SEO News

To find out more I spoke to Tom Anthony, head of research and development at Distilled. 

Read on to discover what he had to say, and for more on this topic read our posts investigating the importance of local SEO and highlighting compelling mobile search stats.

What are the best ways to optimise for mobile/local search? 


The consensus seems to be that Google will be pushing forward more with some very mobile-specific ranking factors, but these all seem to be around ensuring that it delivers the searcher to a good result, which is a combination of the correct content given the user’s intent, and the best experience considering the device they are on.

If you are doing SEO right, and you are providing a good mobile experience for your users, then you don’t need to worry about doing any ‘mobile SEO’.

It is a little bit reminiscent of SEO pre-Panda in some regards; the people who were just doing their best with content got rewarded as Google caught up with identifying that correctly.

Google is getting a lot better at identifying good mobile experiences, so you should focus on doing that well, and Google will come to you, so to speak.

For brands with chains of locations, how can you get all of these physical locations ranking for mobile search? 


Please please stay away from the cookie cutter ‘local content’. If I am looking to rent a lawn mower in Oxford then I almost certainly have no need or interest to read about the history of Oxford, the landmarks and how beautiful the city is etc.

To a degree this is Google’s fault – it pushed hard on the unique content front but was still ill-equipped to understand what good ‘local content’ consisted of or how to identify it.

Find a way to leverage your people on the ground – empower the managers at each location to be able to craft content.

That should definitely contain useful information about that location beyond the usual NAP and opening times info; they should be able to add imagery, and specific information that is actually helpful to people looking to visit the store. This is hard to do well!

We have experimented with helping clients gamify this process, or by revealing stats to each location such that they can understand better how they might have an impact.

With Google’s recent moves around optimisation and mobile search, will mobile SEO now require a focus on user experience? 
 

I’d reiterate my point from earlier – if you are doing SEO right, and you are delivering a good mobile experience to your users then you are already doing it right.

So yes – that does involve paying careful attention to the user experience, because Google wants to send users (both mobile and desktop) to a page that will provide the best possible experience.

One area to pay attention to is that providing a good mobile experience does not mean simply having a website that displays well on a mobile device; you should also pay attention to the fact that mobile users might be looking for something different from your website than a desktop searcher.

You should try to think about the different intents that might exist and ensure you are serving those.

Why do you think that SEO will require a greater focus on user experience?  

There is a familiar and established pattern with Google over the last few years; it has increasingly been able to tune its algorithm to better keep up with the ‘rhetoric’ (for want of a better word!).

Before the Panda update there was quite a divide between what Google said you should do to succeed and what the reality was. Panda was not perfect but it went a long way towards closing that gap. The same with Penguin and several of the other smaller updates. 

Google has always wanted to get users to what it calls the ‘long click’ where a user does not bounce back to the search results to look for an alternative response.

In a world of increasingly complex and dynamic websites, landing on a page with a good user experience is going to be pivotal to reducing bounce rate (and this is likely of more import for mobile users). Google knows this, and so it isn’t hard to see where things will be going.

Google has spoken about this on several occasions. In mid 2013 it said it would be penalising sites in mobile search results that were misconfigured for smartphone users.

Then late last year Google spoke of its intention to start rewarding sites that deliver a good mobile experience, and finally it has started adding the ‘mobile friendly’ icons to mobile search results to indicate to users where they might find a better mobile experience.

Google already looks at factors such as site speed and mobile usability – what other UX factors will/could Google look at in future? 

I don’t think it is a coincidence that a lot of this mobile focus is coming not that long after Google announced it is now better able to render Javascript dependent pages; any sort of automated assessment of usability requires that step.

So as an aside, I think people start needing to pay attention to whether they previous blocked Googlebot from crawling Javascript and CSS files, and whether they are using any such files hosted on CDN or third party sites which might blocked — Google needs to be able to crawl those files to properly render your pages. You can check this in the Googlebot section of webmaster tools.

I think Google will likely be rendering pages on different screen sizes (virtually), and trying to assess whether there are hidden or inaccessible elements.

It will do more in-depth analysis of page speed based not only on downloading your HTML source but all the source files, and combining that with the processing time until the page is fully loaded.

Google will be trying to tap into any and all user-metrics it can, which will include taking old school metrics like bouncing back to the SERPs up a notch (maybe by segmenting those bounces by desktop / tablet / mobile to understand the user experience people are getting on different devices).

How will/does Google measure these UX factors? 

For things like site speed, time until page loaded, or bounce rate by device the answer is relatively straightforward.

For the more complex and subtle factors, I’d be surprised if it didn’t also try the Panda-like approach of surveying large numbers of users for their assessment of the user experience of large numbers of pages (broken down into different factors) and then trying to apply Machine Learning to extrapolate the relative importance of those factors to new pages.

Posted by David-Mihm

As we approach Moz Local’s first birthday—just over six weeks away—I’m excited to share with you our second major feature release since launch!

For those of you who are already managing your local search listings through Moz Local, this feature is available as of today for all accounts. For those of you who aren’t yet customers, we hope this release provides a few more reasons to sign up (if you’re curious to see what it looks like, you can check your local listing for free).

Read on for more detailed information about what we’re releasing and why we’re so excited about these new features.

New Dashboard Metrics

Listing Reach

Obviously local search is an incredibly complex discipline, and one of the hardest things for non-experts to understand (most of your clients and bosses, I’m guessing?) is the dramatic impact that the primary aggregators can have on the health and visibility of your listings. We hope that this metric helps explain the value of the data aggregators via Moz Local.

Listing Reach is our indirect representation of how far the data aggregators have spread your listings across the local ecosystem, based on the number of results returned for exact-match searches of your NAP. For more information about this metric, head on over to our Help Hub.

Percentage accuracy on each site in the Moz Local network

While these metrics have always been available at the individual location level (and will continue to be), you can now view them right from your dashboard, and <spoiler alert> across multiple locations at a time.

New Reporting Features

Metrics across multiple listings

Percentage accuracy is not the only metric that’s available across multiple listings; average score and aggregate listing reach are also enabled by default for whatever locations are in view on your dashboard.

Labeling of listings

If you’re managing multiple clients, or work at a large brand with multiple locations, though, you probably want to pick and choose the ones whose metrics you want to roll-up. You can now add labels to each listing that you manage, for easy slicing and dicing.

Our labels work similarly to Gmail, which we hope will make them intuitive to use. Once you add one or more labels, they’ll start to appear as presets within your sidebar. Naming conventions are totally flexible, so you can segment your locations however you’d like.

You’re just one click away from a roll-up report for all locations with a given label.

Enhanced search operators

To make the job of labeling locations easier for you, we’ve also added some additional search operators to make your lives easier. The full list of supported operators is below:

• label
• store
• name
• phone
• street
• unit
• state
• zip
• url

You can use these operators to pull up instantly any location you’re managing (and of course, view metrics for that specific listing).

Metrics over time

Two metrics are also now visible over time: average score and aggregate listing reach. One of the primary requests we’ve heard from agency owners and practitioners over the last several months is the need to demonstrate the value of your efforts to your clients, and we hope that graphs like the one below will help you do just that.

In September 2014, you may notice a stairstep in the shaded area at the bottom of the report, and a corresponding dip in the line graph above.

The shaded area represents total locations under management in a given month. Our goal in showing your metrics over time in the context of the number of managed locations is to explain anomalies in the graph like the dip above. In my specific case, I added a mortgage broker friend’s location in September who was just getting started with his Local SEO campaign—meaning his Listing Score was literally 0 prior to starting with Moz Local.

Those of you who phase in clients over time will likely see similar anomalies in your line graphs, so we hope that this representation helps prevent unnecessary panicking :).

Upcoming Enhancements

We’re definitely not stopping here.

Later this spring, we’ll be rolling out the ability to export metrics from your dashboard for use in your own Excel reports, a PDF report generation feature, and a more streamlined Foursquare validation process, among other improvements. We’re growing our engineering team rapidly and will release these as soon as we can!

Check It Out for Yourself

As I said in the intro, this feature is available for all existing customers today, so just head on over to your
dashboard. And if you’re not yet a customer, we hope you soon will be.

Along with yours truly, fellow Mozzers from our product, engineering and account teams will be available for demos throughout the day on Saturday at
#LocalUp, so don’t be a stranger. We’re looking forward to speaking with as many of you in Seattle!

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 andrewmeyer

This post was co-written by: @AndrewMeyer8 & @AudreyBloemer at Seer Interactive.

Back in 2013, Seer began testing the use of content distribution networks to help promote assets and valuable content across the web. Our goal was to test a variety of distribution networks to determine the best ways to pay for promotion on client content and assets. Overall, we wanted to test the impact paid content promotion had on assets that we had previously launched and to measure the impact of this traffic on the high-level goals of each client.

For those of you unfamiliar with this form of content marketing, content distribution networks are quickly becoming powerful tools for engaging new audiences and expanding the reach of creative content. This method for online advertising provides content within the context of a user’s experience, making the native advertising feel less intrusive and more like part of a discovery process, all while increasing the odds that users will click-through.

The native ads appear at the bottom of well-known content sources like Time, CNN, USA Today, ESPN & the Huffington Post, and are served to users based on a variety of algorithms. This reduces the feeling of actually seeing an ad, as users are captured when they finish digesting other content and feel they have discovered the promoted content naturally.

What started out as a $10k intern-led test for Seer has expanded into a full-blown service offering for current clients that we’re working hard to improve every day. Wil Reynolds also presented on this during SearchLove London. With a growing amount of data across multiple networks, we’d like to:

• Compare overall stats for a few content distribution platforms
• Share the results from some of our most recent campaigns
• Offer tips to help you maximize the ROI on your campaigns
• Provide feedback on some of the content platforms we’ve used, researched or tested
• Share a few tests we’ll be running in 2015!

Content distribution networks to test

Below are the metrics we have across multiple clients and niches for networks with significant data to report on. This includes a mix of mobile, tablet and desktop advertising, but we’ve also broken it out individually. Since conversions vary across all our clients, we’ll report on specific conversion metrics in a later section. Across almost 1 billion impressions, here are the metrics we’ve seen.

Overall metrics by network

* Seer used nRelate throughout 2014 to promote content that was niche-specific to tech, computers/gaming, and gadgets. In December 2014, nRelate announced they would be shutting down after five years in the industry.

While we did use separate platforms for different verticals, clients and niches, visitors coming from Outbrain tended to be more engaged. Typically these visitors from Outbrain were also more familiar with those brands and were not new visitors. We typically used Taboola to promote newer clients with less marketing reach and therefore the higher new visitor percentage and bounce rates are to be expected.

Comparing mobile vs. desktop

We’ve seen higher engagement rates for lower costs on mobile devices across both networks. When a client has a responsive, mobile-friendly site and a positive user experience on mobile we always recommend testing mobile campaigns.

We usually start by separating the audiences into two campaigns, one targeting mobile/tablet users and one targeting desktop users so we can monitor performance, CPCs and spend on an individual level. This allows us to get the best bang for our buck.

Tracking conversions & ROI on goal-specific campaigns

Building a holistic campaign for conversions

Goal Set: Promote one landing page for a large client in the B2B product industry targeted at small business owners using a holistic campaign across native advertising, Google Display Network (GDN), Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and outreach. The goal was to help generate 10 total conversions, with a goal CPA of $1,200 or less.

Results & ROI: Below is a breakdown of our results from this campaign, outlined by source, total percent of our spend, the sessions this spend drove and the percent of conversions for our campaign. Overall, we were able to reduce our CPA to $64.22 from the paid promotion efforts.

We spent the most with Taboola and it also drove the highest number of sessions. While Twitter spend was lower than three of the other channels, we were able to achieve a 10.53% conversion rate for the users we were able to drive to the site.

Despite Taboola having the lowest conversion rate, it was able to generate the largest percentage of conversions because of its ability to drive large quantities of traffic.

Improvements for Next Time: Next time, we’d like to better optimize our titles from paid distribution to target the demographics of our audience. We were looking for brand awareness and exposure, but could have altered our titles sooner to better target the niche market we were targeting which was small business owners.

Brand awareness & link building

Goal Set: Use Taboola to promote six content blogs from a recognized food brand to generate 5,000 visits for brand awareness & get 10 sites to link back to our content.

Results & ROI:

We ended up spending about $2,000 including setup time & spend, and drove over 11,000 clicks at a CTR of 0.055% to these posts. Over 6 posts, we saw an additional 1,000+ social shares and 82 new referring domains, or about $24.39/link. We also saw 31% higher pages/visit and a 28% lower bounce rate than our average campaign metrics.

Since the blog posts were all new and no outreach had begun, we were able to attribute the linking domains to paid distribution. Combined with the social shares, blog post comments and other goal completions throughout the site, we were very happy with the ROI for this campaign.

Important Note: Directly correlating links to content distribution networks can be difficult, so we recommend testing this with brand new blog posts, prior to any outreach, and using tracked URLs to differentiate traffic/conversions from the distribution networks. This also works best when you’re promoting relevant and sharable assets in the right industries.

Improvements for Next Time: If we had redone this campaign, we would have made the embed links and social sharing buttons on the landing page more accessible and easier to use. The content we were promoting was timely, so the pickup was much better than if had we promoted during a down time.

Goal completions and lead completions

Goal Set: Promote asset from a prominent B2B company to increase lead generation.

Results & ROI:

Through Taboola, we were able to promote the content on high quality sites like Entrepreneur and CNN Money. In less than one month, we drove 8,348 new visits at an average CPC of $0.32 and saw a 2.31% conversion rate, leading to 205 overall goal completions.

Improvements for Next Time: In the future, we’d recommend tracking additional assisted conversion goals to more accurately report ROI to the client. The page we promoted only had one clear CTA, so we also recommended including more prominent secondary CTAs such as social shares and PDF downloads to further increase the ROI and get visitors to complete additional actions on the page.

10 steps to better maximize your ROI

1. Use Custom Tracking URLs & Parameters – Setting up parameters for your landing page URLs can help you track ROI all the way down to specific images or titles. Platforms typically offer the ability to include parameters on campaigns, but we’d recommend testing down to the image & title level as this can also help you determine which titles brought in more qualified traffic. By placing custom tracking on your embed links, you can also better track the link building results of your content promotion.
2. Set Goals Prior to Launching a Campaign – Setting goals is a great way to both measure the success of your promotion and make improvements for the following campaigns. This will also help you to manage expectations for yourself and your clients.
3. Include Micro Conversions on Landing Pages – Micro conversions help to track additional ROI from your content distribution. Maybe email signups or following your brand on social are valuable micro conversions for your business. These can also lead to additional reporting values once the campaign closes.
4. Use Event Tracking on Landing Pages – Event tracking is by far the most useful method we have for tracking micro conversions. These can be assigned a variety of fields for a more granular analysis. We expand further on this process here.
5. A/B TEST! – We can’t mention this enough, but regardless of the goals behind your campaign, always set up some sort of A/B test. At a minimum test a few different titles and images on each piece of content you decided to promote. You can also test landing pages performance and optimize your pages for conversions! Setting a daily cap on your campaigns allows you to decipher the data and make changes before spending your entire budget in a day!
6. Set a Daily Cap & Don’t Be Afraid to Cut It Off – Setting a daily cap on your campaigns allows you to decipher the data and make changes before spending your entire budget in less than a day. Also, don’t be afraid to cut off a campaign if the results are underwhelming. Usually two or three days of data is enough to tell if it’s worth your time and investment. Cut it off and regroup with better titles, images or new content all together.
7. Add a Static Content Widget Below Your Own Content – When we tested paid promotion vs. PPC, we found that on average, content distribution networks had an 8% higher bounce rate. In order to combat high bounce rates, perhaps include a custom widget at the bottom of your posts to keep users on your site. How did people end up finding your articles? Through the “read more” or “you may like” sections below content pieces! You can either hardcode additional blog posts at the bottom or rotate your most popular articles to help keep users on your site and engaged with your brand’s content.
8. Use Your Data to Inform Future Decisions – Once you A/B test titles, images and landing pages, measure the success of each campaign and use that data to inform future content and marketing decisions. If certain titles or images resonated well with your audience, update the posts you promoted and use this knowledge to help make future decisions. You can even use the data to inform your PPC decisions as well!
9. Write Titles to Better Target Demographics – With most content distribution networks, you can’t target by demographic or interest. One way to better utilize your spend is to speak directly to your audience with your campaign titles and images. In one campaign, we were looking to target 35-45 year old mothers for a contest and used CTAs in our titles that were focused directly at moms.
10. Implement Social Sharing Numbers and Prep for the Residual – We’ve found that making your social sharing buttons more prominent and including social sharing counters led to an exponential increase in shares. Also, prepare for residual traffic after you pause a promotion. Looking at the cumulative traffic to five landing pages of a recent campaign, we saw an additional 15,540 visits to these pages over six weeks, from social and new backlink referrals, after the promotion ended. If you’ve found the right audiences that share via social, the reach for the campaign continues to grow even after the promotion ends.

Features for each distribution network

Seer POV: Overall, we’ve found that this platform is highly scalable as you can send a higher quantity of traffic more quickly than others at a lower cost. In terms of quality of traffic, bounce rates compared to Outbrain are slightly higher and on average users spend less time on site than Outbrain visitors. However, depending on niche, Taboola can outperform Outbrain.

Pros: Generally less-expensive CPCs than other platforms, easier to upload content, images and titles, well-respected news and content publishers.

Cons: Can’t edit multiple campaigns or multiple titles/images at once, somewhat outdated admin/backend platform, and inability to pull native ad examples appearing in the wild.

Seer POV: Along with Taboola, this is one of Seer’s favorite distribution networks. One intriguing development for Outbrain is they recently became the sole provider of content distribution for Time.com, which makes their platform more appealing to advertisers like ourselves in 2015.

In terms of quality of traffic, Outbrain generally sends fewer visitors to the site for the same cost as Taboola, but users are more engaged and tend to have a higher conversion rate.

Pros: Better post-click results in our tested campaigns and easy uploading system.

Cons: The self-service admin is also a little difficult to use. Can’t pull large data sets from the admin, so when comparing to a Twitter or Pinterest Analytics dashboard, there is definitely room for improvement!

Seer POV: Gravity once had a substantial monthly minimum, which caused us to initially forgo testing in 2014. Now that the threshold has been lowered, we’ve started planning initial campaigns for Q1 of 2015. Some of their larger network sites include Wordpress, AOL, Forbes & exclusivity with the Huffington Post. Gravity also has some niche specific sites that might work well for auto, beauty and sports content. We’ll follow up once we have statistics to share.

Seer POV: ZergNet operates differently than the other distribution networks, as it is not yet monetized. It’s free to work with ZergNet, but you’re required to have a widget placed on your site to promote your article (along with others), that sends traffic to the ZergNet homepage. The problem with this model is that it’s a 1:1 relationship and you must push traffic from your site to Zergnet in order to capitalize. If you are looking for a CPC mode,l you will not find it here. While a CPC model is not yet available, there are plans to potentially expand to this in 2015.

Seer POV: Initially, there were high monthly minimums for spend, however if you upload funds via a credit card, then there are no monthly minimums. The biggest advantages we see is here is the ability to target based on interests (other content networks use an algorithm that advertisers can’t control) and implement retargeting for ads. Publishers include Forbes, VentureBeat, Parade, Bloomberg, Answers.com and more.

Seer POV: Zemanta has moved away from their old platform to promote content at scale across multiple content networks. They’ll aggregate your content into multiple ad formats, then use platforms like Outbrain, Adblade, Gravity, and Disqus to promote them at scale. We prefer to work directly with each platform for more transparency and control over campaign optimizations.

Others we’ve reviewed, but not yet tested:

What’s next? What we’re testing in 2015

2015 is going to be another big year for content marketing, especially as digital continues to grow into a more holistic marketing channel. As we shown above, we’ve spent a lot of time testing out various networks and strategies in 2014 and are excited to continue the push in 2015, specifically on paid social promotion combined with content distribution.

Content promotion is more than just building links; it’s about doing #RCS and running integrated campaigns to drive engagement and interest in your business. During the course of the year we worked closely with one of our largest ecommerce clients to support several marketing campaigns.

The goal was to drive engagement with the assets created and ultimately to drive users to complete the desired conversion action, which was a combination of signups and downloads. The results of this campaign led us to put more emphasis on this holistic approach.

While not all social networks have the scale of the content distribution networks, their targeting abilities more than make up for it. You can see that overall conversion rates are much higher with relatively comparable CPCs. While, setting up multiple, A/B tested social campaigns is a more tedious process and slightly more costly compared to content networks, the results we’ve seen when compared 1:1 to content distribution are promising.

Lastly, since Pinterest just opened up their ad platform to businesses in January, we’d like to start combining content distribution with concurrent Pinterest promotion to determine how Pinterest ads stack up against the variety of other distribution platforms. We’re already seeing quite a significant ROI in our initial test, with CPCs ranging from $0.20 – 0.25 and CTRs around 0.15% – 0.20%.

Do you have any data to share on other content distribution networks? Are there any other networks we should be testing in 2015? We’d love to hear your comments below or feel free to reach out via Twitter – @AndrewMeyer8 & @AudreyBloemer!

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