Many SEOs think of keyword research as a very basic part of SEO, which can actually be a problem. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Tom explains some of the common mistakes SEOs make when doing keyword research that are easy to fix, many of which come from metrics like search volume, click-through rate, and difficulty.
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Video Transcription
Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today I’m going to be talking to you about metrics, but specifically metrics for keyword research. Now I think this is a very fundamental part of SEO. A lot of people think of it as a very basic part of SEO, which can be a problem sometimes.
I think often this might be the very first task you’re asked to do in your SEO career. But I think there are some common sort of mistakes or misunderstandings within keyword research that are quite easy to fix, and a lot of it comes from metrics. So these are the three metrics I want to talk about today. So there’s search volume, click-through rate, and difficulty. I want to talk to you about how you can sort of use these together and where you need to be careful.
Search volume
So search volume, I think obviously you’re not going to get away from this as a metric. I’m not asking you to get away from this as a metric, don’t worry. But it does have some well-known problems and some lesser-known problems.
Problems with Google Keyword Planner data
So one of the better known ones is, I think, probably about seven years ago now, I can remember the late great Russ Jones talking about some of the problems with Google Keyword Planner data, which is really a ubiquitous data source in a lot of tools.
I understand why. In a lot of cases, it’s the only practical data source to use. But Google Keyword Planner data has some issues. So I’m not going to go into those now because, like I say, it’s been talked about a lot in the industry. Hopefully, some of those older resources will be linked to below.
But I just want to talk about how impactful it can be in your research and in what you’re trying to do for your business. So I did a test recently where I gathered a bunch of sample keywords and I benchmarked them in various metrics and various tools to see what volumes I got. Now, the source of truth I’m using here is Google Search Console. So you can be reasonably confident that if you rank first for something, then in Google Search Console, the number of impressions you have will be equivalent to the true volume.
Now, there are some caveats there. Maybe you only rank first on certain days or in certain locals or certain devices. There’s a bunch of data cleaning and work that we have to do to clean that out. But once that’s done, we can say, okay, in this particular sample of keywords, the average search volume was about 97 searches a month. Now, it could have been anything.
Just in this particular sample it happened to be 97 searches a month. Now, in Moz’s tools, I put in the same set of keywords and we got an average of 101, which I’m pretty pleased with. That’s quite close. Then in a couple of competing tools that also don’t use Google Keyword Planner data, they got 150 and 190. So same sort of order of magnitude.
But then the Google Keyword Planner data, on average was 1,803. So that doesn’t even fit on the whiteboard, by the way, to get that chart into scale. Obviously, that’s quite a big problem. If you were using this in anything sort of business critical and your boss is saying, “Oh, can you estimate how much traffic this new site section might get or how much revenue we might make,” and your estimate is out by a factor of 18, that is going to be a problem.
So this is a big danger. Even though this is an old problem, I was actually surprised by how impactful this could be in the real world.
SERPs changing over time
The other problem with keyword volume is a bit of a subtler one, and it has to do with how much SERPs are changing over time now. The issue here is that we’re only interested in search volume because we’re interested in clicks.
We want people to search a keyword, and we want to know how many people are searching a keyword because we think we might win their click by ranking. But the trouble is, these days, search volume doesn’t actually give you that much of an idea about how many people might click or could click. So you might have keywords with very similar volumes that actually have very different numbers of clicks available.
This is a random sample of keywords from 750 keywords from MozCast. I put these into Moz Pro to get an idea of the different click-through rates, and this is the total click-through rates of the queries. So this is the percentage of people that clicked on anything, not just one specific result. Eighty-five of these keywords, so over 10% of these keywords, they had a total click-through rate for all results of under 20%, meaning the vast majority of people clicked on nothing.
Only about a third of these keywords, slightly over a third of these keywords had a total number of clicks that were similar to the search volume, 81% to 100% of the search volume. So this is really interesting because there’s a wild spread here, and this varies a lot from one keyword sample to the next. Basically what this means is that just knowing about volume doesn’t mean you actually know about clicks, any more at least.
So this is a bit of a problem when we’re using search volume as a metric. We kind of have to use, but there are maybe some issues.
Click-through rate
So how can we get around that? So, as I’ve just talked about, one thing we can look at is click-through rate in combination with search volume. So I just said, in Moz, you can look at the total click-through rate of a query, but you can also look in Search Console at the click-through rate just for your specific result where you’ve ranked now.
So that can help you to have a better idea for the sort of actual opportunity that comes with a keyword rather than just search volume, which basically doesn’t give you much of a clue about that on its own. So you can use these together to get a better idea.
Keyword difficulty
The last metric I want to talk about that you can use with these is difficulty.
So keyword difficulty is a metric we have in Moz. Some other tools have similar things. What we do is we take the Page Authority and Domain Authority of the other results that are ranking for that keyword to get an idea of sort of how tough the table stakes are for this competition. Then we also look at the click-through rate, the total click-through rate of that query, like I was just talking about.
So this gives you an idea of how dominated this SERP is going to be perhaps by Google features or something like that. Then together this forms our difficulty score. So this gives you an idea of the level of opportunity here. So when you use all three of these together, you can say, “Okay, I’ve got this many searches and this click-through rate, so I know how many clicks are available. Then with the difficulty, I know how many of these clicks I might actually be able to win.”
So that’s all. Relatively quick and simple one. Hope you found that useful. Let us know on social, and I’m sure we’ll have more of these coming right up. Thank you.
TikTok has quickly become a viral sensation, with millions of users across the globe spending hours scrolling through the app’s endless supply of videos. But for marketers, TikTok’s greatest asset lies in its algorithm.
In the first chapter of this series, we dug into the search behavior on TikTok and why it should matter to SEOs. In this article, we are going to cover the ins and outs of the TikTok algorithm, and how to leverage it to get more users looking at your brand’s content.
The principles behind the TikTok algorithm
Before we dig into the algorithm’s ranking factors, a bit of background.
In 2020, TikTok’s CEO Kevin Mayer published a manifesto on the importance of transparency for tech companies, especially when it comes to their content algorithms. Mayer committed to being more open than its competitors, indirectly challenging Meta and Google.
Luckily for us marketers, TikTok has kept its promise and has some solid documentation on how their algorithm works. In this article, I will be combining that information along with secondary sources and inference based on general social media principles.
Surfacing interesting topics
A few months ago, I was raving about TikTok to my partner. He is big on privacy and didn’t love the idea of joining the platform, but I convinced him.
The moment he joined the app, his feed was flooded with bikini-clad teenagers, crude physical “humor” and what I can just describe as a bunch of British guys acting very lad-y. All the platform knew about him is that he is young(-ish), male, and British.
The content TikTok was serving was based on his demographic data. The algorithm hadn’t had time to work its magic then, but when it did, he could hardly put down his phone.
TikTok collects data on how users interact with different videos. Based on this information, TikTok can determine a user’s interests and serve them related content.
TikTok uses the content of each video to understand what topic it pertains to. This is based on the use of hashtags, video descriptions, the TikTok sound used, and the textual spoken audio. Based on what we know about other platforms’ natural language processing capabilities, this is likely more effective in English than in other languages.
The platform gets better at tailoring this content for you as you engage with it, but it also bases its recommendations on demographic data such as gender, age, and location.
According to their privacy policy, TikTok adds “inferred information” to your profile, such as age-range, gender, and interests.
Knowing this, it would make sense that TikTok puts audiences into different interest cohorts. By connecting different topics by how closely related they are, TikTok should be able to surface topics you’re likely to enjoy, even if you’ve never engaged with them on the platform before.
Let’s see an example. I like interior design, so I’m likely into IKEA hacks, which means I’m likely into DIY. If I’m into home improvements, I’m likely into crafting. Boom, a cross-stitching video reached my feed, and I love it.
TikTok’s transparency policy came about after receiving some criticism around how their algorithm creates echo chambers that promote radicalization and the spread of misinformation. Now some platform representatives have spoken about how the platform is trying to prevent that.
Youtube and Facebook have come under fire for this before, but the truth is that any platform with a content discovery algorithm that relies on engagement is susceptible to creating echo chambers and promoting radicalization. Human psychology tells us that we’re more likely to engage with content that elicits a strong emotional reaction. This incentivizes content creators to promote content that makes us angry or afraid.
TikTok’s answer to the filter bubble effect has been somewhat simple: the platform will show you random content from time to time.
In order to avoid homogeneity of content, the app has started showing users content that they don’t usually engage with. This includes surfacing random hashtags, video aesthetics, sounds, and topics. The app tries to keep things fresh by avoiding content repetition, so you’re unlikely to see two videos by the same creator or using the same sound in a row.
Another interesting incorporation into the algorithm is showing you fresh content that has not had any engagement yet. If you’re a TikTok user, I’m sure you have noticed this.
Is this enough to prevent creating echo chambers? Probably not. Familiarity or the mere exposure effect will make you engage with the content you see most frequently, so there’s still a pretty high chance of developing echo chambers.
According to the teachings of one of my favorite psychology textbooks, we’d need to see about 50% of this random content on our feed to break the behavioral learning and bias towards what we already like. Obviously that would be against the business interests of most social media platforms, so it seems unlikely to happen.
With this background and context in mind, let’s dig into TikTok’s ranking factors.
TikTok ranking factors
As I mentioned above, this list of ranking factors is based on a mix of TikTok-confirmed features as well as unofficial sources and general social media practices.
1. Video engagement
One TikTok ranking factor is engagement, which includes likes and comments as well as watch time and profile visits. When a TikTok video has a high level of engagement, it means people are taking the time to interact and engage with the content.
This also includes replays, follows, bookmarks, and tagging a video as “not interested” (which affects your video negatively, of course). Engagement shows TikTok that the content is worth pushing out to more users, thereby helping it rank higher on TikTok’s algorithm.
Not all forms of engagement are created equal, of course. A comment or share are stronger engagement indicators than a like. We see this on TikTok’s documentation and it’s true in many other social media platforms too.
According to TikTok’s documentation, engagement is measured at video level, not at account level.
The profiles a user follows on TikTok also contribute to determining the user’s interest profile. Following gardening accounts indicates to the algorithm even further that you’re interested in gardening videos.
The follower count or the previous performance of an account doesn’t directly impact the rankings of their videos. However, having a high follower count can indirectly help your videos perform better, as it will expose them to more eyes through your followers. If your followers engage with your content, that engagement can help you reach bigger audiences.
This is a big shift from classic forms of social media marketing, were the previous performance of posts on a profile are thought to influence the reach that future posts will have.
2. Discover tab engagement
Another way in which TikTok determines a user’s potential interest in a video is by analyzing their interactions with TikTok content beyond just video. Searching, clicking on a hashtag, exploring a trending topic, or viewing videos from a specific sound will weigh towards the video recommendations that users receive on their For You feed.
3. The content of the videos
As an SEO, I can’t help but draw a parallel between on-page SEO and the TikTok ranking factors within the video content.
For the platform to be able to recommend videos of topics that you like, it needs to understand what each of the videos are about.
There are several elements within the uploaded videos that help the app understand what topic and emotional tone each video has. Let’s take a look at what those elements are:
The video’s visuals. According to their privacy policy, TikTok can “detect and collect characteristics and features about the video and audio recordings” by identifying objects, scenery, and what body parts are present in your video. This is used for content moderation and to power their recommendations algorithm.
The audio. The platform can process the “text of words spoken” within your videos to further understand what they’re about.
Text over the video. Using text over the video also contributes to that understanding of the content. Adding the text natively within the platform might provide a stronger signal, based on the way other content ranking algorithms work.
Title and hashtags. This is the OG signal for TikTok and it’s the one they’ve publicly discussed the most. The title and hashtags used in the video help tell TikTok what the video is about, but they can also influence rankings indirectly by affecting engagement and discovery.
TikTok sounds. The sound being used in a video is a ranking factor on its own, as it helps the platform understand a video’s content. But the biggest way in which sounds affect your content’s performance is jumping on a trend. Trending sounds get a ranking boost for a short while, since they can predict user engagement.
4. Content language
There are three language preferences you can set in your account: app language, preferred languages, and translation language. This should be pretty self-explanatory, but there is an interesting aspect to explore here.
You can select several preferred languages and TikTok prompts you to select the languages you understand. However, you can only select one language for your app and one for your automatic content translations. It would not surprise me if TikTok used those settings to establish which of your preferred languages is actually your favorite.
5. Device suitability
TikTok explains in their documentation that the user’s device matters in the videos that users get shown, but they have not specified exactly how.
According to TikTok, the information they receive about your device is anything from user agent, mobile carrier, time zone settings, model and operating system,and network type to screen resolution, battery state, or audio settings.
My guess is that older and slower devices get shown shorter and lighter videos more often, to prevent disrupting the user experience if the phone’s performance can’t keep up.
6. Creator locality
There is one line on TikTok’s official documentation that really caught my eye:
“A strong indicator of interest, such as whether a user finishes watching a longer video from beginning to end, would receive greater weight than a weak indicator, such as whether the video’s viewer and creator are both in the same country.”
There isn’t a lot of clarity about how location is used as a ranking factor, but we know it exists. We can understand that proximity between viewers and creators helps in ranking, but we don’t know at what level this is measured.
TikTok tracks user location through SIM card information, IP address, and, if you give your permission, GPS.
7. Ineligible content
TikTok has two ways of moderating content: removing it or making it ineligible to rank. These include your usual suspects such as violence, nudity, and hate speech, along with some others.
Content uploaded by users under 16 — so don’t use your company’s actual age to make an account.
Content that includes QR codes — TikTok wants to know what you’re linking out to and get a piece of the cake if it’s a product recommendation.
Content that manipulates users into engaging with the video or user — all that “tap the screen twice to see something magical” stays on Instagram.
Duplicated content from TikTok or other platforms where the user doesn’t add any significant creative edits.
Dangerous stunts not performed by professionals.
Content that features tobacco.
8. Native content creation
I am pretty confident that building content using TikTok’s native tooling can help boost your content ranking. Other social media platforms tend to favor native content and native content creation in their algorithm, so it would make sense for TikTok to do the same. For the sake of transparency, this is just an educated guess and not an official ranking factor.
TikTok’s own analysis shows that companies who used their native creative tools saw 14 times more engagement than those who didn’t.
There is an indirect mechanism that could lead to native TikTok videos performing better: the familiarity of users with the type of content the app can produce natively. Users are very quick to spot an overproduced video as an ad and will tend to engage with it a lot less. This blog post on TikTok for Business supports that theory, by telling brands: “don’t make ads, make TikToks”.
TL;DR
In conclusion, the TikTok algorithm aims to show you content you’ll find interesting while avoiding filter bubbles.
Based on the user’s interactions with the app, TikTok is able to suggest videos that the user might be interested in. This is done through analyzing likes, comments, watch time, replays, follows, and bookmarks. The app is also able to understand the content of the videos through visuals, audio, text, and hashtags. Additionally, TikTok takes into account the language preferences, device information, and locations of both the user and the creator when suggesting videos.
What unique strategies have you implemented to perform well on TikTok? Share with us @LidiaInfanteM and @Moz on Twitter, and be on the lookout for part three of this TikTok SEO series: how to rank in 2022.
I like nothing better than using this annual local SEO holiday column as a greeting card with messages of good cheer, great strategy, and healthy profit penned inside. With economists caroling “austere” and “scary” in their predictions for 2022’s 4th quarter shopping season, however, it’s not easy to be jolly. Doomsayers’ dirges have their point, but we’re in this together, and here’s my own ditty for courage, set to the chorus of Jingle Bells:
Big brands (particularly those that trade in the trends of electronics) are not expecting a banner year for people buying new TVs or surveillance technology. Yet, if what your local business offers is help with basic needs and modest comforts, 2022’s holiday sales can be decent, if not a phenomenal spree. Let’s look at a solid strategy for stocking what folks want and communicating that you’re here to serve.
Food, warmth, wellness, and deals
Image credit: Michael Li
“Heat or eat” is the troubling slogan I’m hearing in multiple countries where economics have been allowed to create an artificial scarcity of energy resources on the back of a quite legitimate shortage of labor due to the pandemic. Until we all have our own nearby solar, wind and water power, we’ll continue to face fossil fuel-foolery that will eat up our paychecks and leave many in the cold this winter. All of us non-wealthy folk are feeling the pinch. We’ll be looking at the circle of our loved ones and deciding that instead of giving our favorite nephew electronics this winter, we will either pay part of his heating bill or knit him a very warm scarf.
A story I read recently in the Los Angeles Times sums this moment up well: a seller who previously dealt in luxury cosmetic gift baskets has altered his inventory to offer snack boxes. It makes sense in a time in which shoppers will be looking for ways to ensure that their friends and family have the necessary calories – not the curlicues – of life. This same vendor has also changed his marketing agency’s slogan from “we grow sales” to “we deliver peace of mind”.
2022 is the year to take a very close look at how much of your winter inventory and strategy can be rejigged to focus on food, warmth, wellness, and deals. Get a sense of the shopping season ahead from these eight points:
1. People are longing for health and strength
Fitness and gym membership sales are up as much as 20% as people try to become healthier to weather the extreme vagaries of recent modern life; gift cards that support wellness could do well.
2. Having enough to eat has become a major priority
The US food index increased 11.4% over the past year, with prices on some foods increasing by as much as 38%, meaning that gifts of food may be about as big of a luxury as many of your customers can afford to give this year. Could the brand you’re marketing partner with a local food producer for a selection of edible gifts?
3. Any source of warmth is cherished
Meanwhile, with utility bills off the charts around the world, items on lists like this one of how to stay warm without turning on the heater could make utilitarian items like layered clothing, warmer socks, thick hats, flannel robes, microwavable heat packs, hot water bottles, hot drinks, and soups attractive gifts for caring holiday shoppers. Skew your stock towards thoughtful essentials to be where your customers are this year.
4. Wise young folk are serious about de-consumption
It’s no accident that younger people are responding to the climate instability and energy catastrophe being created by the fossil fuel industry with the caring decision to reduce consumption. 50% of younger shoppers expect to buy more secondhand items as we close out the year. Assess whether re-stored, recycled, and thrift items could make up part of your inventory.
5. Reduced staff necessitates cutbacks and creativity
A challenge for local businesses in 2022 is the pattern we’ve been in since the pandemic began: labor shortages. If some staff are sick and others have quit to seek employment elsewhere, hours of operation may need to be cut. In that event, consider whether an after-hours kiosk outside the place of business could assist. If it’s honor-system based, you’ll need to trust that your community will pay for what they take. It could help you make a few additional sales in this extra challenging season.
6. Early shopping helps spread out purchases
Another trend that’s being widely-reported is of more than 1 in 10 customers shopping earlier this year. That’s a small percentage, of course, but it’s important to know that some of your customers could be trying to spread out their holiday purchases across the paychecks of multiple months, due to financial insecurity. This means that in-store and online features of holiday products could be helpful to some as early as the beginning of the 4th quarter.
7. Insecurity sometimes leads to splurging
I don’t have a statistic for this one, but I’m seeing talk around social media of some shoppers splurging in 2022 because they don’t know if they’ll be able to in 2023. I’m also noticing credit card offers ramping up. Anyone who grew up in the plastic-finance-fueled 80s can see the possibility of people spending what they don’t have as a way to comfort themselves and their loved ones, meaning some indulgent gifts may still sell well. I wouldn’t bet the house on this, though; it was noted that basic necessities were among the top sellers of the recent “Prime” day over at Amazon, with people buying diapers, toothpaste, and lunchboxes.
8. Deals are more welcome than any time in recent years
Finally, due to inflation and fears of recession, the majority of people are eager for deals and coupons, and local retailers may actually be in a good position to offer them this year. In 2021, one of the most significant challenges for nearly all businesses was shortages resulting from a very broken supply chain. While this issue persists in 2022, vendors in many industries are reporting a glut of inventory they need to move. In response, they are lowering prices and promoting coupons to catch the attention of shoppers who will be using the Internet over the next few months to find the best offers in town.
And that brings us to our strategic marketing checklist.
The Holiday Local Search Marketing Checklist
Image credit: Naotake Murayama
With your mindfully-curated inventory in place, you’re ready to serve up your offering to your community, and you have an absolute feast of options at your fingertips for getting the word out. Consider all of the following methodologies for promoting your local business this holiday shopping season:
✅ Website
Now is the time to be sure your website is offering maximum information in abundance:
Update hours of operation to reflect holiday hours.
Double check that store location info is correct in every place it is listed on the site, including headers/footers/side bars, contact pages, location landing pages, and about pages.
Highlight every possible contact methodology, including phone, text, chat, forms, messaging, social and email.
Highlight all fulfillment options, including in-store, buy-online-pick-up-in-store, curbside, home delivery, and shipping.
Don’t buy the hype that COVID is “over”; feature your safest protocols and requirements to serve the maximum number of people in your community, including elders and the immune compromised.
Audit all product landing pages to be sure that they are discoverable via site search and/or menu navigation and that shopping cart functionality is as simple as possible; to avoid cart abandonment, be up front about shipping/handling charges.
Create sitewide or page-specific banners for your best deals of the season (coupons, free shipping, discounts, etc.) as customers will be looking for the least expensive options more than usual this year.
Feature first and third-party reviews on key pages of the site (location or product landing pages) to let the public do the selling for you.
Highlight when items that need to be custom made or shipped must be ordered to reach recipients before a specified holiday date.
Highlight the greenest practices and most important community initiatives in which your local business is participating. Even in hard times, there is a growing trend of people shopping their values. Be sure to publicize if a percentage of your profits support local institutions like food banks, heat for elders, and other worthy causes.
Consider creating an essentials guide section of the website to showcase inventory that meets the goals of providing warmth, nourishment, and comfort. Depending on your industry, consider creating a re-stored/recycled guide, too, for younger shoppers.
✅ Google Business Profile and other local business listings
Full-featured listings will be the online doorway to your offline business, with Google Business Profiles driving as much as 70%-80% of leads:
Be sure fundamental contact information, holiday hours of operation, and branding are accurate across all business listings. Messy and time-consuming? Check out Moz Local for help across the board.
Retroactively respond to any reviews that have been ignored in Q3 and make a schedule for daily checks of incoming reviews over the next few months. Respond with empathetic solutions to cited problems and grow your reputation for customer service excellence. Do not incentivize requests for customers to remove negative reviews.
Integrate Pointy into your point-of-sales system if your inventory is made up of common, branded products, and be present in Google’s shopping platform which customers could be using this year like never before to compare prices. Remember that 2022 is the year in which Google confirmed that in-store product availability is a local visibility factor.
Photograph key lines of your inventory as well as the exterior and interior of your store, and upload these images to your listings. Don’t have time to do it all? Get started by photographing stock that meets the food-warmth-wellness-deals criteria.
Add your holiday-focused products to the Products section of your Google Business Profile.
Throughout the holiday shopping season, publish a variety of Google Posts featuring your inventory and special deals.
Pre-populate the Q&A section of your Google Business Profile with holiday-specific questions and answers such as “are you open on New Year’s Eve?” or “do you have candy canes?”
Speaking of Q&A, Google Messaging now allows you to enter ten questions for providing automated answers. If you have messaging turned on, this is a great opportunity to respond promptly to common queries about your holiday offerings, even when short-staffed. Nice to know that this feature can also include links to pages of your website for more information.
Video content just keeps getting more popular. Make a short holiday offers video and publish it to your listings.
Be sure listing menus reflect holiday-related services and inventory.
Look at the attribute section of your Google Business Profile, and add as many relevant signals (like Black-owned or wheelchair accessible) as possible.
Google has confoundingly removed COVID safety information from their listings just in time for the holiday flu season. If you know health and safety are a priority for your customers, consider adding your sanitary measures to the business description or Posts.
Google Business Profiles tend to steal the show, but in 2022, I would also recommend keeping a special eye on your listings on Nextdoor and Facebook.
✅ Social
Special thanks to my teammate, Senior Learning and Development Specialist Meghan Pahinui, for these timely and trending social media tips:
Regularly share hours of operation on social platforms whether you’re offering special holiday hours or not.
Share information about gift cards or gift certificates you offer along with how to purchase them.
Share any information about sales, specials, or promotions you’re running in-store.
Feature visual buying guides on platforms like Instagram or Twitter. For example, “gifts for dad” or “gifts for college students” which feature products you know are popular among those demographics.
Create “behind the scenes” videos for TikTok and Instagram which feature how a product is made or how your business prepares for the holidays.
Create a hashtag and post it near checkout or on bag inserts encouraging customers to share their purchases. Be sure to include that their posts may be featured on your own social media accounts as UGC.
Tweet to your followers asking them to share their recent purchases or meals. Be sure to interact with the posts and engage in conversation with your community.
Create fun photo-ops in stores with backdrops or merchandise displays. Place a sign near these photo-ops encouraging people to share their photos on social media to generate buzz and foot traffic for others wanting to participate. Be sure you’re following along online, as well, so you can engage with the posts.
Tweet to your followers asking what they are excited about for the holiday season and then reply with recommendations from your business. For example, someone may say they are excited to visit family and friends to which you may recommend travel accessories, games to play in a group, or gift cards they can purchase for those they are visiting.
✅ Real world
Small business owners are the backbone of the US economy. You are essential and heroic for keeping communities supplied over the past few years of extraordinary challenge, and your real-world efforts deserve recognition and huge praise. Here are a few activities that could bring more attention and customers your way.
If a Buy Local association doesn’t exist yet in your town, contact the American Independent Business Association to ask about how to start one, and take part in the growing Shop Indie Local movement. Send business to your peers and turn to them for support in trying times.
If your town or county still has a local newspaper, reach out to reporters there with your business story, including tips for holiday shoppers who need help celebrating on a budget. Never undersell the expertise you’ve earned when it comes to serving the public in good times and bad.
Your voice as a business owner matters in speeding up our transition to affordable, sustainable energy. Coordinate with other local business owners in your community to let local officials know you are done with the instability of the fossil fuel economy and all the problems it is creating for your business and want your city to transition now. Then, team up with other towns in your state and take your lobby to the state level.
Finally, remember that economists like all those I’ve linked to today, and marketing commentators like myself, are just regular people without any special powers over the future you are writing for your business. Predictions matter, but local business owners possess a hardihood and greatness that defies odds, again, and again, and again.
I want to close with the story of Yvon Choiunard, who set up a blacksmith’s shop in his parents’ chicken coop to forge pitons for mountain climbers, which he sold for $1.50 each in 1950s money. He wanted to work at a job he was excited about and that would let him and his staff go surfing when the waves were right. This holiday season, the 83-year-old Chouinard is giving away all the shares of his $3 billion company, Patagonia, to a climate action trust, declaring, “Earth is now our only shareholder.”
It’s the kind of story only a small business owner would be daring enough to write, and as we close out 2022 with eyes open and fingers crossed, I am wishing you Chouinardian grit, innovation, vision, and success.
The level of trust users have in your brand’s expertise is an important component when vying for that #1 spot, but Google has been ambiguous about what E-A-T (expertise-authoritativeness-trustworthiness) actually is, and how it plays into your SERP rankings. In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Lily Ray discusses the ways in which you can prove that all important “E” – expertise.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hi, there. My name is Lily Ray, and today we’re going to be talking about E-A-T — expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. We’re particularly going to be focusing on the E component, expertise.
What is E-A-T?
So just to take a step back, E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It comes directly from Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, which is a document that they use to train human search quality evaluators that they use to conduct tests thousands of times every year to basically benchmark and see how well Google is doing in terms of meeting the expectations of its users. Throughout this document, Google uses E-A-T pretty much synonymously with good content quality, but they’re looking for the raters to describe how well the content creators and the sites are meeting the expectations of users in terms of demonstrating good expertise, authority, and trust.
Google also has a document that’s related to learning SEO. So if you go on Google Search Central, they have documentation related to how you can learn SEO, and they explicitly say that you should be providing content that has a lot of great expertise. In Google’s documentation about core updates, they have an article that’s called “What Webmasters Should Know About Core Updates.” They share this article every time a new core update is rolled out, several times per year, and they explicitly say that you should get to know the Search Quality Rater Guidelines and particularly you should get to know E-A-T.
Google also owns YouTube, and YouTube has its own documentation about particularly how it elevates high-quality information in the video results. There’s one section that’s dedicated to how it combats misinformation on YouTube, and in that section, they talk a lot about the importance of authoritativeness in YouTube rankings. Google, also, in its documents about Google News and Google Discover, they talk about the importance of E-A-T.
So if you’re a brand that wants to rank in Google News or Google Discover, Google extensively describes the importance of demonstrating good E-A-T throughout your content.
Product reviews updates
The product reviews updates are a new series of updates that Google started to roll out in the past year. In these updates, sites that do product reviews or companies that do reviews of different products, Google is saying that in order to rank really well for this type of content, they’re expecting to see expert-level content, and basically experts and enthusiasts who know the products really well are the ones that are going to rank a little bit better than people that are just maybe reviewing products that they haven’t actually tried or spent time with.
Can you measure E-A-T?
So a lot of people in the SEO industry are curious how do we measure E-A-T because Google tends to be pretty ambiguous about what E-A-T actually is, how it’s measured. So it’s not a direct ranking factor. It’s really important to understand that, unlike something like page speed or Core Web Vitals, which is very measurable, there’s no E-A-T score. There’s no way to know, on a scale of 1 to 100, how good is my E-A-T.
The only factors that Google has explicitly confirmed as ranking factors that contribute to E-A-T are PageRank and links. That being said, there’s a lot of ways that E-A-T plays into the algorithms indirectly and a lot of things that Google has said that we can piece together to understand the role that E-A-T plays in the algorithms.
Google’s expertise patents
So, for example, there’s a variety of different patents that I’ve been researching with the patent expert, Bill Slawski, rest in peace, late patent expert Bill Slawski. Basically, there’s a variety of different patents that describe the role that authoritativeness might play in the search results. So, for example, starting way back in 2007, Google registered for a patent that allows it to understand who the author is of a given piece of content and to rank that content according to the authoritativeness of that author.
More recently, there’s a patent called website representation vectors, which Google applied for in 2018, and this patent allows Google to understand how authoritative a piece of content is or how authoritative a brand is and to rank that content accordingly. They also have a couple of different patents to identify who authors and experts are either by their writing style or by their tone of voice or their accent.
So Google is doing a lot of work to really kind of get an understanding of who everybody is and to understand the areas where they’re credible or where they demonstrate expertise. The results of this is what Google has been doing across a lot of different products and throughout the course of many years in the SEO space, which is really trying to get an understanding of who the authors are, why they can be trusted, why they’re credible.
There’s a lot of different examples, for example dating back to Author Rank and Agent Rank, which was something around 2007. It’s been a very big project for Google. Later, they had rel=author. They’ve had a lot of different manifestations of how they’re basically identifying different authors in the search results and ranking content according to their authoritativeness. But what this boils down to is the role of experts in SEO.
I believe that this is where Google is really going. They’re trying to get an understanding of who the authors are, why they can be trusted, what are the areas where they specialize, and what is the subject matter where they demonstrate true expertise. I believe that with the product reviews updates, which are relatively new updates by Google, this is an update where they’re algorithmically trying to understand who is a true subject matter expert, who has actually done the work of putting together the research because they’ve actually spent a lot of time reviewing the products.
I believe that they’re taking this type of approach to a lot of the different algorithms that they’re using where they’re trying to understand who’s an expert that’s actually done the research, they’ve spent time in the field, they’ve done a lot of this work. They’re not just SEO people or content marketers who are doing keyword research and reverse engineering what’s already ranking and kind of saying the same thing as everybody else.
In fact, there’s another patent that Google has, which basically enables them to identify, when they have a bunch of pieces of content that talk about the same thing, if there’s one piece of content that has something new, they’re able to basically elevate the rankings of that piece of content because it’s introducing something new to the conversation.
What Google is doing with entities
So with all these patents and the ability to identify individual experts, we have to remember what Google is doing on a larger scale with entities.
So particularly with something like Google’s Knowledge Graph, which allows them to understand 500 billion facts about 5 billion entities online, this is a way that Google can basically say, “This is a person, place, or thing. We know all these different information about them, and we know how they’re connected to other entities.” So this is a visualization of what that might look like.
There’s a variety of different tools that are available online to visualize how these entities are understood, all the different attributes that might relate to these entities. So in this example, we have Joe Smith, and perhaps we know that Joe Smith has a certain hometown. He has a certain age. This is his career. This is the name of his wife.
These are the awards that he’s won. This is the skills that he has. Google is able to start building out that profile for that entity, and that could play into, potentially, the way that Joe Smith ranks for different content that he’s found in or perhaps how he’s displayed in Google Knowledge Graph or Google Scholar. I personally believe that Google is connecting the dots between all these different Google products and evaluating E-A-T across all these different products when they’re looking for somebody to rank on YouTube or somebody to rank on Google, depending on the query itself, depending on how much E-A-T is required for that query.
So if it’s something where what we call your money or your life, it’s very much related to health, it’s related to finances, security, E-A-T is going to be much more important for those queries, and they’re going to do this evaluation to say, “We know that we have all these different authors that we can choose from and different brands that we can choose from. We have this understanding of E-A-T on the entity level.”
Incorporate experts into your SEO strategy
That’s going to play a role in who they choose to rank for certain queries. So how can we factor this into our SEO strategy? Well, I think it’s very important to focus on incorporating experts into your content strategy. So what my team and I do, for example, is we might work with a bona fide expert in a different area, bring that person into the conversation in terms of creating content.
There are also many examples where the expert themselves actually creates the content or starts a blog. I’ve seen, in my research, many, many examples of experts who are providing first-hand information about their area of expertise. In many cases, they’re not necessarily linking out to other sites when they’re citing their sources in terms of how they’re putting together information.
They’re actually breaking the news. They’re providing the information. They’re talking about what it’s like to work in their respective fields. So they offer first-hand experience, and I strongly believe that Google is algorithmically trying to identify where that first-hand experience exists. They’re providing original research, which is something that Google has been elevating algorithmically.
Google has actually said in the past couple of years that they’re going to elevate the rankings of content that provides original research above the other people that are maybe linking back to that original research or citing it. There’s nothing wrong with citing that research. It’s just that Google is going to now kind of reward the source that’s breaking the news. There’s also, in the case of top stories for news sites, Google can apply a label that says “Highly cited,” if it’s the piece of news that all the other news sites are linking to.
In the case of experts, other people are often linking to them. So while it’s definitely a best practice in SEO to link out to other sites and to cite your sources and to link to all the places that are helping you provide information, in the case of using expert-driven content, many people are linking to the expert. So you don’t necessarily need to link out that much if you’re the expert writing the content, because you’re just sharing what you know about the area where you actually demonstrate expertise.
In the case of the experts that are doing very well with SEO, you can look at the link profile, and you can notice they’re the ones breaking the information, and other sites are referencing them with links. They’re also very focused on their niche.
So one thing that Google is doing a lot of is that they are basically evaluating E-A-T on the website level, on the domain level. This is something that my team and I notice in our research. You can basically take something like a website’s categories, a website’s tags, a website’s breadcrumbs. You can collect all that information, cross-reference it with the performance of how the site is doing for SEO with using Google Search Console or Google Analytics or another analytics tool, and you can start to visualize the different categories and subcategories and topics where a site tends to demonstrate a lot of expertise, where it tends to drive a lot of traffic.
You might notice that there are other areas or other topics or breadcrumbs or subcategories where your site is unable to rank. This is especially true for your money or your life sites. There are often cases where you’re able to maybe perform well on topics related to like fitness and nutrition but maybe not as much when you talk about medical conditions or health conditions. Also, with expert sites, it’s really important to include author bios.
So you want to talk about who that expert is. You should include their name in the content. If you have somebody else writing the content, try to incorporate the expert into that content strategy. So you can say, “This article was written by Sarah, but the expert reviewer was Joe Smith, and he came in to basically review the content.” So that’s a nice way to incorporate experts into your content strategy, and you can basically, with any of the clients that you work with or your company that you work with, work with the people who are actually the bona fide experts at your company and see if you can incorporate them into your content strategy even if it’s just to say, “Can you please review this content and make sure it makes sense, make sure it’s factually accurate? Can we include your name on it?”
In some cases, they might be skeptical to say, “Why do you want to include my name in your content? Why is the marketing team involving me in this process?” One thing that I’ve found very effective is to talk to them and say, “This is actually a personal branding strategy for you. If we put your name behind this, if we build this really nice profile for you on the website, you’re probably going to have a really nice listing on Google that ranks for your name.”
That often gets their attention, and that’s something that they want to participate in. So that’s kind of in line with what we call like a brand SERP. You can have the expert Google their own name, and you can say, “Are you satisfied with the way that it looks on Google?” We can influence that. If you really go deep into this strategy, you can ultimately help them get included in Google’s Knowledge Graph, which is definitely something people love to show off.
When you Google your name, you get all this great information directly on Google about the expert. I believe that, tying it all together, when you have experts who Google understands who they are, Google understands all these attributes about them, and how much they can be trusted in a certain area, I believe that that process is something that Google is more and more incorporating into its evaluation in who gets to rank for certain keywords.
Conclusion
So tying it all together, I think expertise is becoming increasingly important. E-A-T is extremely important, especially for your money or your life websites. It’s not going anywhere. It’s something that Google references throughout much of its documentation. So think about not taking shortcuts when it comes to demonstrating E-A-T but really kind of doing an overhaul of your content strategy to make sure that real experts are collaborating with you in the content process.
So I hope you enjoyed the talk. My name is Lily Ray, and my Twitter handle is @lilyraynyc. So feel free to get in touch with me and enjoy the rest of your day.
There’s a fine line between optimizations and experiments. Testing something is an exercise in curiosity, whereas optimizing a thing is an act of certainty.
If we know the outcome of a given activity before we perform that activity, we’re in optimization territory. For example, if you’ve discovered a load of orphaned pages, then the act of internally linking to those pages is highly likely to result in a positive outcome. We can deem this scenario, “untestworthy” (yes, I know that’s actually a word).
But, as we’ll discuss here, SEO includes a vast array of activities where the outcomes of our work are either uncertain or difficult to predict. Think about the last time you experienced a site migration. Were you certain that the new site would perform better than the original? This might be a scenario that we’ll deem, “testworthy.”
In short, a testworthy activity is one where we don’t know the ending until we measure our outcomes with data.
Measuring our SEO tests
The step-by-step measurement processes and techniques for conducting SEO experiments fall outside the scope of this article, so if you’re reading this and asking yourself, “how exactly do I run an SEO experiment from start to finish?”, here are a couple links to resources that can assist you in learning the nitty-gritty specifics of setting up and measuring SEO experiments:
For each of the experiments below, I will assume a time-based measurement technique. Although some of the ideas here can be tested using an A/B split testing technique, not all of them can.
Curious about time-based techniques? I cover them in detail in this guide.
A word on statistical significance
One final note to remember. Statistical significance, i.e. when your results can be confidently attributed to your testing criteria, is a sexy concept, but one sobering reality of SEO testing is that statistical significance can only be achieved through rigorously advanced split testing.
Time-based SEO experiments provide us with directional learnings, not absolute conclusions. Advantages of experimenting in this way include the ability to react more quickly, use up fewer resources, and the flexibility to experiment in nearly all search environments where split testing cannot.
Here’s one way to visualize how non-significant tests remain valuable. On the left end of the spectrum, there are the crapshoot experiments: low confidence, low investment initiatives that provide less reliable insights. Further to the right, we can begin categorizing experiments according to higher confidence intervals and higher resource investments. Somewhere in the middle, there are a great many SEO tests that provide directional insights, even when our directional insights aren’t guaranteed with the promise of scientific certainty.
With this in mind, I’ve put together a list of five inconspicuous SEO tests that appear “untestworthy,” but are actually SEO tests disguised as optimizations.
Test in disguise #1: URL switching
A URL switch test is really very similar to SEO title testing. The idea behind URL switch tests is simple: like page titles, we know that URLs are heavily weighted ranking factors, so if we find that there are URLs that look under-optimized or misaligned with our target terms and search intents, then we can build a hypotheses for testing a new URL and redirecting the original URL.
Some of you might be silently blowing a fuse right about now, and for good reason. URL switch tests can be very risky. If your original URL has already generated a substantial number of links (internal or external) I would exercise extreme caution before running a URL switch test.
As you probably know by now, redirects have the potential to backfire, and if your test fails, cannot be rolled back to the original URL variant as easily as a title test can be rolled back.
But this shouldn’t scare you if you are running a URL switch test in lower-risk scenarios. I have seen many successful URL switch tests in scenarios where the target URL was either freshly-launched, had too few links pointing to it, or where the URL was so ineffective that an experiment was justifiably worth the risk.
How to run a URL switch test
Check the URL’s current traffic levels. Higher traffic levels = higher risk.
Check the URL’s internal and external links. Internal links can be updated, but external links can still lose strength as you pass them through a 302/301.
If the risk is within your level of tolerability, clarify what your new hypothesis and URL test variation will be.
Example hypothesis: Changing the URL string from a partial match string to an exact match string will align our page more closely with the target keyword and increase rankings and clicks for the target keyword.
Change the URL from the control URL to the variation URL.
Add a 302 temporary redirect from the control to the variation, submit the URL for re-indexation in Google Search Console (GSC), and benchmark the date that this is completed on.
Wait 2-6 weeks to measure the clicks before vs. clicks after for equal time durations and days of the week in GSC.
For example: If your measurement period (after data) begins on a Thursday and ends on a Sunday, then I recommend comparing with an equivalent time duration in GSC that also begins on a Tuesday and ends on a Sunday just prior to the experiment launch date (before data). For most websites, the click patterns on weekends will be lower than on weekdays. Using the same days of the week and time durations allows you to control for these differences in daily click patterns.
The optimal time-range is situation-dependent. Pages that generate high click volumes can be measured closer to the two-week time-frame, while pages that generate lower click-volumes will need to run longer.
Caution: If the risk to this page is high, you may want to check in periodically during the first few days to make sure that performance doesn’t drop unexpectedly.
When measuring performance, use the “compare URLs” feature in GSC. This lets you check both the control URL and the variation URL simultaneously.
After you’ve gathered enough data to make a directionally-sound judgment call about which URL performs better, do one of the following:
If the new variation performed better: Change the 302 temporary redirect to a 301 permanent redirect and update all internal links to reflect the new URL.
If the original control URL performed better: Remove the 302 redirect. [Optional: you may want to add a new redirect from the failed variation URL back to the original control URL to speed up the re-indexation process.]
Resubmit the final URL in Google Search Console and periodically monitor the performance after the test has ended to ensure that performance remains positive.
Test in disguise #2: Content refreshes
Isn’t a content refresh a given? We know that refreshing content is good for SEO, so why does it need testing?
Yes, content refreshes are incredibly important and this is an activity that has been proven successful time and time again. However, not every content refresh yields positive results.
Even though it isn’t the norm, content refresh projects can occasionally result in traffic losses, and perhaps equally frustrating, many refresh projects can turn out neutral results. This means that all of that precious time and energy that we spent rewriting and republishing a piece of content failed to produce the outcome that we intended.
For these reasons, it’s important to figure out if our investments in these projects have achieved their desired positive outcomes or not. That’s where SEO testing comes into play.
How to run a content refresh SEO test
Perform your content refresh project exactly as you otherwise would, according to your own content team’s workflow. Make sure to save all of the original files, in case you need to revert back to the original content.
On the date of republication, submit the page URL to Google Search Console to be re-indexed and benchmark the date.
Wait 2-6 weeks to measure the clicks before vs. clicks after in GSC.
Once again, keep in mind that the best time duration will vary based on the click volumes that each page receives.
After you’ve gathered enough data to make a directionally-sound judgment call about which URL performs better, do one of the following:
If the variation performed better: Congrats! Report the results to your team and keep the change.
If the control performed better: Reinstate the original content and files. Then, re-index the page and continue monitoring performance to look for rebounding traffic.
Test in disguise #3: Section rearrangement
A section rearrange test is just what it sounds like. The hypothesis for these experiments is that if we can reprioritize some of the on-page content, elements, or components, then we might be able to influence the page’s rankings and traffic coming in.
This can work particularly well, if the page section that addresses our audiences’ main search intents is either buried deep below the fold, or if it requires extra steps for the user to access that content.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s use the example keyword: “email ideas for cold outreach.”
This keyword appears to have a lot of demand from users who are looking for specific email templates and phrasings that they can use in their outreach campaigns.
Now, let’s assume that you’ve got a blog post on this exact topic, but the exact email templates and scripts that users are searching for are buried at the end of your posts, well past a dozen other sections of content that don’t satisfy their search demand. This might be a great case for running a section rearrange test.
The idea is, if you can reprioritize those pieces of information that users are looking for from the bottom of your page to the top of your page, Google is likely to notice the prioritized content as a better match for users to quickly access the information they want. Thus, rankings and traffic may improve in the same way they might improve with a content refresh project.
Added bonus: it’s faster than rewriting new content!
How to run a section rearrange SEO test
Look for pages that are underperforming, and that have addressed a users’ primary search intent somewhere deep within the page.
Rearrange the page sections in a way that might create a better experience or flow for the readers.
Launch the new page (but remember to save the original control page files), re-index in Google Search Console, and benchmark the date.
Wait 2-6 weeks to measure the clicks before vs. clicks after in GSC.
Again, keep in mind that the best time duration will vary based on the click volumes that each page receives.
After you’ve gathered enough data to make a directionally-sound judgment call about which URL performs better, do one of the following:
If the variation performed better: Congrats! Report the results to your team and keep the changes.
If the control performed better: Reinstate the original content and files. Then, re-index the page and continue monitoring performance to look for rebounding traffic.
Test in disguise #4: Content removal
This test is the SEO-equivalent of what CRO professionals call “a takeaway test.”
In digital marketing, there are times when less really is more, so the idea for this experiment is, if we just trim out certain items — whether those might be page elements, or less-helpful content sections — then the removal process could lend itself to creating a tighter, stronger webpage.
In a CRO-driven takeaway experiment, a CRO professional might notice certain elements that distract users or get in the way of a conversion path.
This concept works just a little bit differently for SEO if our goal is to improve rankings and traffic performance. For SEO, content removal experiments are just a matter of “trimming the fat” from our content and page elements.
When analyzing your top pages, ask yourself if you see any sections, paragraphs, or sentences which deviate from the information that the search audience really came for. You might be surprised to see how much of the content we create is actually worthless for our users.
How to run a content removal SEO test
Scan for high-value pages and posts that may be hitting a wall with rankings and traffic performance.
Make sure to analyze the top keywords and SERPs so that you can get very clear on which primary and secondary search intents the users predominantly wish to see and read about.
Scan your page’s content with a dose of radical honesty to look for content that diverges from the information that you might want to see if you were a reader.
If your investigation turns up content and/or elements that don’t help the users, remove them and make sure to save the original control page files, just in case the experiment results are negative.
Launch the new page, re-index in Google Search Console, and benchmark the date.
Wait 2-6 weeks to measure the clicks before vs clicks after in GSC.
Again, keep in mind that the best time duration will vary based on the click volumes that each page receives.
After you’ve gathered enough data to make a directionally-sound judgment call about which URL performs better, do one of the following:
If the variation performed better: Congrats! Report the results to your team and keep the changes.
If the control performed better: Reinstate the original content and files. Then, re-index the page and continue monitoring performance to look for rebounding traffic.
Test in disguise #5: Featured snippets
This activity is one of my all-time favorites.
Treating our featured snippet answers like an SEO test is one of the ways that my teams have been able to accrue competitively high volumes of traffic and clicks in recent years.
When our team began to treat our featured snippets as experiments, rather than optimizations, we were able to learn much more about how to write better answers, and we were able to create processes for scaling up to higher quantities of featured snippet experiments. This meant more “at bats” for acquiring the answer box rankings, which meant faster traffic growth.
Much has already been covered about how to optimize for featured snippets. I’ll simply add a process for testing your featured snippet copy.
What’s more, featured snippet tests are one of the rare instances where statistical significance is undeniably attainable because the success measurement is binary. Either your experiment resulted in acquiring the featured snippet, or it did not. (Caveat: Some longer tail featured snippets may also be impacted by your experiments, but the impacts are generally negligible if you are targeting a strong primary keyword.)
How to run featured snippet tests
Identify opportunities where featured snippets are appearing in the SERPs, and where one of your pages ranks within the top 5 positions but is not occupying the answer box. (Tip: some of the current rank tracking solutions such as STAT make featured snippet identification much easier.)
Sort and prioritize featured snippet opportunities according to the opportunities that represent the highest value to your website. I recommend considering the traffic’s audience and conversion potential alongside the potential search volume.
Rewrite the portion of your article where the featured snippet is being targeted. This step is another one where the full context of featured snippet practices span outside the scope of this article, so you may want to check out resources like this if you’re not already familiar with featured snippet rewriting.
Periodically check in on your target answer box(s) and traffic over the next several weeks.
If at first you don’t succeed, test again! The great part about answer box testing is that you rarely need to revert to your control, and you can keep swinging until you hit the home run. In some cases, we’ve had to make as many as ten or more rewrite attempts before successfully capturing the featured snippet.
Repeat this process to run more experiments the remaining featured snippet opportunities that were identified in step one.
More SEO tests in disguise
This list is far from exhaustive.
As I alluded to earlier in the piece, I think that just about anything which requires measurement is a form of testing to some degree, regardless of whether or not this activity can be measured to true statistical significance.
If your team is investing any serious resources into activities like core web vitals, internal linking, E-A-T enhancements, site migrations, Schema markup, or UX changes, it’s usually wise to do a retrospective before and after analysis on whether or not that investment yielded a positive payoff.
Stacking up those experiments to figure out where your bets are paying off, versus where they are not paying off will start to steer your strategy and SEO knowledge toward more profitable outcomes.
Google Business Profile is both a free tool and a suite of interfaces that encompasses a dashboard, in-SERP editing, local business profiles, and a volunteer-driven support forum with this branding. Google Business Profiles and the associated Google Maps make up the core of Google’s free local search marketing options for eligible local businesses.
Today, we’re doing foundational learning! Share this simple, comprehensive article with incoming clients and team members to get off on the right foot with this important local business digital asset.
An introduction to the basics of Google Business Profiles
First, let’s get on the same page regarding what Google Business Profiles (formerly Google My Business) are and how to be part of it.
What is Google Business Profile?
Google Business Profile (GBP) is the branding of a multi-layered platform that enables you to submit information about local businesses, to manage interactive features like reviews and questions, and to publish a variety of media like photos, posts, and videos.
What is GBP eligibility?
Eligibility to be listed within the Google Business Profile setting is governed by the Guidelines for representing your business on Google, which is a living document that undergoes frequent changes. Before listing any business, you should consult the guidelines to avoid violations that can result in penalties or the removal of your listings.
You need a Google account to get started
You will need a Google account to use Google’s products and can create one here, if you don’t already have one. It’s best for each local business to have its own company account, instead of marketing agencies using their accounts to manage clients’ local business profiles.
When a local business you’re marketing has a large in-house marketing department or works with third party agencies, Google Business Profile permits you to add and remove listing owners and managers so that multiple people can be given a variety of permissions to contribute to listings management.
How to create and claim/verify a Google Business Profile
Once the business you’re marketing has a Google account and has determined that it’s eligible for Google Business Profile inclusion, you can create a single local business profile by starting here, using Google’s walkthrough wizard to get listed.
Fill out as many fields as possible in creating your profile. This guide will help you understand how best to fill out many of the fields and utilize many of the features. Once you’ve provided as much information as you can, you’ll be given options to verify your listing so that you can control and edit it going forward.
Alternatively, if you need to list 10+ locations of a business all at the same time, you can do a bulk upload via spreadsheet and then request bulk verification.
Where your Google Business Profile information can display
Once your data has been accepted into the GBP system, it will begin showing up in a variety of Google’s local search displays, including the mobile and desktop versions of:
Google Business Profiles
Your comprehensive Google Business Profile (GBP) will most typically appear when you search for a business by its brand name, often with a city name included in your search language (e.g. “Amy’s Drive Thru Corte Madera”). In some cases, GBPs will show for non-branded searches as well (e.g. “vegan burger near me”). This can happen if there is low competition for a search term, or if Google believes (rightly or wrongly) that a search phrase has the intent of finding a specific brand instead of a variety of results.
Google Business Profiles are extremely lengthy, but a truncated view looks something like this, located to the right of the organic search engine results:
Google Local Packs
Local packs are one of the chief displays Google uses to rank and present the local business information in their index. Local packs are shown any time Google believes a search phrase has a local intent (e.g. “best vegan burger near me”, “plant-based burger in corte madera”, “onion rings downtown”). The searcher does not have to include geographic terms in their phrase for Google to presume the intent is local.
Most typically these days, a local pack is made up of three business listings, with the option to click on a map or a “view all” button to see further listings. On occasion, local packs may feature fewer than three listings, and the types of information Google presents in them varies.
Local pack results look something like this on desktop search, generally located above the organic search results:
Google Local Finders
When a searcher clicks through on the map or the “view all” link in a local pack, they will be taken to the display commonly known as the Local Finder. Here, many listings can be displayed, typically paginated in groups of ten, and the searcher can zoom in and out on the map to see their options change.
The URL of this type of result begins google.com/search. Some industries, like hospitality have unique displays, but most local business categories will have a local finder display that looks like this, with the ranked list of results to the left and the map to the right:
Google Maps
Google Maps is the default display on Android mobile phones, and desktop users can also choose to search via this interface instead of through Google’s general search. You’ll notice a “maps” link at the top of Google’s desktop display, like this:
Searches made via Google Maps yield results that look rather similar to the local finder results, though there are some differences. It’s a distinct possibility that Google could, at some point, consolidate the user experience and have local packs default to Google Maps instead of the local finder.
The URL of these results begins google.com/maps instead of google.com/search and on desktop, Google’s ranked Maps’ display looks like this:
In-SERP vs. Dashboard GBP Management
Until quite recently, the majority of Google-based local business listings were managed via the interface formerly known as the Google Business Profile Manager Dashboard, which looks like this:
However, small businesses with only one or a few locations are now likely to see this prompt when logging into the dashboard:
If you choose the “stay here” button, hopefully Google will continue to let you manage your listings within the traditional dashboard, though this dynamic is in flux and could change at any time. If, instead, you choose the “manage on search” button, you will have to search Google for the phrase “my business” or the name of your business, and then manage all of your Google Business Profile functions within search, like this:
Google is currently testing a variety of in-SERP prompts like the following to guide business owners through the process of editing their listings in the absence of a convenient dashboard:
It’s my feeling that Google has made this unnecessary complicated, treating small businesses unequally by not giving them the same dedicated dashboard that larger brands enjoy. If you prefer having all your GBP-related assets in a very convenient and organized single dashboard, check out Moz Local.
GBP Insights
The GBP dashboard also hosts the analytical features called GBP Insights. It’s a very useful interface, though the titles and functions of some of its components can be opaque. Some of the data you’ll see in GBP Insights includes:
How many impressions happened surrounding searches for your business name or location (called Direct), general searches that don’t specify your company by name but relate to what you offer (called Discovery), and searches relating to brands your business carries (called Branded).
Customer actions, like website visits, phone calls, messaging, and requests for driving directions.
Search terms people used that resulted in an impression of your business.
There are multiple other GBP Insights features, and I highly recommend this tutorial by Joy Hawkins for a next-level understanding of why reporting from this interface can be conflicting and confusing. There’s really important data in GBP Insights, but interpreting it properly deserves a post of its own and a bit of patience with some imperfections.
If you’ve lost your dashboard and are now managing your listing in-SERPs, you can still get to insights from the prompt within search that is labeled “promote”, and what you see will look something like this:
When things go wrong with Google Business Profile
When engaging in GBP marketing, you’re bound to encounter problems and find that all kinds of questions arise from your day-to-day work. Google relies heavily on volunteer support in their Google Business Profile Help Community Forum and you can post most issues there in hopes of a reply from the general public or from volunteer contributors titled Gold Product Experts.
In some cases, however, problems with your listings will necessitate speaking directly with Google or filling out forms. Download the free Local SEO Cheat Sheet for robust documentation of your various GBP support options.
How to use Google Business Profile as a digital marketing tool
Let’s gain a quick, no-frills understanding of how GBP can be used as one of your most important local marketing tools.
How to drive local business growth with Google’s local features
While each local business will need to take a nuanced approach to using Google Business Profile and Google Maps to market itself, most brands will maximize their growth potential on these platforms by following these seven basic steps:
1) Determine the business model (brick-and-mortar, service area business, home-based business, or hybrid). Need help? Try this guide.
3) Before you create GBP profiles, be certain you are working from a canonical source of data that has been vetted by all relevant parties at the business you’re marketing. This means that you’ve checked and double-checked that the name, address, phone number, hours of operation, business categories and other data you have about the company you are listing is 100% accurate.
4) Create and claim a profile for each of the locations you’re marketing. Depending on the business model, you may also be eligible for additional listings for practitioners at the business or multiple departments at a location. Some models, like car dealerships, are even allowed multiple listings for the car makes they sell. Consult the guidelines. Provide as much high quality, accurate, and complete information as possible in creating your profiles.
5) Once your listings are live, it’s time to begin managing them on an ongoing basis. Management tasks will include:
Analyzing chosen categories on an ongoing basis to be sure you’ve selected the best and most influential ones, and know of any new categories that appear over time for your industry.
Committing to a Google Posts schedule, publishing micro-blog-style content on an ongoing basis to increase awareness about products, services, events, and news surrounding the locations you’re marketing.
Populating Google Questions & Answers with company FAQs, providing simple replies to queries your staff receives all the time. Then, answer any incoming questions from the public on an ongoing basis.
Commiting to keeping your basic information up-to-date, including any changes in contact info and hours, and adding special hours for holidays or other events and circumstances.
Investigating and utilizing additional features that could be relevant to the model you’re marketing, like menus for goods and services, product listings, booking functionality, and so much more!
Analyzing listing performance by reviewing Google Business Profile Insights in your dashboard, and using tactics like UTM tagging to track how the public is interacting with your listings.
Need help? Moz Local is Moz’s software that helps with ongoing management of your listings not just on Google, but across multiple local business platforms.
7) In addition to managing your own local business profiles, you’ll need to learn to view them in the dynamic context of competitive local markets. You’ll have competitors for each search phrase for which you want to increase your visibility and your customers will see different pack, finder, and maps results based on their locations at the time of search. Don’t get stuck on the goal of being #1, but do learn to do basic local competitive audits so that you can identify patterns of how dominant competitors are winning.
In sum, providing Google with great and appropriate data at the outset, following up with ongoing management of all relevant GBP features, and making a commitment to ongoing local SEO education is the right recipe for creating a growth engine that’s a top asset for the local brands you market.
How to optimize Google Business Profile listings
This SEO forum FAQ is actually a bit tricky, because so many resources talk about GBP optimization without enough context. Let’s get a handle on this topic together.
Google uses calculations known as “algorithms” to determine the order in which they list businesses for public viewing. Local SEOs and local business owners are always working to better understand the secret ranking factors in Google’s local algorithm so that the locations they’re marketing can achieve maximum visibility in packs, finders, and maps.
Many local SEO experts feel that there are very few fields you can fill out in a Google Business Profile that actually have any impact on ranking. While most experts agree that it’s pretty evident the business name field, the primary chosen category, the linked website URL, and some aspects of reviews may be ranking factors, the Internet is full of confusing advice about “optimizing” service radii, business descriptions, and other features with no evidence that these elements influence rank.
My personal take is that this conversation about GBP optimization matters, but I prefer to think more holistically about the features working in concert to drive visibility, conversions, and growth, rather than speculating too much about how an individual feature may or may not impact rank.
Whether answering a GBP Q&A query delivers a direct lead, or writing a post moves a searcher further along the buyer journey, or choosing a different primary category boosts visibility for certain searches, or responding to a review to demonstrate empathy wins back an unhappy customer, you want it all. If it contributes to business growth, it matters.
Why Google Business Profile plays a major role in local search marketing strategy
Within Google’s massive share of search, a company representative stated in 2018 that 46% of queries have a local intent. It’s been estimated that Google processes 5.8 billion global daily queries. By my calculation, this would mean that roughly 2.7 billion searches are being done every day by people seeking nearby goods, services, and resources. It’s also good to know that, according to Google, searches with the intent of supporting local business increased 20,000% in 2020.
Local businesses seeking to capture the share they need of these queries to become visible in their geographic markets must know how to incorporate Google Business Profile marketing into their local SEO campaigns.
A definition of local search engine optimization (local SEO)
Local SEO is the practice of optimizing a business’s web presence for increased visibility in local and localized organic search engine results. It’s core to providing modern customer service, ensuring today’s businesses can be found and chosen on the internet. Small and local businesses make up the largest business sector in the United States, making local SEO the most prevalent form of SEO.
Local SEO and Google Business Profile marketing are not the same thing, but learning to utilize GBP as a tool and asset is key to driving local business growth, because of Google’s near monopoly.
A complete local SEO campaign will include management of the many components of the Google Business Profile profile, as well as managing listings on other location data and review platforms, social media publication, image and video production and distribution, and a strong focus on the organic and local optimization of the company website. Comprehensive local search marketing campaigns also encompass all the offline efforts a business makes to be found and chosen.
When trying to prioritize, it can help to think of the website as the #1 digital asset of most brands you’ll market, but that GBP marketing will be #2. And within the local search marketing framework, it’s the customer and their satisfaction that must be centered at every stage of on-and-offline promotion.
Focus on GBP but diversify beyond Google
Every aspect of marketing a brand contains plusses, minuses and pitfalls. Google Business Profile is no exception. Let’s categorize this scenario into four parts for a realistic take on the terrain.
1) The positive
The most positive aspect of GBP is that it meets our criteria as owners and marketers of helping local businesses get found and chosen. At the end of the day, this is the goal of nearly all marketing tactics, and Google’s huge market share makes their platforms a peerless place to compete for the attention of and selection by customers.
What Google has developed is a wonder of technology. With modest effort on your part, GBP lets you digitize a business so that it can be ever-present to communities, facilitate conversations with the public which generate loyalty and underpin everything from inventory development to quality control, and build the kind of online reputation that makes brands local household names in the offline world.
2) The negative
The most obvious negative aspects of GBP are that its very dominance has cut Google too much slack in letting issues like listing and review spam undermine results quality. Without a real competitor, Google hasn’t demonstrated the internal will to solve problems like these that have real-world impacts on local brands and communities.
Meanwhile, a dry-eyed appraisal of Google’s local strategy observes that the company is increasingly monetizing their results. For now, GBP profiles are free, but expanding programs like Local Service Ads point the way to a more costly local SEO future for small businesses on tight budgets
Finally, local brands and marketers (as well as Google’s own employees) are finding themselves increasingly confronted with ethical concerns surrounding Google that have made them the subject of company walkouts, public protests, major lawsuits, and government investigations. If you’re devoting your professional life to building diverse, inclusive local communities that cherish human rights, you may sometimes encounter a fundamental disconnect between your goals and Google’s.
3) The pitfall
Managing your Google-based assets takes time, but don’t let it take all of your time. Because local businesses owners are so busy and Google is so omnipresent, a pitfall has developed where it can appear that GBP is the only game in town.
The old adage about eggs in baskets comes into play every time Google has a frustrating bug, monetizes a formerly-free business category, or lets competitors and lead generators park their advertising in what you felt was your space. Sometimes, Google’s vision of local simply doesn’t match real-world realities, and something like a missing category or an undeveloped feature you need is standing in the way of fully communicating what your business offers.
The pitfall is that Google’s walls can be so high that the limits and limitations of their platforms can be mistaken as all there is to local search marketing.
4) The path to success
My article on how to feed, fight, and flip Google was one of the most-read here on the Moz blog in 2020. With nearly 14,000 unique page views, this message is one I am doubling down on in 2021:
Feed Google everything they need to view the businesses you’re marketing as the most relevant answers to people in close proximity to brand locations so that the companies you promote become the prominent local resources in Google’s index.
Fight spam in the communities you’re marketing to so that you’re weeding out fake and ineligible competitors and protecting neighbors from scams, and take principled stands on the issues that matter to you and your customers, building affinity with the public and a better future where you work and live.
Flip the online scenario where Google controls so much local business fate into a one-on-one environment in which you have full control over creating customer experiences exceptional enough to win repeat business and WOM recommendations, outside the GBP loop. Turn every customer Google sends you into a keeper who comes directly to you — not Google — for multiple transactions.
GBP is vital, but there’s so much to see beyond it! Get listed on multiple platforms and deeply engage in your reviews across them. Add generous value to neighborhood sites Nextdoor, or on old school fora that nobody but locals use. Forge B2B alliances and join the Buy Local movement to become a local business advocate and community sponsor. Help a Reporter Out. Evaluate whether image, video, or podcasting media could boost your brand to local fame. Profoundly grow your email base. Be part of the home delivery revival, fill the hungry longing for bygone quality and expertise, or invest in your website like never before and make the leap into digital sales. The options and opportunities are enticing and there’s a right fit for every local brand.
Key takeaway: don’t get stuck in Google’s world — build your own with your customers from a place of openness to possibilities.
A glance at the future of Google Business Profile
By now, you’ve likely decided that investing time and resources into your GBP assets is a basic necessity to marketing a local business. But will your efforts pay off for a long time to come? Is GBP built to last, and where is Google heading with their vision of local?
Barring unforeseen circumstances, yes, Google Business Profile is here to stay, though it could be rebranded, as Google has often rebranded their local features in the past. Here are eight developments I believe we could see over the next half decade:
As mentioned above, Google could default local packs to Maps instead of the local finder, making their network a bit tidier. This is a good time to learn more about Google Maps, because some aspects of it are quite different.
Pay-to-play visibility will become increasingly prevalent in packs, organic, and Maps, including lead generation features and trust badges.
If Apple Maps manages to make Google feel anxious, they may determine to invest in better spam filters for both listings and reviews to defend the quality of their index.
Location-based image filters and search features will grow, so photograph your inventory.
Google will make further strides into local commerce by surfacing, and possibly even beginning to take commissions from, sales of real time inventory. The brands you market will need to decide whether to sell via Google, via their own company websites, or both.
Google could release a feature depicting the mapped delivery radii of brick-and-mortar brands. Home delivery is here to stay, and if it’s relevant to brands you market, now is the time to dive in.
Google has a limited time window to see if they can drive adoption of Google Messaging as a major brand-to-consumer communications platform. The next five years will be telling, in this regard, and brands you market should discuss whether they wish to invite Google into their conversations with customers.
Google could add public commenting on Google Posts to increase their interactivity and push brands into greater use of this feature. Nextdoor has this functionality on their posts and it’s a bit of a surprise that Google doesn’t yet.
What I’m not seeing on the near horizon is a real commitment to better one-on-one support for the local business owners whose data makes up Google’s vast and profitable local index. While the company has substantially increased the amount of automated communications it sends GBP listing owners, Google’s vision of local as an open-source, DIY free-for-all appears to continue to be where they’re at with this evolving venture.
Your job, then, is to be vigilant about both the best and worst aspects of the fascinating Google Business Profile platform, taking as much control as you can of how customers experience your brand in Google’s territory. This is no easy task, but with ongoing education, supporting tools, and a primary focus on serving the customer, your investment in Google Business Profile marketing can yield exceptional rewards!
In this week’s Whiteboard Friday episode, Shawn walks you through four steps to overcome the challenge of gaining prioritization for your SEO projects, and how to connect your initiatives with a business’s timelines and goals.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to this week’s version of Whiteboard Friday. I am your host this week, Shawn Huber. Currently my role is Director of SEO at Trellis Law, but previously I was a senior manager of SEO at T-Mobile and that’s why we’re here today to talk about my experiences while at T-Mobile.
That brings me to our topic of this week — How to Get Buy-in for Your SEO Projects. If you go back a few weeks, you can catch a really awesome episode of Whiteboard Friday from Kavi, that talks about the ROI of SEO. I highly recommend you watch that so that way it helps you with this next step here. All right.
In the SEO world, you know we’re full of challenges. One of them is the fact that we’re super dependent on other teams. I know at T-Mobile I was very dependent on my engineering partners, and so getting any project prioritized wasn’t always an easy feat, especially because my goals and timelines don’t align with theirs because they have other teams and leaders and departments of the org that need their services as well.
So I’m going to walk through how to gain that prioritization for your projects and how to connect our initiatives with their timelines and goals.
1. Identify motivations and goals
So the first step you want to identify their motivations and goals. Remember different teams have different needs. So you’ve got to figure out what matters to each of those teams. Sometimes it’s as simple as just educating and letting them know that really it’s not that much work for your SEO projects, and sometimes that helps.
Sometimes you don’t have a complete picture. You might be missing some data points. So try to find any other ones that might be relevant to that specific audience you’re trying to sell this to. Then lastly, figure out how does your data align with what they care about.
Now I was working on a project that was going to help save T-Mobile a few million dollars. But that only hit the SEO bottom line. The engineering team that I needed very heavily to push through this project, it didn’t matter to them. Even though the company was saving money, at the end of the day that didn’t align to his goals. So I had to figure out how can I help him help me. It turns out, obviously, they’re resource strapped, and so I was able to make a deal with them and say, “Hey, you give me this little bit of time and resources, SEO won’t need you anymore for this type of project.”
So that helped get that project green-lighted.
2. Build a data-informed business case
Now once you have all that awesome information that you’ve collected, it’s time to build that data-informed business case. You put all that together and make sure you customize or tailor it for each of the different audiences that you’ll be presenting to. Yes, that means you’re going to have to build a few decks along the way, but it’s going to pay off in the end because you’re making it relevant to them to help sell why they should help you.
3. Pitch and evangelize
Now that you have all those decks and everything put together, it’s time to pitch and evangelize why your project needs to be prioritized over others. These are the elements that should be in that deck to help sell your project: a really awesome executive summary that says what they’re going to get; what you’re asking of them; why you’re asking of them; the problem we have today and what it’s going to look like tomorrow when your project is implemented; any test results, white papers, case studies, anything like that that you gather along the way to help prove why it’s important; a very nice roadmap that talks about timelines and how long you expect this project to last; and obviously very great next steps.
You want to really focus on making sure you customize it to your audience. I know I’ve said it before, but it’s super important, as I learned at my time at T-Mobile, that different departments have different needs. Keep it very concise because you know as it starts to bubble up and gets to senior leaders, they don’t have a ton of time to go through a big deck.
Make sure you have clear next steps. Those leaders love to know what to expect each step of the way. Then include as much visualizations as possible. Make sure that you put them in brand colors and things like that because leaders love when you take that extra minute to finesse it so that it looks like you care about it and it helps them to care that you care.
4. Follow through and follow up
Then lastly, follow through and follow up. Always establish and come through on your reporting, timelines, statuses, things of that nature because that’s going to help make it easier to establish the proof of value that SEO is bringing, and it fosters trust so that next time when you come knocking on the door saying, “Hey, I need your help to create this next project,” or whatever, they’re going to be like, “Hey, the SEO team always delivers. It makes me look good. I’ll green-light whatever you want.”
So in the end, our keys for ensuring program success are collaborating with all those different departments, figuring out what’s valuable to them and what’s important to them, and aligning it to your SEO goals and what’s important to you. Thank you for watching this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday.
Search engine optimization is ever-changing as search engines are continuously evolving. A semantic SEO strategy can help you to carve out a competitive advantage. As search engines adapt to provide the best results to conversation queries, your web content should adapt too.
Once you understand the principles, you can apply semantic SEO writing to any niche. In this post, I’ll outline some of the successful strategies I’ve used across different types of sites along with some insights into the results they have achieved.
Let’s start by explaining a little more about semantic search and content before we examine some useful applications and tips.
How does semantic search work?
Semantic search provides the best results for user queries by understanding user intent and language. Through machine learning and artificial intelligence, search engines have gained a deep knowledge of the semantics (or meaning) of words and phrases, and how they link to each other. Google understands entities and topics, and groups them using The Knowledge Graph.
This is a much more sophisticated approach than the keyword matching that was used by search algorithms in their early days. Today, the semantic search engine is continuously refining its understanding of language so that it can serve the most relevant and helpful results to any given query. This requires an appreciation of the search intent, and the intent of the content being served up to the user.
What are the benefits of semantic search?
The benefits of semantic search are many.
For users:
They get a better user experience using search engines because the results they receive are of higher quality.
They can get to the information they need faster, and sometimes even answer their next question before they’ve asked it.
They can search on different devices, in different ways, and still receive qualified results.
For search engines:
They can handle the increase in conversational search queries from devices like smartphones and smart home devices (often through voice search).
They are providing a really useful service, making the general public even more likely to use their search engine, in turn giving them more data to help them learn about human language.
What is semantic content?
In linguistics, semantics refers to the study of meaning. So in this context, semantic content looks to use words, phrases, and sentences to construct a piece of writing with a certain meaning.
A piece of semantic writing aims to utilize the relationships between words, phrases, concepts, and sentences to create a really valuable resource on a certain topic. It’s paying attention to the detail in your piece of content, from sentence structure to overall page structure and everything in between.
In slightly more relatable terms, it’s writing well for humans and following linguistic rules. It’s keeping things clear, concise, and easy to read. It’s using semantically related keywords to contextualize your topics and removing unnecessary words. You don’t need complex language or convoluted text. But you do need in-depth content.
In SEO, this is vital when writing content that you’d like to rank. Natural Language Processing (or NLP) is used by search engines to understand our content, and this process is assessing the words we’ve used, and the relationships between them.
A semantic approach to improving e-commerce SEO
So, with semantics being all about words, how does that apply to selling products? Is it purely for journalists, publishers, and blog sites? Not at all. Semantic SEO is important for all web pages on any website.
You shouldn’t assume semantic SEO isn’t for you if you run an e-commerce site. In fact, it can be really effective in an e-commerce environment. When you’re writing category, product, and landing page copy, you should still think about phrase-based indexing, writing for NLP, content structure, and readability.
Review category and product page content
Make sure all your content is top-notch by making it unique, helpful, detailed, and well-structured. Research the entities that relate to your products and include them on the relevant category, subcategory, and product pages.
Provide in-depth information about your products and product ranges. Consider their benefits and key selling points. This is all helpful for the user experience as well as search engines, so keep your audience in mind and make sure your copy serves a purpose.
Working with one of my e-commerce clients, I focused on NLP terms and entities to create semantic content on over 200 categories, subcategories, product, and information pages. Going beyond basic search term research, we focused on content structure, co-occurrence, entities, synonyms, and the relationship between terms to craft high-performing content.
Here’s an example of a subcategory page that was optimised in this way:
Source: Express Doors Direct
Over a twelve-month period, the brand saw the following results:
Increased non-blog organic sessions: +495.97%
Increased organic transactions: +365.58%
Increased organic revenue: +415.30%
Examine keyword clusters and missing category pages
Using a keyword gap analysis, you can start to uncover the areas your e-commerce store isn’t ranking for in comparison with your closest competitors. You can then use this to lead your strategy for category and subcategory creation. You’re likely to find clusters of keywords on one topic that you don’t have a page to satisfy, so you can create one.
This might cover:
a different way of grouping your products (e.g. by color or style rather than by material)
a supporting guide that you’re missing
a type of product that you don’t sell but could
Examine the common themes in your keyword gap analysis and create a plan for new website pages by grouping these into keyword clusters. Collate the products for a page if necessary, and write the copy carefully, optimizing for multiple keywords in your cluster, combining concepts and ideas to contextualize your overall topic.
Source: SEMRush
I’ve seen a client’s search rankings and traffic soar when they added a key page to fulfill one of their biggest keyword gaps. Overall, the unique keywords they rank for have increased by 47.92% during 2022, and 79.4% since we started working on their new and existing content using this semantic approach:
First place rankings have also increased, by 59.43% during 2022 and staggeringly, by 627.58% since starting work with a semantic approach:
Source: Big Metrics, linked with client’s Google Search Console account
Covering multiple keyword clusters also captures more search traffic and can genuinely help customers who often shop in different ways.
Research and plan supporting content
Create content to support your website visitors’ needs, centered around common product questions and guides. Rather than housing these on your blog or in a resources section, add them to the category or product pages they support.
Semantic SEO is about relationships, and that goes beyond the terms used on a single page or a single piece of content. It covers the way in which pages and topics are clustered together. If you demonstrate that you not only sell a product, but you provide a whole host of expert advice relating to that product, you will demonstrate topical authority.
Internal links
Consider the use of semantic relationships within and between your pages. You can build a really powerful resource using a series of great pages with strong connections to each other. Use a clear internal linking strategy to get this right.
A hub and spoke approach using a key category page as the center of the hub (or the pillar page) can be especially effective. A large e-commerce client we work with made almost 2% of their revenue from assisted and last click conversions through hub content in a twelve-month period. This might not sound like a large percentage, but when the overall revenue is high, an extra 2% equates to quite a sum.
Here’s a hub and spoke strategy in action, organizing help and advice on washing machines around a central washing machine category page:
Source: Appliance City
Apply schema markup or structured data
Use schema markup or structured data to help signpost your products, FAQs, and other aspects of a given page. It’s also known as semantic markup for a reason! This adds an additional level of information that helps search engines really understand your content.
For example, the below image shows product search results for UK retailers Currys and Argos displaying prices, images, and review ratings:
Source: Google SERPS
Adding structured data can help you generate rich snippets because you’re helping Google to organize your content and display it creatively. This can get you more real estate in the SERPs and therefore generate more qualified traffic.
Keep the quality high and helpful
When you’ve built up performance with great quality semantic content, you can still lose ground if you subsequently release a lot of unhelpful, thin, or badly written content.
In Google’s latest documentation about the helpful content update, they explicitly say:
“Any content — not just unhelpful content — on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search, assuming there is other content elsewhere from the web that’s better to display. For this reason, removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.” – Source: Google
This goes to show that even if you create fantastic content, it will still suffer if there aren’t enough pages of high-quality content on your website.
When you’re managing a busy e-commerce site and adding lots of new products, it’s easy to let thin, badly written, or even duplicate content slip through the net. But if you do, it can have a knock-on effect and actually harm the progress you’ve been making.
Working with e-commerce clients, I’ve seen this happen. Overall progress has taken a dip when nothing on our top-performing pages has changed. But digging into the data, I’ve often found that a large batch of products has been added to the site with low-quality, rushed descriptions. This has likely had an influence on the overall website content quality and tipped the balance in the wrong direction. If these descriptions had been carefully written for semantic SEO, taking entities, related phrases, and good structure into account, the addition of new products could have increased results across the site rather than hindered progress on key pages.
Once you start creating higher-quality content for semantic search (and your users) it’s really important to keep it up. Consistency is key. If you can, have a plan for every new page that hits the site and make sure it’s as good as it can be within the time restrictions you have.
B2B service and creative industries
Service and creative industries often have quite lengthy, text-rich pages that are ideal for optimizing with a semantic approach.
Content is key
Many B2B service websites and creative industry sites only have a small number of key pages. Unlike e-commerce sites that have hundreds — maybe thousands — of subcategories and product pages, you might have a limited number of options when it comes to your services.
This is where your informational content can play a pivotal role in the success of your site. Through the addition of informative and FAQ content, we increased an e-commerce website’s informational search queries by 75%. But even so, they only account for 12% of their total keyword rankings.
In contrast, for a service site that I work on, informational queries make up 76% of their total keyword rankings. These information pages help to make semantic connections by providing further context around the subjects a service provider specializes in. Without these supporting pages, they wouldn’t be able to display their depth of knowledge or expertise on a topic.
Source: Sistrix
Information pages also help to bring your target audience in at the top of the funnel. Perhaps they’re just starting out in an industry and looking for answers. If you are present in the search results and provide a helpful resource, your brand will be associated with their learning. When they try to think of an expert to help them with a problem later down the line, you’ll stand a good chance of being the one that springs to mind and winning their business.
Structure your content well
As service and creative sites are often quite wordy, it’s vital to use structure to your advantage. This helps out search engines and users alike.
Use clear headings and subheadings to signpost different areas and group common themes within an article or page. Bullet points and bold text can help certain aspects stand out. Proximity within the text can indicate the strength of relationships between phrases and entities.
On the Boom Online website, we structure our content with clear formatting to make text-heavy service pages easier to read:
Source: Boom Online
This is helpful for both search engines and users because relevant information can be located quickly and efficiently.
Don’t forget to use synonyms and close variants
When reviewing service sites, I often find that they stick with one way of saying something for consistency. Perhaps they do it just because that’s how they refer to a certain thing internally. But when you’re optimizing for semantic search, it’s much more beneficial to consider the variety of different ways you can refer to something and use them appropriately.
Let’s look at a digital marketing example: PPC can also be called pay-per-click, sponsored search, keyword auction, paid search, or search advertising. If you stay with just one of these options, you’re likely to be missing out on opportunities for traffic and chances to add context to the meaning of your page.
Here’s a good example of some content about “meet the team” pages. Because synonyms and close variants have been included, it ranks for similar terms like team bios, our team page, team profiles, and many more:
Source: Search Console
So, research these varied options for your page and use them in a suitable way. Don’t just add them for the sake of it, but add any that make sense. You’ll probably find your page is much more readable due to the variety of language you’ve used, and it will perform better in search too.
Keep your eye on the detail
If you’re using statistics to back up a point or referring to prices or facts, review these regularly. Update your pages to show the most recent stats and research and review pricing changes. Search engines don’t like out-of-date or incorrect information, and they can identify it because they understand the meaning and context they are displayed in.
Creating semantic content in the home & DIY sector
If you’re working in the home and DIY sector, you might be selling high-ticket items or services that require a little extra persuasion to close the sale. The average consumer might not have all the DIY knowledge they need to tackle their project, and is likely to be searching for additional information before they make a purchase.
You can address these sales barriers by creating semantic content that not only helps users but also drives search traffic and increases your chances of becoming a topical authority.
On-page FAQs
One useful application to consider is adding on-page FAQs that tackle some of the queries consumers might have before they purchase. Not only is this helpful for UX, but it’s also powerful for semantic SEO.
The answers to FAQs enrich your category pages, allowing you to add related entities and complete phrases to support phrase-based indexing.
Keep answers short and succinct, use schema markup, and link to more detailed articles where required.
Source: Climadoor
Implementing this across a DIY client’s site has resulted in a 44% increase in keyword rankings with informational intent since January 2022, from 2.5k informational keywords ranking in Jan 2022 to 3.6k in October 2022.
Keywords by intent Oct 2022:Keywords by intent Oct 2022:
Detailed guides
Working with a lot of home improvement and DIY clients, there’s plenty of scope in this sector for creating detailed how-to and informational guides. This type of content offers an abundance of helpful information to potential customers, and it helps you to rank too.
How-to and other informational guides can bring a wealth of relevant organic traffic, capture featured snippets, and demonstrate your expertise in a topic area. They can also help to drive your target customers through your sales funnel, getting them closer to the buying phase.
If you’re creating this type of content, take the time to make it really detailed, rich, and useful. Add unique images, video content, expert opinions, and more. Think about what it takes to really bring the topic to life, making it an interesting and helpful read. If competitors are doing the same thing, try to set your resource apart as the best by including some media or original insight that they have missed.
Source: Express Doors Direct
Don’t forget to execute a hub and spoke strategy. This can be really powerful if you position key category pages as hub centers, and create spokes to support them. I’ve talked more about this in the e-commerce section.
The technology sector
Selling a very technical product or service presents its own challenges for semantic SEO. Website copy is often written by subject matter experts to maintain accuracy, but this doesn’t always produce the best search results.
Create content that search users want
This is SEO 101, right? But it isn’t always that obvious. Sometimes technical providers can get carried away with explaining the intricacies of what their product or service can do, without thinking about how a user would search for that information.
To succeed with semantic SEO, go back to your keyword research. Re-focus on the relevant search queries, and then match their intent with suitable content. This might mean reworking some existing content to support the relevant keywords or the creation of new content.
For example, the below content fulfills a multitude of search queries about a specific technology in a simple format.
Source: GeoSLAM
Follow the longtail
When I’ve been working in technical niches, search queries are often very specific and have low to zero search volume in many of the common tools. But longtail keywords can still be really valuable if they are relevant to your users.
Don’t be afraid to create great content to satisfy “zero volume” phrases. Group these phrases together to create a detailed resource and as always, research the related entities and phrases to strengthen your content. Group a series of these very specific articles together for even more semantic SEO power. The search traffic you receive might not be huge, but it will be extremely relevant and qualified.
This recently published article based on a series of longtail, very low-volume queries has generated 18.3K impressions and 816 clicks in the last four months:
Source: Search Console
Reduce jargon and improve readability
Technical sites can often use a lot of industry jargon and long, winding sentences. Whilst technical subjects do tend to have higher reading difficulty scores, they shouldn’t be impossible to comprehend.
Very long and complex sentences make it difficult for Google to understand the links between words, reducing its confidence in the meaning of that sentence. It’s important to be precise, concise and clear no matter what the subject.
For this complex sentence, there are a lot of dependency “hops” between words:
Google sees the most salient entities as “products” and “front”.
But I am talking about reaching an audience using advertising. So when we simplify the language as below:
You can instantly see the dependency “hops” reduce. And the overall result is a sentence that retains meaning, while the most salient entities “audience” and “advertising” have a much higher salience score showing they are understood as more important or central to the text:
Re-focus your content for clarity and readability. It’s absolutely possible to do this for technical subjects. Don’t try to baffle your readers with science or technology. Making things clear and succinct will help search engines and users alike process your language and extract the meaning.
If specific industry terms are necessary, define them where possible. A great definition will reinforce your expertise, and could also pick up other relevant queries and featured snippets.
Working on all of the above with a technical client across their blog content has yielded a 43.42% increase in organic traffic landing on blog pages, and a 24.92% increase in goal completions so far in 2022:
General tips for semantic SEO
No matter what type of website you work on, you can apply semantic principles to make your content perform better. Here are some general tips for semantic SEO success:
Use it as a competitive advantage
Don’t assume that you can’t rank well enough for competitive terms without a strong link profile. Links are only one part of the picture. If you are an expert in a field and can create great content on the topic, it’s certainly worth considering. Plan the content carefully, provide high-quality, unique insights and give it a shot. You might be surprised by the results.
I have helped clients to outrank really well-known brands with strong backlink profiles for competitive search terms by using a semantic approach. It required plenty of time and effort to research the topic, related phrases, and entities. Equal care and attention have gone into writing the copy and optimizing it at a later date, but allowing for attention to detail has really been worthwhile.
Don’t forget your link-building strategy
If you create quality content using semantic search it can rank well. High-ranking content can attract some valuable backlinks. A client of ours picked up one from the New York Times in this manner.
Don’t forget to include your semantic content in your link-building plans. Share it with others, and use social media and email marketing to get it noticed. If you’ve done a really great job for semantic search, you’ve probably nailed your content for users too. And this is the kind of content that other publications would choose to share or link to, which will only add to its success.
Always stay relevant to your topics and relationships
The way to build things up with this approach is by gaining ground in your topic area. Broader topics will have little use, so it’s best to stick to what you know.
Carry out a content audit to see what’s working for your website. Use this to define your areas of strength and relevance. When you have a clear focus, thoroughly research your topic area, and stick to it. Make sure irrelevant content doesn’t creep in – you must stick to your strategy.
I worked with a client who used to add broader blog content for interest and color, assuming that people didn’t want to know about their product area as much because it didn’t seem exciting. But after a content audit uncovered that their successful content was all very closely related to their product area, we refined their strategy in early 2022.
Now, most of their blog content is very tightly related to their products, and each new post ranks well and brings in qualified traffic. The site as a whole is seeing the benefit, and the visibility for blog content has been steadily increasing:
Source: Sistrix
Give it time
Don’t try to optimize too early. Give your pieces at least three months before reviewing performance. Some really well-written pieces can rank in weeks. Others can take months. If you start to change them before you’ve really seen what they can do, you risk harming their performance.
Lots of the content myself and my team have worked on in the first half of 2022 has seen some really positive gains after the May 2022 Google Core Update, so you might even need to wait for algorithm updates to really know what’s paying off.
Here’s an example of a specific content piece that was published in January, and saw virtually no visibility for just over three months. Things started to take hold and really ramp up after the May core update (marker B) with no significant changes made to the content.
Source: Sistrix
Keep optimizing
Whilst you shouldn’t start optimizing too soon after releasing a piece of content, the landscape keeps changing. You should always keep optimizing and improving your content once you’ve given it some time to get established.
This new, key sales page was added to a client’s site in December 2020. It took hold quite quickly, so was further optimized in March 2021, and visibility increased massively from then on.
Source: Sistrix
The content quality was reviewed again when things began to dip in December 2021, which brought about recovery.
Create an optimization plan so you don’t forget to come back to key pages. Review important pages again if you see a dip in traffic, or if things change after a core update.
Balance quality with quantity
Whilst you need to keep a close eye on the quality of each page you publish, it’s more effective to focus on quality over perfection. Ten articles that are well optimized with a semantic SEO approach will be more powerful than one article that contains all the entities possible. This is because the relationships between pages are important too, and as mentioned earlier, a larger proportion of higher quality, helpful content on your site is beneficial to the whole site.
Whatever your niche, you can take a semantic approach
You can use semantic SEO to get results in any niche. Whilst the things you focus on will be different for each, the general principles always apply. Take time over your writing, consider the words you use and the relationships between them. Create clear, structured writing, and make sure you review and optimize as the search landscape changes. Enjoy creating content that’s topically relevant and you’ll see the results!
In June 2022, the Moz team released The Professional’s Guide to SEO — a resource to help level-up anyone comfortable with the basics of SEO, who have some experience practicing it professionally, and who crave the challenge and reward of moving from intermediacy toward mastery.
And now, we’re excited to announce a series of bonus chapters for different SEO niches, that will be added to the core guide over the next few months!
Managing the on- and off-page optimization tasks for a large business’s website (or websites) is only part of the battle for enterprise-level SEOs. In order for your SEO tactics to be successful, you also need to consider the bigger operational and interdepartmental workflows and priorities that will come into play. With all that in mind, this chapter will help you:
Break silos and create a culture of SEO
Scale your SEO efforts
Use SEO to bolster your brand
Develop meaningful content at the enterprise level
Improve your link acquisition strategies
Who should read this chapter?
If you’re an in-house or agency SEO that works for or with large businesses (think Fortune 1000), or large websites with thousands of pages (like travel and listings sites) this chapter is for you!
Ready to learn?
Level-up your enterprise SEO with this bonus chapter to the Professional’s Guide to SEO! Use the tips in this chapter as a guideline when you need to scale up your efforts, and be sure to check out the rest of the guide for more expert SEO advice.
Heart-on-my-sleeve: I’m stricken over climate change and wondering how I can help. What have I been doing about it lately? Listening to two remarkable women interview some outstanding experts on marketing and business sustainability.
Co-authors of the celebrated book Sustainable Marketing – How To Drive Profits with Purpose, Gemma Butler and Michelle Carvill have got something really special going on over on the Can Marketing Save the Planet? podcast. I’ve been glued to their broadcasts, and have been speaking with them while researching this piece. My vision of marketing as a catalyst for good is being refreshed and refined as I absorb why renowned creatives are defining sustainability as thecritical skill now for their careers and lives. This is my chance to share what I’m learning with you.
We’ll be swimming mainly at the deep end of the big business pool, but I’ll also be doing some local laps with you on what we learn so that we can apply large sustainability takeaways to nearby small business marketing, strengthening what I believe is the best of all business narratives. Let’s dive in!
We always start with a goal
Image credit: Tobias Abel
Every good SEO and marketer already knows that we base initiatives on client goals. At ninety years of age, Professor Philip Kotler has earned the honorific title of “Father of Modern Marketing”. He has the lived experience necessary to explain how marketing grew up in an era in which the industry believed that people have an infinite number of desires and that business has an infinite supply of resources, but now he’s telling the world that our job is to market “deconsumption or more sensible consumption”.
Given this, Ollie Deane and Guy Jones, founders of The Goodnet, made the clearest statement of goals for marketing sustainability that I heard in any episode:
“The prize is hundreds of millions of people living their lives differently and more sustainably than how we live now.”
Now we know what success will look like.
Owning up
Image credit: David Ellis
“We’ve got a long way to go in regaining trust in marketing. It’s time for marketing to become the conscience of a business, and it can only do that if it stands up and takes responsibility for having been part of the problem and having contributed to this overconsumption that is part of the big problem. We in marketing are responsible for helping companies sell a whole bunch of stuff that people probably don’t need…Marketing has done it through having the expertise and the skills and the art of persuasion. So, to take all those great qualities and realign them with ensuring that brands do the right thing, becoming proper brand custodians, protecting brand integrity, protecting brand reputation, and driving that through – that’s where I think marketing can make a real difference.” – Sarah Duncan, sustainability consultant and author of ‘The Ethical Business Book’
If Butler and Carvill could interview a landfill loaded with decades of undegraded hula hoops, styrofoam ice chests, and coffee pods, I’m sure it would groan agreement to this statement of accountability from creatives like Duncan. When marketing is based on transitory persuasion rather than sustainable human happiness, we write narratives that create trending desires for things that aren’t actually good for us or our planet in the long term.
To take the sustainability journey, marketers can first own the blame for our share of the landfills and their underlying fossil fuel ingredients. Only then, as Duncan suggests, can we rededicate our valuable talents to promoting what is authentically good for all of us, including our common home. In other words, if we were able to talk people into pollution and overconsumption, we can talk them back out of it, too.
The 3 C’s and the 3 P’s: Where marketing’s at right now
Image credit: John Englart
“If marketing doesn’t change behaviors, what’s that? It’s not marketing.” – Phil Korbel, Co-Founder, The Carbon Literacy Project
“As a marketer, would you rather be a master of persuasion or a master of authenticity?” – author and Director of ServiceBrand Global, Alan Williams
No regular reader of the Moz blog needs to be told that the whole way in which we think and talk about search marketing and customers is significantly changing. It might be said that, despite its potential for connecting people, the Internet first threw up a barrier between folk and brands, with all of us acting weirdly on either side in terms of anonymity, low-quality ranking tactics, and other behaviors we’d likely never employ in the real world. I think Alan Williams best sums up an important shift that is happening now with the 3 Cs, which are:
1) Choice: Whereas customers formerly made choices primarily on the basis of what was the best deal for them, they are now increasingly prioritizing what their values are. Williams gives Fair Trade as an example in which people are willing to spend a 20% premium if they value how a product makes it onto a shelf.
2) Communication: We’re all now becoming more comfortable with the Internet making it possible for customers and brands to communicate thoughts and feelings in both directions, instantaneously.
3) Control: This element is the one with which local business owners will already be abundantly familiar due to the rise of local reviews. Whereas brands in the past used to decide how they wanted to be seen and hire PR and marketing firms to promote that vision hoping to persuade a number of people to it, now, organizations are not what they say about themselves, but what others say about them. It’s a major shift in the dimension of control.
In sum, we now have values-driven customers who are readily telling brand stories to everyone who is communicating with them online. Again, local brands will be particularly aware of the need Williams highlights for authenticity and transparency and for owning up whenever mistakes occur. His redefinition of marketing strikes me as truly fit for this moment:
“Marketing is not about persuasion any more; it’s about making sure that everything that happens within the organization is informed by its values, because if it’s not, it will not be perceived as authentic and people will not want to have the connection and relationship with it.”
Brands large and small are experiencing this change and responding to it in a variety of ways, and here we return to Butler and Carvill’s remarkable interview with Sarah Duncan who referenced the triple bottom line concept originated by “sustainability Godfather” John Elkington, author of Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism. With the rising generations deeply interested in climate action and championing least consumption, upcycling, recycling and circularity, and with incoming marketing staff walking into organizations from the global school strike marches launched by Greta Thunberg, Elkington codified this economic approach:
1) People: No business has any future without its customers.
2) Planet: No business can thrive on an uninhabitable planet.
3) Profit: Business can become profitable from helping and healing people and planet, rather than harming them.
Some companies now set out extra unoccupied chairs at board meetings to represent people and planet, and many brands are doing outstanding work in sustainability, but the 3 Ps are also where we get into the dark places of greenwashing. How bad is it? So bad that John Elkington has spoken of revoking his triple bottom line due to corporate abuse of it.
Duncan Meisal, director of Clean Creatives speaks with absolute clarity on the fossil fuel industry being responsible for ¾ of pollution, of the seven million human beings who die untimely deaths every year from this pollution, and of the industry being the worst of all greenwashers. While we SEOs are busy right now trying to understand how to respond to frameworks like E-A-T and the Helpful Content Update with truth and authenticity, Meisal calls out oil and gas companies for mass deception:
“We have invented all the technology we need to solve climate change. There is no fanciful future technology we need to begin this transition. We don’t need any new oil wells, gas, or coal, but the fossil fuel industry is spending over 99% of its capital expenditures on opening new oil wells and pipelines that we don’t need. There is not a scientific case for expanding the oil and gas industry. The fossil fuel industry is simply trying to keep its business alive, but it is doing so at a catastrophic cost to the rest of the planet…The companies causing this pollution are investing hugely in greenwashing by telling stories about ‘look at us inventing algae fuel’, or ‘we sent someone to Antarctica on biofuel.’ The majority of the ads they are creating are about clean energy investments which they aren’t actually undertaking at scale.”
Because polluters wouldn’t be nearly so good at telling these tragically misleading stories without the skills of creatives, millions of marketers with a life-stake in a livable planet are now standing at a fork in the road.
Marketer’s choice: Stay, go, but speak up wherever you are
Image credit: Simon G
From listening to Butler and Carvill speak to multiple guests deeply embedded in big brand marketing, I’ve realized that creatives are facing two career choices in our era:
1. Go
You can take your marketing voice away from the worst polluters. You can become one of the many creatives who are signing Can Marketing Save the Planet’s Sustainable Marketer Manifesto, which acts as a hippocratic oath-like declaration to use your skills only for good, as well as pledges like the one from Clean Creatives which vow that your agency will refuse all contracts with the fossil fuel industry.
By withdrawing your incredible talents from the use of severe polluters, you’ll be standing in the company of climate scientists like those who canceled their speaking engagements at the Science Museum of London’s climate change exhibition sponsored by Shell Oil. You can decide that your marketing agency will only accept clients who are seriously committed to people and planet, not just profit. And it’s important to know that this is a two-way street. Meisal mentions that ethical brands are refusing to hire agencies that have polluters on their client rosters, saying,
“Why would we do business with marketers who are helping other brands do harm?”
2. Stay
Every business has some carbon footprint and as an ethical marketer, you need to know what that is so you can decide if you want to stay working for a problematic brand with the goal of radically changing it from the inside. From Korbel’s interview, I learned that 40% of marketers have now realized they need to become carbon literate for the sake of self-respect and career goals. Even if you are working for least-polluting local businesses, advocate for your org to send you for essential training to resources like carbonliteracy.org.
The BBC, which was an early adopter of this strategy, literally shut its staff in a room for a carbon literacy training day, a process described by one attendee as making them feel like a terrible human being by lunchtime, but knowing by day’s end what to do about it.
Sarah Duncan advises you to be ready to make people uncomfortable if you become trained to help brands transition to sustainable models. She says you must be prepared to prod and poke, no matter how junior you are in an organization, to be continually curious with your questions, and to learn to frame issues in third-party language, like “this is what our customers say they want,” as well as making the business case in commercial language. Deloitte finds that nearly half of youngest staffers are putting pressure on their employers to act on climate change. If you succeed in bringing about serious transformation as a result of workplace advocacy, it can be a major career and life accomplishment.
If, however, an agency or brand you’re staying with doesn’t act quickly enough to become sustainable and is stubborn in the face of essential change, you’re likely looking at an organization that is about to fail. The Paris Climate Agreement is real, and its regulations are about to be felt around the world. Korbel says that future is already here, noting,
“If you’re in a supply chain to any large organization, if they’re not already, your clients are going to go, ‘What are your scope 3 emissions?’ and if you’re left going, ‘Huh?’, if you don’t understand what a science-based target is, you’re not in the game. There will be businesses that fail because they’re simply not going to get the work – their publics, their clients, their staff, their punters, will simply say, ‘No, not having it.’”
As I listen to Meisal watching Exxon, which he describes as having been “the richest company in the history of money just a decade ago”, being removed from the Dow Index in 2021 and generally crashing and burning after haunting my youth with images of oiled wildlife, it’s time to ask what is actually working now in the sustainable marketing world.
A narrative of gains, not losses
Image credit: Ffion Atkinson
Butler and Carvill’s guests have made me realize that marketers have three tasks ahead of us:
1) Win on messaging, and rethink competition
Capitalism is so tied up with competition that it can be hard to separate the one from the other. Supermarket A seeing Supermarket B as their fierce foe may be standard, but it no longer works as a use of essential creative energy in the PPP/CCC dynamic. We need to identify our real opponents.
Oil and gas lobbyists and their social trolls are spending their energy (and money) writing a stark narrative of our future without fossil fuels so that they can stall transition while squeezing out every last penny. SEOs likely already know that the minute they post a popular tweet about solar panels, or electric vehicles, or the obvious cause of climate disasters, all kinds of unknown accounts rush to the defense of polluters. They want very badly to paint a bleak picture of a society running on the gifts of wind, water and solar, and unfortunately, destructive marketing like this not only influences governmental policy making, but also fills humans with confusion and with dread of the future. Korbel wisely points out how to see clearly through this false narrative of losses.
“It’s quite the opposite. It’s about having more. It’s about having more connection with people, less obsession with useless stuff we can’t afford, and actually looking at things of tangible value – that sense of personal connection to the people, communities and things around us that actually make us happy.”
With saving the planet becoming core to business models, smart big brands will rethink who their real competition is and band together against polluters to create a living wall of messaging about a healthy and happy green future for all of us. In this scenario, Supermarkets A and B can stop scrapping over the lowest price of potatoes and start sharing with one another how they are overhauling their supply chains to meet carbon goals, and what gains in community mental and physical health they are fostering. By working together, brands can re-envision competitive advantage as making connections to share institutional knowledge with the goal of winning out over polluters.
2) Transformational and inclusive storytelling
Kotler reminds us that marketing is research and that it originated in finding out what people want and how to give it to them, not in persuading them to want things they don’t need. Meanwhile, Goodvertising founder Thomas Kolster says that what modern customers want to know most from brands is, “Who can you help me become?” Studies find that people want to become healthier, greener, smarter, and more connected, and according to Kolster, about ⅓ of them are willing to pay a premium price for the help. Thus, the first half of task #2 is for marketers to write the honest, hope-filled narrative of transformation and transition for all who can afford it.
The second half comes down to an embracing welcome of inclusion for all of us, regardless of income. It’s an unacceptable worldview that planetary stewardship is only for the privileged and I listened with great interest to Collective Stories Director, Helen Hepworth, explain how a major UK supermarket chain has intentionally installed its least-packaging options in one of the poorest neighborhoods in West Yorkshire. It made me think of how often I hear wise and thrifty elders in Ireland calling into talk radio shows to explain all the little, daily things they are doing to help save the Earth for their descendents. As a marketer, don’t exclude any fellow human being who is eager for a message of hope and a chance to contribute to healing.
3) Inventing frameworks for reporting
SEOs now have a long history and multiple tools and methodologies surrounding measuring and reporting movement and success. I’ve learned that sustainable marketers are just at the beginning of this journey, as Sarah Duncan describes,
“We have fairly internationally-understood frameworks for financial reporting, but we don’t have the same maturity when it comes to non-financial reporting…With the triple bottom line you can throw in a few initiatives and say you’ve got a triple bottom line without it having that kind of integrity. You’ve got to have clear action plans, you’ve got to have clear initiatives that you can measure with metrics so that you can report on them with the same authority that you would for your financial performance.”
Bringing sustainability to the core of the businesses you market may actually involve you inventing your own way of tracking outcomes. Deane and Jones are urging the industry to brainstorm ways to quantify how transformative marketing is affecting behavioral changes in society. This is a great moment of opportunity for truly creative marketers!
A special word with Michelle Carvill
The sustainable mindset doesn’t just transform business, it transforms the lives of marketers, and I was truly honored that Michelle Carvill graciously offered me this summary of her own journey:
“When writing and researching our book, there were just so many lightbulb moments and life-changing realizations. Understanding the reality of how marketing has driven unprecedented levels of convenience and consumption – that more than 7 million people die of air pollution each year, that only 9% of plastic that’s been created to date ever gets recycled, that a third of all food production is wasted before it even gets to our homes, that we give little concern to precious resources such as water, learning from one of our podcast guests, Steve Haskew at Circular Computing, that every laptop made uses a whopping 190,000 liters of water from extraction to sitting on our desk.
The more we researched, the more we listened, the more we learned, the more we realized we just had to somehow, become part of the solution.
As we say often… ‘Once you see something, you simply can’t unsee it’.
At the outset, we were on a mission to write a book – by the end, we were on a mission, and still are, to champion sustainable marketing – driving education and awareness to support the approx 10.6 million marketers on the planet in using their skills, creativity and influence as a force for good.
And that’s why we started the podcast – and to date we’ve interviewed a range of people and organizations; academics, institutions, thought-leaders, founders, creatives, agencies, marketing professionals, sustainability experts, authors, economists – always posing the question; Can Marketing Save the Planet?
With every conversation, there’s learning, lessons, takeaways and importantly, hope – the realization that there are many brilliant minds focused on positive solutions. We truly are in this together – so the more we can share experience and solutions, educate and support one another the faster the positive outcomes. Urgent action is what’s required – and collective urgent action is the key to much needed planet and human civilization-saving change.”
My local lens
Image credit: Becky Striepe
Can Marketing Save the Planet? tends to highlight big brands making big impacts, but my decades of working in local search have habituated me to taking marketing and SEO lessons from all directions and downsize them to fit independent local businesses and their marketers. Almost everything we’ve covered today is directly applicable to small businesses, but with a really significant modifier: I believe that in most sectors of commerce, economic localism is the very best path forward for achieving worldwide sustainability. And it turns out that podcast guest and Wherefrom founder Adam Williams agrees when asked what he hopes business will look like ten years from now:
“I hope we have an even more profound microbusiness revolution, where people can be making their own products at an even lower entry into the market than you get today, where you’re buying and selling products in quite a local sphere. Some things can scale quite nicely (but)…once a really ethical company starts scaling, and they can just scale to the ends of the Earth, we start questioning things again. I want to see more small businesses.”
After many purposeful hours of learning from Butler and Carvill’s brilliant guests, three local lessons emerged for me:
1) Help wanted: local guardians
The more we connect our loved ones’ health and safety with climate stability, the more intense public desire becomes for sustainability. Multiple interviewees referred to the middle folk in the supply chain (namely retailers) as essential gatekeepers, urging them to put in the work to source their inventory from suppliers with the lowest possible carbon footprint to make green choices readily accessible.
At a local level, this takes on truly meaningful proportions. If my neighborhood grocer, pharmacy, housewares shop, hardware store, and clothier want to protect me, my family, and my community, then it is becoming their very honorable job to transform their shops into showcases of what is available locally. These guardians of people, planet and ethical profit can help everyone in a community quit our too-costly habit of seeking remote big brand products and replace it with loyalty to whatever is nearest and best.
In a nutshell, I’d be delighted to buy bare bread from my neighborhood baker instead of a plastic-wrapped loaf made on the other side of my country or world if it will decrease my family’s chance of experiencing a climate disaster. I don’t derive any meaningful or lasting happiness from unsustainable consumption that outweighs my love of my family and community. If local shopkeepers prioritize stocking the nearest and greenest goods, I’m truly grateful to them for their good guardianship.
2) Marketing authentic community identity
This is where local business owners band together, not as competitors, but as a united body that shows up at town councils and mayors’ offices with a sustainable vision for the community. It’s how farming allotments get opened up so that local wheat can be grown for that local loaf of bread, and so that every family in town has access to fresh, organic fruits and vegetables. It’s how a city decides to ban the construction of any new gas stations and starts building EV charging hubs.
Local search marketers can offer a significant helping hand here in facilitating the surveys their clients should be conducting to identify what customers need most as well as key sources of local pride. I grew up in a region that was once famed for its local fruit production. Our fruit was the subject of annual fairs and celebrations, a source of living wage work, and a bulwark of community identity. Then, unfortunately, localism was pushed aside in favor of a new vision of the area as an alcohol-producing tourist hub. The beautiful orchards that once fed all the families in the area were bulldozed for monocropped wine grapes, and the community has become largely lost in an overpriced fantasy that has nothing to do with residents. Teachers, firefighters, and librarians can’t afford to live here anymore and our apples now come from Argentina.
The rise of sustainability presents a remarkable opportunity for independent business owners and the creatives who work with them to discover and promote unique, diverse, inclusive new community visions. It’s time to fix the brokenness of local homelessness, hunger and other forms of suffering that have been engineered by unsustainable economics.
3) Our own two hands for good
I’ve only been listening to Can Marketing Save the Planet? for a short time, and I can’t say enough good things about its outstanding quality and timeliness, but for most of my adult life, I have been attending to the messaging emanating from Indigenous authors and speakers nearest me – leaders like Bill Tripp, Corrina Gould, and Ron Goode. In tuning into the marketing world’s shift to circular economics and regenerative least-consumption, I feel I am hearing a differently-worded echo of the fully-realized and truly time-tested wisdom that sustained abundant life on this continent for millenia.
Whereas marketers are now taking the time to ask themselves, “What am I really using my creativity for?”, and business owners who opened their doors to serve others are querying, “Am I being true to my original vision of helping people?”, my Indigenous neighbors have helped me to ask, “What was I given these two useful hands for?”
There is an Indigenous philosophy I’ve been lucky enough to encounter up and down the place called Northern California that, as best as I am able to understand it, envisions human beings as being the ones with the hands capable of helping nature continuously regenerate itself. With that in mind, my most local vision for sustainability is based in honoring and assisting the great gifts that are all around us.
I understand that some few people will spend their lives on Earth intentionally creating climate change, but that most of us don’t want wars for oil, or pipelines in our drinking water, or desolation. When we turn down the high-consumption messaging and spend a minute reflecting on the happiest moments of our lives, there is a very good chance our warmest memories stem from simply being with our loved ones, perhaps sharing a home-cooked meal, perhaps taking a walk together in some beautiful place. Most of us don’t really need anything more than that for happiness. At a local level, then, this may well be the vision of stability we are setting out today to make reality for the many generations ahead.
Innovative Man 