Is Google moving towards greater search equity?

30-second summary:

  • Search equity allows for your average business owner to compete on the SERP without being impeded by a lack of SEO-knowledge
  • A more equitable SERP is a necessity for Google from a business and overall web-health perspective
  • Google is pushing for equity on the SERP to a far greater extent
  • The democratization of the SERP represents an enormous paradigm shift that brings certain SEO skills to the fore

What would happen if instead of having to jump through hoops to rank your new website, you were given a seat at the SERP straight away? Presumably, that would cause all sorts of havoc for SEO professionals. What if I told you that there’s a strong push at Google to do just that? I call it “search equity”. It’s Google trying to remove optimization barriers so site owners (aka business owners) can focus on creating great content and reap the benefits of it. 

It’s a move that I think Google is pushing hard for and has already taken steps towards. 

What is search equity?

Search equity is the ability for a site to be able to compete at some level of significance on the SERP without being impeded by technical structures. It is the ability for a site to rank its content solely because that content is worthy of being consumed by the searcher. 

As such, search equity would mean that sites with limited resources can compete on the SERP. It means they would not need to have an overly complex understanding of SEO on a technical level and from a content structure perspective (think things like page structure and other technical SEO aspects). 

Search equity gives a business owner the ability to be visible on the SERP and in many ways helps to preserve the overall health of the web.

It’s a spectrum. It’s not even possible to have total search equity. At any given time, there could be more or less of it within the Google ecosystem. It’s not an all-or-nothing equation. It’s not even possible to have total search equity. What matters is that Google is trying to create as much search equity as it reasonably can. 

Why is search equity necessary?

The idea of search equity being highly desirable to your average site is self-evident but it also makes a lot of sense. What do I mean by that? 

Business owners are content experts. They are experts on the subject matter that is related to their business. They are the ones who should be creating content around the topics associated with their business. Not SEOs, not content marketers, and not some content agency. 

There’s a problem with this, however. That problem is the incentive. Content creation is hard and time-consuming so there has to be a reward for the efforts. Also, there needs to be a way to address the various technicalities that go into SEO, but that’s for later. This is where the current model falls into trouble. 

What happens when a business decides to dedicate the time and resources to create content? What happens when they are now faced with things like optimizing their page structure, internally linking, external linking, title-tags, canonical tags, keyword cannibalization, or whatever else floats your SEO boat? 

Do you see the problem?

SEO, as it’s often thought of, discourages the very people you want to be creating content for from creating content. Business owners don’t know anything about tags and links and structure. They know about running their businesses and creating content around that expertise. 

This is a real problem for Google. It means there is a lot of potential content out there that the current incentive structure doesn’t allow for.

If you think the notion that there’s a gap in the content generation is fantastical, it’s not. For starters, Google has often indicated such a gap exists in non-English speaking markets. Further, Google has an entire “Question Hub” to provide answers for when the “content just isn’t there”.

What I think makes this notion a contradiction and hard pill to swallow as there is an overabundance of content and a lack of it at the same time. This is because a vast amount of content being produced simply lacks substance. I’m not even referring to spam and the 25 billion+ pages of it that Google finds each day. The content bloat we experience is due to the overabundance of low to medium quality content. When was the last time you felt there was just so much really quality content on the web? Exactly. 

There is no gap in the quantitative amount of content on the web but there is in its quality. If Google’s main SEO talking point is any indicator, the gap of quality content out there might well be significant. That’s not to say that such content doesn’t exist, but it may not exist in healthy quantities. 

To fully capitalize on the content creation resources it needs to maintain a healthy web, Google needs, and has moved towards, search equity.

But not all of Google’s drive towards search equity is purely altruistic—there’s also a business interest. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, in this case, it’s quite healthy. In any event, understanding how search equity aligns with Google’s business interests is an important part of understanding the impending urgency of a more equitable SERP. 

Why Google My Business demands search equity

The prominence of Google My Business and of the local SERP, in general, has risen in recent years. No longer is local SEO relegated to the loser’s table at SEO conferences. Rather, local SEO has come front and center in many ways. 

Part of this is due to the growing importance of having a GMB profile. Local SEO isn’t getting more attention because of some internal shift in SEO, it’s because it’s becoming more important for businesses to have a GMB listing set up. 

With the plethora of options and abilities that GMB offers (think Reserve with Google or Product Carousels) having a listing has become a way for a business to showcase itself.

Look no further than GMB itself advocates setting up a profile as a way to “stand out”.

Here too, Google runs into the very same problem I mentioned earlier: incentives. If Google My Business isn’t just about “managing your listing” but is also about standing out and marketing yourself, then the environment on the SERP has to be equitable.

In other words, what would happen to GMB adoption if business owners felt that in order for them to compete on all fronts they had to jump through all sorts of hoops and/or spend a ton of money hiring an SEO on a continuing basis?

Clearly, Google is trying to grow the relevancy of GMB not just in terms of the number of businesses adopting it but in how involved the platform is in the everyday functioning of the business. This incentivizes the business to create a listing, add images, and create Google Posts. What’s lacking, however, is content. 

When it comes to the content local sites create, they have to play by the rules of every other site. There is no branded query driving users to their product carousel, Google Posts, or online menu. If Google wants businesses to feel they can thrive with GMB that success has to be across the board. This means sites have to have success within the traditional organic results for a slew of keywords (not just branded local searches).  

You can’t have the truly successful adoption of GMB if it doesn’t incorporate the business’ site itself. If a business feels that Google is making it excessively difficult to perform in one area, it will not fully adopt the other area. Meaning, if Google makes it difficult for a business to rank content, that business will not be willing to fully commit to GMB in the way that Google so desires. Businesses have to feel that Google has their backs, that Google is not an impediment before they’ll consider GMB a place to showcase themselves. It’s just common sense.  

If GMB is to continue to thrive and grow in unprecedented ways, then Google needs to make sure businesses feel that the entire Google ecosystem is a place where they can thrive. 

Search equity is the only way this can happen.

How Google has already been moving towards search equity

Truth be told, Google has been heading towards greater search equity for a while. I would argue that this movement began back in 2015 when RankBrain entered the scene. As time has gone on and as Google has introduced other machine learning properties as well as natural language processing the move towards greater search equity has followed exponentially. 

To put it simply, as Google can better understand content per se, it inherently no longer needs to rely on secondary signals to the extent it used to. This is why the debate about the importance of links and specific ranking factors has grown like a wildfire in a dry forest. 

Take headers or title-tags. Whereas at one point in time you might have had to worry about the specific keyword you put into your titles and headers, that’s not exactly the case today. Aligning your title-tags to user intent and being topically focused is more significant than a specific keyword per se (one could even argue, that while still important, the overall ranking significance of the title-tag has diminished as Google takes a broader look at a page’s content).

This is really the idea of taking a more “topical” approach than a keyword-specific approach to a page’s content (an idea that has come to the forefront of SEO in recent years). That’s search equity right there. What happens when you don’t have to rummage through a tool to find the exact keyword you need? What happens when you don’t need to place that exact keyword here, there, and everywhere in order for Google to understand your page? 

What happens is businesses can write naturally and, by default (so long as the content is good), create something that Google can more or less assimilate.

In other words, the flip side of Google’s often discussed “breakthroughs” in better understanding content is “search equity”. If Google can better understand a page’s main content without having to rely as much on peripheral elements, that inherently translates into a more equitable environment on the SERP.    

You don’t need to look any further than Google’s mantra of “write naturally for users” to see what I’m referring to. Google’s improved ability to comprehend content, via elements such as BERT and the like, allows for site/business owners to write naturally for users, as previous “impediments” that demanded a specific understanding of SEO have to an extent been removed.  

An even stronger push towards increased search equity

Advocating that Google is headed towards increased search equity by pointing to an almost ethereal element, that is, the search engine’s ability to more naturally understand content is a bit abstract. There are clearer and more concrete cases of Google’s ever-increasing push towards search equity. 

Passages ranking and the clear move towards a more equitable SERP

Passage ranking is the absolute perfect example of Google’s desire for a more equitable search environment. In fact, when discussing Passage ranking, Google’s John Muller had this to say

“In general, with a lot of these changes, one thing I would caution from is trying to jump on the train of trying to optimize for these things because a lot of the changes that we make like these are essentially changes that we make because we notice that web pages are kind of messy and unstructured.

And it’s not so much that these messy and unstructured web pages suddenly have an advantage over clean and structured pages.

It’s more, well… we can understand these messy pages more or less the same as we can understand clean pages.”

Does that not sound exactly like the concept of search equity as I have presented it here? Passage ranking further equalizes the playing field. It enables Google to understand content where the page structure is not well optimized. In real terms, it offers an opportunity to content creators who don’t understand the value of strong structure from an SEO perspective, i.e., a business owner. 

Simply, Passage Ranking is a clear and direct move towards creating a more equitable SERP.  

Discover feed could lead to more equity

This is a tricky one. On the one hand, there is a tremendous danger to the average site with auto-generated feeds, such as Google Discover. It’s easy to conceive of a person’s feed being dominated by large news publishers, YouTube, and other high authority websites. That would leave little room for the average business owner and their content. 

However, let’s take a step back here and focus on the nature of the beast and not the specific content possibly being shown. What you have with Google Discover (and personally this sort of custom feed is where things are headed in many ways), is content delivery without the ability to influence placement via direct SEO. In other words, unlike the SERP, there is far less direct influence over what you can do to optimize a specific page for Discover. There is no keyword that a user implements in Discover, so there are far fewer things SEOs can do to tilt a page in a certain and very specific direction. 

Rather, Google Discover relies on the overall relevance of the page to a user’s interests as well as the site’s general authority around the topic at hand. It’s far more a content strategy-focused endeavor that hinges on the production of highly relevant and authoritative content in the context of a site’s overall identity than it is about traditional SEO. 

Discover, as such, is inherently a far more equitable construct than the SERP itself. Does that mean that it is in actuality a more equitable environment? That all depends on how Google goes about weighing the various considerations that go into showing content in Discover. Still, as a framework, the feed is of a more equitable nature regardless. 

CMSes and their role in search equity

There’s been an interesting development in the role of CMSes for SEO, to which I have a front-row seat (as I work for Wix as their SEO liaison). CMSes, like Wix and Shopify in particular, have put a heavy emphasis on evolving their SEO offering. 

As a result, and I can tell you this first-hand as I’m often a direct participant in these conversations, Google seems to be taking a more outright welcoming approach to the closed-CMSes. The reason is that as the CMSes have evolved for SEO, they offer the ability to create an equitable experience on the SERP. 

Just look at what John Mueller had to say as part of a conversation around businesses using Wix: 

The evolution of some of the closed CMSes is in many ways the missing piece to Google’s search equity puzzle. If a platform like Wix or Shopify provides the defaults and out-of-the-box solutions that remove the impediments associated with the more technical side of SEO then the SERP is far closer to search equity than ever. 

This is reflected by John’s statement in the next tweet from the thread I presented just above: 

Having platforms out there that take care of the user from a technical standpoint puts businesses in the position to be able to rank content. This is search equity. 

If you combine what’s happening with the CMSes along with Google’s advances around Passages and the like and you have one massive step forward for search equity. 

This creates an environment where the average person can use a platform that handles many of the SEO issues and then rely on Google’s ability to parse unstructured content. That’s a tremendous amount of equity hitting the SERP at one time. 

What greater search equity means for SEO

When you look back and what we’ve discussed so far here, search equity is a far-reaching construct. It touches on everything from the algorithm to the CMSes supporting the web. More than that, it’s an enormous shift in the paradigm that is Google search. In a way, it’s revolutionary and has the potential to fundamentally change the search marketing landscape. I don’t mean that hyperbolically either and I’m not generally an alarmist. 

No, I’m not saying SEO is dead. No, I’m not saying technical SEO is dead (not by a long shot). What I am saying is a more even playing field for those who can’t invest heavily in traditional SEO is a major change to the SERP and potentially for our industry. 

Bringing SEO strategy into focus

The evolution of search equity might mean that it is (and will be) easier for business owners to create content that ranks. It does not mean that these businesses will have any idea of what to target and how to construct the most advantageous SEO content strategy. 

In fact, I speculate that most businesses will end up trying to target extremely competitive spaces. They will try to target top-level keywords without focusing on the elements that differentiate themselves and without creating an “organic niche” for themselves. 

The point is, search equity only makes understanding SEO at the strategic level more important than ever. Understanding the algorithm and the overall direction and “inertia” that Google is trending towards will be an extremely valuable commodity.  

The business owners who will benefit from search equity will need our help to give their content efforts direction. 

(By the way, this is not to say that ensuring these sites adhere to SEO best practices should or will fall to the wayside. Although, I do think this does widen the gap in what it means to do SEO for different kinds of sites). 

Emphasis on the site as a whole (not the page)

As mentioned, search equity takes the focus off the “page” and the explicit optimization of it and places it onto the content itself. The spotlight being moved onto content per se creates a new operating framework. Namely, the importance of the site from a holistic point of view versus the significance of a per-page outlook on SEO. 

The various pages of content on a site do not exist in isolation of each other. They’re all intricately related. Imagine a site that had pages that talked about buying car insurance and other pages on how to make chicken soup with no clear connection between the two topics. From a per page perspective, each page could offer wonderful content and be intricately optimized and therefore expected to rank. However, if you step back the lack of topical focus brings with it a slew of issues. 

Search equity is synonymous with an explicit focus on the substance of a page’s content. You cannot have search equity without Google being better able to understand and subsequently value the content on a page. Search equity is synonymous with an increased valuation of the page content as page content (as opposed to page structure, for example).  

An increased focus on the content itself, with ancillary factors having, at times, a diminished role. This means that the site itself comes into a larger focus. Once that happens, the overall purpose, identity, focus, and health of that site become more important as well. 

Great content that is out of context relative to the other content on the site is less relevant. Just think about a user who hits the page from the SERP. They finish reading a blog post only to see a carousel of related articles that are entirely irrelevant to them. Who is that good for? Or imagine the internal links in such a piece of content, how relevant would they be? How strong is the content if it intrinsically can’t have any internal links, as internal links can often help support the user’s content acquisition? 

The effectiveness of a webpage’s content does not exist in a vacuum. It gains strength and relevancy from the pages that support it. If Google is taking a more direct look at content, the pages that support a given piece of content must also come into focus. 

The advancements towards greater search equity require us to take a more holistic view of a website. Search equity and the direct content focus that Google has taken mean that the relevancy of the entire site comes into focus.

This means we need to perhaps shift our attention from the role of individual pages to consider the site’s efficacy overall. This might mean a revamping of our SEO strategies and priorities and directly speaks to the importance of having a well-thought-out SEO outlook (as I mentioned earlier).   

It’s a good thing

At the end of the day, a web that removes impediments to the creation of strong content is a good thing. Might it change the SEO landscape as time goes on? Certainly. A more equitable SERP will most likely have a major impact on SEO over time. Does that mean we shouldn’t embrace it? No. Does that mean SEO is dead? Of course not. Does it mean we shouldn’t be concerned with best SEO practices to the same extent? Clearly, doing so would be a terrible idea. 

What it does mean is that we may need to change our outlook on SEO a bit and understand where we have true value to certain types of sites. 

Search equity is a good thing.

Mordy Oberstein is Liaison to the SEO Community at Wix. Mordy can be found on Twitter @MordyOberstein.

https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2021/03/10/is-google-moving-towards-greater-search-equity/




Turning reviews into opportunities for reputation and SEO impact

30-second summary:

  • Reviews are absolutely crucial to a business’s success and need to be acknowledged.
  • Engagement with consumers will positively benefit your business and bring in more reviews in the future.
  • Staying honest with your reviews will pay off in the long run.
  • Take most reviews as honest opinions about your business and work to build on them for a better consumer experience.

When a busy day means dinner will be takeout instead of home-cooked, chances are you don’t simply choose a restaurant at random. Most likely, you’ll use Google or Yelp to search for data on locations or types of food, and then, most importantly, you’ll look at customer reviews. With tacos on your mind, you may look for a casual Mexican restaurant or fast food. But what if it has less than four stars on Yelp? Scenarios like these have become part of daily life in the communities being served by almost any brand you market.

Reviews and web exposure

Customer reviews have played a significant role in customer choices for decades, and they aren’t specific to restaurants. In recent years their importance has increased exponentially and can even decide a business’s fate. With 93% of consumers using the internet to search for businesses — and 34% of those reading more reviews than before due to the coronavirus — it’s impossible to understate the importance of a good review.

Good reviews positively affect business exposure. The perceived quality of a company will contribute to a consumer’s eventual decision, and very rarely will a customer trust a three-star repair shop over a five-star one. Often, the three-star business will rank too poorly to be featured in Google’s sets of three local results, called “local packs”. Google’s local packs are meant to make it easy to find top results that match a customer’s query while suppressing less-recommended options. Exposure alone is helpful, but reviews impact both visibility in the packs and searchers’ ultimate decisions.

Increasing presence and reviews through engagement

Reviews generally follow the trend of highlighting a specific feature of the company that stood out to the customer — good service, speed, cleanliness, and so on. If there are multiple negative reviews, there’s a good chance there will also be specific issues reviewers are citing. There are two actions a business can take, ignore the bad comments or actively engage. Since only 48% of people would even consider using a business with less than four stars, negative customer reviews should be taken as serious critiques (at least most of the time).

A good way to immediately engage with reviewers is to simply reply via the owner response function Google provides in the Google My Business dashboard. Replies, thoughtful replies, can net forgiveness, understanding, and even a changed star rating for your business. Customers are more forgiving than you think and actively wait for owner responses. Even without incentives like coupons or gifts, they will appreciate the time and effort you took to understand their grievances. For smaller businesses, a few three-star reviews changed into four-stars can generate a meaningful boost in Google or Yelp search results. Direct communication increases trust from both current and future consumers and can lead to tangible business gains.

Staying honest and relevant

Faking positive reviews is nothing new in the business world. While review platforms like Google and Yelp have some safeguards in place for catching or filtering out fake reviews, they don’t automatically discover every review that violates their guidelines. This means that it’s often up to business owners to do their part by asking themselves whether it’s right to intentionally mislead consumers with false advertising.

The answer is, of course, no. Brands that lean on fake reviews in hopes of a quick gain in rankings or foot traffic may find themselves on the wrong end of lawsuits, legal penalties, business listing removal, and permanent reputation damage.

A far better approach for local brands that hope to enjoy many years of success in business is to commit to constantly earning and improving reputation through exceptional customer service. Rather than misleading the public with fake sentiment, embrace consumers as providers of both free quality control (in the form of negative reviews) and the best sales copy anyone could possibly publish about your company in the form of positive reviews.

When you receive an honest but negative review, consider it a mini-inspection one customer made of your business, citing elements you can often actively correct. A flood of negative reviews mentioning similar grievances may require fundamental operational changes to improve customer experience, prompting action on your part that can eventually lead to an enviable, lucrative online reputation. Your brand is so much better off when dissatisfied patrons speak up because stated problems can be solved, and when your public responses show how seriously you act on complaints, you’re offering rock-solid proof that your brand puts the customer first.

Meanwhile, when a happy customer takes the time to leave a positive review, make the respectful gesture of thanking them in return. Use the owner response space to express appreciation and, where possible, mention something exciting about your business like a new menu item or the debut of a new service that you hope they’ll stop by again to experience. Don’t be too sales-y, but do engage. Reviews, at their best, are two-way conversations.

If you’re just beginning to promote your business online and are feeling a sense of urgency about getting your first reviews, study the guidelines of the various review platforms and then create a compliant review acquisition campaign that yields results. But take it slow, too many reviews at once can result in removal, and keep in mind that you’ll be earning reviews for the life of the business you’re marketing. It’s a long hike rather than a sprint. Avoid guideline violations and center excellent customer service and you’ll be ahead of the review game from the get-go.

Miriam Ellis is a Local Subject Matter Expert at Moz.

https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2021/02/17/turning-reviews-into-opportunities-for-reputation-and-seo-impact/




A small business’s step-by-step guide to dominating local search in 2021

30-second summary:

  • Optimizing a small business for local search is a powerful way to boost local traffic and increase sales.
  • With the large majority of web users actively seeking products/services in their vicinity, building local leads is essential.
  • Joseph Dyson offers a step-by-step guide to improving local visibility for small businesses.
  • He focuses on the importance of Google My Business, keyword research and implementation, internal and external links, reviews, and more.

Do you want your business to appear in the top local search results on Google? Do you want to attract high-quality traffic that helps you boost sales and grow your business in the long run? Do you want to achieve and sustain target KPIs?

If you answered these questions in the affirmative, you may want to optimize your business for local search if you haven’t already.

An astounding 80% of all local searches on mobile phones result in a transaction.

While you may have created a winning social media marketing strategy and revamped your brand identity, the work doesn’t end there. In fact, it only begins. With the competition becoming increasingly cut-throat each day, standing out among the crowd has become more important than ever—especially for small businesses that are struggling to navigate the digital marketing learning curve during the ongoing pandemic.

To make things easier without compromising efficacy, you need to start off on the right foot by focusing on local SEO.

We’ll break down the basics and offer a step-by-step guide to dominating local search in 2020 so your business can hit the ground running.

What is local SEO and why does it matter?

Local SEO is the process of optimizing your business to improve its visibility in local search results on Google.

Why does this matter? Because local consumers are actively looking for products/services close to them.

If you run a small business, it’s very likely that you operate within a certain area, i.e. a specific city or state. If you fail to optimize your business for local search, you’ll attract generic leads that aren’t capable of making a transaction because of geographical constraints. You’ll also reduce your chances of appearing in the top local search results each time someone runs a “near me” or “close to me” search.

Instead of appearing in the Google 3-Pack (attached below for reference), your business will show up on the eighth, ninth, or 30th SERP.

And while earning a not-so-favorable spot among Google search results may not sound too bad, the large majority of web users never scroll past the first SERP.

So what do you do? You optimize your business for local search.

We’ve rounded up some of the most effective local SEO strategies for small businesses in 2021 to help you get started.

Claim and optimize your Google My Business listing

Leveraging Google My Business is a surefire way to give your business a much-needed visibility boost. The popular platform allows businesses to drive local traffic by creating and maintaining a strong online presence on Google Search and Google Maps.

As you share relevant information about your business, Google will effectively crawl, index, and rank your business.

The outcome? Improved local rankings.

Claim and optimize your Google My Business listing to maximize your chances of appearing in the Google 3-Pack.

We suggest sharing the following information:

  • Name
  • Address
  • Phone Number
  • Business Hours
  • High-Quality Photos and Videos
  • Categories
  • Description
  • Website
  • Reviews
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Attributes and Amenities

Google’s algorithm determines the legitimacy of a business by checking for consistency across the board. For instance, if your business hours are inconsistent across multiple platforms, your business will not be perceived as credible or reliable.

Even the slightest deviation can lower your chances of appearing in the Google 3-Pack.

Ensure consistency to dominate local search and increase the visitor-to-lead conversion rate.

In addition, keep your listing updated by sharing fresh content and interacting with customers through Google My Business Messages.

Become a pro at keyword research

Keyword research is undeniably the crème de la crème of local search. If done right, the process can help your content stand out among the massive pool of competition.

Why should you use keywords in the first place?

Let’s break it down.

If you own a small salon in Los Angeles, most people looking for salon services will search for very specific phrases like “salons in Los Angeles” or “best hair stylists in Los Angeles.” These keywords are a set of industry-specific and location-specific phrases that help customers find what they’re looking for.

If you want your products/services to appear in the top local search results, you have to incorporate these phrases into your content to give users exactly what they’re looking for.

Use Google’s Keyword Planner to find local industry-relevant keywords. It’s important to note that keywords are constantly evolving based on current trends, events, and news. So while you may have assiduously compiled a list of the most relevant keywords, it’s unlikely that they’ll dominate search engines within a few months.

Stay at the top of your game by actively researching and re-researching keywords. You can also use third-party tools based on your preference.

If you’re unsure about how to incorporate keywords based on regional trends, use Google Trends to discover what’s trending.

Use actionable on-page SEO techniques

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing web pages to boost rankings and attract high-quality local traffic.

How does this work? As you focus on specific on-page optimization factors, your website will become more visible on the web.

These factors include:

  • Title Tag: The title/topic of each page
  • Meta Description Tags: A short description that summarizes the content
  • Robots Meta Tag: A piece of code that helps web crawlers determine which pages on the site should be indexed
  • URL: The web address of a specific page
  • Header Tags: Headings that add structure to a page, for example, H1, H2, and H3
  • Image Alt Tags/Alt Text: Short and clear description of an image
  • Canonical Tags: An HTML link tag that helps crawlers prioritize the main page instead of indexing duplicate page URLs

Each time you create new content, incorporate high-volume keywords in the aforementioned on-page optimization factors, especially the title tag, meta description, URL, and header. This will help you attract local traffic and make your website more search-friendly.

Leverage internal and external links

Focusing on your website’s link structure is a great way to optimize your business for local search.

Internal links are hyperlinks that take readers to content or products/services on your own website. Here’s an example to help make things a bit clearer. If you’re writing a new blog for your website and hyperlink an old infographic on your own domain, this will qualify as an internal link. Of course, you can link any type of content, including blogs, articles, press releases, infographics, videos, product pages, service pages, etc.

How does this help? As web users interact with your content, they’re more likely to engage with the internal links. This, in turn, helps Google determine the relevance of your internal pages and rank them accordingly.

If you’re already ahead of the game, you can link location-specific keywords, thereby organically improving your website’s visibility for local search. These factors collectively play a big role in ensuring your business climbs local SERPs and maintains a strong online presence.

External links work in a similar manner. If an external (third-party) website links to your content or products/services, this qualifies as an external link, also known as a backlink.

For instance, if an established website like Forbes links to a value-added blog you wrote a few months ago, you’ll earn a high-quality backlink. As a plethora of potential customers is redirected to your website, you’ll reap the benefits of high traffic for your local business.

High-quality backlinks from websites with a high domain authority (great rankings on SERPs) help Google determine the validity and reputability of a business.

If a considerable number of established businesses are hyperlinking to your content, it’s very likely that you’re producing engaging, informative, and impactful content.

Google’s reward system is quick on its toes. Their algorithm will immediately process the information and make sure your business gradually climbs SERPs. If you were stuck on the 15th SERP, you could climb a few pages.

Of course, if you continue to produce winning content and earn quality backlinks, you’ll manage to break into the first search page.

How should you use internal links?

  • Create more content so it’s easier to include internal links in new content
  • Check the domain authority of pre-existing content to use internal links accordingly (for example, link to popular content more frequently)

How should you increase external links?

  • Write high-quality and engaging guest blogs
  • Leverage broken link building
  • Convert unlinked mentions into backlinks
  • Collaborate with non-competitor businesses in your industry to build quality backlinks
  • Repurpose and syndicate content
  • Offer to write authentic testimonials for other businesses in return for a backlink

Optimization isn’t enough, create high-quality local content

Optimization isn’t the be-all and end-all of content marketing. If you haven’t produced high-quality content in the first place, it’s unlikely that optimization will help you get any further.

The best way to dominate local search is to strike the perfect balance between optimization and quality. Losing sight of either one of the two could end up doing more damage than good.

Create impactful content around local events, trends, movements, and news.

For instance, find a way to incorporate popular holidays like the 4th of July into your content plan. If you sell pool accessories, you could create a blog titled “Five Tips for Having a Lockdown-Friendly Fourth of July Party This Weekend.” One of the tips could include having a family pool party and ordering fun pool accessories online.

Building these connections will go a long way in helping your business become a familiar sight in local search results.

Of course, don’t forget to incorporate location-specific keywords to make sure you attract high-quality leads that can easily buy your products/services.

Request and respond to reviews to climb SERPs

Reviews are a gold mine when it comes to improving visibility for local search.

A whopping 53% of Americans carefully read product/service ratings and reviews to guide their shopping experience.  In fact, 15% of the ranking factors for the Google 3-Pack comprise review signals.

If you run a local search, you’ll notice that each business in the Google 3-Pack includes a plethora of positive reviews.

Here’s an example:

Google doesn’t want to take any risks. The entire point of the Google 3-Pack is to display the top businesses for a specific search. The factors used to determine whether a business should appear in the Google 3-Pack include NAP consistency, relevance, reputability, experience, and—you guessed it—reviews.

If your business has a great review rating and flattering reviews, you’re very likely to earn a spot in the Google 3-Pack.

But how should you generate positive reviews? The most obvious way is to offer excellent products/services and ensure great customer service.

But there’s a little more than meets the eye.

Here are some expert strategies to increase positive reviews for your business:

  • Use Google My Business to encourage your customers to share reviews
  • Request reviews from customers who recently invested in your products/services by sending a short, individualized, and engaging email
  • Use social media to encourage customers to share their feedback
  • Create a testimonials page on your website and include a short form that allows customers to share their experience with your products/services

Actively respond to positive reviews to encourage customers to share reviews in the future. In addition, take correctional measures to make it up to your customers who leave negative reviews. If done right, you can end up turning a bad experience into a good one.

If you’ve been struggling to give your business the boost it deserves, implementing these strategies will go a long way in turning things around.

Closely monitor your progress using Google My Business Insights and additional tracking platforms to determine where you stand and realign strategies accordingly. Ensure consistency to view concrete results in local search rankings and traffic.

We also recommend keeping up with your competition to develop an edge as a small business with relatively less experience. Go over their strategies and replicate certain aspects that seem relevant.

As you develop a holistic local SEO strategy, your business will begin to reach milestones and gear up for long-term growth.

Conclusion

Local SEO is undeniably one of the most powerful weapons in the digital marketing arsenal for small businesses. Polishing these skills can help a business actively climb SERPs for local search and build a wide audience that continues to grow organically.

While implementing local SEO strategies may seem challenging at first, it’s less complex than many small businesses think. The right tools, resources, and expertise can make the process much easier.

Incorporate these strategies into your current marketing campaign to get started. If you have any concerns, feel free to connect with an expert. Good luck!

Joseph Dyson is a renowned content marketing manager at Search Berg. He offers expert small business SEO services and has headed various local SEO campaigns over the years.

A small business’ step-by-step guide to dominating local search in 2021




Search in 2021: Five must knows for advertisers and marketers

30-second summary:

  • 2020 set the stage for one of the most disruptive and fluid years search has ever seen.
  • Local search and Google My Business (GMB) set to be key focal areas for search advertisers and marketers amid shifts in COVID era search activity.
  • Google continues to make moves at further integrating ecommerce into search.
  • Manual Text Ads look to be on shaky ground as we move into 2021.
  • Ashley Fletcher, VP of Marketing at Adthena, shares five must-knows for search in 2021.

From algorithm changes to shifts in search activity as a result of COVID-19, 2020 was one of the most disruptive years that the search industry has ever seen. And although positive movements have been made in helping to rein in the COVID-19, a “return to normal” still seems a long way off. However, with the COVID-19 vaccine raising the possibility that “non-COVID era” search habits may return, search professionals are hard at work trying to determine which industry changes are here to stay, and which may fade away, as the world begins to get long overdue COVID relief. This means the landscape of search in 2021 is likely to see just as unpredictable of evolution as it did in 2020.

With that in mind, here are three key areas search advertisers and marketers should pay close attention to as we move into, and through, 2021.

Doubling down on GMB and local search

Remember when Google My Business (GMB) was just a helpful little tool for search advertising and marketing? Those days are now behind us.

Accounting for 33% of how local businesses are ranked, GMB is now a huge factor when it comes to SEO. Moreover, as local continues to become a bigger part of the search environment as more users are opting to stay close to home as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, advertisers and marketers need to optimize their search strategies appropriately and stay abreast of any enhancements to GMB.

Greater consideration for voice search

With 157 million Amazon Echos in homes around the US at the start of 2020, voice search is poised to continue being a massive player in search moving forward. And given how easy it is, the fact that more smart speakers are set to be purchased in the years to come, voice search is likely to go from a secondary voice channel to a primary one in short order. Therefore, with this new avenue opening up and PPC having to be rethought as a result, advertisers should begin thinking about how to optimize their searches from traditional keyword search logic to spoken word-centric phrases.

Direct buy on Google? Amazon beware

E-commerce is set to be one of the most intriguing areas of search in 2021 as Google continues to indicate that shopping will be a key goal for its platform moving forward. For years, Google has been signaling that shopping and e-commerce are key focal areas for its platform. And through the rollout of features such as Smart Shopping — among other things — Google has never been in a better position to drive sales directly from its SERPs. This means that not only should Amazon be on high-alert, but traditional retail search advertisers need to seriously consider their search strategies in the year ahead.

The end of the text ad?

Could 2021 be the end of the road for text ads? This has been the question on search pros minds particularly since Google briefly scrapped the ability to create text ads in October — not to mention when the ability to create ETAs disappeared from Google Ads dropdown menus on a smaller scale in August. Plus, given the added emphasis being placed on Smart Bidding, it seems that manual text ads could have a limited lifespan at best, and 2021 could be the year where we see this search staple wound down entirely.

Being OK with uncertainty

Search advertisers are used to adapting to continuously evolving circumstances. But 2021 could push the term “evolution” to an extreme. From better understanding search patterns during the COVID era to figuring out which trends are here to stay and which are just passing fads, 2021 is going to be a very hard year for search professionals to get their heads around — let alone always get it right. With that in mind, it has never been more important for search professionals to lean into both technology and teamwork to make sense of what lies ahead. Moreover, search professionals need to move into 2021 with a whole new perspective on flexibility. Simply put, search advertising is set to chart completely foreign waters in 2021, and by embracing the fact that uncertainty is the new normal search professionals will likely have a much easier time adapting to these new circumstances.

Closing note

While 2020 presented the search industry with an unprecedented amount of uncertainty, 2021 could represent a period of even greater unpredictability as several foundational changes seem to be set to take place within the space. However, by keeping an eye on these emerging areas and game planning now, search advertisers and marketers will not only be able to avoid potential headaches and growing pains but be able to put themselves in a position to drive success as soon as possible.

Ashley Fletcher is VP of Marketing at Adthena.

Search in 2021: Five must knows for advertisers and marketers




Search engine saturation: The ever evolving SERP and how brands are responding

30-second summary:

  • The evolution of search results in addition to this crazy pandemic has changed search results more than ever. Including new features to drill down by brand, see news, and reviews.
  • Brands who appear in both paid and organic listings were at the lowest level in 11 years with just 8% of brands appearing in both categories.
  • Google local map pack results are appearing in 47% of search results. The highest since this study has been conducted in four years.

Yes, we know, this year is unlike any other. The world is always changing around us, but this year the pace of change is faster and more jarring than ever. The search engine marketing world has had massive changes. This made my annual look at search engine results very interesting. Starting back in 2010 I started trying to understand how brands handled bidding on paid search when they were also in organic search. Recently, this has also included how often the local map pack + shopping results were included. At a macro level, this year caused massive changes – for example, travel is basically shut down, curbside is now a word that not only we are all familiar with but expect brands to deliver, and ecommerce has experienced explosive growth.

Search engine saturation at the lowest level in 11 years

So how did these macro changes impact the number of brands who appeared in both paid and organic search? Simply put it crashed. Overall, it was down by 60% year over year and 78% from 2018. This was mostly driven by a reduction in paid search results overall. Travel alone was down 78% since 2019. Travel down is very logical and makes sense given the reduction in both consumer and business travel. Travel brands are choosing to not make the investment in paid traffic at this point given the low likelihood of conversion. 

percentage of brands appearing in paid and organic search

What is surprising was the reduction in the retail overlap. Retail volume hasn’t been reduced, instead, it’s simply shifted to a more digitally forward DTC model. Retail search overlap is down 77% year over year to just 3%. That means that just 3% of the page one listings had the same brand in both organic listings and either Paid Search or Shopping listings. This stat is really incredible. We had retail peaking at 33% of brands having listings in both areas just a few years ago. So why the decrease? I think you can directly attribute this to two key factors:

1. The rise of DTC brands

This year has seen the massive growth of brands that are direct to consumers. Take a look at the screenshot below. The search results seen without scrolling are all ads and the top two are DTC brands (Bombas and Mack Weldon). These brands increase the number of competitors to “traditional brands” who would have traditionally competed for these listings. This makes it more difficult to have your listing in both paid and organic search.

2. Google Shopping moving from paid to free

This democratizes smaller brands’ ability to appear in shopping results. The move from paid to free has not only removed any financial barrier allowing more brands to enter. It also lets those brands who were only submitting just portions of their product feed to submitting the entire feed. 

Search Engine Saturation - Google Shopping moves from paid to free

Shopping and local map listings appear on 40% of search results

Long gone are the days of 10 blue links. Now search results are filled with an assortment of various results from the local map pack, shopping results, news, images, “brand refinement,” and reviews to name a few. These results complicate things for brands. Understanding how all these pieces fit together and impact the customer journey and customer experience isn’t easy. 

For the purposes of this article let’s just focus on how often these various types of listings appear. Starting with Shopping listings. The frequency of times a shopping listing is included in a search result has been fairly consistent at around 40%. One theory would be change from paid to free listings would decrease the number of shopping ads Google would show to maximize revenue. However, this isn’t the case. Instead, the results are consistent with Google’s overall strategy to continue to provide consumer choice and fight against Amazon as the first source for retail searches.

Stats on retail search

It’s a different story for the local map pack. This has continued to grow year on year. This year it was the highest since I started tracking this 4 years ago at 47%. This finding was fascinating given the economic environment we are in. However, Google continues to want to provide choices to consumers and support local businesses. There have been a lot of updates to the Google My Business product over the past few years and those investments are showing up by being included in more search results.

Search engine saturation - Stats on industries

Maximize your SERP for your customers

There are three things we recommend our clients think about when trying to determine how to best optimize their search engine strategy.

1. Understand the customer experience

You should always walk through the experience that your customers would be having. Understand what they might be seeing and experiencing. Are landing pages and ad copy aligned? Is another brand providing a better-optimized schema that provides direct answers for a key consumer query? You need to understand what they are experiencing to be able to create a strong search engine marketing strategy.

2. Understand your KPIs

Not everyone can afford $60 for a car insurance paid search click. Understanding what you can afford and what your key business drivers are is key. Your strategy and ability to be aggressive might be different for different targets, keywords, etc… This is a great place to understand your various customers, some are more valuable than others and can impact your bid modifiers. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. This is the key to this important pillar.

3. Always be testing

As you can see from these results things have changed a lot over the years and will continue to do so. Personalization will continue to drive these results based on the specific individual making it even harder to understand what’s driving impact. The key is to accept change and build a plan that enables testing and optimization. This will help keep your continue fresh on your site, the big strategy agile, and your technical architecture held accountable for SEO results. These elements will help you stay ahead of the competition who might be distracted by other elements or relying on previous success.

Jason Tabeling is CEO at AirTank. He can be found on Twitter @jtabeling.

Search engine saturation: The ever evolving SERP and how brands are responding




Fake reviews: How to combat a growing online problem

30-second summary:

  • Reviews are critical for both merchants and consumers. That’s especially true right now, as holiday shoppers look to reviews to help make decisions about which TVs, wireless earbuds, home security systems or air fryers to buy.
  • Many consumers will probably encounter inauthentic or illegitimate reviews without knowing it. Fake reviews exist on all the major platforms; it’s really just a question of degree. And it’s a growing problem.
  • Trafficking in fake reviews is a bad idea for many reasons, including platform suspensions and blacklisting. But consumer trust is arguably the most important reason to not try and game the system.
  • Assuming the business is not generating fake reviews for itself, recognizing and removing them can be a challenge. Sophisticated reputation management software tools can help spot fake reviews or monitor incoming reviews in real-time for easier detection.
  • Online reputation is a long game. Reviews aren’t just about rankings. They can help businesses improve products, services, and operations. Businesses that listen to their customers (and care) will have greater loyalty and better referrals over the long term.

Reviews are critical for both merchants and consumers. That’s especially true right now, as holiday shoppers look to reviews to help make decisions about which TVs, wireless earbuds, home security systems, or air fryers to buy. 

But many consumers will probably encounter inauthentic or illegitimate reviews without knowing it. Fake reviews exist on all the major platforms, it’s really just a question of degree. And it’s a growing problem. 

In this article, I’ll discuss what’s at stake with fake reviews, the types of inauthentic reviews, how to recognize them, and how to get them removed.  

The scale of the problem

Google, Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Amazon take different approaches to content moderation and review fraud. Yelp has probably been the most aggressive of the major sites in keeping review fraud down. But Google, Amazon, and the others frequently say they’re actively addressing the problem as well — with varying degrees of success.

Review fraud is an especially big problem on Amazon. Separate studies performed by Objection.co, Fakespot, and The Washington Post have determined that a majority of reviews in certain product categories are deceptive or inauthentic. Objection.co has indicated, for example, that the vast majority of Bluetooth-enabled products in the electronics category are fake in some way. And Fakespot found that reviews for 63% of products in the beauty category on Amazon are illegitimate.

Amazon disputes these findings and contends it’s dealing with the problem. Fake reviews are also a problem on Google, where thousands of Local Guide profiles are controlled by “review farms,” according to Objection.co’s findings.

Review fraud is something of a cat and mouse game, in which shady but increasingly sophisticated fraudsters try to stay one step ahead of platform algorithms. The reasons fake reviews are proliferating are obvious. Reviews impact rankings on Google and Amazon and more than 90% of consumers rely on them to make purchase decisions.

Yet more consumers are starting to notice fake reviews online. According to a 2019 survey, 82% of respondents said they had read at least one fake review in the past year. (Consumers often don’t recognize them.) And the same study found consumers are increasingly turning to multiple review sites before making a buying decision, as a kind of hedge against review fraud.

Types of fake reviews

We often speak about fake reviews as a uniform phenomenon. Yet there’s a spectrum and multiple categories of inauthentic or fake reviews:

  • Business owners who generate reviews for themselves, directly or indirectly
  • Employees who write positive reviews for their employers and ex-employees that write retaliatory reviews of a former employer
  • Customers who lie or exaggerate a bad experience to get a refund or some other compensation
  • Friends and family who write positive or negative reviews on behalf of a business
  • Businesses that pay for reviews or offer some sort of quid pro quo in exchange
  • Global vendors that sell positive and negative reviews to businesses around the world

Many fake review vendors operate offshore in China, India, Bangladesh, or the Philippines. However, according to Objection. co, the most common kind of review fraud is perpetrated by a business owner using a fake profile to write positive reviews about themselves or negative reviews of a competitor. 

Trafficking in fake reviews is a bad idea for many reasons, including platform suspensions and blacklisting. But consumer trust is arguably the most important reason to not try and game the system. According to a global consumer survey released earlier this year by Bazaarvoice, fake reviews can cause a loss of trust in the brand or merchant. A majority of consumers (54%) say they won’t buy the product if they suspect reviews are fake.

Being called out by the platforms – Yelp in particular – can also be harsh. The company’s consumer alerts can remain on business profiles for months, depending on the infraction. That can be the kiss of death for a local business.

Recognizing and removing fake reviews

Assuming the business is not generating fake reviews for itself, recognizing and removing them can be a challenge. Sophisticated reputation management software tools can help spot fake reviews or monitor incoming reviews in real-time for easier detection.

Manual fake-review spotting is more challenging. But some of the things to look for include reviewers not present in the customer database, profiles or names that seem fake, geographically distributed reviews, references that indicate the review is aimed at the wrong business, review content that is “generic” or without much detail, and stars without comments (on Google). There are other signals as well.

Each of the platforms has somewhat different procedures to address questionable reviews and request removal:

 Following these procedures doesn’t always work, however. On Google, in particular, the review(s) in question must violate one of its content policies, which include “spam and fake content.” In addition, Google will remove reviews if they’re written by a non-customer, if they’re directed at the wrong business, or if the review is not based on an actual customer experience (for example, political objection to the business).

It’s generally best to respond to the review publicly and point out the mistake or error (for example, wrong business location) without emotion. If it’s a competitor writing a negative review, politely point out that you don’t recall them as a customer. Then you need to locate and flag the review as “inappropriate” in the Google My Business dashboard. Local SEOs also recommend notifying @GoogleMyBiz on Twitter.   

In the best-case scenario, it can take several days for reviews to be removed by Google if they agree the review was inappropriate. However, there are also instances where it can take much longer, 20 days in one example.

Online reputation is a long game. Reviews aren’t just about rankings. They can help businesses improve products, services, and operations. Businesses that listen to their customers (and care) will have greater loyalty and better referrals over the long term. It doesn’t pay to try and game the system by generating or buying fake reviews.

If the business has an active review management program in place and regular reviews coming in, any isolated review spam probably won’t have a meaningful impact. And any demonstrably fake reviews should be easily identified – and ultimately removed.

Norman Rohr is SVP Marketing & Communications at Uberall.

Fake reviews: How to combat a growing online problem




Five SEO tips that capture holiday attention and boost sales

30-second summary:

  • The best time to prepare for the holidays was 6 months ago. The second best time is now.
  • Stay ahead: pinpoint a launch date for next year’s holiday season by backing into link acquisition needs for target SERPs.
  • Holiday-related URLs on your site are not temporary. They should be evergreen components of your year-round organic strategy.
  • Tap into the previous year’s Google Search Console data. Identify holiday-related terms you’ve surfaced for and make sure you have intent-aligned pages for them.

The end-of-year holiday season is stressful. And whether you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or Winter Solstice, Las Posadas or Festivus, as a digital marketing professional, your day-to-day job doesn’t do much to reduce that stress.

Between the Q4 rush, the abbreviated weeks due to bank holidays, and having to juggle a litany of “real world” holiday prep, the holidays for people like you and me often leave us feeling like we have more work than there are hours in the day.

I get it. It’s a lot. Despite being in the middle of a pandemic, we must make good on the promises we’ve made to our teams and our customers. We’ve got quotas to hit and metrics to make. As a result of that fact, every year around this time, Victorious receives a lot of requests for guidance on how best to prepare organic search channels to capitalize on the holiday season, specifically Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The problem is that these requests tend to come three to six months too late. But as the old saying goes, “The best time to start is yesterday. The next best time is now.” So, if you’ve found yourself reading this article and feeling a little behind the eight ball, read on.

Understand link acquisition needs

If you work in an organization that is metrics-driven and requires data to inform projects, one of the more straightforward methods to discerning when to launch your SEO holiday prep is ascertaining the number of Referring Domains (RDs) that are needed to have competitive parity from an off-site perspective with the sites you want to emulate. Once you have that number, you can work backward to land on a start date.

Here’s an example. For the query “black Friday clothing deals”, the average number of RDs for the top five results this year is 51.

Holiday shopping - Black Friday

Now, let’s say that your link acquisition efforts — when firing on all cylinders — are able to net you 10 links a month to a specified URL. And for the sake of the example, let’s assume that the URL is brand new with zero RDs.

From here, it’s a simple math problem. You take the average number of RDs for top-five results, subtract the current number of RDs of your target URL, and divide that by your monthly link acquisition rate. The product of this is the number of months you need to achieve competitive parity.

So, for our example, we’re looking at needing to start 5.1 months before the holiday we’re planning around — in this case Black Friday — to make sure we’ve appeased the off-site needs of these specific SERPs needs.

Note: Not all links are created equal. You may need more or less than the average based on the quality of the links you’re acquiring. Yet, starting with the absolute count arrived at above and adjusting your efforts as the months’ progress is recommended.

Understand content needs

With your launch date locked in, understanding your content needs is a good next step. To do that, we’ll be utilizing SurferSEO. SurferSEO allows us to find out the word count we need to strive towards, the mix of important and semantically-related keywords to include, and more.

Creating a query for holiday shopping

After navigating to SurferSEO’s Content Editor, you plug in the query that you want to gather intel on, change the settings to your liking, and hit “Create a query”.

At Victorious, we usually default to utilizing the “Mobile” setting in the toggle shown above because it’s a better representation of what Google is looking for given the presence of mobile-first indexation. Additionally, we include NLP entities to give us as much info about the semantic makeup of the top five results as possible.

After running the query, you should see something like this:

List after running a search query for holiday shopping

Competitive selection is very important. You need to make sure that you’re selecting non-anomalous results. For example, in our results for “black Friday clothing deals”, Walmart is in the top five with a total word count of five. Although this number isn’t accurate, a quick review of the URL in question shows that it is very thin on content and most likely ranking due to the strength of the Walmart domain as a whole. Because of this, we won’t include the result in our list of competitors to review.

After you’ve chosen your top five competitors, SurferSEO will begin returning content guidelines to follow in the form of total word count, a number of paragraphs, and more. While you can spend some time going through and modifying the options available to you, we recommend making it easy on yourself and moving forward with their recommendations by clicking “Let’s go”.

Result on search query performance

By this point, you should now have a word count range to target with your content, as well as insight into the individual words and NLP entities that you should include ensuring competitive parity from the content perspective.

From there, it’s as simple as unleashing your writers on the prompt and guidelines provided.

Create evergreen deals pages

When I asked the Strategy team here at Victorious for their hot takes for holiday SEO tips, I got a great scalable suggestion from one of our strategists, Vlad Davniuk, and Lead SEO, Pablo Villalpando: create a singular deals page for each holiday deal permutation you identify in your keyword research process.

For example, instead of creating a new page every year targeting things like “New Years 2020 deals”, “New Years 2021 deals”, etc., you should create a single “New Years (year) deals” page that you update every year based on a review of what Google is rewarding that year content-wise around that query.

By maintaining one page that you update on a yearly basis, you open up the ability to accrue links year-over-year rather than needing to “reset” with each new year, ultimately saving you a lot of time and resources.

In treating these pages as a part of your core strategy — taking care to not neglect them, but also not hyper-focus on them — you can avoid a lot of the stress you’d experience if you had to do this process every holiday season from the ground up. Approaching these pages as “evergreen” pages provides a template for you to work from and templates are always time savers.

Still need convincing? Here’s the tactic being utilized in the wild by ASOS. Navigating to their “black Friday clothing deals” URL, we’re met with the below:

Creating evergreen deal pages for holiday shopping 2021

However, a quick review of the screenshot captured just months ago by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows this:

Archive of deal page

If a $3.4B company such as ASOS is utilizing this tactic, it doesn’t hurt to give it a shot!

Google My Business promo posts

Another tip from Victorious Strategist Vlad Davniuk involves the use of Google My Business posts. If you’re a business with a local presence, your Google My Business can be an immediate source of capturing holiday attention through the use of posts promoting your holiday deals. See the example here (though unrelated to holiday deals specifically):

Use Google My Business promo posts

The only caveat with this one is that your potential customer will need to be fairly far along in their purchase journey since the posts won’t surface unless your business is specifically searched for.

That said, here are the steps to publishing a post on Google My Business according to Google:

  • On your computer, sign in to Google My Business.
    • If you have multiple locations, open the location you want to update.
  • From the menu, click
  • At the top of the page, choose the type of post you want to create: Update, Event, Offer, or Product.
    • Click the elements you want to add to your post: photos, videos, text, events, offers, or a button. Enter relevant information for each post addition you choose.
  • Choose to publish or preview your post.
    • To publish your post: In the top right, click
    • To get a preview of your changes: Click If you want to change your post, in the top left, click Back. Edit your draft until it’s ready to publish.

Look at previous year’s Google Search Console clicks and impressions

Another tip from another one of our Lead SEOs, Kenny Spotz, is to dive into your site’s Google Search Console data to glean insights into any previous Cyber Monday, Black Friday, and general holiday queries that your site surfaced for last year.

If you don’t yet know your way around Google Search Console, here are the steps to getting to the type of data shown above:

  1. Navigate to your site’s property within Google Search Console
  2. Click “Search Results” in the left-hand navigation
  3. Click “Date” and set the range to 16 months
  4. Click “Query” and filter the data by “Queries containing”, “black Friday” (or any other variants you’ve identified, for example, cyber Monday, Christmas, and the others)

Once you’ve identified the queries that your site has shown up for in the past, reconcile those against the URLs on your site that are surfacing for those queries, and assess whether or not they adequately address the query’s intent.

What you’re looking for are queries you’ve ranked for in the past that is being served up via URLs that are fundamentally mismatched with those queries’ intents, for example, a general curling iron product page that Google has a history of surfacing for Black Friday-related queries.

Once you’ve got the list of intent mismatch, you’re able to group the queries thematically and build out content based on those themes. And because Google has already shown to favor your site for those queries, you can make the assumption that you have some authority built up already for them. As a result, building out pages dedicated specifically to those holiday-related themes can be quick wins.

In conclusion

If the holidays took you by surprise this year, the above should get you set up to be better prepared next time. At the end of the day, prepping for the holidays organically is not unlike the approach you take now around “tangible” product launches.

And it’s here that most people make the mistake. The pages you build out to capture holiday attention and sales should not be treated temporally. The more you look at them as a core aspect of your organic strategy, the easier it will be to plan, execute, and maintain a system around this in the future.

Houston Barnett-Gearhart is Director of SEO at Victorious, where he not only oversees the Strategy team, responsible for delivering superior SEO campaigns to Victorious’s customer base but also drives innovation of product and ideation of new ways to deliver even more amazing SEO to our customers.

Five SEO tips that capture holiday attention and boost sales




10 Effective ways to boost click-through rate (CTR) using SERPs

30-second summary:

  • Search engine ranking pages and algorithms are evolving quickly and you should keep pace with them to succeed.
  • Did you know, 51% of all searches end without a click?
  • Gone are the days when there are only organic text-based results on the page.
  • Today, there are paid listings, zero-click searches, images, videos, maps, featured snippets, people also asked for boxes, and even podcasts that result in dismal click-through rates (CTRs).
  • Branex’s digital marketing strategist, Irfan Ak has created a top 10 list that can boost your CTR in Google SERPs.

If you closely look at the first page of Google for any competitive keyword, you will find tons of elements on it. Gone are the days when there are only organic text-based results on the page. Today, there are images, videos, maps, featured snippets, people also asked for boxes, and even podcasts. Then there are paid listings which are visible on top of organic listings. SEO trends are changing quickly and it is impacting search engine results pages (SERPs). All this translates into declining organic reach, dismal click-through rate (CTR), and the rise of zero-click searches.

In fact, 51% of all searches end without a click. With search engines trying their best to fulfill user needs on search pages itself, fewer users will scroll down and click through your listing as they get the desired answer on the search page.

In this article, you will learn about ten effective ways to boost click-through rate (CTR) using SERPs.

How to increase click-through rate (CTR) - Stats

Source: SparkToro

1. Optimize for featured snippets

The coveted number one spot is no longer the target for digital marketers and digital marketing agencies. The focus has shifted to Position Zero. According to Ahrefs study, 12.3% of search queries have featured snippets. Search engines like Google pull data from the top 10 results to show as a featured snippet. If your blog or website is ranking on the first page of Google, you have an opportunity to grab the featured snippet and boost your visibility.

To do so, you need to understand the purpose of featured snippets. The main reason why search engines show featured snippets is that they want to provide a direct answer to a search query and if your listing does that, you have a bright chance of getting featured on a much sought-after position zero. 

Add featured snippets to increase click-through rate (CTR)

Source: Ahrefs

Secondly, featured snippets are displayed for long-tail keywords or questions-based queries. The focus is usually on offering short and precise answers to the user query and if your listing can do that while optimizing for long-tail keywords, it can rank on featured snippets. 

2. Improve your rankings

According to a study conducted by Backlnko which analyzed 5 million Google search results, moving one spot up can increase your click-through rate by almost 30.8%. Even though, this might vary depending on your current position and the position you have moved to. The same study also found that jumping from 10th position to 7th position did not have the same impact as moving from 6th position to 5th position or 2nd position to 1st position might have on your click-through rate. Instead of striving for ranking on the first page of Google, you should focus on ranking in the top three positions as 75.1% of all clicks go to the top three spots.

Click-through rate (CTR) organic - breakdown stats

Source: Backlinko

3. Write captivating headlines

David Ogilvy, the “Father of Advertising” and Founder of Ogilvy & Mather, once said,

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

What is the first thing that users will read when they look at your listing? It is the headline. It can literally make it or break it for you. That is why it is important to write attention-grabbing headlines. Add an emotional element to your headline as research has shown that including positive or negative sentiments to your headlines can increase its click-through rate by 7%. Backlinko’s study I referenced above also found that titles that contain 15-40 characters have the highest organic click-through rate.

4. Meta description and URL

Have you ever seen a search result closely? What does it contain? A search engine listing usually comprises of three things

  • Title
  • URL
  • Meta Description

After optimizing your title, you should focus on optimizing your URL and meta description for click-through rate. Add your keyword in the URL as it will increase your clickthrough rate by 45% as compared to URLs that don’t contain the keyword.

Just like the title and URL, add your keyword in the meta description as well. Write a meta description in active voice and try to make it as actionable as possible. Don’t forget to add a call to action to persuade users to click on your listings. Make sure all the pages on your website have a meta description because pages that contain the meta description generate 5.8% more clicks than pages without meta description.

5. Add a schema markup

Search engines use a spider to crawl web pages and create an index of all those pages. The easier it is for search engines to crawl your website, the faster they will crawl your website and more likely your website to get indexed and ranked. By adding schema markup to your website, you can make it easy for search engines to understand what your website is all about and how different pages on your website covers.

There are different types of schema markups and implementing the right kind on your website can do wonders. For example, a review schema markup allows search engines to display ratings in your organic results. If your rating is good, it can increase your credibility, build trust, and help you attract new customers while increasing your click-through rate.

6. Optimize for Google My Business

Do you have a Google My Business page? If your answer is no, then you are missing out. Get your business featured on Google My Business and enter all the business details. Whether it is location-based searches, branded searches, or business-related or service-related searches, Google My Business results tend to show up.

Another advantage of using Google My Business is that it allows you to collect reviews and ratings from customers as well as allows your business to answer user questions. Both can help you build trust and win new customers. The more positive reviews your business has or the higher the rating, the better. It also offers some useful features to customers such as sharing business information with others or contacting the business directly.

7. Run well-targeted PPC ads

One of the best ways to overcome declining organic reach is to invest in PPC ads. Yes, they might be expensive in certain industries and might not work that well in other industries but if you are looking for quick results, PPC ads are your best bet, provided your PPC targeting strategy is on the money. Run PPC ads on branded keywords and prevent others from occupying your ad space. 

When you run PPC ads, it attracts targeted traffic that is more likely to convert into paying customers. This means that it not only increases your click-through rate but also increases your conversion rates too. The key to success with PPC ads is to choose the right ad type according to your industry.

8. Optimize images and videos for SEO

As mentioned before, SERPs are no longer limited to showing organic results anymore. They also show images, videos, and featured snippets to name just a few. What’s even more interesting is the fact that SERPs showing images and videos are slowly but surely increasing in number. This means that you can optimize your images and videos to increase your chances of ranking on these SERPs.

Here are some of the ways you can use to optimize images for SEO.

  • Use targeted keywords in image and video title, description, and alternate text
  • Place the image and video in a section of the page or in content where it best matches the keyword intent
  • Compress large size images and videos
  • Add a caption to images
  • Use common image sizes and optimal image formats

9. Give an irresistible limited time offer

Create a sense of urgency and use tactics such as countdown timer or mention the number of items remaining. When a user sees these things on your page, they are rushed into taking the desired action. Give a limited time offer that your target audience cannot resist, and you will see your clickthrough rate shoot through the roof. Don’t forget to add a call to action that tells users which action they should take next.

10. Optimize social media channel to show up in knowledge panels

Last but certainly not least is to optimize social media pages for knowledge panels. Search engines display these knowledge panels in order to present all your business information in a concise way. As a business, you can use this as an opportunity to connect your social media accounts and let users contact you directly from search engine results pages. For this process to work, all your social media accounts should pass the verification by Google. You can also use schema markup to highlight your social media accounts.

How do you boost your click-through rate using search engine result pages? Let us know in the comments section below.

Irfan Ak is an experienced digital marketing strategist, growth hacker, digital transformation expert at Branex. He can be found on Twitter @irrfanAK.

10 Effective ways to boost click-through rate (CTR) using SERPs




Does changing your business phone number affect SEO?

30-second summary:

  • Although a business phone number isn’t as tough on your SEO as a complete rebrand, changing it can have an impact on your SEO.
  • Preserving NAP consistency should be your primary goal when changing your phone number.
  • Your marketing strategy can help make the transition easier for your customers, too, as you can notify them of the change ahead of time.
  • The key goal in addition to retaining your ranking should be to not lose the trust of your customers by changing your information – hence the need to approach the process carefully.

Much like all other aspects of digital marketing and brand positioning, SEO is a constantly changing game. With so many moving pieces and evolving trends, it’s no wonder that brands aren’t quite certain which decisions will negatively impact their SEO, and which ones are safe enough to make. 

One day, it seems that one kind of behavior is perfectly fine, while the next Google will penalize it because they’ve implemented algorithm changes. Add customer expectations into the mix, and it gets even more difficult to figure out just what’s worth the effort, and what should be left alone. 

When it comes to your business details, including your name, address, and phone number (neatly packed into the notion of NAP information), change can be good. After all, entire companies have successfully rebranded without a hitch. However, changing a single piece of information such as your phone number can change the entire customer journey if not done right.

Here, we’ll tackle a few essential steps in the process to keep in mind, so that your phone number shift doesn’t impact your ranking or your brand perception negatively. 

NAP it in the bud

Local search is a vital component of your overall SEO strategy, all the more so when you’re running a strictly local business with a physical presence, such as a pastry shop, a car repair facility, or a beauty salon. Your foot traffic heavily depends on your customers’ ability to find correct information online when they search for your services.

If they stumble upon an outdated number, they’ll call the next business in their search results with solid reviews and forget that you exist. Simply put, consistency matters. Google doesn’t want to disappoint its users, so it penalizes businesses with inconsistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) information across the internet. As soon as your directories, your website and other online listings don’t show your actual phone number, your ranking will suffer.

The remedy is fairly simple. If you have decided to change your phone number or your entire communications system, for that matter, you should take the time to revise all your local business listings and directories where your company pops up. 

NAP consistency is a vital ranking factor that can either plummet your business in the eyes of search engines, or it can help you reach those topmost desirable spots in the SERPs. So, while changing your business phone number might not be a cause for worry on its own, how you distribute it will greatly matter in local rankings. 

Take care of your call tracking

Some businesses steer clear of call tracking simply because they aren’t sure how to go about it, afraid to damage their SEO in the process. Even more importantly with regards to call tracking, every business needs to adhere to those key legal requirements, such as the EU’s GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, to make sure their customers’ sensitive information is safe. But when the time comes to move from outdated landlines and change your numbers or merge them, you can also reap the benefits of this potentially SEO-beneficial process.

Wanting to unify and improve their communication systems, companies are switching to digital phone solutions such as voice over internet protocol (or VoIP for short). There are many perks of such a transition for call tracking, smarter customer support, and better customer engagement, all of which can support your SEO efforts in the long run. As you learn about VoIP and its many applications, you’ll be able to make the most of your phone-based interactions with your customers to serve your brand reputation, but also your ranking.

In addition to having more business phone numbers at your disposal if you need them, you should know that VoIP platforms come with other useful features such as call analytics, recording, emailing, and texting. Collecting all of that data and implementing SEO-safe call tracking with the help of Dynamic Number Insertion both work in favor of your SEO.

Building and preserving customer trust

When done right, changing your business phone number can be a seamless process that doesn’t do any damage to your ranking. However, it’s important to remember the reason for the ranking in the first place: search engines want to give users the best, most trustworthy results first and above all other available options online. In doing so, they reward businesses that accurately portray themselves online, and contact information is a vital component of that representation.

The basic premise goes as follows: if a customer calls you and gets a notification that the number no longer exists, they lose trust in your brand. Google and other search engines recognize that lack of trust and thus push other businesses above yours, with accurate and verified contact details available. In a sense, it’s customer trust that drives search engine ranking. 

Research has confirmed this, as 80% of surveyed respondents in BrightLocal research have stated that they would lose trust in a business with incorrect and inconsistent contact details. If you’ve decided to change your phone number, making sure it’s consistently represented across all of your digital outlets is the key piece of your SEO puzzle: to preserve customer trust and thus to preserve your ranking. 

Notifying the customer in time

Thankfully, you can make sure that your customers have the correct information in a few simple ways. If you’ve taken care of all of your business directory listings, your social media pages, messaging app presence, and your website, you can use your marketing strategy to get the word out. 

Your subscribers and return customers will want to know that your business has changed a vital piece of information. Just like you don’t want them to spend an hour going to an old address of your café only to discover a weird-looking shop for plumbing supplies, you want to have your new number added to their contacts list.

You can use your weekly/monthly newsletter to notify them of the switch, post a social media update letting customers know the new number they can reach you on, and post a little announcement on your website, too, especially if you gain plenty of call traffic from all of these outlets.

Changing a business phone number can be a simple process in itself, but its impact on your business will not be unless you prepare properly. Taking care of all the business registers where your company is listed paired with implementing search engine-approved tracking tactics as well as customer engagement will be more than enough to help you through the process. 

Emma Worden is a digital marketer and blogger from Sydney. Emma writes for many relevant, industry related online publications and does a job of an Executive Editor at Bizzmark blog and a guest lecturer at Melbourne University. You can find Emma on @EmmaRWorden.

Does changing your business phone number affect SEO?




Voice search SEO guide: Trends and best practices

30-second summary:

  • An optimized content and voice search SEO is crucial to rank higher in search engines.
  • Long-tail keywords are the backbone of voice searches.
  • Mobile optimization goes hand-in-hand with voice search optimization.
  • FAQ sections are your best friend.

Voice search is fast gaining popularity among online users. It is easier, faster, and more conversational as compared to traditional search.

As per ComScore, by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice searches. Google also reports that 27% of online users are using voice search on mobile globally.

But to make it work, you will require optimized content and focus on voice search SEO. In this article, we will be digging into the eight best practices of optimizing just that.

Before that, what exactly is voice search SEO?

In simple terms, voice search SEO is a technique that optimizes the content, phrases, keywords, metadata, and more to enable your voice search to rank on top whenever a user asks questions. It mainly focuses on the natural language of users and delivers them answers accordingly.

The new 2020 voice search trends

1. Smart speakers are driving voice search adoption

As per emarketer, smart speaker usage is estimated to grow at a compound yearly growth rate of approximately 48% to meet the demands of more than 76 million users by 2020.

And it is said that 40 million Americans currently possess a smart speaker. Clearly, more and more households are using smart speakers these days.

Earlier, only a handful of products such as Alexa and Siri were popular. But over the years, voice technology has improved tremendously. As a result, many tech companies are releasing their own smart speakers.

2. Improvement in voice AI and machine learning (ML)

There is a remarkable improvement in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and it has changed how users interact with their smart devices and search the internet.

For instance, with Google’s RankBrain, you can recognize words and phrases to predict forecast results more accurately. When it encounters a new phrase, it makes its best guess and gives answers accordingly.

3. Used to search for local products and services

People are increasingly using voice search to search for local products and services. According to statistics, 58% of people have used voice search while finding information about a local business.

Also, as per Google reports, searches for “near me” business has increased drastically over the last few years. It is indeed great news for local businesses.

4. Increase in popularity of voice SEO

To emerge at the top, marketers are regularly fine-tuning their SEO strategy to optimize for voice search. Considering that Google’s voice recognition has 95% accuracy, businesses wanting to attract more inbound traffic to their site have to implement voice SEO.

And Google alone is not working on perfecting voice recognition to make the most of voice search. China’s iFlytek speech recognition system has an accuracy rate of 98%, and the team is working to achieve 99% accuracy.

5. Voice search is more mobile than ever

Google’s voice search is now available in more than 100 languages on mobile devices.

Moreover, statistics suggest that mobile phones are used nearly 40% more than smart speakers for voice search.

And with mobile phones, people usually use voice search in different environments like at the office alone, at a restaurant, at a party, or any other location.

Voice search SEO - stats

This trend of voice search on smartphones continues to rise – all thanks to advances in speech recognition technology.

Here are some best practices to optimize voice search SEO

1. Use long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords are specific keywords that your target audience is likely to enter (and in this case speak) to the search engine.

People have been using long-tail keywords for a long time and seeing brilliant results with their search rankings.

Thus, it’s a great idea to use long-tail keywords to optimize voice search for a website.

In fact, according to statistics, they make up 70% of all web searches.

Voice search SEO - long tail keywords

In voice search, you can add long-tail keywords in a more conversational tone and specify what users are looking for.

The good news is that you can use plenty of online tools to search for relevant phrases and add them to your content. Some of them include:

  • Ubersuggest
  • SEMrush
  • HubSpot Content Strategy Tool

2. Implement schema markup

Also known as Structured Data, Schema Markup is a code that you can add to your website. It will allow search engines to understand your site’s content, what it means, and why it is there.

Schema Markup can also help search engines robots crawl and make it rank higher on search engines. Further, you can use it for improving and getting comprehensive search results that boost the user experience.

Just have a look at the example below

Voice search SEO - SEPR snapshot

The second search result has a star rating and a publication date, which has been added using Schema Markup. Since the result is illustrated, the users are likely to click on it readily.

You can also implement schema markup SEO best practices to provide more information about your site to the search engines and rank higher.

3. Curate content that gives direct answers

Users don’t do voice search like they do a text search. Instead, they will probably be making longer and more specific queries.

As per research, there has been a 61% growth in question keyphrases.

Voice search SEO - Graph

The statistics reveal how people are using question keywords to ask queries through voice search.

Thus, it’s an excellent idea to curate your content to answer their queries. However, make sure that you write great content that is valuable to your target audience. It will satisfy your user and, at the same time, increase the chances of appearing in featured snippets.

4. Optimize your Google My Business page

Another way to rank higher for voice searches is to optimize your Google My Business page.

Actually, it’s one of the easiest ways to get discovered by your target audience when they voice out their queries in Google. You just have to make sure that your content, images, and information are complete and precise.

Additionally, implement your prevailing local SEO strategy along with targeting how users are phrasing their queries. As per reports, 76% of smart speaker-users carry out local searches at least once a week. Thus, local SEO is as crucial as entering relevant info and images.

5. Work on increasing domain authority

Websites with many links pointing to them rank higher in regular search. And it is the same for voice search.

A study by Brian Dean, which examined 10,000 Google Home search results, found that sites with more links rank more often in voice search.

As soon as you put in your voice query, the Google search engine will provide results from high authority websites.

Here are some of the ways to increase your domain authority to rank higher in voice search:

6. Make your site mobile-optimized

Everyone surfs the internet via smartphones these days since it’s convenient and accessible. It is only evident that most users will do their voice search from mobile.

The graph below shows the different environments where people use voice search.

Voice search SEO - Stat

Since voice searches are mostly done via mobile phones, mobile optimization is crucial.

Some useful tips for mobile-optimization site include:

  • Optimizing your mobile pages with AMP
  • Checking your site’s speed using GTMetrix and working to boost it
  • Creating mobile-responsive web pages
  • Taking advantage of responsive landing page builders
  • Creating content to be more readable on smartphones
  • Regularly testing your website with Google’s mobile-friendly test tool

7. Optimize site speed

Your page speed is going to play a significant role in voice search SEO. Studies show that the pages that rank higher in search engines after doing a voice search load in 4.6 seconds. They are also 52% faster compared to average pages.

Thus, optimizing your site speed is essential if you want to rank higher in search engines.

To increase your page speed, you can implement tricks like:

8. Create voice search FAQ pages

Crafting voice search FAQ pages will benefit you a lot since question keywords are very popular.

According to statistics, voice search results come more from FAQ pages than desktops.

Voice search SEO - Stat showing FAQ pages

The best part is that FAQ pages can rank for several voice search queries. Moreover, they are concise and answer precisely what the users are looking for.

Therefore, Google usually pulls out the answer from your FAQ page whenever users do a voice search.

Wrapping up

Voice search is convenient and straightforward to use. No wonder it is gaining popularity among online users. But unless you optimize your voice search for SEO, users won’t be able to find your content.

Implementing all the eight tips mentioned in this article to optimize your site for voice search SEO can help you a great deal. These are tried and tested tips and will definitely work.

Plus, when you optimize your site for voice search SEO, you will be optimizing your website in general and rank higher in search engines either way.

Ricky Wang is a freelance content marketer and blogger at rickywang.com where he writes to readers about growing an online business. Connect with him on Twitter.

Voice search SEO guide: Trends and best practices