Technical Tips: How to Develop Effective Sitemaps

Creating and maintaining sitemaps are critical steps in ensuring that search engines can find, understand, and index the most important pages of your site.


On today's episode of Technical Tips, we'll walk through what sitemaps are, where they belong on your site, and some helpful tips on how to make uploading your sitemaps a breeze. Stick around.


Hey everyone, welcome back to today's episode of Technical Tips from Moz, where we're taking you through some important strategies each week to help you streamline your workflows and simplify complex SEO tasks.


I'm Kavi, Senior Learning Specialist at Moz. I develop coursework and other learning resources for Moz Academy, where you can access in-depth SEO lessons, exams, and the chance to earn an official SEO certification.


Check out academy.moz.com for more information. Today we're focusing on sitemaps.


A sitemap is really just a list of pages on a website, formatted in a way that's accessible to the search engines.


If you don't create a sitemap, or if you create one that includes every page of your website, what you're telling Google is that every page is of equal importance.


Either of those options is like saying, go ahead and index everything. And if the search engine sees that you're expecting them to index a lot of low-quality pages, they might consider your site to be of lower quality overall than they would if you used your sitemap to prioritize your most valuable content.


Now, just because a page isn't listed in your sitemap doesn't mean Google can't find it. But providing a sitemap sends a strong indexation message, and it can help surface pages that are buried within a complicated navigation structure.


Any sitemap you upload needs to live in the appropriate root directory for all the pages you want it to cover.


If you can include all the pages you want indexed in a single XML file, you can just upload that to the main root directory of your site and have it live on a URL like example.com slash sitemap.xml.


If you create sitemaps for individual subdomains, they'll each need to live on their subdomains root directory, not the root directory for the primary domain.


And if your site is big enough that you need different sitemaps for different subfolders, remember that each sitemap can only affect descendants of its root directory.


So if you upload a blog sitemap to the folder example.com slash blog, it shouldn't include any URLs that don't start with that same URL path.


When you create a sitemap for any section of your site, you'll want to let the search engines know it exists. There are two ways to do that.


First, add all of your sitemap URLs to your robots.txt file, either above or below your user agent directives.


Next, be sure to submit your sitemaps to Google directly using Search Console.


A single file can contain up to 50,000 URLs, which may mean that you need to create multiple sitemaps to cover different sections of your site if you have a lot of pages to be included in Google's index.


If you do this, you should also submit a sitemap index file that lists your individual sitemaps.


It's important to get the formatting of your individual and index files right in order for them to be accepted, but you can see and copy some helpful examples of formatting for various cases at sitemaps.org slash protocol dot html.


There's no need to resubmit your files regularly if no significant changes have happened, but if you've coded a script that generates a dynamic XML sitemap, that script may also ping Google periodically so they know about any new or deleted URLs.


Remember, a sitemap is a valuable method of communication between your site and the search engines, so you'll want to think carefully about what it is you're communicating to ensure you're prioritizing the right content.


Seeing the pages you want to see in the search results starts with showing Google what you think belongs in their index, and your sitemaps are powerful tools of suggestion.


#WhiteboardFriday: Understanding & Fulfilling Search Intent

Hey Moz fans, welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


Today we're going to be uncovering understanding and fulfilling search intent.


This is a really important topic to understand and better prepare your content around.


I want you to think about this idea that Google houses the world's information.


They very likely know what majority of people searching X are seeking.


They're going to continue to get better and better and better at that.


What I would suggest you do and what you arm yourself with is this idea of really leaning


on Google to better understand the intent behind any given search.


You're probably very familiar of the informational, navigational, investigational, transactional


related intent types.


You can pull this information directly off the SERP.


Is there a featured snippet?


Is there a knowledge graph?


You can pull that sort of information.


Are there site links?


Is it navigational in nature?


People just trying to go to one destination?


Is there comparison tables?


Are they perhaps investigating?


Transactional, right?


Are there tons of ads?


Are there lots of product pages showing up and results?


Is there a shopping carousel?


You can pull intent types directly from the search.


What's interesting though is any given SERP doesn't necessarily have one intent type.


In fact, it likely has a couple and nitty-gritty intent types that Google themselves haven't


quite totally figured out.


I just want to pull back the curtain on Google is actively trying to get better at understanding


intent within questions and answers within content.


They put up a competition to a bunch of data scientists to determine if anyone could build


a model that can accurately weight these various intents with the content.


There's question information that they wanted the model to predict around is this fact seeking?


Does it have multi-intent?


Is it not really a question?


That's my favorite.


Is it well-written?


They're also trying to understand the type of question.


Is it a definition?


Is it instructions?


Spelling, which is most of my searches.


Then they get into answer information.


Is the answer intent helpful?


Is it plausible?


Is it relevant?


Does it satisfy the question?


They even drill a bit deeper into answer types.


Is it instructions, procedure, well-written?


You see these themes occur.


It's important.


It's not just these four.


It's great to know these and run with them a bit, but put these in your back pocket and


know that it goes a lot deeper and it's a lot more complicated than that.


Let's dig into this checklist of sorts.


The idea behind this is that there's a Google Sheet that you can have today, make a copy,


and tweak however you'd like that walks you through really this first process of understanding


the intent and then fulfilling it.


Once you do this a couple of times, you're not going to need this checklist.


This will become second nature to you.


Let's just walk through what this looks like.


First, what is the primary SERP intent?


For my example, I have phonetic alphabet, informational.


Secondary intent might be investigational for the types of content people are looking


for.


I list the SERP features that I notice in the search results.


I'm really just making mental notes of what I'm seeing.


For this particular SERP, there were a lot more visuals than I expected.


I made note of that.


That kind of surprised me.


I also made note this is the order of the features that are showing up.


The next thing you do is to read and consume all of the ranking URLs.


This is so, so important if you're serious about ranking for a particular keyword.


You should actively be consuming this content and making notes about topics and entities


covered.


What sort of multimedia are they using?


What are the layouts?


What does it feel like?


You can really start to have a better checklist of what does that content look like.


What are those expectations?


My favorite secret hack is to activate MozBar for the search result page.


You can see the domain authority and the backlinks for every single URL on a SERP.


A lot of people don't know you can use MozBar directly within Google search results.


It's fantastic.


What I use this for, if I want to rank for something like this, I would just evaluate


all of the organic DAs.


I would really evaluate that range and see if the website or my client's website might


be competitive with it.


If they're not even close, maybe I pivot this and I try to target something more appropriate


for them to rank for in the short term.


Now the fulfill part.


Are you fulfilling this intent?


What is the page goal?


Every page should have a goal.


Outline scannable framework.


I want to just briefly explain what I mean by this.


Social content is so, so important.


More and more people are on mobile.


Our attention span is getting shorter and shorter.


This idea that you should generate multiple title ideas to come up with the best one,


but then use the others for social media.


Shout out to Andy Crestadino who came up with that, which I love.


Use the inverted pyramid.


Use the journalistic style where you tell people the most important information at the


top.


Make sure you have succinct summaries.


Omit needless words, whether that be at the top or at the bottom of your content.


So important to have.


Google loves pulling that information for things like featured snippets.


Make sure you have scannable subtitles.


Copyblogger does this beautifully where you can just scan one of their articles and you


quickly understand what the content is about like that.


That's incredibly helpful for users.


Leverage multimedia.


There's no reason why you couldn't also take a piece of content you're working on and provide


other options, other forms for your visitors to consume it.


We don't know what any given visitor might be or the position they're in to consume content


that time.


Maybe they're going for a walk and they want to hear audio.


It's really great to provide different media types.


And then lastly, I have this here and here.


Are you providing relevant next steps?


And so I really thought about this for someone searching phonetic alphabet that are looking


for information, what might be relevant next steps?


It sounds like they're sort of in a learning mode.


So why not quiz them on it?


Why not entice them to learn more about aviation jargon and language?


You can start to put yourself in the mindset of the user and really try to cultivate logical


next steps for someone to go through on your site.


So really building out that supportive content.


And then lastly, make sure you have a CTA.


And hopefully it's to fulfill the page goal that you set for yourself.


But ideally, this is really, this should become second nature after a couple passes where


you just have these kind of mental checks in your head and you can quickly and better


evaluate search result pages to target and rank and succeed in search.


So really look forward to hearing your thoughts and your comments down below.


And thank you so much for joining me on this edition of Whiteboard Friday.


I will see you all soon.


Conversion Rate Optimization for B2B — Whiteboard Friday

Hey there, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


I'm Austin Peachey, an SEO manager at Obility, a B2B-focused digital marketing agency based


in Portland, Oregon.


Today I'd like to talk to you about conversion rate optimization, specifically optimizing


sites for B2B organizations.


When compared to the offerings of a typical B2C business, the sales cycle in B2B means


that users will be visiting your site multiple times throughout their sales cycle before


making a final purchase.


It's necessary that you are reaching them at different stages in their journey.


The earliest and sometimes overlooked step in conversion rate optimization is actually


click-through rate optimization.


Increasing the traffic to your site from Google search results can help grow your potential


pipeline and increase total leads.


Google Search Console is a fantastic tool to review and optimize your listings on search


page results.


Audit your queries and pages and find out which are the lowest performing.


For example, pull in a report of all things that have a click-through rate of less than


Once you've targeted your underperformers, review the title tags and meta descriptions.


Start out with the easy things like are they getting truncated and your full message isn't


showing up, but go beyond that and actually evaluate the language being used.


Are you providing incentive for them to click on you versus competitor?


Is there a CTA?


And if not, try adding one.


It can also be helpful to look at the pages that do have a high click-through rate and


see what is written for their title and their description, what's different and what could


be moved from a high performer to a low performer to try to replicate those results.


The next step in conversion rate optimization is to know your audience.


This is especially important when it comes to B2B businesses as you have individuals


from many different roles exploring your site.


Providing input and ultimately making critical decisions.


Don't make assumptions and let the data help you along the way.


Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and heat mapping tools like Hotjar and Crazy Egg can


provide valuable insights to your customers and how they interact with your website.


When using the heat mapping tool, you can see how far users are typically scrolling


down your page.


And from that, you can get a lot of different insights.


For example, if they don't get very far down your page, but all your CTAs are in the footer,


try moving a second CTA mid page that might capture more of the audience that isn't getting


all the way to the bottom.


You can also use heat mapping tools to see where users usually click on the spot on the


site.


If they continuously click on a piece of content that doesn't have a link, that continuous


click most likely means that they want to click there and read more about it.


So you can improve the user experience by going in and adding one to the relevant content.


Follow your user's journey with Google Analytics and see where in the funnel they might commonly


drop off.


And is there an opportunity to shorten the time from entry to the site to where your


site's conversion points are?


A key point of knowing your audience is to be mindful of where they are in the buying


process.


Take a look at the keywords that are driving traffic to that page using a tool like Moz's


Keyword Explorer.


If they are using long-tailed keywords, they're more likely a more seasoned user and are ready


for a gated asset like a white paper or a case study.


But if it's short-tailed keywords, they're probably still in the discovery phase and


just want to read a blog post or a recent article.


Try not to think of things as a marker, but instead put yourself in the shoes of your


potential customers.


Figure out what they want and not what you want them to want.


Now that you know your audience, the next step is to solve for poor user experience


on the website.


User experience tip number one, please remove the pop-up from your website.


No one wants to go to a page and immediately have a big ad block the content they're trying


to see.


You want to go to that page for a reason and it's not to have them be redirected somewhere


else on the site.


Once you have gotten rid of all the pop-ups, the next step is to optimize your top navigation


of your site.


Make sure it's easy to access all the different areas of your site's content and make sure


that you have a CTA available in the header to easily send them to conversion points.


To help optimize your navigation, use, track what people are searching for using in site


search in Google Analytics and make sure the topics that they're searching for on a regular


basis are easy enough to find.


Next up is to review your content and add internal links to relevant pieces of content


that may help the user with their decision-making process.


Technical health is also important.


Make sure that your site loads quickly and users aren't running to broken links all the


time that will then hinder them on their process of discovery and learning more about your


product.


The last thing I'd like to discuss when it comes to user experience are contact forms.


As mentioned before, you could have anyone from a small team manager to a C-suite executive


looking through your site and they want a form that's going to be quick and easy to


use.


Only collect the data that is needed to get the conversion and don't bog them down with


extra form fields that don't mean anything.


Now I wouldn't be talking about conversion optimization if I didn't mention optimizing


your CTAs.


When it comes to CTAs, you want to make sure that they're unique and relevant to the content


of the page.


Skip out on the contact us and learn more that's on every single site and really try


and tailor it to what's happening.


If your content is about the benefits of your software, say something like don't believe


the hype and try a demo to see for yourself.


It's really going to push them to make that conversion more than just learn more.


The final thing when it comes to conversion optimization is testing.


Test everything.


There's so much data to be collected and analyzed that there's no reason you need to be making


all of your changes just based on hunches.


If you see something that's performing on your site, set up an A-B test or a multivariate


test to gather information on what really works best for your users.


Whether like Google optimize or optimizely let you easily conduct these tests and make


strong, data-driven changes to your site.


There are so many potential things you can test.


Try different ways of saying things, different colors of buttons or components, or even entire


layouts completely.


But just as you're doing the testing, remember to go through the five phases of testing something.


One is the research phase.


What can you learn from your data as it is right now?


Two, the hypothesis phase.


What educated ideas can you think of to potentially test?


Three, the prioritization phase.


What changes are you going to have the biggest impact on your site?


And make sure you're doing those first to drive further conversions in the future.


Four, the testing phase.


Run and collect your data, whether it's an A-B test or multivariate test, and make sure


you can get substantial evidence to make a permanent change on your site.


And then five, the learning phase.


What can you learn from these tests to make other further improvements in the future?


Remember, the only failed test is one where you don't learn anything.


Well, that's it, everybody.


That is our best tips for conversion rate optimization.


Brand Is King: How to Rule in the New Era of Local Search - Presented by Mary Bowling

Hi everyone. Today I'm going to talk about your brand as local. We're going to talk about


how your defense against what's happening in the SERPs right now is really to build


your local brand.


Brand is really king these days. We went through that era when links were king and when content


was king. Brand is king and I think it's going to stay that way.


Local search is hard. It has seemed to be an underappreciated sibling of SEO for a very


long time, but it's actually harder than regular SEO. Google seems to be making it harder all


the time because they're giving searchers answers right in the search results instead


of letting them go off to our websites.


These are just some examples of local answers that Google's putting in the SERPs that are


preventing people from going to your website. A lot of people think of this as Google hijacking


your brand's traffic. Is that really true? Well, it's sort of true, but Google owns the


SERPs. It's going to do whatever it wants to do and we can't change that. We've got


to adapt our thinking and figure out ways to twist things around and take advantage


of the opportunities that we're getting.


This is some research that was published by Jump Shot and Moz about a year ago that said


90% of US search traffic comes from Google properties. I think that Rand mentioned yesterday


that it's gotten up to 95%. Between Google, Google's YouTube and Google images, they own


90% of the local search traffic. That's why I'm going to be talking about Google, Google,


Google, Google all day long.


In local search, there are four KPIs that have been generally accepted at the low end


of the funnel. Filling out forms, Facebook messaging, clicks to call and driving directions.


My business partner and colleague in local you, Mike Blumenthal, who contributed a lot


to this presentation and a lot to my thinking, he did a survey where he looked at these local


business conversions.


70% of them occurred right at Google and another 25% of them occurred on the business's website.


What this means to us is those are the two places for local businesses where we really


need to be concentrating our efforts these days. We need to really fine tune the SERPs


to make sure they're accurate, that they're appealing to searchers and that complete information


is being given about our businesses.


I'm going to take some time to give you an evolution of local search and the algorithms.


Local search is simply just looking for something in some place. It's as simple as that. When


Google acquired maps and started thinking about maps, their idea was to model the real


world, make their map a highly usable representation of the real world. It was going to be about


real things in real places.


The idea has always been that the best businesses of their type within a certain area should


be the ones that rank the best. In fact, a lot of searchers think that that's what's


been going on for years, but it hasn't been. When things got started, Google started with


a lot of what I call poor proxies for their algorithm.


One of the worst of these was back in the day when proximity, distance between the business


was measured by the business' distance from the central post office in the city. How ridiculous


is that? Today, now the distance is measured between the searcher and the business.


This really badly distorted the search results in local for years because we were using weird


proxies, we got weird results. A lot of us were chasing these weird proxies instead of


concentrating on building our businesses.


The local search algorithm has always been based on relevance, prominence, and proximity.


These things haven't changed. What's gotten better are Google's proxies. For relevance,


what Google's asking is does the business provide the products, services, or attributes


the searcher's asking for?


How does Google know if you're relevant? It looks at what you've put on Google My Business,


what you've put on your website, what customers are saying about you in reviews and on social


media, and what the traditional media is saying about you.


For prominence, Google's asking is the business well-known and well-regarded within its own


industry? How does Google know that? Google's looking mostly at what other people are saying


about your business and their authority.


Proximity is really what defines the local algorithm. Is the business close enough to


the searcher to be considered a good answer for their search query? The real answer is


how close is close enough? It really depends. It depends on the query, the business's relevance


to the query, how many other businesses of that type in that area are relevant, the prominence


of your business and your competition.


Basically, Google's trying to satisfy the searcher. If the searcher asks for something


near them, the businesses that are closer to them have an advantage. If this searcher


was asking for something in Harrisonburg, Google wants to give them relevant answers


in Harrisonburg.


But if she were to ask for the best of something or the cheapest something or something that's


open now, there are other businesses that could be more relevant than the businesses


closer to her. Proximity is very fluid. That's something I think a lot of people have a problem


with grasping and a lot of problems explaining to their clients.


In 2012, local search really started coming into focus with the knowledge graph. This


really increased Google's understanding of local businesses. You know with the knowledge


graph, we're talking about things, not strings. In this little simple knowledge graph of the


Flintstones, Bedrock is an entity and Wilma Flintstone is an entity. Their relationship


is that Wilma lives in Bedrock. Knowledge graphs are as simple as that.


In local search, I want you to make your website a knowledge graph of your brand. Feed this


information directly to Google. Make your pages about your entities, your people, your


products, where you are, who you are, what you do. Then think of the links between those


entities, those pages. You want to make them anchor text links that describe the relationship


between them. Think about this. You're just feeding your knowledge graph to Google with


your website. This is very powerful.


Then in 2018, Google announced that they'd been working on topical layers. This topical


layer shows the nutrients that are in different vegetables. Imagine a topical layer that was


about a location, say Seattle, or an industry like plumbing, or even about a particular


business. Think about working on your topical layer and feeding Google more information


about your business. What the knowledge graph really did was it switched Google's ranking


algorithms from ranking pages, web pages, and websites to ranking entities or brands.


What you really want to work on is optimizing your brand. Local features pretty much stagnated


from 2011 to 2014, mostly because of the Google Plus fiasco. From 2015 until now, Google has


really doubled down on local search. They started with a presentation layer because


they wanted to make information usable on very, very small screens and kind of solidify


the way they displayed things across all devices. We started getting these tabs on our mobile


phones. They had to put a lot of information on a very small screen.


There was an increased focus on reviews. We started seeing stars everywhere, and not just


on Google properties, but on their competitor. Then in 2015, brand reputation really kicked


in. This started with the Google Quality Rater guidelines. In the first version of it, they


said for websites to get the highest possible rating, Google is looking at reputation as


well. Every time they've updated this document, reputation has gotten more and more attention


in it. They also started adding a transaction and


engagement layer where the businesses and customers could actually chat with each other


or do things like contact us now and make an appointment. Of course, there was Google


local ads expansion. We started seeing ads everywhere. There are even ads inside the


local packs now. In the last two years, Google has given us


an average of about two different features or improvements to features every month. That's


pretty big. The pace of it seems to be accelerating. It seems like every other week we're hearing


about something new happening in local search, and it is happening.


Why did Google jump in to local search all of a sudden with both feet? Just a few months


ago, Google's CEO said, we are moving from a company that helps you find answers to a


company that helps you get things done. This answers and actions right there in the


SERPs is a really double-edged sword. Google is trying to prove its value to local businesses.


The reason is they want to extract more profit from local search. They're going to insert


themselves into transactions already happening, sell more ads already happening, and possibly


create a subscription model that people will have to pay for certain GMB features.


Your defense against this is to really boost your local brand on Google in 2019. Your local


brand is simply awareness. Do people know who you are, where you are, what you do, and


your reputation? What do the people in your market area think about your brand? You should


be thinking of those in that manner as well, awareness and reputation. You want to make


sure people know about you and that you want to be one of the good guys.


Google really loves brands. That's why we want to build up our brands. We know this


because in 2008, the Google CEO said the internet is a cesspool where false information thrives


and brands are how you sort out the cesspool. Google is letting the marketplace sort out


the cesspool for them. That's why they are rewarding good brands. It does a lot of the


work for them. What's your brand story on Google?


In local search, we've started calling the results that you get when you search for a


business name and location as the brand page. This is a snapshot of your answers in the


SERPs. You also want to look at your mobile brand page. You really want to examine these


well. As I said, it's just a snapshot, but it gives you a very good idea of what Google


knows about you, what's important to searchers, what Google knows searchers want to know about


you. It gives you a general overview of your reputation.


If you do it for your competitors, you might see some missed opportunities, things they're


doing that maybe you should try doing. The essence of this particular page is to try


to control what you can. I usually break it down into three different sections. Your own


info, which is stuff from your website or stuff that you've put in Google My Business.


Reviews which show up in the SERPs and on your knowledge panel. Then a third category


of other which is mostly listings and news about your brand. You can control all your


own info. With reviews and listings and news, this is stuff that you can influence. If you


think about influencing it, you will find ways to influence it. Control what you can


on this page. By improving this, you're essentially improving your presence all across Google.


The first thing I suggest you do on this page is review what I like to call your organic


ads. The combination of your page title and meta description. In local search in particular,


it seems like there are so many ads that were written 10 years ago that are still stuck


on local websites. Go review these and make sure that they have a customer focus, the


phone numbers present, that they include your service area and a call to action. Then look


at your Google My Business cover photo. This is a critical image for your business. This


is probably the most seen image that represents your business online. For other photos, think


about what searchers want to see about either your particular business or businesses like


yours. If you're a caterer, people want to see your food, your fancy food. They want


to see the decorations, the party decorations you put up. They want to see people having


fun at parties that you've put on. If you're a water park, they want to see all the features


in the park and they want to see kids having a ball. In this particular instance, this


is an adult entertainment store. Their goal was to show people that this is a clean, modern,


retail establishment that you might even want to take your grandmother to. Maybe not, but


that's the image that they're trying to convey with their photos. Think about what you want


to convey and give searchers those photos. If you have listings with stars in the SERPs,


go take a look at these. You want to respond to at least a few of the most recent reviews


if you haven't been paying attention to them. You want to add photos and details. These


are on your brand page when people search for you. They're likely going to click on


them. Try to improve these if you can. If you have listings without stars, you may never


have heard of these, but these are sites that are important to Google for your location


and for your industry. If they accept reviews, you can encourage more reviews there. You


can add photos and details. If you do a good job of it, you can even get stars on your


own URLs in the SERPs. You're going to have to use proper schema, not review gate. It's


much, much easier with a platform like Get Five Stars that's out in the exhibit hall.


If you do a really good job, your own site can even show up as reviews from the web in


your local knowledge panel. Google Posts. In my opinion, this is Google's gift to small


businesses who've been inundated with SEOs telling them to blog, blog, blog. This is


an SMB version of blogging. Greg Gifford's going to talk more about Google Posts and


Google Q&A tomorrow. With Google Q&A, you need to pay attention to what's going on.


This is on almost everyone's local knowledge panel. If you don't answer these questions,


someone else will. Some of the answers we've seen have been awful. Ask your own questions.


You're allowed to do this. Think of your FAQs, the frequently asked questions in your


business, and add those and answer them for your brand. You are your brand authority.


A lot of searchers think that Q&A is somehow some kind of real time thingy that's going


on, and it's not. You end up with reviews and trolls and all kinds of strange things


happening there. You really need to monitor this. You can flag unsuitable content and


get it removed. The biggest thing about Q&A and monitoring it is there are a lot of sales


opportunities that pop up there. If you need to convince yourself of this, go look through


the Q&A of a lot of local businesses. If you don't respond in a timely manner, people are


thinking this is in real time, and if you don't respond in a timely manner, they're


going to forget about you and move on. Make sure you're monitoring your Q&A.


You can also do Google My Business profile messaging. You can communicate via text with


searchers directly from your profile if you enable it. You can turn it on and off as you


wish, even from your mobile GMB app. This is something that every business kind of needs


to try out and see how it works for them and decide for themselves whether it's a good


thing or not. I can't imagine it not being a good thing, being able to communicate directly


with people who had questions or things to ask me about my business.


Google My Business bookings will help you automate scheduling. This is really huge for


a lot of low-consideration businesses. If you want a good example of how you can use


this well, look at Lloyd's Barber Shop in Santa Monica, California. They've done a great


job of automating their scheduling. Think about how many phone calls this could save


your business if people could schedule things online themselves. Think about how great it


is from the customer's point of view to be able to do that. GMB products have recently


been made available to almost all local businesses. This allows you to feed your brand answers


directly into Google. You are adding information into the knowledge graph that Google has about


your business. Anybody who's not using this is crazy. Google My Business services also


allow you to feed brand answers into Google about your services. You have a lot of flexibility


with these fields in Google My Business. The more information you put in there, the more


Google knows about you. Then the more information Google can give to searchers. You need to


give Google the answers so that Google can tell the answers to searchers. Google My Business


and your website are the ways that you want to do this. They should reinforce each other.


If you're putting products on your website, put products in Google My Business. If you


are putting services in Google My Business, make sure that you're talking about them on


your website as well. When I look at these things, to me they seem like gifts from Google,


ways for small businesses to attract many, many more people from the search engine results.


I'm not sure why people think that Google's competing with them. I think this is Google


giving you more and more opportunities to get actions in the SERPs, even if they want


to take a little piece of the cut. For a couple of bonus ideas is to use your offline marketing


to encourage brand searches. You can have a billboard that says, Search Kaufman, guess


on Google to get a money saving coupon. The people that answer your phones can be telling


prospective customers that. What this is doing is making people search for your brand online


that clues Google into the fact that you are prominent and popular in your local area.


For the same reason you want to encourage location visits, Google knows where people


are and where they're moving around. If they're coming to your location, that makes you more


prominent. Google recognizes that. The ways to encourage location visits, for some businesses


it's easy. You have a sale. You have an open house at a realtor's office. You have a party


for your customers. For other businesses it's not quite so easy, but nearly everyone could


do some kind of customer appreciation day for their customers, even if they're a service


area business. You can partner up with local non-profits and other local groups to hold


events at your location if you don't think that you have a draw for it. Google recognizes


people going to your location and they reward you for being a prominent brand.


It's been a really long and winding road with local search since it started in 2004. We


had all these bad proxies that Google had to work through, we had to work through. As


SEOs we spammed the heck out of Google trying to chase this algorithm which distorted the


results even more. The answer today is that we are approaching reality. Google has gotten


very, very good at being able to recognize what you're doing offline and translating


that into online rewards.


Will Scott, another partner of mine in local use, said, �The key for us to remember,


SEO was never really about search engines. It's always been about optimizing the business.�


I'd like to replace that word business with brand. You need to be concentrating on optimizing


your brand. You need to be thinking about doing that on your website and on Google first.


A lot of the other things that are going on online are just noise for most small local


businesses. Your strategy really is to be one of the best. Not to just say you're one


of the best, but to actually be one of the best businesses of your type in your local


market area.


That way, when people are thinking about Google stealing their traffic, �Where did all my


clicks go?� You'll just be cruising along, getting those sales and conversions because


you've built up your local brand in your area and you don't have to rely so much on Google


for new customers all the time.


I want to thank you and again I want to thank Mike Blumenthal for helping me out with this


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MozCon 2014 - 19 - Elizabeth Marsten - Shop 'til You Drop: Google Shopping PPC

Thank you. It's really great to be here not only representing the PPC community, which


is also slightly terrifying and flattering at the same time, but I have a feeling this


is kind of like what Miss USA feels like when she goes to the Miss Universe pageant. Right?


This is how it works. I'm here to talk about Google Shopping or Shop Till You Drop and


how it will forever be known now in MozCon as the advertising platform that's also a


search engine. So a little bit about myself. I am the vice


president of search marketing at Porton. That means that I know about PPC, SEO, social and


content and I'm formerly a paper clip marketer. That means that when I first started in paper


click, I actually thought it was called paper clip marketing. Go figure.


Once I figured out what it was, everything was fine. And this is a picture of me doing


Kendo, which is a Japanese martial art and it's what my Twitter handle is based off of.


So a lot of people thought it was my maiden name. It's not. It's this thing that I do


after work where I hit people for two hours with sticks and I feel great.


As I said, I work at Porton, Inc. That's here in Seattle, Washington, just in the Smith


Tower down the street. Eight years and counting. And it does mean that I work with Ian Lurie,


who's probably familiar to a few of you. And if you would like to talk about what he's


really like, I'll be at the bar later. There we go. Oh, that one didn't ‑‑ that


slide broke. Well, here's what it says. No SEOs were harmed in the making of this presentation.


So I did talk to SEOs before I put my outline together and make sure that they didn't fall


asleep because I realized that, you know, like I said, this is the only PPC speaker


at a social SEO kind of conference. And how this presentation is going to go.


So it's Shop to You Drop. So it's based off of a shopping theme. So you're going to see


pictures from images and movies that feature shopping, as well as this is the Bitly link


bundle for where you can find all of the links that I will mention throughout the presentation.


So you don't have to write any of them down. Just go to the one link and you'll get them


all. I'll have it at the end, too, and we'll tweet it out.


So how did we get here? So as Cyrus was talking about, Google Shopping used to be a free platform,


essentially. It used to be part of organic search. And Google Shopping does affect you


as an SEO, believe it or not. So if you will mind the terrible pun, we're


going to go back to the future first. So these are the five kind of names that get


tossed around with Google Shopping. So the first two, base and merchant center,


actually refer to the place where you would upload a product feed.


The other four kind of refer more to Google.com's search results or the shopping portal itself.


And actually Google product search got it right the first time when they rolled it out


with their tag line. It's just searching for stuff to buy, whether or not that's on Google.com


or Google.com slash shopping. And one thing I want to make sure that I clarify


before we get too into detail here is the way that the terminology works.


So Google Shopping is the user interface on Google.com slash shopping and the search results


on a Google.com page. A product listing ad, which I'm also going


to talk about, is the name of the ad unit that appears through Google Shopping.


So in October of 2012, the formerly free platform became paid.


So what did that do to SEO, besides a lot of crying?


Well, first of all, Google made about $500 million out of the gate that holiday season.


So they're looking pretty good. What that did, though, for PPC was it fundamentally


changed the landscape of e-commerce paid search forever.


And of course it took away a large, large piece of search traffic.


It also created a huge cost to these companies, because now they've lost thousands, if not


hundreds, if not thousands of visits that they previously were getting for free.


So in order to be able to do Google Shopping, it's not just a matter of flipping a switch.


Now they have to invest in things like additional platforms, companies, or possibly even bid


management. And I'll get into those in detail a little


bit as well. So as I promised, mall theme, the food court.


I know, right? I love silent pop.


How does it work? Some of the technical difficulties that you'll


run into when you go to do Google Shopping. So first and foremost, it's not a matter of


just having an AdWords account anymore. The first three are actually required.


You have to have those. The fourth one is really required too.


You should have analytics. But these four are what you need to even get


started in Google Shopping. But there are some technical difficulties


where SEO and PPC overlap, and we can pool our resources to get some of these things


through. So, for example, site speed.


You guys have heard a lot about this, I'm sure, over the conference just in general.


But it affects quality score as well. And product listing ads have a quality score,


but it's not visible. We just kind of know that it's there.


And landing page relevance and site speed and site speed affects our quality score,


which means that we have to pay a higher cost per click.


This is a picture of Tag Man's conversion loss calculator.


So it is based on their internal data. But if you would like to see what it's like


to play with the slider bars and watch revenue melt off a site as the site speed increases,


this is a good way to do it. Cart issues.


This is the bane of my existence and the number one obstacle to really doing Google Shopping


is everybody has a damn stupid snowflake of a cart that's unique that somebody built for


them in their backyard or their cousin's brother's friend did it.


And then there's some of the bigger platforms that are these huge, that have hundreds and


hundreds of sites on them but can't do very simple things because of the way that they


have their cart set up, their site architecture. So how do we get ‑‑ and why this is such


a big deal is because in order to do Google Shopping, you have to be able to pull a clean


feed. So a feed is what you extract from your shopping


cart. It's the list of all your products.


It's your product catalog. And it will have all of the attributes listed


to each of those products. So whether or not that's a product description,


a title, a brand, individual like a SKU number, all that kind of stuff.


And each cart will pull something different because they're awesome like that.


So pulling a clean feed is really, really important because a lot of times as you pull


it, it will mimic site architecture or site navigation.


And I think I just saw somebody grimace there because some sites have terrible, terrible


cart navigation and architecture and you know it and trying to imagine pulling a feed like


that is just a nightmare. So here is an example.


I have a WordPress eCommerce site. It's a plug‑in that I paid for.


And this is the message that appears to me when I go into my WordPress interface.


This is terrible advice. It is telling me to just go ahead and put


my feed into merchant center and everything is going to be okay.


This is what the feed looks like when I pull it out.


There's tons of information missing. I can't edit it.


It's crap, right? And this is why there are entire companies


that have built up a huge revenue stream on doing clean feeds.


And I will actually get into that a little bit more as well.


So what happens when you have product descriptions that don't have any product ‑‑ don't have


a description? This is something I see quite a lot.


So if you have a huge SKU catalog, you know, 80,000, 3 million, whatever, there's a good


chance that there's probably a product on there that doesn't have a product description


or maybe even hundreds. So what will happen is someone gets the bright


idea of creating a fix, well, they'll go in and they'll take the product title and they'll


move it to the description and then they'll put in some sort of awesome boilerplate text


like Nike is great. So then you have 100 products that have the


same exact text. So they not only have it on your Web site,


but you also have it in your product feed. Or they'll do something like this where they


do two sentences of unique text and then they'll put in formatting that makes my eyes bleed.


This is what it's going to look like on Google Shopping.


Then we get into the site architecture as well.


So this is what the URLs look like for that particular site and what their navigation


looks like. If I go and pull a raw feed from here, I can


only guess that the horror horrors, what this probably looks like when I pull it out, but


I'm willing to bet that a lot of the category designations are missing or misattributed


and then trying to clean those up in general. So sometimes someone will get a great idea


and they'll take the color black on the Web site and they'll abbreviate it as BLK.


That means that somebody has to go through and clean up every single instance of BLK


to black in order for it to be submitted to Google Merchant Center.


The more information that you can give Google Merchant Center, the better your feed is going


to do and the better your product listing ads are going to do because then Google doesn't


have to guess so much at the queries and the products that they're trying to match up.


So you can see why pulling a clean feed is kind of really important.


So what this means is that we also need developer help.


So if you were going to go in this holiday season and buy a scotch for your Web dev team


to try to get them to do some changes you've been waiting on, tap your PPC person and see


if you can get them to go in on it with you. A couple of other things that we have in common


as far as PPC and SEO go, this is new, local inventory ads.


So local inventory ads is only in the U.S. and it is a beta at this time, so it's only


got a few advertisers in it. But what happens is if someone searches for


a product and it's in stock and in a store nearby you and they're doing local inventory


ads, you're going to see this little red marker. It also works with Google Express, which is


the most horrible, awful, quick start AdWords program there is on the planet.


Never do it. It also links with Google Places, which from


what I heard from like last week, it's now called My Places for Business or My Business


Google Places, whatever they renamed it this week.


So that all links together. But in a nutshell, local inventory ads also


require a separate feed. So when you go to upload into Merchant Center,


you're actually going to have two feeds. You're going to have your local inventory


feed and you're going to have your regular feed.


And it requires that it be updated more often. Google trusted stores.


So if you're a Google trusted store, you get this really cool badge and then you get to


be front and center. And if you're overstock.com, you get to outrank


Macy's and Target for something that's really popular and a lot of folks search for.


KitchenAid mixers, these are everywhere. But in order to do it, so you have to place


a piece of code on your site and then you have to wait, it could be a minimum of 45


days, it could be longer, because you have to have a certain amount of data and orders


go through in order to jump through all of the hoops that Google requires for you to


be a Google trusted store. And those hoops are things like order fulfillment


time, shipping rates and return rate. Once you qualify, though, you get this badge


and then you get to stand out on the page. And you can put it on your site just in general


and you can also have it show on your product listing ads and on your and in the sorry,


just in your product listing ads. If you're not comfortable with Google having


that much information, you and you got really hit hard with the change from paid to from


free to paid, then you might not have any other choice.


Besides, as Marshall said, they already have all your information anyway. So go for it.


So before we go too much further, is it worth it and can you do it?


Yes. Hell, yes. You can do it.


It's just a real pain in the ass to set up when you first get going.


But once you get it going, it actually gets pretty good.


So department stores, or I like to call it the targeting, the layering.


So how can you do Google shopping or if you're already on Google shopping, how can you do


it without getting eaten by zombies? The first thing you want to remember for when


working with Google shopping is you're not working with keywords.


You're working with attributes. And attributes are the columns in the feed


of information that you're giving to Google. And so in the case of Google, you can target


by the attributes that are listed here. So category, brand, item ID, condition, so


like new or used, product type, and then custom labels from zero to four.


So that's five total. But Google is unique in that it gives you five


custom labels in which you can apply to your feed however you want.


Very few other current pairs of shopping engines do this.


So let's say that you had a shipping threshold of let's say your cost of shipping is 7.99,


but you have a bunch of products that are under that.


You don't necessarily want to be submitting or bidding to those products the same way


that you would for products that qualify for your free shipping offer.


So you would just go into your feed, add a column for custom label zero, and then add


an identifier. So let's say we'll call it shipping.


For every product that's under 7.99 that you would like to have that custom label apply


to, just add it to their row. And then when you go into AdWords, you can


target that group of products and bid less for it.


You can also do this if you want to bid more. So let's say you have a brand that you want


to do or you have a promotion, like you have a 50% off sale and you want all of the products


that are 50% off to get a designation, put them in a new group, and then pump up the


bid. This is how you do it.


And just to kind of give you some visualization, I like pictures, and I got some help with


this. You should have seen the one that I made.


It looked like glue sticks and glitter, I swear.


So I got our design team to help me out. So all products is the designation that every


single Google Shopping campaign starts with. So you go into AdWords, you create a new campaign,


and by default, all products is what it's opted into.


Thank you, Google. So what that means is you want your all products


bid to be the lowest bid out of all of your bids because of the way that this is going


to kind of layer. So you have your top level categories, your


subcategories, your ID, and your custom labels. And you can target to any of those depending


on how much you want to promote a product or group of products or not.


So let's say that you had 3 million SKUs. How do you do this without losing your mind?


Because if you've ever tried to open an Excel sheet with 3 million SKUs, it doesn't work.


So portfolio approach. And then we'd also, sorry, you want to take


it from a portfolio approach. So groups of products instead of trying to


focus on a single product every single time. Maybe you do have a single product that gets


huge amounts of traffic and is very popular and you want to bid for it separately.


No problem. You can do that with the item ID attribute.


But it's those thousands of other products that you're worried about either getting out


of control, showing the wrong size, showing the wrong pack, like maybe you have a six-pack


versus an eight-pack versus a 12-pack and you want the eight-pack to show more often.


This is how you do it. Kind of look at it as a portfolio.


And then you don't want to focus, although PLAs have them, you can see search queries


within the AdWords interface. I'll show you why those are crap later.


But this portfolio approach is the best way to do it.


Then when you want to get fancy, you can layer your bids.


So layering bids means that you can have any single product appear in multiple portfolios


and then bid differently for each of those portfolios.


So let's say I have a sweatshirt and it is categorized in the active wear column.


And then it's also a certain brand and it's in a 50% off sale.


So that means that that particular sweatshirt can show up in three different product portfolios


at any given time. So I want to make sure that I structure my


bids appropriately as to what portfolio is more important to me versus less.


And so you can see how this can get really messy really fast if you had 3 million products.


So another thing that's not always known about PLAs is that there are negative keywords.


So you can use negative keywords in the same way that you can use them in search text ads.


What you want to make sure is that you don't go crazy with them.


So negative keywords in the context of Google Shopping restricts traffic.


It actually just stops it. It says to Google, we are not relevant for


these things, go away. Whereas most people guess that instead it


tries to find another product or something else that's similar that it could show for


it, it doesn't. If you put in a negative keyword that says


for like porcelain because you only sell things made out of granite or whatever, then it's


going to anything, any query around porcelain, it's not going to go through.


So don't go crazy when you do this, especially because a lot of folks only do one Google


Shopping campaign and then they'll put the negative keywords in at the top level and


not realize how much traffic they're restricting underneath.


Okay. There we go.


All right. Let's get weird.


All right. Also, I just really like this scene.


So as I was talking about, there are entire companies that have built an empire on Google


Shopping. They're very happy about the change to paid.


And what these companies do is they really, more than anything, they help you get over


that technical difficulties thing. So you can actually export a feed that looks


like raw hamburger and give it to these guys and they will turn it into steak.


They'll charge you for it too. And that's kind of what you have to consider


when you go to do Google Shopping is how much money do you have to invest in this endeavor.


Some of them are flat fee, some of them are percentage of spend, and some of them are


percentage of revenue. So it depends entirely on how much you're


willing to give up in order to have these guys clean up your feed for you.


But they can also do some other really cool things like setting floors and ceilings and


bidding to margin. So setting a floor.


If you have a product, let's say you have 300 SKUs, but at the end of the day you look


at it and you go, okay, really, we should only be sending about 80,000.


You can have these platforms, program it in and give it rules that say, all right, any


product that's under 999, don't send to Google Shopping.


I don't want to pay for those clicks. And this is something you should not send


every single product you've ever made in your life to Google Shopping.


Same thing as with ceilings. If you have a product that's just for fun


or kind of a joke, when I got married, my husband wanted to register for the Martin


jet pack, which he did. We didn't get it.


But I'm sure whoever was advertising it enjoyed the clicks that he had on it in the shopping


interface. The other thing is margins.


So maybe you have products that are really good margin for you and maybe they don't.


You can actually just go into these systems and say, all right, if there is less than


5% margin on these products, don't send it. Or bid it down to like 5 cents because I don't


want it unless I can get it super cheap. Otherwise you're spending on a per-click basis


more than you would have than you should, honestly, or than the cost of the actual product


itself. One thing that came up while I was doing this


presentation is whether or not schema.org affects product listing ads.


And it kind of was going to before 2012 in October.


And then once it went ahead and went all database feed managed was it.


So it doesn't really. This is something that is near and dear to


me that I would like to see more people do, which is image testing and using image testing


and product listing ads. So if you have a really strong affiliate program


or you have what's called the Amazon problem where you got really strong on Amazon for


your products and now Amazon is taking all your traffic, this is how you stand out in


the crowd. Have a folder on your server of unique images


just for product listing ads. Serve those images through your feed and then


you can stand out in the crowd and you don't have the same picture as everybody else.


Now, you can't do text on the pictures. Nice try.


Somebody already tried that. You can't put like your 30% off or your promotions


on it. Just the images.


Catalog submission. So a lot of you folks already know about this.


Or if you didn't, surprise, catalog submission. You can go ahead and submit this.


And why not? If you have a physical catalog. It's not shown right now to be linked to Google


Shopping, but you really can you really tell me that it's not going to be?


I mean, come on. Oh, Bing.


Bing, they decided to do product ads, too. So in March of this year, they launched theirs.


Only they don't call them product listing ads, they call them product ads.


So it works almost exactly the same. They made it stupid easy to get into.


It mimics Google almost exactly. Same required attributes, same kind of feed


load upload, same kind of editorial guidelines, same structure within the Bing ads interface.


The trick is they actually beat Google to the punch on this.


They didn't make a separate merchant center the way that Google did.


They nested it in Bing ads. So all you have to do is go into the Bing ads


platform and go into merchant center to get started.


However, I would recommend not going crazy and doing all the crazy and doing all the


layering and the targeting, the attributes, because what we're seeing on average right


now is 4% of Google PLA traffic or 20. There's no in between.


It's either 4 or 20. And I asked a whole bunch of my friends in


the industry about this and said, you guys seeing the same thing?


So it's either a very small piece or it's a big healthy piece, depending on what vertical


you're in. This, I don't know if everybody knows about


this one. This was Bing ads rich captions.


So this allows you to go into the Bing ads interface.


You can upload the product feed, click the box for rich captions, and then this is what's


going to show in the organic search results on Bing.com.


So if you don't want to do Bing product ads and you don't want to do Google shopping,


you can still utilize that feed that's sitting around and have it come in and do price and


availability. However, it will get attributed to Google


or I'm sorry, it will get attributed to Bing organic traffic in your analytics platform.


They have no way to track it yet separately. They're still working on that.


And there's not a whole lot of movement on if they're going to make any more improvements


to it. It's just there if you want it for free for


now. Okay.


No mall presentation is complete without a fat guy on a Segway, right?


How did this move even get made? All right.


Google Analytics, come on, dashboards are your friends.


Even Marshall said it. Dashboards are cool.


But what isn't a no-brainer is tracking the difference between your search text ads and


your PLA traffic. And you should definitely, definitely track


between the two. So we have a toy.


Aww, and it broke a little bit. But that's okay.


So Google Analytics PLA dashboard. This is free.


This was created at Portent by our analytics architect, Michael Wegan.


This is in the Bitly bundle and it's on our blog.


Go ahead, get it, grab the link, install it in your analytics platform.


Just make sure that you named your campaign something similar like with the word shopping


in it or PLA instead of like ran suggestion of you guys are dicks.


So this will work and it will just plug in and off you go.


Marshall also brought this up, Supermetrics. If both of us giving this particular tool


an endorsement doesn't do it for you, I don't know what else you need.


But Supermetrics is awesome. So I use it for two things.


One is the import third-party cost data tool. So if you've ever wanted to import your cost


data for Bing, Facebook, Twitter, whatever you're doing, this is how you do it.


And then you can make super cool reports like data grabber from Excel.


So that's two endorsements for Supermetrics right there.


And I have an endorsement for the same thing, actually, as Splunk.


So doing log file analysis. And it turns out, and I talked to the folks


at Splunk and I said, do people actually use your product for what I'm doing, which is


looking for comparison shoppers? And they said, actually, they do.


They found a couple folks that were doing that.


And what it is, is Google does this really cool thing where if somebody clicks on your


ad multiple times and goes to your site back and forth and opens multiple tabs, they just


charge you as it's a new auction every single time.


So you don't get a discount or anything. They just keep charging you.


So comparison shoppers is a real thing. And this is how you would actually find them


is through log file management. I'm sorry, log file analysis.


And the reason that comparison shoppers are something you want to take a look at is you


want to see how much is the true cost of Google Shopping to you.


Because people are weird. People like my mom.


There we go. My mom has no idea that she's clicking on


an ad, Google Shopping. And while Google Shopping has done a beautiful


job of making these comparison shopping grids and indexes for you to scroll through, people


open multiple tabs. They just do it.


I asked my mom once how she gets to I asked her what browser do you use?


She said the Internet. I said, okay.


All right. You're on Internet Explorer.


Got it. All right.


Assisted conversions. These are important.


You want to make sure that you count these, especially in product listing ads.


As what we've noticed in particular across the industry, these PLAs are not all about


last click. Again, comparison shoppers kind of thing.


They come in, they look around, they come back direct, maybe they come back organic.


Who knows? But make sure that if you're not considering


assisted conversions already in your PLA efforts, that you do.


Okay. Check out.


All right. These are some things that I'm going to that


I feel that are going to be important in the context of Google Shopping in the future.


So reviews. And we've talked about this a little bit already


at the conference. These are important.


Third party reviews. Pick a platform that Google scrapes like biz


rate or reseller ratings. Don't be the guy with no rating.


People listen to strangers more than any before.


They read reviews, they trust them, they look at them.


And when you go into the fierce competition now that is Google Shopping, you're going


to need to be able to be part of the group. So search queries.


As I was saying in AdWords, you can see search queries from product listing ads, but they're


not everything they shake out to be. So in this case, we were able to determine


that one is a person and one is not a person. And here's what's happening.


So that query is very, very specific. I mean, that is a product name, it is a description,


and it is a style number. Think of all the times that you've searched


like that versus all the times that you haven't searched like that.


And it turns out what that is, if you look at the third listing down, is that is a product


title. That is a product page on Amazon.


And what is happening is these are showing up as PLA impressions, but they're actually


on the Google search partner network. So Kohl's is a prime, prime violator of this.


And they have tons of ads on their site. You'd think they would not want to do this


because they're selling things on their site, but no, they have massive amounts of Google


ads on their site and they are getting racked up as partner impressions.


So if you'd like to dig in more of this, because it's pretty nerdy, there is a presentation


that I've linked to in the Bitly link bundle that was given at PPC Herald Conference this


year that goes into it in great detail. Okay.


Why would I even do this, right? Why would I even do Google Shopping besides


obviously desperately needing a hobby? Well, it's the advertising platform that's


also a search engine. You get so many things.


It's Google's game, right? Google has Google, it's their game, it's


their shopping engine, and if you want to play, you have to pay.


And they really, really like money. The nice thing is that PLA CPCs at this time


or cost per clicks are actually lower than search text ads on average.


Search text ads, I go in and my favorite that I've seen personally was $122 a click.


Second DUI attorney in Los Angeles. So if you're a DUI attorney in Los Angeles,


it's a pretty heavy investment. But for product listing ads, it's like $5


and under, what we're seeing on average. So it's still cheap to get into.


I'm waiting for the $122 a day. I think the record now is $204 for mesotheliome


attorney. But it's their game.


And if you want to play, you have to pay. To give you an idea of how important some


industries know this to be, in October of 2012, when they went to paid, Etsy, the craft


vendor marketplace, told all of their vendors, we will pay for your PLA clicks this holiday


season. So Etsy made the investment, did all the shopping


feeds, and paid $250,000 out of their pocket to keep all of their vendors in the game,


knowing that it would have resulted in tons of lost business and confusion.


Can you imagine all the crafters and knitters and potters trying to figure out how to do


PLAs? Etsy said, you know what, we'll take care


of it for you. They knew how important it was for their folks to be in this space, especially


with such short notice in October of 2012. Okay.


So there's a lot of information here. So who should you listen to?


Really you want to follow the money. Turns out that paid that in PPC, we are huge


nerds too. Don't think you have a corner on the nerd


market, okay? We are huge freaking nerds.


So here are the three companies that I recommend taking a look at.


If you want to keep on top of the industry but kind of more of a 30,000-foot view.


Let's say you don't want to get that nerdy. So RKG or rim Kaufman, they handle the most


PLA spend in the entire United States. Every white paper, blog post, and quarterly


report they do is paid nerd heaven. Word stream also handles millions of dollars


through their platform, and they are mostly for SMBs, but every time Google rolls out


a new feature, you can count on them to go through and rip it apart.


And then Marin Software actually does a really good quarterly report, but it is the most


aggressive marketing team I've ever dealt with.


So if you've got a PPC person in-house, have them do it first.


Don't give them your name. They'll call you every week.


But they have lots of money and they know what they're doing.


And then I'm very important. I kind of know what I'm doing.


I don't have millions of dollars, and I don't have any cat memes.


I'm really sorry about that. But I do kind of know what's going on.


So last but not least, I'm going to show you this one more time, which is my bit.ly.com,


my link bundle, if you want to go through. Every link that I talked about is in there.


It's from TagMan to Splunk to Etsy, you name it.


And that's all I have. Thank you.


Lots of information. I think anybody who's interested is going


to have to download your slide deck and link bundle.


Come find me. Let's nerd out. We don't have time for Q&A, but there's two


big takeaways I got from that. One, there seems to be plenty of opportunity


in Google. It's still in its infancy. And second, you're the second or third speaker


today to mention site speed. And I think when working with clients, you


must see multiple advantages that everything's intertwined.


Exactly. And I mean, we all know that.


I mean, there's no need to beat a dead horse at site speed.


When you go shopping, you don't want to sit there and watch for it to load either.


So why would anyone else? Oh, that horse isn't dead yet.


We're going to keep beating that. Okay.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

This week, minimum viable SEO.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

So if you only have a few minutes in a month, in a week, to do some SEO, and I know many


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

of you are professional SEOs, but you work with lots of folks, like content creators,


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

clients, web developers, who have very, very limited time, what I want to try and do is


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

provide a path for you of do this if you have no other time in the week to do your SEO.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

So let's say, here's my calendar, it's February, so 28 days.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Start of the month, you have an hour to give me.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Sometime in the first week of the month, doesn't have to be, but that's a great way to go.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

And at the start of each week, I'm going to ask for 10 minutes, right, just to do a little


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

bit of planning, and then each time you publish content, a very, very small amount of time,


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

just three minutes.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

And I know it sounds hard to believe, but you can get a fair amount of solid SEO work,


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

especially if you're in an industry that is not hyper-competitive, or if you're going


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

after right kinds of keywords that aren't super-competitive, you can really make a difference.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

If you're building up a lot of content over months and years, just following this simple


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

protocol can really take your SEO to the next level.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

So all right, let's say we're at the start of our month, we have our hour, I want you


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

to do one of two things, and this is going to be based on if your technical SEO, meaning


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

if your website is using WordPress and it's pretty much nicely crawlable, maybe you've


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

signed up for Google Search Console, you don't see a lot of errors, there's not a lot of


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

issues, you haven't created a bunch of technical debt on your website in the past, great, fine,


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

and you're going to be focused on keywords and content.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

And a keyword content map, which is something we've discussed here on Whiteboard Friday,


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

I'd urge you to check that video out if you haven't yet, but I'm going to make an MVP


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

version, right, a very, very small version that can help a little bit.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

That spreadsheet, I just want a spreadsheet with a few things in it, three things really.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

The most valuable keywords, so just the most valuable keywords that you know you're targeting


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

or that you care about right now for your business.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

You think that people are searching for these keywords, maybe you've done a little bit of


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

keyword research, it could be for free through Google's AdWords tool, or you could pay for


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

something like Keyword Explorer from Moz, but really just 50 to 100 keywords in there.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

I want the current rank and whatever SERP features appear.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

You could even trim this down to just your current ranking and the top SERP feature.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

So if it has a featured snippet or if it has videos or if it shows maps or news, whatever


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

that is, tweets.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

And then I want the URL that's targeting it, or if you have no URL targeting it yet, you


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

haven't yet created a piece of content that targets this keyword, put a little, okay,


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

that's a needs to be created, right?


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

I need this before I can start targeting this keyword and trying to rank for it.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

And you're going to update this weekly.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

You can do that totally manually.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

You know, 50 keywords, you can look them up in an hour.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

You can check the rankings.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

You can see where you're going.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

That's fine.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

It's a little bit of a pain in the butt, but it can totally be done.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Or you could use a tool, Moz Pro, Ahrefs, SEMrush, SearchMetrics.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

There's all sorts of tools out there that'll track rankings and show you which features


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

appear and whether your URLs are in there or not.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Okay.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

This is our keyword to content map.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

If you have that hour, but you know you have technical issues on the site, I'm going to


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

urge you before you focus on keywords and content to make sure your technical SEO, your


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

crawl is set.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

And that means step one, just a basic simple crawl analysis.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

So for free, you can use Google Search Console.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

It will show you most of the time with relative accuracy, big important errors like 404s and


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

500s and things that Google thought were duplicate content and that kind of stuff.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

If you want to pay, you can get a little bit more advanced features and some better filters


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

and sorting and more frequency and those kinds of things.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Moz Pro is fine for that.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Screaming Frog is good.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

OnPage.org.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

All of these are popular in the SEO field.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Step two, you don't need to worry about every single crawl issue.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

I just want you to worry about the most severe, most important ones with your one hour.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

And those are things like 404s and 500s, which can really cause a lot of problems.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Duplicate content, where you potentially need to use a rel canonical or 301 redirect.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Broken links, where you just go in and fix the broken link to something that's not broken.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Missing or bad titles, title elements that are particularly long or include misspellings


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

or that just don't exist.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Bad, very bad to have a page on the web with no title.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

And thin content or no crawlable content.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Those are really the worst of the bunch.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

There's a number more that you could take care of, but if you only have that limited


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

time, take care of this.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

If you've already done this, then we can move on here.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Finally, last thing but not least, every time you publish a piece of content, I'm going


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

to ask for just three minutes of your time.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

And that is going to be around this minimum viable pre-publish checklist.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

So does the content have a keyword target?


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Yes, no, maybe.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

If it doesn't, you're going to need to go and refer over to your keyword content list


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

and make sure that it does.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

So you're publishing something.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

I'm assuming you're not publishing a tremendous amount of content, but a little bit.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Make sure everyone has a keyword target.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Make sure, if you can, that it's targeting two to three additional keywords, related


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

keywords.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

So let's say I'm going after something like Fabergé eggs.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

I probably also want to target Carl Fabergé, or I want to target Fabergé eggs museums,


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

or I want to target Fabergé eggs replicas.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

So these other terms and phrases that people are likely searching for that could have the


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

same or similar keyword intent that could live on the same page, that kind of thing.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Is that keyword in the title the main one you're targeting?


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Do you have a compelling meta description?


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Is your content doing a good job of truly answering the searcher's query?


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

So if they've searched for this thing, are you serving up the content they need?


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

And then have you used related topics?


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

You can get those from places like the Moz Bar or MarketMuse or SEOzone or Moz Pro.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Related topics are essentially the words and phrases that you should also be using in addition


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

to your keyword to indicate to the search engines, hey, this is really about this topic.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

We've seen some nice bumps from that.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

You're doing this every time you publish content.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

It only takes three minutes.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

And the last thing, at the start of the week, I'm also asking you for these 10 minutes to


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

do one or two actions.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

I just want you to play on one or two actions at the start of the week to bump your SEO.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

It could include some publication stuff, but let's assume you're just doing these three


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

minutes every time you do that.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

At the start of the week, the last thing you're doing is just choosing one of these, maybe


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

two.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

I don't need more.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

I want you to do something like link outreach.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Reach out to a couple high potential targets.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Maybe you use a link intersect tool to figure out people who are linking to two of your


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

competitors or reach out to partners, to friends, do some content contributions, just a little


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

thing to get one or two links.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Or maybe you create some content that's targeting a missed keyword.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

And when you do that, of course, you go through your pre-published checklist.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Maybe you are upgrading some content that's already ranking, like number five through


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

That's where there's a lot of opportunity for a high value keyword to get bumped up.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

You could just do little things like make sure that it's serving all of these items,


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

try and get it a featured snippet, try and identify content that might be old that needs


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

a refresh that's not serving the searcher intent as well because the information in


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

there is old.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Or you could try contributing some offsite content.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

That could be to places like YouTube.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Maybe you've seen videos show up or something, guest posts, a forum where you contribute,


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

answer some questions on Quora, contribute something to LinkedIn or Medium, just something


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

to get your brand, your content, and hopefully a link out there to a different audience than


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

what's already coming to your site.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

You do these things, right?


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

You start the month with an hour.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Every time you publish content, you put in three minutes, and at the start of the week,


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

you put in 10 minutes to do a couple pieces of planning.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

This will take you a long way.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Look, SEO professionals are going to do a lot more than this, for sure, but this can


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

be a great start, great way to get that SEO kicked off, to have a minimum viable SEO plan.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Look forward to your thoughts, and we'll see you again next week for another edition


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday

of Whiteboard Friday.


Minimum Viable SEO - Whiteboard Friday


#WhiteboardFriday: How to get Backlinks in 2020 and 2021 [Series]

Hey Moz fans, welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


Today we are going to be looking at the easiest ways for you to get backlinks to your website.


None of these involve content creation whatsoever, so we are really excited to dive into this.


It will be part of a larger link building in the 2020 series and beyond.


We are really excited to dive into some of the easiest things that you can do today to


enhance your backlink profile.


Let's take a look.


Remember unlinked brand product name mentions.


This is simply going to Google, doing a search for these things within quotes, and looking


at the first several pages of results to ensure that all of those results are linking back


to your site.


They likely are not.


Those will be your opportunities to send a message or email asking for the webmaster


or the writer to provide a link back to your site with your mention.


So is unlinked images.


This is a goldmine if you are working with a website that has a lot of proprietary images


or really great graphic design.


Maybe you have infographics or some things that are special to the brand or the domain.


Use Google reverse image search and put in the images that you think might have been


taken or used on other websites.


You will immediately see what those websites are and whether or not they link back to your


site.


Redirect your 404 pages with backlinks.


This is completely within your control.


No outreach required.


In fact, Moz Link Explorer provides this really easily within Moz Pro.


You basically take a look at all of your pages that have backlinks and you can filter by


status code.


You just change that to 400s, 404s and you can see all of the pages to your website that


currently have backlinks but the page is no longer there.


All you want to do with that is just simply 301 redirect that old broken page to a new


relevant page and you are saving that authority that is being sent to your site.


Keep an eye on recently lost links.


The keyword here is recently.


If you can engage with another website that has recently either on accident or changed


things around on purpose on the page, you are more likely to reclaim your lost link.


It's also important to understand why.


Is that website going through a redesign?


Have they gotten rid of pages?


Did a competitor come in and provide a better resource than what you currently have?


There are all sorts of reasons why you really want to identify what is going on.


This is a new tactic that was recently brought to my attention by the brilliant Sarah Hollenbeck


at Siege Media.


They have a brilliant team.


I highly recommend you checking out this article that's basically all about moving backlink


targets which has never really occurred to me where you basically have backlinks to older


resources or older content or products that you want restructured to newer or more important


pages on your website.


Sarah goes into great detail about this and can help explain just how you can do this


successfully and what that means for your site.


Really neat.


I highly suggest that.


Check out sites that list competitors but not you.


These might be resource pages or roundups of information of sorts.


You can play around with this in Google as well by providing competitors within quotes


and then minus your company or the website you're working on.


It really starts to give you an idea of what websites might be great opportunities for


a backlink because you fit within that vein.


Makes sense.


But similarly, sites that provide topic or industry plus geo information.


So again, finding those resource pages, those roundups.


And often times you'll see these on lots of EDU sites or even.gov.


You can do some different searches around if you were Columbia outdoor clothing in Minnesota.


Play around with this a bit.


This could be in the Midwest, in the United States.


You can change these words around and really start to identify some higher quality link


prospects.


And lastly, build relationships.


I cannot speak more highly about this.


Just for your own career longevity and what you do in SEO and marketing in general, it


is so important to develop genuine, real relationships with individuals that work in the industry.


Whether that be at other websites or just in the same vein of things.


Not only can you bounce ideas off of these people and really get help with different


things, but you get to help support the incredible things that they're working on.


And it's just an all around feel good, help each other out situation.


So if you're not already reaching out and building relationships, I highly suggest you


do that.


It's a lot of fun and I can't stress enough, there are so, so many good people within our


industry.


It's incredible.


And lastly, we really want to take a modern look at link building practices in 2020 and


beyond.


And a big part of that goes around things like, let people choose the anchor text for


your back link.


You know, five, ten years ago it was standard to request very specific anchor text for the


keyword you want to rank for.


It's not really the case anymore.


Right, especially with the addition of BERT, Google has gotten so much more sophisticated


in understanding text and language and websites that it's really unnecessary and might even


cause problems to ask for those specific anchor link texts.


So definitely take a look at this article we'll link to down below by David F. here


who wrote about link building lies.


It's a really great article and we'll continue to build upon this series to provide you with


some fresher information around link building today.


And I really look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions down below.


Feel free to let us know what you liked about this, what you didn't like.


If you have any great ideas, please let us know down in the comments.


And I look forward to seeing you all next time.


Thanks so much.


Using Social Media as Your Primary Link Building Tactic Probably Won't Work - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


This week we're talking about an assumption that I think many of us have made over the


years.


I know I have, and in fact I've amplified that.


I might have even covered it on Whiteboard Friday, but thanks to some research that we've


done together with Bud Sumo, as well as some research we've seen from our correlation study


this summer, you know what, it's looking like we were just dead wrong on this very important


aspect of how SEO and social media and content marketing fit together.


So you've probably seen me present on this, either here on Whiteboard Friday or in one


of my slide decks or in a blog post, right?


It's kind of this idea of flywheel marketing, where you create some great content, you amplify


that content via social media and your social channels, you attract visitors through that,


you naturally earn links from some of those people who visit your site, and you grow your


social following, and now next time your audience potential is bigger, right, and your rankings


potential is also bigger, because you have more links coming to your site and that helps


all the other pages on your site, and you have a bigger social audience, so now there's


more people to amplify to.


You know what?


It actually looks like this is totally broken and wrong.


Like the idea that you are naturally earning links from people who come via social looks


to us like it was a bunk belief in its entirety.


Let me show you.


So first off, BuzzSumo, they did the vast majority of the work.


I appreciate them including Moz as well, and we did participate in some of our linked metrics,


but the BuzzSumo crew did a bunch of this work.


So they looked at articles that received social shares, right?


In fact, a million articles that were taken from their database, and then they looked


at the number of shares and number of links those received.


The vast, vast majority received zero links.


In fact, 75% plus of all articles they looked at received zero, not a single one, social


shares.


Same with links, by the way.


I think it was 90% plus for links, maybe even more.


This is like a power law distribution, right?


You're essentially seeing that a few articles get all the shares out there, everything else


really gets nothing.


So if you're not going to be in the top 10% of content that's created, don't even bother.


Don't even bother.


You're not going to get shares, you're not going to get links, you're not going to get


traffic.


Forget it.


A lot of content marketing is probably spent in vain.


Granted, maybe a lot of that is learning what actually works and experimenting, that's fine.


Then they looked at the correlation between links and shares, and as you can see from


this crudely drawn scatter plot, no correlation whatsoever.


If you were to draw the line here, it'd probably be something like, oh, look at that total


crap correlation.


Here are the numbers.


Facebook, 0.0221.


Twitter, 0.0281.


Slightly better, but still in the realm of totally insignificant.


Google Plus, 0.0058.


You're just talking about numbers that suggest essentially that there is virtually no correlation


between links and shares.


Now they did look at places where there were lots of shares and links, and those tended


to be a few things.


I'll let you read the report, and you should.


I think it's one of the most important reports to come out in our industry in a while, and


credit to BuzzSumo for putting it together.


We know from our research, we've done experiments looking at whether anchor text still moves


things.


We've done experiments looking at whether URL mentions move the needle.


URL mentions don't, by the way, once you turn them into live links.


They do.


We've looked at whether you can actually rank content without any links at all.


Turns out almost impossible, so next to impossible that we couldn't find a single credible example


of a page that ranked without any links unless it was on a site that had lots of links pointed


at it.


We know we still need links to rank.


In fact, notably ranking correlations with links haven't dropped over the last few years.