The SEO Elevator Pitch - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

What is it you do again?

It's a question every SEO has had to answer at some point, whether to your family members over the holidays or to the developer who will eventually implement your suggestions. If you don't have a solid elevator pitch for describing your job, this is the Whiteboard Friday for you! Learn how to craft a concise, succinct description of life as an SEO without jargon, policing, or acting like a superhero.

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

Video Transcription

Hey guys, welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and I work here at Moz. Today we're going to be talking about creating an SEO elevator pitch, what is it, why we need one, and what kind of prompted this whole idea for an SEO elevator pitch.

So essentially, a couple of weeks ago, I was on Twitter and I saw John Mueller. He tweeted, "Hey, I meet with a lot of developers, and a lot of times they don't really know what SEOs do." He was genuinely asking. He was asking, "Hey, SEO community, how do you describe what you do?" I'm scrolling through, and I'm seeing a lot of different answers, and all of them I'm resonating with.

They're all things that I would probably say myself. But it's just interesting how many different answers there were to the question, "What do SEOs do and what value do they provide?" So I kind of thought to myself, "Why is that? Why do we have so many different explanations for what SEO is and what we do?" So I thought about it, and I thought that it might be a good idea for myself and maybe other SEOs if you don't already have an elevator pitch ready.

What is an SEO elevator pitch?

Now, if you're not familiar with the concept of an elevator pitch, it's basically — I have a definition here — a succinct and persuasive speech that communicates your unique value as an SEO. It's called an elevator pitch essentially because it should take about the length of time it takes to ride the elevator with someone. So you want to be able to quickly and concisely answer someone's question when they ask you, "Oh, SEO, what is that?I think I've heard of that before. What do you do?"

Why is this so hard?

So let's dive right in. So I mentioned, in the beginning, how there are so many different answers to this "what do you say you do here" type question. I think it's hard to kind of come up with a concise explanation for a few different reasons. So I wanted to dive into that a little bit first.

1. Lots of specialties within SEO

So number one, there are lots of specialties within SEO.

As the industry has advanced over the last two plus decades, it has become very diverse, and there are lots of different facets in SEO. I found myself on quite a rabbit trail. I was on LinkedIn and I was kind of browsing SEO job descriptions. I wanted to see basically: What is it that people are looking for in an SEO?

How do they describe it? What are the characteristics? So basically, I found a lot of different things, but I found a few themes that emerged. So there are your content-focused SEOs, and those are people that are your keyword research aficionados. There are the people that write search engine optimized content to drive traffic to your website. You have your link builders, people that focus almost exclusively on that.

You have your local SEOs, and you have your analysts. You have your tech SEOs, people that either work on a dev team or closely with a dev team. So I think that's okay though. There are lots of different facets within SEO, and I think that's awesome. That's, to me, a sign of maturity in our industry. So when there are a lot of different specialties within SEO, I think it's right and good for all of our elevator pitches to differ.

So if you have a specialty within SEO, it can be different. It should kind of cater toward the unique brand of SEO that you do, and that's okay.

2. Different audiences

Number two, there are different audiences. We're not always going to be talking to the same kind of person. So maybe you're talking to your boss or a client. To me, those are more revenue-focused conversations.

They want to know: What's the value of what you do? How does it affect my bottom line? How does it help me run my business and stay afloat and stay profitable? If you're talking to a developer, that's going to be a slightly different conversation. So I think it's okay if we kind of tweak our elevator pitch to make it a little bit more palatable for the people that we're talking to.

3. Algorithm maturity

Three, why this is hard is there's been, obviously, a lot of changes all the time in the algorithm, and as it matures, it's going to look like the SEO's job is completely different than last year just because the algorithm keeps maturing and it looks like our jobs are changing all the time. So I think that's a reality that we have to live with, but I still think it's important, even though things are changing all the time, to have a baseline kind of pitch that we give people when they ask us what it is we do.

So that's why it's hard. That's what your elevator pitch is.

My elevator pitch: SEO is marketing, with search engines

Then, by way of example, I thought I'd just give you my SEO elevator pitch. Maybe it will spark your creativity. Maybe it will give you some ideas. Maybe you already have one, and that's okay. But the point is not to use mine.

The point is essentially to kind of take you through what mine looks like, hopefully get your creative juices flowing, and you can create your own. So let's dive right into my pitch.

So my pitch is SEO is marketing, just with search engines. So we have the funnel here — awareness, consideration, and decision.

Awareness: Rank and attract clicks for informational queries.

First of all, I think it's important to note that SEO can help you rank and attract clicks for informational queries.

Consideration: Rank and attract clicks for evaluation queries.

So when your audience is searching for information, they want to solve their pain points, they're not ready to buy, they're just searching, we're meeting them there with content that brings them to the site, informs them, and now they're familiar with our brand. Those are great assisted conversions. Rank and attract clicks for evaluation queries. When your audience is starting to compare their options, you want to be there. You want to meet them there, and we can do that with SEO.

Decision: Rank, attract clicks, and promote conversion for bottom-funnel queries

At the decision phase, you can rank and attract clicks and kind of promote conversions for bottom of funnel queries. When people are in their "I want to buy" stage, SEO can meet them there. So I think it's important to realize that SEO isn't kind of like a cost center and not a profit center. It's not like a bottom of funnel thing. I've heard that in a lot of places, and I think it's just important to kind of draw attention to the fact that SEO is integrated throughout your marketing funnel. It's not relegated to one stage or another.

But how?

We talked about rank and attract clicks and promote conversions. But how do we do that? That's the what it does.

But how do we do it? So this is how I explain it. I think really, for me, there are two sides to the SEO's coin. We have driving, and we have supporting.

1. Driving

So on the driving side, I would say something like this. When someone searches a phrase or a keyword in Google, I make sure the business' website shows up in the non-ad results. That's important because a lot of people are like, "Oh, do you bid on keywords?"

We're like, "No, no, that's PPC." So I always just throw in "non-ad" because people understand that. So I do that through content that answers people's questions, links that help search engines find my content and show signs of authority and popularity of my content, and accessibility. So that's kind of your technical foundation.

You're making sure that your website is crawlable and it that it's index the way that you want it to be indexed. When people get there, it works. It works on mobile and on desktop. It's fast. So I think these are really the three big pillars of driving SEO — content, links, and making sure your website is technically sound. So that's how I describe the driving, the proactive side of SEO.

2. Supporting

Then two, we have supporting, and I think this is kind of an underrated or maybe it's often seen as kind of an interruption to our jobs.

But I think it's important to actually call it what it is. It's a big part of what we do. So I think we should embrace it as SEOs.

A. Be the Google Magic 8-ball

For one, we can serve as the Google Magic 8-Ball. When people come to us in our organization and they say, "Hey, I'm going to make this change, or I'm thinking about making this change.Is this going to be good or bad for SEO?"

I think it's great that people are asking that question. Always be available and always make yourself ready to answer those types of questions for people. So I think on the reactionary side we can be that kind of person that helps guide people and understand what is going to affect your organic search presence.

B. Assist marketing

Two, we can assist marketing. So on this side of the coin, we're driving.

We can drive our own marketing strategies. As SEOs, we can see how SEO can drive all phases of the funnel. But I think it's important to note that we're not the only people in our organization. Often SEOs maybe they don't even live in the marketing department. Maybe they do and they report to a marketing lead. There are other initiatives that your marketing lead could be investigating.

Maybe they say, "Hey, we've just done some market research, and here's this plan." It could be our job as SEOs to take that plan, take that strategy and translate it into something digital. I think that's a really important value that SEOs can add. We can actually assist marketing as well as drive our own efforts.

C. Fix mistakes

Then number three here, I know this is another one that kind of makes people cringe, but we are here to fix mistakes when they happen and train people so that they don't happen again. So maybe we come in on a Monday morning and we're ready to face the week, and we see that traffic has taken a nosedive or something. We go, "Oh, no," and we dive in.

We try to see what happened. But I think that's really important. It's our job or it's part of our job to kind of dive in, diagnose what happened, and not only that but support and be there to help fix it or guide the fixes, and then train and educate and make sure that people know what it is that happened and how it shouldn't happen again.

You're there to help train them and guide them. I think that's another really important way that we can support as SEOs. So that's essentially how I describe it.

3 tips for coming up with your own pitch

Before I go, I just wanted to mention some tips when you're coming up with your own SEO elevator pitch. I think it's really important to just kind of stay away from certain language when you're crafting your own "this is what I do" speech.

So the three tips I have are:

1. Stay away from jargon.

If you're giving an SEO elevator pitch, it's to people that don't know what SEO is. So try to avoid jargon. I know it's really easy as SEOs. I find myself doing it all the time. There are things that I don't think are jargon.

But then I take a couple steps back and I realize, oh yeah, that's not layman's terms. So stay away from jargon if at all possible. You're not going to benefit anyone by confusing them.

2. Avoid policing.

It can be easy as SEOs I've found and I've found myself in this trap a couple of times where we kind of act as these traffic cops that are waiting around the corner, and when people make a mistake, we're there to wag our finger at them.

So avoid any language that makes it sound like the SEOs are just the police waiting to kind of punish people for wrongdoing. We are there to help fix mistakes, but it's in a guiding and educating and supporting, kind of collaborative manner and not like a policing type of manner. Number three, I would say is kind of similar, but a little different.

3. Avoid Supermanning.

I call this Supermanning because it's the type of language that makes it sound like SEOs are here to swoop in and save the day when something goes wrong. We do. We're superheroes a lot of times. There are things that happen and thank goodness there was an SEO there to help diagnose and fix that.

But I would avoid any kind of pitch that makes it sound like your entire job is just to kind of save people. There are other people in your organization that are super smart and talented at what they do. They probably wouldn't like it if you made it sound like you were there to help them all the time. So I just think that's important to keep in mind. Don't make it seem like you're the police waiting to wag your finger at them or you're the superhero that needs to save everyone from their mistakes.

So yeah, that's my SEO elevator pitch. That's why I think it's important to have one. If you've kind of crafted your own SEO elevator pitch, I would love to hear it, and I'm sure it would be great for other SEOs to hear it as well. It's great to information share. So drop that in the comments if you feel comfortable doing that. If you don't have one, hopefully this helps. So yeah, that's it for this week's Whiteboard Friday, and come back again next week for another one.

Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog http://bit.ly/2EQUPOT
via IFTTT

Why Local Businesses Will Need Websites More than Ever in 2019

Posted by MiriamEllis

64% of 1,411 surveyed local business marketers agree that Google is becoming the new “homepage” for local businesses. Via Moz State of Local SEO Industry Report

...but please don’t come away with the wrong storyline from this statistic.

As local brands and their marketers watch Google play Trojan horse, shifting from top benefactor to top competitor by replacing former “free” publicity with paid packs, Local Service Ads, zero-click SERPs, and related structures, it’s no surprise to see forum members asking, “Do I even need a website anymore?”

Our answer to this question is,“Yes, you’ve never needed a website more than you will in 2019.” In this post, we’ll examine:

• Why it looks like local businesses don’t need websites
• Statistical proofs of why local businesses need websites now more than ever
• The current status of local business websites and most-needed improvements

How Google stopped bearing so many gifts

Within recent memory, a Google query with local intent brought up a big pack of ten nearby businesses, with each entry taking the user directly to these brands’ websites for all of their next steps. A modest amount of marketing effort was rewarded with a shower of Google gifts in the form of rankings, traffic, and conversions.

Then these generous SERPs shrank to seven spots, and then three, with the mobile sea change thrown into the bargain and consisting of layers and layers of Google-owned interfaces instead of direct-to-website links. In 2018, when we rustle through the wrapping paper, the presents we find from Google look cheaper, smaller, and less magnificent.

Consider these five key developments:

1) Zero-click mobile SERPs

This slide from a recent presentation by Rand Fishkin encapsulateshis findings regarding the growth of no-click SERPs between 2016–2018. Mobile users have experienced a 20% increase in delivery of search engine results that don’t require them to go any deeper than Google’s own interface.

2) The encroachment of paid ads into local packs

When Dr. Peter J. Myers surveyed 11,000 SERPs in 2018, he found that 35% of competitive local packs feature ads.

3) Google becoming a lead gen agency

At last count, Google’s Local Service Ads program via which they interposition themselves as the paid lead gen agent between businesses and consumers has taken over 23 business categories in 77 US cities.

4) Even your branded SERPs don’t belong to you

When a user specifically searches for your brand and your Google Knowledge Panel pops up, you can likely cope with the long-standing “People Also Search For” set of competitors at the bottom of it. But that’s not the same as Google allowing Groupon to advertise at the top of your KP, or putting lead gen from Doordash and GrubHub front and center to nickel and dime you on your own customers’ orders.

5) Google is being called the new “homepage” for local businesses

As highlighted at the beginning of this post, 64% of marketers agree that Google is becoming the new “homepage” for local businesses. This concept, coined by Mike Blumenthal, signifies that a user looking at a Google Knowledge Panel can get basic business info, make a phone call, get directions, book something, ask a question, take a virtual tour, read microblog posts, see hours of operation, thumb through photos, see busy times, read and leave reviews. Without ever having to click through to a brand’s domain, the user may be fully satisfied.

“Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.”
- Epicurus

There are many more examples we could gather, but they can all be summed up in one way: None of Google’s most recent local initiatives are about driving customers to brands’ own websites. Local SERPs have shrunk and have been re-engineered to keep users within Google’s platforms to generate maximum revenue for Google and their partners.

You may be as philosophical as Epicurus about this and say that Google has every right to be as profitable as they can with their own product, even if they don’t really need to siphon more revenue off local businesses. But if Google’s recent trajectory causes your brand or agency to conclude that websites have become obsolete in this heavily controlled environment, please keep reading.

Your website is your bedrock

“65% of 1,411 surveyed marketers observe strong correlation between organic and local rank.” - Via Moz State of Local SEO Industry Report

What this means is that businesses which rank highly organically are very likely to have high associated local pack rankings. In the following screenshot, if you take away the directory-type platforms, you will see how the brand websites ranking on page 1 for “deli athens ga” are also the two businesses that have made it into Google’s local pack:

How often do the top 3 Google local pack results also have a 1st page organic rankings?

In a small study, we looked at 15 head keywords across 7 US cities and towns. This yielded 315 possible entries in Google’s local pack. Of that 315, 235 of the businesses ranking in the local packs also had page 1 organic rankings. That’s a 75% correlation between organic website rankings and local pack presence.

*It’s worth noting that where local and organic results did not correlate, it was sometimes due the presence of spam GMB listings, or to mystery SERPs that did not make sense at first glance — perhaps as a result of Google testing, in some cases.

Additionally, many local businesses are not making it to the first page of Google anymore in some categories because the organic SERPs are inundated with best-of lists and directories. Often, local business websites were pushed down to the second page of the organic results. In other words, if spam, “best-ofs,” and mysteries were removed, the local-organic correlation would likely be much higher than 75%.

Further, one recent study found that even when Google’s Local Service Ads are present, 43.9% of clicks went to the organic SERPs. Obviously, if you can make it to the top of the organic SERPs, this puts you in very good CTR shape from a purely organic standpoint.

Your takeaway from this

The local businesses you market may not be able to stave off the onslaught of Google’s zero-click SERPs, paid SERPs, and lead gen features, but where “free” local 3-packs still exist, your very best bet for being included in them is to have the strongest possible website. Moreover, organic SERPs remain a substantial source of clicks.

Far from it being the case that websites have become obsolete, they are the firmest bedrock for maintaining free local SERP visibility amidst an increasing scarcity of opportunities.

This calls for an industry-wide doubling down on organic metrics that matter most.

Bridging the local-organic gap

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
- Aristotle

A 2017 CNBC survey found that 45% of small businesses have no website, and, while most large enterprises have websites, many local businesses qualify as “small.”

Moreover, a recent audit of 9,392 Google My Business listings found that 27% have no website link.

When asked which one task 1,411 marketers want clients to devote more resources to, it’s no coincidence that 66% listed a website-oriented asset. This includes local content development, on-site optimization, local link building, technical analysis of rankings/traffic/conversions, and website design as shown in the following Moz survey graphic:

In an environment in which websites are table stakes for competitive local pack rankings, virtually all local businesses not only need one, but they need it to be as strong as possible so that it achieves maximum organic rankings.

What makes a website strong?

The Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO offers incredibly detailed guidelines for creating the best possible website. While we recommend that everyone marketing a local business read through this in-depth guide, we can sum up its contents here by stating that strong websites combine:

• Technical basics
• Excellent usability
• On-site optimization
• Relevant content publication
• Publicity

For our present purpose, let’s take a special look at those last three elements.

On-site optimization and relevant content publication

There was a time when on-site SEO and content development were treated almost independently of one another. And while local businesses will need a make a little extra effort to put their basic contact information in prominent places on their websites (such as the footer and Contact Us page), publication and optimization should be viewed as a single topic. A modern strategy takes all of the following into account:

• Keyword and real-world research tell a local business what consumers want
• These consumer desires are then reflected in what the business publishes on its website, including its homepage, location landing pages, about page, blog and other components
• Full reflection of consumer desires includes ensuring that human language (discovered via keyword and real-world research) is implemented in all elements of each page, including its tags, headings, descriptions, text, and in some cases, markup

What we’re describing here isn’t a set of disconnected efforts. It’s a single effort that’s integral to researching, writing, and publishing the website. Far from stuffing keywords into a tag or a page’s content, focus has shifted to building topical authority in the eyes of search engines like Google by building an authoritative resource for a particular consumer demographic. The more closely a business is able to reflect customers’ needs (including the language of their needs), in every possible component of its website, the more relevant it becomes.

A hypothetical example of this would be a large medical clinic in Dallas. Last year, their phone staff was inundated with basic questions about flu shots, like where and when to get them, what they cost, would they cause side effects, what about side effects on people with pre-existing health conditions, etc. This year, the medical center’s marketing team took a look at Moz Keyword Explorer and saw that there’s an enormous volume of questions surrounding flu shots:

This tiny segment of the findings of the free keyword research tool, Answer the Public, further illustrates how many questions people have about flu shots:

The medical clinic need not compete nationally for these topics, but at a local level, a page on the website can answer nearly every question a nearby patient could have about this subject. The page, created properly, will reflect human language in its tags, headings, descriptions, text, and markup. It will tell all patients where to come and when to come for this procedure. It has the potential to cut down on time-consuming phone calls.

And, finally, it will build topical authority in the eyes of Google to strengthen the clinic’s chances of ranking well organically… which can then translate to improved local rankings.

It’s important to note that keyword research tools typically do not reflect location very accurately, so research is typically done at a national level, and then adjusted to reflect regional or local language differences and geographic terms, after the fact. In other words, a keyword tool may not accurately reflect exactly how many local consumers in Dallas are asking “Where do I get a flu shot?”, but keyword and real-world research signals that this type of question is definitely being asked. The local business website can reflect this question while also adding in the necessary geographic terms.

Local link building must be brought to the fore of publicity efforts

Moz’s industry survey found that more than one-third of respondents had no local link building strategy in place. Meanwhile, link building was listed as one of the top three tasks to which marketers want their clients to devote more resources. There’s clearly a disconnect going on here. Given the fundamental role links play in building Domain Authority, organic rankings, and subsequent local rankings, building strong websites means bridging this gap.

First, it might help to examine old prejudices that could cause local business marketers and their clients to feel dubious about link building. These most likely stem from link spam which has gotten so out of hand in the general world of SEO that Google has had to penalize it and filter it to the best of their ability.

Not long ago, many digital-only businesses were having a heyday with paid links, link farms, reciprocal links, abusive link anchor text and the like. An online company might accrue thousands of links from completely irrelevant sources, all in hopes of escalating rank. Clearly, these practices aren’t ones an ethical business can feel good about investing in, but they do serve as an interesting object lesson, especially when a local marketer can point out to a client, that best local links are typically going to result from real-world relationship-building.

Local businesses are truly special because they serve a distinct, physical community made up of their own neighbors. The more involved a local business is in its own community, the more naturally link opportunities arise from things like local:

• Sponsorships
• Event participation and hosting
• Online news
• Blogs
• Business associations
• B2B cross-promotions

There are so many ways a local business can build genuine topical and domain authority in a given community by dint of the relationships it develops with neighbors.

An excellent way to get started on this effort is to look at high-ranking local businesses in the same or similar business categories to discover what work they’ve put in to achieve a supportive backlink profile. Moz Link Intersect is an extremely actionable resource for this, enabling a business to input its top competitors to find who is linking to them.

In the following example, a small B&B in Albuquerque looks up two luxurious Tribal resorts in its city:

Link Intersect then lists out a blueprint of opportunities, showing which links one or both competitors have earned. Drilling down, the B&B finds that Marriott.com is linking to both Tribal resorts on an Albuquerque things-to-do page:

The small B&B can then try to earn a spot on that same page, because it hosts lavish tea parties as a thing-to-do. Outreach could depend on the B&B owner knowing someone who works at the local Marriott personally. It could include meeting with them in person, or on the phone, or even via email. If this outreach succeeds, an excellent, relevant link will have been earned to boost organic rank, underpinning local rank.

Then, repeat the process. Aristotle might well have been speaking of link building when he said we are what we repeatedly do and that excellence is a habit. Good marketers can teach customers to have excellent habits in recognizing a good link opportunity when they see it.

Taken altogether

Without a website, a local business lacks the brand-controlled publishing and link-earning platform that so strongly influences organic rankings. In the absence of this, the chances of ranking well in competitive local packs will be significantly less. Taken altogether, the case is clear for local businesses investing substantially in their websites.

Acting now is actually a strategy for the future

“There is nothing permanent except change.”
- Heraclitus

You’ve now determined that strong websites are fundamental to local rankings in competitive markets. You’ve absorbed numerous reasons to encourage local businesses you market to prioritize care of their domains. But there’s one more thing you’ll need to be able to convey, and that’s a sense of urgency.

Right now, every single customer you can still earn from a free local pack listing is immensely valuable for the future.

This isn’t a customer you’ve had to pay Google for, as you very well might six months, a year, or five years from now. Yes, you’ve had to invest plenty in developing the strong website that contributed to the high local ranking, but you haven’t paid a penny directly to Google for this particular lead. Soon, you may be having to fork over commissions to Google for a large portion of your new customers, so acting now is like insurance against future spend.

For this to work out properly, local businesses must take the leads Google is sending them right now for free, and convert them into long-term, loyal customers, with an ultimate value of multiple future transactions without Google as a the middle man. And if these freely won customers can be inspired to act as word-of-mouth advocates for your brand, you will have done something substantial to develop a stream of non-Google-dependent revenue.

This offer may well expire as time goes by. When it comes to the capricious local SERPs, marketers resemble the Greek philosophers who knew that change is the only constant. The Trojan horse has rolled into every US city, and it’s a gift with a questionable shelf life. We can’t predict if or when free packs might become obsolete, but we share your concerns about the way the wind is blowing.

What we can see clearly right now is that websites will be anything but obsolete in 2019. Rather, they are the building blocks of local rankings, precious free leads, and loyal revenue, regardless of how SERPs may alter in future.

For more insights into where local businesses should focus in 2019, be sure to explore the Moz State of Local SEO industry report:

Read the State of Local SEO industry report

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/2RTKrJU
via IFTTT

Evolving Keyword Research to Match Your Buyer’s Journey

Posted by matthew_jkay

Keyword research has been around as long as the SEO industry has. Search engines built a system that revolves around users entering a term or query into a text entry field, hitting return, and receiving a list of relevant results. As the online search market expanded, one clear leader emerged — Google — and with it they brought AdWords (now Google Ads), an advertising platform that allowed organizations to appear on search results pages for keywords that organically they might not.

Within Google Ads came a tool that enabled businesses to look at how many searches there were per month for almost any query. Google Keyword Planner became the de facto tool for keyword research in the industry, and with good reason: it was Google’s data. Not only that, Google gave us the ability to gather further insights due to other metrics Keyword Planner provided: competition and suggested bid. Whilst these keywords were Google Ads-oriented metrics, they gave the SEO industry an indication of how competitive a keyword was.

The reason is obvious. If a keyword or phrase has higher competition (i.e. more advertisers bidding to appear for that term) it’s likely to be more competitive from an organic perspective. Similarly, a term that has a higher suggested bid means it’s more likely to be a competitive term. SEOs dined on this data for years, but when the industry started digging a bit more into the data, we soon realized that while useful, it was not always wholly accurate. Moz, SEMrush, and other tools all started to develop alternative volume and competitive metrics using Clickstream data to give marketers more insights.

Now industry professionals have several software tools and data outlets to conduct their keyword research. These software companies will only improve in the accuracy of their data outputs. Google’s data is unlikely to significantly change; their goal is to sell ad space, not make life easy for SEOs. In fact, they've made life harder by using volume ranges for Google Ads accounts with low activity. SEO tools have investors and customers to appease and must continually improve their products to reduce churn and grow their customer base. This makes things rosy for content-led SEO, right?

Well, not really.

The problem with historical keyword research is twofold:

1. SEOs spend too much time thinking about the decision stage of the buyer’s journey (more on that later).

2. SEOs spend too much time thinking about keywords, rather than categories or topics.

The industry, to its credit, is doing a lot to tackle issue number two. “Topics over keywords” is something that is not new as I’ll briefly come to later. Frameworks for topic-based SEO have started to appear over the last few years. This is a step in the right direction. Organizing site content into categories, adding appropriate internal linking, and understanding that one piece of content can rank for several variations of a phrase is becoming far more commonplace.

What is less well known (but starting to gain traction) is point one. But in order to understand this further, we should dive into what the buyer’s journey actually is.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s or customer’s journey is not new. If you open marketing text books from years gone by, get a college degree in marketing, or even just go on general marketing blogs you’ll see it crop up. There are lots of variations of this journey, but they all say a similar thing. No matter what product or service is bought, everyone goes through this journey. This could be online or offline — the main difference is that depending on the product, person, or situation, the amount of time this journey takes will vary — but every buyer goes through it. But what is it, exactly? For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on three stages: awareness, consideration, & decision.

Awareness

The awareness stage of the buyer’s journey is similar to problem discovery, where a potential customer realizes that they have a problem (or an opportunity) but they may not have figured out exactly what that is yet.

Search terms at this stage are often question-based — users are researching around a particular area.

Consideration

The consideration stage is where a potential consumer has defined what their problem or opportunity is and has begun to look for potential solutions to help solve the issue they face.

Decision

The decision stage is where most organizations focus their attention. Normally consumers are ready to buy at this stage and are often doing product or vendor comparisons, looking at reviews, and searching for pricing information.

To illustrate this process, let’s take two examples: buying an ice cream and buying a holiday.

Being low-value, the former is not a particularly considered purchase, but this journey still takes place. The latter is more considered. It can often take several weeks or months for a consumer to decide on what destination they want to visit, let alone a hotel or excursions. But how does this affect keyword research, and the content which we as marketers should provide?

At each stage, a buyer will have a different thought process. It’s key to note that not every buyer of the same product will have the same thought process but you can see how we can start to formulate a process.

The Buyer’s Journey - Holiday Purchase

The above table illustrates the sort of queries or terms that consumers might use at different stages of their journey. The problem is that most organizations focus all of their efforts on the decision end of the spectrum. This is entirely the right approach to take at the start because you’re targeting consumers who are interested in your product or service then and there. However, in an increasingly competitive online space you should try and find ways to diversify and bring people into your marketing funnel (which in most cases is your website) at different stages.

I agree with the argument that creating content for people earlier in the journey will likely mean lower conversion rates from visitor to customer, but my counter to this would be that you're also potentially missing out on people who will become customers. Further possibilities to at least get these people into your funnel include offering content downloads (gated content) to capture user’s information, or remarketing activity via Facebook, Google Ads, or other retargeting platforms.

Moving from keywords to topics

I’m not going to bang this drum too loudly. I think many in of the SEO community have signed up to the approach that topics are more important than keywords. There are quite a few resources on this listed online, but what forced it home for me was Cyrus Shepard’s Moz article in 2014. Much, if not all, of that post still holds true today.

What I will cover is an adoption of HubSpot’s Topic Cluster model. For those unaccustomed to their model, HubSpot’s approach formalizes and labels what many search marketers have been doing for a while now. The basic premise is instead of having your site fragmented with lots of content across multiple sections, all hyperlinking to each other, you create one really in-depth content piece that covers a topic area broadly (and covers shorter-tail keywords with high search volume), and then supplement this page with content targeting the long-tail, such as blog posts, FAQs, or opinion pieces. HubSpot calls this "pillar" and "cluster" content respectively.

Source: Matt Barby / HubSpot

The process then involves taking these cluster pages and linking back to the pillar page using keyword-rich anchor text. There’s nothing particularly new about this approach aside from formalizing it a bit more. Instead of having your site’s content structured in such a way that it's fragmented and interlinking between lots of different pages and topics, you keep the internal linking within its topic, or content cluster. This video explains this methodology further. While we accept this model may not fit every situation, and nor is it completely perfect, it’s a great way of understanding how search engines are now interpreting content.

At Aira, we’ve taken this approach and tried to evolve it a bit further, tying these topics into the stages of the buyer’s journey while utilizing several data points to make sure our outputs are based off as much data as we can get our hands on. Furthermore, because pillar pages tend to target shorter-tail keywords with high search volume, they're often either awareness- or consideration-stage content, and thus not applicable for decision stage. We term our key decision pages “target pages,” as this should be a primary focus of any activity we conduct.

We’ll also look at the semantic relativity of the keywords reviewed, so that we have a “parent” keyword that we’re targeting a page to rank for, and then children of that keyword or phrase that the page may also rank for, due to its similarity to the parent. Every keyword is categorized according to its stage in the buyer’s journey and whether it's appropriate for a pillar, target, or cluster page. We also add two further classifications to our keywords: track & monitor and ignore. Definitions for these five keyword types are listed below:

Pillar page

A pillar page covers all aspects of a topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page. A keyword tagged with pillar page will be the primary topic and the focus of a page on the website. Pillar pages should be awareness- or consideration-stage content.

A great pillar page example I often refer to is HubSpot’s Facebook marketing guide or Mosi-guard’s insect bites guide (disclaimer: probably don’t click through if you don’t like close-up shots of insects!).

Cluster page

A cluster topic page for the pillar focuses on providing more detail for a specific long-tail keyword related to the main topic. This type of page is normally associated with a blog article but could be another type of content, like an FAQ page.

Good examples within the Facebook marketing topic listed above are HubSpot’s posts:

• How Do Facebook Stories Stack Up to Snapchat?
• How to Use Facebook Live: The Ultimate Guide

For Mosi-guard, they’re not utilizing internal links within the copy of the other blogs, but the "older posts" section at the bottom of the blog is referencing this guide:

• The malaria map and your guide to traveling safe

Target page

Normally a keyword or phrase linked to a product or service page, e.g. nike trainers or seo services. Target pages are decision-stage content pieces.

HubSpot’s target content is their social media software page, with one of Mosi-guard’s target pages being their natural spray product.

Track & monitor

A keyword or phrase that is not the main focus of a page, but could still rank due to its similarity to the target page keyword. A good example of this might be seo services as the target page keyword, but this page could also rank for seo agency, seo company, etc.

Ignore

A keyword or phrase that has been reviewed but is not recommended to be optimized for, possibly due to a lack of search volume, it’s too competitive, it won’t be profitable, etc.

Once the keyword research is complete, we then map our keywords to existing website pages. This gives us a list of mapped keywords and a list of unmapped keywords, which in turn creates a content gap analysis that often leads to a content plan that could last for three, six, or twelve-plus months.

Putting it into practice

I’m a firm believer in giving an example of how this would work in practice, so I’m going to walk through one with screenshots. I’ll also provide a template of our keyword research document for you to take away.

1. Harvesting keywords

The first step in the process is similar, if not identical, to every other keyword research project. You start off with a batch of keywords from the client or other stakeholders that the site wants to rank for. Most of the industry call this a seed keyword list. That keyword list is normally a minimum of 15–20 keywords, but can often be more if you’re dealing with an e-commerce website with multiple product lines.

This list is often based off nothing more than opinion: “What do we think our potential customers will search for?” It’s a good starting point, but you need the rest of the process to follow on to make sure you’re optimizing based off data, not opinion.

2. Expanding the list

Once you’ve got that keyword list, it’s time to start utilizing some of the tools you have at your disposal. There are lots, of course! We tend to use a combination of Moz Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, Keywords Everywhere, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, ranking tools, and SEMrush.

The idea of this list is to start thinking about keywords that the organization may not have considered before. Your expanded list will include obvious synonyms from your list. Take the example below:

Seed Keywords	Expanded Keywords
ski chalet	ski chalet ski chalet rental ski chalet hire ski chalet [location name] etc

There are other examples that should be considered. A client I worked with in the past once gave a seed keyword of “biomass boilers.” But after keyword research was conducted, a more colloquial term for “biomass boilers” in the UK is “wood burners.” This is an important distinction and should be picked up as early in the process as possible. Keyword research tools are not infallible, so if budget and resource allows, you may wish to consult current and potential customers about which terms they might use to find the products or services being offered.

3. Filtering out irrelevant keywords

Once you’ve expanded the seed keyword list, it’s time to start filtering out irrelevant keywords. This is pretty labor-intensive and involves sorting through rows of data. We tend to use Moz’s Keyword Explorer, filter by relevancy, and work our way down. As we go, we’ll add keywords to lists within the platform and start to try and sort things by topic. Topics are fairly subjective, and often you’ll get overlap between them. We’ll group similar keywords and phrases together in a topic based off the semantic relativity of those phrases. For example:

Topic	Keywords
ski chalet	ski chalet ski chalet rental ski chalet hire ski chalet [location name]
catered chalet	catered chalet luxury catered chalet catered chalet rental catered chalet hire catered chalet [location name]
ski accommodation	ski accommodation cheap ski accommodation budget ski accommodation ski accomodation [location name]

Many of the above keywords are decision-based keywords — particularly those with rental or hire in them. They're showing buying intent. We’ll then try to put ourselves in the mind of the buyer and come up with keywords towards the start of the buyer’s journey.

Topic	Keywords	Buyer’s stage
ski resorts	ski resorts best ski resorts ski resorts europe ski resorts usa ski resorts canada top ski resorts cheap ski resorts luxury ski resorts	Consideration
skiing	skiing skiing guide skiing beginner’s guide	Consideration
family holidays	family holidays family winter holidays family trips	Awareness

This helps us cater to customers that might not be in the frame of mind to purchase just yet — they're just doing research. It means we cast the net wider. Conversion rates for these keywords are unlikely to be high (at least, for purchases or enquiries) but if utilized as part of a wider marketing strategy, we should look to capture some form of information, primarily an email address, so we can send people relevant information via email or remarketing ads later down the line.

4. Pulling in data

Once you’ve expanded the seed keywords out, Keyword Explorer’s handy list function enables your to break things down into separate topics. You can then export that data into a CSV and start combining it with other data sources. If you have SEMrush API access, Dave Sottimano’s API Library is a great time saver; otherwise, you may want to consider uploading the keywords into the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension and manually exporting the data and combining everything together. You should then have a spreadsheet that looks something like this:

You could then add in additional data sources. There’s no reason you couldn’t combine the above with volumes and competition metrics from other SEO tools. Consider including existing keyword ranking information or Google Ads data in this process. Keywords that convert well on PPC should do the same organically and should therefore be considered. Wil Reynolds talks about this particular tactic a lot.

5. Aligning phrases to the buyer’s journey

The next stage of the process is to start categorizing the keywords into the stage of the buyer’s journey. Something we’ve found at Aira is that keywords don’t always fit into a predefined stage. Someone looking for “marketing services” could be doing research about what marketing services are, but they could also be looking for a provider. You may get keywords that could be either awareness/consideration or consideration/decision. Use your judgement, and remember this is subjective. Once complete, you should end up with some data that looks similar to this:

This categorization is important, as it starts to frame what type of content is most appropriate for that keyword or phrase.

The next stage of this process is to start noticing patterns in keyphrases and where they get mapped to in the buyer’s journey. Often you’ll see keywords like “price” or ”cost” at the decision stage and phrases like “how to” at the awareness stage. Once you start identifying these patterns, possibly using a variation of Tom Casano’s keyword clustering approach, you can then try to find a way to automate so that when these terms appear in your keyword column, the intent automatically gets updated.

Once completed, we can then start to define each of our keywords and give them a type:

• Pillar page
• Cluster page
• Target page
• Track & monitor
• Ignore

We use this document to start thinking about what type of content is most effective for that piece given the search volume available, how competitive that term is, how profitable the keyword could be, and what stage the buyer might be at. We’re trying to find that sweet spot between having enough search volume, ensuring we can actually rank for that keyphrase (there’s no point in a small e-commerce startup trying to rank for “buy nike trainers”), and how important/profitable that phrase could be for the business. The below Venn diagram illustrates this nicely:

We also reorder the keywords so keywords that are semantically similar are bucketed together into parent and child keywords. This helps to inform our on-page recommendations:

From the example above, you can see "digital marketing agency" as the main keyword, but “digital marketing services” & “digital marketing agency uk” sit underneath.

We also use conditional formatting to help identify keyword page types:

And then sheets to separate topics out:

Once this is complete, we have a data-rich spreadsheet of keywords that we then work with clients on to make sure we’ve not missed anything. The document can get pretty big, particularly when you’re dealing with e-commerce websites that have thousands of products.

5. Keyword mapping and content gap analysis

We then map these keywords to existing content to ensure that the site hasn’t already written about the subject in the past. We often use Google Search Console data to do this so we understand how any existing content is being interpreted by the search engines. By doing this we’re creating our own content gap analysis. An example output can be seen below:

The above process takes our keyword research and then applies the usual on-page concepts (such as optimizing meta titles, URLs, descriptions, headings, etc) to existing pages. We’re also ensuring that we’re mapping our user intent and type of page (pillar, cluster, target, etc), which helps us decide what sort of content the piece should be (such as a blog post, webinar, e-book, etc). This process helps us understand what keywords and phrases the site is not already being found for, or is not targeted to.

Free template

I promised a template Google Sheet earlier in this blog post and you can find that here.

Do you have any questions on this process? Ways to improve it? Feel free to post in the comments below or ping me over on Twitter!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/2C3n8rO
via IFTTT

Content Comprehensiveness - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

When Google says they prefer comprehensive, complete content, what does that really mean? In this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday, Kameron Jenkins explores actionable ways to translate the demands of the search engines into valuable, quality content that should help you rank.

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

Video Transcription

Hey, guys. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and I work here at Moz.

Today we're going to be talking about the quality of content comprehensiveness and what that means and why sometimes it can be confusing. I want to use an example scenario of a conversation that tends to go on between SEOs and Google. So here we go.

An SEO usually says something like, "Okay, Google, you say you want to rank high-quality content. But what does that really mean? What is high quality, because we need more specifics than that."

Then Google goes, "Okay, high quality is something that's comprehensive and complete. Yeah, it's really comprehensive." SEOs go, "Well, wait. What does that even mean?"

That's kind of what this was born out of. Just kind of an explanation of what is comprehensive, what does Google mean when they say that, and how that differs depending on the query.

Here we have an example page, and I'll kind of walk you through it. It's just going to serve to demonstrate why when Google says "comprehensive," that can mean something different for an e-commerce page than it would for a history of soccer page. It's really going to differ depending on the query, because people want all sorts of different kinds of things. Their intent is going to be different depending on what they're searching in Google. So the criteria is going to be different for comprehensiveness. So hopefully, by way of example, we'll be able to kind of walk you through what comprehensiveness looks like for this one particular query. So let's just dive in.

1. Intent

All right. So first I'm going to talk about intent. I have here a Complete Guide to Buying a House. This is the query I used as an example. Before we dive in, even before we look into keyword research tools or anything like that, I think it's really important to just like let the query sit with you for a little bit. So "guide to buying a house," okay, I'm going to think about that and think about what the searcher probably wanted based on the query.

So first of all, I noticed "guide." The word "guide" to me makes it sound like someone wants something very complete, very thorough. They don't just want quick tips. They don't want a quick bullet list. This can be longer, because someone is searching for a comprehensive guide.

"To buying a house," that's a process. That's not like an add-to-cart like Amazon. It's a step-by-step. There are multiple phases to that type of process. It's really important to realize here that they're probably looking for something a little lengthier and something that is maybe a step-by-step process.

And too, you just look at the query, "guide to buying a house," people are probably searching that if they've never bought a house before. So if they've never bought a house before, it's just good to remember that your audience is in a phase where they have no idea what they're doing. It's important to understand your audience and understand that this is something that they're going to need very, very comprehensive, start-to-finish information on it.

2. Implications

Two, implications. This is again also before we get into any keyword research tools. By implications, I mean what is going to be the effect on someone after reading this? So the implications here, a guide to buying a house, that is a big financial decision. That's a big financial purchase. It's going to affect people's finances and happiness and well-being, and Google actually has a name for that. In their Quality Rater Guidelines, they call that YMYL. So that stands for "your money, your life."

Those types of pages are held to a really high standard, and rightfully so. If someone reads this, they're going to get advice about how to spend their money. It's important for us, as SEOs and writers crafting these types of pages, to understand that these are going to be held to a really high standard. I think what that could look like on the page is, because they're making a big purchase like this, it might be a good sign of trustworthiness to maybe have some expert quotes in here. Maybe you kind of sprinkle those throughout your page. Maybe you actually have it written by an expert author instead of just Joe Schmoe blogger. Those are just some ideas for making a page really trustworthy, and I think that's a key to comprehensiveness.

3. Subtopics

Number three here we have subtopics. There are two ways that I'll walk you through finding subtopics to fit within your umbrella topic. I'm going to use Moz Keyword Explorer as an example of this.

Use Keyword Explorer to reveal subtopics

In Moz Keyword Explorer, you can search for different keywords and related keywords two different ways. You can type in a query. So you can type in something like "buy a house" or "home buying" or something like that. You start with your main topic, and what you'll get as a result is a bunch of suggested keywords that you can also incorporate on your page, terms that are related to the term that you searched. This is going to be really great, because you're going to start to notice themes emerge. Some of the themes I noticed were people tend to search for "home buying calculator," like a can-I-afford-it type of calculator. A lot of people search financial-related things obviously, bad credit. I filed for bankruptcy, can I still buy a house? You'll start to see subthemes emerge.

Then I also wanted to mention that, in Moz Keyword Explorer, you can also search by URL. What I might do is query my term that I'm trying to target on my page. I'm going to pick the top three URLs that are ranking. You pop them into Keyword Explorer, and you can compare them and you can see the areas of most overlap. So what you'll get essentially is a list of keywords that the top ranking pages for that term also rank for. That's going to be a really good way to mine some extra keyword ideas for your page to make it more comprehensive.

4. Questions

Then here we go. We have step four. After we've come up with some subtopics, I think it's also a really good idea to mine questions and try to find what questions our audience is actually asking. So, for these, I like to use Answer the Public and Keywords Everywhere. Those are two really great tools that I kind of like to use in tandem.

Use Answer the Public to mine questions

Answer the Public, if you've never used it, is a really fun tool. You can put in a keyword, and you get a huge list. Depending on how vague your query is, you might get a ton of ideas. If your query is really specific, you might not get as many keyword ideas back. But it's a really great way to type in a keyword, like "buying a house" or "buy a house" or "home buying" or something like that, and get a whole, big, long list of questions that your audience is asking. People that want to know how to buy a house, they're also asking these questions.

I think a comprehensive page will answer those questions. But it can be a little bit overwhelming. There's going to be probably a lot of questions potentially to answer. So how do you prioritize and choose which questions are the best to address on your page?

Use Keywords Everywhere to highlight keywords on a page

That's where the Keywords Everywhere plug-in comes in handy. I use it in Chrome. You can have it highlight the keywords on the page. I think I have mine set to highlight anything that's searched 50 or more times a month. That's a really good way to gauge, just right off the bat you can see, okay, now there are these 10 instead of these 100 questions to potentially answer on my page.

So examples of questions here, I have questions like: Can I afford this? Is now the right time to buy? So you can kind of fit those into your page and answer those questions.

5. Trends

Then finally here I have trends. I think this is a really commonly missed step. It's important to remember that a lot of terms have seasonality attached to them. So what I did with this query, I queried "buy a house," and I wanted to see if there were any trends for home buying-type of research queries in Google Trends. I zoomed out to five years to see if I could see year-over-year if there were any trends that emerged.

That was totally the case. When people are searching "buy a house," it's at its peak kind of around January into spring, and then in the summer it starts to dive, and then it's at its lowest during the holidays. That kind of shows you that people are researching at the beginning of the year. They're kind of probably moving into their house during the summertime, and then during the holidays they've had all the time to move in and now they're just enjoying the holidays. That's kind of the trend flow that it follows. That's really key information, if you're going to build a comprehensive page, to kind of understand that there's seasonality attached with your term.

Because I know now that there's seasonality with my term, I can incorporate information like what are the pros and cons of buying in peak season versus off-season for buying a house. Maybe what's the best time of year to buy. Those are, again, other ideas for things that you can incorporate on your page to make it more comprehensive.

This page is not comprehensive. I didn't have enough room to fit some things. So you don't just stop at this phase. If you're really building a comprehensive page on this topic, don't stop where I stopped. But this is kind of just an example of how to go about thinking through what Google means when they say make a page comprehensive. It's going to mean something different depending on your query and just keep that in mind. Just think about the query, think about what your audience wanted based on what they searched, and you'll be off to a great start building a comprehensive page.

I hope that was helpful. If you have any ideas for building your own comprehensive page, how you do that, maybe how it differs in different industries that you've worked in, pop it in the comments. That would be really good for us to share that information. Come back again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/2PsM9Ad
via IFTTT

7 Search Ranking Factors Analyzed: A Follow-Up Study

Posted by Jeff_Baker

Grab yourself a cup of coffee (or two) and buckle up, because we’re doing maths today.

Again.

Back it on up...

A quick refresher from last time: I pulled data from 50 keyword-targeted articles written on Brafton’s blog between January and June of 2018.

We used a technique of writing these articles published earlier on Moz that generates some seriously awesome results (we’re talking more than doubling our organic traffic in the last six months, but we will get to that in another publication).

We pulled this data again… Only I updated and reran all the data manually, doubling the dataset. No APIs. My brain is Swiss cheese.

We wanted to see how newly written, original content performs over time, and which factors may have impacted that performance.

Why do this the hard way, dude?

“Why not just pull hundreds (or thousands!) of data points from search results to broaden your dataset?”, you might be thinking. It’s been done successfully quite a few times!

Trust me, I was thinking the same thing while weeping tears into my keyboard.

The answer was simple: I wanted to do something different from the massive aggregate studies. I wanted a level of control over as many potentially influential variables as possible.

By using our own data, the study benefited from:

• The same root Domain Authority across all content.
• Similar individual URL link profiles (some laughs on that later).
• Known original publish dates and without reoptimization efforts or tinkering.
• Known original keyword targets for each blog (rather than guessing).
• Known and consistent content depth/quality scores (MarketMuse).
• Similar content writing techniques for targeting specific keywords for each blog.

You will never eliminate the possibility of misinterpreting correlation as causation. But controlling some of the variables can help.

As Rand once said in a Whiteboard Friday, “Correlation does not imply causation (but it sure is a hint).”

Caveat:

What we gained in control, we lost in sample size. A sample size of 96 is much less useful than ten thousand, or a hundred thousand. So look at the data carefully and use discretion when considering the ranking factors you find most likely to be true.

This resource can help gauge the confidence you should put into each Pearson Correlation value. Generally, the stronger the relationship, the smaller sample size needed to be be confident in the results.

So what exactly have you done here?

We have generated hints at what may influence the organic performance of newly created content. No more, and no less. But they are indeed interesting hints and maybe worth further discussion or research.

What have you not done?

We have not published sweeping generalizations about Google’s algorithm. This post should not be read as a definitive guide to Google’s algorithm, nor should you assume that your site will demonstrate the same correlations.

So what should I do with this data?

The best way to read this article, is to observe the potential correlations we observed with our data and consider the possibility of how those correlations may or may not apply to your content and strategy.

I’m hoping that this study takes a new approach to studying individual URLs and stimulates constructive debate and conversation.

Your constructive criticism is welcome, and hopefully pushes these conversations forward!

The stat sheet

So quit jabbering and show me the goods, you say? Alright, let’s start with our stats sheet, formatted like a baseball card, because why not?:

*Note: Only blogs with complete ranking data were used in the study. We threw out blogs with missing data rather than adding arbitrary numbers.

And as always, here is the original data set if you care to reproduce my results.

So now the part you have been waiting for...

The analysis

To start, please use a refresher on the Pearson Correlation Coefficient from my last blog post, or Rand’s.

1. Time and performance

I started with a question: “Do blogs age like a Macallan 18 served up neat on a warm summer Friday afternoon, or like tepid milk on a hot summer Tuesday?”

Does the time indexed play a role in how a piece of content performs?

Correlation 1: Time and target keyword position

First we will map the target keyword ranking positions against the number of days its corresponding blog has been indexed. Visually, if there is any correlation we will see some sort of negative or positive linear relationship.

There is a clear negative relationship between the two variables, which means the two variables may be related. But we need to go beyond visuals and use the PCC.

Days live vs. target keyword position
PCC	-.343
Relationship	Moderate

The data shows a moderate relationship between how long a blog has been indexed and the positional ranking of the target keyword.

But before getting carried away, we shouldn’t solely trust one statistical method and call it a day. Let’s take a look at things another way: Let’s compare the average age of articles whose target keywords rank in the top ten against the average age of articles whose target keywords rank outside the top ten.

Average age of articles based on position
Target KW position ≤ 10	144.8 days
Target KW position > 10	84.1 days

Now a story is starting to become clear: Our newly written content takes a significant amount of time to fully mature.

But for the sake of exhausting this hint, let’s look at the data one final way. We will group the data into buckets of target keyword positions, and days indexed, then apply them to a heatmap.

This should show us a clear visual clustering of how articles perform over time.

This chart, quite literally, paints a picture. According to the data, we shouldn’t expect a new article to realize its full potential until at least 100 days, and likely longer. As a blog post ages, it appears to gain more favorable target keyword positioning.

Correlation 2: Time and total ranking keywords on URL

You’ll find that when you write an article it will (hopefully) rank for the keyword you target. But often times it will also rank for other keywords. Some of these are variants of the target keyword, some are tangentially related, and some are purely random noise.

Instinct will tell you that you want your articles to rank for as many keywords as possible (ideally variants and tangentially related keywords).

Predictably, we have found that the relationship between the number of keywords an article ranks for and its estimated monthly organic traffic (per SEMrush) is strong (.447).

We want all of our articles to do things like this:

We want lots of variants each with significant search volume. But, does an article increase the total number of keywords it ranks for over time? Let’s take a look.

Visually this graph looks a little murky due to the existence of two clear outliers on the far right. We will first run the analysis with the outliers, and again without. With the outliers, we observe the following:

Days live vs. total keywords ranking on URL (w/outliers)
PCC	.281
Relationship	Weak/borderline moderate

There appears to be a relationship between the two variables, but it isn’t as strong. Let’s see what happens when we remove those two outliers:

Visually, the relationship looks stronger. Let’s look at the PCC:

Days live vs. total keywords ranking on URL (without outliers)
PCC	.390
Relationship	Moderate/borderline strong

The relationship appears to be much stronger with the two outliers removed.

But again, let’s look at things another way.

Let’s look at the average age of the top 25% of articles and compare them to the average age of the bottom 25% of articles:

Average age of top 25% of articles versus bottom 25%
Top 25%	148.9 days
Bottom 25%	73.8 days

This is exactly why we look at data multiple ways! The top 25% of blog posts with the most ranking keywords have been indexed an average of 149 days, while the bottom 25% have been indexed 74 days — roughly half.

To be fully sure, let’s again cluster the data into a heatmap to observe where performance falls on the time continuum:

We see a very similar pattern as in our previous analysis: a clustering of top-performing blogs starting at around 100 days.

Time and performance assumptions

You still with me? Good, because we are saying something BIG here. In our observation, it takes between 3 and 5 months for new content to perform in organic search. Or at the very least, mature.

To look at this one final way, I’ve created a scatterplot of only the top 25% of highest performing blogs and compared them to their time indexed:

There are 48 data plots on this chart, the blue plots represent the top 25% of articles in terms of strongest target keyword ranking position. The orange plots represent the top 25% of articles with the highest number of keyword rankings on their URL. (These can be, and some are, the same URL.)

Looking at the data a little more closely, we see the following:

90% of the top 25% of highest-performing content took at least 100 days to mature, and only two articles took less than 75 days.

Time and performance conclusion

For those of you just starting a content marketing program, remember that you may not see the full organic potential for your first piece of content until month 3 at the earliest. And, it takes at least a couple months of content production to make a true impact, so you really should wait a minimum of 6 months to look for any sort of results.

In conclusion, we expect new content to take at least 100 days to fully mature.

2. Links

But wait, some of you may be saying. What about links, buddy? Articles build links over time, too!

It stands to reason that, over time, a blog will gain links (and ranking potential) over time. Links matter, and higher positioned rankings gain links at a faster rate. Thus, we are at risk of misinterpreting correlation for causation if we don’t look at this carefully.

But what none of you know, that I know, is that being the terrible SEO that I am, I had no linking strategy with this campaign.

And I mean zero strategy. The average article generated 1.3 links from .5 linking domains.

Nice.

Linking domains vs. target keyword position
PCC	-.022
Relationship	None
Average linking domains to top 25% of articles	.46
Average linking domains to bottom 25% of articles	.46

The one thing consistent across all the articles was a shocking and embarrassing lack of inbound links. This is demonstrated by an insignificant correlation coefficient of -.022. The same goes for the total number of links per URL, with a correlation coefficient of -.029.

These articles appear to have performed primarily on their content rather than inbound links.

(And they certainly would have performed much better with a strong, or any, linking strategy. Nobody is arguing the value of links here.) But mostly...

Shame on me.

Shame. Shame. Shame.

But on a positive note, we were able to generate a more controlled experiment on the effects of time and blog performance. So, don’t fire me just yet?

Note: It would be interesting to pull link quality metrics into the discussion (for the precious few links we did earn) rather than total volume. However, after a cursory look at the data, nothing stood out as being significant.

3. Word count

Content marketers and SEOs love talking about word count. And for good reason. When we collectively agreed that “quality content” was the key to rankings, it would stand to reason that longer content would be more comprehensive, and thus do a better job of satisfying searcher intent. So let’s test that theory.

Correlation 1: Target keyword position versus total word count

Will longer articles increase the likelihood of ranking for the keyword you are targeting?

Not in our case. To be sure, let’s run a similar analysis as before.

Word count vs. target keyword position
PCC	.111
Relationship	Negligible
Average word count of top 25% articles	1,774
Average word count of bottom 25% articles	1,919

The data shows no impact on rankings based on the length of our articles.

Correlation 2: Total keywords ranking on URL versus word count

One would think that longer content would result in is additional ranking keywords, right? Even by accident, you would think that the more related topics you discuss in an article, the more keywords you will rank for. Let’s see if that’s true:

Total keywords ranking on URL vs. word count
PCC	-.074
Relationship	None

Not in this case.

Word count, speculative tangent

So how can it be that so many studies demonstrate higher word counts result in more favorable rankings? Some reconciliation is in order, so allow me to speculate on what I think may be happening in these studies.

1. Most likely: Measurement techniques. These studies generally look at one factor relative to rankings: average absolute word count based on position. (And, there actually isn’t much of a difference in average word count between position one and ten.)As we are demonstrating in this article, there may be many other factors at play that need to be isolated and tested for correlations in order to get the full picture, such as: time indexed, on-page SEO (to be discussed later), Domain Authority, link profile, and depth/quality of content (also to be discussed later with MarketMuse as a measure). It’s possible that correlation does not imply correlation, and by using word count averages as the single method of measure, we may be painting too broad of a stroke.
2. Likely: High quality content is longer, by nature. We know that “quality content” is discussed in terms of how well a piece satisfies the intent of the reader. In an ideal scenario, you will create content that fully satisfies everything a searcher would want to know about a given topic. Ideally you own the resource center for the topic, and the searcher does not need to revisit SERPs and weave together answers from multiple sources. By nature, this type of comprehensive content is quite lengthy. Long-form content is arguably a byproduct of creating for quality. Cyrus Shepard does a better job of explaining this likelihood here.
3. Less likely: Long-form threshold. The articles we wrote for this study ranged from just under 1,000 words to nearly as high as 4,000 words. One could consider all of these as “long-form content,” and perhaps Google does as well. Perhaps there is a word count threshold that Google uses.

This is all speculation. What we can say for certain is that all our content is 900 words and up, and shows no incremental benefit to be had from additional length.

Feel free to disagree with any (or all) of my speculations on my interpretation of the discrepancies of results, but I tend to have the same opinion as Brian Dean with the information available.

4. MarketMuse

At this point, most of you are familiar with MarketMuse. They have created a number of AI-powered tools that help with content planning and optimization.

We use the Content Optimizer tool, which evaluates the top 20 results for any keyword and generates an outline of all the major topics being discussed in SERPs. This helps you create content that is more comprehensive than your competitors, which can lead to better performance in search.

Based on the competitive landscape, the tool will generate a recommended content score (their proprietary algorithm) that you should hit in order to compete with the competing pages ranking in SERPs.

But… if you’re a competitive fellow, what happens if you want to blow the recommended score out of the water? Do higher scores have an impact on rankings? Does it make a difference if your competition has a very low average score?

We pulled every article’s content score, along with MarketMuse’s recommended scores and the average competitor scores, to answer these questions.

Correlation 1: Overall MarketMuse content score

Does a higher overall content score result in better rankings? Let’s take a look:

Absolute MarketMuse score vs. target keyword position
PCC	.000
Relationship	None

A perfect zero! We weren’t able to beat the system by racking up points. I also checked to see if a higher absolute score would result in a larger number of keywords ranking on the URL — it doesn’t.

Correlation 2: Beating the recommended score

As mentioned, based on the competitive landscape, MarketMuse will generate a recommended content score. What happens if you blow the recommended score out of the water? Do you get bonus points?

In order to calculate this correlation, we pulled the content score percentage attainment and compared it to the target keyword position. For example, if we scored a 30 of recommended 25, we hit 120% attainment. Let’s see if it matters:

Percentage content score attainment vs. target keyword position
PCC	.028
Relationship	None

No bonus points for doing extra credit!

Correlation 3: Beating the average competitors’ scores

Okay, if you beat MarketMuse’s recommendations, you don’t get any added benefit, but what if you completely destroy your competitors’ average content scores?

We will calculate this correlation the same way we previously did, with percentage attainment over the average competitor. For example, if we scored a 30 over the average of 10, we hit 300% attainment. Let’s see if that matters:

Percentage attainment over average competitor score versus target KW position
PCC	-.043
Relationship	None

That didn’t work either! Seems that there are no hacks or shortcuts here.

MarketMuse summary

We know that MarketMuse works, but it seems that there are no additional tricks to this tool.

If you regularly hit the recommended score as we did (average 110% attainment, with 81% of blogs hitting 100% attainment or better) and cover the topics prescribed, you should do well. But don’t fixate on competitor scores or blowing the recommended score out of the water. You may just be wasting your time.

Note: It’s worth noting that we probably would have shown stronger correlations had we intentionally bombed a few MarketMuse scores. Perhaps a test for another day.

5. On-page optimization

Ah, old-school technical SEO. This type of work warms the cockles of a seasoned SEO’s heart. But does it still have a place in our constantly evolving world? Has Google advanced to the point where it doesn’t need technical cues from SEOs to understand what a page is about?

To find out, I have pulled Moz’s on-page optimization score for every article and compared them to the target keywords’ positional rankings:

Let’s take a look at the scatterplot for all the keyword targets.

Now looking at the math:

On-page optimization score vs. target keyword position
PCC	-.384
Relationship	Moderate/strong
Average on-page score for top 25%	91%
Average on-page score for bottom 25%	87%

If you have a keen eye you may have noticed a few strong outliers on the scatterplot. If we remove three of the largest outliers, the correlation goes up to -.435, a strong relationship.

Before we jump to conclusions, let’s look at this data one final way.

Let’s take a look at the percentage of articles with their target keywords ranking 1–10 that also have a 90% on-page score or better. We will compare that number to the percentage of articles ranking outside the top ten that also have a 90% on-page score or better.

If our assumption is correct, we will see a much higher percentage of keywords ranking 1–10 with an on-page score of 90% or better, and a lower number for articles ranking greater than 10.

On-page optimization score by rankings
Percentage of KWs ranking 1–10 with ≥ 90% score	73.5%
Percentage of keywords ranking >10 with ≥ 90% score	53.2%

This is enough of a hint for me. I’m implementing a 90% minimum on-page score from here on out.

Old school SEOs, rejoice!

6. The competition’s average word count

We won’t put this “word count” argument to bed just yet...

Let’s ask ourselves, “Does it matter how long the average content of the top 20 results is?”

Is there a relationship between the length of your content versus the average competitor?

What if your competitors are writing very short form, and you want to beat them with long-form content?

We will measure this the same way as before, with percentage attainment. For example, if the average word count of the top 20 results for “content marketing agency” is 300, and our piece is 450 words, we hit 150% attainment.

Let’s see if you can “out-verbose” your opponents.

Percentage word count attainment versus target KW position
PCC	.062
Relationship	None

Alright, I’ll put word count to bed now, I promise.

7. Keyword density

You’ve made it to the last analysis. Congratulations! How many cups of coffee have you consumed? No judgment; this report was responsible for entire coffee farms being completely decimated by yours truly.

For selfish reasons, I couldn’t resist the temptation to dispel this ancient tactic of “using target keywords” in blog content. You know what I’m talking about: when someone says “This blog doesn’t FEEL optimized... did you use the target keyword enough?”

There are still far too many people that believe that littering target keywords throughout a piece of content will yield results. And misguided SEO agencies, along with certain SEO tools, perpetuate this belief.

Yoast has a tool in WordPress that some digital marketers live and die by. They don’t think that a blog is complete until Yoast shows the magical green light, indicating that the content has satisfied the majority of its SEO recommendations:

Uh oh, keyword density is too low! Let’s see if it that ACTUALLY matters.

Not looking so good, my keyword-stuffing friends! Let’s take a look at the PCC:

Target keyword ranking position vs. Yoast keyword density
PCC	.097
Relationship	None/Negligible

Believers would like to see a negative relationship here; as the keyword density goes down, the ranking position decreases, producing a downward sloping line.

What we are looking at is a slightly upward-sloping line, which would indicate losing rankings by keyword stuffing — but fortunately not TOO upward sloping, given the low correlation value.

Okay, so PLEASE let that be the end of “keyword density.” This practice has been disproven in past studies, as referenced by Zyppy. Let’s confidently put this to bed, forever. Please.

Oh, and just for kicks, the Flesch Reading Ease score has no bearing on rankings either (-.03 correlation). Write to a third grade level, or a college level, it doesn’t matter.

TL;DR (I don’t blame you)

What we learned from our data

1. Time: It took 100 days or more for an article to fully mature and show its true potential. A content marketing program probably shouldn’t be fully scrutinized until month 5 or 6 at the very earliest.
2. Links: Links matter, I’m just terrible at generating them. Shame.
3. Word count: It’s not about the length of the content, in absolute terms or relative to the competition. It’s about what is written and how resourceful it is.
4. MarketMuse: We have proven that MarketMuse works as it prescribes, but there is no added benefit to breaking records.
5. On-page SEO: Our data demonstrates that it still matters. We all still have a job.
6. Competitor content length: We weren’t successful at blowing our competitors out of the water with longer content.
7. Keyword density: Just stop. Join us in modern times. The water is warm.

In conclusion, some reasonable guidance we agree on is:

Wait at least 100 days to evaluate the performance of your content marketing program, write comprehensive content, and make sure your on-page SEO score is 90%+.

Oh, and build links. Unlike me. Shame.

Now go take a nap.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/2riWEwj
via IFTTT