SEO News

Posted by MiriamEllis

Albuquerque’s locals and tourists agree, you can’t find a more authentic breakfast in town than at Perea’s New Mexican Restaurant. Yelp reviewers exclaim, “Best green chile ever!!”, “Soft, chewy, thick-style homemade flour tortillas soak up all the extra green chili,” “My go-to for great huevos rancheros,” and “Carne was awesome! Tender, flavorful, HOT!” The descriptions alone are enough to make one salivate, but the Yelp reviews for this gem of an eatery also tell another story — one so heavily spiced with the potential of duplicate listings that it may take the appetite of any hard-working local SEO away:

“Thru all of the location changes, this is a true family restaurant with home cooking.”

“This restaurant for whatever reason, changes locations every couple years or so.”

“They seem to wander from different locations”

“As other reviews have already mentioned, Perea’s changes locations periodically (which is puzzling/inconvenient — the only reason they don’t get 5 stars)”

“They switch locations every few years and the customers follow this place wherever it goes.”

Reading those, the local SEO sets aside sweet dreams of sopapillas because he very much doubts the accuracy of that last review comment. Are all customers really following this restaurant from place to place, or are visitors (with money to spend) being misdirected to false locations via outdated, inconsistent, and duplicate listings?

The local SEO can’t stand the suspense, so he fires up Moz Check Listing

He types in the most recent name/zip code combo he can find, and up comes:

A total of 2 different names, 3 different phone numbers, and 4 different addresses! In 5 seconds, the local SEO has realized that business listings around the web are likely misdirecting diners left and right, undoubtedly depriving the restaurant of revenue as locals fail to keep up with the inconvenient moves or travelers simply never find the right place at all. Sadly, two of those phone numbers return an out-of-service message, further lessening the chances that patrons will get to enjoy this establishment’s celebrated food. Where is all this bad data coming from?

The local SEO clicks on just the first entry to start gaining clues, and from there, he clicks on the duplicates tab for a detailed, clickable list of duplicates that Check Listing surfaces for that particular location:

From this simple Duplicates interface, you can immediately see that 1 Google My Business listing, 1 Foursquare listing, 3 Facebook Places, 1 Neustar Localeze listing, and 1 YP listing bear further investigation. Clicking the icons takes you right to the sources. You’ve got your clues now, and only need to solve your case. Interested?

The paid version of Moz Local supports your additions of multiple variants of the names, addresses, and phone numbers of clients to help surface further duplicates. Finally, your Moz Local dashboard also enables you to request closure of duplicates on our Direct Network partners. What a relief!

Chances are, most of your clients don’t move locations every couple of years (at least, we hope not!), but should an incoming client alert you to a move they’ve made in the past decade or so, it’s likely that a footprint of their old location still exists on the web. Even if they haven’t moved, they may have changed phone numbers or rebranded, and instead of editing their existing listings to reflect these core data changes, they may have ended up with duplicate listings that are then auto-replicating themselves throughout the ecosystem.

Google and local SEOs share a common emotion about duplicate listings: both feel uneasy about inconsistent data they can’t trust, knowing the potential to misdirect and frustrate human users. Feeling unsettled about duplicates for an incoming client today?

Get your appetite back for powerful local SEO with our free Check Listing tool!

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Posted by Alan_Coleman

Hey Moz Blog readers.

I’m delighted to share with you a big body of work the Wolfgang team has just completed. It’s our E-commerce Benchmarks 2016 study. We dove into Google Analytics insights from over 80 million website sessions and over one-quarter of a billion dollars in online revenue for travel and retail websites, calculating average e-commerce website key performance indicators (KPIs) for you to use as benchmarks.

I hope these findings help you benchmark your KPIs and gain deeper insights into what you can do to boost conversion.

There are a number of unique features to this study:

• We’ve divvied the results up into overall, travel, and retail. Within the retail cohort, we’ve broken out results for our “online only” retailers and “multichannel” retailers. The KPIs are distinctly different for the two sets of retailers.
• We’ve conducted a correlation study in which we correlate all the factors of the study with conversion rate and with average order value.
• We’ve expanded the scope of the study since last time and based on your comments, we’ve included site speed analysis, as well as more info around paths to conversion and assisted conversions.

In this post I’m going to give you an overview of 12 key takeaways. You can read the full report here. Or grab some quick insights from our infographic here.

1/ The average e-commerce conversion rate is 1.48%.

• Retail websites averaged 1.36%.
• Online-only websites converted almost twice as well as their multi-channel counterparts with 2%, compared to 1.12%.
• The travel websites in the study averaged a 2.04% conversion rate.

It was notable that the travel websites enjoyed higher conversion rates but lower engagement rates than the average retailer. This spiked my curiosity, as that just seemed too darn easy for the travel retailers. After deep-diving the data, I found that the committed retail customer would visit the one retail website multiple times on their journey to purchase. On the other hand, the travel shopper does a lot of research, but on other websites, review sites, via online travel agents, travel bloggers, etc. before arriving at the e-commerce website to merely check price and availability before booking. This finding illuminates the fact that the retailer has more influence on its customers’ journey to purchase than the travel website, who’s more dependent on an ecosystem of travel websites to warm up the prospect.

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2/ The death of SEO?

The data states it emphatically: “Hell no!”

Google organic is the largest source of both traffic (43%) and revenue (42%). SEO traffic from Google organic has actually increased by 5% since our last study.

There was also a strong correlation between websites with a high percentage of traffic from Google organic and higher-than-average Average Order Values (AOVs).

From this finding, we can infer that broad organic coverage will be rewarded by transactions from research-heavy, high-value customers.

3/ AdWords is the king of conversion

The strongest correlation we saw with higher conversion rates was higher-than-average traffic and revenue from AdWords.

In my experience, Google AdWords is the best-converting traffic source. So my take is that, when a website increases its spend on Adwords, it adds more high-conversion traffic to its profile and increases its average conversion rate.

AdWords accounts for 26% of traffic and 25% of revenue on average.

4/ Google makes the World Wide Web go ’round

When you combine Google organic and PPC, you see that Google accounts for 69% of traffic and 67% of revenue. More than two-thirds! Witness the absolute dominance of “The Big G” as our window to the web.

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5/ Facebook traffic quadruples!

In our last study, Facebook accounted for a meagre 1.3% of traffic. This time around, it’s leapt up to 5%, with Facebook CPC emerging from nowhere to 2%. When better cross-device measurement becomes available in Google Analytics, I expect Facebook to be seen as an assisted conversion power player.

6/ Don’t discount email

Email delivers 6% of traffic, which is actually as much as all the social channels combined — and treble the revenue. In fact, with a 6% share of revenue, Google is the only medium that delivers more revenue than email. Digital marketers often lust after shiny new toys (hello, Snapchat!), but the advice here is to look after the old reliables first. And this 40-year-old technology we all use every day is about as old and reliable as it gets.

7/ Site speed matters most

This section was added to the study after comments from you, the Moz Blog readers, last time around, so thanks for your input. The server response time correlation with conversion rate (-0.31) was one of the strongest we saw. It was dramatically stronger than engagement metrics, such as time on site (0.11) or pages viewed (0.10). We also found that for every two-tenths of a second you shave off your server response time, you’ll increase conversion rate by 8%. Don’t forget that site speed is a Google ranking factor, so by optimizing for it you’ll benefit from a “multiplier effect” of more traffic and a higher conversion rate on all your traffic. Google’s page speed tool is a great place to start your speed optimization journey.

Check out our conversion rate correlation chart below to get more insights on which metrics can move conversion rate.

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8/ Mobile is our “decision device”

2015 was finally “the year of mobile.” Mobile became the largest traffic source of the devices, but seriously underperforms for revenue. Its 42% share of traffic becomes a miserly 21% share of revenue, and it suffers the lowest average conversion rate and AOV. Despite these lowly conversion metrics, our correlation study found that websites with a larger-than-average portion of mobile traffic benefitted from larger-than-average conversion rates. This indicates that the “PA in your pocket” is the device upon which decisions are arrived at before being completed on desktop. We can deduce that while desktop remains our “transaction device,” mobile has become our “decision device,” where research is carried out and purchase decisions arrived at.

9/ Digital marketers are over-indexing on display advertising

Despite accounting for 38% of digital marketers budgets (IAB Europe), display failed to register as a top ten traffic source. This means it contributed less than 1% of e-commerce website traffic.

10/ Bounce rate don’t mean diddly squat

Bounce rate actually has zero correlation with conversion rate! Digital marketers feel a deep sense of rejection when they see a high bounce rate. However, as an overall website metric, it’s a dud. While admittedly there are bad bounces, there are many good bounces accounted for in the number.

11/ Digital marketing “economies of scale”

Interestingly, websites that enjoyed more-than-average traffic levels enjoyed higher-than-average conversion rates.

This illustrates a digital marketing version of “economies of scale”; more traffic equals better conversion rates.

The corollary of this is lower CPAs (Cost Per Acquisitions).

12/ People are buying more frequently and spending more per order online.

Average conversion rates have increased 10% since the last study. Retail average order value has shot up a whopping 25%! This demonstrates people are migrating more and more of their shopping behavior off the high street and onto the Internet. There’s never been a better time to be an e-commerce digital marketer.

You can deep-dive the above digestibles by reading the full study here.

How do these benchmarks compare to your personal experience? Anything you’re surprised by, or that confirms your long-held suspicions?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Optimize hard,

Alan

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