The poet Burns once observed that the best laid plans “gang aft agley.” At Moz, we were about to publish our State of Local SEO industry report, based on our local search marketing survey to which hundreds of you generously replied. Then the public health emergency unexpectedly arose, and we decided to pause in our planning.
The findings of the survey, as they currently stand, contain valuable and surprising insights which are as relevant today as they were pre-COVID-19. Yet, in order to reflect the substantial changes the local business community is currently weathering, we are reaching out to you with a timely additional request.
If you market local businesses in any capacity, whether in-house or for an agency, please take our quick, supplementary six-question survey. Your answers will help everyone gauge the impacts of the past few weeks on our industry, and hopefully help in planning for the future. We would be so grateful for just a few minutes of your time to be sure the final report reflects the full picture of local business marketing.
Thank you for your time, and please know that all of us at Moz are wishing your local businesses and agencies well!
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We want to fix things and believe we're in control. When your house is filling with water, you grab a bucket. If there's a hole in your roof, the bucket might help. If your sink is overflowing, the bucket is distracting you from the real problem. If the river is overflowing, that distraction could be deadly.
When traffic is falling, it's easy to panic and focus on what you can control. Traffic isn't just a nice-to-have — it puts food on the table and the roof over your head that keeps the water out. In the rush to solve the problem, though, we often don't take the time to validate the problem we're solving. Fixing the wrong problem is at best a waste of time and money, but at worst could deepen the crisis.
In any crisis, and especially a global one, the first question you need to ask is: is it just me, or is it the whole world? The answer won't magically solve your problems, but it can keep you from making costly mistakes and start you on the path to a solution. Let's start with a fundamental question:
(1) Did your traffic really drop?
My "fundamental" question might sound like a stupid question, especially given the wide impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it's important to remember that traffic fluctuates all the time — there are weekends and seasonality and plain, old regression to the mean. What goes up must come down, and as much as we'd like it to be true, business is not perpetually up and to the right.
Using Google Analytics, let's consider some ways we can validate a traffic drop. Here's four weeks of GA data (March 1-28) for a site which was seriously impacted by COVID-19:
Given the known timeline of COVID-19 (the WHO declared it a pandemic on March 11), this is about as clean a picture of a traffic drop in the presence of a known cause as you're going to get. Most situations are far messier. Even here, we've got the impact of weekends and day-to-day fluctuations. One quick way to get a cleaner view is to summarize the data by week (make sure your date-range covers full weeks, or this data will be skewed).
The trend is much clearer now. In a two week period, this site lost more than half of its traffic. I'm restricting the timeline for clarity, but as we gather more data, we can validate the trend pretty easily. The graph above covers all traffic sources. From an SEO perspective, let's add in a traffic segment for Google traffic:
This graph is just eight data points, but it tells us a lot. First, we can clearly see the trend. Second, we can see that the trend is almost identical for both Google traffic and overall traffic. Third, we can see that this site is very dependent on Google for traffic. Don't underestimate what you can learn from small data, if it's the right data.
This isn't meant to be a GA primer, but let's look at one last question: Is this traffic drop seasonal? Usually, your own industry experience and intuition would come into play, but one quick way to spot this is to compare year-over-year traffic. One note: match your full weeks so that you're covering the same amount of weekdays vs weekends. In this case, I've shifted the 2019 range to the four full weeks of March 3-30 ...
This isn't the easiest graph to read, and I probably wouldn't put it in a report to a client, but you can see from the green and purple lines that both overall traffic and Google traffic for this site were relatively flat last year during March. This really does seem to be an unusual situation. Even if we knew nothing about the context and COVID-19, we could tell from just a few minutes of analysis that something serious is going on here.
(1b) Did your rankings drop?
As a search marketer, and given that we've clearly measured a Google traffic drop, the next question is whether this drop was due to a loss of rankings (we'll get to other explanations in a moment). In Moz Pro, one quick way to assess overall weekly search visibility is to use either the main view under "Rankings" or go to the "Competition" tab. I like the competitive view, because you can quickly see if any changes impacted your broader industry ...
I've simplified this view a little bit (and removed the site's and competitors' names for privacy reasons), but the basic story is clear — neither the site in question nor its competitors seemed to have any drop in visibility during March.
For a richer view, go back to the "Rankings" tab and select "Rankings" (instead of "Search Visibility") from the drop-down. You'll see a graph that looks something like this ...
This visualization takes some getting used to, but it contains a wealth of information. The bars represent total ranking keywords/phrases, and the color blocks show you the ranking range (see the legend). Here we can see that overall rankings have been relatively stable, with even some small gains in the #1-3 bucket.
If your account is connected to Google Analytics, you can also overlay traffic during the same period, which is shown by the dark gray line. Dual-scale graphs can get tricky, but this visualization really makes it clear that there's a mismatch between the traffic drop for this site and their search rankings.
(2) Did Google do something?!
Usually, when we ask [demand / shout / sob] this question, we mean "Did Google do something to the algorithm to make my life miserable?" We can argue about whether Google is trying to make your life miserable at another time (preferably, when the bars re-open), but the core question is valid. Did Google change the algorithmic rules in a way that's negatively impacting your site?
For large-scale algorithm updates, you can check our own Google Algorithm History page. For smaller/daily updates, you can check our MozCast research project. While having a gut-check against major changes can be very useful, the messy truth is that Google rankings are a real-time phenomenon that's changing minute-by-minute. In 2018 alone, Google reported 3,234 "improvements" to search.
Keep in mind that all Google algorithm tracking tools are based, to some degree, on fluctuations in rankings. In our example scenario, we're not seeing ranking shifts. Let's pretend, though, that we have seen a traffic drop with a corresponding ranking drop, and we're trying to determine if it's just us or if something changed with Google.
Here's a graph of MozCast data from my analysis of the January 2020 Core Update ...
In this case, we've got a pretty clear three-day period of ranking fluctuations. If our traffic dropped during this period, it's not absolute proof that an algorithm update is to blame, but it's a solid, educated guess and a useful starting point.
Let's look at the two weeks around when COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic ...
I've kept the same scale and 30-day average reference (from a relatively quiet period early this year). Note that algorithmic activity (i.e. ranking flux) is way up compared to the period before and after the January Core Update. One day (March 18) doesn't even fit on the scale of the original graph and came in at 104°F on MozCast.
What does all of this mean? It's possible that Google is changing the algorithm rapidly to address the broader changes in the world, but I strongly suspect that the world itself is impacting this flux. Sites are changing rapidly, adding and removing products and content, news sources have dramatically shifted their coverage, and some businesses are closing completely. On top of that, we're seeing an unprecedented shift in searcher and consumer behavior.
Algorithm flux can be a useful answer to the question "Is it just me, or is it Google?" during normal times, but all that it's telling us right now is that the world has turned upside-down. While that's an accurate assessment, it's not particularly helpful. If you'd like to hear more about the impact of COVID-19 on Google rankings, check out "SEOs talk COVID-19 search disruption" from Barry Schwartz with myself, Marie Haynes, Olga Andrienko, and Mordy Oberstein.
If traffic has dropped, but rankings haven't, it's also possible that the behavior of searchers has changed. We can get some insights into this by using Google Search Console. Here's the graph of total clicks for our example site from March 1-28 (corresponding with the GA data) ...
As expected, total clicks on Google results show roughly the same trend as Google organic traffic in GA. Total clicks are a function of two variables, though: (1) search impressions, and (2) click-through rate (CTR). Let's look at those individually. Here's the graph of total impressions for the same time period ...
Now we're getting somewhere — there's an overall drop in impressions. This isn't just about the example site, but searcher behavior before they even see or click on that site. People are searching less for the phrases that drive traffic to our example site. Finally, let's look at CTR ...
CTR has also dropped, even a bit steeper than impressions. This is a bit harder to interpret. Knowing what we know, it's likely that people are clicking less because of overall lack of interest. This is consistent with the COVID-19 scenario. People are less likely to be looking for the service this site offers. On the other hand, it could be that something about the site or the competitive landscape has changed that's driving down CTR.
If you see a CTR drop without a corresponding impression drop, review recent changes to the site, especially changes that could impact what's displayed in search results (including your TITLE tags and META descriptions). In this case, though, it's reasonable to assume that we're looking at an overall drop in demand.
(3) Has the world gone mad?
Spoiler alert: yes, yes it has.
The Google Search Console data above has already suggested that we're seeing a shift in the wider world and searcher behavior, but if you want to get outside of your own data, you can explore the world a bit with Google Trends. For example, here's a Google Trends search for "movie tickets" for March 1-28 ...
Not surprisingly, searcher interest in movie tickets declined sharply after the COVID-19 outbreak. People who aren't going to movies aren't going to be searching for showtimes and ticket prices. Google Trends data can be spotty in the long-tail, and we can't necessarily attribute a trend to an event, but non-brand trends are a good supporting data point for whether your traffic drop is isolated to your site or is impacting your broader industry.
One final tip — everything discussed in this post can also be used to explore a traffic increase. Even during COVID-19, traffic has gone up for many topics and sites. For example, here's the Google Trends data for "how to cut hair" from the same March 1-28 time period ...
Whether or not cutting your own hair is a good idea, people are definitely showing more interest in the topic (I admit I've watched a couple of YouTube videos myself). We don't typically dive deep into traffic increases — it's too easy to just sit back and take the credit. I think this is a big mistake. Understanding whether a traffic increase was driven by changes you made or broader market shifts can help you understand what you've done right so that you can replicate that success.
The big picture is everything
Over the last few years, I've heard more people say things like "I don't care about traffic, I care about conversions!" or "I don't care about Google rankings, as long as I'm getting traffic!" Our gradual move toward bottom-of-funnel metrics makes sense — we're all trying to make a living. Taken to extreme, though, we lose valuable information. Focusing on conversions is certainly better than focusing on "hits" a la 1998, but no single metric tells the whole story.
Let's say that the only thing you track is leads. Leads are where the money is. Sales are up, leads are up, times are good. Great. Inevitably, disaster strikes (even if it's a minor disaster), and your leads drop. What do you do? You've cut off your ability to read anything but the last chapter of the story. You know how it ends, but you don't know how you got there. Without understanding the path from leads back to visits back to rankings back to impressions, you're not going to see the whole story, and you're not going to know where things went wrong.
Even when times are good, this approach is short-sighted. Sales-focused culture creates a tendency to celebrate the wins and not ask too many questions. If traffic is going up, why is it going up? What content or keywords are driving that traffic? What industry trends are driving that traffic? If you can answer those questions, you can replicate success. If you can't, then you're going to have to start from scratch as soon as the celebration ends (and the celebration always ends).
It may be cold comfort to know that your entire industry or the whole world is suffering with you, but I hope that this process at least prevents you from fixing the wrong things and making costly mistakes. Ideally, this process can help you uncover areas that may be trending upward or at least help you focus your time and money on what's working.
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For the last decade, I’ve touted the enormous long-term value of a dualistic approach to content marketing for SEO.
By leveraging data-centered campaigns, paired with personalized outreach to top publishers, we regularly garner earned media placements for our clients.
In rare cases, we create content that generates results so far beyond what was anticipated that a single project can greatly move the needle.
I’m going to walk through one such instance to reveal how it all works together, what can be learned from this experience, and the type of result it can achieve.
While typically you need to invest in ongoing content generation and promotion, extraordinary examples like these demonstrate the impact this kind of work has over the long-term.
Content marketing + digital PR case study: ADT
ADT is a household name with good domain authority, providing a great base to start from.
We knew that the content we’d create would likely have a leg up in terms of ranking potential, especially if that content addressed many potential high-intent keywords.
Content production
After speaking with ADT, we determined our joint goal was to create a piece of content that could earn dozens to hundreds of links from top publishers, with another focus on earning links from local news publications.
The client had the idea to create a crime map tool for ADT.com, and it fit the bill for everything we typically look for in a piece of content. But for the purpose of this article, I’ll examine what makes it ideal.
Say you were starting from scratch. You can start with a simple Google search of “crime,” which would serve as a reminder of how localized the topic is.
Just from this search alone, you can identify the desire for crime maps specifically, and you can consider why someone would search for a crime map:
To identify crime in their area
To investigate the crime in places they’re looking to visit
To investigate the crime in places they’re looking to move
Because people might not want to know just about the areas right around where they live, it was a strong idea to create a comprehensive, interactive crime mapping tool that gives users the ability to search local areas and see detailed, local-level crime statistics.
This concept had a high chance of success for other reasons as well, including:
1. It has a practical use. Not all content necessarily needs to be practical — it depends on the industry you’re in and whether you can get by with entertainment value. If it’s not practical, it should reveal insights that speak to the human experience and inform a reader about their context in the world. We actually added this element in the crime map project by building in functionality where you can compare the crime rate in your area to national averages.
However, having a practical element (or actionable advice) means your content has built-in value. It communicates that you care about the person reading it, and they engage with the content more because they feel like they can do something with the information.
2. It's data-based, making it authoritative and accurate. It’s very difficult these days to pitch publishers anything that isn’t data-based. Not only does it add credibility to what you’re working on, but showing that you did your research also indicates that you’re an authority (or becoming an authority) on the subject. I’ll dive into more on this toward the end of the article.
3. The data can be tailored to countless local angles. If your goal is to build as many valuable links and as much general brand awareness as possible, you should always consider how to localize your content.
This has to happen at the beginning when you’re collecting your data. Ask yourself: Is the data set comprehensive enough that insights about different segments, like geographic locations, can be gathered? The more people who can connect with and “see” themselves in your content by having it be as personalized as possible, the better.
4. It invokes emotions like safety and concern for loved ones. Tapping into emotional concepts is always a good strategy when creating content. Crime and security inherently come with some obvious emotions: fear, concern, pride in protecting your family, etc. If you’re in a niche that doesn’t seem to have straightforward ties to emotion, ask yourself these questions to reveal the emotions at work in the background:
Why do people care about this?
What is our audience’s biggest struggle?
What might our audience worry most about?
For example, while it doesn't seem so on the surface, personal finance can be extremely emotional. It involves the way people lead their lives and is tied to the guilt of not saving enough, the pride of being on top of their finances, the fear they won’t have enough money to retire, etc. No matter what vertical you’re in, there are emotions involved, and tapping into them with empathy can make your content exponentially more compelling and helpful.
5. As a security company, it makes perfect sense for ADT to be the brand that’s offering a resource where people can check the crime rates all over the country. When you have this sort of brand alignment with an idea, it's clear to publishers and readers alike why the brand created it, and it helps build trust.
Always consider these types of criteria when you move forward on a content concept.
Digital PR
Because of the local/regional aspect of the interactive, our outreach approach was to pitch regional news publishers with the exclusive coverage.
We customized pitches for publishers by state for our initial outreach. Here is a sample pitch similar to the one that successfully landed coverage:
Hi [Website Name] team,
In the wake of natural disasters like Hurricane Florence, fears of looting and other forms of crime are often heightened. The newly released ADT crime map wants residents to be aware of crime hot spots in their neighborhoods and use precautionary measures to prevent being victims of crime, especially during hurricane season.
The interactive map allows users to look up specific crime data and compare it to national averages to determine how much crime is happening in their area. For example, Florida’s overall crime rate is 1.21x higher than the national average. That said, the murder rate is relatively low when compared to the rest of the nation (0.03x less).
Interested in covering this so that your readers can stay as safe as possible under any circumstance? If so, feel free to use this press release or graphics from the map. We just ask that you attribute ADT by linking to the Crime Map somewhere in your coverage.
Best,
[Your Name]
Each pitch was personalized by adjusting the first and second paragraph to include locally relevant details for that area.
This regional outreach strategy had a high chance of success because:
The content was highly relevant to local news publishers
Local news publications are often the best syndicators
We put together a new, exclusive resource that many consumers would find helpful
Offering content as an exclusive makes it especially newsworthy and appealing to writers
In this case, the exclusive was given to ABCActionNews.com, a Tampa Bay, Florida ABC affiliate.
Luckily, the publisher liked the story so much, they decided to include it in that day’s nightly news coverage. As one of the largest local news affiliates in that area, this coverage was likely seen on over 25,000 local televisions.
We continued pitching the story, attempting to exhaust our pitch list and support syndication of the exclusive picked up by ABCActionNews.com.
After roughly a month, we compiled a report on all coverage and syndications. We were happy to report to our client that the story was picked up by dozens of local news publishers, eventually generating links from 127 unique linking domains per Ahrefs.
The impact on search
A graph of acquired links shows a very organic progression — something we see often when a story syndicates well across many domains.
Almost immediately the page began ranking — likely a result of the ADT site’s awesome existing domain authority, topical relevance of the project related to the domain, and the massive injection of new unique links to the crime maps page.
Don’t have high domain authority?
While having an authoritative brand can make this whole strategy a bit easier, that doesn’t mean it can’t work for you if you are newer or are trying to keep up with huge, household-name competitors.
It just means it’s even more important that you use data-focused content. We’ve always thought that using data as a foundation for content was the best way to build authority, but a recent study we did with BuzzStream about authoritative content confirmed that.
Having an authoritative methodology can increase the chances people trust your content — and thus your brand — by extension. And when you’re trying to get attention in competitive spaces, every authority signal matters.
Regarding promotions, all of the tips I’ve provided in this article should work for you. Perhaps when pitching, you can provide a sentence or two describing your brand. It’s also best practice to have someone at your company, either the person who knows the most about the topic or the person who did the research, ready to answer questions that writers may have about the content.
But in general, promotional success will be heavily based on the quality of the content you’re pitching, especially if the writer isn’t familiar with who you are.
Conclusion
Is this type of strategy easy? No. It’s much simpler to pay for links or churn out quick blog posts.
But if you’re looking for long-lasting, sustainable, never-to-be-penalized, link-and-authority-building content, this is your best route.
As we can see here, a combination of existing domain authority, an injection of a large number of new high-authority links, and a topically relevant/related piece of content for the brand can generate huge numbers of new ranking keywords extremely quickly.
If you don’t have that level of domain authority, don’t worry! This strategy can still work for you — just don’t expect it to happen overnight (as that’s so rarely the case for anyone).
It’s an investment, but as we’ve seen time and time again, it pays off exponentially.
To learn more about keyword research, visit the Keyword Research Master Guide!
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Are you mindful of your customer's experience after they become a lead? It's easy to fall in the same old rut of newsletters, invoices, and sales emails, but for a truly exceptional customer experience that improves their retention and love for your brand, you need to go above and beyond. In this popular episode of Whiteboard Friday, the ever-insightful Dana DiTomaso shares three big things you can start doing today that will immensely better your customer experience and make earning those leads worthwhile.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hi, Moz fans. My name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm the President and partner of Kick Point, and today I'm going to talk to you about building better customer experiences. I know that in marketing a lot of our jobs revolve around getting leads and more leads and why can't we have all of the leads.
The typical customer experience:
But in reality, the other half of our job should be making sure that those leads are taken care of when they become customers. This is especially important if you don't have, say, a customer care department. If you do have a customer care department, really you should be interlocking with what they do, because typically what happens, when you're working with a customer, is that after the sale, they usually get surveys.
- Surveys
"How did we do? Please rate us on a scale of 1 to 10," which is an enormous scale and kind of useless. You're a 4, or you're an 8, or you're a 6. Like what actually differentiates that, and how are people choosing that?
- Invoices
Then invoices, like obviously important because you have to bill people, particularly if you have a big, expensive product or you're a SaaS business. But those invoices are sometimes kind of impersonal, weird, and maybe not great.
- Newsletters
Maybe you have a newsletter. That's awesome. But is the newsletter focused on sales? One of the things that we see a lot is, for example, if somebody clicks a link in the newsletter to get to your website, maybe you've written a blog post, and then they see a great big popup to sign up for our product. Well, you're already a customer, so you shouldn't be seeing that popup anymore.
What we've seen on other sites, like Help Scout actually does a great job of this, is that they have a parameter of newsletter at the end of any URLs they put in their newsletter, and then the popups are suppressed because you're already in the newsletter so you shouldn't see a popup encouraging you to sign up or join the newsletter, which is kind of a crappy experience.
- Sales emails
Then the last thing are sales emails. This is my personal favorite, and this can really be avoided if you go into account-based marketing automation instead of personal-based marketing automation.
We had a situation where I was a customer of the hosting company. It was in my name that we've signed up for all of our clients, and then one of our developers created a new account because she needed to access something. Then immediately the sales emails started, not realizing we're at the same domain. We're already a customer. They probably shouldn't have been doing the hard sale on her. We've had this happen again and again.
So just really make sure that you're not sending your customers or people who work at the same company as your customers sales emails. That's a really cruddy customer experience. It makes it look like you don't know what's going on. It really can destroy trust.
Tips for an improved customer experience
So instead, here are some extra things that you can do. I mean fix some of these things if maybe they're not working well. But here are some other things you can do to really make sure your customers know that you love them and you would like them to keep paying you money forever.
1. Follow them on social media
So the first thing is following them on social. So what I really like to do is use a tool such as FullContact. You can take everyone's email addresses, run them through FullContact, and it will come back to you and say, "Here are the social accounts that this person has." Then you go on Twitter and you follow all of these people for example. Or if you don't want to follow them, you can make a list, a hidden list with all of their social accounts in there.
Then you can see what they share. A tool like Nuzzel, N-U-Z-Z for Americans, zed zed for Canadians, N-U-Z-Z-E-L is a great tool where you can say, "Tell me all the things that the people I follow on social or the things that this particular list of people on social what they share and what they're engaged in." Then you can see what your customers are really interested in, which can give you a good sense of what kinds things should we be talking about.
A company that does this really well is InVision, which is the app that allows you to share prototypes with clients, particularly design prototypes. So they have a blog, and a lot of that blog content is incredibly useful. They're clearly paying attention to their customers and the kinds of things they're sharing based on how they build their blog content. So then find out if you can help and really think about how I can help these customers through the things that they share, through the questions that they're asking.
Then make sure to watch unbranded mentions too. It's not particularly hard to monitor a specific list of people and see if they tweet things like, "I really hate my (insert what you are)right now," for example. Then you can head that off at the pass maybe because you know that this was this customer. "Oh, they just had a bad experience. Let's see what we can do to fix it,"without being like, "Hey, we were watching your every move on Twitter.Here's something we can do to fix it."
Maybe not quite that creepy, but the idea is trying to follow these people and watch for those unbranded mentions so you can head off a potential angry customer or a customer who is about to leave off at the pass. Way cheaper to keep an existing customer than get a new one.
2. Post-sale monitoring
So the next thing is post-sale monitoring. So what I would like you to do is create a fake customer. If you have lots of sales personas, create a fake customer that is each of those personas, and then that customer should get all the emails, invoices, everything else that a regular customer that fits that persona group should get.
Then take a look at those accounts. Are you awesome, or are you super annoying? Do you hear nothing for a year, except for invoices, and then, "Hey, do you want to renew?" How is that conversation going between you and that customer? So really try to pay attention to that. It depends on your organization if you want to tell people that this is what's happening, but you really want to make sure that that customer isn't receiving preferential treatment.
So you want to make sure that it's kind of not obvious to people that this is the fake customer so they're like, "Oh, well, we're going to be extra nice to the fake customer." They should be getting exactly the same stuff that any of your other customers get. This is extremely useful for you.
3. Better content
Then the third thing is better content. I think, in general, any organization should reward content differently than we do currently.
Right now, we have a huge focus on new content, new content, new content all the time, when in reality, some of your best-performing posts might be old content and maybe you should go back and update them. So what we like to tell people about is the Microsoft model of rewarding. They've used this to reward their employees, and part of it isn't just new stuff. It's old stuff too. So the way that it works is 33% is what they personally have produced.
So this would be new content, for example. Then 33% is what they've shared. So think about for example on Slack if somebody shares something really useful, that's great. They would be rewarded for that. But think about, for example, what you can share with your customers and how that can be rewarding, even if you didn't write it, or you can create a roundup, or you can put it in your newsletter.
Like what can you do to bring value to those customers? Then the last 33% is what they shared that others produced. So is there a way that you can amplify other voices in your organization and make sure that that content is getting out there? Certainly in marketing, and especially if you're in a large organization, maybe you're really siloed, maybe you're an SEO and you don't even talk to the paid people, there's cool stuff happening across the entire organization.
A lot of what you can bring is taking that stuff that others have produced, maybe you need to turn it into something that is easy to share on social media, or you need to turn it into a blog post or a video, like Whiteboard Friday, whatever is going to work for you, and think about how you can amplify that and get it out to your customers, because it isn't just marketing messages that customers should be seeing.
They should be seeing all kinds of messages across your organization, because when a customer gives you money, it isn't just because your marketing message was great. It's because they believe in the thing that you are giving them. So by reinforcing that belief through the types of content that you create, that you share, that you find that other people share, that you shared out to your customers, a lot of sharing, you can certainly improve that relationship with your customers and really turn just your average, run-of-the-mill customer into an actual raving fan, because not only will they stay longer, it's so much cheaper to keep an existing customer than get a new one, but they'll refer people to you, which is also a lot easier than buying a lot of ads or spending a ton of money and effort on SEO.
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I couldn’t believe the response to my last post about coming up with content ideas in the B2C space during COVID-19. Thank you to all who read and commented — I truly hope it was helpful.
One piece of feedback we received was an ask to see some B2B content ideas, which, frankly, is an excellent subject. At first I was stumped about how to determine this, but then I decided that a different tool could do the trick.
Exploding Topics, the new tool by Brian Dean (Backlinko) and Josh Howarth, explores topics that are surging in popularity but haven’t hit their peak.
This time around, rather than focusing on specific keywords, I focused on overall trends so we can identify which categories might be of interest to your target businesses and their audiences. Then, you can examine whether these trends make sense for your niche and draw inspiration from them for your content.
All things remote
This trend obviously applies to B2C as well, but it’s an important consideration for B2B. Nearly everything has been either canceled, paused, or moved into the world of the virtual. For many companies and industries, this is uncharted territory, and they need guidance.
There is another category I could have included here that focuses on website and app development, programming, and the open source tools that help people build those types of assets as they lean more into digital.
If you’re not one of these B2B providers, there are still ways to gain inspiration from this data. Consider if your brand can provide:
The logistics of how to set up remote platforms
Best practices on how to make anything remote more successful and engaging
Comparison guides for different tools and solutions
The platform for people to lend the help and support they’re hoping to (like in the case of virtual tip jars)
Communication tips and solutions to help people stay productively connected
Shipping and delivery
Consumers are interested in having things shipped directly to them, but not everyone has the infrastructure to deal with shipping to begin with, let alone an increased order volume with the (understandable) safety limitations now in place.
Consumers and businesses alike are curious about how to make the shipping and delivery process more effective.
Consider if your brand can provide:
Guides for small businesses who’ve never had to ship product before
Tips on how companies can message shipping updates and delays to consumers
Advice on how to improve the delivery component of a business
UX or language tips for updating delivery messaging in apps or on websites
Transactions and payment
As we’re all staying six feet away from each other, we’re also trying not to hand off credit cards (let alone cash). Companies used to brick-and-mortar business models are also needing to adapt to fully digital payment systems.
Not all of these searches apply to business (like Venmo), but they do point to a concern everyone’s having: How do we pay for things now?
Consider if your brand can provide:
Answers about privacy or security questions people have regarding digital payments
A detailed list of all the payment options available
Advice on how to optimize storefronts and purchasing processes
Explanations of how payment processes can impact sales, and how to optimize them
Design tools
This section speaks to an overall trend I touched on before: Professionals now build their own assets if they can’t afford to hire web developers, designers, etc. More and more people are trying to figure out how to keep their businesses going when they can’t keep on as much staff or hire as many contractors.
Perhaps you can identify what your target audience might be struggling with and suggest free or inexpensive online tools to help.
Consider if your brand can provide:
A list of tools that can assist your target audience in communicating, organizing, creating, etc.
Design advice to help them get up to speed as quickly as possible
Resources in how to complete tasks on a smaller team
Recommendations for what should be prioritized when money is tight
Ethical trends
This is perhaps the most fascinating trend I saw arise. The four brands below have something in common: they all have to do with either sustainability or a transparent, mission-driven approach.
My theory is now that people don’t have as much disposable income, they’re becoming more mindful in their shopping choices, selecting items they believe match their own values.
Consider if your brand can provide:
A greater level of analysis on this potential trend
Research into how the consumer perspective has shifted during COVID-19
Advice on how to potentially shift marketing, branding, and advertising messaging
Tips on how your target audience can better understand their marketing during this tumultuous time
And finally (*sigh of relief*), marketing
Yes, as I was doing my research, my instinct that marketing would remain crucial during this time was confirmed.
That doesn’t mean you won’t lose business. We’ve had clients pull back because even though they’d like to keep marketing, keeping the company afloat by fulfilling their product orders and services and paying their employees will always (and very understandably) come first by a long shot.
But for businesses that can still afford marketing, they’ll likely need it, and they’re looking for the tools and insight they need to thrive.
Consider if your brand can provide:
Marketing 101 tips for smaller businesses
Specific how-to guides for different aspects of inbound or outbound marketing
Tool recommendations to help people get marketing tasks done quickly and cheaply
Advice on the kind of marketing that’s most successful during an economic downturn
Conclusion
Remember: This is only for inspiration. What matters most is what your target audience needs and wants. Put yourself in their shoes to be able to best address their challenges and concerns.
But hopefully some of these concepts spark some ideas for how your B2B brand can provide value to your target audiences. Companies around the world are looking for guidance and support now more than ever, and if you’re in a position to provide it to them, your content can go a long way in building trust.
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When it boils down to it, every idea in SEO can be understood as a set of measurements we use to rank one page over another. And that means that when it comes to measuring a concept like the authoritativeness of your content, there are almost certainly factors that you can analyze and tweak to improve it.
But if Google were to use a measure of content authority, what might go into it? Against what yardstick should SEOs be measuring their content's E-A-T? In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Russ Jones walks us through a thought experiment as to what exactly might constitute a "content authority" score and how you can begin to understand your content's expertise like Google.
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Video Transcription
Hey, folks, this is Russ Jones here with another Whiteboard Friday, and today we're going to have fun. Well, at least fun for me, because this is completely speculative. We're going to be talking about this concept of content authority and just some ideas around ways in which we might be able to measure it.
Maybe Google uses these ways to measure it, maybe not. But at the same time, hopefully what we'll be able to do is come up with a better concept of metrics we can use to get at content authority.
Now, we know there's a lot of controversy around this. Google has said quite clearly that expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are very important parts of their Quality Rater Guidelines, but the information has been pretty flimsy on exactly what part of the algorithm helps determine exactly this type of content.
We do know that they aren't using the quality rater data to train the algorithm, but they are using it to reject algorithm changes that don't actually meet these standards.
How do we measure the authoritativeness of content?
So how can we go about measuring content authority? Ultimately, any kind of idea that we talk about in search engine optimization has to boil down in some way, shape, or form to a set of measurements that are being made and in somehow shape or form being used to rank one page over another.
Now sometimes it makes sense just to kind of feel it, like if you're writing for humans, be a human. But authoritative content is a little bit more difficult than that. It's a little harder to just off the top of your head know that this content is authoritative and this isn't. In fact, the Quality Rater Guidelines are really clear in some of the examples of what would be considered really highly authoritative content, like, for example, in the News section they mention that it's written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author.
Well, I don't know how many of you have Pulitzer Prize winning authors on your staff or whose clients have Pulitzer Prize winning authors. So I don't exactly see how that's particularly helpful to individuals like ourselves who are trying to produce authoritative content from a position of not being an award-winning writer.
So today I want to just go through a whole bunch of ideas, that have been running through my head with the help of people from the community who've given me some ideas and bounced things off, that we might be able to use to do a better job of understanding authoritative content. All right.
1. ALBERT
So these are what I would consider some of the potential measures of authoritative content. The first one, and this is just going to open up a whole rat's nest I'm sure, but okay, ALBERT. We've talked about the use of BERT for understanding language by Google. Well, ALBERT, which stands for "a lighter BERT," is a similar model used by Google, and it's actually been trained in specific circumstances for the goal of answering questions.
Now that might not seem like a particularly big deal. We've been doing question answering for a whole long time. Featured snippets are exactly that. But ALBERT has jumped on the scene in such a dominant fashion as to have eclipsed anything we've really seen in this kind of NLP problem.
So if you were to go to the SQuAD dataset competition, which is Stanford's Question Answering competition, where they've got these giant set of questions and giant set of documents and then they had humans go in and find the answers in the documents and say which documents don't have answers and which do, and then all sorts of different organizations have produced models to try and automatically find the answers.
Well, this competition has just been going back and forth and back and forth for a really long time between a bunch of heavy hitters, like Google, Baidu, multiple Microsoft teams. We're talking the smartest people in the world, the Allen Institute, all fighting back and forth.
Well, right now, ALBERT or variations thereof have the top 5 positions and 9 of the top 10 positions, and all of them perform better than humans. That is dominance. So we've got right here this incredible technology for answering questions.
Well, what does this have to do with content authority? Why in the world would this matter? Well, if you think about a document, any kind of piece of content that we produce, the intention is that we're going to be answering the questions that our customers want answered. So any topic we start with, let's say the topic we started with was data science, well, there are probably a lot of questions people want to know about that topic.
They might want to know: What is a data scientist? How much money do they make? What kind of things do you need to know to be a data scientist? Well, this is where something like ALBERT could come in and be extremely valuable for measuring the authoritativeness of the content. You see, what if one of the measures of the authoritative content is how well that content answers all of the related questions to the topic?
So you could imagine Google looking at all of the pages that rank for data science, and they know the top 10 questions that are asked about it, and then seeing which piece of content answers those 10 questions best. If they were able to do that, that would be a pretty awesome metric for determining how thorough and how significant and valuable and useful and authoritative that content is.
So I think this one, the ALBERT algorithm really has a lot of potential. But let's move on from that. There are all sorts of other things that might have to do with content authority.
2. Information density
One that I really like is this idea of information density. So a lot of times when we're writing content, especially when we're not familiar with the topic, we end up writing a lot of fluff.
We kind of are just putting words in there to meet the word length that is expected by the contract, even though we know deep down that the number of words on the page really doesn't determine whether or not it's going to rank. So one of the ways that you can get at whether a piece of content is actually valuable or not or at least is providing important information is using natural language programs to extract information.
ReVerb + OpenIE
Well, the probably most popular NLP open source or at least openly available technology started as a project called ReVerb and now has merged into the Open IE project. But essentially, you can give it a piece of content, and it will extract out all of the factual claims made by that content.
So if I gave it a paragraph that said tennis is a sport that's played with a racket and a ball and today I'm having a lot of fun, something of that sort, it would be able to identify the factual claim, what tennis is, that it's a sport played with a racket and a ball.
But it would ignore the claim that I'm having a lot of fun today, because that's not really a piece of information, a factual claim that we're making. So the concept of information density would be the number of facts that can be extracted from a document versus the total number of words. All right.
If we had that measurement, then we could pretty easily sift through content that is just written for length versus content that is really information rich. Just imagine a Wikipedia article, how dense the information is in there relative to the type of content that most of us produce. So what are some other things?
3. Content style
Let's talk about content style.
This would be a really easy metric. We could talk about the use of in-line citations, which Wikipedia does, in which after stating a fact they then link to the bottom of the page where it shows you the citation, just like you would do if you were writing a paper in college or a thesis, something that would be authoritative. Or the use of fact lists or tables of contents, like Wikipedia does, or using datelines accurately or AP style formatting.
These are all really simple metrics that, if you think about it, the types of sites that are more trustworthy more often use. If that's the case, then they might be hints to Google that the content that you're producing is authoritative. So those aren't the only easy ones that we could look at.
4. Writing quality
There are a lot of other ones that are pretty straightforward, like dealing with writing quality.
How easy is it to make sure you are using correct spelling and correct grammar? But have you ever looked at the reading level? Has it ever occurred to you to make sure that the content that you're writing isn't written at a level so difficult that no one can understand it, or is written at a level so low as to be certainly not thorough and not authoritative? If your content is written at a third-grade level and the page is about some health issue, I imagine Google could use that metric pretty quickly to exclude your site.
There are also things like sentence length, which deals with readability, the uniqueness of the content, and also the word usage. This is a pretty straightforward one. Imagine that once again we're looking at data science, and Google looks at the words you use on your page. Then maybe instead of looking at all sites that mention data science, Google only looks at edu sites or Google only looks at published papers and then compares the language usage there.
That would be a pretty easy way for Google to identify a piece of content that's meant for consumers that is authoritative versus one that's meant for consumers and isn't.
5. Media styles
Another thing we can look at is media styles. This is something that is a little bit more difficult to understand how Google might actually be able to take advantage of.
But at the same time, I think that these are measurable and easy for search engine optimizers, like ourselves, to use.
Annotated graphs
One would be annotated graphs. I think we should move away from graph images and move more towards using open source graphing libraries. That way the actual factual information, the numbers can be provided to Google in the source code.
Unique imagery
Unique imagery is obviously something that we would care about. In fact, it's actually listed in the Quality Rater Guidelines.
Accessibility
Then finally, accessibility matters. I know that accessibility doesn't make content authoritative, but it does say something about the degree to which a person has cared about the details of the site and of the page. There's a really famous story about, and I can't remember what the band's name was, but they wrote into their contracts that for every concert they needed to have a bowl of M&Ms, with all of the brown M&Ms removed, waiting for them in the room.
Now it wasn't because they had a problem with the brown M&Ms or they really liked M&Ms or anything of that sort. It was just to make sure that they read the contract. Accessibility is kind of one of those things of where they can tell if you sweat the details or not.
6. Clickbait titles, author quality, and Google Scholar
Now finally, there are a couple of others that I think are interesting and really have to be talked about. The first is clickbait titles.
Clickbait titles
This is explicitly identified as something that Google looks at or at least the quality raters look at in order to determine that content is not authoritative. Make your titles say what they mean, not try to exaggerate to get a click.
Author quality
Another thing they say specifically is do you mention your author qualifications. Sure, you don't have a Pulitzer Prize writer, but your writer has some sort of qualifications, at least hopefully, and those qualifications are going to be important for Google in assessing whether or not the author actually knows what they're talking about.
Google Scholar
Another thing that I think we really ought to start looking at is Google Scholar. How much money do you think Google makes off of Google Scholar? Probably not very much. What's the point of having a giant database of academic information when you don't run ads on any of the pages? Well, maybe that academic information can be mined in a way so that they can judge the content that is made for consumers as to whether or not it is in line with, whether we're talking about facts or language or authoritativeness, with what academia is saying about that same topic.
Now, course, all of these ideas are just ideas. We've got a giant question mark sitting out there about exactly how Google gets at content authority. That doesn't mean we should ignore it. So hopefully these ideas will help you come up with some ideas to improve your own content, and maybe you could give me some more ideas in the comment section.
That would be great and we could talk more about how those might be measured. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks again.
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Often in SEO, we get so preoccupied with technical SEO (pagination, site speed, the latest Python course, etc.) that we forget the basis of winning SEO begins and ends with keywords.
Not choosing keywords before you start with SEO means shooting in the dark — a likely losing gamble if your content will succeed or not.
Choosing the wrong keywords means wasting your time and budget on content that will never gain visibility in search results.
Conversely, choosing smart, targeted keywords can help carve out and dominate a traffic niche that raises you above the competition.
No doubt, the difference between good SEOs and mediocre SEOs is often their keyword research strategy.
Here at Moz, a question we often hear after people finish reading the famous Beginner's Guide to SEO is: What do I read next?
To give people a practical place to start, we wanted to provide you with concrete keyword research workflows. It's as if you're looking over our shoulder as we do strategic keyword research.
We also included a few intermediate-to-advanced concepts, such as keyword grouping, understanding keyword priority, and on-page keyword optimization.
And finally, we wanted to make sure it was free.
If you want, feel free to jump to the guide now, or read below about what the guide covers and how it differs from any other guide on keyword research.
We call them "seed" keywords because all your other keywords grow out of them. Finding the right seed keywords will absolutely make or break your entire keyword research strategy.
Finding the right seed keywords is about asking and answering three key questions:
What do you think you want to rank for?
What do you already rank for?
What do your competitors rank for?
After this, you validate your answers with data to find the absolute best seeds.
We also show you the exact process and tools we use to extract these seeds, such as Google Search Console (shown below).
The cool thing about seed keywords is this: they grow more seeds! Once you find the right seeds, you can reiterate the process again and again to grow a complete keyword strategy for an entire site, even one that's thousands of pages.
This is where the rubber hits the road. Here you expand your seed keywords into complete lists. These lists support multiple pages and topics, and can even grow more seeds.
This is also the place you want to be as comprehensive as possible, in order to uncover the opportunities your competition probably missed.
Nearly any old keyword tool can give you lists of hundreds or thousands of keywords. The secret to success is knowing which keywords to prioritize and pursue.
Which keywords will actually prove profitable? Which keywords can you actually rank for?
To answer these questions, we do a deep dive into the keyword metrics that help us to prioritize our keyword lists:
Relevance
Monthly volume
Keyword difficulty
Organic click-through rate (CTR)
Priority
Understanding how to use these metrics goes a long way in choosing the exact right keywords to invest in.
Keywords never exist in a vacuum. Instead, they almost always appear with other keywords.
Adding related keywords to a page is a smart strategy for increasing topical relevance. At the same time, trying to target too many keywords on the same page may dilute their relevance and make it more difficult to rank.
Here, we show you techniques to address both of these problems:
When to create separate pages for each keyword
How to group related keywords together
We'll also show you some grouping tips to help set you up for your next task: on-page keyword optimization.
Very few keyword research guides ever even mention on-page keyword optimization.
We wanted to do better.
Because keyword research uncovers intent, this is a great starting point for on-page optimization. If you understand not only what your users are searching for, but also what they expect to find, you can better create your content to satisfy their expectations.
We've also included a brief overview of where and how to incorporate keywords on the page. While this section is mostly beginner level, more immediate SEOs should find the refresher useful.
If you’re a consultant, agency, in-house SEO, or simply work for yourself, you want to know how your keywords perform in search engines.
Traditionally, keyword tracking was synonymous with "ranking" — but times have changed. Today, with personalization, localization, and shifting competitive environments, keyword tracking has grown much more sophisticated.
In this chapter, we'll cover:
Traditional keyword ranking
Local rank tracking
Rank indexes
Share of Voice (SOV) and visibility
By the end of this chapter, you'll understand which type of keyword tracking is right for you, and how to report these numbers to the people who matter.
We couldn't squeeze everything in the previous chapters, so we added all our extra resources here. The crème de la crème is the Keyword Research Cheat Sheet. You can download, print, share with your team, or pin to your wall.
We've also made a handy list of our favorite keyword research tools, along with a few other useful resources on keyword research.
We hope you enjoy! Let us know what you think in the comments below.
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