Local Search Ranking Factors 2018: Local Today, Key Takeaways, and the Future

Local Search Ranking Factors 2018: Local Today, Key Takeaways, and the Future https://ift.tt/2SidhUf

Posted by Whitespark

In the past year, local SEO has run at a startling and near-constant pace of change. From an explosion of new Google My Business features to an ever-increasing emphasis on the importance of reviews, it's almost too much to keep up with. In today's Whiteboard Friday, we welcome our friend Darren Shaw to explain what local is like today, dive into the key takeaways from his 2018 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, and offer us a glimpse into the future according to the local SEO experts.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. I'm Darren Shaw from Whitespark, and today I want to talk to you about the local search ranking factors. So this is a survey that David Mihm has run for the past like 10 years. Last year, I took it over, and it's a survey of the top local search practitioners, about 40 of them. They all contribute their answers, and I aggregate the data and say what's driving local search. So this is what the opinion of the local search practitioners is, and I'll kind of break it down for you.

Local search today

So these are the results of this year's survey. We had Google My Business factors at about 25%. That was the biggest piece of the pie. We have review factors at 15%, links at 16%, on-page factors at 14%, behavioral at 10%, citations at 11%, personalization and social at 6% and 3%. So that's basically the makeup of the local search algorithm today, based on the opinions of the people that participated in the survey.

The big story this year is Google My Business. Google My Business factors are way up, compared to last year, a 32% increase in Google My Business signals. I'll talk about that a little bit more over in the takeaways. Review signals are also up, so more emphasis on reviews this year from the practitioners. Citation signals are down again, and that makes sense. They continue to decline I think for a number of reasons. They used to be the go-to factor for local search. You just built out as many citations as you could. Now the local search algorithm is so much more complicated and there's so much more to it that it's being diluted by all of the other factors. Plus it used to be a real competitive difference-maker. Now it's not, because everyone is pretty much getting citations. They're considered table stakes now. By seeing a drop here, it doesn't mean you should stop doing them. They're just not the competitive difference-maker they used to be. You still need to get listed on all of the important sites.

Key takeaways

All right, so let's talk about the key takeaways.

1. Google My Business

The real story this year was Google My Business, Google My Business, Google My Business. Everyone in the comments was talking about the benefits they're seeing from investing in a lot of these new features that Google has been adding.

Google has been adding a ton of new features lately — services, descriptions, Google Posts, Google Q&A. There's a ton of stuff going on in Google My Business now that allows you to populate Google My Business with a ton of extra data. So this was a big one.

✓ Take advantage of Google Posts

Everyone talked about Google Posts, how they're seeing Google Posts driving rankings. There are a couple of things there. One is the semantic content that you're providing Google in a Google post is definitely helping Google associate those keywords with your business. Engagement with Google Posts as well could be driving rankings up, and maybe just being an active business user continuing to post stuff and logging in to your account is also helping to lift your business entity and improve your rankings. So definitely, if you're not on Google Posts, get on it now.

If you search for your category, you'll see a ton of businesses are not doing it. So it's also a great competitive difference-maker right now.

✓ Seed your Google Q&A

Google Q&A, a lot of businesses are not even aware this exists. There's a Q&A section now. Your customers are often asking questions, and they're being answered by not you. So it's valuable for you to get in there and make sure you're answering your questions and also seed the Q&A with your own questions. So add all of your own content. If you have a frequently asked questions section on your website, take that content and put it into Google Q&A. So now you're giving lots more content to Google.

✓ Post photos and videos

Photos and videos, continually post photos and videos, maybe even encourage your customers to do that. All of that activity is helpful. A lot of people don't know that you can now post videos to Google My Business. So get on that if you have any videos for your business.

✓ Fill out every field

There are so many new fields in Google My Business. If you haven't edited your listing in a couple of years, there's a lot more stuff in there that you can now populate and give Google more data about your business. All of that really leads to engagement. All of these extra engagement signals that you're now feeding Google, from being a business owner that's engaged with your listing and adding stuff and from users, you're giving them more stuff to look at, click on, and dwell on your listing for a longer time, all that helps with your rankings.

2. Reviews

✓ Get more Google reviews

Reviews continue to increase in importance in local search, so, obviously, getting more Google reviews. It used to be a bit more of a competitive difference-maker. It's becoming more and more table stakes, because everybody seems to be having lots of reviews. So you definitely want to make sure that you are competing with your competition on review count and lots of high-quality reviews.

✓ Keywords in reviews

Getting keywords in reviews, so rather than just asking for a review, it's useful to ask your customers to mention what service they had provided or whatever so you can get those keywords in your reviews.

✓ Respond to reviews (users get notified now!)

Responding to reviews. Google recently started notifying users that if the owner has responded to you, you'll get an email. So all of that is really great, and those responses, it's another signal to Google that you're an engaged business.

✓ Diversify beyond Google My Business for reviews

Diversify. Don't just focus on Google My Business. Look at other sites in your industry that are prominent review sites. You can find them if you just look for your own business name plus reviews, if you search that in Google, you're going to see the sites that Google is saying are important for your particular business.

You can also find out like what are the sites that your competitors are getting reviews on. Then if you just do a search like keyword plus city, like "lawyers + Denver," you might find sites that are important for your industry as well that you should be listed on. So check out a couple of your keywords and make sure you're getting reviews on more sites than just Google.

3. Links

Then links, of course, links continue to drive local search. A lot of people in the comments talked about how a handful of local links have been really valuable. This is a great competitive difference-maker, because a lot of businesses don't have any links other than citations. So when you get a few of these, it can really have an impact.

✓ From local industry sites and sponsorships

They really talk about focusing on local-specific sites and industry-specific sites. So you can get a lot of those from sponsorships. They're kind of the go-to tactic. If you do a search for in title sponsors plus city name, you're going to find a lot of sites that are listing their sponsors, and those are opportunities for you, in your city, that you could sponsor that event as well or that organization and get a link.

The future!

All right. So I also asked in the survey: Where do you see Google going in the future? We got a lot of great responses, and I tried to summarize that into three main themes here for you.

1. Keeping users on Google

This is a really big one. Google does not want to send its users to your website to get the answer. Google wants to have the answer right on Google so that they don't have to click. It's this zero-click search result. So you see Rand Fishkin talking about this. This has been happening in local for a long time, and it's really amplified with all of these new features Google has been adding. They want to have all of your data so that they don't have to send users to find it somewhere else. Then that means in the future less traffic to your website.

So Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm also talk about Google as your new homepage, and this concept is like branded search.

• What does your branded search look like?
• So what sites are you getting reviews on?
• What does your knowledge panel look like?

Make that all look really good, because Google doesn't want to send people to your new website.

2. More emphasis on behavioral signals

David Mihm is a strong voice in this. He talks about how Google is trying to diversify how they rank businesses based on what's happening in the real world. They're looking for real-world signals that actual humans care about this business and they're engaging with this business.

So there's a number of things that they can do to track that -- so branded search, how many people are searching for your brand name, how many people are clicking to call your business, driving directions. This stuff is all kind of hard to manipulate, whereas you can add more links, you can get more reviews. But this stuff, this is a great signal for Google to rely on.

Engagement with your listing, engagement with your website, and actual humans in your business. If you've seen on the knowledge panel sometimes for brick-and-mortar business, it will be like busy times. They know when people are actually at your business. They have counts of how many people are going into your business. So that's a great signal for them to use to understand the prominence of your business. Is this a busy business compared to all the other ones in the city?

3. Google will monetize everything

Then, of course, a trend to monetize as much as they can. Google is a publicly traded company. They want to make as much money as possible. They're on a constant growth path. So there are a few things that we see coming down the pipeline.

Local service ads are expanding across the country and globally and in different industries. So this is like a paid program. You have to apply to get into it, and then Google takes a cut of leads. So if you are a member of this, then Google will send leads to you. But you have to be verified to be in there, and you have to pay to be in there.

Then taking a cut from bookings, you can now book directly on Google for a lot of different businesses. If you think about Google Flights and Google Hotels, Google is looking for a way to monetize all of this local search opportunity. That's why they're investing heavily in local search so they can make money from it. So seeing more of these kinds of features rolling out in the future is definitely coming. Transactions from other things. So if I did book something, then Google will take a cut for it.

So that's the future. That's sort of the news of the local search ranking factors this year. I hope it's been helpful. If you have any questions, just leave some comments and I'll make sure to respond to them all. Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

---

If you missed our recent webinar on the Local Search Ranking Factors survey with Darren Shaw and Dr. Pete, don't worry! You can still catch the recording here:

Check out the webinar

You'll be in for a jam-packed hour of deeper insights and takeaways from the survey, as well as some great audience-contributed Q&A.

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!

Local Search Ranking Factors 2018: Local Today, Key Takeaways, and the Future

Local Search Ranking Factors 2018: Local Today, Key Takeaways, and the Future https://ift.tt/2SidhUf

Posted by Whitespark

In the past year, local SEO has run at a startling and near-constant pace of change. From an explosion of new Google My Business features to an ever-increasing emphasis on the importance of reviews, it's almost too much to keep up with. In today's Whiteboard Friday, we welcome our friend Darren Shaw to explain what local is like today, dive into the key takeaways from his 2018 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, and offer us a glimpse into the future according to the local SEO experts.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. I'm Darren Shaw from Whitespark, and today I want to talk to you about the local search ranking factors. So this is a survey that David Mihm has run for the past like 10 years. Last year, I took it over, and it's a survey of the top local search practitioners, about 40 of them. They all contribute their answers, and I aggregate the data and say what's driving local search. So this is what the opinion of the local search practitioners is, and I'll kind of break it down for you.

Local search today

So these are the results of this year's survey. We had Google My Business factors at about 25%. That was the biggest piece of the pie. We have review factors at 15%, links at 16%, on-page factors at 14%, behavioral at 10%, citations at 11%, personalization and social at 6% and 3%. So that's basically the makeup of the local search algorithm today, based on the opinions of the people that participated in the survey.

The big story this year is Google My Business. Google My Business factors are way up, compared to last year, a 32% increase in Google My Business signals. I'll talk about that a little bit more over in the takeaways. Review signals are also up, so more emphasis on reviews this year from the practitioners. Citation signals are down again, and that makes sense. They continue to decline I think for a number of reasons. They used to be the go-to factor for local search. You just built out as many citations as you could. Now the local search algorithm is so much more complicated and there's so much more to it that it's being diluted by all of the other factors. Plus it used to be a real competitive difference-maker. Now it's not, because everyone is pretty much getting citations. They're considered table stakes now. By seeing a drop here, it doesn't mean you should stop doing them. They're just not the competitive difference-maker they used to be. You still need to get listed on all of the important sites.

Key takeaways

All right, so let's talk about the key takeaways.

1. Google My Business

The real story this year was Google My Business, Google My Business, Google My Business. Everyone in the comments was talking about the benefits they're seeing from investing in a lot of these new features that Google has been adding.

Google has been adding a ton of new features lately — services, descriptions, Google Posts, Google Q&A. There's a ton of stuff going on in Google My Business now that allows you to populate Google My Business with a ton of extra data. So this was a big one.

✓ Take advantage of Google Posts

Everyone talked about Google Posts, how they're seeing Google Posts driving rankings. There are a couple of things there. One is the semantic content that you're providing Google in a Google post is definitely helping Google associate those keywords with your business. Engagement with Google Posts as well could be driving rankings up, and maybe just being an active business user continuing to post stuff and logging in to your account is also helping to lift your business entity and improve your rankings. So definitely, if you're not on Google Posts, get on it now.

If you search for your category, you'll see a ton of businesses are not doing it. So it's also a great competitive difference-maker right now.

✓ Seed your Google Q&A

Google Q&A, a lot of businesses are not even aware this exists. There's a Q&A section now. Your customers are often asking questions, and they're being answered by not you. So it's valuable for you to get in there and make sure you're answering your questions and also seed the Q&A with your own questions. So add all of your own content. If you have a frequently asked questions section on your website, take that content and put it into Google Q&A. So now you're giving lots more content to Google.

✓ Post photos and videos

Photos and videos, continually post photos and videos, maybe even encourage your customers to do that. All of that activity is helpful. A lot of people don't know that you can now post videos to Google My Business. So get on that if you have any videos for your business.

✓ Fill out every field

There are so many new fields in Google My Business. If you haven't edited your listing in a couple of years, there's a lot more stuff in there that you can now populate and give Google more data about your business. All of that really leads to engagement. All of these extra engagement signals that you're now feeding Google, from being a business owner that's engaged with your listing and adding stuff and from users, you're giving them more stuff to look at, click on, and dwell on your listing for a longer time, all that helps with your rankings.

2. Reviews

✓ Get more Google reviews

Reviews continue to increase in importance in local search, so, obviously, getting more Google reviews. It used to be a bit more of a competitive difference-maker. It's becoming more and more table stakes, because everybody seems to be having lots of reviews. So you definitely want to make sure that you are competing with your competition on review count and lots of high-quality reviews.

✓ Keywords in reviews

Getting keywords in reviews, so rather than just asking for a review, it's useful to ask your customers to mention what service they had provided or whatever so you can get those keywords in your reviews.

✓ Respond to reviews (users get notified now!)

Responding to reviews. Google recently started notifying users that if the owner has responded to you, you'll get an email. So all of that is really great, and those responses, it's another signal to Google that you're an engaged business.

✓ Diversify beyond Google My Business for reviews

Diversify. Don't just focus on Google My Business. Look at other sites in your industry that are prominent review sites. You can find them if you just look for your own business name plus reviews, if you search that in Google, you're going to see the sites that Google is saying are important for your particular business.

You can also find out like what are the sites that your competitors are getting reviews on. Then if you just do a search like keyword plus city, like "lawyers + Denver," you might find sites that are important for your industry as well that you should be listed on. So check out a couple of your keywords and make sure you're getting reviews on more sites than just Google.

3. Links

Then links, of course, links continue to drive local search. A lot of people in the comments talked about how a handful of local links have been really valuable. This is a great competitive difference-maker, because a lot of businesses don't have any links other than citations. So when you get a few of these, it can really have an impact.

✓ From local industry sites and sponsorships

They really talk about focusing on local-specific sites and industry-specific sites. So you can get a lot of those from sponsorships. They're kind of the go-to tactic. If you do a search for in title sponsors plus city name, you're going to find a lot of sites that are listing their sponsors, and those are opportunities for you, in your city, that you could sponsor that event as well or that organization and get a link.

The future!

All right. So I also asked in the survey: Where do you see Google going in the future? We got a lot of great responses, and I tried to summarize that into three main themes here for you.

1. Keeping users on Google

This is a really big one. Google does not want to send its users to your website to get the answer. Google wants to have the answer right on Google so that they don't have to click. It's this zero-click search result. So you see Rand Fishkin talking about this. This has been happening in local for a long time, and it's really amplified with all of these new features Google has been adding. They want to have all of your data so that they don't have to send users to find it somewhere else. Then that means in the future less traffic to your website.

So Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm also talk about Google as your new homepage, and this concept is like branded search.

• What does your branded search look like?
• So what sites are you getting reviews on?
• What does your knowledge panel look like?

Make that all look really good, because Google doesn't want to send people to your new website.

2. More emphasis on behavioral signals

David Mihm is a strong voice in this. He talks about how Google is trying to diversify how they rank businesses based on what's happening in the real world. They're looking for real-world signals that actual humans care about this business and they're engaging with this business.

So there's a number of things that they can do to track that -- so branded search, how many people are searching for your brand name, how many people are clicking to call your business, driving directions. This stuff is all kind of hard to manipulate, whereas you can add more links, you can get more reviews. But this stuff, this is a great signal for Google to rely on.

Engagement with your listing, engagement with your website, and actual humans in your business. If you've seen on the knowledge panel sometimes for brick-and-mortar business, it will be like busy times. They know when people are actually at your business. They have counts of how many people are going into your business. So that's a great signal for them to use to understand the prominence of your business. Is this a busy business compared to all the other ones in the city?

3. Google will monetize everything

Then, of course, a trend to monetize as much as they can. Google is a publicly traded company. They want to make as much money as possible. They're on a constant growth path. So there are a few things that we see coming down the pipeline.

Local service ads are expanding across the country and globally and in different industries. So this is like a paid program. You have to apply to get into it, and then Google takes a cut of leads. So if you are a member of this, then Google will send leads to you. But you have to be verified to be in there, and you have to pay to be in there.

Then taking a cut from bookings, you can now book directly on Google for a lot of different businesses. If you think about Google Flights and Google Hotels, Google is looking for a way to monetize all of this local search opportunity. That's why they're investing heavily in local search so they can make money from it. So seeing more of these kinds of features rolling out in the future is definitely coming. Transactions from other things. So if I did book something, then Google will take a cut for it.

So that's the future. That's sort of the news of the local search ranking factors this year. I hope it's been helpful. If you have any questions, just leave some comments and I'll make sure to respond to them all. Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

---

If you missed our recent webinar on the Local Search Ranking Factors survey with Darren Shaw and Dr. Pete, don't worry! You can still catch the recording here:

Check out the webinar

You'll be in for a jam-packed hour of deeper insights and takeaways from the survey, as well as some great audience-contributed Q&A.

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!

The State of Local SEO: Industry Insights for a Successful 2019

The State of Local SEO: Industry Insights for a Successful 2019 https://ift.tt/2rdsJVX

Posted by MiriamEllis

A thousand thanks to the 1,411 respondents who gave of their time and knowledge in contributing to this major survey! You’ve created a vivid image of what real-life, everyday local search marketers and local business owners are observing on a day-to-day basis, what strategies are working for them right now, and where some frankly stunning opportunities for improvement reside. Now, we’re ready to share your insights into:

• Google Updates
• Citations
• Reviews
• Company infrastructure
• Tool usage
• And a great deal more...

This survey pooled the observations of everyone from people working to market a single small business, to agency marketers with large local business clients:

Respondents who self-selected as not marketing a local business were filtered from further survey results.

Thanks to you, this free report is a window into the industry. Bring these statistics to teammates and clients to earn the buy-in you need to effectively reach local consumers in 2019.

Get the full report

There are so many stories here worthy of your time

Let’s pick just one, to give a sense of the industry intelligence you’ll access in this report. Likely you’ve now seen the Local Search Ranking Factors 2018 Survey, undertaken by Whitespark in conjunction with Moz. In that poll of experts, we saw Google My Business signals being cited as the most influential local ranking component. But what was #2? Link building.

You might come away from that excellent survey believing that, since link building is so important, all local businesses must be doing it. But not so. The State of the Local SEO Industry Report reveals that:

When asked what’s working best for them as a method for earning links, 35% of local businesses and their marketers admitted to having no link building strategy in place at all:

And that, Moz friends, is what opportunity looks like. Get your meaningful local link building strategy in place in the new year, and prepare to leave ⅓ of your competitors behind, wondering how you surpassed them in the local and organic results.

The full report contains 30+ findings like this one. Rivet the attention of decision-makers at your agency, quote persuasive statistics to hesitant clients, and share this report with teammates who need to be brought up to industry speed. When read in tandem with the Local Search Ranking Factors survey, this report will help your business or agency understand both what experts are saying and what practitioners are experiencing.

Sometimes, local search marketing can be a lonely road to travel. You may find yourself wondering, “Does anyone understand what I do? Is anyone else struggling with this task? How do I benchmark myself?” You’ll find both confirmation and affirmation today, and Moz’s best hope is that you’ll come away a better, bolder, more effective local marketer. Let’s begin!

Download the report

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!

The State of Local SEO: Industry Insights for a Successful 2019

The State of Local SEO: Industry Insights for a Successful 2019 https://ift.tt/2rdsJVX

Posted by MiriamEllis

A thousand thanks to the 1,411 respondents who gave of their time and knowledge in contributing to this major survey! You’ve created a vivid image of what real-life, everyday local search marketers and local business owners are observing on a day-to-day basis, what strategies are working for them right now, and where some frankly stunning opportunities for improvement reside. Now, we’re ready to share your insights into:

• Google Updates
• Citations
• Reviews
• Company infrastructure
• Tool usage
• And a great deal more...

This survey pooled the observations of everyone from people working to market a single small business, to agency marketers with large local business clients:

Respondents who self-selected as not marketing a local business were filtered from further survey results.

Thanks to you, this free report is a window into the industry. Bring these statistics to teammates and clients to earn the buy-in you need to effectively reach local consumers in 2019.

Get the full report

There are so many stories here worthy of your time

Let’s pick just one, to give a sense of the industry intelligence you’ll access in this report. Likely you’ve now seen the Local Search Ranking Factors 2018 Survey, undertaken by Whitespark in conjunction with Moz. In that poll of experts, we saw Google My Business signals being cited as the most influential local ranking component. But what was #2? Link building.

You might come away from that excellent survey believing that, since link building is so important, all local businesses must be doing it. But not so. The State of the Local SEO Industry Report reveals that:

When asked what’s working best for them as a method for earning links, 35% of local businesses and their marketers admitted to having no link building strategy in place at all:

And that, Moz friends, is what opportunity looks like. Get your meaningful local link building strategy in place in the new year, and prepare to leave ⅓ of your competitors behind, wondering how you surpassed them in the local and organic results.

The full report contains 30+ findings like this one. Rivet the attention of decision-makers at your agency, quote persuasive statistics to hesitant clients, and share this report with teammates who need to be brought up to industry speed. When read in tandem with the Local Search Ranking Factors survey, this report will help your business or agency understand both what experts are saying and what practitioners are experiencing.

Sometimes, local search marketing can be a lonely road to travel. You may find yourself wondering, “Does anyone understand what I do? Is anyone else struggling with this task? How do I benchmark myself?” You’ll find both confirmation and affirmation today, and Moz’s best hope is that you’ll come away a better, bolder, more effective local marketer. Let’s begin!

Download the report

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!

Using a New Correlation Model to Predict Future Rankings with Page Authority

Using a New Correlation Model to Predict Future Rankings with Page Authority https://ift.tt/2RptcAc

Posted by rjonesx.

Correlation studies have been a staple of the search engine optimization community for many years. Each time a new study is released, a chorus of naysayers seem to come magically out of the woodwork to remind us of the one thing they remember from high school statistics — that "correlation doesn't mean causation." They are, of course, right in their protestations and, to their credit, and unfortunate number of times it seems that those conducting the correlation studies have forgotten this simple aphorism.

We collect a search result. We then order the results based on different metrics like the number of links. Finally, we compare the orders of the original search results with those produced by the different metrics. The closer they are, the higher the correlation between the two.

That being said, correlation studies are not altogether fruitless simply because they don't necessarily uncover causal relationships (ie: actual ranking factors). What correlation studies discover or confirm are correlates.

Correlates are simply measurements that share some relationship with the independent variable (in this case, the order of search results on a page). For example, we know that backlink counts are correlates of rank order. We also know that social shares are correlates of rank order.

Correlation studies also provide us with direction of the relationship. For example, ice cream sales are positive correlates with temperature and winter jackets are negative correlates with temperature — that is to say, when the temperature goes up, ice cream sales go up but winter jacket sales go down.

Finally, correlation studies can help us rule out proposed ranking factors. This is often overlooked, but it is an incredibly important part of correlation studies. Research that provides a negative result is often just as valuable as research that yields a positive result. We've been able to rule out many types of potential factors — like keyword density and the meta keywords tag — using correlation studies.

Unfortunately, the value of correlation studies tends to end there. In particular, we still want to know whether a correlate causes the rankings or is spurious. Spurious is just a fancy sounding word for "false" or "fake." A good example of a spurious relationship would be that ice cream sales cause an increase in drownings. In reality, the heat of the summer increases both ice cream sales and people who go for a swim. That swimming can cause drownings. So while ice cream sales is a correlate of drowning, it is *spurious.* It does not cause the drowning.

How might we go about teasing out the difference between causal and spurious relationships? One thing we know is that a cause happens before its effect, which means that a causal variable should predict a future change.

An alternative model for correlation studies

I propose an alternate methodology for conducting correlation studies. Rather than measure the correlation between a factor (like links or shares) and a SERP, we can measure the correlation between a factor and changes in the SERP over time.

The process works like this:

1. Collect a SERP on day 1
2. Collect the link counts for each of the URLs in that SERP
3. Look for any URLs are out of order with respect to links; for example, if position 2 has fewer links than position 3
4. Record that anomaly
5. Collect the same SERP in 14 days
6. Record if the anomaly has been corrected (ie: position 3 now out-ranks position 2)
7. Repeat across ten thousand keywords and test a variety of factors (backlinks, social shares, etc.)

So what are the benefits of this methodology? By looking at change over time, we can see whether the ranking factor (correlate) is a leading or lagging feature. A lagging feature can automatically be ruled out as causal. A leading factor has the potential to be a causal factor.

We collect a search result. We record where the search result differs from the expected predictions of a particular variable (like links or social shares). We then collect the same search result 2 weeks later to see if the search engine has corrected the out-of-order results.

Following this methodology, we tested 3 different common correlates produced by ranking factors studies: Facebook shares, number of root linking domains, and Page Authority. The first step involved collecting 10,000 SERPs from randomly selected keywords in our Keyword Explorer corpus. We then recorded Facebook Shares, Root Linking Domains, and Page Authority for every URL. We noted every example where 2 adjacent URLs (like positions 2 and 3 or 7 and 8) were flipped with respect to the expected order predicted by the correlating factor. For example, if the #2 position had 30 shares while the #3 position had 50 shares, we noted that pair. Finally, 2 weeks later, we captured the same SERPs and identified the percent of times that Google rearranged the pair of URLs to match the expected correlation. We also randomly selected pairs of URLs to get a baseline percent likelihood that any 2 adjacent URLs would switch positions. Here were the results...

The outcome

It's important to note that it is incredibly rare to expect a leading factor to show up strongly in an analysis like this. While the experimental method is sound, it's not as simple as a factor predicting future — it assumes that in some cases we will know about a factor before Google does. The underlying assumption is that in some cases we have seen a ranking factor (like an increase in links or social shares) before Googlebot has and that in the 2 week period, Google will catch up and correct the incorrectly ordered results. As you can expect, this is a rare occasion. However, with a sufficient number of observations, we should be able to see a statistically significant difference between lagging and leading results. However, the methodology only detects when a factor is both leading and Moz Link Explorer discovered the relevant factor before Google.

Factor	Percent Corrected	P-Value	95% Min	95% Max
Control	18.93%	0
Facebook Shares Controlled for PA	18.31%	0.00001	-0.6849	-0.5551
Root Linking Domains	20.58%	0.00001	0.016268	0.016732
Page Authority	20.98%	0.00001	0.026202	0.026398

Control:

In order to create a control, we randomly selected adjacent URL pairs in the first SERP collection and determined the likelihood that the second will outrank the first in the final SERP collection. Approximately 18.93% of the time the worse ranking URL would overtake the better ranking URL. By setting this control, we can determine if any of the potential correlates are leading factors - that is to say that they are potential causes of improved rankings.

Facebook Shares:

Facebook Shares performed the worst of the three tested variables. Facebook Shares actually performed worse than random (18.31% vs 18.93%), meaning that randomly selected pairs would be more likely to switch than those where shares of the second were higher than the first. This is not altogether surprising as it is the general industry consensus that social signals are lagging factors — that is to say the traffic from higher rankings drives higher social shares, not social shares drive higher rankings. Subsequently, we would expect to see the ranking change first before we would see the increase in social shares.

RLDs

Raw root linking domain counts performed substantially better than shares at ~20.5%. As I indicated before, this type of analysis is incredibly subtle because it only detects when a factor is both leading and Moz Link Explorer discovered the relevant factor before Google. Nevertheless, this result was statistically significant with a P value <0.0001 and a 95% confidence interval that RLDs will predict future ranking changes around 1.5% greater than random.

Page Authority

By far, the highest performing factor was Page Authority. At 21.5%, PA correctly predicted changes in SERPs 2.6% better than random. This is a strong indication of a leading factor, greatly outperforming social shares and outperforming the best predictive raw metric, root linking domains.This is not unsurprising. Page Authority is built to predict rankings, so we should expect that it would outperform raw metrics in identifying when a shift in rankings might occur. Now, this is not to say that Google uses Moz Page Authority to rank sites, but rather that Moz Page Authority is a relatively good approximation of whatever link metrics Google is using to determine ranking sites.

Concluding thoughts

There are so many different experimental designs we can use to help improve our research industry-wide, and this is just one of the methods that can help us tease out the differences between causal ranking factors and lagging correlates. Experimental design does not need to be elaborate and the statistics to determine reliability do not need to be cutting edge. While machine learning offers much promise for improving our predictive models, simple statistics can do the trick when we're establishing the fundamentals.

Now, get out there and do some great research!

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!

Using a New Correlation Model to Predict Future Rankings with Page Authority

Using a New Correlation Model to Predict Future Rankings with Page Authority https://ift.tt/2RptcAc

Posted by rjonesx.

Correlation studies have been a staple of the search engine optimization community for many years. Each time a new study is released, a chorus of naysayers seem to come magically out of the woodwork to remind us of the one thing they remember from high school statistics — that "correlation doesn't mean causation." They are, of course, right in their protestations and, to their credit, and unfortunate number of times it seems that those conducting the correlation studies have forgotten this simple aphorism.

We collect a search result. We then order the results based on different metrics like the number of links. Finally, we compare the orders of the original search results with those produced by the different metrics. The closer they are, the higher the correlation between the two.

That being said, correlation studies are not altogether fruitless simply because they don't necessarily uncover causal relationships (ie: actual ranking factors). What correlation studies discover or confirm are correlates.

Correlates are simply measurements that share some relationship with the independent variable (in this case, the order of search results on a page). For example, we know that backlink counts are correlates of rank order. We also know that social shares are correlates of rank order.

Correlation studies also provide us with direction of the relationship. For example, ice cream sales are positive correlates with temperature and winter jackets are negative correlates with temperature — that is to say, when the temperature goes up, ice cream sales go up but winter jacket sales go down.

Finally, correlation studies can help us rule out proposed ranking factors. This is often overlooked, but it is an incredibly important part of correlation studies. Research that provides a negative result is often just as valuable as research that yields a positive result. We've been able to rule out many types of potential factors — like keyword density and the meta keywords tag — using correlation studies.

Unfortunately, the value of correlation studies tends to end there. In particular, we still want to know whether a correlate causes the rankings or is spurious. Spurious is just a fancy sounding word for "false" or "fake." A good example of a spurious relationship would be that ice cream sales cause an increase in drownings. In reality, the heat of the summer increases both ice cream sales and people who go for a swim. That swimming can cause drownings. So while ice cream sales is a correlate of drowning, it is *spurious.* It does not cause the drowning.

How might we go about teasing out the difference between causal and spurious relationships? One thing we know is that a cause happens before its effect, which means that a causal variable should predict a future change.

An alternative model for correlation studies

I propose an alternate methodology for conducting correlation studies. Rather than measure the correlation between a factor (like links or shares) and a SERP, we can measure the correlation between a factor and changes in the SERP over time.

The process works like this:

1. Collect a SERP on day 1
2. Collect the link counts for each of the URLs in that SERP
3. Look for any URLs are out of order with respect to links; for example, if position 2 has fewer links than position 3
4. Record that anomaly
5. Collect the same SERP in 14 days
6. Record if the anomaly has been corrected (ie: position 3 now out-ranks position 2)
7. Repeat across ten thousand keywords and test a variety of factors (backlinks, social shares, etc.)

So what are the benefits of this methodology? By looking at change over time, we can see whether the ranking factor (correlate) is a leading or lagging feature. A lagging feature can automatically be ruled out as causal. A leading factor has the potential to be a causal factor.

We collect a search result. We record where the search result differs from the expected predictions of a particular variable (like links or social shares). We then collect the same search result 2 weeks later to see if the search engine has corrected the out-of-order results.

Following this methodology, we tested 3 different common correlates produced by ranking factors studies: Facebook shares, number of root linking domains, and Page Authority. The first step involved collecting 10,000 SERPs from randomly selected keywords in our Keyword Explorer corpus. We then recorded Facebook Shares, Root Linking Domains, and Page Authority for every URL. We noted every example where 2 adjacent URLs (like positions 2 and 3 or 7 and 8) were flipped with respect to the expected order predicted by the correlating factor. For example, if the #2 position had 30 shares while the #3 position had 50 shares, we noted that pair. Finally, 2 weeks later, we captured the same SERPs and identified the percent of times that Google rearranged the pair of URLs to match the expected correlation. We also randomly selected pairs of URLs to get a baseline percent likelihood that any 2 adjacent URLs would switch positions. Here were the results...

The outcome

It's important to note that it is incredibly rare to expect a leading factor to show up strongly in an analysis like this. While the experimental method is sound, it's not as simple as a factor predicting future — it assumes that in some cases we will know about a factor before Google does. The underlying assumption is that in some cases we have seen a ranking factor (like an increase in links or social shares) before Googlebot has and that in the 2 week period, Google will catch up and correct the incorrectly ordered results. As you can expect, this is a rare occasion. However, with a sufficient number of observations, we should be able to see a statistically significant difference between lagging and leading results. However, the methodology only detects when a factor is both leading and Moz Link Explorer discovered the relevant factor before Google.

Factor	Percent Corrected	P-Value	95% Min	95% Max
Control	18.93%	0
Facebook Shares Controlled for PA	18.31%	0.00001	-0.6849	-0.5551
Root Linking Domains	20.58%	0.00001	0.016268	0.016732
Page Authority	20.98%	0.00001	0.026202	0.026398

Control:

In order to create a control, we randomly selected adjacent URL pairs in the first SERP collection and determined the likelihood that the second will outrank the first in the final SERP collection. Approximately 18.93% of the time the worse ranking URL would overtake the better ranking URL. By setting this control, we can determine if any of the potential correlates are leading factors - that is to say that they are potential causes of improved rankings.

Facebook Shares:

Facebook Shares performed the worst of the three tested variables. Facebook Shares actually performed worse than random (18.31% vs 18.93%), meaning that randomly selected pairs would be more likely to switch than those where shares of the second were higher than the first. This is not altogether surprising as it is the general industry consensus that social signals are lagging factors — that is to say the traffic from higher rankings drives higher social shares, not social shares drive higher rankings. Subsequently, we would expect to see the ranking change first before we would see the increase in social shares.

RLDs

Raw root linking domain counts performed substantially better than shares at ~20.5%. As I indicated before, this type of analysis is incredibly subtle because it only detects when a factor is both leading and Moz Link Explorer discovered the relevant factor before Google. Nevertheless, this result was statistically significant with a P value <0.0001 and a 95% confidence interval that RLDs will predict future ranking changes around 1.5% greater than random.

Page Authority

By far, the highest performing factor was Page Authority. At 21.5%, PA correctly predicted changes in SERPs 2.6% better than random. This is a strong indication of a leading factor, greatly outperforming social shares and outperforming the best predictive raw metric, root linking domains.This is not unsurprising. Page Authority is built to predict rankings, so we should expect that it would outperform raw metrics in identifying when a shift in rankings might occur. Now, this is not to say that Google uses Moz Page Authority to rank sites, but rather that Moz Page Authority is a relatively good approximation of whatever link metrics Google is using to determine ranking sites.

Concluding thoughts

There are so many different experimental designs we can use to help improve our research industry-wide, and this is just one of the methods that can help us tease out the differences between causal ranking factors and lagging correlates. Experimental design does not need to be elaborate and the statistics to determine reliability do not need to be cutting edge. While machine learning offers much promise for improving our predictive models, simple statistics can do the trick when we're establishing the fundamentals.

Now, get out there and do some great research!

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!

What to Do with Your Old Blog Posts

What to Do with Your Old Blog Posts https://ift.tt/2DMisYE

Posted by -LaurelTaylor-

Around 2005 or so, corporate blogs became the thing to do. Big players in the business world touted that such platforms could “drive swarms of traffic to your main website, generate more product sales” and even “create an additional stream of advertising income” (Entrepreneur Magazine circa 2006). With promises like that, what marketer or exec wouldn’t jump on the blog bandwagon?

Unfortunately, initial forays into branded content did not always dwell on minor issues like “quality” or “entertainment,” instead focusing on sheer bulk and, of course, all the keywords. Now we have learned better, and many corporate blogs are less prolific and offer more value. But on some sites, behind many, many “next page” clicks, this old content can still be found lurking in the background.

This active company blog still features over 900 pages of posts dating back to 2006

This situation leaves current SEOs and content teams in a bit of a pickle. What should you do if your site has excessive quantities of old blog posts? Are they okay just sitting there? Do you need to do something about them?

Why bother addressing old blog posts?

On many sites, the sheer number of pages are the biggest reason to consider improving or scaling back old content. If past content managers chose quantity over quality, heaps of old posts eventually get buried, all evergreen topics have been written about before, and it becomes increasingly harder to keep inventory of your content.

From a technical perspective, depending on the scale of the old content you're dealing with, pruning back the number of pages that you put forward can help increase your crawl efficiency. If Google has to crawl 1,000 URLs to find 100 good pieces of content, they are going to take note and not spend as much time combing through your content in the future.

From a marketing perspective, your content represents your brand, and improving the set of content that you put forward helps shape the way customers see you as an authority in your space. Optimizing and curating your existing content can give your collection of content a clearer topical focus, makes it more easily discoverable, and ensures that it provides value for users and the business.

Zooming out for a second to look at this from a higher level: If you've already decided that it's worth investing in blog content for your company, it’s worth getting the most from your existing resources and ensuring that they aren’t holding you back.

Decide what to keep: Inventory and assessment

Inventory

The first thing to do before accessing your blog posts is to make sure you know what you have. A full list of URLs and coordinating metadata is incredibly helpful in both evaluating and documenting.

Depending on the content management system that you use, obtaining this list can be as simple as exporting a database field. Alternatively, URLs can be gleaned from a combination of Google Analytics data, Webmaster Tools, and a comprehensive crawl with a tool such as Screaming Frog. This post gives a good outline of how to get the data you need from these sources.

Regardless of whether you have a list of URLs yet, it’s also good to do a full crawl of your blog to see what the linking structure looks like at this point, and how that may differ from what you see in the CMS.

Assessment

Once you know what you have, it’s time to assess the content and decide if it's worth holding on to. When I do this, I like to ask these 5 questions:

1. Is it beneficial for users?

Content that's beneficial for users is helpful, informative, or entertaining. It answers questions, helps them solve problems, or keeps them interested. This could be anything from a walkthrough for troubleshooting to a collection of inspirational photos.

These 5-year-old blog posts from different real estate blogs illustrate past content that still offers value to current users, and past content that may be less beneficial for a user

2. Is it beneficial for us?

Content that is beneficial to us is earning organic rankings, traffic, or backlinks, or is providing business value by helping drive conversions. Additionally, content that can help establish branding or effectively build topical authority is great to have on any site.

3. Is it good?

While this may be a bit of a subjective question to ask about any content, it’s obvious when you read content that isn’t good. This is about fundamental things such as if content doesn’t make sense, has tons of grammatical errors, is organized poorly, or doesn’t seem to have a point to it.

4. Is it relevant?

If content isn’t at least tangentially relevant to your site, industry, or customers, you should have a really good reason to keep it. If it doesn’t meet any of the former qualifications already, it probably isn’t worth holding on to.

These musings from a blog of a major hotel brand may not be the most relevant to their industry

5. Is it causing any issues?

Problematic content may include duplicate content, duplicate targeting, plagiarized text, content that is a legal liability, or any other number of issues that you probably don’t want to deal with on your site. I find that the assessment phase is a particularly good opportunity to identify posts that target the same topic, so that you can consolidate them.

Using these criteria, you can divide your old blog posts into buckets of “keep” and “don’t keep.” The “don’t keep” can be 301 redirected to either the most relevant related post or the blog homepage. Then it’s time to further address the others.

What to do with the posts you keep

So now you have a pile of “keep” posts to sort out! All the posts that made it this far have already been established to have value of some kind. Now we want to make the most of that value by improving, expanding, updating, and promoting the content.

Improve

When setting out to improve an old post that has good bones, it can be good to start with improvements on targeting and general writing and grammar. You want to make sure that your blog post has a clear point, is targeting a specific topic and terms, and is doing so in proper English (or whatever language your blog may be in).

Once the content itself is in good shape, make sure to add any technical improvements that the piece may need, such as relevant interlinking, alt text, or schema markup.

Then it’s time to make sure it’s pretty. Visual improvements such as adding line breaks, pull quotes, and imagery impact user experience and can keep people on the page longer.

Expand or update

Not all old blog posts are necessarily in poor shape, which can offer a great opportunity. Another way to get more value out of them is to repurpose or update the information that they contain to make old content fresh again. Data says that this is well worth the effort, with business bloggers that update older posts being 74% more likely to report strong results.

A few ways to expand or update a post are to explore a different take on the initial thesis, add newer data, or integrate more recent developments or changed opinions. Alternatively, you could expand on a piece of content by reinterpreting it in another medium, such as new imagery, engaging video, or even as audio content.

Promote

If you’ve invested resources in content creation and optimization, it only makes sense to try to get as many eyes as possible on the finished product. This can be done in a few different ways, such assharing and re-sharing on branded social channels, resurfacing posts to the front page of your blog, or even a bit of external promotion through outreach.

The follow-up

Once your blog has been pruned and you’re working on getting the most value out of your existing content, an important final step is to keep tabs on the effect these changes are having.

The most significant measure of success is organic organic traffic; even if your blog is designed for lead generation or other specific goals, the number of eyes on the page should have a strong correlation to the content’s success by other measures as well. For the best representation of traffic totals, I monitor organic sessions by landing page in Google Analytics.

I also like to keep an eye on organic rankings, as you can get an early glimpse of whether a piece is gaining traction around a particular topic before it's successful enough to earn organic traffic with those terms.

Remember that regardless of what changes you’ve made, it will usually take Google a few months to sort out the relevance and rankings of the updated content. So be patient, monitor, and keep expanding, updating, and promoting!

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!

What to Do with Your Old Blog Posts

What to Do with Your Old Blog Posts https://ift.tt/2DMisYE

Posted by -LaurelTaylor-

Around 2005 or so, corporate blogs became the thing to do. Big players in the business world touted that such platforms could “drive swarms of traffic to your main website, generate more product sales” and even “create an additional stream of advertising income” (Entrepreneur Magazine circa 2006). With promises like that, what marketer or exec wouldn’t jump on the blog bandwagon?

Unfortunately, initial forays into branded content did not always dwell on minor issues like “quality” or “entertainment,” instead focusing on sheer bulk and, of course, all the keywords. Now we have learned better, and many corporate blogs are less prolific and offer more value. But on some sites, behind many, many “next page” clicks, this old content can still be found lurking in the background.

This active company blog still features over 900 pages of posts dating back to 2006

This situation leaves current SEOs and content teams in a bit of a pickle. What should you do if your site has excessive quantities of old blog posts? Are they okay just sitting there? Do you need to do something about them?

Why bother addressing old blog posts?

On many sites, the sheer number of pages are the biggest reason to consider improving or scaling back old content. If past content managers chose quantity over quality, heaps of old posts eventually get buried, all evergreen topics have been written about before, and it becomes increasingly harder to keep inventory of your content.

From a technical perspective, depending on the scale of the old content you're dealing with, pruning back the number of pages that you put forward can help increase your crawl efficiency. If Google has to crawl 1,000 URLs to find 100 good pieces of content, they are going to take note and not spend as much time combing through your content in the future.

From a marketing perspective, your content represents your brand, and improving the set of content that you put forward helps shape the way customers see you as an authority in your space. Optimizing and curating your existing content can give your collection of content a clearer topical focus, makes it more easily discoverable, and ensures that it provides value for users and the business.

Zooming out for a second to look at this from a higher level: If you've already decided that it's worth investing in blog content for your company, it’s worth getting the most from your existing resources and ensuring that they aren’t holding you back.

Decide what to keep: Inventory and assessment

Inventory

The first thing to do before accessing your blog posts is to make sure you know what you have. A full list of URLs and coordinating metadata is incredibly helpful in both evaluating and documenting.

Depending on the content management system that you use, obtaining this list can be as simple as exporting a database field. Alternatively, URLs can be gleaned from a combination of Google Analytics data, Webmaster Tools, and a comprehensive crawl with a tool such as Screaming Frog. This post gives a good outline of how to get the data you need from these sources.

Regardless of whether you have a list of URLs yet, it’s also good to do a full crawl of your blog to see what the linking structure looks like at this point, and how that may differ from what you see in the CMS.

Assessment

Once you know what you have, it’s time to assess the content and decide if it's worth holding on to. When I do this, I like to ask these 5 questions:

1. Is it beneficial for users?

Content that's beneficial for users is helpful, informative, or entertaining. It answers questions, helps them solve problems, or keeps them interested. This could be anything from a walkthrough for troubleshooting to a collection of inspirational photos.

These 5-year-old blog posts from different real estate blogs illustrate past content that still offers value to current users, and past content that may be less beneficial for a user

2. Is it beneficial for us?

Content that is beneficial to us is earning organic rankings, traffic, or backlinks, or is providing business value by helping drive conversions. Additionally, content that can help establish branding or effectively build topical authority is great to have on any site.

3. Is it good?

While this may be a bit of a subjective question to ask about any content, it’s obvious when you read content that isn’t good. This is about fundamental things such as if content doesn’t make sense, has tons of grammatical errors, is organized poorly, or doesn’t seem to have a point to it.

4. Is it relevant?

If content isn’t at least tangentially relevant to your site, industry, or customers, you should have a really good reason to keep it. If it doesn’t meet any of the former qualifications already, it probably isn’t worth holding on to.

These musings from a blog of a major hotel brand may not be the most relevant to their industry

5. Is it causing any issues?

Problematic content may include duplicate content, duplicate targeting, plagiarized text, content that is a legal liability, or any other number of issues that you probably don’t want to deal with on your site. I find that the assessment phase is a particularly good opportunity to identify posts that target the same topic, so that you can consolidate them.

Using these criteria, you can divide your old blog posts into buckets of “keep” and “don’t keep.” The “don’t keep” can be 301 redirected to either the most relevant related post or the blog homepage. Then it’s time to further address the others.

What to do with the posts you keep

So now you have a pile of “keep” posts to sort out! All the posts that made it this far have already been established to have value of some kind. Now we want to make the most of that value by improving, expanding, updating, and promoting the content.

Improve

When setting out to improve an old post that has good bones, it can be good to start with improvements on targeting and general writing and grammar. You want to make sure that your blog post has a clear point, is targeting a specific topic and terms, and is doing so in proper English (or whatever language your blog may be in).

Once the content itself is in good shape, make sure to add any technical improvements that the piece may need, such as relevant interlinking, alt text, or schema markup.

Then it’s time to make sure it’s pretty. Visual improvements such as adding line breaks, pull quotes, and imagery impact user experience and can keep people on the page longer.

Expand or update

Not all old blog posts are necessarily in poor shape, which can offer a great opportunity. Another way to get more value out of them is to repurpose or update the information that they contain to make old content fresh again. Data says that this is well worth the effort, with business bloggers that update older posts being 74% more likely to report strong results.

A few ways to expand or update a post are to explore a different take on the initial thesis, add newer data, or integrate more recent developments or changed opinions. Alternatively, you could expand on a piece of content by reinterpreting it in another medium, such as new imagery, engaging video, or even as audio content.

Promote

If you’ve invested resources in content creation and optimization, it only makes sense to try to get as many eyes as possible on the finished product. This can be done in a few different ways, such assharing and re-sharing on branded social channels, resurfacing posts to the front page of your blog, or even a bit of external promotion through outreach.

The follow-up

Once your blog has been pruned and you’re working on getting the most value out of your existing content, an important final step is to keep tabs on the effect these changes are having.

The most significant measure of success is organic organic traffic; even if your blog is designed for lead generation or other specific goals, the number of eyes on the page should have a strong correlation to the content’s success by other measures as well. For the best representation of traffic totals, I monitor organic sessions by landing page in Google Analytics.

I also like to keep an eye on organic rankings, as you can get an early glimpse of whether a piece is gaining traction around a particular topic before it's successful enough to earn organic traffic with those terms.

Remember that regardless of what changes you’ve made, it will usually take Google a few months to sort out the relevance and rankings of the updated content. So be patient, monitor, and keep expanding, updating, and promoting!

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!

What SEOs Can Learn from AdWords - Whiteboard Friday

What SEOs Can Learn from AdWords - Whiteboard Friday https://ift.tt/2POmhUo

Posted by DiTomaso

Organic and paid search aren't always at odds; there are times when there's benefit in knowing how they work together. Taking the time to know the ins and outs of AdWords can improve your rankings and on-site experience. In today's edition of Whiteboard Friday, our fabulous guest host Dana DiTomaso explains how SEOs can improve their game by taking cues from paid search in this Whiteboard Friday.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi, my name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm President and Partner at Kick Point, and one of the things that we do at Kick Point is we do both SEO and paid. One of the things that's really useful is when SEO and paid work together. But what's even better is when SEOs can learn from paid to make their stuff better.

One of the things that is great about AdWords or Google Ads — whenever you're watching this, it may be called one thing or the other — is that you can learn a lot from what has a high click-through rate, what performs well in paid, and paid is way faster than waiting for Google to catch up to the awesome title tags you've written or the new link building that you've done to see how it's going to perform. So I'm going to talk about four things today that you can learn from AdWords, and really these are easy things to get into in AdWords.

Don't be intimidated by the interface. You can probably just get in there and look at it yourself, or talk to your AdWords person. I bet they'd be really excited that you know what a callout extension is. So we're going to start up here.

1. Negative keywords

The first thing is negative keywords. Negative keywords, obviously really important. You don't want to show up for things that you shouldn't be showing up for.

Often when we need to take over an AdWords account, there aren't a lot of negative keywords. But if it's a well-managed account, there are probably lots of negatives that have been added there over time. What you want to look at is if there's poor word association. So in your industry, cheap, free, jobs, and then things like reviews and coupons, if these are really popular search phrases, then maybe this is something you need to create content for or you need to think about how your service is presented in your industry.

Then what you can do to change that is to see if there's something different that you can do to present this kind of information. What are the kinds of things your business doesn't want? Are you definitely not saying these things in the content of your website? Or is there a way that you can present the opposite opinion to what people might be searching for, for example? So think about that from a content perspective.

2. Title tags and meta descriptions

Then the next thing are title tags and meta descriptions. Title tags and meta descriptions should never be a write it once and forget it kind of thing. If you're an on-it sort of SEO, you probably go in every once in a while and try to tweak those title tags and meta descriptions. But the problem is that sometimes there are just some that aren't performing. So go into Google Search Console, find the title tags that have low click-through rate and high rankings, and then think about what you can do to test out new ones.

Then run an AdWords campaign and test out those title tags in the title of the ad. Test out new ad copy — that would be your meta descriptions — and see what actually brings a higher click-through rate. Then whichever one does, ta-da, that's your new title tags and your meta descriptions. Then add those in and then watch your click-through rate increase or decrease.

Make sure to watch those rankings, because obviously title tag changes can have an impact on your rankings. But if it's something that's keyword rich, that's great. I personally like playing with meta descriptions, because I feel like meta descriptions have a bigger impact on that click-through rate than title tags do, and it's something really important to think about how are we making this unique so people want to click on us. The very best meta description I've ever seen in my life was for an SEO company, and they were ranking number one.

They were obviously very confident in this ranking, because it said, "The people above me paid. The people below me aren't as good as me. Hire me for your SEO." I'm like, "That's a good meta description." So what can you do to bring in especially that brand voice and your personality into those titles, into those meta descriptions and test it out with ads first and see what's going to resonate with your audience. Don't just think about click-through rate for these ads.

Make sure that you're thinking about conversion rate. If you have a really long sales cycle, make sure those leads that you're getting are good, because what you don't want to have happen is have an ad that people click on like crazy, they convert like crazy, and then the customers are just a total trash fire. You really want to make sure you're driving valuable business through this kind of testing. So this might be a bit more of a longer-term piece for you.

3. Word combinations

The third thing you can look at are word combinations.

So if you're not super familiar with AdWords, you may not be familiar with the idea of broad match modifier. So in AdWords we have broad phrases that you can search for, recipes, for example, and then anything related to the word "recipe" will show up. But you could put in a phrase in quotes. You could say "chili recipes." Then if they say, "I would like a chili recipe," it would come up.

If it says "chili crockpot recipes," it would not come up. Now if you had + chili + recipes, then anything with the phrase "chili recipes" would come up, which can be really useful. If you have a lot of different keyword combinations and you don't have time for that, you can use broad match modifier to capture a lot of them. But then you have to have a good negative keyword list, speaking as an AdWords person for a second.

Now one of the things that can really come out of broad match modifier are a lot of great, new content ideas. If you look at the keywords that people had impressions from or clicks from as a result of these broad match modifier keywords, you can find the strangest phrasing that people come up with. There are lots of crazy things that people type into Google. We all know this, especially if it's voice search and it's obviously voice search.

One of the fun things to do is look and see if anybody has "okay Google" and then the search phrase, because they said "okay Google" twice and then Google searched "okay Google" plus the phrase. That's always fun to pick up. But you can also pick up lots of different content ideas, and this can help you modify poorly performing content for example. Maybe you're just not saying the thing in the way in which your audience is saying it.

AdWords gives you totally accurate data on what your customers are thinking and feeling and saying and searching. So why not use that kind of data? So definitely check out broad match modifier stuff and see what you can do to make that better.

4. Extensions

Then the fourth thing is extensions. So extensions are those little snippets that can show up under an ad.

You should always have all of the extensions loaded in, and then maybe Google picks some, maybe they won't, but at least they're there as an option. Now one thing that's great are callout extensions. Those are the little site links that are like free trial, and people click on those, or find out more information or menu or whatever it might be. Now testing language in those callout extensions can help you with your call-to-action buttons.

Especially if you're thinking about things like people want to download a white paper, well, what's the best way to phrase that? What do you want to say for things like a submit button for your newsletter or for a contact form? Those little, tiny pieces, that are called micro-copy, what can you do by taking your highest performing callout extensions and then using those as your call-to-action copy on your website?

This is really going to improve your lead click-through rate. You're going to improve the way people feel about you, and you're going to have that really nice consistency between the language that you see in your advertising and the language that you have on your website, because one thing you really want to avoid as an SEO is to get into that silo where this is SEO and this is AdWords and the two of you aren't talking to each other at all and the copy just feels completely disjointed between the paid side and the organic side.

It should all be working together. So by taking the time to understand AdWords a little bit, getting to know it, getting to know what you can do with it, and then using some of that information in your SEO work, you can improve your on-site experience as well as rankings, and your paid person is probably going to appreciate that you talked to them for a little bit.

Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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What SEOs Can Learn from AdWords - Whiteboard Friday

What SEOs Can Learn from AdWords - Whiteboard Friday https://ift.tt/2POmhUo

Posted by DiTomaso

Organic and paid search aren't always at odds; there are times when there's benefit in knowing how they work together. Taking the time to know the ins and outs of AdWords can improve your rankings and on-site experience. In today's edition of Whiteboard Friday, our fabulous guest host Dana DiTomaso explains how SEOs can improve their game by taking cues from paid search in this Whiteboard Friday.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi, my name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm President and Partner at Kick Point, and one of the things that we do at Kick Point is we do both SEO and paid. One of the things that's really useful is when SEO and paid work together. But what's even better is when SEOs can learn from paid to make their stuff better.

One of the things that is great about AdWords or Google Ads — whenever you're watching this, it may be called one thing or the other — is that you can learn a lot from what has a high click-through rate, what performs well in paid, and paid is way faster than waiting for Google to catch up to the awesome title tags you've written or the new link building that you've done to see how it's going to perform. So I'm going to talk about four things today that you can learn from AdWords, and really these are easy things to get into in AdWords.

Don't be intimidated by the interface. You can probably just get in there and look at it yourself, or talk to your AdWords person. I bet they'd be really excited that you know what a callout extension is. So we're going to start up here.

1. Negative keywords

The first thing is negative keywords. Negative keywords, obviously really important. You don't want to show up for things that you shouldn't be showing up for.

Often when we need to take over an AdWords account, there aren't a lot of negative keywords. But if it's a well-managed account, there are probably lots of negatives that have been added there over time. What you want to look at is if there's poor word association. So in your industry, cheap, free, jobs, and then things like reviews and coupons, if these are really popular search phrases, then maybe this is something you need to create content for or you need to think about how your service is presented in your industry.

Then what you can do to change that is to see if there's something different that you can do to present this kind of information. What are the kinds of things your business doesn't want? Are you definitely not saying these things in the content of your website? Or is there a way that you can present the opposite opinion to what people might be searching for, for example? So think about that from a content perspective.

2. Title tags and meta descriptions

Then the next thing are title tags and meta descriptions. Title tags and meta descriptions should never be a write it once and forget it kind of thing. If you're an on-it sort of SEO, you probably go in every once in a while and try to tweak those title tags and meta descriptions. But the problem is that sometimes there are just some that aren't performing. So go into Google Search Console, find the title tags that have low click-through rate and high rankings, and then think about what you can do to test out new ones.

Then run an AdWords campaign and test out those title tags in the title of the ad. Test out new ad copy — that would be your meta descriptions — and see what actually brings a higher click-through rate. Then whichever one does, ta-da, that's your new title tags and your meta descriptions. Then add those in and then watch your click-through rate increase or decrease.

Make sure to watch those rankings, because obviously title tag changes can have an impact on your rankings. But if it's something that's keyword rich, that's great. I personally like playing with meta descriptions, because I feel like meta descriptions have a bigger impact on that click-through rate than title tags do, and it's something really important to think about how are we making this unique so people want to click on us. The very best meta description I've ever seen in my life was for an SEO company, and they were ranking number one.

They were obviously very confident in this ranking, because it said, "The people above me paid. The people below me aren't as good as me. Hire me for your SEO." I'm like, "That's a good meta description." So what can you do to bring in especially that brand voice and your personality into those titles, into those meta descriptions and test it out with ads first and see what's going to resonate with your audience. Don't just think about click-through rate for these ads.

Make sure that you're thinking about conversion rate. If you have a really long sales cycle, make sure those leads that you're getting are good, because what you don't want to have happen is have an ad that people click on like crazy, they convert like crazy, and then the customers are just a total trash fire. You really want to make sure you're driving valuable business through this kind of testing. So this might be a bit more of a longer-term piece for you.

3. Word combinations

The third thing you can look at are word combinations.

So if you're not super familiar with AdWords, you may not be familiar with the idea of broad match modifier. So in AdWords we have broad phrases that you can search for, recipes, for example, and then anything related to the word "recipe" will show up. But you could put in a phrase in quotes. You could say "chili recipes." Then if they say, "I would like a chili recipe," it would come up.

If it says "chili crockpot recipes," it would not come up. Now if you had + chili + recipes, then anything with the phrase "chili recipes" would come up, which can be really useful. If you have a lot of different keyword combinations and you don't have time for that, you can use broad match modifier to capture a lot of them. But then you have to have a good negative keyword list, speaking as an AdWords person for a second.

Now one of the things that can really come out of broad match modifier are a lot of great, new content ideas. If you look at the keywords that people had impressions from or clicks from as a result of these broad match modifier keywords, you can find the strangest phrasing that people come up with. There are lots of crazy things that people type into Google. We all know this, especially if it's voice search and it's obviously voice search.

One of the fun things to do is look and see if anybody has "okay Google" and then the search phrase, because they said "okay Google" twice and then Google searched "okay Google" plus the phrase. That's always fun to pick up. But you can also pick up lots of different content ideas, and this can help you modify poorly performing content for example. Maybe you're just not saying the thing in the way in which your audience is saying it.

AdWords gives you totally accurate data on what your customers are thinking and feeling and saying and searching. So why not use that kind of data? So definitely check out broad match modifier stuff and see what you can do to make that better.

4. Extensions

Then the fourth thing is extensions. So extensions are those little snippets that can show up under an ad.

You should always have all of the extensions loaded in, and then maybe Google picks some, maybe they won't, but at least they're there as an option. Now one thing that's great are callout extensions. Those are the little site links that are like free trial, and people click on those, or find out more information or menu or whatever it might be. Now testing language in those callout extensions can help you with your call-to-action buttons.

Especially if you're thinking about things like people want to download a white paper, well, what's the best way to phrase that? What do you want to say for things like a submit button for your newsletter or for a contact form? Those little, tiny pieces, that are called micro-copy, what can you do by taking your highest performing callout extensions and then using those as your call-to-action copy on your website?

This is really going to improve your lead click-through rate. You're going to improve the way people feel about you, and you're going to have that really nice consistency between the language that you see in your advertising and the language that you have on your website, because one thing you really want to avoid as an SEO is to get into that silo where this is SEO and this is AdWords and the two of you aren't talking to each other at all and the copy just feels completely disjointed between the paid side and the organic side.

It should all be working together. So by taking the time to understand AdWords a little bit, getting to know it, getting to know what you can do with it, and then using some of that information in your SEO work, you can improve your on-site experience as well as rankings, and your paid person is probably going to appreciate that you talked to them for a little bit.

Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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!