Normally when one does a site move – whether for https or moving to an entirely new domain, one of the steps to to redirect all the old site pages to the new ones. This helps Google match up the old pages to the new ones, as well as transfer all the ranking signals, including […]
The post Keeping Old Site Live Can Cause Site Move & Ranking Issues in Google appeared first on The SEM Post.
Posted by bridget.randolph
SEOs have been talking about structured data for a few years now — ever since Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex got together in 2011 to create a standardized list of attributes and entities which they all agreed to support, and which became known as Schema.org. However, there's still a lot of confusion around what structured data is, what it’s for, and how and when to implement structured data for SEO purposes. In fact, a survey carried out last year by Bing found that only 17% of marketers are using (or were planning to use) Schema.org structured data markup.
In this two-part series, you’ll learn the basics of structured data: first we’ll talk about what it is, and how it relates to SEO (Part 1), and then I’ll take you through a simple process for identifying structured data opportunities and implementing structured data on your own site (Part 2).
"Structured data" as a general term simply refers to any data which is organized (i.e., given "structure"). For example, if you have a bunch of scattered Post-It notes with phone messages about meetings, dates, times, people, etc, and you organize these into a table with labeled rows and columns for each type of information, you’re structuring the data.
Post-It 1: “John called, confirming 3pm on Wed at Coffee Shop”
Post-It 2: “Don’t forget your 10am meeting at Mary’s Office this Friday”
|
Meeting With |
Date |
Time |
Location |
|---|---|---|---|
|
John |
Wednesday |
3pm |
Coffee Shop |
|
Mary |
Friday |
10am |
Office |
Structured data can be used in many different ways, such as using Open Graph markup to specify a Facebook title and description, or using SQL to query a relational database. In an SEO context, "structured data" usually refers to implementing some type of markup on a webpage, in order to provide additional detail around the page’s content. This markup improves the search engines’ understanding of that content, which can help with relevancy signals and also enables a site to benefit from enhanced results in SERPs (rich snippets, rich cards, carousels, knowledge boxes, etc). Because this type of markup needs to be parsed and understood consistently by search engines as well as by people, there are standardized implementations (known as formats and/or syntaxes) and classifications of concepts, relationships, and terms (known as vocabularies) which should be used.
There are three syntaxes which search engines will typically support (Microdata, JSON-LD, and microformats) and two common vocabularies which can be used with these syntaxes: Schema.org and Microformats.org. If you’re reading up on this topic, you may also see references to RDFa, which is another syntax.
*This all gets pretty confusing, so if you’re feeling less-than-crystal-clear right now, you might want to check out this great glossary cheat sheet from Aaron Bradley.
When we talk about structured data for SEO, we're usually talking about the particular vocabulary known as "Schema.org." Schema.org is the most commonly used approach to structured data markup for SEO purposes. It isn’t the only one, though. Some websites use the Microformats.org vocabulary, most often for marking up product reviews (h-review markup) or defining a physical location (h-card markup).
In addition to being able to use different vocabularies to mark up your site, you can also implement this markup in different ways using syntaxes. For Schema.org vocabulary, the best ways to add markup to your site are either through using the Microdata format, or JSON-LD. With Microdata markup, your structured data is integrated within the main HTML of the page, whereas JSON-LD uses a Javascript object to insert all of your markup into the head of the page, which is often a cleaner, simpler implementation from a development perspective.
The Microdata approach was originally the recommended one for SEO purposes, but Google’s JSON-LD support has improved in the past few years and now it is their recommended approach when possible. Note, however, that Bing does not currently support JSON-LD (although hopefully this may be changing soon).
Google, Bing, and other search engines encourage webmasters to use structured data, and incentivize that usage by providing benefits to websites with structured data correctly implemented.
Some of these benefits include search result enhancements and content-specific features, such as:
These enhanced search results can also improve your click-through rate (CTR) and drive additional traffic, because they are more visually appealing and provide additional information to searchers. And improved CTR can also indirectly improve your rankings, as a user behavior signal.
Implementing structured data on your site is also a way to prepare for the future of search, as Google in particular continues to move in the direction of hyper-personalization and solving problems and answering questions directly. Tom Anthony gave a presentation about this topic not too long ago, titled Five Emerging Trends in Search.
Part 2 of this series will go into more detail around specific structured data opportunities and how to implement them. However, there are certain common uses for structured data which almost any website or brand can benefit from:
If you have a personal or business brand, you can edit the information which appears on the right-hand side of the SERP for branded searches. Google uses structured data to populate the Knowledge Graph box.
The most commonly used markup allows you to provide additional context for:
Using this markup allows your site to show up in the SERPs as a rich snippet or rich card:
Google’s rich cards examples for "Recipe"
If your site has several items that would fit the query, you can also get a “host carousel” result like this one for "chicken recipes":
In addition to these types of content markup, Google is currently experimenting with "action markup," which enables users to take an action directly from the SERP, such as booking an appointment or watching a movie. If this is relevant to your business, you may want to express interest in participating.
If your site uses AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), you’ll want to make sure you include structured data markup on both the regular and AMP pages. This will allow your AMP pages to appear in rich results, including the Top Stories carousel and host carousels.
Although Open Graph, Twitter cards, and other social-specific markup may not have a big impact from a purely SEO perspective, this markup is visible to search engines and Bing specifically notes that their search engine can understand Open Graph page-level annotations (although at the moment they only use this data to provide visual enhancements for a specific handful of publishers).
If you use any social networks for marketing, or simply want your content to look good when it’s shared on social media, make sure you correctly implement social markup and validate using the various platforms’ respective testing tools:
You can include structured data in your AdWords ads, using structured snippet extensions. These allow you to add additional information within your ad copy to help people understand more about your products or services and can also improve click-through rate (CTR) on your ads.
If you have Gmail, you may have gotten a confirmation email for a flight and seen the information box at the top showing your flight details, or seen a similar information box for your last Amazon order. This is possible due to structured data markup for emails. Google Inbox and Gmail support both JSON-LD and Microdata markup for emails about various types of orders, invoices and reservations.
Although using structured data markup is necessary to be eligible for rich snippets and rich cards, there is no guarantee that simply adding structured data markup to your site will immediately result in rich snippets or cards. Sometimes it may not show up at all, or may appear inconsistently. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done anything wrong.
Using structured data correctly can help search engines to better understand what your content is about and may therefore contribute to a stronger relevancy signal. In addition, studies have shown that rich snippets can improve click-through rate (CTR), which can lead to better rankings indirectly. However, the use of structured data markup on its own is not a direct ranking signal.
Sometimes it’s tempting to skip extra steps, like implementing structured data, since we know that Google is getting smarter at figuring things out and understanding content without much help. But this is a short-sighted view. Yes, Google and other search engines can understand and figure out some of this stuff on their own, but if you want them to be able to understand a specific thing about your content, you should use the correct markup. Not only will it help in the short term with the things the algorithms aren’t so good at understanding, it also ensures that your site itself is well structured and that your content serves a clear purpose. Also, Google won’t give you certain features without correct implementation, which could be costing you on a large scale over time, especially if you’re in a competitive niche. Apart from anything else, studies have shown that rich snippets can improve CTR by anywhere from 5%–30%.
In Part 2 of this two-part series, we’ll be looking at the practical side of structured data implementation: how to actually identify structured data opportunities for your site, and how to implement and test the markup correctly.
But for now, here are some resources to help you get started:
In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you: Have you implemented structured data markup on your site? Share your results in the comments!
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It seems that if you have an AMP page and also have the featured snippet that Google will now show the AMP version in the featured snippet. When AMP first came out, Google was still using the mobile version of the page if the page that won the featured snippet also had an AMP version. […]
The post Google Now Showing AMP Results in Featured Snippets appeared first on The SEM Post.
Google Search Console has long been a go-to platform for SEOs on a daily basis.
It provides invaluable insight into how people are finding our websites, but also allows us to monitor and resolve any issues Google is having in accessing our content.
Originally known as Google Webmaster Tools, Search Console has benefited from some significant upgrades over the past decade. That said, it is still far from perfect and few would argue that it provides a complete package in its current guise. A raft of industry updates, particularly those affecting mobile rankings, has left Search Console’s list of features in need of an overhaul.
Therefore, Google’s recent announcement of some ongoing and upcoming changes to the platform was very warmly received by the SEO community. These changes go beyond the cosmetic and should help site owners both identify and rectify issues that are affecting their performance. There have also been some tantalizing glimpses of exciting features that may debut before the end of the year.
Google categorizes the initial Search Console changes into the following groups: Insights, Workflow, and Feedback Loops.
Within the Insights category, Google’s new feature aims to identify common “root-cause” issues that are hampering the crawling and indexation of pages on a website. These will then be consolidated into tasks, allowing users to monitor progress and see whether any fixes they submit have been recognized by Google.
This should be hugely beneficial for site owners and developers as it will accelerate their progress in fixing the big ticket items in the platform.
On a broader level, this is in line with Google’s drive to use machine learning technologies to automate some laborious tasks and streamline the amount of time people need to spend to get the most out of their products.
The second area of development is Organizational Workflow which, although not the most glamorous part of an SEO’s work, should bring some benefits that make all of our lives a little easier.
As part of the Search Console update, users will now be able to share ticket items with various team members within the platform. Given how many people are typically involved in identifying and rectifying technical SEO issues, often based in different teams or even territories, this change should have a direct and positive impact on SEO work streams.
Historically, these workflows have existed in other software packages in parallel to what occurs directly within Search Console, so bringing everything within the platform is a logical progression.
The third announcement pertains to Feedback Loops and aims to tackle a longstanding frustration with Search Console. It can be difficult to get everyone on board with making technical fixes, but the time lag we experience in verifying whether the change was effective makes this all the more difficult. If the change does not work, it takes days to realize this and we have to go back to the drawing board.
This lag is caused by the fact that Google has historically needed to re-crawl a site before any updates to the source code are taken into account. Though this will remain true in terms of affecting performance, site owners will at least be able to see an instant preview of whether their changes will work or not.
Feedback is also provided on the proposed code changes, so developers can iterate very quickly and adjust the details until the issue is resolved.
All of the above upgrades will help bring SEO to the center of business discussions and allow teams to work together quickly to improve organic search performance.
In addition to these confirmed changes, Google has also announced some interesting BETA features that will be rolled out to a wider audience if they are received positively.
Google has announced two features that will be tested within a small set of users: Index Coverage report and AMP fixing flow.
The screenshot below shows how the Index Coverage report will look and demonstrates Google’s dedication to providing a more intuitive interface in Search Console.
As Google summarized in their announcement of this new report:
“The new Index Coverage report shows the count of indexed pages, information about why some pages could not be indexed, along with example pages and tips on how to fix indexing issues. It also enables a simple sitemap submission flow, and the capability to filter all Index Coverage data to any of the submitted sitemaps.”
Once more, we see the objective of going beyond simply displaying information to go to a deeper level and explain why these issues occur. The final, most challenging step, is to automate the prescription of advice to resolve the issues.
Other platforms have stepped into this arena in the past, with mixed success. SEO is dependent on so many other contingent factors that hard and fast rules tend not to be applicable in most circumstances. Automated advice can therefore either be too vague to be of any direct use, or it can provide specific advice that is inapplicable to the site in question.
Technical SEO is more receptive to black and white rules than other industry disciplines, however, so there is cause for optimism with this new Google update.
The second BETA feature is the AMP fixing flow. AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is Google’s open source initiative to improve mobile page loading speeds by using a stripped-back version of HTML code.
With the weight of one of the world’s biggest companies behind it, AMP has taken hold with an increasing number of industries and looks set to widen its reach soon within both ecommerce and news publishers.
Google has bet on AMP to see off threats from the likes of Facebook and Snapchat, so it stands to reason that they want to help webmasters get the most out of its features. Any new coding initiative will bring with it a new set of challenges too, and some developers will find a few kinks as they translate their content to AMP HTML.
The AMP fixing flow will look similar to the screenshot below and will allow users to identify and tackle any anomalies in their code, before receiving instant verification from Google on whether the proposed fix is sufficient.
The one aspect of Search Console that all marketers would love to see upgraded is the lag in data processing time. As it stands, the data is typically 48 hours behind, leading to some agonizing waits as marketers hope to analyze performance on a search query level. Compared to the real-time data in many other platforms, including Google Analytics and AdWords, Search Console requires two days to source and process its data from a variety of sources.
That may change someday, however. As reported on SE Roundtable, Google’s John Mueller has stated that they are investigating ways to speed up the data processing. Although Mueller added, “Across the board, we probably at least have a one-day delay in there to make sure that we can process all of the data on time”, this still hints at a very positive development for SEO.
With so many changes focused on speed and efficiency, a significant decrease in the data lag time on Search Console would cap this round of upgrades off very nicely.
Posted by NorthStarInbound
This survey and its analysis was co-authored with North Star Inbound's senior creative strategist, Andrea Pretorian.
In the spring of 2017, North Star Inbound partnered up with seoClarity and BuzzStream to survey the state of enterprise SEO. We had a fair share of anecdotal evidence from our clients, but we wanted a more objective measurement of how SEO teams are assembled, what resources are allocated to them, what methods they use, and how they perform.
We hadn’t seen such data collected, particularly for enterprise SEO. We found this surprising given its significance, evident even in the number of “enterprise SEO tools” and solutions being marketed.
There is no single fixed-industry definition of “enterprise” beyond “large business.” For the purposes of this survey, we defined enterprise businesses as being comprised of 500 or more employees. “Small enterprise” means 500–1000 employees, while “large enterprise” means over 1000 employees.
Industry discussion often points to the number of pages as being a potential defining factor for enterprise SEO, but even that is not necessarily a reliable measure.
We developed the widest enterprise SEO survey to date, made up of 29 questions that delved into every aspect of the enterprise SEO practice. From tools and tactics to content development, keyword strategy, and more, we left no stone unturned. We then picked the brains of 240 SEO specialists across the country. You can check out our complete survey, methodology, and results here.
Let’s start by looking at enterprise team size and the resources allocated to them. We focused on companies with an in-house SEO team, and broke them down in terms of small (500–1000 employees) and large enterprise (>1000 employees).
We found that 76% of small enterprise companies have in-house SEO teams of 5 people or less, but were surprised that 68% of large enterprise companies also had teams of this size. We expected a more pronounced shift into larger team sizes paralleling the larger size of their parent company; we did not expect to see roughly the same team size across small and large enterprise companies.
Interestingly, in larger companies we also see less confidence in the team’s experience in SEO. Of the companies with in-house SEO, only 31.67% of large enterprise teams called themselves “leaders” in the SEO space, which was defined in this survey as part of a team engaged broadly and critically within the business. 40% of small enterprise teams called themselves “leaders.” In terms of viewing themselves more positively (leaders, visionaries) or less (SEO pioneers in their company or else new SEO teams), we did not notice a big difference between small or large enterprise in-house SEO teams.
Large enterprise companies should have more resources at their disposal — HR teams to hire the best talent, reliable onboarding practices in place, access to more sophisticated project management tools, and more experience managing teams — which makes these results surprising. Why are large enterprise companies not more confident about their SEO skills and experience?
Before going too far in making assumptions about their increased resources, we made sure to ask our survey-takers about this. Specifically, we asked for how much budget is allocated to SEO activity per month — not including the cost of employees’ salaries, or the overhead costs of keeping the lights on — since this would result in a figure easier to report consistently across all survey takers.
It turns out that 57% of large enterprise companies had over $10K dedicated strictly to SEO activity each month, in contrast to just 24% of small enterprise companies allocating this much budget. 40% of large enterprise had over $20K dedicated to SEO activity each month, suggesting that SEO is a huge priority for them. And yet, as we saw earlier, they are not sold on their team having reached leader status.
We asked survey takers to rate the success of their current SEO strategy, per the scale mapped below, and here are the results:
A smaller percentage of large enterprise SEOs had a clearly positive rating of the current success of their SEO strategy than did small enterprise SEOs. We even see more large enterprise SEOs “on the fence” about their strategy’s performance as opposed to small. This suggests that, from the enterprise SEOs we surveyed, the ones who work for smaller companies tend to be slightly more optimistic about their campaigns’ performance than the larger ones.
What’s notable about the responses to this question is that 18.33% of managers at large enterprise companies would rate themselves as successful — calling themselves “scalable and repeatable.” No one at a small enterprise selected this to describe their strategy. We clearly tapped into an important value for these teams, who use it enough to measure their performance that it's a value they can report on to others as a benchmark of their success.
Anyone seeking to work with large enterprise clients needs to make sure their processes are scalable and repeatable. This also suggests that one way for a growing company to step up its SEO team’s game as it grows is by achieving these results. This would be a good topic for us to address in greater detail in articles, webinars, and other industry communication.
Regardless of the resources available to them, across the board we see that in-house SEOs do not show as much confidence as agencies. Agencies are far more likely to rate their SEO strategy as successful: 43% of survey takers who worked for agencies rated their strategy as outright successful, as opposed to only 13% of in-house SEOs. That’s huge!
While nobody said their strategy was a total disaster — we clearly keep awesome company — 7% of in-house SEOs expressed frustration with their strategy, as opposed to only 1% of agencies.
Putting our bias as a link building agency aside, we would expect in-house SEO enterprise teams to work like in-house agencies. With the ability to hire top talent and purchase enterprise software solutions to automate and track campaigns, we expect them to have the appropriate tools and resources at their disposal to generate the same results and confidence as any agency.
So why the discrepancy? It’s hard to say for sure. One theory might be that those scalable, repeatable results we found earlier that serve as benchmarks for enterprise are difficult to attain, but the way agencies evolve might serve them better. Agencies tend to develop somewhat organically — expanding their processes over time and focusing on SEO from day one — as opposed to an in-house team in a company, which rarely was there from day one and, more often than not, sprouted up when the company’s growth made it such that marketing became a priority.
One clue for answering this question might come from examining the differences between how agencies and in-house SEO teams responded to the question asking them what they find to be the top two most difficult SEO obstacles they are currently facing.
When we look at the third obstacles, we find the biggest reveal. While agencies find themselves hindered by trying to secure enough budget, in-house SEO teams struggle to develop the right content; this seems in line with the point we made in the previous section comparing agency versus in-house success. Agencies have the processes down, but need to work hard to fit their clients’ budgets. In-house teams have the budget they need, but have trouble lining them up to the exact processes their company needs to grow as desired. The fact that almost half of the in-house SEOs would rank developing the right content as their biggest obstacle — as opposed to just over a quarter of agencies — further supports this, particularly given how important content is to any marketing campaign.
Now, let’s take a step back and dig deeper into that second obstacle we noted: demonstrating ROI.
One question that we asked of survey takers was about the top two technical SEO issues they monitor:
But when we asked everyone what their top two factors are when reviewing their rankings, we got these results:
For both agencies and in-house SEO teams, national-level keywords were the top factor, although this was true for almost-three quarters of in-house SEOs and about half of agencies. Interestingly, agencies focused a bit more on geo/local keywords as well as mobile. From when we first opened this data we found this striking, because it suggests a narrative where in-house SEO teams focus on more conservative, “seasoned” methods, while agencies are more likely to stay on the cutting-edge.
Looking at the “Other” responses (free response), we had several write-ins from both subgroups who answered that traffic and leads were important to them. One agency survey-taker brought up a good point: that what they monitor “differs by client.” We would be remiss if we did not mention the importance of vertical-specific and client-specific approaches — even if you are working in-house, and your only client is your company. From this angle, it makes sense that everyone is measuring rankings and SEO differently.
However, we would like to see a bit more clarity within the community on setting these parameters, and we hope that these results will foster that sort of discussion. Please do feel free to reply in the comments:
We’d love to hear about your experiences, in-house or agency, and how you’ve been able to demonstrate ROI on your campaigns.
We’re going to repeat this survey again next year, so stay tuned. We hope to survey a larger audience so that we can break down the groups we examine further and analyze response trends among the resulting subgroups. We wanted to do this here in this round of analysis, but were hesitant because of how small the resulting sample size would be.
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SEO is an exceptionally fast-paced industry, and sometimes keeping on top of the latest updates and imminent changes can be a full-time job in itself.
One factor that is having an unprecedented effect on organic search is voice search. The combination of an increase in mobile searches and the rise in voice assistants has meant that the way in which people are searching for information online is changing dramatically.
Whether it’s Siri, Cortana, Amazon Echo, Google, or another robot friend, there is no questioning the importance of voice search. According to Google, more than half of queries will be voice search by 2020, and this requires a refreshed approach to SEO.
One of the key aspects of this is featured snippets, as these are the results which are read aloud in response to voice searches. Featured snippets are often referred to as ‘Position Zero’, a phrase coined by Pete Meyers. They are the direct answer results that appear at the top of the SERPs in a box, and they often include a link back to the source of the answer.
Source: Stone Temple
According to Stone Temple Consulting, nearly 30% of 1.4 million Google queries tested now show Featured Snippets. That’s a lot of affected searches. Updating your search strategy to include optimization for featured snippets should therefore be a priority.
The key point to remember with featured snippets is that if a searcher is using voice search and expecting a verbal reply, they will not be presented with a choice of results. Instead, only one result is read out and where there is a featured snippet, this will be the choice of the voice assistant.
You could have the most mind-blowing and enticing meta description and title tags in the world, but if you’re not in that sought after position zero, then your lovingly crafted content will not be read aloud and will therefore remain both unseen and unheard by the searcher.
Of course the key difference between voice search and standard search is the use of more natural, conversational language. This new style of search and query formats must be factored into your strategy. Cue long-tail keywords!
The first step in your journey to the exclusive realm of featured snippets is to identify the informational queries related to your product or services. Use keyword tools, but also ask customers and consider the frequently asked questions you receive on a regular basis.
Answer the Public is a fantastic tool for these more conversational search queries. The tool allows you to dig deeper into user intent by separating the results into question starters, such as ‘who’, ‘why’ and ‘how’. Build on this research by uncovering other similar queries, using the ‘People also asked’ feature on Google.
Test the questions that you generate by typing them into Google and analyzing the results of the featured snippets. Use these as a basis, but work out what you could add or improve on to make the result even better. Perhaps the article source does not provide much further information, or perhaps the current answer displaying isn’t long enough.
The next step is to write a response to these questions, which is likely to be in the form of a blog post. Sure, Google only shows a small percentage of the text from an article in the featured snippet, but this does not mean that your article should only answer the question directly.
Include a direct response, but expand on this further in the article and provide depth. We all know that Google loves depth of information and given that featured snippets provide the option to click through to the source, you need to be offering additional information that could be of use to the reader.
Adopt the formula of answering the question directly and then follow it up by covering other related search queries. This should help you cover all the bases and achieve that coveted spot. Ultimately, you may need to do a bit of testing and reiterating to see what works best.
It is also worth integrating more Q&A style formats into your content. These do not have to just be limited to an FAQ page and it is worth revisiting how you can optimize some of your content to fit this Q&A style. The easier you can make it for Google to pull the featured snippet from your content, the more likely you are to appear in that prized position zero and therefore benefit from voice search as well.
More than a third of featured snippets and knowledge boxes contain an image, so another tactic to experiment with is to utilize different formats, such as tables or graphs. Try using numbered points to break up the content into simple steps, as this helps to optimize the content for voice search.
Plus, if there are too many steps to display in the featured snippet, then Google will include a read more button that links through to your website, which can be an effective way of converting people from voice search into website traffic.
Voice search is characterized by its prevalence on mobile devices and its focus on local searches. This is of paramount importance to local search strategies, especially given that 50% of mobile visitors who perform a local search will visit a store within one day.
Although these may not bring up featured snippets, they do reveal the Google My Business profiles, which can be read aloud as directions. In fact, directions are one of the most popular queries for voice search, unsurprising given the push towards hands free, particularly when driving.
Source: Google Official Blog
As far as local searches go, you need to make sure that all of your contact information is as accessible as possible on your site. Make Google’s life easy when it comes to crawling your site; you’ll be more likely to feature high up in the featured results and therefore be the winner of the voice search game. Ensure your contact information isn’t simply within an image or this will certainly damage your chances of appearing.
You know what else you can do to make the Google bots even happier? Schema markup – it will significantly increase the chances of obtaining a featured snippet.
It goes without saying that you need to keep your Google My Business up to date. Again, this should be part of your SEO efforts anyway, so no sweat there. Once your contact information is updated and where it should be, help the process along by submitting a sitemap to Google. Also submit any new content that you add to your site, just to speed up the process.
Don’t forget to focus on mobile. Given that the vast majority of voice searches occur on mobile, it is essential that the mobile version of your site is fully optimized.
I know what you’re thinking: but voice search entails that only the featured snippet will be read aloud, so what’s the point of a fancy pants mobile friendly website? Well, Google likes fancy pants mobile friendly websites, that’s why. Don’t believe me? Riddle me this – why are they moving to a mobile-first index?
Even using voice search, there is always the chance that the user decides to delve into their query further to read more. In which case they’ll head straight to your site, and if it’s not delivering in terms of user experience then you won’t be staying in that top spot for long.
When it comes to trying to get that valuable featured snippet place, there is no special technique that is any different to standard SEO. In short, if you are thinking carefully about user intent then you should be fine.
Given the recent updates like Hummingbird and Rankbrain, user intent should already be a priority in your search strategy. So if you’re doing this then your content should already be optimized for featured snippets and voice search.
Using voice search for commercial intent is only in its infancy at the moment. However, we are only expecting this to evolve and develop over time as people become more and more comfortable with voice search.
So you’d best be ready!
Posted by randfish
Are you ranking pretty well in one locale, only to find out your rankings tank in another? It's not uncommon, even for sites without an intent to capture local queries. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows you how to diagnose the issue with a few clever SEO tricks, then identify the right strategy to get back on top.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to this edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about rankings that differ from geography to geography. Many of you might see that you are ranking particularly well in one city, but when you perform that search in another city or in another country perhaps, that still speaks the same language and has very similar traits, that maybe you're not performing well.
Maybe you do well in Canada, but you don't do well in the United States. Maybe you do well in Portland, Oregon, but you do poorly in San Diego, California. Sometimes you might be thinking to yourself, "Well, wait, this search is not particularly local, or at least I didn't think of it as being particularly local. Why am I ranking in one and not the other?" So here's a process that you can use to diagnose.
A. Google's AdPreview Tool - Google has an ad preview tool, where you can specify and set a particular location. That's at AdWords.Google.com slash a bunch of junk slash ad preview. We'll make sure that the link is down in the notes below.
B. The ampersand-near-equals parameter (&near=) - Now, some SEOs have said that this is not perfect, and I agree it is imperfect, but it is pretty close. We've done some comparisons here at Moz. I've done them while I'm traveling. It's not bad. Occasionally, you'll see one or two things that are not the same. The advertisements are frequently not the same. In fact, they don't seem to work well. But the organic results look pretty darn close. The maps results look pretty darn close. So I think it's a reasonable tool that you can use.
That is by basically changing the Google search query — so this is the URL in the search query — from Google.com/search?q= and then you might have ice+cream or WordPress+web+design, and then you use this, &near= and the city and state here in the United States or city and province in Canada or city and region in another country. In this case, I'm going with Portland+OR. This will change my results. You can give this a try yourself. You can see that you will see the ice cream places that are in Portland, Oregon, when you perform this search query.
For countries, you can use another one. You can either go directly to the country code Google, so for the UK Google.co.uk, or for New Zealand Google.co.nz, or for Canada Google.ca. Then you can type that in.You can also use this parameter &GL= instead of &near. This is global location equals the country code, and then you could put in CA for Canada or UK for the UK or NZ for New Zealand.
C. The Mozbar's search profiles - You can also do this with the MozBar. The MozBar kind of hacks the near parameter for you, and you can just specify a location and create a search profile. Do that right inside the MozBar. That's one of the very nice things about using it.
D. Rank tracking with a platform that supports location-specific rankings - Some of them don't, some of them do. Moz does right now. I believe Searchmetrics does if you use the enterprise. Oh, I'm trying to remember if Rob Bucci said STAT does. Well, Rob will answer in the comments, and he'll tell us whether STAT does. I think that they do.
So next, once you've figured out whether this ranking anomaly that you perceive is real or not, you can step two look at who is ranking in the one where you're not and figure out what factors they might have going for them.
Now we're not considering who is ranking, but we're considering who is doing the searching, these location-based searchers and what their behavior is like.
You're going to divide the search queries that you care about that have these challenges into three different types of buckets:
This would be sort of the classic geo-specific search, where you see maps results right up at the top. The SERPs change completely from geo to geo. So if you perform the search in Portland and then you perform it in San Diego, you see very, very different results. Seven to nine of the top ten at least are changing up, and it's the case that almost no non-local listings are showing in the top five results. When you see these, this is probably non-targetable without a physical location in that geography. So if you don't have a physical location, you're kind of out of business until you get there. If you do, then you can work on the local ranking signals that might be holding you back.
I've actually illustrated this one over here, because this can be a little bit challenging to describe. But basically, you're getting a mix of geo-specific and global results. So, for example, I use the &near=Portland, Oregon, because I'm in Seattle and I want to see Portland's results for WordPress web design.
WordPress web design, when I do the search all over the United States, the first one or two results are pretty much always the same. They're always this Web Savvy Marketing link and this Creative Bloq, and they're very broad. They are not specifically about a local provider of WordPress web design.
But then you get to number three and four and five, and the results change to be local-specific businesses. So in Portland, it's these Mozak Design guys. Mozak, no relation to Moz, to my knowledge anyway. In San Diego, it's Kristin Falkner, who's ranking number three, and then other local San Diego WordPress web design businesses at four and five. So it's kind of this mix of geo and non-geo. You can generally tell this by looking and changing your geography in this fashion seeing those different things.
Some of the top search results usually will be like this, and they'll stay consistent from geography to geography. In these cases, what you want to do is work on boosting those local-specific signals. So if you are ranking number five or six and you want to be number three, go for that, or you can try and be in the global results, in which case you're trying to boost the classic ranking signals, not the local ones so you can get up there.
Those would be, "I do this search, and I don't see any local-specific results." It's just a bunch of nationwide or worldwide brands. There are no maps, usually only one, maybe two geo-specific results in the top 10, and they tend to be further down, and the SERPs barely change from geo to geo. They're pretty much the same throughout the country.
So once you put these into these three buckets, then you know which thing to do. Here, it's pursue classic signals. You probably don't need much of a local boost.
Here, you have the option of going one way or the other, boosting local signals to get into these rankings or boosting the classic signals to get into those global ones.
Here you're going to need the physical business.
All right, everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.
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