We want to help you start/manage and grow your business using innovative strategies and implementation. We have a passion for helping businesses and companies of various sizes see the same success that we have achieved.
Our skillsets are wide and varied, from business strategy, marketing, to online strategy. An increasing number of companies are turning to the internet and online media as a means to maximising their marketing reach and exposure. This is special area of focus for us and we do more than simple SEO strategies.
A few years ago I started a website and to my delight, the SEO efforts I was making to grow it were yielding results. However, one day I checked my rankings, and got the shock of my life. It had fallen, and badly.
I was doing my SEO right and I felt that was enough, but I didn’t know there was more. I hadn’t paid attention to my website security, and I didn’t even know that it mattered when it comes to Google and its ranking factors. Also, there were other security concerns I wasn’t paying attention to. As far as I was concerned back then, it didn’t matter since I had good content.
Obviously I was wrong, and I now know that if you really want to rank higher and increasing your site’s search traffic, then you need to understand that there is more to it than just building links and churning out more content. Understanding Google’s algorithm and it’s ranking factors are crucial.
Currently, Google has over 200 ranking factors they consider when they want to determine where to rank a site. And as expected, one of them is about how protected your site is. According to them, website security is a top priority, and they make a lot of investments all geared towards enduring that all their services, including Gmail and Google Drive, use top-notch security and other privacy tools by default all in a bid to make the internet a safer place generally.
Unfortunately, I was uninformed about these factors until my rankings started dropping. Below are four things you can do to protect your site.
Four steps to get started on website security
1. Get security plug-ins installed
On average, a typical small business website gets attacked 44 times each day, and software “bots” attack these sites more than 150 million times every week. And this is for both WordPress sites and even for non-WordPress websites.
Malware security breaches can lead to hackers stealing your data, data loss, or it could even make you lose access to your website. And in some cases, it can deface your website and that will not just spoil your brand reputation, it will also affect your SEO rankings.
To prevent that from happening, enhance your website security with WordPress plugins. These plugins will not just block off the brute force and malware attacks, they will harden WordPress security for your site, thus addressing the security vulnerabilities for each platform and countering all other hack attempts that could pose a threat to your website.
2. Use very strong passwords
As much as it is very tempting to use a password you can easily remember, don’t. Surprisingly, the most common password for most people is still 123456. You can’t afford to take such risks.
Make the effort to generate a secure password. The rule is to mix up letters, numbers, and special characters, and to make it long. And this is not just for you. Ensure that all those who have access to your website are held to the same high standard that you hold yourself.
3. Ensure your website is constantly updated
As much as using a content management system (CMS) comes with a lot of benefits, it also has attendant risks attached. According to this Sucuri report, the presence of vulnerabilities in CMS’s extensible components is the highest cause of website infections. This is because the codes used in these tools are easily accessible owing to the fact that they are usually created as open-source software programs. That means hackers can access them too.
To protect your website, make sure your plugins, CMS, and apps are all updated regularly.
If you pay attention, you will notice that some URLs begin with “https://” while others start with “http://”. You may have likely noticed that when you needed to make an online payment. The big question is what does the “s” mean and where did it come from?
To explain it in very simple terms, that extra “s” is a way of showing that the connection you have with that website is encrypted and secure. That means that any data you input on that website is safe. That little “s” represents a technology known as SSL.
But why is website security important for SEO ranking?
Following Google’s Chrome update in 2017, sites that have “FORMS” but have no SSL certificate are marked as insecure. The SSL certificate, “Secure Sockets Layer” is the technology that encrypts the link between a browser and a web server, protects the site from hackers, and also makes sure that all the data that gets passed between a browser and a web server remains private.
A normal website comes with a locked key in the URL bar, but sites without SSL certificates, on the other hand, have the tag “Not Secure”. This applies to any website that has any form.
According to research carried out by Hubspot, 82% of those that responded to a consumer survey stated that they would leave a website that is not secure. And since Google chrome already holds about 67% out of the whole market share, that is a lot of traffic to lose.
Technically, the major benefit of having Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) instead of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is that it gives users a more secure connection that they can use to share personal data with you. This adds an additional layer of security which becomes important especially if you are accepting any form of payment on your site.
To move from HTTP to HTTPS you have to get an SSL certificate (Secure Socket Layer certificate) installed on your website.
Once you get your SSL certificate installed successfully on a web server and configured, Google Chrome will show a green light. It will then act as a padlock by providing a secure connection between the browser and the webserver. For you, what this means is that even if a hacker is able to intercept your data, it will be impossible for them to decrypt it.
Security may have a minor direct effect on your website ranking, but it affects your website in so many indirect ways. It may mean paying a little price, but in the end, the effort is worth it.
Segun Onibalusi is the Founder and CEO at SEO POW, an organic link building agency. He can be found on Twitter @iamsegun_oni.
MozCon 2019 was an absolute blast. There were endless snacks. There were Roger hugs. There were networking opportunities and Birds of a Feather tables and search epiphanies galore. And there were a ton of folks in our community who watched it all unfold from the perspective of a Twitter hashtag — fun to follow along with, but not quite the same impact as seeing the talks unfold in real-time.
If you're still wishing you could've joined us in Seattle this past July, you’ll be happy to know that you can recreate the MozCon experience from the comfort of your home or office (or your home office, but hopefully not your office-home — seriously, Karen, the quarterly reports will still be there in the morning!).
Yep, you got it: the MozCon 2019 Video Bundle is available for your purchasing and viewing pleasure!
For those of you who attended in-person, good news: you've already got access! The video bundle is always included in the price of your MozCon ticket, so you can relive your three jam-packed days of learning as many times as you want — and if you aren't too bummed that they already made you share your MozCon swag with them, be sure to share the vids with your team!
For the rest of us, the video bundle lets us enjoy the presentations at our own pace. It's condensed MozCon-caliber information in a neat, on-demand package that you can — have we mentioned this? — share with your team. Seriously, we think they'll like it. We were humbled to host some of the very brightest minds in SEO and digital marketing on our stage. With topics ranging from content marketing to technical SEO, PPC to local SEO, and just about everything in between, there are presentations to inspire just about any role in marketing (and your web dev just might be interested in a few talks, too).
What's covered in the videos:
The Golden Age of Search, Sarah Bird
Web Search 2019: The Essential Data Marketers Need, Rand Fishkin
Human > Machine > Human: Understanding Human-Readable Quality Signals and Their Machine-Readable Equivalents, Ruth Burr Reedy
Improved Reporting & Analytics Within Google Tools, Dana DiTomaso
Local Market Analytics: The Challenges and Opportunities, Rob Bucci
Keywords Aren't Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing, Ross Simmonds
How to Supercharge Link Building with a Digital PR Newsroom, Shannon McGuirk
From Zero to Local Ranking Hero, Darren Shaw
Esse Quam Videri: When Faking it is Harder than Making It, Russ Jones
Building a Discoverability Powerhouse: Lessons From Merging an Organic, Paid, & Content Practice, Heather Physioc
Brand Is King: How to Rule in the New Era of Local Search, Mary Bowling
Making Memories: Creating Content People Remember, Casie Gillette
20 Years in Search & I Don't Trust My Gut or Google, Wil Reynolds
Super-Practical Tips for Improving Your Site's E-A-T, Marie Haynes
Fixing the Indexability Challenge: A Data-Based Framework, Areej AbuAli
What Voice Means for Search Marketers: Top Findings from the 2019 Report, Christi Olson
Redefining Technical SEO, Paul Shapiro
How Many Words Is a Question Worth?, Dr. Peter J. Meyers
Fraggles, Mobile-First Indexing, & the SERP of the Future, Cindy Krum
Killer E-commerce CRO and UX Wins Using A SEO Crawler, Luke Carthy
Content, Rankings, and Lead Generation: A Breakdown of the 1% Content Strategy, Andy Crestodina
Running Your Own SEO Tests: Why It Matters & How to Do It Right, Rob Ousbey
Dark Helmet's Guide to Local Domination with Google Posts and Q&A, Greg Gifford
How to Audit for Inclusive Content, Emily Triplett Lentz
Factors that Affect the Local Algorithm that Don't Impact Organic, Joy Hawkins
Featured Snippets: Essentials to Know & How to Target, Britney Muller
What you’ll get:
For just $299, you'll get all of the MozCon education and inspiration with none of the air travel or traffic. The bundle includes:
27 full-length presentation videos chock full of leading SEO innovations, thought leadership, and tips & tricks
Instant downloads and streaming to your computer, tablet, or mobile device
Downloadable slide decks for all presentations
If we could include a download of a Top Pot doughnut and some piping hot Starbucks, we would in a heartbeat. Alas, they don't have the technology for that... yet.
Free preview - Running Your Own SEO Tests: Why It Matters & How to Do It Right by Rob Ousbey
Speaking of doughnuts, we wouldn't expect you to buy a dozen sweet treats without taking a little taste first to see if you like 'em. It's important to know that your doughnuts are both delicious, shareable, and relevant to your everyday work as an SEO — almost exactly like the MozCon video bundle. And just like the feeling of warmth and goodwill you receive when you come back to the office with a fragrant baker's dozen, your teammates will thank you when you've got twenty-seven highly actionable talks to share with them — presentations that'll hone your skills and level up your understanding of modern SEO and digital marketing.
That's why we've released a talk we're super proud of as your free preview of all the juicy goodness you can look forward to in the video bundle: Running Your Own SEO Tests: Why It Matters & How to Do It Right, presentedby our very own Rob Ousbey.
Google's algorithms have undergone significant changes in recent years. Traditional ranking signals don't hold the same sway they used to, and they're being usurped by factors like UX and brand that are becoming more important than ever before. What's an SEO to do? The answer lies in testing. Sharing original data and results from clients, Rob highlights the necessity of testing, learning, and iterating your work, from traditional UX testing to weighing the impact of technical SEO changes, tweaking on-page elements, and changing up content on key pages. Actionable processes and real-world results abound in this thoughtful presentation on why you should be testing SEO changes, how and where to run them, and what kinds of tests you ought to consider for your circumstances.
Gather the team, grab some snacks, and get ready to binge these presentations Netflix-Original-Series-style.
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!
from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/36gd1gf
via IFTTT
Google updated the no-follow attribute on Tuesday 10th September 2019 regarding which they say it aims to help fight comment spam. The Nofollow attribute has remained unchanged for 15 years, but Google has had to make this change as the web evolves.
Google also announced two new link attributes to help website owners and webmasters clearly call out what type for link is being used,
rel=”sponsored”: Use the sponsored attribute to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements.
rel=”ugc”: UGC stands for User Generated Content, and the ugc attribute value is recommended for links within user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
rel=”nofollow”: Use this attribute for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.
March 1st, 2020 changes
Up until the 1st of March 2020, all of the link attributes will serve as a hint for ranking purposes, anyone that was relying on the rel=nofollow to try and block a page from being indexed should look at using other methods to block pages from being crawled or indexed.
John Mueller mentioned the use of the rel=sponsered in one of the recent Google Hangouts.
Source: YouTube
The question he was asked
“Our website has a growing commerce strategy and some members of our team believe that affiliate links are detrimental to our website ranking for other terms do we need to nofollow all affiliate links? If we don’t will this hurt our organic traffic?”
John Mueller’s answer
“So this is something that, I think comes up every now and then, from our point of view affiliate links are links that are placed with a kind of commercial background there, in that you are obviously trying to earn some money by having these affiliate link and pointing to a distributor that you trust and have some kind of arrangement with them.
From our point of view that is perfectly fine, that’s away on monetizing your website your welcome to do that.
We do kind of expect that these types of links are marked appropriately so that we understand these are affiliate links, one way to do that is to use just a nofollow.
A newer way to do that to let us know about this kind of situation is to use the sponsored rel link attribute, that link attribute specifically tells us this is something to do with an advertising relationship, we treat that the same as a no-follow.
A lot of the affiliate links out there follow really clear patterns and we can recognize those so we try to take care of those on our side when we can but to be safe we recommend just using a nofollow or rel sponsered link attribute, but in general this isn’t something that would really harm your website if you don’t do it, its something that makes it a little clearer for us what these links are for and if we see for example a website is engaging in large scale link selling then that’s something where we might take manual action, but for the most part if our algorithms just recognize these are links we don’t want to count then we just won’t count them.”
How quickly are website owners acting on this?
This was only announced by Google in September and website owners have until march to make the change required but data from Semrush show that website owners are starting to change over to the new rel link attribute with.
The data shows that out of From one million domains, only 27,763 has at least one UGC link but the interesting fact is that if we’ll look at those 27,763 domains that have at least one UGC link, each domain from this list on average has 20,904,603 follow backlinks, 6,373,970 – no follow, 22.8 – UGC, 55.5 – sponsored.
Source: Semrush.com
This is still very early days but we can see that there is change and I would expect that to grow significantly into next year.
Conclusion
I believe that Google is going to use the data from these link attributes to catch out website owners that continue to sell links and mark them up incorrectly in order to pass any sort of SEO value other to another website in any sort of agreement Paid or otherwise.
Paul Lovell is an SEO Consultant And Founder at Always Evolving SEO. He can be found on Twitter @_PaulLovell.
Can franchises make good digital marketing agency clients? There are almost 750,000 of them in the US alone, employing some 9 million Americans. Chances are good you’ll have the opportunity to market a business with this specialized model at some point. In this structure:
The Franchisor grants permission to others to operate under its trademark, selling approved goods and services supported by an operating system and marketing.
The Franchisee is the person or group paying the franchisor for the right to use the trademark and the benefits of the operating system and marketing.
Seems simple enough. But it’s this structure that gives franchise marketing its unique complexities. For your agency, the challenge is that you can’t enter these marketing relationships equipped solely with your knowledge of corporate or local search marketing.
You need to deeply understand the setup to avoid bewilderment over why implementation bogs down with franchise clients and why players lose track of their roles, or even overwrite one another’s efforts.
In this post, we’ll give you some quick and useful coaching on the franchise model, but if your agency just got a phone call from Orangetheory or Smoothie King, you can get the bigger playbook right away.
Imagine a post-game locker room scene. On the field, all players seemed united by the goal of winning. But now, at different press conferences, the owner is saying the coach failed to meet standards, the coach is saying the owner should keep his opinions to himself, and several of the star players are saying they didn’t get the ball enough.
Franchises can be just like that when there’s confusion over roles and goals. Read on to get a peek into the playbook we've prepared to help the team as a whole work better together:
Franchise marketing is a unique kind of activity. It does share a lot of qualities with corporate marketing (on the awareness side) and with SMB marketing (on the local side) but as we noted earlier, it’s sort of a joint custody arrangement that — like all custody arrangements — can get contentious at times.
Everyone wants the best for the brand, but everyone’s “best” is very much a matter of their own perspective and goals. Typically in this arrangement, there are at least two stakeholders, though sometimes there are more. The stakeholders and their goals tend to play out as follows:
Corporate Franchisor goals
Creating a strong brand to license more franchisors.
Controlling that brand so it isn’t negatively impacted.
Supporting franchisees with strong branding and resources so they succeed.
Master Franchisor goals
Working with corporate to protect the brand.
Licensing more local franchisors.
Supporting franchisees with resources so they succeed.
Regional or Area Franchisee goals
Driving customer traffic and revenue at individual locations.
Growing their portfolio of locations.
Supporting location managers with resources so they succeed.
Owner/Operator Franchisee goals
Increasing location(s) foot traffic.
Increasing location(s) revenue.
Building customer loyalty at the location(s).
In what ways is franchise marketing different from corporate or standard SMB marketing? There are some unique challenges that franchisors and franchisees face which are worth unpacking. Some of them are:
Conflicting goals between franchisor/franchisee
Faster turnover of locations and addresses
Different opening hours, menus and promotions from location to location
Unique local sales and marketing opportunities and challenges
Competitors on both the brand side but also among local SMBs
Lack of clearly defined marketing roles causing work to be overwritten, duplicated, or even neglected
Your agency can be a better coach to franchises by having a playbook that respects how they differ from corporate or SMB clients at the very outset. But differences don’t have to equal weaknesses. Are you ready to draft a game plan that draws from the strengths of both franchisors and franchisees?
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!
from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/2BNvMK2
via IFTTT
On Friday we held the Transformation of Search Summit 2019 here in New York City. Huge thank you to all of our speakers, attendees, and sponsors who made the day a success!
In this article we’ve compiled some key quotes, stats, and otherwise tweetable highlights from the event.
Keynote: The transformation of search
First we heard from Carolyn Shelby, SEO Manager, Audience Development at the Walt Disney Company / ESPN.
One of the key quotes from her session was “The trick is to understand the psychology of people. Get in front of the consumer. That’s where search engines are going. What is the least amount of thinking that I can make a consumer do? How can I get them what they want the fastest?”
"The trick is to understand the psychology of people. Get in front of the consumer. That’s where search engines are going. What is the least amount of thinking that I can make a consumer do? How can I get them what they want the fastest?"@cshel at #TSS2019
She also walked us through a brief SERP evolution, from collecting and organizing, to scoring / ranking relevancy, to now delivering immediate gratification.
Next up we heard from Michael Akkerman of Pinterest on the growth of visual search and its role in the future.
He talked about the evolution of consumer expectations, from physical stores, to digital convenience, to omnichannel promise, to the inspired shopping of today.
Where it once may have seemed that consumers were only focused on convenience, we’re now seeing the re-emergence of shopping and discovery in the consumer experience.
Evolution of consumer expectations:
-> Physical stores
-> Digital convenience
-> Omnichannel promise
-> Today == Inspired shopping@Mike_Akka of @Pinterest on how shopping / discovery are re-emerging in the consumer experience#TSS2019pic.twitter.com/iegoYfLCn4
He also talked about the role of Pinterest in consumer discovery. On Pinterest, he says, they have billions of text-based searches every month. Of those, 90% are non-brand searches. “People don’t know what they want,” he says. For brands looking to focus on the discovery portion of the consumer journey, Pinterest could be a great option.
"We have billions of text-based searches every month, and 90% of them don’t have a brand qualifier yet — people don’t know what they want."@Mike_Akka on the potential to be found on @Pinterest#TSS2019
Michael was joined on stage by Dave Fall, CEO of BrandNetworks. They did a Q&A about what brands can do to get started with visual search.
For many brands, they said, it can feel like there’s a big barrier of entry or that it has to be a huge undertaking. But, they noted, remember that your brand does have visual assets already — think about what you use for your website, display ads, Amazon product listings, etc. Consider how you can re-purpose those to get started.
"I would say just start. Sometimes the barrier to entry is going from text to visual. But your brand has visual assets: website, display, Amazon. Collect that and think about how you can reuse it."@Mike_Akka & @davefall#TSS2019
What DTCs and legacy brands can learn from each other
Next we heard from Kerry Curran of Catalyst (GroupM). She talked about what brands can do to flip their performance marketing mindsets.
One particularly interesting finding she shared was that in campaigns, when brands communicate like a human, it can improve conversion by 900%.
"Communicating like a human increases campaign conversion by 900%."@KSCdigitalpulse from @CatalystSEM on what #DTC brands can do to flip their performance marketing mindset.#TSS2019
She also noted that in the US, women over age 50 have $15 trillion in buying power. For many marketers, it might seem like younger generations have more appeal — but older generations have deeper pockets.
"Women over 50 in the US have $15 trillion in buying power. Yes the younger generations might seem to have more appeal, but how can you expand into audiences with deeper pockets?"@KSCdigitalpulse from @CatalystSEM at #TSS2019
After this, we had a panel discussion on “embarking on a search transformation project.”
The panel included experts from Conde Nast, Microsoft, Mindshare, Volvo, and McKinsey.
John Shehata from Conde Nast shared some work they did to refresh and consolidate older content in order to boost keyword visibility by up to 1000%.
The challenge, as he pointed out, is that 90% of online content was created in the last two years, and 90% of that content gets no traffic. And, 50% of searches on Google end in no clicks. To face that, his team is working on taking past content, consolidating multiple pieces, and focusing on making each piece amazing.
90% of content online created in last two years
90% of that content gets no traffic
50% of searches on Google get no clicks
What can we do about this?@JShehata from @CondeNast on how they refresh / consolidate older content to boost keyword visibility by up to 1000%#TSS2019
Noel Reilly of Microsoft also touched on the speed at which new content is created. She encouraged marketers to think more broadly about what people want and are looking to discover. At Microsoft Ads, she said, 18% of queries each month are new queries.
When inputs are continuing to change so much, she recommended marketers really look at their search query reports to build content around those.
"At Microsoft Ads, 18% of queries each month are new queries.
Inputs are changing so much, you need to broaden your thinking to discover what people want.
Look at your search query reports, build your content around that."@Noooel from @Microsoft at #TSS2019
John Shehata of Conde Nast also spoke a bit about what they’re doing to prepare for voice search. Overall, he’s adopting a more conservative approach: investing a little, getting the foundation ready, and waiting for more clarity before diving into larger scale investment.
He likened the current discussion of voice search to the conversation about mobile a decade ago: “Remember when we said ‘mobile is here’ for ten years? But then it took ten years.”
"Remember when we said “mobile is here” for 10 years? But then it took 10 years.
Be ready for voice search, invest a little bit. Beyond that, there's not much we can do yet on a big scale. Have the foundation ready, wait for more clarity."@JShehata on #voicesearch at #TSS2019
And to wrap up from this session, we heard another great point from Noel of Microsoft: “The most successful brands I see are the ones putting people at the center of their advertising. Regardless of what the next big thing is in search, your job as a marketer is to understand your customer.”
"The most successful brands I see are the ones putting people at the center of their advertising. Regardless of what the next big thing is in search, your job as a marketer is to understand your customer."@Noooel from @Microsoft at #TSS2019
Next we heard from John Denny with some interesting statistics and expert tips on Amazon search.
When it comes to how different generations search, he revealed that 52% of Gen Z named Amazon as their favorite site for shopping. The number two spot went to Nike, who claimed just 4% of votes — putting Amazon at 13 times that.
He also discussed three of the main options CPG brands have for driving purchases / traffic: a brand’s own website, a brand’s detail page on Amazon, and in-store traffic.
For the largest 100 CPG brands out there, he said, there was five times more traffic on the Amazon detail page plus in-store than there was on the brand’s own website.
His message: for brands not on Amazon, might be time to consider it.
Of the 100 largest CPG brands out there, between
1. Brand website
2. Brand detail page on Amazon
3. In-store traffic
There was 5x more traffic on the Amazon detail page + in-store than there was on the brand’s own website.@johnhdenny at #TSS2019
Next, we heard another panel, this time specifically on voice search, from Mastercard, Synup, and Advantix Digital.
While earlier in the day we heard a more cautious perspective from Conde Nast, this panel was a bit more bullish on voice search.
Synup CEO Ashwin Ramesh gave one interesting rationale around the rapid adoption of voice search globally in countries like India, Indonesia, and parts of Southeast Asia. In India, he says, 50% of all searches are already done via voice. “They’re leapfrogging markets,” he said. He also gave the personal example that his grandmother — she doesn’t type and has never used a computer, but she sends him voice messages via her iPad.
"In India, 50% of all searches are voice.
Countries like India, Indonesia, SE Asia — they’re leapfrogging markets.
My grandmother doesn’t type, she’s never used a computer. She sends me voice messages via her iPad."@ashwin_ramesh of @synup at #TSS2019
After this we heard from Stephen Kraus, Head of Digital Insights at Jumpshot. He shared many interesting statistics about the current state of the search industry and how it’s shifting.
90% of all search happens on Google, he says, and it skews branded (unlike on Pinterest). Of the top ten most used search terms on Google in the past couple months, seven are brands: Google, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, Walmart, Craigslist, and BMW.
The other three, interestingly, were “you,” “weather,” and “news.”
Top searches on Google in past couple months (total volume):
We couldn’t do it without you! In 2018, over 1,400 marketers responded to our State of the Local SEO industry survey. We all learned so much from your responses about the day-to-day realities of marketing local businesses. This year, we can do even better because your answers will give us all valuable comparative data to analyze, YoY.
Who can take the survey?
Anyone who markets local businesses in any way is eagerly invited. Whether you market a single location, work for an agency with some local business clients, or are an in-house SEO for a brand with thousands of locations, we would love your participation! Whether you do just a little local search marketing or a lot, are a novice or an adept, your insights have value.
What is the survey about?
Unlike a typical local ranking factors poll, The State of the Local SEO Industry Survey digs deep into marketers’ experiences with tactics, challenges, clients, Google, and the working environment. For example, we learned last year that:
90% of respondents felt Google’s emphasis on proximity was detrimental to SERP quality
62% felt there aren’t enough quality local search marketing training materials available
60% lacked a comprehensive review management strategy
49% felt utilization of Google Business Profile features were impacting local rank
35% had no link building strategy in place
17% of enterprises had no in-house SEO staff
With your help, we’ll see what’s changed and what hasn’t. There are fresh questions, too, which we hope will uncover new stories to spark new strategies for local brands and their marketers.
There will be four lucky winners!
Everyone is a winner with access to the data we’ll be sharing from this large survey. But we’d like to offer a little extra thank-you for your time and knowledge.
Every respondent who completes the full survey will be automatically entered for a chance to win one of four $50 Visa gift cards. Winners will be selected at random, and we hope they will use these gift cards to shop someplace local and awesome this holiday season!
Look forward to seeing the results in early 2020. We can't wait to see what we find out this time around. Thank you for participating!
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!
from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/2PqwKUv
via IFTTT
Earlier this week, I hosted a webinar all about featured snippets covering essential background info, brand-new research we've done, the results of all the tests I've performed, and key takeaways. Things didn't quite go as planned, though. We had technical difficulties that interfered with our ability to broadcast live, and lots of folks were left with questions after the recording that we weren't able to answer in a follow-up Q&A.
The next best thing to a live webinar Q&A? A digital one that you can bookmark and come back to over and over again! We asked our incredibly patient, phenomenally smart attendees to submit their questions via email and promised to answer them in an upcoming blog post. We've pulled out the top recurring questions and themes from those submissions and addressed them below. If you had a question and missed the submission window, don't worry!Ask it down in the comments and we'll keep the conversation going.
If you didn't get a chance to sign up for the original webinar, you can register for it on-demand here:
And if you're here to grab the free featured snippets cheat sheet we put together, look no further — download the PDF directly here. Print it off, tape it to your office wall, and keep featured snippets top-of-mind as you create and optimize your site content.
Now, let's get to those juicy questions!
1. Can I win a featured snippet with a brand-new website?
If you rank on page one for a keyword that triggers a featured snippet (in positions 1–10), you're a contender for stealing that featured snippet. It might be tougher with a new website, but you're in a position to be competitive if you're on page one — regardless of how established your site is.
We've got some great Whiteboard Fridays that cover how to set a new site up for success:
2. Does Google provide a tag that identifies traffic sources from featured snippets? Is there a GTM tag for this?
Unfortunately, Google does not provide a tag to help identify traffic from featured snippets. I'm not aware of a GTM tag that helps with this, either, but would love to hear any community suggestions or ideas in the comments!
It's worth noting that it's currently impossible to determine what percentage of your traffic comes from the featured snippet versus the duplicate organic URL below the featured snippet.
3. Do you think it's worth targeting longer-tail question-based queries that have very low monthly searches to gain a featured snippet?
Great question! My advice is this: don’t sleep on low-search-volume keywords. They often convert really well and in aggregate they can do wonders for a website. I suggest prioritizing long tail keywords that you foresee providing a high potential ROI.
For example, there are millions of searches a month for the keyword “shoes.” Very competitive, but that query is pretty vague. In contrast, the keyword “size 6 red womens nike running shoes” is very specific. This searcher knows what they want and they're dialing in their search to find it. This is a great example of a long tail keyword phrase that could provide direct conversions.
4. What's the best keyword strategy for determining which queries are worth creating featured snippet-optimized content for?
Dr. Pete wrote a great blog post outlining how to perform keyword research for featured snippets back in 2016. Once you've narrowed down your list of likely queries, you need to look at keywords that you rank on page one for, that trigger a snippet, and that you don't yet own. Next, narrow your list down further by what you envision will have the highest ROI for your goals. Are you trying to drive conversions? Attract top-of-funnel site visitors? Make sure the queries you target align with your business goals, and go from there. Both Moz Pro and STAT can be a big help with this process.
A tactical pro tip: Use the featured snippet carousel queries as a starting point. For instance, if there's a snippet for the query "car insurance" with a carousel of "in Florida," "in Michigan," and so on, you might consider writing about state-specific topics to win those carousel snippets. For this technique, the bonus is that you don't really need to be on page one for the root term (or ranking at all) — often, carousel snippets are taken from off-SERP links.
5. Do featured snippets fluctuate according to language, i.e. if I have several versions of my site in different languages, will the snippet display for each version?
This is a great question! Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to do international/multi-language featured snippet research just yet, but hope to in the future. I would suspect the featured snippet could change depending on language and search variation. The best way to explore this is to do a search in an incognito (and un-logged-in) browser window of Google Chrome.
If you've performed research along these lines, let us know what you found out down in the comments!
6. Why do featured snippet opportunities fluctuate in number from day to day?
Change really is the only constant in search. In the webinar, I discussed the various tests I did that caused Moz to lose a formerly won featured snippet (and what helped it reappear once again). Changes as simple as an extra period at the end of a sentence were enough to lose us the snippet. With content across the web constantly being created and edited and deprecated and in its own state of change, it's no wonder that it's tough to win and keep a featured snippet — sometimes even from one day to the next.
The SERPs are incredibly volatile things, with Google making updates multiple times every day. But when it comes down to the facts, there are a few things that reliably cause volatility (is that an oxymoron?):
If a snippet is pulling from a lower-ranking URL (not positions 1–3); this could mean Google is testing the best answer for the query
Google regularly changing which scraped content is used in each snippet
Featured snippet carousel topics changing
The best way to change-proof yourself is to become an authority in your particular niche (E-A-T, remember?) and strive to rank higher to increase your chances of capturing and keeping a featured snippet.
7. How can I use Keyword Lists to find missed SERP feature opportunities? What's the best way to use them to identify keyword gaps?
Keyword Lists are a wonderful area to uncover feature snippet (and other SERP feature) opportunity gaps. My favorite way to do this is to filter the Keyword List by your desired SERP feature. We’ll use featured snippets as an example. Next, sort by your website’s current rank (1–10) to determine your primary featured snippet gaps and opportunities.
The filters are another great way to tease out additional gaps:
Which keywords have high search volume and low competition?
Which keywords have high organic CTR that you currently rank just off page one for?
8. What are best practices around reviewing the structure of content that's won a snippet, and how do I know whether it's worth replicating?
Content that has won a featured snippet is definitely worth reviewing (even if it doesn’t hold the featured snippet over time). Consider why Google might have provided this as a featured snippet:
Does it succinctly answer the query?
Might it sound good as a voice answer?
Is it comprehensive for someone looking for additional information?
Does the page provide additional answers or information around the topic?
Are there visual elements?
It’s best to put on your detective hat and try to uncover why a piece of content might be ranking for a particular featured snippet:
What part of the page is Google pulling that featured snippet content from?
Is it marked up in a certain way?
What other elements are on the page?
Is there a common theme?
What additional value can you glean from the ranking featured snippet?
9. Does Google identify and prioritize informational websites for featured snippets, or are they determined by a correlation between pages with useful information and frequency of snippets?
In other words, would being an e-commerce site harm your chances of winning featured snippets, all other factors being the same?
I’m not sure whether Google explicitly categorizes informational websites. They likely establish a trust metric of sorts for domains and then seek out information or content that most succinctly answers queries within their trust parameters, but this is just a hypothesis.
While informational sites tend to do overwhelmingly better than other types of websites, it’s absolutely possible for an e-commerce website to find creative ways of snagging featured snippets.
It’s fascinating how various e-commerce websites have found their way into current featured snippets in extremely savvy ways. Here's a super relevant example: after our webinar experienced issues and wasn't able to launch on time, I did a voice search for “how much do stamps cost” to determine how expensive it would be to send apology notes to all of our hopeful attendees.
This was the voice answer:
“According to stamps.com the cost of a one ounce first class mail stamp is $0.55 at the Post Office, or $.047 if you buy and print stamps online using stamps.com.”
Pretty clever, right? I believe there are plenty of savvy ways like this to get your brand and offers into featured snippets.
10. When did the "People Also Ask" feature first appear? What changes to PAAs do you anticipate in the future?
People Also Ask boxes first appeared in July 2015 as a small-scale test. Their presence in the SERPs grew over 1700% between July 2015 and March 2017, so they certainly exploded in popularity just a few years ago. Funny enough, I was one of the first SEOs to come across Google’s PAA testing — you can read about that stat and more in my original article on the subject: Infinite "People Also Ask" Boxes: Research and SEO Opportunities
When it comes to predicting the future of PAAs, well, we don't have a crystal ball yet, but featured snippets continue to look more and more like PAA boxes with their new-ish accordion format. Is it possible Google will merge them into a single feature someday? It's hard to say, but as SEOs, our best bet is to maintain flexibility and prepare to roll with the punches the search engines send our way.
11. Can you explain what you meant by "15% of image URLs are not in organic"?
Sure thing! The majority of images that show up in featured snippet boxes (or to be more accurate, the webpage those images live on) do not rank organically within the first ten pages of organic search results for the featured snippet query.
12. How should content creators consider featured snippets when crafting written content? Are there any tools that can help?
First and foremost, you'll want to consider the searcher.
What is their intent?
What desired information or content are they after?
Are you providing the desired information in the medium in which they desire it most (video, images, copy, etc)?
Look to the current SERPs to determine how you should be providing content to your users. Read all of the results on page one:
13. "Write quality content for people, not search engines" seems like great advice. But should I also be using any APIs or tools to audit my content?
The only really helpful tool that comes to mind is the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, but even that can be a bit disruptive to the creative process. The very best tool you might have for reviewing your content might be a real person. I would ensure that your content can be easily understood when read out loud to your targeted audience. It may help to consider whether your content, as a featured snippet, would make for an effective, helpful voice search result.
14. What's the best way to stay on top of trends when it comes to Google's featured snippets?
Find publications and tools that resonate, and keep an eye on them. Some of my favorites include:
Industry news publications like Search Engine Journal and, of course, the Moz Blog ;-)
Subscribing to SEO newsletters like the Moz Top 10
One of the very best things you can do, though, is performing your own investigative featured snippet research within your space. Publishing the trends you observe helps our entire community grow and learn.
Thank you so much to every attendee who submitted their questions. Digging into these follow-up thoughts and ideas is one of the best parts of putting on a presentation. If you've got any lingering questions after the webinar, I would love to hear them — leave me a note in the comments and I'll be on point to answer you. And if you missed the webinar sign-up, you can still access it on-demand whenever you want.
We also promised you some bonus content, yeah? Here it is — I compiled all of my best tips and tricks for winning featured snippets into a downloadable cheat sheet that I hope is a helpful reference for you:
Free download: The Featured Snippets Cheat Sheet
There's no reason you shouldn't be able to win your own snippets when you're armed with data, drive, and a good, solid plan! Hopefully this is a great resource for you to have on hand, either to share around with colleagues or to print out and keep at your desk:
Again, thank you so much for submitting your questions, and we'll see you in the comments for more.
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!
from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/2NbTaGd
via IFTTT
Purpose of the content, author expertise, links, and brand citations all come into play while measuring the quality of a page.
In this article, I will discuss the top five factors that directly impact the overall quality of a web page. Let’s start!
1. Purpose of the page
The purpose of the page is the real reason behind the creation of the page.
A page can be created to serve a particular purpose or multiple purposes, make money or harm the user by inserting malicious code via cookies or download buttons.
The first thing that Google does is understanding the purpose of the page in response to the user search. Google applies semantic search to understand the meaning of the words behind the query and matches them with the purpose of the page.
Google presents the best answers to the user after accurately identifying the real intent of the searcher. The purpose of your page must match the real intent of the searcher.
Different sites have different purposes. Hence it is important to identify the real purpose of the page.
Some common purposes of a page
The homepage of a news website to share the news with the people.
The category page of a shopping portal to sell products to people.
A personal review site to inform users about the features, pros, and cons of the product.
A how-to page created to help users find the answers to a specific question.
A video created to educate people on how to draw a summer landscape.
Category page of a software website to allow people to download a particular software.
For example, this page of Best VPN Zone site might have a high PQ rating for the query “how to save money on internet safety” because it lists 55 ways that actually help the searcher to find different methods that helps them to save money on internet safety. Content is over 3000 words and it is divided into proper subheadings that improve the overall readability score of the page. (For tools that you can use to check the word count and readability levels of a web page, please see point three).
When creating a web page, you should keep in mind the actual intent of the user. Identify the main purpose of your page and ask yourself – Does it accurately serve the user intent? The answer should be “yes”.
A page should not be created solely to earn money by running ads or to harm the user. Such pages have the lowest PQ rating.
2. Amount of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness
Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness are collectively known as EAT in SEO. Pages that have strong EAT are rated highly by the search quality raters. Let’s understand what EAT means:
Expertise
Who is the creator of the content? (An article written by Danny Sullivan on SEO has more expertise when compared to an article written by any new author having a few years of experience).
Authoritativeness
How authoritative is the website where the content is published or how authoritative is the author? (An article published on science mission on the NASA website is far more authoritative when compared with an article published on a local science magazine such as this).
Trustworthiness
How trustworthy is the website where the content is published or how trustworthy is the author? (An article published by the Medical Association of Alabama is found to be more trustworthy when compared with the information in the personal blog of any random Alabama blogger).
EAT is an extremely important factor to evaluate the overall quality of a page. A page lacking EAT is considered to be of a low-quality and ranks poorly in the search results.
3. Main content quality and amount
The quality of the MC or main content is another major criteria in the calculation of the PQ rating. While determining the quality of MC, Google pays special focus on the following things:
There should be no spelling or grammatical errors.
Content should be clearly written and comprehensive (an interesting point to note here is that long-form content gets more backlinks when compared to shorter content and this is another reason why long-form content actually helps in rankings. This Backlinko study proves it.)
The information presented on the site should be factually correct.
The information should be presented well.
Content on a shopping website should allow users to find the products easily.
Any video or other features on the site like a calculator or game should be working properly.
EAT also applies here.
You can check the word count of a web page using a tool like Word Counter. Similarly, Grammarly can be used to check the content for any grammatical errors. Sophisticated tools like Readable give you a score for your content based on its readability levels.
A good example of a page having high-quality MC is this Wiki on Siberian Husky. The information is comprehensive, clearly written, accurate, has lots of images to make readers understand the various characteristics and every point is backed up by proper data. This makes this Wiki a page having very high-quality MC and no wonder it ranks on the first position in Google for its target keyword.
4. Clear and satisfying website information
Any website on the web should have clear information about who is responsible for the information contained on the website along with details like office address and other contact details.
Having all the contact details on your websites adds to a high degree of trust. For websites that are directly responsible for the health and well-being of a human, disclosing the details of the organization or the person behind the site is extremely necessary.
For shopping websites, adding a customer support number is important because it helps the users to resolve issues. Hence, contact information along with customer support numbers or live chats are a factor in the PQ rating of Google. Depending on the niche of your website, you must add all the information in it that will help your users.
5. Website reputation
Google also finds out the reputation of the website by analyzing the web about references from other experts regarding what they have written or said about a website.
Some ways how Google identifies a website’s reputation
Articles published in reputed news agencies about the website.
Awards and recognitions won by the business. For example, a website run by a culinary expert who has won the James Beard Foundation Award for culinary excellence would be trusted more by Google when compared to any random blog run by a blogger who hasn’t received any awards.
User ratings about an online store or business or about a particular product or service. Google considers a large number of positive reviews as evidence of a positive reputation.
For health-related queries, Google carefully considers both the website and the author’s reputation while evaluating the PQ ratings. For example for a query like “what is CBD”, this resource from CBD Central might achieve high PQ ratings because it has clear information about the author. Similarly, this resource from Medicine Net has all the claims are backed up by trustworthy references and might be rated highly by the raters.
Any other information about the website or the author of the article on any other website like Wikipedia, niche blogs, magazine articles, and forums.
You can check the reputation of a website using tools like the Moz (for checking Domain Authority), SEMrush (for checking the Trust Score), Ahrefs (for checking the Ahrefs Domain Rating) and Majestic SEO (for checking the Trust Flow). Each of these metrics is important to determine the reputation of a website.
You can’t ignore the page quality if you want to rank your page(s) highly in the search results. The above five factors should be considered carefully and steps should be taken to optimize your pages in accordance with these.
Remember, PQ rating is given by real people so don’t think of applying any Black Hat tactics to fool them. Offer the best services to your customers and genuinely earn a positive reputation for your brand. Focus on the main content quality and the purpose of the page.
Last but not least, try to earn brand mentions and links from reputed media publications and nominate your business for prestigious awards in your business category.
Joydeep Bhattacharya is a digital marketing evangelist and author of the SEO Sandwitch blog.
Machine learning is only growing in importance for anyone working in the digital world, but it can often feel like an inaccessible subject. It doesn't have to be — and you don't have to miss out on the competitive edge it can give you when it comes to SEO task automation. Put on your technical SEO cap and get ready to take notes, because Britney Muller is walking us through Machine Learning 101 in this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today I'm talking about all things machine learning, something, as many of you know, I'm super passionate about and love to talk about. So hopefully, this sparks a seed in some of you to explore it a bit further, because it is truly one of the most powerful things to happen in our space in a very long time.
What is machine learning?
So a brief overview, in a nutshell, machine learning is actually a subset of AI, and some would argue we still haven't really reached artificial intelligence. But it's just one facet of the overall AI.
Traditional programming
The best way to think about it is in comparison to traditional programming. So traditional programming, you input data and a program into a computer and out comes the output, whether that be a web page or calculator you built online, whatever that might be.
Machine learning
With machine learning, what you do is you put in the data and the desired output and put this into a computer, and you get a program, otherwise known as a machine learning model. So it's a bit flipped, and it works extremely well. There are two primary types of machine learning:
You have supervised, which is where you're basically feeding a model labeled training data,
And then unsupervised, which is where you're feeding a program data and letting it create clusters or associations between data points.
The supervised is a bit more common. You'll see things like classification, linear regression, and image recognition. Things like that are all very common. If you think about machine learning in terms of, okay, there's all of this data that you're putting into the model, data is the biggest part of machine learning. A lot of people would argue that if machine learning was a vehicle, data would be the fuel.
It's a really important part to understand, because unless you have the right types of data to feed a model, you're not going to get the desired outcome that you would like.
A machine learning model example
So let's look at an example. If you wanted to build a machine learning model that predicts housing prices, you might have all of this information.
You might have the current price, square foot of these homes, land, the number of bathrooms, the number of bedrooms, you name it. It goes on and on. These are also known as features. So what a model is going to try to do, when you put in all of this data, it's going to try to understand associations between this information and come up with a model that best predicts home prices in the future.
The most basic of these machine learning models is linear regression. So if you think about inputting the data where maybe you just put in the price and the square foot, and you can kind of see the data like this.
You see that as the square foot goes up, so does the price. A model over time, in looking at this data, is going to start to find the smoothest line through the data to have the most accurate predictions in the future.
What you don't want it to do is to fit every single data point and have a line that looks like that — that's also known as overfitting — because it doesn't play nice for new data points. You don't want a model to get so calculated to your dataset that it doesn't predict accurately in the future.
A way to look at that is by the loss function. That's maybe getting a bit deeper in this, but that's how you would measure how the line is being fit. Let's see.
What are the machine learning possibilities in SEO?
So what are some of the possibilities in SEO? How can we leverage machine learning in the SEO space?
Automate meta descriptions
So there are couple ways that people are already doing this. You can automate meta descriptions by looking at the page content and using a machine model to summarize the text. So this literally summarizes the content for you and pares it down to a meta description length. Pretty incredible.
Automate titles
You could similarly do this for titles, although I don't suggest you do this for primary pages. This isn't going to be perfect. But if you have a huge, huge website, with hundreds of thousands of pages, it gets you halfway there. It's really interesting to start playing around in that space with these large websites.
Automate image alt text
You can also automate alt text for images. We see these models getting really good at understanding what's in an image.
Automate 301 redirects
301 redirects, Paul Shapiro has an incredible write-up and basically process for that already.
Automate content creation
Content creation, and if that scares some of you or if you doubt that these models can currently create content that is decent, I challenge you to go check out Talk to Transformer.
It is a pared-back version of OpenAI, which was founded by Elon Musk. It's pretty incredible and a little scary as to how good the content is just from that pared back model. So that is for sure possible in the future and even today.
Automate product/page suggestions
In addition to product and page suggestions.
So this is just going to get better. Imagine us providing content and UX specifically for the unique users that come to our site, highly personalized content, highly personalized experiences. Really exciting stuff moving forward.
Resources
I've got some resources I highly suggest you check out.
Google Codelabs is one of my favorites, just because it walks you through the steps. So if you go to Google Codelabs, filter by TensorFlow or machine learning, you can see the possible examples there. Colab notebooks or Jupyter notebooks are where you'll likely be doing any of the machine learning that you want to do on your own.
Kaggle.com is the number one resource for data science competitions. So you get to really see what are the examples, how are people using machine learning today. You'll see things like TSA has put up over $1 million for a data science team to come up with a model that predicts potential threats from security footage.
This stuff gets really interesting really fast. It's also so important to have diversity and inclusion in this space to avoid really dangerous models in the future. So it's something to definitely think about.
TensorFlow is a great resource. It's what Google put out, and it's what a lot of their machine learning models is built off of. They've got a really great JavaScript platform that you can play around with.
Then Algorithmia is sort of a one-stop shop for models. So if you don't care to dip your toes into machine learning and you just want say a summarizer model or a particular type of model, you could potentially find one there and do a plug-and-play of sorts.
So that's pretty interesting and fun to explore. The last thing is a machine learning model is only as good as the data. I can't express that enough. So a lot of machine learning and data scientists, it's all data cleaning and parsing, and that's the bulk of the work in this field.
It's important to be aware of that. So that's it for Machine Learning 101. Thank you so much for joining me, and I hope to see you all again soon. Thanks.
If you enjoyed this episode of Whiteboard Friday, you'll be delighted by all the cutting-edge SEO knowledge you'll get from our newly released MozCon 2019 video bundle. Catch more useful technical tips in Britney's talk, plus 26 additional future-focused topics from our top-notch speakers:
We suggest scheduling a good old-fashioned knowledge share with your colleagues to educate the whole team — after all, who didn't love movie day in school? ;-)
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!
from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/31N2yFs
via IFTTT
