Thursday, May 2, 2019

People Ask Their Most Pressing SEO Questions — Our Experts Answer

Posted by TheMozTeam

We teamed up with our friends at Duda, a website design scaling platform service, who asked their agency customers to divulge their most pressing SEO questions, quandaries, and concerns. Our in-house SEO experts, always down for a challenge, hunkered down to collaborate on providing them with answers. From Schema.org to voice search to local targeting, we're tackling real-world questions about organic search. Read on for digestible insights and further resources!

How do you optimize for international markets?

International sites can be multi-regional, multilingual, or both. The website setup will differ depending on that classification.

  • Multi-regional sites are those that target audiences from multiple countries. For example: a site that targets users in the U.S. and the U.K.
  • Multilingual sites are those that target speakers of multiple languages. For example, a site that targets both English and Spanish-speakers.

To geo-target sections of your site to different countries, you can use a country-specific domain (ccTLD) such as “.de” for Germany or subdomains/subdirectories on generic TLDs such as “example.com/de.”

For different language versions of your content, Google recommends using different URLs rather than using cookies to change the language of the content on the page. If you do this, make use of the hreflang tag to tell Google about alternate language versions of the page.

For more information on internationalization, visit Google’s “Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites” or Moz’s guide to international SEO.

How do we communicate to clients that SEO projects need ongoing maintenance work?

If your client is having difficulty understanding SEO as a continuous effort, rather than a one-and-done task, it can be helpful to highlight the changing nature of the web.

Say you created enough quality content and earned enough links to that content to earn yourself a spot at the top of page one. Because organic placement is earned and not paid for, you don’t have to keep paying to maintain that placement on page one. However, what happens when a competitor comes along with better content that has more links than your content? Because Google wants to surface the highest quality content, your page’s rankings will likely suffer in favor of this better page.

Maybe it’s not a competitor that depreciates your site’s rankings. Maybe new technology comes along and now your page is outdated or even broken in some areas.

Or how about pages that are ranking highly in search results, only to get crowded out by a featured snippet, a Knowledge Panel, Google Ads, or whatever the latest SERP feature is?

Set-it-and-forget-it is not an option. Your competitors are always on your heels, technology is always changing, and Google is constantly changing the search experience.

SEO specialists are here to ensure you stay at the forefront of all these changes because the cost of inaction is often the loss of previously earned organic visibility.

How do I see what subpages Google delivers on a search? (Such as when the main page shows an assortment of subpages below the result, via an indent.)

Sometimes, as part of a URL’s result snippet, Google will list additional subpages from that domain beneath the main title-url-description. These are called organic sitelinks. Site owners have no control over when and which URLs Google chooses to show here aside from deleting or NoIndexing the page from the site.

If you’re tracking keywords in a Moz Pro Campaign, you have the ability to see which SERP features (including sitelinks) your pages appear in.

The Moz Keyword Explorer research tool also allows you to view SERP features by keyword:

What are the best techniques for analyzing competitors?

One of the best ways to begin a competitor analysis is by identifying the URLs on your competitor’s site that you’re directly competing with. The idea of analyzing an entire website against your own can be overwhelming, so start with the areas of direct competition.

For example, if you’re targeting the keyword “best apple pie recipes,” identify the top ranking URL(s) for that particular query and evaluate them against your apple pie recipe page.

You should consider comparing qualities such as:

Moz also created the metrics Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) to help website owners better understand their ranking ability compared to their competitors. For example, if your URL has a PA of 35 and your competitor’s URL has a PA of 40, it’s likely that their URL will rank more favorably in search results.

Competitor analysis is a great benchmarking tool and can give you great ideas for your own strategies, but remember, if your only strategy is emulation, the best you’ll ever be is the second-best version of your competitors!

As an SEO agency, can you put a backlink to your website on clients’ pages without getting a Google penalty? (Think the Google Penguin update.)

Many website design and digital marketing agencies add a link to their website in the footer of all their clients’ websites (usually via their logo or brand name). Google says in their quality guidelines that “creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines” and they use the example of “widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites.” This does not mean that all such footer links are a violation of Google’s guidelines. What it does mean is that these links have to be vouched for by the site’s owner. For example, an agency cannot require this type of link on their clients’ websites as part of their terms of service or contract. You must allow your client the choice of using nofollow or removing the link.

The fourth update of the Google Penguin algorithm was rolled into Google’s core algorithm in September of 2016. This new “gentler” algorithm, described in the Google Algorithm Change History, devalues unnatural links, rather than penalizing sites, but link schemes that violate Google’s quality guidelines should still be avoided.

We’re working on a new website. How do we communicate the value of SEO to our customers?

When someone searches a word or phrase related to a business, good SEO ensures that the business’s website shows up prominently in the organic (non-ad) search results, that their result is informative and enticing enough to prompt searchers to click, and that the visitor has a positive experience with the website. In other words, good SEO helps a website get found, get chosen, and convert new business.

That’s done through activities that fall into three main categories:

  • Content: Website content should be written to address your audience’s needs at all stages of their purchase journey: from top-of-funnel, informational content to bottom-of-funnel, I-want-to-buy content. Search engine optimized content is really just content that is written around the topics your audience wants and in the formats they want it, with the purpose of converting or assisting conversions.
  • Links: Earning links to your web content from high-quality, relevant websites not only helps Google find your content, it signals that your site is trustworthy.
  • Accessibility: Ensuring that your website and its content can be found and understood by both search engines and people. A strong technical foundation also increases the likelihood that visitors to the website have a positive experience on any device.

Why is SEO valuable? Simply put, it’s one more place to get in front of people who need the products or services you offer. With 40–60 billion Google searches in the US every month, and more than 41% / 62% (mobile / desktop) of clicks going to organic, it’s an investment you can’t afford to ignore.

How do you optimize for voice search? Where do you find phrases used via tools like Google Analytics?

Google doesn’t yet separate out voice query data from text query data, but many queries don’t change drastically with the medium (speaking vs. typing the question), so the current keyword data we have can still be a valuable way to target voice searchers. It’s important here to draw the distinction between voice search (“Hey Google, where is the Space Needle?”) and voice commands (ex: “Hey Google, tell me about my day”) — the latter are not queries, but rather spoken tasks that certain voice assistant devices will respond to. These voice commands differ from what we’d type, but they are not the same as a search query.

Voice assistant devices typically pull their answers to informational queries from their Knowledge Graph or from the top of organic search results, which is often a featured snippet. That’s why one of the best ways to go after voice queries is to capture featured snippets.

If you’re a local business, it’s also important to have your GMB data completely and accurately filled out, as this can influence the results Google surfaces for voice assistance like, “Hey Google, find me a pizza place near me that’s open now.”

Should my clients use a service such as Yext? Do they work? Is it worth it?

Automated listings management can be hugely helpful, but there are some genuine pain points with Yext, in particular. These include pricing (very expensive) and the fact that Yext charges customers to push their data to many directories that see little, if any, human use. Most importantly, local business owners need to understand that Yext is basically putting a paid layer of good data over the top of bad data — sweeping dirt under the carpet, you might say. Once you stop paying Yext, they pull up the carpet and there’s all your dirt again. By contrast, services like Moz Local (automated citation management) and Whitespark (manual citation management) correct your bad data at the source, rather than just putting a temporary paid Band-Aid over it. So, investigate all options and choose wisely.

How do I best target specific towns and cities my clients want to be found in outside of their physical location?

If you market a service area business (like a plumber), create a great website landing page with consumer-centric, helpful, unique content for each of your major service cities. Also very interesting for service area businesses is the fact that Google just changed its handling of setting the service radius in your Google My Business dashboard so that it reflects your true service area instead of your physical address. If you market a brick-and-mortar business that customers come to from other areas, it’s typically not useful to create content saying, “People drive to us from X!” Rather, build relationships with neighboring communities in the real world, reflect them on your social outreach, and, if they’re really of interest, reflect them on your website. Both service area businesses and bricks-and-mortar models may need to invest in PPC to increase visibility in all desired locations.

How often should I change page titles and meta descriptions to help local SEO?

While it’s good to experiment, don’t change your major tags just for the sake of busy work. Rather, if some societal trend changes the way people talk about something you offer, consider editing your titles and descriptions. For example, an auto dealership could realize that its consumers have started searching for “EVs” more than electric vehicles because society has become comfortable enough with these products to refer to them in shorthand. If keyword research and trend analysis indicate a shift like this, then it may be time to re-optimize elements of your website. Changing any part of your optimization is only going to help you rank better if it reflects how customers are searching.

Read more about title tags and metas:

Should you service clients within the same niche, since there can only be one #1?

If your keywords have no local intent, then taking on two clients competing for the same terms nationally could certainly be unethical. But this is a great question, because it presents the opportunity to absorb the fact that for any keyword for which Google perceives a local intent, there is no longer only one #1. For these search terms, both local and many organic results are personalized to the location of the searcher.

Your Mexican restaurant client in downtown isn’t really competing with your Mexican restaurant client uptown when a user searches for “best tacos.” Searchers’ results will change depending on where they are in the city when they search. So unless you’ve got two identical businesses within the same couple of blocks in a city, you can serve them both, working hard to find the USP of each client to help them shine bright in their particular setting for searchers in close proximity.

Is it better to have a one-page format or break it into 3–5 pages for a local service company that does not have lengthy content?

This question is looking for an easy way out of publishing when you’ve become a publisher. Every business with a website is a publisher, and there’s no good excuse for not having adequate content to create a landing page for each of your services, and a landing page for each of the cities you serve. I believe this question (and it’s a common one!) arises from businesses not being sure what to write about to differentiate their services in one location from their services in another. The services are the same, but what’s different is the location!

Publish text and video reviews from customers there, showcase your best projects there, offer tips specific to the geography and regulations there, interview service people, interview experts, sponsor teams and events in those service locations, etc. These things require an investment of time, but you’re in the publishing business now, so invest the time and get publishing! All a one-page website shows is a lack of commitment to customer service. For more on this, read Overcoming Your Fear of Local Landing Pages.

How much content do you need for SEO?

Intent, intent, intent! Google’s ranking signals are going to vary depending on the intent behind the query, and thank goodness for that! This is why you don’t need a 3,000-word article for your product page to rank, for example.

The answer to “how much content does my page need?” is “enough content for it to be complete and comprehensive,” which is a subjective factor that is going to differ from query to query.

Whether you write 300 words or 3,000 words isn’t the issue. It’s whether you completely and thoroughly addressed the page topic.

Check out these Whiteboard Fridays around content for SEO:


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Win That Pitch: How SEO Agencies Can Land New Business

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How Do I Improve My Domain Authority (DA)?

Posted by Dr-Pete

The Short Version: Don't obsess over Domain Authority (DA) for its own sake. Domain Authority shines at comparing your overall authority (your aggregate link equity, for the most part) to other sites and determining where you can compete. Attract real links that drive traffic, and you'll improve both your Domain Authority and your rankings.

Unless you've been living under a rock, over a rock, or really anywhere rock-adjacent, you may know that Moz has recently invested a lot of time, research, and money in a new-and-improved Domain Authority. People who use Domain Authority (DA) naturally want to improve their score, and this is a question that I admit we've avoided at times, because like any metric, DA can be abused if taken out of context or viewed in isolation.

I set out to write a how-to post, but what follows can only be described as a belligerent FAQ ...

Why do you want to increase DA?

This may sound like a strange question coming from an employee of the company that created Domain Authority, but it's the most important question I can ask you. What's your end-goal? Domain Authority is designed to be an indicator of success (more on that in a moment), but it doesn't drive success. DA is not used by Google and will have no direct impact on your rankings. Increasing your DA solely to increase your DA is pointless vanity.

So, I don't want a high DA?

I understand your confusion. If I had to over-simplify Domain Authority, I would say that DA is an indicator of your aggregate link equity. Yes, all else being equal, a high DA is better than a low DA, and it's ok to strive for a higher DA, but high DA itself should not be your end-goal.

So, DA is useless, then?

No, but like any metric, you can't use it recklessly or out of context. Our Domain Authority resource page dives into more detail, but the short answer is that DA is very good at helping you understand your relative competitiveness. Smart SEO isn't about throwing resources at vanity keywords, but about understanding where you realistically have a chance at competing. Knowing that your DA is 48 is useless in a vacuum. Knowing that your DA is 48 and the sites competing on a query you're targeting have DAs from 30-45 can be extremely useful. Likewise, knowing that your would-be competitors have DAs of 80+ could save you a lot of wasted time and money.

But Google says DA isn't real!

This topic is a blog post (or eleven) in and of itself, but I'm going to reduce it to a couple points. First, Google's official statements tend to define terms very narrowly. What Google has said is that they don't use a domain-level authority metric for rankings. Ok, let's take that at face value. Do you believe that a new page on a low-authority domain (let's say DA = 25) has an equal chance of ranking as a high-authority domain (DA = 75)? Of course not, because every domain benefits from its aggregate internal link equity, which is driven by the links to individual pages. Whether you measure that aggregate effect in a single metric or not, it still exists.

Let me ask another question. How do you measure the competitiveness of a new page, that has no Page Authority (or PageRank or whatever metrics Google uses)? This question is a big part of why Domain Authority exists — to help you understand your ability to compete on terms you haven't targeted and for content you haven't even written yet.

Seriously, give me some tips!

I'll assume you've read all of my warnings and taken them seriously. You want to improve your Domain Authority because it's the best authority metric you have, and authority is generally a good thing. There are no magical secrets to improving the factors that drive DA, but here are the main points:

1. Get more high-authority links

Shocking, I know, but that's the long and short of it. Links from high-authority sites and pages still carry significant ranking power, and they drive both Domain Authority and Page Authority. Even if you choose to ignore DA, you know high-authority links are a good thing to have. Getting them is the topic of thousands of posts and more than a couple of full-length novels (well, ok, books — but there's probably a novel and feature film in the works).

2. Get fewer spammy links

Our new DA score does a much better job of discounting bad links, as Google clearly tries to do. Note that "bad" doesn't mean low-authority links. It's perfectly natural to have some links from low-authority domains and pages, and in many cases it's both relevant and useful to searchers. Moz's Spam Score is pretty complex, but as humans we intuitively know when we're chasing low-quality, low-relevance links. Stop doing that.

3. Get more traffic-driving links

Our new DA score also factors in whether links come from legitimate sites with real traffic, because that's a strong signal of usefulness. Whether or not you use DA regularly, you know that attracting links that drive traffic is a good thing that indicates relevance to searches and drives bottom-line results. It's also a good reason to stop chasing every link you can at all costs. What's the point of a link that no one will see, that drives no traffic, and that is likely discounted by both our authority metrics and Google.

You can't fake real authority

Like any metric based on signals outside of our control, it's theoretically possible to manipulate Domain Authority. The question is: why? If you're using DA to sell DA 10 links for $1, DA 20 links for $2, and DA 30 links for $3, please, for the love of all that is holy, stop (and yes, I've seen that almost verbatim in multiple email pitches). If you're buying those links, please spend that money on something more useful, like sandwiches.

Do the work and build the kind of real authority that moves the needle both for Moz metrics and Google. It's harder in the short-term, but the dividends will pay off for years. Use Domain Authority to understand where you can compete today, cost-effectively, and maximize your investments. Don't let it become just another vanity metric.


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The One-Hour Guide to SEO: Link Building - Whiteboard Friday

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4 Unconventional Ways to Become a Better SEO

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Using STAT for Content Strategy - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by DiTomaso

Search results are sophisticated enough to show searchers not only the content they want, but in the format they want it. Being able to identify searcher intent and interest based off of ranking results can be a powerful driver of content strategy. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we warmly welcome Dana DiTomaso as she describes her preferred tools and methods for developing a modern and effective content strategy.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. My name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm President and partner of Kick Point, which is a digital marketing agency based way up in Edmonton, Alberta. Come visit sometime.

What I'm going to be talking about today is using STAT for content strategy. STAT, if you're not familiar with STAT Search Analytics, which is in my opinion the best ranking tool on the market and Moz is not paying me to say that, although they did pay for STAT, so now STAT is part of the Moz family of products. I really like STAT. I've been using it for quite some time. They are also Canadian. That may or may not influence my decision.

But one of the things that STAT does really well is it doesn't just show you where you're ranking, but it breaks down what type of rankings and where you should be thinking about rankings. Typically I find, especially if you've been working in this field for a long time, you might think about rankings and you still have in your mind the 10 blue links that we used to have forever ago, and that's so long gone. One of the things that's useful about using STAT rankings is you can figure out stuff that you should be pursuing other than, say, the written word, and I think that that's something really important again for marketers because a lot of us really enjoy reading stuff.

Consider all the ways searchers like to consume content

Maybe you're watching this video. Maybe you're reading the transcript. You might refer to the transcript later. A lot of us are readers. Not a lot of us are necessarily visual people, so sometimes we can forget stuff like video is really popular, or people really do prefer those places packs or whatever it might be. Thinking outside of yourself and thinking about how Google has decided to set up the search results can help you drive better content to your clients' and your own websites.

The biggest thing that I find that comes of this is you're really thinking about your audience a lot more because you do have to trust that Google maybe knows what it's doing when it presents certain types of results to people. It knows the intent of the keyword, and therefore it's presenting results that make sense for that intent. We can argue all day about whether or not answer boxes are awesome or terrible.

But from a visitor's perspective and a searcher's perspective, they like them. I think we need to just make sure that we're understanding where they might be showing up, and if we're playing by Google rules, people also ask is not necessarily going anywhere.

All that being said, how can we use ranking results to figure out our content strategy? The first thing about STAT, if you haven't used STAT before, again check it out, it's awesome.

Grouping keywords with Data Views

But one of the things that's really nice is you can do this thing called data views. In data views, you can group together parts of keywords. So you can do something called smart tags and say, "I want to tag everything that has a specific location name together."

Opportunities — where are you not showing up?

Let's say, for example, that you're working with a moving company and they are across Canada. So what I want to see here for opportunities are things like where I'm not ranking, where are there places box showing up that I am not in, or where are the people also ask showing up that I am not involved in. This is a nice way to keep an eye on your competitors.

Locations

Then we'll also do locations. So we'll say everything in Vancouver, group this together. Everything in Winnipeg, group this together. Everything in Edmonton and Calgary and Toronto, group all that stuff together.

Attributes (best, good, top, free, etc.)

Then the third thing can be attributes. This is stuff like best, good, top, free, cheap, all those different things that people use to describe your product, because those are definitely intent keywords, and often they will drive very different types of results than things you might consider as your head phrases.

So, for example, looking at "movers in Calgary" will drive a very different result than "top movers in Calgary." In that case, you might get say a Yelp top 10 list. Or if you're looking for "cheapest mover in Calgary,"again a different type of search result. So by grouping your keywords together by attributes, that can really help you as well determine how those types of keywords can be influenced by the type of search results that Google is putting out there.

Products / services

Then the last thing is products/services. So we'll take each product and service and group it together. One of the nice things about STAT is you can do something called smart tags. So we can, say, figure out every keyword that has the word "best" in it and put it together. Then if we ever add more keywords later, that also have the word "best,"they automatically go into that keyword group. It's really useful, especially if you are adding lots of keywords over time. I recommend starting by setting up some views that make sense.

You can just import everything your client is ranking for, and you can just take a look at the view of all these different keywords. But the problem is that there's so much data, when you're looking at that big set of keywords, that a lot of the useful stuff can really get lost in the noise. By segmenting it down to a really small level, you can start to understand that search for that specific type of term and how you fit in versus your competition.

A deep dive into SERP features

So put that stuff into STAT, give it a little while, let it collect some data, and then you get into the good stuff, which is the SERP features. I'm covering just a tiny little bit of what STAT does. Again, they didn't pay me for this. But there's lots of other stuff that goes on in here. My personal favorite part is the SERP features.

Which features are increasing/decreasing both overall and for you?

So what I like here is that in SERP features it will tell you which features are increasing and decreasing overall and then what features are increasing and decreasing for you.

This is actually from a real set for one of our clients. For them, what they're seeing are big increases in places version 3, which is the three pack of places. Twitter box is increasing. I did not see that coming. Then AMP is increasing. So that says to me, okay, so I need to make sure that I'm thinking about places, and maybe this is a client who doesn't necessarily have a lot of local offices.

Maybe it's not someone you would think of as a local client. So why are there a lot more local properties popping up? Then you can dive in and say, "Okay, only show me the keywords that have places boxes." Then you can look at that and decide: Is it something where we haven't thought about local SEO before, but it's something where searchers are thinking about local SEO? So Google is giving them three pack local boxes, and maybe we should start thinking about can we rank in that box, or is that something we care about.

Again, not necessarily content strategy, but certainly your SEO strategy. The next thing is Twitter box, and this is something where you think Twitter is dead. No one is using Twitter. It's full of terrible people, and they tweet about politics all day. I never want to use it again, except maybe Google really wants to show more Twitter boxes. So again, looking at it and saying, "Is Twitter something where we need to start thinking about it from a content perspective? Do we need to start focusing our energies on Twitter?"

Maybe you abandoned it and now it's back. You have to start thinking, "Does this matter for the keywords?" Then AMP. So this is something where AMP is really tricky obviously. There have been studies where it said, "I implemented AMP, and I lost 70% of my traffic and everything was terrible." But if that's the case, why would we necessarily be seeing more AMP show up in search results if it isn't actually something that people find useful, particularly on mobile search?

Desktop vs mobile

One of the things actually that I didn't mention in the tagging is definitely look at desktop versus mobile, because you are going to see really different feature sets between desktop and mobile for these different types of keywords. Mobile may have a completely different intent for a type of search. If you're a restaurant, for example, people looking for reservations on a desktop might have different intent from I want a restaurant right now on mobile, for example, and you're standing next to it and maybe you're lost.

What kind of intent is behind the search results?

You really have to think about what that intent means for the type of search results that Google is going to present. So for AMP, then you have to look at it and say, "Well, is this newsworthy? Why is more AMP being shown?" Should we consider moving our news or blog or whatever you happen call it into AMP so that we can start to show up for these search results in mobile? Is that a thing that Google is presenting now?

We can get mad about AMP all day, but how about instead if we actually be there? I don't want the comment section to turn into a whole AMP discussion, but I know there are obviously problems with AMP. But if it's being shown in the search results that searchers who should be finding you are seeing and you're not there, that's definitely something you need to think about for your content strategy and thinking, "Is AMP something that we need to pursue? Do we have to have more newsy content versus evergreen content?"

Build your content strategy around what searchers are looking for

Maybe your content strategy is really focused on posts that could be relevant for years, when in reality your searchers are looking for stuff that's relevant for them right now. So for example, things with movers, there's some sort of mover scandal. There's always a mover who ended up taking someone's stuff and locking it up forever, and they never gave it back to them. There's always a story like that in the news.

Maybe that's why it's AMP. Definitely investigate before you start to say, "AMP everything." Maybe it was just like a really bad day for movers, for example. Then you can see the decreases. So the decrease here is organic, which is that traditional 10 blue links. So obviously this new stuff that's coming in, like AMP, like Twitter, like places is displacing a lot of the organic results that used to be there before.

So instead you think, well, I can do organic all day, but if the results just aren't there, then I could be limiting the amount of traffic I could be getting to my website. Videos, for example, now it was really interesting for this particular client that videos is a decreasing SERP for them, because videos is actually a big part of their content strategy. So if we see that videos are decreasing, then we can take a step back and say, "Is it decreasing in the keywords that we care about? Why is it decreasing? Do we think this is a test or a longer-term trend?"

Historical data

What's nice about STAT is you can say "I want to see results for the last 7 days, 30 days, or 60 days." Once you get a year of data in there, you can look at the whole year and look at that trend and see is it something where we have to maybe rethink our video strategy? Maybe people don't like video for these phrases. Again, you could say, "But people do like video for these phrases." But Google, again, has access to more data than you do.

If Google has decided that for these search phrases video is not a thing they want to show anymore, then maybe people don't care about video the way that you thought they did. Sorry. So that could be something where you're thinking, well, maybe we need to change the type of content we create. Then the last one is carousel that showed up for this particular client. Carousel, there are ones where they show lots of different results.

I'm glad that's dropping because that actually kind of sucks. It's really hard to show up well there. So I think that's something to think about in the carousel as well. Maybe we're pleased that that's going away and then we don't have to fight it as much anymore. Then what you can see in the bottom half are what we call share of voice.

Share of voice

Share of voice is calculated based on your ranking and all of your competitors' ranking and the number of clicks that you're expected to get based on your ranking position.

So the number 1 position obviously gets more ranks than the number 100 position. So the share of voice is a percentage calculated based on how many of these types of items, types of SERP features that you own versus your competitors as well as your position in these SERP features. So what I'm looking at here is share of voice and looking at organic, places, answers, and people also ask, for example.

So what STAT will show you is the percentage of organic, and it's still, for this client — and obviously this is not an accurate chart, but this is vaguely accurate to what I saw in STAT — organic is still a big, beefy part of this client's search results. So let's not panic that it's decreasing. This is really where this context can come in. But then you can think, all right, so we know that we are doing "eeh" on organic.

Is it something where we think that we can gain more? So the green shows you your percentage that you own of this, and then the black is everyone else. Thinking realistically, you obviously cannot own 100% of all the search results all the time because Google wouldn't allow that. So instead thinking, what's a realistic thing? Are we topping out at the point now where we're going to have diminishing returns if we keep pushing on this?

Identify whether your content efforts support what you're seeing in STAT

Are we happy with how we're doing here? Maybe we need to turn our attention to something else, like answers for example. This particular client does really well on places. They own a lot of it. So for places, it's maintain, watch, don't worry about it that much anymore. Then that can drop off when we're thinking about content. We don't necessarily need to keep writing blog post for things that are going to help us to rank in the places pack because it's not something that's going to influence that ranking any further.

We're already doing really well. But instead we can look at answers and people also ask, which for this particular client they're not doing that well. It is something that's there, and it is something that it may not be one of the top increases, but it's certainly an increase for this particular client. So what we're looking at is saying, "Well, you have all these great blog posts, but they're not really written with people also ask or answers in mind. So how about we go back and rewrite the stuff so that we can get more of these answer boxes?"

That can be the foundation of that content strategy. When you put your keywords into STAT and look at your specific keyword set, really look at the SERP features and determine what does this mean for me and the type of content I need to create, whether it's more images for example. Some clients, when you're looking at e-commerce sites, some of the results are really image heavy, or they can be product shopping or whatever it might be.

There are really specific different features, and I've only shown a tiny subset. STAT captures all of the different types of SERP features. So you can definitely look at anything if it's specific to your industry. If it's a feature, they've got it in here. So definitely take a look and see where are these opportunities. Remember, you can't have a 100% share of voice because other people are just going to show up there.

You just want to make sure that you're better than everybody else. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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People Ask Their Most Pressing SEO Questions — Our Experts Answer

Posted by TheMozTeam

We teamed up with our friends at Duda, a website design scaling platform service, who asked their agency customers to divulge their most pressing SEO questions, quandaries, and concerns. Our in-house SEO experts, always down for a challenge, hunkered down to collaborate on providing them with answers. From Schema.org to voice search to local targeting, we're tackling real-world questions about organic search. Read on for digestible insights and further resources!

How do you optimize for international markets?

International sites can be multi-regional, multilingual, or both. The website setup will differ depending on that classification.

  • Multi-regional sites are those that target audiences from multiple countries. For example: a site that targets users in the U.S. and the U.K.
  • Multilingual sites are those that target speakers of multiple languages. For example, a site that targets both English and Spanish-speakers.

To geo-target sections of your site to different countries, you can use a country-specific domain (ccTLD) such as “.de” for Germany or subdomains/subdirectories on generic TLDs such as “example.com/de.”

For different language versions of your content, Google recommends using different URLs rather than using cookies to change the language of the content on the page. If you do this, make use of the hreflang tag to tell Google about alternate language versions of the page.

For more information on internationalization, visit Google’s “Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites” or Moz’s guide to international SEO.

How do we communicate to clients that SEO projects need ongoing maintenance work?

If your client is having difficulty understanding SEO as a continuous effort, rather than a one-and-done task, it can be helpful to highlight the changing nature of the web.

Say you created enough quality content and earned enough links to that content to earn yourself a spot at the top of page one. Because organic placement is earned and not paid for, you don’t have to keep paying to maintain that placement on page one. However, what happens when a competitor comes along with better content that has more links than your content? Because Google wants to surface the highest quality content, your page’s rankings will likely suffer in favor of this better page.

Maybe it’s not a competitor that depreciates your site’s rankings. Maybe new technology comes along and now your page is outdated or even broken in some areas.

Or how about pages that are ranking highly in search results, only to get crowded out by a featured snippet, a Knowledge Panel, Google Ads, or whatever the latest SERP feature is?

Set-it-and-forget-it is not an option. Your competitors are always on your heels, technology is always changing, and Google is constantly changing the search experience.

SEO specialists are here to ensure you stay at the forefront of all these changes because the cost of inaction is often the loss of previously earned organic visibility.

How do I see what subpages Google delivers on a search? (Such as when the main page shows an assortment of subpages below the result, via an indent.)

Sometimes, as part of a URL’s result snippet, Google will list additional subpages from that domain beneath the main title-url-description. These are called organic sitelinks. Site owners have no control over when and which URLs Google chooses to show here aside from deleting or NoIndexing the page from the site.

If you’re tracking keywords in a Moz Pro Campaign, you have the ability to see which SERP features (including sitelinks) your pages appear in.

The Moz Keyword Explorer research tool also allows you to view SERP features by keyword:

What are the best techniques for analyzing competitors?

One of the best ways to begin a competitor analysis is by identifying the URLs on your competitor’s site that you’re directly competing with. The idea of analyzing an entire website against your own can be overwhelming, so start with the areas of direct competition.

For example, if you’re targeting the keyword “best apple pie recipes,” identify the top ranking URL(s) for that particular query and evaluate them against your apple pie recipe page.

You should consider comparing qualities such as:

Moz also created the metrics Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) to help website owners better understand their ranking ability compared to their competitors. For example, if your URL has a PA of 35 and your competitor’s URL has a PA of 40, it’s likely that their URL will rank more favorably in search results.

Competitor analysis is a great benchmarking tool and can give you great ideas for your own strategies, but remember, if your only strategy is emulation, the best you’ll ever be is the second-best version of your competitors!

As an SEO agency, can you put a backlink to your website on clients’ pages without getting a Google penalty? (Think the Google Penguin update.)

Many website design and digital marketing agencies add a link to their website in the footer of all their clients’ websites (usually via their logo or brand name). Google says in their quality guidelines that “creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines” and they use the example of “widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites.” This does not mean that all such footer links are a violation of Google’s guidelines. What it does mean is that these links have to be vouched for by the site’s owner. For example, an agency cannot require this type of link on their clients’ websites as part of their terms of service or contract. You must allow your client the choice of using nofollow or removing the link.

The fourth update of the Google Penguin algorithm was rolled into Google’s core algorithm in September of 2016. This new “gentler” algorithm, described in the Google Algorithm Change History, devalues unnatural links, rather than penalizing sites, but link schemes that violate Google’s quality guidelines should still be avoided.

We’re working on a new website. How do we communicate the value of SEO to our customers?

When someone searches a word or phrase related to a business, good SEO ensures that the business’s website shows up prominently in the organic (non-ad) search results, that their result is informative and enticing enough to prompt searchers to click, and that the visitor has a positive experience with the website. In other words, good SEO helps a website get found, get chosen, and convert new business.

That’s done through activities that fall into three main categories:

  • Content: Website content should be written to address your audience’s needs at all stages of their purchase journey: from top-of-funnel, informational content to bottom-of-funnel, I-want-to-buy content. Search engine optimized content is really just content that is written around the topics your audience wants and in the formats they want it, with the purpose of converting or assisting conversions.
  • Links: Earning links to your web content from high-quality, relevant websites not only helps Google find your content, it signals that your site is trustworthy.
  • Accessibility: Ensuring that your website and its content can be found and understood by both search engines and people. A strong technical foundation also increases the likelihood that visitors to the website have a positive experience on any device.

Why is SEO valuable? Simply put, it’s one more place to get in front of people who need the products or services you offer. With 40–60 billion Google searches in the US every month, and more than 41% / 62% (mobile / desktop) of clicks going to organic, it’s an investment you can’t afford to ignore.

How do you optimize for voice search? Where do you find phrases used via tools like Google Analytics?

Google doesn’t yet separate out voice query data from text query data, but many queries don’t change drastically with the medium (speaking vs. typing the question), so the current keyword data we have can still be a valuable way to target voice searchers. It’s important here to draw the distinction between voice search (“Hey Google, where is the Space Needle?”) and voice commands (ex: “Hey Google, tell me about my day”) — the latter are not queries, but rather spoken tasks that certain voice assistant devices will respond to. These voice commands differ from what we’d type, but they are not the same as a search query.

Voice assistant devices typically pull their answers to informational queries from their Knowledge Graph or from the top of organic search results, which is often a featured snippet. That’s why one of the best ways to go after voice queries is to capture featured snippets.

If you’re a local business, it’s also important to have your GMB data completely and accurately filled out, as this can influence the results Google surfaces for voice assistance like, “Hey Google, find me a pizza place near me that’s open now.”

Should my clients use a service such as Yext? Do they work? Is it worth it?

Automated listings management can be hugely helpful, but there are some genuine pain points with Yext, in particular. These include pricing (very expensive) and the fact that Yext charges customers to push their data to many directories that see little, if any, human use. Most importantly, local business owners need to understand that Yext is basically putting a paid layer of good data over the top of bad data — sweeping dirt under the carpet, you might say. Once you stop paying Yext, they pull up the carpet and there’s all your dirt again. By contrast, services like Moz Local (automated citation management) and Whitespark (manual citation management) correct your bad data at the source, rather than just putting a temporary paid Band-Aid over it. So, investigate all options and choose wisely.

How do I best target specific towns and cities my clients want to be found in outside of their physical location?

If you market a service area business (like a plumber), create a great website landing page with consumer-centric, helpful, unique content for each of your major service cities. Also very interesting for service area businesses is the fact that Google just changed its handling of setting the service radius in your Google My Business dashboard so that it reflects your true service area instead of your physical address. If you market a brick-and-mortar business that customers come to from other areas, it’s typically not useful to create content saying, “People drive to us from X!” Rather, build relationships with neighboring communities in the real world, reflect them on your social outreach, and, if they’re really of interest, reflect them on your website. Both service area businesses and bricks-and-mortar models may need to invest in PPC to increase visibility in all desired locations.

How often should I change page titles and meta descriptions to help local SEO?

While it’s good to experiment, don’t change your major tags just for the sake of busy work. Rather, if some societal trend changes the way people talk about something you offer, consider editing your titles and descriptions. For example, an auto dealership could realize that its consumers have started searching for “EVs” more than electric vehicles because society has become comfortable enough with these products to refer to them in shorthand. If keyword research and trend analysis indicate a shift like this, then it may be time to re-optimize elements of your website. Changing any part of your optimization is only going to help you rank better if it reflects how customers are searching.

Read more about title tags and metas:

Should you service clients within the same niche, since there can only be one #1?

If your keywords have no local intent, then taking on two clients competing for the same terms nationally could certainly be unethical. But this is a great question, because it presents the opportunity to absorb the fact that for any keyword for which Google perceives a local intent, there is no longer only one #1. For these search terms, both local and many organic results are personalized to the location of the searcher.

Your Mexican restaurant client in downtown isn’t really competing with your Mexican restaurant client uptown when a user searches for “best tacos.” Searchers’ results will change depending on where they are in the city when they search. So unless you’ve got two identical businesses within the same couple of blocks in a city, you can serve them both, working hard to find the USP of each client to help them shine bright in their particular setting for searchers in close proximity.

Is it better to have a one-page format or break it into 3–5 pages for a local service company that does not have lengthy content?

This question is looking for an easy way out of publishing when you’ve become a publisher. Every business with a website is a publisher, and there’s no good excuse for not having adequate content to create a landing page for each of your services, and a landing page for each of the cities you serve. I believe this question (and it’s a common one!) arises from businesses not being sure what to write about to differentiate their services in one location from their services in another. The services are the same, but what’s different is the location!

Publish text and video reviews from customers there, showcase your best projects there, offer tips specific to the geography and regulations there, interview service people, interview experts, sponsor teams and events in those service locations, etc. These things require an investment of time, but you’re in the publishing business now, so invest the time and get publishing! All a one-page website shows is a lack of commitment to customer service. For more on this, read Overcoming Your Fear of Local Landing Pages.

How much content do you need for SEO?

Intent, intent, intent! Google’s ranking signals are going to vary depending on the intent behind the query, and thank goodness for that! This is why you don’t need a 3,000-word article for your product page to rank, for example.

The answer to “how much content does my page need?” is “enough content for it to be complete and comprehensive,” which is a subjective factor that is going to differ from query to query.

Whether you write 300 words or 3,000 words isn’t the issue. It’s whether you completely and thoroughly addressed the page topic.

Check out these Whiteboard Fridays around content for SEO:


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