7 Advanced SEO Strategies I’m Trying to Implement Before 2020

Google makes over 3,200 algorithm changes per year.

That’s a lot of changes.

Just think about that for a minute… and let that sink in. It’s roughly 9 changes per day.

So how can you beat this gigantic company at their own game and rank high? Especially when you consider that they generate over $100 billion+ per year in ad revenue?

You could follow their advice on how to rank well but that won’t do much for you.

The real trick to rank well is to leverage technology.

See, although Google has made things harder, there are things you can do now that I couldn’t when I first started. For years now technology has evolved, which has made your life easier as an SEO.

Here are 7 advanced SEO strategies that I’m implementing as we speak and you should too.

Advanced SEO Strategy #1: SEO A/B Split Testing

To improve your rankings, what do you have to do?

You have to go in and manually make changes to your site. And if you aren’t sure what changes to make, just put in your URL into this SEO Analyzer and it will spit out a report like the one below.

But there is one issue with making changes manually, and I know this because I own an ad agency and I do the SEO for my own website.

It takes forever to make changes.

Heck, I can barely keep up with the changes I need to make on NeilPatel.com as I have far too many pages.

But now with companies like Rank Science and Distilled ODN, you no longer have to make changes to your site.

I know that sounds crazy, but think about what I just said.

You no longer have to make changes to your site.

You are probably wondering how right?

When you want to track your website, you just install a piece of javascript like the one Google Analytics gives you and you are off to the races.

Rank Science and Distilled ODN are similar. You install a piece of javascript and that’s it. From there it doesn’t matter if you have a CMS, or how your website is built, or any of that… they can make changes to your HTML code without you needing to do anything.

You don’t even have to give them your server password or an FTP login. The technology has changed so much that the simple javascript you add to your website can now make the changes for you.

I know that may be hard to believe, but that is how A/B testing worked for years. If you use Optimizely, VWO, or Crazy Egg… you just add a javascript and from their end, they can adjust your site.

So why can’t the same be done for SEO? Why do you have to manually make changes still?

The cool part about tools like ODN or Rank Science is they can make the changes automatically, which is really useful if you have thousands of pages.

Here’s how they work:

This way your site can always be SEO-friendly without you having to make any of the adjustments yourself.

Advanced SEO Strategy #2: E-A-T

In the SEO world, there has been an acronym that has been thrown around a lot and it is E-A-T.

It stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

Google no longer wants to rank just “good” content. Now, they are worried that a piece of content that ranks is inaccurate and can hurt the potential searcher.

For example, let’s imagine you are giving medical advice on your site. You have a ton of links and all of the right signals to rank well but your content is inaccurate. Now imagine someone injures themselves after taking your advice… well, that would be bad.

In the SEO world, you see sites in the health space or financial space having more issues with Google algorithm updates because their information may be inaccurate and Google is looking for sites to prove their expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

But my hunch is, over the next year or two, they will crack down on many more industries.

If you are going to rank a site, everyone these days can manipulate SEO signals, but it is hard to manipulate things like expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Especially when you combine all three.

One thing I’m focusing on in the next 12 months is to increase what I believe will help boost my rankings in the long run.

How you may ask? Well, I’m going to leverage a handful of tactics:

• Guest post – guest posting on popular industry and news sites should help increase my brand recognition over time. I used to do this more frequently in the past and I will kick this off again. If you don’t know how to guest post, check this out.
• Speak at conferences – I’ve slowed down on this a bit, but I will pick it up for the same reason above. It should help with E-A-T. If you haven’t spoken at many events, the key is to just apply to a lot of them and eventually some will accept you.
• Awards and recognition – continually apply for more awards. I used to do this when I was much younger and I’ve gotten lazy about it these days. The same goes for publishing more books… I already have one New York Times bestseller, why not go for a few more?

A simple thing that you can do if you believe you have been negatively impacted by some of the more recent Google updates is to include an author bio box on every piece of content you write. And, of course, use author schema markup.

A good example of this is my author box…

Using this should help boost your long-term rankings.

Advanced SEO Strategy #3: Host HTML Files From a CDN

We all know that speed impacts rankings. It also impacts conversion rates. Walmart, for example, boosted their conversion rate by 2% for every second of load time they reduced.

And nowadays more Google searches happen on mobile devices, hence load time and speed really matter.

I already have a faster server… my hosting bill is a bit more than I would like.

And it’s actually going to get a bit worse.

Currently, I have a server where my site is hosted. That server is somewhere in the United States… I believe the east coast.

That means if someone wants to visit my website from let’s say New York City, it should load fairly fast. However, if someone from São Paulo, Brazil wants to visit NeilPatel.com, it would take a bit longer as they are further away from my server.

To solve this, I’ve been using a CDN. A CDN is a content delivery network.

Services like Cloudflare cache your images and static content and server it from the closest server to the person visiting your website.

So now when someone from São Paulo visits my website, they are usually served up cached content from a server in Brazil. This makes their experience load much faster.

But as your content changes, and with things like WordPress blogs where you are constantly getting comments and going through page changes, not all of your content is served up through a CDN.

My team is now making a tweak to improve my load time even more. So instead of serving up my HTML pages from my server, we are now going to serve them up from a CDN.

In other words, we are trying to serve as much of our site from a CDN.

As you can see from the Trello list above, that’s all of the stuff we are working on serving up from our Cloudflare account in order to speed up our site and eventually boost our search rankings and conversion rates.

I wish I can walk you through how to do it step by step, and maybe that could be a future blog post, but the easiest is to just find a developer from UpWork to do it for you.

Advanced SEO Strategy #4: Multi-lingual Title Tag Tests

Similar to Rank Science, there’s a tool I currently use to test my title tags.

It’s called Clickflow.

I use to automatically test my title tag and meta description to maximize my click-through rate. And like Rank Science, you just add a piece of javascript and it can start running tests for you automatically.

That way, you don’t have to manually keep changing things.

And Clickflow has worked well for me for over the past year… really well. Just look at my month-over-month growth from the past couple of months.

Just in the last 31 days, I saw an increase in organic traffic by 96,723 just through title tag split tests.

But here is the kicker: I’m only able to effectively use the software for my English content. Now just imagine if I did this in less competitive markets like Brazil where I am generating 418,953 unique visitors a month.

Or what if I did that with my German blog or Spanish blog? The possibilities are endless!

Sure in English, not many SEOs are doing title tag split testing but some still are. In other regions, many marketers haven’t even heard of this yet.

So, over the next few months, my team will have to manually do this to figure out what works in these markets.

If you haven’t done it yet in English, check out this post. Here you will see some of the basic findings when it comes to boosting CTRs were:

• Title tags that contain a question generate 14.1% more clicks on average.
• Title tags between 15 and 40 characters generate the most clicks.
• Leveraging emotions can increase clicks. Meta tags with a positive or negative emotion generated roughly 7% more clicks.

And if you want something really simple, I’ve found that adding the year in your title tag can drastically increase CTR.

For example, look at a lot of the top results that rank for the phrase “how to start a blog”.

3 of the top 5 results contain the year in the title tag.

Advanced SEO Strategy #5: FAQpage Schema Markup

I blogged about this in the past, but less than .17% of sites are leveraging it.

Before I get into it, just look at my search traffic from the term “digital marketing”.

Sure the chart is bouncing up and down a lot, but I’m getting way more traffic than I was before I implemented the FAQpage markup.

In essence, what it does is add common FAQ-based questions to your search listing. Similar to the image below.

I know some people say that if you add this to your site then there is no reason for people to visit your site. And in essence, Google wins because it keeps them on their search engine.

But the way I look at it is if your website provides amazing content and helps create an amazing experience, a portion of those people will remember your URL and will come back in the future.

Plus if you aren’t in the number 1 spot, you don’t have much to lose by implementing this. Even if you are in the number 1 spot like I am for my affiliate marketing page and you add FAQpage schema…

I’ve found that when I add the FAQpage schema my traffic hasn’t dropped.

Now all I have to do is add this for another 649 blog posts that we identified that are a good fit for this on my blog. 🙁

Advanced SEO Strategy #6: Content Clusters

I bet you have content on your site. And similar to me, when you wrote the content you used tools like Ubersuggest and wrote whatever had a lot of search volume.

And if you want to get a bit more organized and move faster, you probably even used a content calendar.

But just like me, I bet over the years you never focused on clustering your content together. And because you didn’t you probably have tons of pages on similar topics if not the same topic.

This is a big problem because it confuses Google.

For example, I have so many pages on “keyword tools” and “keyword research” that Google doesn’t necessarily know which page to rank. Because of this, my rankings for some of those terms are somewhat stable, but the rank page from my site constantly changes.

A good solution to this problem and improved overall rankings is to use content clusters. A great example of a site that didn’t use clustering but now does is Hubspot.

Their content went from looking like this:

To looking like this:

The overall goal is to have sections of your site and blog about specific topics. And from there you can link and connect other articles around the same topic together. Doing this lets the search engines know which one is the main topic through things like breadcrumbs and URL hierarchy.

A good example of this is the Beginners Guide to SEO by Moz.

Within that guide, they link 8 chapters that cover all aspects of SEO. Each of those chapters links back to the main introductory article.

Instead of making them 9 separate blog posts (including the introductory page), they linked them all together and made them flow with each other.

Just look at how they set up their URL structure.

Here is the URL of the introductory page:

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

And here is the URL of a chapter:

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/why-search-engine-marketing-is-necessary

Do you see what they did?

They are telling search engines that the chapter is part of the whole Beginner’s Guide to SEO and they did this through the use of folders.

And here is another chapter… https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

As you can see, they followed the same structure. This a simple way to use content clustering to improve your rankings. Case in point, they rank number 1 on Google for the term “SEO” and have for years.

Now I just have to do this with my whole site in multiple languages.

Advanced SEO Strategy #7: Conquer the World

I’m serious when I say that by the way… I really am going after all of the major countries.

The most vital SEO strategy I ever learned came from a Google employee. And it was simple… Google has tons of content to choose from when it comes to ranking sites in English but they lack a lot of high-quality content in other regions.

So, I decided to do something simple years ago… I translated my content into other languages. That’s how my traffic has gone from this:

To this:

Sure, I have leveraged a lot of other tactics over the years as well, like building Ubersuggest into a free SEO tool. But even that, Ubersuggest has grown so fast because it is translated into 9 different languages.

Just look at the language breakdown of Ubersuggest’s traffic stats.

When you combine all of the different variations of English, all of the other variations make up roughly 40% of the tools traffic.

Now with my blog, I haven’t gone as far as translating it into as many languages as the tool, but I plan on translating it eventually into 22 languages. I pick them based on population size and GDP.

This one will take me a few years to really scale up but it provides massive gains for me.

If you want to scale globally, follow this.

This is a must if you want to not only dominate SEO but business in general. Companies these days aren’t just based in the US or UK or China… they are all going global.

Conclusion

No matter if you have been doing SEO for just a few weeks or even years like me, there is always more to do.

Google is constantly changing and with the new technology that’s available to you, there is still a lot of room to do well.

As you can see from the above strategies, that’s the stuff I am focusing on over the next 12 months. They’re tactics that work and provide results.

Some of them are really advanced and require engineering help, but SEO is no longer just about hiring a marketer and having them help you get more traffic. To really do well, you have to get a bit more technical than most marketers are comfortable with.

So, what do you think of the strategies above? Have you tried any of them yet?

The post 7 Advanced SEO Strategies I’m Trying to Implement Before 2020 appeared first on Neil Patel.

* This article was originally published here

The Data You’re Using to Calculate CTR is Wrong and Here’s Why

Posted by Luca-Bares

Click Through Rate (CTR) is an important metric that’s useful for making a lot of calculations about your site’s SEO performance, from estimating revenue opportunity, prioritize keyword optimization, to the impact of SERP changes within the market. Most SEOs know the value of creating custom CTR curves for their sites to make those projections more accurate. The only problem with custom CTR curves from Google Search Console (GSC) data is that GSC is known to be a flawed tool that can give out inaccurate data. This convolutes the data we get from GSC and can make it difficult to accurately interpret the CTR curves we create from this tool. Fortunately, there are ways to help control for these inaccuracies so you get a much clearer picture of what your data says.

By carefully cleaning your data and thoughtfully implementing an analysis methodology, you can calculate CTR for your site much more accurately using 4 basic steps:

1. Extract your sites keyword data from GSC — the more data you can get, the better.
2. Remove biased keywords — Branded search terms can throw off your CTR curves so they should be removed.
3. Find the optimal impression level for your data set — Google samples data at low impression levels so it’s important to remove keywords that Google may be inaccurately reporting at these lower levels.
4. Choose your rank position methodology — No data set is perfect, so you may want to change your rank classification methodology depending on the size of your keyword set.

Let’s take a quick step back

Before getting into the nitty gritty of calculating CTR curves, it’s useful to briefly cover the simplest way to calculate CTR since we’ll still be using this principle. 

To calculate CTR, download the keywords your site ranks for with click, impression, and position data. Then take the sum of clicks divided by the sum of impressions at each rank level from GSC data you’ll come out with a custom CTR curve. For more detail on actually crunching the numbers for CTR curves, you can check out this article by SEER if you’re not familiar with the process.

Where this calculation gets tricky is when you start to try to control for the bias that inherently comes with CTR data. However, even though we know it gives bad data we don’t really have many other options, so our only option is to try to eliminate as much bias as possible in our data set and be aware of some of the problems that come from using that data.

Without controlling and manipulating the data that comes from GSC, you can get results that seem illogical. For instance, you may find your curves show position 2 and 3 CTR’s having wildly larger averages than position 1. If you don’t know that data that you’re using from Search Console is flawed you might accept that data as truth and a) try to come up with hypotheses as to why the CTR curves look that way based on incorrect data, and b) create inaccurate estimates and projections based on those CTR curves.

Step 1: Pull your data

The first part of any analysis is actually pulling the data. This data ultimately comes from GSC, but there are many platforms that you can pull this data from that are better than GSC's web extraction.

Google Search Console — The easiest platform to get the data from is from GSC itself. You can go into GSC and pull all your keyword data for the last three months. Google will automatically download a csv. file for you. The downside to this method is that GSC only exports 1,000 keywords at a time making your data size much too small for analysis. You can try to get around this by using the keyword filter for the head terms that you rank for and downloading multiple 1k files to get more data, but this process is an arduous one. Besides the other methods listed below are better and easier.

Google Data Studio — For any non-programmer looking for an easy way to get much more data from Search Console for free, this is definitely your best option. Google Data Studio connects directly to your GSC account data, but there are no limitations on the data size you can pull. For the same three month period trying to pull data from GSC where I would get 1k keywords (the max in GSC), Data Studio would give me back 200k keywords!

Google Search Console API — This takes some programming know-how, but one of the best ways to get the data you’re looking for is to connect directly to the source using their API. You’ll have much more control over the data you’re pulling and get a fairly large data set. The main setback here is you need to have the programming knowledge or resources to do so.

Keylime SEO Toolbox — If you don’t know how to program but still want access to Google’s impression and click data, then this is a great option to consider. Keylime stores historical Search Console data directly from the Search Console API so it’s as good (if not better) of an option than directly connecting to the API. It does cost $49/mo, but that’s pretty affordable considering the value of the data you’re getting.

The reason it’s important what platform you get your data from is that each one listed gives out different amounts of data. I’ve listed them here in the order of which tool gives the most data from least to most. Using GSC’s UI directly gives by far the least data, while Keylime can connect to GSC and Google Analytics to combine data to actually give you more information than the Search Console API would give you. This is good because whenever you can get more data, the more likely that the CTR averages you’re going to make for your site are going to be accurate.

Step 2: Remove keyword bias

Once you’ve pulled the data, you have to clean it. Because this data ultimately comes from Search Console we have to make sure we clean the data as best we can.

Remove branded search & knowledge graph keywords

When you create general CTR curves for non-branded search it’s important to remove all branded keywords from your data. These keywords should have high CTR’s which will throw off the averages of your non-branded searches which is why they should be removed. In addition, if you’re aware of any SERP features like knowledge graph you rank for consistently, you should try to remove those as well since we’re only calculating CTR for positions 1–10 and SERP feature keywords could throw off your averages.

Step 3: Find the optimal impression level in GSC for your data

The largest bias from Search Console data appears to come from data with low search impressions which is the data we need to try and remove. It’s not surprising that Google doesn’t accurately report low impression data since we know that Google doesn’t even include data with very low searches in GSC. For some reason Google decides to drastically over report CTR for these low impression terms. As an example, here’s an impression distribution graph I made with data from GSC for keywords that have only 1 impression and the CTR for every position.

If that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, I’m right there with you. This graph says a majority of the keywords with only one impression has 100 percent CTR. It’s extremely unlikely, no matter how good your site’s CTR is, that one impression keywords are going to get a majority of 100 percent CTR. This is especially true for keywords that rank below #1. This gives us pretty solid evidence low impression data is not to be trusted, and we should limit the number of keywords in our data with low impressions.

Step 3 a): Use normal curves to help calculate CTR

For more evidence of Google giving us biased data we can look at the distribution of CTR for all the keywords in our data set. Since we’re calculating CTR averages, the data should adhere to a Normal Bell Curve. In most cases CTR curves from GSC are highly skewed to the left with long tails which again indicates that Google reports very high CTR at low impression volumes.

If we change the minimum number of impressions for the keyword sets that we’re analyzing we end up getting closer and closer to the center of the graph. Here’s an example, below is the distribution of a site CTR in CTR increments of .001.

The graph above shows the impressions at a very low impression level, around 25 impressions. The distribution of data is mostly on the right side of this graph with a small, high concentration on the left implies that this site has a very high click-through rate. However, by increasing the impression filter to 5,000 impressions per keyword the distribution of keywords gets much much closer to the center.

This graph most likely would never be centered around 50% CTR because that’d be a very high average CTR to have, so the graph should be skewed to the left. The main issue is we don’t know how much because Google gives us sampled data. The best we can do is guess. But this raises the question, what’s the right impression level to filter my keywords out to get rid of faulty data?

One way to find the right impression level to create CTR curves is to use the above method to get a feel for when your CTR distribution is getting close to a normal distribution. A Normally Distributed set of CTR data has fewer outliers and is less likely to have a high number of misreported pieces of data from Google.

3 b): Finding the best impression level to calculate CTR for your site

You can also create impression tiers to see where there’s less variability in the data you're analyzing instead of Normal Curves. The less variability in your estimates, the closer you’re getting to an accurate CTR curve.

Tiered CTR tables

Creating tiered CTR needs to be done for every site because the sampling from GSC for every site is different depending on the keywords you rank for. I’ve seen CTR curves vary as much as 30 percent without the proper controls added to CTR estimates. This step is important because using all of the data points in your CTR calculation can wildly offset your results. And using too few data points gives you too small of a sample size to get an accurate idea of what your CTR actually is. The key is to find that happy medium between the two.

In the tiered table above, there’s huge variability from All Impressions to >250 impressions. After that point though, the change per tier is fairly small. Greater than 750 impressions are the right level for this site because the variability among curves is fairly small as we increase impression levels in the other tiers and >750 impressions still gives us plenty of keywords in each ranking level of our data set.

When creating tiered CTR curves, it’s important to also count how much data is used to build each data point throughout the tiers. For smaller sites, you may find that you don’t have enough data to reliably calculate CTR curves, but that won’t be apparent from just looking at your tiered curves. So knowing the size of your data at each stage is important when deciding what impression level is the most accurate for your site.

Step 4: Decide which position methodology to analyze your data

Once you’ve figured out the correct impression-level you want to filter your data by you can start actually calculating CTR curves using impression, click, and position data. The problem with position data is that it’s often inaccurate, so if you have great keyword tracking it’s far better to use the data from your own tracking numbers than Google’s. Most people can’t track that many keyword positions so it’s necessary to use Google’s position data. That’s certainly possible, but it’s important to be careful with how we use their data.

How to use GSC position

One question that may come up when calculating CTR curves using GSC average positions is whether to use rounded positions or exact positions (i.e. only positions from GSC that rank exactly 1. So, ranks 1.0 or 2.0 are exact positions instead of 1.3 or 2.1 for example).

Exact position vs. rounded position

The reasoning behind using exact position is we want data that’s most likely to have been ranking in position 1 for the time period we’re measuring. Using exact position will give us the best idea of what CTR is at position 1. Exact rank keywords are more likely to have been ranking in that position for the duration of the time period you pulled keywords from. The problem is that Average Rank is an average so there’s no way to know if a keyword has ranked solidly in one place for a full time period or the average just happens to show an exact rank.

Fortunately, if we compare exact position CTR vs rounded position CTR, they’re directionally similar in terms of actual CTR estimations with enough data. The problem is that exact position can be volatile when you don’t have enough data. By using rounded positions we get much more data, so it makes sense to use rounded position when not enough data is available for exact position.

The one caveat is for position 1 CTR estimates. For every other position average rankings can pull up on a keywords average ranking position and at the same time they can pull down the average. Meaning that if a keyword has an average ranking of 3. It could have ranked #1 and #5 at some point and the average was 3. However, for #1 ranks, the average can only be brought down which means that the CTR for a keyword is always going to be reported lower than reality if you use rounded position.

A rank position hybrid: Adjusted exact position

So if you have enough data, only use exact position for position 1. For smaller sites, you can use adjusted exact position. Since Google gives averages up to two decimal points, one way to get more “exact position” #1s is to include all keywords which rank below position 1.1. I find this gets a couple hundred extra keywords which makes my data more reliable.

And this also shouldn’t pull down our average much at all, since GSC is somewhat inaccurate with how it reports Average Ranking. At Wayfair, we use STAT as our keyword rank tracking tool and after comparing the difference between GSC average rankings with average rankings from STAT the rankings near #1 position are close, but not 100 percent accurate. Once you start going farther down in rankings the difference between STAT and GSC become larger, so watch out how far down in the rankings you go to include more keywords in your data set.

I’ve done this analysis for all the rankings tracked on Wayfair and I found the lower the position, the less closely rankings matched between the two tools. So Google isn’t giving great rankings data, but it’s close enough near the #1 position, that I’m comfortable using adjusted exact position to increase my data set without worrying about sacrificing data quality within reason.

Conclusion

GSC is an imperfect tool, but it gives SEOs the best information we have to understand an individual site's click performance in the SERPs. Since we know that GSC is going to throw us a few curveballs with the data it provides its important to control as many pieces of that data as possible. The main ways to do so is to choose your ideal data extraction source, get rid of low impression keywords, and use the right rank rounding methods. If you do all of these things you’re much more likely to get more accurate, consistent CTR curves on your own site.

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* This article was originally published here

How Does the Local Algorithm Work? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by JoyHawkins

When it comes to Google's algorithms, there's quite a difference between how they treat local and organic. Get the scoop on which factors drive the local algorithm and how it works from local SEO extraordinaire, Joy Hawkins, as she offers a taste of her full talk from MozCon 2019.

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

Video Transcription

Hello, Moz fans. I'm Joy Hawkins. I run a local SEO agency from Toronto, Canada, and a search forum known as the Local Search Forum, which basically is devoted to anything related to local SEO or local search. Today I'm going to be talking to you about Google's local algorithm and the three main factors that drive it. 

If you're wondering what I'm talking about when I say the local algorithm, this is the algorithm that fuels what we call the three-pack here. When you do a local search or a search that Google thinks has local intents, like plumbers let's say, you traditionally will get three results at the top with the map, and then everything below it I refer to as organic. This algorithm I'll be kind of breaking down is what fuels this three-pack, also known as Google My Business listings or Google Maps listings.

They're all talking about the exact same thing. If you search Google's Help Center on what they look at with ranking these entities, they tell you that there are three main things that fuel this algorithm. The three things that they talk about are proximity, prominence, and relevance. I'm going to basically be breaking down each one and explaining how the factors work.

1. Proximity

I'll kind of start here with proximity. Proximity is basically defined as your location when you are searching on your phone or your computer and you type something in. It's where Google thinks you are located. If you're not really sure, often you can scroll down to the bottom of your page, and at the bottom of your page it will often list a zip code that Google thinks you're in.

Zip code (desktop)

The other way to tell is if you're on a phone, sometimes you can also see a little blue dot on the map, which is exactly where Google thinks you're located. On a high level, we often think that Google thinks we're located in a city, but this is actually pretty false, which I know that there's been actually a lot of talk at MozCon about how Google pretty much always knows a little deeper than that as far as where users are located.

Generally speaking, if you're on a computer, they know what zip code you're in, and they'll list that at the bottom. There are a variety of tools that can help you check ranking based on zip codes, some of which would be Moz Check Your Presence Tool, BrightLocal, Whitespark, or Places Scout. All of these tools have the ability to track at the zip code level. 

Geo coordinates (mobile)

However, when you're on a phone, usually Google knows your location even more detailed, and they actually generally know the geo coordinates of your actual location, and they pinpoint this using that little blue dot.

It knows even more about the zip code. It knows where you're actually located. It's a bit creepy. But there are a couple of tools that will actually let you see results based on geo coordinates, which is really cool and very accurate. Those tools include the Local Falcon, and there is a Chrome extension which is 100% free, that you can put in your browser, called GS Location Changer.

I use this all the time in an incognito browser if I want to just see what search results look like from a very, very specific location. Now these two levels, depending on what industry you are working in, it's really important to know which level you need to be looking at. If you work with lawyers, for example, zip code level is usually good enough.

There aren't enough lawyers to make a huge difference at certain like little points inside a given zip code. However, if you work with dentists or restaurants, let's say, you really need to be looking at geo coordinate levels. We have seen lots of cases where we will scan a specific keyword using these two tools, and depending on where in that zip code we are, we see completely different three-packs.

It's very, very key to know that this factor here for proximity really influences the results that you see. This can be challenging, because when you're trying to explain this to clients or business owners, they search from their home, and they're like, "Why am I not there?" It's because their proximity or their location is different than where their office is located.

I realize this is a challenging problem to solve for a lot of agencies on how to represent this, but that's kind of the tools that you need to look at and use. 

2. Prominence

Moving to the next factor, so prominence, this is basically how important Google thinks you are. Like Is this business a big deal, or are they just some random, crappy business or a new business that we don't know much about?

• This looks at things like links, for example. 
• Store visits, if you are a brick-and-mortar business and you get no foot traffic, Google likely won't think you're very prominent. 
• Reviews, the number of reviews often factors in here. We often see in cases where businesses have a lot of reviews and a lot of old reviews, they generally have a lot of prominence.
• Citations can also factor in here due to the number of citations. That can also factor into prominence. 

3. Relevance

Moving into the relevance factor, relevance is basically, does Google think you are related to the query that is typed in? You can be as prominent as anyone else, but if you do not have content on your page that is structured well, that covers the topic the user is searching about, your relevance will be very low, and you will run into issues.

It's very important to know that these three things all kind of work together, and it's really important to make sure you are looking at all three. On the relevance end, it looks at things like:

• content, 
• onsite SEO, so your title tags, your meta tags, all that nice SEO stuff
• Citations also factor in here, because it looks at things like your address. Like are you actually in this city? Are you relevant to the city that the user is trying to get locations from? 
• Categories are huge here, your Google My Business categories. Google currently has just under 4,000 different Google My Business categories, and they add an insane amount every year and they also remove ones. It's very important to keep on top of that and make sure that you have the correct categories on your listing or you won't rank well.
• The business name is unfortunately a huge factor as well in here. Merely having keywords in your business name can often give you relevance to rank. It shouldn't, but it does. 
• Then review content. I know Mike Blumenthal did a really cool experiment on this a couple years ago, where he actually had a bunch of people write a bunch of fake reviews on Yelp mentioning certain terms to see if it would influence ranking on Google in the local results, and it did. Google is definitely looking at the content inside the reviews to see what words people are using so they can see how that impacts relevance. 

How to rank without proximity, prominence, or relevance

Obviously you want all three of these things. It is possible to rank if you don't have all three, and I'll give a couple examples. If you're looking to expand your radius, you service a lot of people.

You don't just service people on your block. You're like, "I serve the whole city of Chicago," for example. You are not likely going to rank in all of Chicago for very common terms, things like dentist or personal injury attorney. However, if you have a lot of prominence and you have a really relevant page or content related to really niche terms, we often see that it is possible to really expand your radius for long tail keywords, which is great.

Prominence is probably the number one thing that will expand your radius inside competitive terms. We'll often see Google bringing in a business that is slightly outside of the same area as other businesses, just because they have an astronomical number of reviews, or maybe their domain authority is ridiculously high and they have all these linking domains.

Those two factors are definitely what influences the amount of area you cover with your local exposure. 

Spam and fake listings

On the flip side, spam is something I talk a lot about. Fake listings are a big problem in the local search space. Fake listings, these lead gen providers create these listings, and they rank with zero prominence.

They have no prominence. They have no citations. They have no authority. They often don't even have websites, and they still rank because of these two factors. You create 100 listings in a city, you are going to be close to someone searching. Then if you stuff a bunch of keywords in your business name, you will have some relevance, and by somehow eliminating the prominence factor, they are able to get these listings to rank, which is very frustrating.

Obviously, Google is kind of trying to evolve this algorithm over time. We are hoping that maybe the prominence factor will increase over time to kind of eliminate that problem, but ultimately we'll have to see what Google does. We also did a study recently to test to see which of these two factors kind of carries more weight.

An experiment: Linking to your site within GMB

One thing I've kind of highlighted here is when you link to a website inside your Google My Business listing, there's often a debate. Should I link to my homepage, or should I link to my location page if I've got three or four or five offices? We did an experiment to see what happens when we switch a client's Google My Business listing from their location page to their homepage, and we've pretty much almost always seen a positive impact by switching to the homepage, even if that homepage is not relevant at all.

In one example, we had a client that was in Houston, and they opened up a location in Dallas. Their homepage was optimized for Houston, but their location page was optimized for Dallas. I had a conversation with a couple of other SEOs, and they were like, "Oh, well, obviously link to the Dallas page on the Dallas listing. That makes perfect sense."

But we were wondering what would happen if we linked to the homepage, which is optimized for Houston. We saw a lift in rankings and a lift in the number of search queries that this business showed for when we switched to the homepage, even though the homepage didn't really mention Dallas at all. Something to think about. Make sure you're always testing these different factors and chasing the right ones when you're coming up with your local SEO strategy. Finally, something I'll mention at the top here.

Local algorithm vs organic algorithm

As far as the local algorithm versus the organic algorithm, some of you might be thinking, okay, these things really look at the same factors. They really kind of, sort of work the same way. Honestly, if that is your thinking, I would really strongly recommend you change it. I'll quote this. This is from a Moz whitepaper that they did recently, where they found that only 8% of local pack listings had their website also appearing in the organic search results below.

I feel like the overlap between these two is definitely shrinking, which is kind of why I'm a bit obsessed with figuring out how the local algorithm works to make sure that we can have clients successful in both spaces. Hopefully you learned something. If you have any questions, please hit me up in the comments. Thanks for listening.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Ubersuggest 6.0: Track and Improve Your Rankings Without Learning SEO

I’ve been an SEO for roughly 17 years now.

And one thing that has remained constant, no matter how much you know about SEO, there is just too much to do.

So much so, that most SEOs don’t even optimize their own websites anymore. And if they do, you’ll find that their site doesn’t rank for many competitive terms.

Why?

Because it is a lot of work!

That’s why I’m excited to announce Ubersuggest 6.0.

It now tracks and improves your rankings, even if you don’t have an SEO bone in your body.

So, what’s new?

Dashboard and login

First off, you can now keep track of all of your websites. You’ll have to register to use this feature, but don’t worry, it’s free.

Once you register, you’ll be dropped into a dashboard.

Now for me, I’m already tracking a few websites. Which is why my dashboard is already populated.

The dashboard will keep track of your SEO errors, link growth (or decline), your monthly search traffic, your overall search rankings, and any SEO errors that you need to fix.

Best of all, it crawls your website for you each and every week so you don’t have to worry about keeping up with Google’s latest algorithm changes.

And with the search rankings feature, you can automatically track how your rankings are changing on a daily basis.

Rank tracking

Within each site you add to the dashboard, you’ll be able to automatically track your rankings for any specific keyword.

Not only are you able to track your rankings on desktop devices, but Ubersuggest also shows how you rank on mobile devices.

If you want to track specific keywords, all you have to do is click Add Keywords and it will pull a list of suggestion from your Google Search Console. Of course, you can also track any other keyword even if it doesn’t show up in your Search Console.

What’s also cool is that you have the ability to track your rankings in any country, city, or region. That means if you do local SEO or international SEO, you can see your rankings anywhere.

There’s also a date picker so once you’ve been using Ubersuggest for a while, you’ll be able to see a nice chart of how your rankings are improving over time.

Conclusion

What’s great about these changes is you can now directly see how Ubersuggest is helping you grow your search traffic.

It will automatically keep track of all of your changes and notify you when it finds any new SEO issues to fix.

And over the next few months, you’ll see a few more features added that will make your life even easier.

One example is that I’ll introduce email alerts so that you don’t have to log into Ubersuggest anymore and it emails you when there is an issue that needs your attention.

I’ll also be adding in competitive analysis features. You’ll be able to track your competitors and be notified when they make an SEO or marketing change that you should look at.

And my long-term goal is to make it so you don’t even have to code or make any changes manually. Ubersuggest will eventually be able to go into your website and make these fixes for you. However, this feature won’t happen until next year sometime.

So, what do you think of the new Ubersuggest? Give it a try… make sure you create your free account.

PS: If you missed it, I released some cool features like local keyword research and a billion-plus keyword database last week. Click here to get the update on those new Ubersuggest features.

The post Ubersuggest 6.0: Track and Improve Your Rankings Without Learning SEO appeared first on Neil Patel.

* This article was originally published here

Amazon vs. Google: Decoding the World's Largest E-commerce Search Engine

Posted by Lorna_Franklin

A lot of people forget that Amazon is a search engine, let alone the largest search engine for e-commerce. With 54 percent of product searches now taking place on Amazon, it’s time to take it seriously as the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. In fact, if we exclude YouTube as part of Google, Amazon is technically the second largest search engine in the world.

As real estate on Google becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, moving beyond a website-centric e-commerce strategy is a no brainer. With 54% of shoppers choosing to shop on e-commerce marketplaces, it’s no surprise that online marketplaces are the number one most important digital marketing channel in the US, according to a 2018 study by the Digital Marketing Institute. While marketplaces like Etsy and Walmart are growing fast, Amazon maintains its dominance of e-commerce market share owning 47 percent of online sales, and 5 percent of all retail sales in the US.

Considering that there are currently over 500 million products listed on Amazon.com, and more than two-thirds of clicks happen on the first page of Amazon’s search results—selling products on Amazon is no longer as easy as "set it and forget it." 

Enter the power of SEO.

When we think of SEO, many of us are aware of the basics of how Google’s algorithm works, but not many of us are up to speed with SEO on Amazon. Before we delve into Amazon’s algorithm, it’s important to note how Google and Amazon’s starkly different business models are key to what drives their algorithms and ultimately how we approach SEO on the two platforms.

The academic vs. The stockbroker

Google was born in 1998 through a Ph.D. project by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin. It was the first search engine of its kind designed to crawl and index the web more efficiently than any existing systems at the time.

Google was built on a foundation of scientific research and academia, with a mission to;

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google

Now, answering 5.6 billion queries every day, Google’s mission is becoming increasingly difficult — which is why their algorithm is designed as the most complex search engine in the world, continuously refined through hundreds of updates every year.

In contrast to Brin and Page, Jeff Bezos began his career on Wall Street in a series of jobs before starting Amazon in 1994 after reading that the web was growing at 2,300 percent. Determined to take advantage of this, he made a list of the top products most likely to sell online and settled with books because of their low cost and high demand. Amazon was built on a revenue model, with a mission to:

“Be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” — Amazon

Amazon doesn’t have searcher intent issues

When it comes to SEO, the contrasting business models of these two companies lead the search engines to ask very different questions in order to deliver the right results to the user.

On one hand, we have Google who asks the question:

“What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”

Amazon, on the other hand, wants to know:

“What product is the searcher most likely to buy?”

On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions, they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy. So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell.

With this in mind, working to increase organic rankings on Amazon becomes a lot less daunting.

Amazon’s A9 algorithm: The secret ingredient

Amazon may dominate e-commerce search, but many people haven’t heard of the A9 algorithm. Which might seem unusual, but the reason Amazon isn’t keen on pushing their algorithm through the lens of a large scale search engine is simply that Amazon isn’t in the business of search.

Amazon’s business model is a well-oiled revenue-driving machine — designed first and foremost to sell as many products as possible through its online platform. While Amazon’s advertising platform is growing rapidly, and AWS continues as their fastest-growing revenue source — Amazon still makes a large portion of revenue through goods sold through the marketplace.

With this in mind, the secret ingredient behind Amazon’s A9 algorithm is, in fact: Sales Velocity

What is sales velocity, you ask? It’s essentially the speed and volume at which your products sell on Amazon’s marketplace.

There are lots of factors which Amazon SEO’s refer to as "direct" and "indirect" ranking factors, but ultimately every single one of them ties back to sales velocity in some way.

At Wolfgang Digital, we approach SEO on Google based on three core pillars — Technology, Relevance, and Authority.

Evidently, Google’s ranking pillars are all based on optimizing a website in order to drive click through on the SERP.

On the other hand, Amazon’s core ranking pillars are tied back to driving revenue through sales velocity — Conversion Rate, Keyword Relevance and of course, Customer Satisfaction.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the key factors behind each of these pillars, and what you can optimize to increase your chances of ranking on Amazon’s coveted first page.

Conversion rate

Conversion rates on Amazon have a direct impact on where your product will rank because this tells Amazon’s algorithm which products are most likely to sell like hotcakes once they hit the first page.

Of all variables to monitor as an Amazon marketer, working to increase conversion rates is your golden ticket to higher organic rankings.

Optimize pricing

Amazon’s algorithm is designed to predict which products are most likely to convert. This is why the price has such a huge impact on where your products rank in search results. If you add a new product to Amazon at a cheaper price than the average competitor, your product is inclined to soar to the top-ranking results, at least until it gathers enough sales history to determine the actual sales performance.

Even if you’re confident that you have a supplier advantage, it’s worth checking your top-selling products and optimizing pricing where possible. If you have a lot of products, repricing software is a great way to automate pricing adjustments based on the competition while still maintaining your margins.

However, Amazon knows that price isn’t the only factor that drives sales, which is why Amazon’s first page isn’t simply an ordered list of items priced low to high. See the below Amazon UK search results for “lavender essential oil:”

Excluding the sponsored ads, we can still see that not all of the cheap products are ranked high and the more expensive ones lower down the page. So, if you’ve always maintained the idea that selling on Amazon is a race to the bottom on price, read on my friends.

Create listings that sell

As we discussed earlier, Amazon is no longer a “set it and forget” platform, which is why you should treat each of your product listings as you would a product page on your website. Creating listings that convert takes time, which is why not many sellers do it well, so it’s an essential tactic to steal conversions from the competition.

Title

Make your titles user-friendly, include the most important keywords at the front, and provide just enough information to entice clicks. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing titles on Amazon, in fact, it may even hinder your rankings by reducing clicks and therefore conversions.

Bullet points

These are the first thing your customer sees, so make sure to highlight the best features of your product using a succinct sentence in language designed to convert.

Improve the power of your bullet points by including information that your top competitors don’t provide. A great way to do this is to analyze the “answered questions” for some of your top competitors.

Do you see any trending questions that you could answer in your bullet points to help shorten the buyer journey and drive conversions to your product?

Product descriptions

Given that over 50 percent of Amazon shoppers said they always read the full description when they are considering purchasing a product, a well-written product description can have a huge impact on conversions.

Your description is likely to be the last thing a customer will read before they choose to buy your product over a competitor, so give these your time and care, reiterating points made in your bullet points and highlighting any other key features or benefits likely to push conversions over the line.

Taking advantage of A+ content for some of your best selling products is a great way to craft a visually engaging description, like this example from Safavieh.

Of course, A+ content requires additional design costs which may not be feasible for everyone. If you opt for text-only descriptions, make sure your content is easy to read while still highlighting the best features of your product.

For an in-depth breakdown on creating a beautifully crafted Amazon listing, I highly recommend this post from Startup Bros.

AB test images

Images are incredibly powerful when it comes to increasing conversions, so if you haven’t tried split testing different image versions on Amazon, you could be pleasantly surprised. One of the most popular tools for Amazon AB testing is Splitly — it’s really simple to use, and affordable with plans starting at $47 per month.

Depending on your product type, it may be worth investing the time into taking your own pictures rather than using the generic supplier provided images. Images that tend to have the biggest impact on conversions are the feature images (the one you see in search results) and close up images, so try testing a few different versions to see which has the biggest impact.

Amazon sponsored ads

The best thing about Amazon SEO is that your performance on other marketing channels can help support your organic performance.

Unlike on Google, where advertising has no impact on organic rankings, if your product performs well on Amazon ads, it may help boost organic rankings. This is because if a product is selling through ads, Amazon’s algorithm may see this as a product that users should also see organically.

A well-executed ad campaign is particularly important for new products, in order to boost their sales velocity in the beginning and build up the sales history needed to rank better organically.

External traffic

External traffic involves driving traffic from social media, email, or other sources to your Amazon products.

While external sources of traffic are a great way to gain more brand exposure and increase customer reach, a well-executed external traffic strategy also impacts your organic rankings because of its role in increasing sales and driving up conversion rates.

Before you start driving traffic straight to your Amazon listing, you may want to consider using a landing page tool like Landing Cube in order to protect your conversion rate as much as possible.

With a landing page tool, you drive traffic to a landing page where customers get a special offer code to use on your product listing page—this way, you only drive traffic which is guaranteed to convert.

Keyword relevance

A9 still relies heavily on keyword matching to determine the relevance of a product to searcher’s query, which is why this is a core pillar of Amazon SEO.

While your title, bullet points, and descriptions are essential for converting customers, if you don’t include the relevant keywords, your chances of driving traffic to convert are slim to none.

Every single keyword incorporated in your Amazon listing will impact your rankings, so it’s important to deploy a strategic approach.

Steps for targeting the right keywords on Amazon:

1. Brainstorm as many search terms you think someone would use to find your product.
   
2. Analyze 3–5 competitors with the most reviews to identify their target keywords.
   
3. Validate the top keywords for your product using an Amazon keyword tool such as Magnet, Ahrefs, or Keywordtool.io.
4. Download the keyword lists into Excel, and filter out any duplicate or irrelevant keywords. 
5. Prioritize search terms with the highest search volume, bearing in mind that broad terms will be harder to rank for. Depending on the competition, it may make more sense to focus on lower volume terms with lower competition—but this can always be tested later on.

Once you have refined the keywords you want to rank for, here are some things to remember:

• Include your most important keywords at the start of the title, after your brand name.
  
• Use long-tail terms and synonyms throughout your bullets points and descriptions.
  
• Use your backend search terms wisely — these are a great place for including some common misspellings, different measurement versions e.g. metric or imperial, color shades and descriptive terms.
  
• Most importantly — don’t repeat keywords. If you’ve included a search term once in your listing i.e. the title, you don’t need to include it in your backend search terms. Repeating a keyword, or keyword stuffing will not improve your rankings.

Customer satisfaction

Account health

Part of Amazon’s mission statement is “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.” This relentless focus on the customer is what drives Amazon’s astounding customer retention, with 85 percent of Prime shoppers visiting the marketplace at least once a week and 56% of non-Prime members reporting the same. A focus on the customer is at the core of Amazon’s success, which is why stringent customer satisfaction metrics are a key component to selling on Amazon.

Your account health metrics are the bread and butter of your success as an Amazon seller, which is why they’re part of Amazon’s core ranking algorithm. Customer experience is so important to Amazon that, if you fail to meet the minimum performance requirements, you risk getting suspended as a seller—and they take no prisoners.

On the other hand, if you are meeting your minimum requirements but other sellers are performing better than you by exceeding theirs, they could be at a ranking advantage. 

Customer reviews

Customer reviews are one of the most important Amazon ranking factors — not only do they tell Amazon how customers feel about your product, but they are one of the most impactful conversion factors in e-commerce. Almost 95 percent of online shoppers read reviews before buying a product, and over 60 percent of Amazon customers say they wouldn’t purchase a product with less than 4.5 stars.

On Amazon, reviews help to drive both conversion rate and keyword relevance, particularly for long-tail terms. In short, they’re very important.

Increasing reviews for your key products on Amazon was historically a lot easier, through acquiring incentivized reviews. However, in 2018, Amazon banned sellers from incentivizing reviews which makes it even more difficult to actively build reviews, especially for new products.

Tips for building positive reviews on Amazon:

• Maintain consistent communication throughout the purchase process using Amazon email marketing software. Following up to thank someone for their order and notify when the order if fulfilled, creates a seamless buying experience which leaves customers more likely to give a positive review.
  
  
• Adding branded package inserts to thank customers for their purchase makes the buying experience personal, differentiating you as a brand rather than a nameless Amazon seller. Including a friendly reminder to leave a review in a nice delivery note will have better response rates than the generic email they receive from Amazon.
  
  
• Providing upfront returns information without a customer having to ask for it shows customers you are confident in the quality of your product. If a customer isn’t happy with your product, adding fuel to the fire with a clunky or difficult returns process is more likely to result in negative reviews through sheer frustration.
  
  
• Follow up with helpful content related to your products such as instructions, decor inspiration, or recipe ideas, including a polite reminder to provide a review in exchange.
  
  
• And of course, deliver an amazing customer experience from start to finish.

Key takeaways for improving Amazon SEO

As a marketer well versed in the world of Google, venturing onto Amazon can seem like a culture shock — but mastering the basic principles of Amazon SEO could be the difference between getting lost in a sea of competitors and driving a successful Amazon business.

• Focus on driving sales velocity through increasing conversion rate, improving keyword relevance, nailing customer satisfaction and actively building reviews.
  
  
• Craft product listings for customers first, search engines second.
  
  
• Don’t neglect product descriptions in the belief that no one reads them—over 50% of Amazon shoppers report reading the full description before buying a product.
  
  
• Keywords carry a lot of weight. If you don’t include a keyword in your listing, your chances of ranking for it are slim.
  
  
• Images are powerful. Take your own photos instead of using generic supplier images and be sure to test, test, and test.
  
  
• Actively build positive reviews by delivering an amazing customer experience.
  
  
• Invest in PPC and driving external traffic to support organic performance, especially for new products.

What other SEO tips or tactics do you apply on Amazon? Tell me in the comments below!

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* This article was originally published here