a bit. I'm going to quote this recent white paper that Moz did. It was really fascinating


Factors that Affect the Local Algorithm that Don't Impact Organic - Presented by Joy Hawkins

because it kind of matches what we've been seeing. They found that only 8% of local pack


results had a website that also appeared in the search engine results below, so organic.


Digging a little further, out of that 8%, only 12% were actually in the top 20. This


is very, very different than other studies we've seen that have come out years ago. They


used to say the overlap rate was 60%, 70%, 80%.


I'm going to be digging into factors that particularly look at the local algorithm or


the Google My Business listing and going through seven different things that we have seen have


a major impact on the local algorithm.


To start, I'm going to talk about proximity. If you're wondering what that word means,


just to define it here, proximity is your location as the user or the searcher. When


you go to Google on your phone or your computer and you do a search, down at the very bottom


of your search results, you will usually see a zip code based on the location that you


happen to be in.


Sometimes it's more granular than this. On your cell phone, you may actually see a blue


dot where Google can actually see your actual coordinates. They know a lot about you. It's


kind of creepy.


According to the Moz Local Search Ranking Factor study last year, proximity is the number


one thing that influences ranking in the local pack results. We see this a lot. To help illustrate


this a bit, there was a study that was done by Juris Digital. What they did is they took


a single keyword for a lawyer. They searched on 138 different zip codes. They found that


the results varied quite drastically. There was a total of 82 different law firms represented


all within the Houston area.


Linked to the study here is quite fascinating. We may have heard a couple times in this conference


the tracking from zip codes is something that you should be considering or thinking about


because if you're tracking from a city level, you're not getting accurate results. Unfortunately,


it gets even more complicated than that.


This is a tool that I love and we use quite a bit, known as the Local Falcon. For those


of you that aren't familiar with this tool, how it works is you go and you put in a business


and then you put in a keyword. Then you can scan and it uses actual geo coordinates as


the location of the user. A lot more accurate for what you would actually get if you were


searching on your mobile device.


This is a search here for dentists near me. Why this is really fascinating is you'll see


in this example what I've highlighted in blue. This is all the exact same zip code. You've


got 77006, the zip code in Houston. If I'm talking to a business owner, I'm like, yeah,


you rank first in that zip code. Is that really an accurate statement?


Here you can see in some parts of the zip code they're third, in some they're eighth,


in some they're fifth. Really, what is their actual position?


To show you what this looks like in the actual search results, here's the keyword scanned


from two of those points within the same zip code half a mile away. If you look closely,


you will notice that the three dentists on the left don't overlap whatsoever with the


three dentists on the right. They're completely different. Your searcher's location is literally


just half a mile away.


Dentists are a really good illustration of this because there are so many dentists all


over the place. It's very high proximity. We see this also with industries like restaurants.


According to the same local search ranking factor study that Moz did, on the organic


side, proximity does matter. I'm not saying it doesn't matter. It is just not as great.


Like what we see with the local packs where it's number one, it was ranked as the 27th


thing that impacts organic ranking.


We decided that we would mimic the Juris Digital Study. We did a similar thing where we took


one keyword and then abbreviated it to see if there was a difference and searched in


the Toronto area across 72 postal codes. That's what we call zip codes.


We found that the top ranking law firm in the organic results was there for 100% of


the time. Very, very different than what we were seeing in the Juris Digital Study.


Here's another thing that will help illustrate it. This is using one of my favorite tools


called PlacesCout. This is a client of ours. When I searched for lawn care in the Greater


Toronto area, he ranks pretty well organically. He has a pretty widespread when you search


for lawn care in the organic side.


On the local side, so the local pack rankings, he doesn't rank as well. The moment you get


away from his actual office location, the less likely he is to rank. Anything that's


red or yellow, he is not on the first page for.


It's not at all shocking that 90% of his traffic for this keyword comes from organic. However,


that is not always the case. We see lots of other industries where when we look at the


leads that clients are getting from Google My Business versus organic, Google My Business


is killing it. We get way more leads from there, way more calls from there. We invest


more time in obsessing about their local pack rankings because the volume of leads that


they get is higher.


If you're wondering how we're able to isolate this, you can do this inside Search Console


if you are using UTM codes inside Google My Business. If you don't do this already, I


have a really detailed tutorial that shows you exactly how to do that so that you can


go into Search Console, segment the data, and actually track where your traffic's coming


from so you know which algorithm to focus on.


Next I'm going to dive a little bit more into rank tracking. I've already explained that


rank tracking is problematic and difficult for those of us that work in local search.


Unfortunately, it's about to get a little worse.


There was this tweet that was done by Chris Green where he did this really fascinating


study. He decided to take a single keyword and scan daily. Most of us, maybe we scan


... Sorry, he scanned hourly. Most of us scan daily or maybe weekly, sometimes monthly.


He thought he'd check to see how much the search results varied based on the hour of


the day, which is really cool.


What he found, you'll see in this graph, is that anything below page one was very choppy.


There was a lot of variance, which was interesting. We were like, okay, we know this is true for


organic. How does it look in local? It's a lot worse. In local, we find that anything


below position five is really choppy. I'll show you some examples here.


This is a search result for criminal defense lawyer. This was taken over the course of


a couple weeks. I do screenshots and just compare side by side. You'll see that the


top two remain consistent. Then the ones below it are shifting all over the place. We see


one will drop one position, one will go up. We have a couple that just vanish. What's


going on there? I'll explain that later.


This is one for personal injury attorney San Diego. You'll see the same pattern. You see


ones going down, going up. The only one that remained consistent for this case was the


top listing. Here's another example for lawn care. Not as competitive, not as many listings


for Google to place an order. Not as much fluctuation, but you will still see that the


top four are the only ones that remain consistent. Then down below, you've got this shifting


going on. How do you explain this to a small business owner who barely knows how to open


their email or get to Google? I feel like local search rankings are about as consistent


as my son's mood swings. It is very frustrating. My tip to you, if you work with an agency


and you deal with local search, do not send ranking reports to clients. It is confusing.


It results in a lot of questions that are very difficult to answer. What we do at my


agency instead is we shift from focusing and obsessing on rank trackers. We do that internally


ourselves to analyze data, but we don't want to confuse our clients. What we do is we track


their calls and their leads so that we can better represent what they're actually getting


as an ROI from us working on them. If you're not sure how to do this, Darren Shaw did this


great article that I linked to here that shows you how you can track calls inside Google


My Business. No, I'm not talking about Google My Business Insights. Those things suck. You


want to definitely check out this article and make sure you are using call tracking


numbers inside Google My Business. Next, I'm going to talk about the Google My Business


landing page, which is a term that I kind of made up because I didn't know what to call


this thing, but it is basically the page on your website that you link to inside the Google


My Business dashboard. I'll highlight it here, there.


I'm going to tell you a story. I have this client. He's an attorney in Texas. When he


first started his law firm, he had one location in Houston, as most people typically do. He


grew fast. He started opening more offices and hiring more attorneys. Typically, in these


scenarios, you have the main homepage of the website optimized for Houston in this case


because that was his first office. That's where he's ranking. As he expands, he adds


location pages. It makes perfect sense. When he added his Dallas location, he adds a page


on his site that's all about Dallas. It's got Dallas in the H1s, the title tags, all


that nice stuff. That's all fine in D&D.


What I was interested in trying to think about was, okay, which one should I link Google


My Business to? Should I link it to his Dallas page or should I link it to his homepage?


You might think that's a stupid question to ask. Of course, you would link it to Dallas.


That's the location we're talking about here.


The reason why I was questioning it is because the local ranking algorithm is made of three


main components. I already talked about proximity. Relevance and prominence are the other two.


Technically speaking, relevance would be things like content, things like his Dallas location


page is relevant because his citations mention Dallas and they're linking to that page. His


meta tags mention Dallas. His homepage is more prominent. It's got more links. It's


got way more authority. It's been around a lot longer.


Like my kids do with their dance-offs, I really wanted to figure out which of these two was


stronger and more important, so I decided to do a test. We took his Dallas location.


Inside Google My Business, we changed the link. We went from going to the location page


to going to the homepage. This is what we saw happen as a result to the search queries


traffic that he got. This was, again, just local pack queries. It went up pretty much


right away. We were like, this is interesting.


Theoretically speaking, his homepage is Houston, but it's still in Texas. The text, the singles,


they're sort of relevant-ish. How would this work if we did one of his other locations


that wasn't even in Texas at all? We decided to switch his New Orleans location as well.


Again, remember that I'm now linking a listing about New Orleans to a homepage that is optimized


for Houston, Texas. We saw the same exact pattern, an instant spike when we did this.


The winner from this test was definitely prominent. However, I would suggest you test this out


yourself. Always be testing, as Rob was saying earlier. This may not be a strategy that would


work if you have 15,000 locations. However, we have seen really good results from businesses


that have maybe two to 15 locations, a really good way to increase ranking with minimal


effort.


Next, I'm going to talk a bit about reviews. We know as a whole, yes, reviews impact ranking.


They're 15%, according to the Local Search Ranking Factor study. Everybody kind of knows


that. Not new information. I wanted to try and figure out what I could teach you guys


about reviews, because I really love understanding how things exactly impact ranking. I was trying


to think of how to illustrate this, because it is very challenging to tell someone, yes,


reviews impact ranking, when businesses generally get reviews over a long period of time. You


can't really say this ranking increase was definitely a result of that review, because


that business may have got some new links, or some new content, or something else.


Or Google just decided to screw us all over and update their algorithm right in the middle


of the test, like they like to do to me all the time. I was trying to figure out how to


figure this out. I thought I'd take an opposite approach and look at what happens to a business


when they lose a large chunk of reviews.


I had a situation for this, because as Cyrus kind of mentioned, I'm what's called a Google


product expert. We're a group of volunteers that basically help Google for free, because


we're nice, I guess. We moderate the Google My Business Forum, and we have people all


the time that are reporting competitors for violations. Those threads are always quite


interesting.


We had a lot of people that would report competitors that were violating Google's review guidelines.


I'm going to share this one violation with you. If you're not familiar with this concept


called review gating, this is how it works. It's this concept that a lot of review tools


use where they first ask someone, are you happy with your service? If they're like,


yes, we're happy, then you're like, please leave us a review online. If they're like,


no, you suck, you're like, okay, let's go to this little private feedback forum. Don't


leave us a review.


This concept is very popular among small business owners, because seriously, who in their right


mind would want to ask a pissed off customer to leave them a review? However, it is against


Google's guidelines. They actually outline it in their guidelines. Unfortunately, some


people don't know that it's against Google's guidelines, so they are using tools that do


this.


This dentist that got reported, he lost 98% of his reviews as a result of doing this.


This guy, whoever he is, don't know him, he had a very bad day. Went from 738 reviews


to 12 reviews over 48 hours. I feel really bad for whoever his SEO company is. Sorry


if you're here.


This guy obviously had a huge drop. They're like, ooh, this is going to be interesting.


Let's see what happens to his ranking. As a side note, just to make sure you're not


in that boat yourself, make sure you use a tool that does not violate Google's guidelines.


I strongly recommend GatherUp. They are a sponsor here at MozCon. They have a booth


downstairs. Yeah. They are awesome. They are run by two of the best people in this industry


known as Aaron Wikey and Mike Blumenthal. We use them for all our clients, so check


them out.


Anyways, back to that dentist story. We tracked it over the period of several months. I was


looking at some of their main keywords, like dentist, dentist near me, the ones that were


getting traffic. This was not what I was expecting to see. They didn't move at all. You can see


in the screenshots, if you look closely, they went from 738 reviews down to 12, then back


up to 40 because, yes, they started asking customers again to leave them reviews.


It wasn't until after the June algorithm update that they dropped a total whopping one position.


It's like, huh, okay. I have this theory. The one position drop, I believe, maybe, was


related to the fact that their CTR would have dropped in that two-month period. Because


before they had 700 reviews and their average competitor had maybe 10 or 30 reviews. They


were killing it. I would think over time that Google would adjust ranking based on click


through rate drops. Theory. Can't prove it.


What I'm a lot more confident about is why it never changed to begin with. I had this


come up on several other cases and it was mind boggling. I was like, how could this


be? I went to a friend of mine named Joel Hedley, who is one of the smartest people


on the planet when it comes to Google My Business because he worked on the team at Google for


10 years. I said, Joel, can you please make this sense out of me? This makes no sense.


What is going on here? He told me, reviews that are removed for violations are not removed.


They are just hidden from public view. I just looked at him and was like, huh, Google really


needs to fix that. If any of you know anyone at Google that can make that change, that


would be great. I was like, okay, that was crazy. Obviously,


these businesses that are using review violations are winning and that's nuts. To try and again


illustrate how reviews impact ranking, I was like, all right, we'll take a different case.


What about a business that has negative reviews? What's the impact of getting those removed?


Theoretically speaking, if their average rating goes up, their calls should go up and all


that. We had this client, this new client of ours


who is a realtor. They came to us because they were the unfortunate victims, I guess,


of being mentioned in a press article locally. This journalist decided to trash talk them,


say some bad things about them. A bunch of people read the article, got really pissed


off and went and left them a whole bunch of one-star reviews.


It's important to note that these types of reviews, which are growing in popularity,


are against Google's guidelines. If someone in the press says something negative about


a review, which happens a lot, and a whole bunch of people go on and leave you a negative


review, Google will remove these reviews if you put together a detailed document report.


That is exactly what my team did, first thing we did for them. We're like, we are going


to raise their average because they have a 3.6. All these reviews were from two years


ago and this poor guy's been dealing with this for two years.


We had Google remove all the negative reviews. There was 15 total related to the press coverage


and we were stoked. We were so happy. His average went from a 3.6 up to a 4.5. We were


like, oh my gosh, we are so awesome, patting ourselves on the back, yada, yada. I'm going


to put this in my MozCon presentation, show you guys this awesome story until I went to


his call volume and realized his call volume the next month actually went down.


I was like, okay, that's interesting. I started digging into what was going on. We're like,


why is he not getting as much volume? Then looking at some of the main keywords that


he ranks for and gets traffic from, we noticed this crazy drop-off. He went from being in


the 3-pack to just gone, like nowhere. It made me feel like my daughter here feels about


her Cheerios. I was very frustrated and I just didn't understand what was going on.


It's important to remember, ranking is based on a lot more than who has the best reviews.


You might know that sitting here, but I have this conversation daily with business owners


that are like, Joy, why am I not the highest rated ranked business? I have the best reviews


and that should be the way it is. It's not how it is. You got to remember that.


However, in this case, what actually happened with my client, why he wasn't ranking anywhere


was this lovely kiss of death in local search that we know as the filter. The filter in


the local search world is a bit different than how it works in organic. On organic,


we all know that Google has a filter. Google filters duplicate content. They do not want


the same pages ranking multiple times. They don't want the same content ranking multiple


times. I have this long detailed article on the Moz blog I wrote a couple years ago about


this topic. It still pertains to today. That's not what I'm talking about here.


I'm talking about what we call the possum filter. This filter is something that Google


has in the local results where if they see two businesses in the same business category


close together, they kind of see them as duplicates and they usually filter out all but one, maybe


two. This happens a lot with realtors. It happens a lot with dentists. We also see it


happen a lot with lawyers. Here is an illustration that kind of shows you how it works. You go


to Google. You do a search. Then what's in green there is what you would normally see.


You've got this one law firm that's ranking. You zoom in. All of a sudden, all these other


listings appear. These listings were filtered because they are in the same building as this


lawyer that's ranking. In this case for my client, we had just started working with him.


We're like, all right, there's two realtors in his building that are ranking. He is one


of three in the top 20 that is filtered currently. Back to the drawing board. Let us see what


this other realtor or these other two realtors are doing better than him.


I go and I look and I see the realtor that's ranking. I see this. The name of the business


as listed inside Google My Business is the realtor's name, the name of the city, and


then the word real estate professional. You might be sitting here going, okay, what's


wrong with that? Well, keywords in the business name, which I also call keyword stuffing,


is also against Google's guidelines. That listing should have just been the realtor's


name if you want to actually comply with Google guidelines. It gives them a huge benefit to


add the keywords because having keywords in the business name is the number four ranking


factor. It shouldn't be, but it is.


To help illustrate this in case this concept may be new to you guys, I wanted to try and


show how much this actually does impact things. We did this test. We had this listing for


a restaurant. Just to be clear, this restaurant does not have a salad bar. They don't offer


a salad bar. They don't have it on their menu. They don't have it on their links or their


content or anything because they don't have a salad bar.


I wanted to know if I could get this restaurant to rank for the term salad bar or salad bar


in their city by simply adding it to the business name. I did that. I went inside Google My


Business. I added the word salad bar to their business name. Overnight, they went from not


ranking to ranking in the top five. I left them in for a few days, took them out, back


down to nothing, added them back. You can see it was kind of fluctuating because maybe


I was confusing Google at that point, but they went back into the top five.


This works phenomenally. You might be sitting there going, great, thanks, Joy. I'm going


to go back. I'm going to add keywords to all my clients. They're all going to rank overnight


just like you illustrated. That's awesome. No, do not do that.


Let me clarify. Violating Google's guidelines like this can actually result in Google removing


your listing. If you don't believe me, check out this forum thread. There has been a huge


uptick in suspensions as of mid-June, so bad to the point where people that have their


listings wrongly suspended are waiting three to four weeks to even get them back.


Keep that in mind when you're going down that road. You don't want to do that unless you


are okay with having no listing, possibly forever, or at least for three to four weeks.


What I am suggesting you do is I am suggesting that you report the morons that are doing


this to Google. You can do that using this business redressal complaint form. Don't ask


me who came up with that name. It's horrible, but it is unique. If you type that into Google,


you will get the form. This form actually goes to someone on the Google team who will


review it, an actual human being, and take action on it. Usually, it takes about two


weeks. However, probably thanks to me telling you all about it, it's going to be longer


now.


The other thing that you can report on that form is fake listings. It's my favorite. I


have this client, and they are in the insurance vertical. They ranked really well for home


insurance queries for a long time. Then all of a sudden, earlier this year, we see this


happen. We're like, they went from third to like 10th, 11th. We're like, what's going


on here? You'll see we solved the problem, but I'm going to show you what happened.


I did a search on Google for home insurance. What do I get? I get a bunch of listings titled


Homeowners Insurance Provo, Homeowners Insurance Orem. These are not real companies, just to


be clear in case anyone's confused. These are lead gen listings. They are selling leads


to actual insurance companies. There was tons of these. This is not an isolated thing. If


you want to see an example, I guarantee you, pull out your phone, search dog bite attorney.


You'll probably find some fake listings. These exist a lot, usually for long tail keywords


that no one's checking. Kind of like we said yesterday when Will Reynolds was talking about


long tail keywords, the spammers know this. They know this. They create listings for those


long tail keywords. There is an article that is amazing if you have not read it or heard


about it. It was written by the Wall Street Journal very recently. It talks about this


problem. It talks about the real impact it makes on those legitimate businesses that


are getting outranked by this crap. One of the things that I really loved about this


article is that one of those guys, he probably has a dart board with my face on it in his


office, but he has these listings and he creates them and he talked about what he does. He


was talking about how he charges $100 for each of these fake listings and that he can


do up to $3,800 a day. This explains the volume, right? You do the math on that. You can see


why this guy's in this business. If you're sitting there thinking, okay, Joy, great.


He creates 3,800 listings a day, but these are new listings. They don't have websites.


They don't have any authority. They've been around for a few days. They have no reviews.


They have no citations. They will not rank anywhere, right? We all know on the organic


side stuff like this. It takes about a year, maybe 5.7% of all the new published pages


will rank in the top 10 on Google. This is pretty known stuff. We tell this to our clients


all the time, guys. SEO takes time. We have to work on it for months. Don't expect rankings


overnight. I guess unless you're in local because ranking in the 3-pack on the first


page takes less than one day. I can tell you this for certain because we have a client


that has a new office. The first month that we created the listing for him, it got 813


searches. He ranked for very competitive terms in the most competitive city in the United


States. On the organic side, it's going to be a while before he's there. These are businesses


that spend a lot of money on SEO every month. He still gets volume. The actions on the listing


the first month weren't as high. They were 18, but you do the math. You can see why this


business is thriving. The number of fake listings is pretty high. Google mentioned that they


removed 3 million of these last year, which, whatever. Yay, Google. This is a 50% increase


since 2017. This isn't dropping. This is increasing. What really astounded me, the reason why I


really wanted to hit home with this, according to this article, 250,000 of these that Google


removed were reported by users using that form. You might be thinking, okay, this is


awesome. That's a really high number. It is not a high number. I'll explain. We have a


client. They are in the glass repair industry. One client, one small business, one industry.


We have had Google remove 316 listings that are fake that have popped up in the last year


and a half. That's one client. Another client that we've been working with for a while,


we have had three months and 92 listings reported and removed. They are in the junk car space.


This is something we see that is expanding due to the obvious volume and benefits. We've


seen this now with dentists. Dentists, we're like, how is there spam in dentists? There


is. It's crazy. If you're not looking for it, I really suggest checking out long tail


keywords for various terms. You will probably find some fake listings. Why you should care,


I mean, I care. Just to clarify, my Walk-On song, another one bites the dust, that's what


I listen to when I'm reporting these people. It's fine. This is a client of ours that is


recent. The first thing we did, first month, we're like, oh, tree move. There's going to


be so much spam. We went and got rid of seven listings. Seven, that's it. Not a lot of effort.


This was the result. They went from not ranking very far to ranking all over the place. Yes,


that's really cool. You should totally share before and after screenshots with your clients


because they love seeing this crap and understanding the benefit. At the end of the day, remember,


it's about calls. What really made me happy with this case is when I went to them and


after a month, they're like, wow, normally this time of year because we're seasonal,


our trend is flat or down and we're currently up by 10%. That is so wonderful and exciting.


I hope you guys go away from this and look and report some spam. Thank you. If you have


How to Boost your Visibility with a Photo Strategy

Howdy Moz fans, I'm Zach and I'm Serena and we're from the Moz Customer Success


Team.


Today we'll be walking you through how to develop an effective photo strategy that can


increase visibility for your local business in Google.


When you're looking for a new place to eat for example, where do you typically head first?


If you said Google, you're a part of more than 97% of people who search for information


online before heading out to a local business.


Photos offer a sense of predictability.


Recent photos from customers and your business can help other prospective customers gauge


a level of service they can expect, increasing the likelihood that they will engage with


your business.


Let's dive in.


Head into the photos and videos tab of your Moz local location dashboard.


From here you can drag and drop or browse and upload photos from your computer and have


them post directly to your Facebook and Google My Business profiles, as well as other directories,


with just the click of a button.


Start with four to six high quality photos, core to your business, including your logo,


your team, your storefront, and your products or services.


This will ensure that your viewers have a good baseline of what to expect from your


business.


Optimize photos by attributing them to the correct photo category, such as interior,


exterior, or team.


And lastly, steer clear of stock photos.


Customers respond best to authentic images that accurately depict your business.


Once you've added your core photos, make a plan to add a few new images every month


to keep your photo set fresh and active.


We also recommend adding photos to any new posts that you publish to your listing.


Research from local SEO Joy Hawkins and her team at Sterling Sky show that photos with


text outperform those without text.


Photos are an important part of your business's online presence, and Moz local can help you


scale your photo strategy and strengthen your online presence so customers can find and


The Three Bosses of SEO — Whiteboard Friday (Ola King)

Hi Moz fans, I'm Oli King. I work at Moz and I'm excited to join you today for this edition


of Whiteboard Friday. I will be talking to you about the three bosses of SEO. Creating


high quality content, making sure that you have a solid link building strategy, making


sure your site is technically sound. These are great things to do when it comes to SEO.


However, none of them would be as effective if you're not taking a look at things from


a strategic, wider lens. Basically, it means you have to take a step back and look at what


you're doing and why you're doing them in order for you to get the results that you


need. So, for SEO, there are three main pillars really to consider. I call them the three


bosses of SEO. So that's really your business, your searches, and your search engines. And


each of these bosses have their own individual needs. So, let's start with the business.


So these are the needs of the business. This is by no means a comprehensive list. I'm sure


there are things that I'm missing. So if there are things that you think should be here,


please leave a comment and we can have a discussion on that so we can all learn from each other.


The whole idea of this is to get you thinking about things from a broader lens before you


dive into tactics. So the first one is the key metrics and goals. Any activity that is


done without a goal is essentially a hobby, which is fine. However, if you want to do


serious SEO work, you need to have a goal. And in order to know what your goals are,


I guess you have to look at your business goals, then that determines your marketing


goals, which then determines your SEO goals. So understand what your KPIs are, understand


what your priorities are, and then that would then let you know what your next step are.


So for example, if your goal is to get more traffic, you need to focus more on the top


of funnel types of content. So like an ultimate guide, for example, if your goal is to get


more leads, you might start looking at maybe your product comparison pages. And then if


your goal is to have more sales, then it might be time to start optimizing your product pages,


for example. So always look at your key metrics and goals and then work from there.


So the competitors is also something you should really consider. A lot of people are very


familiar with who their direct competitors are in terms of product or services, or when


it comes to SEO, there is also the informational competitors. So people that might not be doing


the same thing as you, but they provide information to your ideal audience. So always keep an


eye on those competitors as well. The resources. So look at the resources that you have in


terms of time, budget, and personnel. If you don't have the time for SEO, you might be


able to consider outsourcing it, or if you don't have the right talent for link building,


maybe you might want to partner up with an agency that does that. So always take a stock


at your resources before you start thinking about what you should do. Your brand identity


and recognition also determines the types of contents that you go after. It doesn't


matter if a content has a lot of volume and it's trendy. If it doesn't align with your


brand in the long run, it's not really a very good at a good use of your time. The area


of expertise as well is very much related to this. So what are you an expert at? Try


to lean on your expertise and if you don't have enough expertise, but you want to provide


any information to your audience, maybe you might want to collaborate with other people


that are better suited to that so that you can still complete your goal for your business


and audience. Strength is very related to expertise, but this is in terms of what talents,


what skills do you have? Are you better at doing research and creating long-form content


or are you better at creating things that go viral and are more like listicles? Leaning


into your strengths and collaborate as needed with people that can help you with your weakness.


The timing business also determines the approach you take for SEO. A brand new website, what


you would need would be completely different from a business that has been around for a


long time that has a great website, but they're just trying to do a refresh, which is also


different from a business that has been around for a very long time, but don't have very


good online presence. All of this would affect the way you approach content, link building,


and trying to rank for those tough content. That's your business. As I mentioned, I'm


sure there are things I'm missing, so I'm very curious to know the other things that


you might come up with as well. Next up, let's look at the searches. These are the people


that you are serving as a business. The first thing when it comes to the searches is look


at your persona. What are the type of people that you're trying to attract to your website?


There's no point creating any piece of content if you don't even know who you're trying to


attract with that content. Start with the persona. Once you've identified the persona,


you can then start looking at the search intent and relevance. What are they looking for?


The good news is the answer is already right on your search engine results pages. Do a


quick search for your ideal keyword, and you'll be able to see the results that search engines


have deemed as the most appropriate for what your audience are looking for, which matches


their search intent. Once you've done that, then you might want to create the right content


to satisfy that search's intent. When you're creating the content, focus on topics and


not keywords. We're going to add these where you just want to create your page and stuff


it with as many keywords as you can, and start ranking, and print out dollars. Not so effective


anymore. You basically want to look at each page on your site covering a topic. That's


to have a focus. While you're doing that, then you want to make sure that you have the


most comprehensive page that answers that search's intent. Cyrus Shepard actually has


a great whiteboard Friday on this where he talked about you want to be the first click,


the long click, and the last click. Be the most comprehensive page that satisfies the


search's intent based on topic, not keywords. When you're creating your content or you're


trying to devise your content strategy, always look at the emotion, psychology, social and


economic factors that are affecting your audience. It's easy to look at data on your site's traffic


and obsess about what could have gone wrong in terms of your competitors or other factors.


You might also want to take a step back and look at what's happening in the lives of your


audience. What are they struggling with right now? In the past 18 months or so, every one


of us have been looking at how we've been experiencing the pandemic. That has changed


the way people search for things. Searches for keywords like the remote, things like


delivery, those searches have gone up over the past few months. That's based on all of


the social factors that are affecting people. It means you can no longer do things that


you were able to do before, so now they haven't adjusted in different ways. Always look at


what's happening to your audience and then react accordingly. The brand affinity and


trust also affects the way people interact with your site. If people are familiar with


the brand, they are more likely to trust them and interact with them more. If you're a newer


website or brand, it might be a good idea to let the content speak for itself and not


try to make your brand the front and center of attention. Whereas for a bigger brand,


it might be a good idea to do the opposite. A site like Amazon would do good to have their


brand name in the title tag, for example, because people know their brand and they can


trust them and click on the site. Whereas a brand new website, it might be a good idea


to not necessarily make that the focus of attention. Other things to look at is trends


and seasonality. As you're looking at your SEO data, if you notice a dip, you might not


be doing anything wrong. It could just mean that it's the nature of the time of the year.


I'm sure certain keywords would trend upward around the early-day season, for example,


for things like electronics, video games, ETC, and then drove towards February, March,


maybe those searches might reduce and it doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. It's just


the seasonality. So the search behavior as well, people's behavior changes over time.


Humans are not robots. They are very dynamic. Things change, things that they search for,


as I mentioned before, when their emotions and emotional, psychological, social, political


factors are affected. It also changes how they search for things as well. So always


try to react to that when you know, or pay attention to what people are doing, try to


understand what's changing in their search behavior and react to that accordingly. The


customer journey is very important. Always understand the touch points that your customer


have with your business, even outside of your business, look at their journey before they


get to your business. This allows you to know the types of content you need to create to


fill in the gap in that journey. This allows you to know who you might need to collaborate


with. So other information sources that your audience have, where they hang out, you are


able to understand those things and be able to create the perfect content with them and


also promote it in the right places as well. The struggles. What are the things keeping


your audience up at night? What are they struggling with? Understanding this allows you to create


a content that no other person will be able to create. It would almost be to them like


you have like some magic wand where you're able to predict what's going on with them.


Try to understand what's their struggles and you can find out their struggles by looking


at questions that your audience asks your help team. For example, that's a good place


to start. You can use SEO tools to do your keyword research to know what some of those


questions that they're asking that indicates struggles. Go on forums like Quora, Reddit,


those types of places allows you to find those struggles. Location and language affects how


people search for things, different locations out there on slangs, out there on culture,


behaviors, ways of doing things. Try to understand the location that you're targeting, try to


understand what the culture is like, what the language is, and try to create a content


with that in mind. If you don't have that expertise or knowledge, it's a good idea to


partner up with someone in those locations as well. Also, make sure that your site is


internationalized as well if you're targeting multiple countries. There's lots of resources


that teach you how to do this. You can find that in the Moz blog as well. Accessibility,


different people search for things in different ways. People have different needs, so make


sure that your site is universally accessible to everyone. Make sure it's mobile-friendly,


make sure you don't have annoying pop-ups everywhere, make sure that you provide an


alt tag for your images to make your content more accessible to all. These are the factors


that are affecting the searchers. There's a lot that I probably miss, so I would love


to know what you think and also other ones that I forgot. The last but not the least


is the search engines. In order to win for SEO, you really need to understand that the


search engines are businesses as well. In order for them to rank your sites, you have


to be a site that is in line with their business. For Google, if you want to understand what


their business model is, there's a video on YouTube that you should watch. It's called


A Trillion Searches, No Easy Answers. It's a very interesting video that shows you the


behind the scenes of how they think about things, what challenges they have, and the


future of where they're heading. This will then allow you to be able to know where they


might go next so that you can react accordingly. For Google, once again, ultimately they are


just trying to provide content to their searchers that are valuable, from sites that are indexable,


that provides a good experience, and of course it has to be relevant content. They put a


huge emphasis on relevant content. That leads us to the next one, Helping. Every additional


change that Google has been making over the past few years is geared towards that goal


of helping people get answers to things that they search for in a natural way. Making search


basically more human, and that allows them to be able to help people find the relevant


content to them by using more advancements in machine learning. In order for you to do


well for SEO, you need to understand what are they doing with this update, read the


release notes, try to understand what each update means, and then try to cater your content


to match that goal as well. EAT, it means expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. Google


is very strict on this when it comes to sites that are in the money or life categories,


so that's help, finance, fitness, things like that. Help, finance, be it finance or fitness.


Make sure that your site is displaying the signals that they need for this authority.


There's a lot of resources out there. I wish I could spend more time to explain this, but


we have limited time, but make sure you look into this so you can follow the right guidelines


for the EAT. The links, I don't need to explain this too much. Everyone that works on SEO


is pretty much familiar with this, but links are basically the digital word of mouth. A


lot of people are familiar with getting backlinks, but just as important to getting backlinks,


you also want to make sure that you're spreading internal links as well. So make sure that


the pages on your site that are getting high traffic, you are also linking to pages on


your site that might not be getting as much traffic, but they are just as important to


you. This is a recent update, the Core Web Vitals. So it's meant to basically build better


websites in the world. A lot of people debate the effectiveness of this at this very moment.


I would say you should do your best, use tools like the Moz Performance Metrics Bader and


try to improve your site as best as you can to at least be prepared when this changes


to start affecting your ranking power. Indexability, of course, make sure your site is indexable


to the search engines. So the things like your robots.txt file is well set up. Make


sure that there are no HTML or JavaScript errors. Make sure that you are reducing pages


on your sites that have no value so that you're not taking away from that crowd budgets for


the most important pages. Look at your site's architecture, make sure certain things are


set up correctly. So make sure your site is very indexable. And take advantage of schemas.


These helps the search engines understand your website very clearly. Having schemas


doesn't mean you would always win the sub features, but at least it gives you a fighting


chance. So take advantage of them, you might as well. The QDF is query deserve freshness.


So for certain queries, the search engines determine that more up-to-date information


are more relevant than other types of content. So they refresh them more frequently. So if


you notice that some of your contents are not performing quite as well, it might just


be because that they are outdated. So a little quick refresh can help you take advantage


of the opportunity to rank better. And last but not least, ongoing updates. SEO is not


stagnant. It's continuously dynamic, it's moving, things are changing. All the search


engines are pushing thousands of updates on a daily basis. So keep an eye on, like I said,


their business model, try to understand where they are headed and try to be able to predict


where they're going, keep on top of the updates and then adjust as you go. But yeah, so these


are the three buses of SEO and these are all what they need. As I mentioned, I probably


missed a lot of things, but the whole idea is not for this to cover everything. The idea


is just getting to think of SEO from a very holistic perspective. And you might be wondering,


this is a lot, where do I even start from? Well, the most important thing is your business.


Try to make sure that you're doing the right thing for your business and then make sure


you do the right thing for your searchers and then start satisfying the search engines


to get results. But yeah, so that's all I have for you today. Leave your comments below.


I would love to have a discussion with you and see what we can learn from each other


Internal and External Linking - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're chatting about linking externally and linking internally and some of the risks


and rewards that are involved.


So some of you probably have seen April 11th, Google made this big move.


They sent out a bunch of penalties to a relatively, well, a noticeably large number of websites.


It was covered on a bunch of the SEO forums and in the SEO news, basically saying, this


is Google sending out these warnings saying, you're linking to unnatural looking sites


or in unnatural patterns and we've noticed and we think that those links shouldn't be


there.


We may be penalizing your site or we may not be passing PageRank or other types of link


mechanisms, link value through your website anymore.


This isn't the first time Google's done this.


They've done it many, many times over the last 10, 15 years.


We've seen plenty of this.


This was just another explosion in that.


And it is also the case that we've seen some other cool things on the other side of the


aisle, which is Google rewarding internal links in a way we had not seen previously.


In fact, some cool experiments were done recently.


Hopefully they'll be made public soon and then we can link over to them around internal


links and the power that internal links still have.


So we know that it still matters and it's still important to consider who we link to


and what we link to from our sites and pages.


And so I thought maybe we'd talk through a few of those scenarios.


First off, when you're linking to external sites and pages, let's say I've got my mobile


phones compared website here, it is actually a very positive thing to link out to places


like the official website of maybe Samsung's S7 or to link out to the Engadget review if


I'm collecting a bunch of reviews and aggregating that data there to give the reference point.


This is positive.


However, if I'm linking, let's say I'm getting some affiliate value or someone's paid me


to link or I'm linking to this site because it turns out that I own it or someone connected


to me owns it and I'm getting some benefit from it, this mobile info for your life, maybe


that could be a little suspicious.


It is the case.


It is true and we've seen plenty of evidence to support this.


I think ever since Marshall Simmons from Define came in here many years ago and did his Whiteboard


Friday about how the New York Times saw so much benefit from linking out, lots of folks


have been investigating that and seen that benefit repeated over and over.


So good external pointing links can give a boost to your site's relevance, to how search


engines consider you, and even to your rankings.


Linking out is a positive thing.


It's also the case that sites and pages that link out tend to earn more links back in,


which seems obvious.


They're more helpful and relevant to people.


They can serve as better resources.


And it's also the case that often that's a very direct correlation because linking out


might drive traffic to other websites who then notice it and say, oh yeah, I'd like


to check you out.


I might link to you.


Engadget might see my link and say, oh, you guys do a great job of those comparison stuff.


Maybe we'll link to one of those in a future blog post that we do.


Or Samsung might see our comparison and say, hey, that's some pretty cool data you've got.


Do you think we could partner with you on a future research project?


And maybe we'd link to you from that project.


Very cool things.


That said, manipulative linking, linking out in fashions that is dangerous.


This is sort of the inverse of what we classically think of as link penalties, right, where we've


gotten links that have pushed us up in the rankings and they are from bad places.


Linking out to bad places or to good places for bad reasons.


Bad reasons being manipulative reasons, right?


Someone's paid you.


You're getting some benefit from it.


Google recently a few months ago made this announcement around how if bloggers are receiving


free items from companies and then they're linking back to those products, that could


be penalized or could be perceived as violating FTC rules if there's not an advertisement


or advertorial sponsor message on there.


So all kinds of things here.


All right.


Let's move over to internal links.


On internal links, we've got a little bit of the same story but with some caveats.


So again, my mobile phone's compared page here.


I could be linking off to my own review.


I could be linking off to my video category, maybe if I've got a video at the bottom of


this page.


I'm providing navigation.


I'm helping visitors go where they want to go.


This is a very positive thing.


It can not only help to get those pages indexed and crawled, it may also help them rank higher


with a few caveats.


So the right internal links, the right internal links, right?


Good ones can have a large positive impact across a big website.


Internal links that tend to perform the best, the ones that help the most, tend to be the


ones that drive real traffic and they sort of continue a visitor's journey, right?


They help people find what they're looking for.


And it's also the case that the ones that don't drive traffic, that aren't perceived


as helpful, seem to have less of an impact on the pages they link to.


Now, I will point this out.


If you're worried about like, oh, should I add one more link on here to another category


page or should I reference another page from here?


You generally don't need to worry about that.


As long as you think that some small portion, even the small portion of your audience, would


be potentially interested in that and it makes sense from a usability perspective, you should


go ahead and add the link.


I don't tend to worry at all about like, well, the difference between 52 links on a page


and 53 links is those 52 links will get a little bit less page rank or a little bit


less link energy, whatever it is, voting power, than the 53rd link.


I would not sweat that at all.


Those days are long since gone.


But it is true that internal links tend to have the largest impact on already authoritative


sites.


With authority on your site, you can help many of the pages deep in your site's structure


to get crawled and indexed and to rank better by linking to them.


We've seen this pretty substantially with some very big websites lately where they've


gone through these redesigns and had remarkable results.


That said, manipulative links, right?


For example, let's say I went through and I just wrote a little bot that crawled my


entire website, found every instance of the word LG, right, the manufacturer, the phone


manufacturer, and linked to my LG page.


It gets a little manipulative.


There's probably some places where it makes great sense.


But every single time the word is mentioned, you've probably seen some websites like this,


although fewer of them in the last three or four years than in the five years before that


when this tactic was really prevalent and Google wasn't penalizing for it.


We've actually seen examples where people removed that and made it, you know, they made


it much more subtle.


They only did it on the first instance of the word on a page and they only did it on,


you know, category level pages or blog level pages, not deeply indexed pages or paginated


versions of things, that kind of stuff.


And in fact, they saw their rankings rise.


They saw their rankings rise.


I love this.


They saw their rankings rise like almost immediately.


There was a really cool example a few years back.


I think I might have done a whiteboard fight about that.


So with manipulative internal links, right, especially ones that are stuffed into footers


or jammed into every word instance or those kinds of things, Google tends to perceive


that as manipulative, which in fact it really is, right?


You're not doing that for visitors benefit.


You're hoping that it helps you with your rankings.


And in fact, it's probably doing the opposite.


General rule of thumb, if you can't find any way to justify how something that you're doing


for SEO also benefits a visitor, maybe you should reconsider it with a few exceptions.


XML site maps might be a reasonable one.


It's the case that oftentimes the ones that are in footers or in structured template areas


of a website that tend not to get clicked by people, sometimes a sidebar can do it,


sometimes TopNav can do it, sometimes even in-content stuff that's wrapped around can


do it.


That tends to be the most dangerous places, but it's not the only kind that gets penalized.


And in fact, it's not even always bad.


We've seen instances, again, on very big websites where they've done very significant footers


and linked off to all their properties that the site or the company owns and controls.


We've seen it where they use it to get greater indexation.


And in fact, it's positive because the footer is well done, because it tends to link to


good places, because it's clearly a high quality one and it's not anchor text stuff.


Anchor text is, again, a big risk here with internal linking.


So this is a very fine line, and it's a fine meandering line.


I can't give you a clear cut, never do this, always do this.


It's a considered process.


That's true for internal linking, and it's true, maybe a little less true, for external


linking.


If you've got great advice that you'd like to share or some experiences or you want us


to take a look at some of your internal or external linking practices, feel free to leave


a comment.


We'll check them out, and I'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard


Friday.


SEO for photos, visuals, & graphics - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we are going to chat all things image SEO, so SEO for photos, for visuals,


for graphics, and talk a little bit about how you rank not just in Google image search


but also in Google in the image pack.


And look, there's a couple of things that we should discuss before we even get into


that.


First off, many folks are asking, is it still even worthwhile to do image search SEO?


You might recall that in years past, when you clicked on an image in Google image search,


you would go to the website or the webpage that had that image on it.


Now if you click it, Google opens up a full-size version of that, tells you the website it's


on, but for many people that's enough, right?


They do a bunch of searches and never actually visit your website.


Google's just serving up your image unbeknownst to you.


And you don't even get any data on that, so you don't know how many impressions it gets,


all that kind of stuff.


So here's the case for image search SEO.


First off, if you are in the world of visually sold products and services, so we've talked


to many people who are like contractors or decorators, remodelers, hotel owners or hotel


buyers, craft sellers, and they find that image search is something that people do as


research before they choose them.


In fact, you might see actual searches for kitchen remodel Seattle, and then people will


base their decision of who to go with based on the images that pop up there.


They'll visit that website.


Anything that's designed to earn links and citations, so if you're producing graphs or


data or you're taking photos of events or of people and you're hoping that those people


or other folks will go and use your images and then link back to you, you definitely


want to do image search SEO that can get you in front of that right audience.


And when they use your image in their presentation or their publication or their website, you


get the link.


And visual content licensors, very obviously they make their living selling images.


Google image search is a great way to get in there, so if you're a photographer or an


illustrator or a stock gallery, you certainly would want to be doing that as well.


A couple of data points.


One comes from Jumpshot, whose US data set is fairly sizable in the millions of searchers,


and they see that about a third of all the searches performed on Google are performed


in Google image search, which is just mind-bogglingly crazy, like huge.


I never realized how big Google image search was until I saw that Jumpshot data.


It's just massive.


MozCast shows us that about 12.5% of all Google searches in the web results do show an image


pack somewhere in there.


Second question, do you have to use original visuals, or can you, for example, license


visual content from other folks?


Can you buy a stock image and put that on your site and potentially still rank for it


in Google images?


And the answer is actually yes.


So unlike web results, duplicates are not viewed as a problem, and Google image search


will generally take one version of an image and that'll rank higher than the others, but


it's not always the original.


In fact, many times it's not the original source.


It's a page that does a really good job of image search SEO, and so this is a great opportunity


for SEOs to get some extra traffic.


Just make sure that you have the right permissions.


How do you figure out if image SEO is actually something you should be doing?


Well, for any given keyword, if you see, for example, I searched for Santa Fe Architecture


here, and there's a result, I think at the top, maybe it's an ad result, and then there's


the image block, right, with a few photos in there.


Google is only going to show that image block when, if and when, the searchers are actually


clicking over to images very frequently or there's lots of searches directly on Google


images for that term.


And so Google itself can sort of be that indicator for you of whether there's demand.


Now, if you're curious about doing this image SEO and you've decided like, okay, this probably


makes sense, I should try it out, I should do some, I've got some use cases, my strong


suggestion would be that you look at all the ranking factors, and they're actually quite


broad, but they're not nearly as complicated maybe, or they're a little more basic than


we're used to with web results.


And I think that is because when it comes to images, Google is mostly hyper-concerned


with relevance and serving the user's interest rather than link popularity.


They don't worry as much nearly about spamming and manipulation in those results.


And so you can see them using a sort of less, more old-school style algorithm.


So here's a page with some pictures of Santa Fe on it, and things that Google might use


are the image file name, certainly, the alt attribute on the image, another very important


reason to add alt attributes in addition to accessibility reasons is for image search


SEO.


It does seem to help a little bit maybe with web results SEO too.


The image caption, so this is something where we've actually seen the caption be more important


than the alt attribute when it comes to image search.


So if you put that little caption down below underneath your image, that can actually help


with the image search rankings.


Surrounding text content, so Google's going to look at this text above and below and around


the images to see if it has relevance.


They'll look at the page title, of course, and the page URL that it's hosted on.


This is one of the reasons, by the way, that galleries of images, especially inside like


stock photo galleries, don't tend to do very well because there's very little sort of relevant


content surrounding them.


They tend to be in these big gallery-style layouts and so there's tons of images all


in one page when what Google's looking for is just one or two that are hyper relevant


to the particular topic, which is why most of the images you see doing really well in


Google image search are the ones that live not by themselves necessarily but are the


premier image on that particular page.


Image engagement and popularity.


This is a big one.


We have seen results where folks have done tests and they've shown that if you do a search


on Google images and you click the 12th image down and a lot of people start doing that,


Google will move it up just like in the web results but sometimes even more so with images.


We think engagement and popularity, what people scroll to, what they click on, what they click


through to matters quite a bit.


That's why you should have a very high quality, highly interesting, highly relevant image


as well as you also want to serve visitor demand.


The image dimensions matter.


If you do a Google image search, you will notice that they don't show unusual sorts


of or they rarely show unusual image dimensions.


An image like this, which is very, very horizontal and not very vertical, probably wouldn't do


well just as a very vertical, not very horizontal one.


They tend to look for sort of 16 by 9, 4 by 3, square images and sometimes turned on their


side so vertically can work as well.


Everything much more than that and you get into problems.


Image size, so Google is generally not looking for very small images.


They also tend not to show gigantic ones, although they sometimes will scale down.


If you do searches for anything plus wallpaper, Google knows that the intent is for very large


sizes and so they will show that.


Embeds of the image, so if your visual appears on many different websites and pages and it's


been embedded multiple times, that seems to have a positive impact.


And then traditional web ranking factors on the existing URL.


So if this page, you know, architecture.com slash Santa Fe, happened to rank well in the


top five or six, seven for Santa Fe architecture, chances are good that images from that page


would also rank in the first few images results.


The reverse isn't always true, but if you can get the ranking in web results, you can


generally do well in the image results as well.


And why wouldn't you want to?


Because you can get traffic from both.


And then finally, of course, Google seems to finally have gotten to the point where


they have some sophistication and they're doing a little bit of image relevance and


visual match in here too.


So if you have, you know, a picture of a koala, as adorable as that might be, even if you


have every other factor in here, they probably won't show you for Santa Fe architecture,


at least not for law.


All right.


What steps should you take if you want to figure out if ImageSEO is right for you?


Well, just a few.


I want you to know what your SEO goals are, and then I want you to compare those SEO goals


against your keyword research list, right?


So you're going to do an audit of your keyword research list.


Keyword Explorer is actually really awesome for this.


I think there are probably some other tools that do it, but right now, Keyword Explorer


is one of the best.


You can also do it in Moz Pro, but, you know, you basically plug in all your keywords, you


go to your list page, and you see what number of results actually have image searches or


image boxes like this, blocks in them, and that will tell you what kind of opportunity


you've got.


You then want to create – if you decide that you're going to do any ImageSEO at


all and it matches with your goals, you're then going to create a set of guidelines,


right?


I want these guidelines basically to be for anyone who's creating content on the site,


if you are putting an image in, just do these three or four things, right?


Make sure you've got that caption right, make sure you do the image all to attribute,


make sure that the size and dimensions are right, and you do some image optimization


so it loads quickly on mobile and those kinds of things.


You're then going to potentially create that target list of ImageSEO opportunities.


So these would be like the five or ten or, if you're bigger, maybe fifty keywords that


you know have image blocks in them or that you know get lots of image searches and, therefore,


you're trying to target them.


You can then go actually, you know, create the priority of, hey, we need a visual for


this, hey, we need to put it on a page and we need to nail these things.


And you can also, and I would recommend this, audit your existing images on your site.


Probably there's a bunch of low-hanging fruit that you're missing out on.


My recommendation, check out Ryan Ayers' How to Perform an Image Optimization Audit from


last year on Moz's website.


Really good post, walks you through how to use Screaming Frog to do this and how to optimize


all those visuals.


Thanks for sticking with me through all this dense information on ImageSEO.


I hope you rock the image rankings and we'll see you again next week for another edition


of Whiteboard Friday.


Size Doesn't Matter: Great Content by Teams of One [MozCon 2017] — Ian Lurie

Have you ever seen me speak? You know I go flying through lots of tactics very, very


quickly. I have a link at the end. Don't worry. It shows where all the stuff is. I Tweet it


out too. So you don't have to be frantically taking pictures of slides or anything. It's


all good. How many people here get reviews, like performance reviews at work or get client


reviews or anything like that? Don't worry. I can't see you, so you can raise your hand


if a trend or whatever you want to do. How many of you on those performance reviews have


a line that says, created unicorns? How about was a unicorn? No? How about helped a client


sell shit? Probably more, right? Created good content, did their jobs, things like that.


Unicorns never show up. But we're always told, create unicorns. Be unicorns. Act like unicorns.


Facilitate unicorns. And so we go out and we go to clients or we go to our boss or whatever


and we say, I need this budget, this unicorn-sized budget. And in response, we get a Chihuahua


budget. So we go to our clients and we go to our boss and we say this. And we say, you


know what? For this blog post, it's going to cost about $1,500. And they freak out.


$1,500? I can get 15 blog posts for that much. Then we say, OK, let's do one really good


piece of content. For that, it'll cost $50,000. And they give you $1,500 and a 2005 laptop


to show their generosity.


So then we say, OK, maybe at least you could give me the unicorn schedule. So it's going


to take me six weeks to create this. And we'll have to do the research very carefully. And


we'll do all this other stuff. And at the end of the six weeks, we'll have this magnificent


thing. And they say, no, what we really need is a herd of Chihuahuas. Is it a herd, a riot,


a pack? I don't know. We need the herd of Chihuahuas.


We're all smart people. You're all smart people. I mean, you're all here. Why do we


keep asking for these things when we always get the opposite every single time? I mean,


maybe once in a while in some organization, big or small, someone comes to you and says,


yeah, you know what? We're going to give you $40,000. Please create that one piece of content


that breaks the mold and does incredible stuff.


It happens, right? And it's fantastic when it does. But sometimes I've got to think we're


trying to be the wrong animals. And so what I say and the whole, what I'm going to say


today, and I want you all to tweet it or whatever, is to hell with the unicorns. We need to be


badgers, okay? More badgers, fewer unicorns. And there's some good reasons for this, okay?


Badgers are really efficient. They adapt. They don't require a ton of stuff. Unicorns


require tons of food. And by the way, only maidens can approach them. I'm not a maiden.


Most of my clients aren't maidens, I'm assuming, which kind of causes problems because no one


can take care of them. Also, while the badgers are out there getting shit done, the unicorns


frolic. And frolicking is great, but it doesn't really get work done. Plus, unicorns have


to be rescued by Tom Cruise in really cheesy 1980s movies. This is a movie called Legend.


And it's funny because when I watched it in the 80s, I thought this is the greatest thing


ever and I showed it to my kids about two months ago and they just looked at me at the


end like this. And I didn't remember that the unicorn had the horn taped onto it so


when it was running around, the horn was bouncing. It turns out it was. So anyway, unicorns,


no unicorns, all right? The hell with the unicorns. We need badgers. There is no question


we need more badgers. Badgers thrive independently. When I say independently, I don't necessarily


mean that everybody is on a team of one. I know some of you get to work on bigger teams.


You're in Fortune 500 companies, whatever. It just means that you work in conditions


where you have a smaller team than you would like. What you're going to see is a big theme


of all of this, right? We're always working with teams that are smaller than we would


like. We're always getting slightly less stuff than we would like. So the badgers chase away


the unicorns pretty easily in spite of much smaller size. And they get into situations


like this with content calendars, right? How many people here, you create the beautiful


content calendar. It's perfect. It has everything laid out. It's all synchronized. Every idea,


every concept, blog posts back up, you know, Cornerstone content which back up tweets,


which back up Facebook posts. And then things start to sort of happen, right? Maybe a product


launch gets delayed. Maybe, you know, a few things get deleted by legal or brand. Maybe


someone decides some stuff should be moved around. And then maybe there's a few things


that, you know, the product department gets involved and they say, hey, let's call it


this instead. And then, of course, people start editing, right? So you've got the posts


ready to go live and they say, you know what, Microsoft just released this new font. We


really want to use that. Well, if you're a unicorn, if you're trying to create a unicorn,


you're kind of out of luck. Not much you can do. Badgers got this. Because badgers understand


that when you're on your own, you're on a small team, structure is way more important


than planning, okay? Any calendar you create is going to go to hell in a hurry. There is


no way around that, okay? And it's not because people are bad or they're not listening to


you or something like that. It's because what you created the calendar for now is going


to change about 60 seconds from now, right? We all know that. So structure is way more


important and at Portent, we look at things from the perspective of content types, all


right? And this has worked really well for us. So there's three basic categories of content


for us. If you're a skier or mountain biker, you know what these are. I had forgotten what


some of these were when I was mountain bike racing and I came up on a sign and I said,


I wonder what two black diamonds mean. It went right off the edge. It was sad. So green


circle is any content whether it's a single tweet, one sentence, a Facebook post, a blog


post or a full e-book. It's whatever content you can create once or twice a week, maybe


more times. Blue square, again, whether it's a Facebook tweet, a blog post, something else,


is content you can create probably once a month. Black diamond is content you can create


maybe once a quarter, once every six months, maybe it's still a tweet in which case I'm


kind of sorry. That's kind of sad, but hopefully it's more. And that creates this basic structure,


right? So instead of having to create this perfect calendar, you create these categories


and you say, all right, we're going to create this content. Here's the general concepts.


And then you also have levels of branding, right? So you have lightly branded content


where the only part of your brand in there is how to do something. So the only part of


your brand is the template that surrounds it. So maybe you have a blog post or an e-book


on how to cook radishes. I've never cooked radishes. It sounds disgusting, but it popped


into my head. So lightly branded content, moderately branded would answer the question


about using your product. So here's how you cook radishes using our radish cooker.


Heavily branded content is the sales pitch. It says, buy our radish cooker. You don't


even have to learn how to cook radishes if you use our radish cooker. It will cook perfect


radishes. Now that we're done with that disgusting metaphor.


What this creates for you is this structure. And you can say, all right, here's how much


lightly branded content we're going to create, moderately branded, heavily branded. You see


how much heavily branded content you're creating, right? When you're thinking about unicorns,


they're always creating 80% lightly branded content or whatever else. I think instead,


it's 80% of the effort goes into the lightly branded content. You're always going to have


much more heavily branded because let's face it, no matter what kind of content you do,


at some point, you've got to write the product descriptions. You've got to write the services


pages. You've got to put the stuff out there that sells because your job is not to create


unicorns. You're not going to get reviewed on that. You're going to get reviewed based


on selling stuff. So you've got heavily branded home pages and heavily branded product pages


and heavily branded category pages, all of this stuff that has to somehow get out there.


That's why there is so much heavily branded content, but why it's all green circle. Not


a whole lot of approval required. It's just going to get right out there.


So you can go to Google and use Google Suggest and everything. And by the way, this is how


this whole talk, this was the genesis, is my patronus, as it turns out, is a badger.


I had hoped for an elk or a dragon, but it's a badger, which it turns out is probably okay.


So that's how this talk started. I was going to do don't create unicorns, create dragons.


Okay, badgers.


So now you've got your structure. It's time to find ideas. Everybody says we've got to


go find some cool ideas. Well, what do you generally do? In a lot of organizations, a


lot of conferences you'll hear, you need to brainstorm. Create the brainstorming session.


Put a whole bunch of people in a room, get them all talking. There are no wrong ideas,


and just write them all down.


Well, if you're a badger, that pisses you off. Because content, and I'm sorry if I'm


offending people on this one, content is not a democracy. It is not a democracy. It can't


be. You don't have time. So badgers don't necessarily do the big brainstorming session.


Certainly not when you're producing green circle content every week.


The other thing is you're drowning in ideas. You don't need more ideas. You've got tons


of ideas. What you need to do is pick one. I work with so many people who have these


incredible lists of ideas, and somehow none of it ever goes live. And you think, what's


happening here? So you can go to answer the public, I'm sure you all know about this,


and get new ideas. But before you do that, look at your support forums. What are the


threads that get the most attention and participation? Maybe you should answer those.


This is for a software product called Moodle. It's a training software. And one of the most


visited, commented on, and viewed threads on the entire support forum is questions about


installing this extension called Solr, which is a search tool. So if I were them, I'd write


a blog post about installing Solr on Moodle. If you don't know what this means, just avoid


eye contact and quietly move on. Doesn't really matter, okay? Point here is you can go to


Stack Overflow and look for the stuff that's getting the most traffic, the most votes,


the most comments, the most views. Answer those. By the way, I can give you the answer


to both of these if you want later. I'm not going to do that here.


If you do slide decks and put them up on SlideShare, find the slides that get clipped. Find the


slides that get clipped the most. If you've got slides that get clipped a lot, like that,


I know three people. Look, I'm a D-lister here, okay? Give me a break. Then you can


do a blog post on how to use Hemingway, right? There's some interest there.


If you do big white papers, sorry for the atrocious color choice there. If you do white


papers, take chunks out of the white paper. Generally, there's going to be whole sections


of the white paper that no one will read because it's a white paper. So people skim the first


part and the last part and if there's a word like transformation in there, they go for


it. Otherwise, forget it. Take those chunks of the white paper and turn those into blog


posts. What are you doing there? You're accomplishing a few things. You're teasing the white paper


and you're getting ideas that you know are at least important to your organization and


you can use those to post. Plus, the content's already there. All you have to do is rewrite


it. Take a blog post and pull tweets out of it, right? Just take something from the post,


if the post got attention, and turn it into a tweet. That's all you got to do. You don't


have to look for new ideas. Finding new ideas is really cool. You want to get them and do


them, but 90% of the time, you don't have to do that. Badgers know that. They know better,


right? The unicorn thing is to always find the biggest, newest idea or take an existing


idea and so revolutionize it that it's unrecognizable. You don't have to do that.


Now you got your idea. It's time to get to work. If you're doing a blog post, you're


generally just going to go zipping right into WordPress, right? Do your post, put it out


there. If you're doing something else, you probably need an HTML producer. How many people


here create, produce, design, and publish your own content all on your own? Not that


many.


Most of us go to a production team and say, hey, production team, I've got this cool piece


of content. Do you mind if you could do some work on this for me? You hop on the production


team and say, yeah, sweet. I'm pretty sure this is Photoshop. I don't think anyone actually


did this with their child. That would be hideous for both of them.


The production team says, we're doing a million things. Maybe it's one person. Maybe it's


40 people, or 39 of them are busy, and the 40th hates you because you corrected their


spelling on Twitter in front of the entire world. Whatever. You can't get the production


team to help out.


Unicorns will often say, okay, well, this is a really awesome idea, so we're going to


work on it. We'll start writing it. We'll do some cool stuff. When you're ready, we'll


get it published, and then we will cavort amongst the beautiful content that we have


created. I'm exaggerating a little here. Okay, you all, just work with it. Work with the


analogy.


Third rule for badger style content is to use what you have, not what you wish you had.


Again, in any organization, no matter how big, we are always going to get slightly less


than we think we need to do a good job. Always. It always feels that way.


What you need to do in those situations is find another way to get it done. This is where


I'm going to dive kind of deep. If you don't have a producer, you need to learn to work


in plain text. You need to learn to use a language called Markdown. Don't tune me out


yet. It's a really simple language, okay? There's some really powerful reasons.


Why on earth would you do this to yourself? First thing is you're using text editors instead


of Microsoft Word. I have never had a text editor just crash and lose all my work or


screw up my work or start doing weird overlaps of text or substituting fonts or giving messages


saying normal.dot cannot be found, whatever. Never had a text editor do that.


You can convert Markdown. I'm going to show you how to do it in a second. It's only going


to take four slides to show you how to do Markdown. You can convert Markdown to just


about anything. Okay? Word docs, HTML, PDF, slides, audio. I don't know about audio, actually.


That might be an exaggeration. But lots of really nifty things. And you can edit text


anywhere you want. This is on my phone. Sitting on the plane writing this as the person next


to me edges further and further away as they're reading what I'm writing.


You'll be able to open it 20 years from now. If we are still reading text, this will still


be content that you can open because it is plain text. It is completely backwards-compatible


forever. If it's not, we have other things to think about.


And most important, you can generate flawless HTML. And this is why you need to learn it.


If you're one of the people in here who did not raise your hands, which is a lot of you


when I ask if you have your own production team, you need to know how to do this. Because


this will help you take one more thing off the production team's plate so that every


time you produce a green circle piece of content, you don't have to go to them and then wait


a week for your content to go live. So you write in Markdown. And all you do is


some really simple things. So a little hash symbol, a pound symbol, creates a level one


heading. Two creates a level two heading. You want to create a link? Two brackets for


the text, two parentheses for the link. That's it. A list? Use asterisks. Or just use numbers


if you want a numbered list. That's all you have to do. Put in an image? Slightly different


from a link. Just add an exclamation point at the beginning. You can preview it in a


whole bunch of different tools like Markt, Two on the Mac, or Dillinger on the web, whatever.


And you can also convert it using those tools. And if you're a serious nerd, I always use


this for nerds. I don't know why. You can use a tool called Pandoc. Very simple command


line thing. But you don't have to learn that. You can do all this with a basic text editor


and one of those Markdown preview tools. And it generates HTML so good that I actually


get tears in my eyes. Because I don't have to write it anymore. Back when I was a kid,


I had to use Notepad to write HTML by hand. You don't have to do that anymore. It turns


those H1s and H2s to perfect H1s and H2s. It turns links into links. It turns lists


into lists. Right? You don't have to know how any of this works. You're just getting


flawless HTML out of it. And yes, there's places where it goes horrifically wrong and


breaks and things. But no more often than Microsoft Word goes horrifically wrong and


breaks and things. In fact, a lot less often than Microsoft Word will do that to you.


It even, this is a personal thing for me, creates smart quotes. So in your post or whatever


else you'll get the little curly quotes instead of the stupid straight quotes that drive me


crazy because from a typography standpoint they're a nightmare. And you really only need


two tools to do this. Sublime Text and Marked. And it can be any text editor you want. I


just happen to love Sublime Text. And then Mark 2 or Dillinger. And then if you want


to be the llama, go for Pandoc. At the same time, you've got to use the right stock photos.


This is where things go horribly wrong. People always seem to pick the perfectly racially


integrated room full of disturbingly attractive people. Generally, if they have water glasses,


all the water glasses are filled to the same level. Check, look for that sometime. The


only thing realistic here is nobody is looking at or paying attention to the person running


the meeting. That is the only thing realistic here, right? They're all looking away from


that person. Some smart ass made a remark in the back, I've never done that, and they're


all ignoring her. You can see the look on her face, right? She's about to say, what


the hell are you doing? Please stop. Then there's Biff here, right? Really accessible,


manly white dude. And he starts showing up all over the place. You know what the one


thing men apparently want more than sex is? Well, it's either inlays and onlays on your


teeth or it's hair transplants. Personally, I can relate. But to pay for either of those,


you got to get some tips on Forex trading so you can get some easy money. So there he


is again. The point here isn't that some smart ass is going to go and search the internet


trying to find all the times that your picture has been used. The point is that is a generic


picture, right? It works here and here and here, or rather it works equally badly in


all of these situations. That is not going to create any good content, unicorn or badger.


What I like to do is try four analogies. If you're trying to explain something to your


audience like a crowd, you could just use a picture of a crowd. The truth is this isn't


a bad image. Or you could use a different kind of crowd. You probably know I use animal


pictures quite a bit, hard to guess. Or a crowd. Or if you want to show someone really


freaking out, go for something completely random like a freaking out chicken. By the


way, featherless chicken, I cannot unsee that from this morning. It's burned into my brain.


I will have nightmares about it tonight. And you can put your own touch on it, right? You


can add a speech balloon or put the kid on top of the screaming badger and it doesn't


have to look that perfect. Whatever it is, again, you're taking what's available and


you're doing something cool with it. It doesn't take very long to find the picture of another


kind of crowd. Just please don't use the stock photo that shows the printed circuit that's


been used before a million or so times. And by the way, I have done it too. Don't sit


here being embarrassed. I've done it so many times. Look back over my blog posts over the


years. Biff is there. The perfectly balanced boardroom is there. All those things are there.


I think I have one of a guy using a megaphone. He's hopped up on a table and he's like smiling


and screaming and then there's a woman sitting in front of him and she's like and she's smiling


too and you're thinking what is happening here? I don't know. I don't know. You do need


to have a way to prep images. So again, you don't have that big production team. And again,


it doesn't matter. Fortune 2000 company, team of one, team of 50, if you're doing images,


you have to send those to someone else to get them done. That's an entire loop, right?


You have to send it to someone. They have to do it. They have to send it back and say,


okay, it's good to go and then you're good to publish. You can't just go in and say,


okay, we're good to go. So have a basic image prep workflow. I don't like stock photos.


I also don't like plagiarism. Use some of these sources. So Pexels and Unsplash are


free. iStock is a screaming deal. Shutterfly as well. I know they seem expensive but like


with iStock you can pay a flat fee a month and get 300 downloads every month. You can


just download them and save them so you can use them later or whatever. I didn't say that.


Keep the originals, all right? You're going to resize images. You're going to mess with


them. You're going to crop them. Keep the originals. Inevitably, the number of times


that people ask you to modify the original is directly proportional to the number of


times that you delete the original. All right? Don't do that so many times. And going back


into iStock or on Pexels and trying to find that image again is not fun.


Keep a double-sized image. Resolution doesn't matter just for all the nerds here. Keep a


double-sized version of the image for retina displays. The super high res displays like


on all the Macs that I see here and a lot of PCs now. And compress your images. This


is the easiest thing in the world to do. Anyone who works at Portent right now is looking


at me like oh my God, again? We have to hear about this again? It is so easy to compress


an image. On the Mac you use preview. On the PC you use something like Cesium. You can


take it from 5 meg to 661 kilobytes, whatever, and it will load that much faster.


Real colors on your own. Now I am a color moron. I have the color sensitivity of a badger,


probably. I can't really go to clients and say so hey client or hey boss, I have no color


sense but you gave me the job of making sure this looks good so can you give me some ideas


for color palettes? That doesn't go over well with clients. If there are any clients here


I never I will never do that to you. Use something like Canva's color palette generator. Go on


there, take some painting or something. We have this at home. I have always loved it.


The closer you look at it, the more detail there is. It is amazing. Take a screen capture


of it or a photo and just feed it into this palette generator and it generates the palette


for you.


Quick aside, since we are talking about editing, I actually know that a honey badger is not


a badger. You can all stop tweeting it now. How many people here were tweeting, come on,


when I first showed the honey badger how many people here immediately tweeted that's not


a badger? Nobody? I am checking Twitter later so if you did you may as well tell me. No?


Okay. Good. Good.


The next thing is you have to edit and everybody always says get someone else to edit your


work. I say it too. How often do we have a chance to get someone else to edit our work?


Not real often. And even if we do, it is a lot nicer to the editor to hand them something


that you have already edited. I can tell you as someone who edits work, it is easier to


edit good work than to edit crap. There is nothing worse than getting something on your


desk, looking at it and saying I don't know where to start with this. This is a catastrophe.


So edit it yourself first. And you can do that all sorts of good ways when the editor


looks at you like this. Which does happen. You need to create your own work flow. The


way I do it is I start with this app called Hemingway which you probably all already know


about. The only advice I will give here is don't take it at face value. If you actually


cut and paste some text by Hemingway into this app, it gets it all wrong. It gives Ernest


Hemingway himself like an F. So just let it mark where you can and cannot or where you


have sentences that are difficult or easy. Use that first. Then read it backwards a paragraph


at a time. That sounds ridiculous, I know. But read it backwards a paragraph at a time.


I'm not talking about Twin Peaks kind of weird talking, I'm nerding out, sorry. Then go to


Grammarly and use Grammarly to edit it. Get rid of all your typos, all your bad grammar,


everything else. You don't have to get a 100 because there's always going to be something


you're doing in there that it doesn't like. And then read it backwards a sentence at a


time. The purpose of reading it backwards is taking all of this stuff out of the context


where you have read it many times and you're just, you're completely blind to it. I will


sometimes read it a word at a time backwards, but I'm not going to do that with a 10,000


word long form post. So everybody has to just have their own limits, that's mine. Then go


have lunch. Again, honey badger. Okay, it's a weasel, not a badger. You have now learned


something from my presentation. And then understand you've got a lot to do. At some point you


got to just publish. And I've seen content get stuck into this kind of eternal loop of


tweak this a little bit, change that a little bit, and we don't have much control over that


as content creators, not always. But there are ways to help move things along. So you've


got your content and you're ready to go live, right, but then all of a sudden legal shows


up. They're a little prickly sometimes. I have a law degree, okay, so I just. And then


engineering shows up. They also can be a little prickly. And then branding shows up. And it


has to go through all these stages of review. Those can become serious hold ups. Your content


can be unrecognizable when it comes out the other end. I've had stuff that looked like


it got recycled through a badger or through a unicorn. You can make it much easier on


those teams. And there's a few things to do. First of all, you do have to understand, be


a little empathetic there, they have jobs too. All right, I have done content review


a long, long time ago as an intern in law school. And we're supposed to do it too. And


we have a stack this high on our desks. So you can do a couple things to make our lives


easier. Same with branding, same with everybody else. First of all, give us the idea first.


Long before you start or if you don't have that opportunity, the day you start writing,


email me the idea. Not a summary, nothing else. Just say, hey, I'm going to write about


this thing. Is that okay? Generally lawyers will say no because that's our job. No, it's


not okay. If you do it, I wash my hands of it. If you've never heard that, you're not


working in a big enough company probably. Send them that one idea. Make sure it's okay.


Then edit your work before you send it to them. All right, nothing flashes an enormous


middle finger at the legal team or the branding team or the engineering team than giving them


a piece of content that's impossible to read because it's horrifically badly written. Or


giving them a video that's impossible to watch because it still has all the places where


it says, no, no, no, go back, edit that, forget it. Make sure that you give them something


that's easier to get through.


And then finally, and this is a trick I found works really well, create one large piece


of content and let them know this is going to be a series of posts. This is going to


be a series of videos. We're going to break this up. This is going to be a bunch of tweets.


You're not tricking them. It's much easier to focus if you get one thing.


And just tapping my own experience here, I worked on a law journal, a little one. I wasn't