SEO News

NerdWallet, a financial information and product comparison site founded in 2009, achieves the greatest share of organic search for typical personal finance keywords such as ‘bank accounts’ and ‘credit cards’. 

Not only does it outperform them, it absolutely destroys them. NerdWallet has an incredible 22.3% share of all organic search traffic for personal finance keywords.

And NerdWallet isn’t the only comparison site to perform better than the major finance firms. Creditcards.com – the second best performing site – has a 15.03% share. 

By contrast, Bank of America – the best performing bank in terms of organic search – has just a 6.12% share. 

In this post I’m going to delve into the report from Linkdex and find out how and why these comparison sites are so far ahead of the competition. 

Is it a simple case of evolution? Newer, faster species outrunning the dinosaurs?

The research

The research looked at 5,000 keywords encompassing more than 7.5m monthly searches in the US throughout 2015. 

Keywords included all popular personal finance words and phrases such as ‘bank accounts’, variations on those such as ‘best student bank accounts’, and long-tail search terms such as ‘best 0% credit cards for travel’.

Check out the report for the full methodology.

What is NerdWallet doing right?

It seems like NerdWallet puts a lot of time and effort into creating content that appeals to its target audience, i.e. normal people searching for straightforward advice about financial products.

Let’s take a deeper look at the different types of content the brand puts out… 

Blog content

The blog content is excellent, not only in terms of the content itself but also in the way it is formatted. 

Each post answers a common question about personal finance, such as how to choose a balance transfer credit card.

There are also a number of list posts, such as ‘Top 10 credit card deals of 2016’, which in many cases are essentially just rehashes of results from the NerdWallet comparison tool, but presented in a different way that also happens to be search-engine friendly. 

The formatting, while not perfect, provides a fairly decent user experience.

Lots of subheadings, short paragraphs, plenty of white space, good use of bullet points, key points highlighted, and the copy itself is simple and easy to read.  

Video content

Again, NerdWallet proves it knows its market. Students or young people looking to get their first bank account or credit card, for example, are likely to be interested in video content about starting their first job.

The speakers in the video below don’t look like bank managers. They look like ordinary people who the target audience could relate to. 

It’s free of technical jargon and non-patronizing – both of crucial importance.

The next video follows a similar format: people talking to the target audience from the same position as them, i.e. recent graduates talking to recent (or soon-to-be-recent) graduates about an issue they are likely to be worrying about. 

Social content

Granted we’re talking about organic search traffic here, so you might question my inclusion of social content. 

But a brand’s reputation on social media can spill over into the SERPs. If you see a list of results on Google and one of them is a brand you’ve previously engaged with on Twitter, you could argue you’re more likely to click that link. 

NerdWallet takes a non-technical, human-feel approach to its social media activity, something vitally important for the type of product we’re dealing with here. 

It tweets about football, for example:

Our investor @JoeMontana on the coin toss! #SB50 pic.twitter.com/XwtgBUFXEK

— NerdWallet (@NerdWallet) February 7, 2016

And it publishes behind-the-scenes images (with not a stuffy corporate type in sight), adding to the human feel of the brand:

Nothing says “employee appreciation” like your management team serving you breakfast! #NerdLove2016pic.twitter.com/WGii5Yxx0X

— NerdWallet (@NerdWallet) February 9, 2016

All of this projects an image that is in direct contrast with the old-fashioned, suit-wearing finance industry and appeals to ordinary people. 

Conclusion: content and UX pays off

It’s impossible to say for definite why the big banks are failing to keep up with their younger rivals, but it is likely a combination of superior content and a much more customer-centric approach to user experience (UX) on the part of the high-performing price comparison sites. 

Linkdex’s global head of digital says:

There’s a huge amount of money being fought over by some of the world’s biggest brands in a very narrow space. Yet the landscape is changing, and players like NerdWallet are demonstrating how simply having a strong content strategy and good SEO can disrupt an entire market.

The banks and traditional institutions in the space will need to carefully consider – and potentially radically transform – their long-term digital strategies if they want to maintain market share. 

For more about financial services content and SEO, check out these posts…

• Eight surprisingly interesting examples of finance content
• Top SEO tips for your international financial services websites
• How Standard Life transformed into a customer-centric finance brand

Posted by jmodjeska

Today I’m proud to announce some new features in Moz Pro that help you get a lot more value out of your keyword rankings reports. You can now view your full rankings history for any campaign, select specific date ranges for your charts and tables, better segment your rankings data to get a clearer understanding of your performance and visibility, and effectively manage large campaigns with numerous keywords. Did I also mention it’s lightning-fast? To get started, visit the keyword rankings page in any of your campaigns or test drive Moz Analytics with a free trial today.

Want a quick recap? Tori goes over the highlights in this quick 1:20 minute video!

Historical rankings: getting from 12 to infinity

The major value of today’s release is that it enables customers to visualize their campaign’s entire rankings history. This is thanks to an ongoing effort to completely overhaul our data assembly architecture. I’m excited about today’s release because it lets loose the first phase of this overhaul initiative, and marks the end of the 12-cycle limitation in our rankings reports.

As of today, timeframe selection has no bounds. You can report on rankings data with start and end dates anywhere in the life of your campaign, up to and including the entire campaign’s history, even on campaigns with long histories and lots of keywords. Your full rankings histories have been liberated.

12 weeks of keyword rankings history in Moz Analytics — a limitation until today

Success! A campaign’s entire rankings history in Moz Analytics

And more new features

In addition to unlimited rankings history, we’re giving users the freedom to compare rankings, search visibility, engine performance, and competitive metrics within customizable timeframes. We want our users’ reporting needs to drive the application, and not vice-versa. Here are some other features available as of today:

• Customizable timeframe selection. In addition to weekly and monthly views, you can now select and display start and end dates, and export reports for specific timeframes. Rankings deltas (changes over time) are now calculated over the duration of the selected timeframe.

Calendar controls to select your data display range

Quick-select menu for common timeframes

• Flexible, universal filtering. Fast response times and full keyword history means no more limits on how you view and filter your data. Use the new universal filter to narrow displayed keywords by locality, labels, and keyword text.

• On-the-fly aggregate calculations. Rankings summaries, deltas, search visibility, and universal results all update on-demand whenever you select a new timeframe.

• Flexible, fast sorting. Data points — like difference between rankings by engine — that previously took so much overhead to calculate that they couldn’t be sorted in-place, are now easily sortable on-demand.

Sort by anything, anywhere

And performance improvements, too

These new features are built on an entirely new architecture. We’ve been running the new and old systems in full parallel mode for about two months now to ensure everything was ready to switch over. This has also given us the opportunity to measure some key performance improvements:

• 30X faster pipeline. Our data assembly and storage processes run up to 30X faster, eliminating delays between data collection and in-app availability. The low latency between data collection and availability is what facilitates the delivery of full campaign histories.
• 20X faster server response times. For most in-app requests, our response times are dramatically faster than the previous system. We’re seeing rankings datasets delivered in 50 ms for average-sized campaigns (compared to 800+ ms in the previous system). We’ve also moved many calculations into the browser, reducing network calls and wait times for filter and sort requests.

Why we did all of this

Rankings data is important to our customers

Keyword rankings data is a core component of the Moz Pro suite of tools. We gather localized and national data on millions of keywords each day across hundreds of search engine locales so that our customers can analyze their SEO keyword performance. Moz Analytics users spend the bulk of their time in the Rankings section, where we present metrics that include mobile and desktop keyword rankings, historical SERP analysis, local and national keywords, search visibility scores, and competitive metrics.

The data was already there

We store deep historical rankings data going back to the moment of a campaign’s creation. While this information has always been accessible via historical rankings CSV downloads, we’ve been aware for some time that this is frustrating and this data would be much more useful in the UI. What held us back was our architecture. If you’re interested in the technical challenges and how we overcame them to deliver these new features, I offer a detailed explanation on our Developer Blog, covering the project background and architecture that makes all of this possible.

Where we’ll go next

We plan to round out our rankings overhaul project with backend and UI updates to the Analyze a Keyword page. We’ll also speed up Page Optimization, at which point the entire corpus of ranking-related data will be on our new platform.

Ultimately, all of our numerous datasets, including crawl and links, will be assembled and stored on the new architecture, unlocking new features and delivering data faster as we go. We’ll continue to be agile and iterative, progressively releasing updates as soon as they’re ready.

So go check it out!

To experience the new features in the rankings section, visit your ranking report in any Moz Analytics campaign. If you’re not already a Moz Pro subscriber, why not take a free trial and see how our software can help you do better marketing? As always, we would love to hear your feedback below.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Suzzicks

Most people in the digital community have heard of Facebook’s 2G Tuesdays. They were established to remind users that much of the world still accesses the Internet on slow 2G connections, rather than 3G, 4G, LTE or WiFi.

For an online marketer in the developed world, it’s easy to forget about slow connections, but Facebook is particularly sensitive to them. A very high portion of their traffic is mobile, and a large portion of their audience uses their mobile device as their primary access to the Internet, rather than a desktop or laptop.

Facebook and Google agree on this topic. Most digital marketers know that Google cares about latency and page speed, but many don’t realize that Google also cares about connection speed.

Last year they began testing their revived mobile transcoding service, which they call Google Web Lite, to make websites faster in countries like India and Indonesia, where connection speed is a significant problem for a large portion of the population. They also recently added Data Saver Mode in Chrome, which has a similar impact on browsing.

AMP pages begin ranking in mobile results this month

This February, Google will begin ranking AMP pages in mobile search results. These will provide mobile users access to news articles that universally render in about one second. If you haven’t seen it yet, use this link on your phone to submit a news search, and see how fast AMP pages really are. The results are quite impressive.

In addition to making web pages faster, Google wants to make search results faster. They strive to provide results that send searchers to sites optimized for the device they’re searching from. They may alter mobile search results based on the connection speed of the searcher’s device.

To help speed up websites and search results as the same time, Google is also striving to make Chrome faster and lighter. They’re even trying to ensure that it doesn’t drain device batteries, which is something that Android users will especially appreciate! Updated versions of Chrome actually have a new compression method called Brötli, which promises to compress website files 26% more than previous versions of Chrome.

We’ll review the impact of Google’s tests on changing search results based on connection speed. We’ll outline how and why results from these tests could become more salient and impact search results at various different speeds. Finally, we’ll explain why Google has a strong incentive to push this type of initiative forward, and how it will impact tracking and attribution for digital marketers now and in the future.

The diagram below provides a sneak peak of the various connection speeds at which Google products are best accessed and how these relationships will likely impact cross-device search results in the future.

Basic vs. standard mobile search results

The image below shows the same search on the same phone. The phone on the left is set to search on EDGE speeds, and the one on the right is set to 4G/LTE. Google calls the EDGE search results “Basic,” and the 4G/LTE results “Standard.” They even include a note at the bottom of the page explaining “You’re seeing a basic version of this page because your connection is slow” with an option to “switch to standard version.” In some iterations of the message, this sentence was also included: “Google optimized some pages to use 80% less data, and rest are marked slow to load.”

Notice that the EDGE connection has results that are significantly less styled and interactive than the 4G/LTE results.

Serving different results for slower connection speeds is something that Google has tested before, but it’s a concept that seems to have been mostly dormant until the middle of last year, when these Basic results started popping up. Google quietly announced it on Google+, rather than with a blog post. These results are not currently re-creatable (at least for me), but the concept and eventual implementation of this kind of variability could have a significant impact on the SEO world, further deprecating our ability to monitor keyword rankings effectively.

The presentation of the mobile search results isn’t all that’s. changing. The websites included and the order in which they’re ranked changes, as well. Google knows that searchers with slow connections will have a bad experience if they try to download apps, so App Packs are not included in any Basic search results. That means a website ranking in position #7 in Standard search results (after the six apps in the App Pack) can switch to ranking number one in a Basic search. That’s great news if you’re the top website being pushed down by the App Pack!

The full list of search results are included below – items that only appear in one result are bolded.

You may have the urge to write this off, thinking all of your potential mobile customers have great phones and fast connections, but you’d be missing the bigger picture here.

First, slow connection speeds can happen to everyone: when they’re in elevators, basements, subways, buildings with thick walls, outside of city centers, or simply in places where the mobile connection is overloaded or bad. Regardless of where they are, users will still try to search, often ignorant of their connection speed.

Second, this testing probably indicates that connection speed is an entirely new variable which could even be described as a ranking factor.

Responsive design does not solve everything

Google’s desire to reach a growing number of devices might sound fantastic if you’re someone who’s recently updated a site to a responsive or adaptive design, but these new development techniques may have been a mixed blessing. Responsive design and adaptive design can be great, but they’re not a panacea, and have actually caused significant problems for Google’s larger goals.

Responsive sites face speed and development challenges.

Responsive design sites are generally slow, which means there is a strong chance that they won’t rank well in Basic search results. Responsive sites can be built to function much more quickly, but it can be an uphill battle for developers. They face an ever-growing set of expectations, frameworks are constantly changing, and they’re already struggling to cram extra functionality and design into clean, light, mobile-first designs.

They can have negative repercussions.

Despite Google’s insistence that responsive design is easier for them to crawl, many webmasters that transitioned saw losses in overall conversions and time-on-site. Their page speed and UX were both negatively impacted by the redesigns. Developers are again having to up their skills and focus on pre-loading, pre-rendering, and pre-fetching content in order to reduce latency — sometimes just to get it back to what it was before their sites went responsive. Others are now forced to create duplicate AMP pages, which only adds to the burden and frustration.

Wearables/interactive media pose new problems.

Beyond the UX and load time concerns, responsive design sites also don’t allow webmasters to effectively target these new growth channels that Google cares about — wearables and interactive media. Unfortunately, responsive design sites are nearly unusable on smartwatches, and probably always will be.

Similarly, Google is getting much more into media, linking search with large-screen TVs, but even when well-built, responsive design sites look wonky on popular wide-screen TVs. It seems that the development of mobile technology may have already out-paced Google’s recommended “ideal” solution.

Regardless, rankings on all of these new devices will likely be strongly influenced by the connection speed of the device.

Is AMP the future of mobile search for slow connections?

The good news is that AMP pages are great candidates for ranking in a Basic search result, because they work well over slow connections. They’ll also be useful on things like smart watches and TVs, as Google will be able to present the content in whichever format it deems appropriate for the device requesting it — thus allowing them to provide a good experience on a growing number of devices.

App streaming & connection speed

A couple months ago, Google announced the small group of apps in a beta test for App Streaming. In this test, apps are hosted and run from a virtual device in Google’s cloud. This allows users to access content in apps without having to download the app itself. Since the app is run in the cloud, over the web, it seems that this technology could eventually remove the OS barrier for apps — an Android app will be able to operate from the cloud on an iOS device, and an iOS app will be able to run on an Android device the same way. Great for both users and developers!

Since Google is quietly working on detecting and perfecting their connection-speed-based changes to the algorithm, it’s easy to see how this new ranking factor will be relied upon even more heavily when App Streaming becomes a reality. App Streaming will only work over WiFi, so Google will be able to leverage what it’s learned from Basic mobile results to provide yet another divergent set of results to devices that are on a WiFi connection.

The potential for App Streaming will make apps much more like websites, and deep links much more like…regular web links. In some ways, it may bring Google back to its “Happy Place,” where everything is device and OS-agnostic.

How do app plugins & deep links fit into the mix?

The App Streaming concept actually has a lot in common with the basic premise of the Chrome OS, which was native on ChromeBooks (but has now been unofficially retired and functionally replaced with the Android OS). The Chrome OS provided a simple software framework that relied heavily on the Chrome browser and cloud-based software and plugins. This allowed the device to leverage the software it already had, without adding significantly more to the local storage.

This echoes the plugin phenomenon that we’re seeing emerge in the mobile app world. Mobile operating systems and apps use deep links to other local apps plugins. Options like emoji keyboards and image aggregators like GIPHY can be downloaded and automatically pulled into to the Facebook Messenger app.

Deep-linked plugins will go a long way toward freeing storage space and improving UX on users’ phones. That’s great, but App Streaming is also resource-intensive. One of the main problems with the Chrome OS was that it relied so heavily on WiFi connectivity — that’s relevant here, too.

What does music & video casting have to do with search?

Most of the apps that people engage with on a regular basis, for hours at a time, are media apps used over WiFi. Google wants to be able to index and rank that content as deep links, so that it can open and run in the appropriate app or plugin.

In fact, the indexing of deep-linked media content has already begun. The ChromeCast app is using new OS crawler capabilities in the Android Marshmallow OS to scan a user’s device for deep-linked media. They then create a local cache of deep links to watched and un-watched media that a user might want to “cast” to another device, then organize it and make it searchable.

For instance, if you want to watch a documentary on dogs, you could search your Netflix and Hulu apps, then maybe Amazon Instant Video, and maybe even the NBC, TLC, BBC, or PBS apps for a documentary on dogs.

Or, you could just do one search in the ChromeCast app and find all the documentaries on dogs that you can access. Assuming the deep links on those apps are set up correctly, you will be able to compare the selection across all apps that you have, choose one, and cast it. Again, these type of results are less relevant if you are on a 2G or 3G connection and thus not able to cast the media over WiFi.

This is an important move for Google. Recently, they’ve been putting a lot of time and energy into their media offerings. They successfully launched ChromeCast2 and ChromeCastMusic at about the same time as they dramatically improved their GoogleMusic subscription service (a competitor to Spotify and Pandora) and launched YouTubeRed (their rival for Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video). They may eventually even begin to include the “cast” logo directly in SERPS, as they have in the default interface of Google+ and YouTube.

Google’s financial interest in adapting results by connectivity

Google’s interest in varying search results by connection speed is critical to their larger goals. A large portion of mobile searches are for entertainment, and the need for entertainment is unending and easy to monetize. Subscription models provide long-term stable revenue with minimal upkeep or effort from Google.

Additionally, the more time searchers spend consuming media, either by surfacing it in Google or the ChromeCast app, or through Now on Tap, the more Google can tailor its marketing messages to them.

Finally, the passive collection and aggregation of people’s consumption data also allows Google to quickly and easily evaluate which media is popular or growing in popularity, so they can tailor Google Play’s licensing strategy to meet users’ demands, improving the long-term value to their subscribers.

As another line of business, Google also offers ChromeCast Music and Google Music, which are subscription services designed to compete with Amazon Music and iTunes. You might think that all this streaming — streaming apps, streaming music, streaming video and casting it from one device to another — would slow down your home or office connection speed as a whole, and you would be right. However, Google has a long-term solution for that too: Google Fiber. The more reliant people become on streaming content from the cloud, the more important it will be for them to get on Google’s super-fast Internet grid. Then you can stream all you want, and Google can collect even more data and monetize as they see fit.

Image credit: The NextWeb

What’s the impact of connection variability in SERPS on SEO strategy & reporting?

So what might this mean for your mobile SEO strategy? Variability by connection speed will make mobile keyword rank reporting and attribution nearly impossible. Currently, most keyword reporting tools either work by aggregating ranking results that are reported from ISPs, or by submitting test queries and aggregating the results.

Unfortunately, while that’s usually sufficient for desktop reporting (though still error-prone and very difficult for highly local searches), it’s nearly impossible for mobile. All of the SEO keyword reporting tools out there are struggling to report on mobile search results, and none take connection speed into account. Most don’t even take OS into account, either, so App Packs and the website rankings around them are not accurately reported.

Similarly, most tools are not able to report on anything about deep links, so it’s hard to know if click-through traffic is even getting to the website, or if it might be getting to a deep screen in an app instead. In short, ranking tools have a long way to go before they will be accurate in mobile, and this additional factor makes the reporting even harder.

In mobile, there are additional factors that can change the mobile rankings and click-through rates dramatically:

• Localization
• Featured Rich Snippets (Answer Boxes)
• Results that are interactive directly in the SERP (playable YouTube videos, news, Twitter and image carousels)
• AJAX expansion opportunities

All of these things are nightmares for the developers who write ranking software that scrapes search results. Even worse, Google is constantly testing new presentation schemes, so even if the tools could briefly get it right, they risk a constant game of catch-up.

One of the reasons Google is constantly testing new presentation schemes? They’re trying to make their search results work on an ever-growing list of new devices while minimizing the need for additional page loads or clicks. This is what drives all the testing.

If you think about a traditional set of search results, they’re an ordered list that goes from top to bottom. Google has gotten so fast that the ten-link restriction actually hurts the user experience when the mobile connection is good.

In response, Google has started to include carousels that scroll left to right. Only one or two search results can show on a smart watch at one time, so this feature allows searchers to delve deeper into a specific type of result without the additional click or page load.

However, carousels don’t appear in Basic search results. Also, the carousels only count as one result in the vertical list, but can add as many as 5 or 10 results to the page. Again, SEO’s and SEO software really haven’t settled on a way to represent this effectively in their tracking, and little has been reported about the impact on CTR for either the items in the carousel or the items below it.

Conclusion

Speed matters.

Not just latency and page speed, but also connection speed. While we can’t directly impact the connection speed of our mobile users, we should at least anticipate that search results might vary based on the use-case of their search and strategize accordingly.

In the meantime, SEOs and digital marketers should be wary of tools that report mobile keyword rankings without specifying things like OS, app pack rankings, location and, eventually, connection speed.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!