact on traffic — there’s never been an easier way to hit your quarterly targets. ;)
I’m going to focus on GA (Google Analytics), as it's the most commonly used provider, but most on-page analytics platforms have the same issues. Platforms that rely on server logs do avoid some issues but are fairly rare, so I won’t cover them in any depth.
On Distilled.net, we have a standard Google Analytics property running from an HTML tag in GTM (Google Tag Manager). In addition, for the last two years, I’ve been running three extra concurrent Google Analytics implementations, designed to measure discrepancies between different configurations.
(If you’re just interested in my findings, you can skip this section, but if you want to hear more about the methodology, continue reading. Similarly, don’t worry if you don’t understand some of the detail here — the results are easier to follow.)
Two of these extra implementations — one in Google Tag Manager and one on page — run locally hosted, renamed copies of the Google Analytics JavaScript file (e.g. www.distilled.net/static/js/au3.js, instead of www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js) to make them harder to spot for ad blockers. I also used renamed JavaScript functions (“tcap” and “Buffoon,” rather than the standard “ga”) and renamed trackers (“FredTheUnblockable” and “AlbertTheImmutable”) to avoid having duplicate trackers (which can often cause issues).
This was originally inspired by 2016-era best practice on how to get your Google Analytics setup past ad blockers. I can’t find the original article now, but you can see a very similar one from 2017 here.
Lastly, we have (“DianaTheIndefatigable”), which just has a renamed tracker, but uses the standard code otherwise and is implemented on-page. This is to complete the set of all combinations of modified and unmodified GTM and on-page trackers.
Two of Distilled’s modified on-page trackers, as seen on https://www.distilled.net/
Overall, this table summarizes our setups:
|
Tracker |
Renamed function? |
GTM or on-page? |
Locally hosted JavaScript file? |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Default |
No |
GTM HTML tag |
No |
|
FredTheUnblockable |
Yes - “tcap” |
GTM HTML tag |
Yes |
|
AlbertTheImmutable |
Yes - “buffoon” |
On page |
Yes |
|
DianaTheIndefatigable |
No |
On page |
No |
I tested their functionality in various browser/ad-block environments by watching for the pageviews appearing in browser developer tools:
Ad blockers, primarily as browser extensions, have been growing in popularity for some time now. Primarily this has been to do with users looking for better performance and UX on ad-laden sites, but in recent years an increased emphasis on privacy has also crept in, hence the possibility of analytics blocking.
Some ad blockers block web analytics platforms by default, others can be configured to do so. I tested Distilled’s site with Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin, two of the most popular ad-blocking desktop browser addons, but it’s worth noting that ad blockers are increasingly prevalent on smartphones, too.
Here’s how Distilled’s setups fared:
(All numbers shown are from April 2018)
|
Setup |
Vs. Adblock |
Vs. Adblock with “EasyPrivacy” enabled |
Vs. uBlock Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
|
GTM |
Pass |
Fail |
Fail |
|
On page |
Pass |
Fail |
Fail |
|
GTM + renamed script & function |
Pass |
Fail |
Fail |
|
On page + renamed script & function |
Pass |
Fail |
Fail |
Seems like those tweaked setups didn’t do much!
Ad blocker usage can be in the 15–25% range depending on region, but many of these installs will be default setups of AdBlock Plus, which as we’ve seen above, does not block tracking. Estimates of AdBlock Plus’s market share among ad blockers vary from 50–70%, with more recent reports tending more towards the former. So, if we assume that at most 50% of installed ad blockers block analytics, that leaves your exposure at around 10%.
This is another privacy motivated feature, this time of browsers themselves. You can enable it in the settings of most current browsers. It’s not compulsory for sites or platforms to obey the “do not track” request, but Firefox offers a stronger feature under the same set of options, which I decided to test as well.
Most browsers now offer the option to send a “Do not track” message. I tested the latest releases of Firefox & Chrome for Windows 10.
|
Setup |
Chrome “do not track” |
Firefox “do not track” |
Firefox “tracking protection” |
|---|---|---|---|
|
GTM |
Pass |
Pass |
Fail |
|
On page |
Pass |
Pass |
Fail |
|
GTM + renamed script & function |
Pass |
Pass |
Fail |
|
On page + renamed script & function |
Pass |
Pass |
Fail |
Again, it doesn’t seem that the tweaked setups are doing much work for us here.
Only Firefox Quantum’s “Tracking Protection,” introduced in February, had any effect on our trackers. Firefox has a 5% market share, but Tracking Protection is not enabled by default. The launch of this feature had no effect on the trend for Firefox traffic on Distilled.net.
It’s a bit of an obvious one, but filters you’ve set up in your analytics might intentionally or unintentionally reduce your reported traffic levels.
For example, a filter excluding certain niche screen resolutions that you believe to be mostly bots, or internal traffic, will obviously cause your setup to underreport slightly.
Impact is hard to estimate, as setup will obviously vary on a site-by site-basis. I do recommend having a duplicate, unfiltered “master” view in case you realize too late you’ve lost something you didn’t intend to.
Google Tag Manager has become an increasingly popular way of implementing analytics in recent years, due to its increased flexibility and the ease of making changes. However, I’ve long noticed that it can tend to underreport vs. on-page setups.
I was also curious about what would happen if you didn’t follow Google’s guidelines in setting up on-page code.
By combining my numbers with numbers from my colleague Dom Woodman’s site (you’re welcome for the link, Dom), which happens to use a Drupal analytics add-on as well as GTM, I was able to see the difference between Google Tag Manager and misplaced on-page code (right at the bottom of the <body> tag) I then weighted this against my own Google Tag Manager data to get an overall picture of all 5 setups.
Traffic as a percentage of baseline (standard Google Tag Manager implementation):
|
Google Tag Manager |
Modified & Google Tag Manager |
On-Page Code In <head> |
Modified & On-Page Code In <head> |
On-Page Code Misplaced In <Body> |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Chrome |
100.00% |
98.75% |
100.77% |
99.80% |
94.75% |
|
Safari |
100.00% |
99.42% |
100.55% |
102.08% |
82.69% |
|
Firefox |
100.00% |
99.71% |
101.16% |
101.45% |
90.68% |
|
Internet Explorer |
100.00% |
80.06% |
112.31% |
113.37% |
77.18% |
There are a few main takeaways here:
It’s worth noting also that the customized implementations actually got less traffic than the standard ones. For the on-page code, this is within the margin of error, but for Google Tag Manager, there’s another reason — because I used unfiltered profiles for the comparison, there’s a lot of bot spam in the main profile, which primarily masquerades as Internet Explorer. Our main profile is by far the most spammed, and also acting as the baseline here, so the difference between on-page code and Google Tag Manager is probably somewhat larger than what I’m reporting.
I also split the data by mobile, out of curiosity:
Traffic as a percentage of baseline (standard Google Tag Manager implementation):
|
Google Tag Manager |
Modified & Google Tag Manager |
On-Page Code In <head> |
Modified & On-Page Code In <head> |
On-Page Code Misplaced In <Body> |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Desktop |
100.00% |
98.31% |
100.97% |
100.89% |
93.47% |
|
Mobile |
100.00% |
97.00% |
103.78% |
100.42% |
89.87% |
|
Tablet |
100.00% |
97.68% |
104.20% |
102.43% |
88.13% |
The further takeaway here seems to be that mobile browsers, like Internet Explorer, can struggle with Google Tag Manager.
Google Tag Manager seems to cost you a varying amount depending on what make-up of browsers and devices use your site. On Distilled.net, the difference is around 1.7%; however, we have an unusually desktop-heavy and tech-savvy audience (not much Internet Explorer!). Depending on vertical, this could easily swell to the 5% range.
On Teflsearch.com, the impact of misplaced on-page code was around 7.5%, vs Google Tag Manager. Keeping in mind that Google Tag Manager itself underreports, the total loss could easily be in the 10% range.
I’ve focused above on areas where you might be missing data altogether. However, there are also lots of ways in which data can be misrepresented, or detail can be missing. I’ll cover these more briefly, but the main issues are dark traffic and attribution.
Dark traffic is direct traffic that didn’t really come via direct — which is generally becoming more and more common. Typical causes are:
It’s also worth noting the trend towards genuinely direct traffic that would historically have been organic. For example, due to increasingly sophisticated browser autocompletes, cross-device history, and so on, people end up “typing” a URL that they’d have searched for historically.
I’ve written about this in more detail here, but in general, a session in Google Analytics (and any other platform) is a fairly arbitrary construct — you might think it’s obvious how a group of hits should be grouped into one or more sessions, but in fact, the process relies on a number of fairly questionable assumptions. In particular, it’s worth noting that Google Analytics generally attributes direct traffic (including dark traffic) to the previous non-direct source, if one exists.
I was quite surprised by some of my own findings when researching this post, but I’m sure I didn’t get everything. Can you think of any other ways in which data can end up missing from analytics?
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Contrary to popular belief, technical SEO isn’t too challenging once you get the basics down; you may even be using a few of these tactics and not know it.
However, it is important to know that your site probably has some type of technical issue. “There are no perfect websites without any room for improvement,” Elena Terenteva of SEMrush explained. “Hundreds and even thousands of issues might appear on your website.”
For example, over 80% of websites examined had 4xx broken link errors, according to a 2017 SEMrush study, and more than 65% of sites had duplicate content.
Ultimately, you want your website to rank better, get better traffic, and net more conversions. Technical SEO is all about fixing errors to make that happen. Here are 12 technical SEO elements to check for maximum site optimization.
One of the first things to do is run a crawl report for your site. A crawl report, or site audit, will provide insight into some of your site’s errors.
You will see your most pressing technical SEO issues, such as duplicate content, low page speed, or missing H1/H2 tags.
You can automate site audits using a variety of tools and work through the list of errors or warnings created by the crawl. This is a task you should work through on a monthly basis to keep your site clean of errors and as optimized as possible.
Switching to HTTPS is a must because search engines and users will not have access to your site if you still have HTTP URLs. They will get 4xx and 5xx HTTP status codes instead of your content.
A Ranking Factors Study conducted by SEMrush found that HTTPS now is a very strong ranking factor and can impact your site’s rankings.
Make sure you switch over, and when you do, use this checklist to ensure a seamless migration.
Next, you need to look for other status code errors. Your site crawl report gives you a list of URL errors, including 404 errors. You can also get a list from the Google Search Console, which includes a detailed breakdown of potential errors. Make sure your Google Search Console error list is always empty, and that you fix errors as soon as they arise.
Finally, make sure the SSL certificate is correct. You can use SEMrush’s site audit tool to get a report.
The XML sitemap serves as a map for Google and other search engine crawlers. It essentially helps the crawlers find your website pages, thus ranking them accordingly.
You should ensure your site’s XML sitemap meets a few key guidelines:
You can submit your XML sitemap to Google via the Google Search Console Sitemaps tool. You can also insert the sitemap (i.e. https://ift.tt/1yk2Rmx) anywhere in your robots.txt file.
Make sure your XML Sitemap is pristine, with all the URLs returning 200 status codes and proper canonicals. You do not want to waste valuable crawl budget on duplicate or broken pages.
Your site’s load time is another important technical SEO metric to check. According to the technical SEO error report via SEMrush, over 23% of sites have slow page load times.
Site speed is all about user experience and can affect other key metrics that search engines use for ranking, such as bounce rate and time on page.
To find your site’s load time you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Simply enter your site URL and let Google do the rest.
You’ll even get site load time metrics for mobile.
This has become increasingly important after Google’s roll out of mobile-first indexing. Ideally, your page load time should be less than 3 seconds. If it is more for either mobile or desktop, it is time to start tweaking elements of your site to decrease site load time for better rankings.
Your site must be mobile-friendly to improve technical SEO and search engine rankings. This is a pretty easy SEO element to check using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test: just enter your site and get valuable insights on the mobile state of your website.
You can even submit your results to Google to let them know how your site performs.
A few mobile-friendly solutions include:
Keyword cannibalization can cause confusion among search engines. For example, if you have two pages in keyword competition, Google will need to decide which page is best.
“Consequently, each page has a lower CTR, diminished authority, and lower conversion rates than one consolidated page will have,” Aleh Barysevich of Search Engine Journal explained.
One of the most common keyword cannibalization pitfalls is to optimize home page and subpage for the same keywords, which is common in local SEO. Use Google Search Console’s Performance report to look for pages that are competing for the same keywords. Use the filter to see which pages have the same keywords in the URL, or search by keyword to see how many pages are ranking for those same keywords.
In this example, notice that there are many pages on the same site with the same exact keyword. It might be ideal to consolidate a few of these pages, where possible, to avoid keyword cannibalization.
If you notice that all of your pages aren’t indexed, the first place to look is your robots.txt file.
There are sometimes occasions when site owners will accidentally block pages from search engine crawling. This makes auditing your robots.txt file a must.
When examining your robots.txt file, you should look for “Disallow: /”
This tells search engines not to crawl a page on your site, or maybe even your entire website. Make sure none of your relevant pages are being accidentally disallowed in your robots.txt file.
On the topic of search engine indexing, there is an easy way to check how well Google is indexing your website. In Google search type in “site:yourwebsite.com”:
It will show you all pages indexed by Google, which you can use as a reference. A word of caution, however: if your site is not on the top of the list, you may have a Google penalty on your hands, or you’re blocking your site from being indexed.
This technical SEO faux pas is very common for ecommerce sites and large sites with hundreds to thousands of pages. In fact, nearly 54% of websites have duplicate metadata, also known as meta descriptions, and approximately 63% have missing meta descriptions altogether.
Duplicate meta descriptions occur when similar products or pages simply have content copied and pasted into the meta descriptions field.
A detailed SEO audit or a crawl report will alert you to meta description issues. It may take some time to get unique descriptions in place, but it is worth it.
While you are checking all your meta descriptions for duplicate content errors, you can also optimize them by ensuring they are the correct length. This is not a major ranking factor, but it is a technical SEO tactic that can improve your CTR in SERPs.
Recent changes to meta description length increased the 160 character count to 320 characters. This gives you plenty of space to add keywords, product specs, location (for local SEO), and other key elements.
Duplicate content in meta-descriptions is not the only duplicate content you need to be on the lookout for when it comes to technical SEO. Almost 66% of websites have duplicate content issues.
Copyscape is a great tool to find duplicate content on the internet. You can also use Screaming Frog, Site Bulb or SEMrush to identify duplication.
Once you have your list, it is simply a matter of running through the pages and changing the content to avoid duplication.
Any type of broken link is bad for your SEO; it can waste crawl budget, create a bad user experience, and lead to lower rankings. This makes identifying and fixing broken links on your website important.
One way in which to find broken links is to check your crawl report. This will give you a detailed view of each URL that has broken links.
You can also use DrLinkCheck.com to look broken links. You simply enter your site’s URL and wait for the report to be generated.
There are a number of technical SEO elements you can check during your next SEO audit. From XML Sitemaps to duplicate content, being proactive about optimization on-page and off is a must.
Posted by randfish
Are you sure that your current SEO goals are the best fit for your organization? It's incredibly important that they tie into both your company goals and your marketing goals, as well as provide specific, measurable metrics you can work to improve. In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines how to set the right SEO goals for your team and shares two examples of how different businesses might go about doing just that.
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Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about SEO goals, how to set smart ones, how to measure your progress against them, how to amplify those goals to the rest of your organization so that people really buy in to SEO.
This is a big challenge. So many folks that I've talked to in the field have basically said, "I'm not sure exactly how to set goals for our SEO team that are the right ones." I think that there's a particularly pernicious problem once Google took away the keyword-level data for SEO referrals.
So, from paid search, you can see this click was on this keyword and sent traffic to this page and then here's how it performed after that. In organic search, you can no longer do that. You haven't been able to do it for a few years now. Because of that removal, proving the return on investment for SEO has been really challenging. We'll talk in a future Whiteboard Friday about proving ROI. But let's focus here on how you get some smart SEO goals that are actually measurable, trackable, and pertain intelligently to the goals of the business, the organization.
So the first thing, the first problem that I see is that a lot of folks start here, which seems like a reasonable idea, but is actually a terrible idea. Don't start with your SEO goals. When your SEO team gets together or when you get together with your consultants, your agency, don't start with what the SEO goals should be.
So that list is kind of right here. It's not very long. There are not that many things in the SEO world that we can truly measure directly. So measurable goal metrics might be things like...
1. Rankings. Which we can measure in three ways. We can measure them globally, nationally, or locally. You can choose to set those up.
2. Organic search visits. So this would be just the raw traffic that is sent from organic search.
3. You can also separate that into branded search versus non-branded search. But it's much more challenging than it is with paid, because we don't have the keyword data. Thus, we have to use an implied or inferred model, where essentially we say, "These pages are likely to be receiving branded search traffic, versus these pages that are likely to be receiving non-branded search traffic."
A good example is the homepage of most brands is most likely to get primarily branded search traffic, whereas resource pages, blog pages, content marketing style pages, those are mostly going to get unbranded. So you can weight those appropriately as you see fit.
Tracking your rankings is crucially important, because that way you can see which pages show up for branded queries versus which pages show up for unbranded queries, and then you can build pretty darn good models of branded search versus non-branded search visits based on which landing pages are going to get traffic.
4. SERP ownership. So ideas around your reputation in the search results. So this is essentially looking at the page of search results that comes up for a given query and what results are in there. There might be things you don't like and don't want and things you really do want, and the success and failure can be measured directly through the rankings in the SERP.
5. Search volume. So for folks who are trying to improve their brand's affinity and reputation on the web and trying to grow the quantity of branded search, which is a good metric, you can look at that through things like Google Trends or through a Google AdWords campaign or through something like Moz's Keyword Explorer.
6. Links and link metrics. So you could look at the growth or shrinkage of links over time. You can measure that through things like the number of linking root domains, the total number of links. Authority or spam metrics and how those are distributed.
7. Referral traffic. And last, but not least, most SEO campaigns, especially those that focus on links or improving rankings, are going to also send referral traffic from the links that are built. So you can watch referral traffic and what those referrers are and whether they came from pages where you built links with SEO intent.
So taking all of these metrics, these should be applied to the SEO goals that you choose that match up with your marketing and company goals. I wanted to try and illustrate this, not just explain it, but illustrate it through two examples that are very different in what they're measuring.
So, first off, Taft Boots, they've been advertising like crazy to me on Instagram. Apparently, I must need new boots.
Now, you might say, "Wait a minute. Rand, this is a pretty common SEO methodology here." Yes, but many times this is not directly tied to the marketing goals, which is not directly tied to the business goals. If you want to have success as an SEO, you want to convince people to keep investing in you, you want to keep having that job or that consulting gig, you've got to connect these up.
From these, we can then say, "Okay, for each one, how do we measure it?" Well...
All of these, this big-picture goal is going to be measured by the contribution of search visits to essentially non-homepage and non-branded pages that contribute to the conversion funnel. So we have a methodology to create a smart goal and system here.
Another example, totally different, but let's try it out because I think that many folks have trouble connecting non-e-commerce pages, non-product stuff. So we're going to use Book-It Theatre. They're a theater group here in the Seattle area. They use the area beneath Seattle Center House as their space. They basically will take popular books and literature and convert them into plays. They'll adapt them into screenplays and then put on performances. It's quite good. We've been to a few shows, Geraldine and I have, and we really like them.
So their goal — I'm making this up, I don't actually know if this is their goal — but let's say they want to...
So what are we going to do as SEOs? Well, as SEOs, we better figure out what's going to match up to this.
So there are ways to measure each of these.
Each of these, and as a whole, the contribution of search visits from non-Seattle regions, so we can remove Seattle or Washington State in our analytics and we can see: How much traffic did we get from there? Was it more than last year? What's it contributing to the ticket sales conversion funnel?
You can see how, if you build these smart goals and you measure them correctly and you align them with what the company and the marketing team is trying to do, you can build something really special. You can get great involvement from the rest of your teams, and you can show the value of SEO even to people who might not believe in it already.
All right, everyone. Look forward to your thoughts and feedback in the comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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