Or, more precisely—for the sake of this guide—your first seven days of SEO.
If you do any kind of web marketing, you know that business and website owners frequently ask for SEO advice. Answering can be difficult because, short of hiring a professional, it's hard to explain to absolute beginners where to start.
For example, what do you tell the small manufacturing business owner who wants to learn the SEO ropes but doesn't have a year or two to master the finer details?
And that's a great answer. For over a decade, the Beginner's Guide has served as a solid and frequently updated resource for those looking to cover the basics, mixing in-depth theory with practical application. I've personally referred people to it literally hundreds of times.
To which the busy business owner replies, "That sounds great, but what do I do about SEO today? We need results ASAP."
To fill this gap and to help more people, we needed a different type of SEO resource.
Improving the time it takes SEO to work
Unless you work for an agency or want to make a lifelong career out of SEO (an excellent choice), most folks don't learn SEO for the sake of learning SEO.
For example, I started in SEO because I built a website that needed marketing. Other people may want to reduce spending on social media advertising. Still others simply have a new product that needs demand.
In other words, people seek SEO because they want results.
And they typically want those results sooner than later.
"How long does it take SEO to work?" is one of the most common questions in our industry. The truth is, of course, it depends. Different activities are impactful over different time periods, from mere days to long months.
Here's a rough estimation of how different SEO activities might impact Google traffic over various timeframes:
Quickly (days to weeks): Indexability, title tags, search appearance
Medium (weeks to months): Keyword targeting, content creation
Slowly (months): Link building, site architecture
Professional SEO agencies, when looking for "quick wins" for clients, often implement a handful of tried and true tactics, things such as a simple health check, title tag optimization, structured data, and internal linking.
Here's the deal: you want the same quick wins that professional SEOs look for, while at the same time setting yourself up for long-term success.
Getting SEO results more quickly
To solve all of these challenges, we created the Quick Start Guide to SEO.
You can find it incorporated into the Intro Chapter of The Beginner's Guide to SEO. Since most people reading the Beginner's Guide are very new to SEO, it made the most sense to put it there.
The Quick Start Guide includes seven days of actions to check the SEO health of your site while putting you on the path of sustained improvement. To make it actionable, the Quick Start Guide is short and sweet, but if you want something even more compact, we also created the SEO Quick Start Guide Cheat Sheet. This serves as a one-page sheet you can use for easy reference.
Get a free downloadable copy by clicking the link below.
More detail can be found in the Beginner’s Guide, but here's a quick overview:
How to use:
Each task is a day
You can start, and in many cases even complete, each task in an hour or two. That said, several tasks take much more than that. An SEO professional might spend 7-20 hours on an audit. (Some audits take 40 hours or longer.) Of course, you're starting from scratch, so some things might take significantly more investment of your time.
The key is to introduce yourselves to these concepts so that you're set up for future success.
Here's what each day covers:
Day 1. Gather your SEO data
SEO is all about working with the right data, and you want to make sure you're looking at the right stuff. Setting up analytics and registering for free with search engines is a simple first step to gathering the data you'll need for most SEO tasks.
Day 2. See how your site is indexed
This day you'll do a quick "health check" to ensure your site is eligible to appear in search results. Learn a few core tricks of the trade to make sure your site isn't stopping itself from fully appearing in Google search results.
Day 3. Target specific keywords
This is where the "magic" happens. SEO is all about providing useful content for exactly what users are searching for. Making sure there's a match between what users ask and what you deliver is the key to success.
Day 4. Optimize your search appearance
At this point, you will examine how your website "looks" in Google search. Do users want to click your result? Have you taken advantage of the various appearance options Google offers? Dialing in your SEO here may make the difference between simply ranking and actually getting visits to your site.
Day 5. Create content like a boss
SEO relies on content. Whether you are creating new pages to capture more keywords or optimizing existing pages, you want to make sure your on-page optimization is solid. From keyword placement to images, we'll cover the basics here.
Day 6. Internal links & site architecture
Here we want to explore how easily users — and search engines — can navigate your site to find what they’re looking for. Examining your navigation, site structure, and internal links can often lead to significant wins.
Day 7. Gaining popularity via link building
You most likely won't conquer link building in a single day, but you can definitely get started. Promoting your site and getting links from others is a bedrock of good SEO. Link building can be challenging, but we'll show you how to gather your data, help you see where the opportunities are, and hopefully inspire you to a few good ideas.
That's it! Hopefully, you enjoy the new Quick Start Guide. If you haven't already, you can download your one-sheet copy of the Cheat Sheet here.
Many SEOs think of keyword research as a very basic part of SEO, which can actually be a problem. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Tom explains some of the common mistakes SEOs make when doing keyword research that are easy to fix, many of which come from metrics like search volume, click-through rate, and difficulty.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today I'm going to be talking to you about metrics, but specifically metrics for keyword research. Now I think this is a very fundamental part of SEO. A lot of people think of it as a very basic part of SEO, which can be a problem sometimes.
I think often this might be the very first task you're asked to do in your SEO career. But I think there are some common sort of mistakes or misunderstandings within keyword research that are quite easy to fix, and a lot of it comes from metrics. So these are the three metrics I want to talk about today. So there's search volume, click-through rate, and difficulty. I want to talk to you about how you can sort of use these together and where you need to be careful.
Search volume
So search volume, I think obviously you're not going to get away from this as a metric. I'm not asking you to get away from this as a metric, don't worry. But it does have some well-known problems and some lesser-known problems.
Problems with Google Keyword Planner data
So one of the better known ones is, I think, probably about seven years ago now, I can remember the late great Russ Jones talking about some of the problems with Google Keyword Planner data, which is really a ubiquitous data source in a lot of tools.
I understand why. In a lot of cases, it's the only practical data source to use. But Google Keyword Planner data has some issues. So I'm not going to go into those now because, like I say, it's been talked about a lot in the industry. Hopefully, some of those older resources will be linked to below.
But I just want to talk about how impactful it can be in your research and in what you're trying to do for your business. So I did a test recently where I gathered a bunch of sample keywords and I benchmarked them in various metrics and various tools to see what volumes I got. Now, the source of truth I'm using here is Google Search Console. So you can be reasonably confident that if you rank first for something, then in Google Search Console, the number of impressions you have will be equivalent to the true volume.
Now, there are some caveats there. Maybe you only rank first on certain days or in certain locals or certain devices. There's a bunch of data cleaning and work that we have to do to clean that out. But once that's done, we can say, okay, in this particular sample of keywords, the average search volume was about 97 searches a month. Now, it could have been anything.
Just in this particular sample it happened to be 97 searches a month. Now, in Moz's tools, I put in the same set of keywords and we got an average of 101, which I'm pretty pleased with. That's quite close. Then in a couple of competing tools that also don't use Google Keyword Planner data, they got 150 and 190. So same sort of order of magnitude.
But then the Google Keyword Planner data, on average was 1,803. So that doesn't even fit on the whiteboard, by the way, to get that chart into scale. Obviously, that's quite a big problem. If you were using this in anything sort of business critical and your boss is saying, "Oh, can you estimate how much traffic this new site section might get or how much revenue we might make," and your estimate is out by a factor of 18, that is going to be a problem.
So this is a big danger. Even though this is an old problem, I was actually surprised by how impactful this could be in the real world.
SERPs changing over time
The other problem with keyword volume is a bit of a subtler one, and it has to do with how much SERPs are changing over time now. The issue here is that we're only interested in search volume because we're interested in clicks.
We want people to search a keyword, and we want to know how many people are searching a keyword because we think we might win their click by ranking. But the trouble is, these days, search volume doesn't actually give you that much of an idea about how many people might click or could click. So you might have keywords with very similar volumes that actually have very different numbers of clicks available.
This is a random sample of keywords from 750 keywords from MozCast. I put these into Moz Pro to get an idea of the different click-through rates, and this is the total click-through rates of the queries. So this is the percentage of people that clicked on anything, not just one specific result. Eighty-five of these keywords, so over 10% of these keywords, they had a total click-through rate for all results of under 20%, meaning the vast majority of people clicked on nothing.
Only about a third of these keywords, slightly over a third of these keywords had a total number of clicks that were similar to the search volume, 81% to 100% of the search volume. So this is really interesting because there's a wild spread here, and this varies a lot from one keyword sample to the next. Basically what this means is that just knowing about volume doesn't mean you actually know about clicks, any more at least.
So this is a bit of a problem when we're using search volume as a metric. We kind of have to use, but there are maybe some issues.
Click-through rate
So how can we get around that? So, as I've just talked about, one thing we can look at is click-through rate in combination with search volume. So I just said, in Moz, you can look at the total click-through rate of a query, but you can also look in Search Console at the click-through rate just for your specific result where you've ranked now.
So that can help you to have a better idea for the sort of actual opportunity that comes with a keyword rather than just search volume, which basically doesn't give you much of a clue about that on its own. So you can use these together to get a better idea.
Keyword difficulty
The last metric I want to talk about that you can use with these is difficulty.
So keyword difficulty is a metric we have in Moz. Some other tools have similar things. What we do is we take the Page Authority and Domain Authority of the other results that are ranking for that keyword to get an idea of sort of how tough the table stakes are for this competition. Then we also look at the click-through rate, the total click-through rate of that query, like I was just talking about.
So this gives you an idea of how dominated this SERP is going to be perhaps by Google features or something like that. Then together this forms our difficulty score. So this gives you an idea of the level of opportunity here. So when you use all three of these together, you can say, "Okay, I've got this many searches and this click-through rate, so I know how many clicks are available. Then with the difficulty, I know how many of these clicks I might actually be able to win."
So that's all. Relatively quick and simple one. Hope you found that useful. Let us know on social, and I'm sure we'll have more of these coming right up. Thank you.
TikTok has quickly become a viral sensation, with millions of users across the globe spending hours scrolling through the app's endless supply of videos. But for marketers, TikTok's greatest asset lies in its algorithm.
In the first chapter of this series, we dug into the search behavior on TikTok and why it should matter to SEOs. In this article, we are going to cover the ins and outs of the TikTok algorithm, and how to leverage it to get more users looking at your brand’s content.
The principles behind the TikTok algorithm
Before we dig into the algorithm’s ranking factors, a bit of background.
In 2020, TikTok’s CEO Kevin Mayer published a manifesto on the importance of transparency for tech companies, especially when it comes to their content algorithms. Mayer committed to being more open than its competitors, indirectly challenging Meta and Google.
Luckily for us marketers, TikTok has kept its promise and has some solid documentation on how their algorithm works. In this article, I will be combining that information along with secondary sources and inference based on general social media principles.
Surfacing interesting topics
A few months ago, I was raving about TikTok to my partner. He is big on privacy and didn’t love the idea of joining the platform, but I convinced him.
The moment he joined the app, his feed was flooded with bikini-clad teenagers, crude physical “humor” and what I can just describe as a bunch of British guys acting very lad-y. All the platform knew about him is that he is young(-ish), male, and British.
The content TikTok was serving was based on his demographic data. The algorithm hadn’t had time to work its magic then, but when it did, he could hardly put down his phone.
TikTok collects data on how users interact with different videos. Based on this information, TikTok can determine a user's interests and serve them related content.
TikTok uses the content of each video to understand what topic it pertains to. This is based on the use of hashtags, video descriptions, the TikTok sound used, and the textual spoken audio. Based on what we know about other platforms’ natural language processing capabilities, this is likely more effective in English than in other languages.
The platform gets better at tailoring this content for you as you engage with it, but it also bases its recommendations on demographic data such as gender, age, and location.
According to their privacy policy, TikTok adds “inferred information” to your profile, such as age-range, gender, and interests.
Knowing this, it would make sense that TikTok puts audiences into different interest cohorts. By connecting different topics by how closely related they are, TikTok should be able to surface topics you’re likely to enjoy, even if you’ve never engaged with them on the platform before.
Let’s see an example. I like interior design, so I’m likely into IKEA hacks, which means I’m likely into DIY. If I’m into home improvements, I’m likely into crafting. Boom, a cross-stitching video reached my feed, and I love it.
TikTok’s transparency policy came about after receiving some criticism around how their algorithm creates echo chambers that promote radicalization and the spread of misinformation. Now some platform representatives have spoken about how the platform is trying to prevent that.
Youtube and Facebook have come under fire for this before, but the truth is that any platform with a content discovery algorithm that relies on engagement is susceptible to creating echo chambers and promoting radicalization. Human psychology tells us that we’re more likely to engage with content that elicits a strong emotional reaction. This incentivizes content creators to promote content that makes us angry or afraid.
TikTok’s answer to the filter bubble effect has been somewhat simple: the platform will show you random content from time to time.
In order to avoid homogeneity of content, the app has started showing users content that they don’t usually engage with. This includes surfacing random hashtags, video aesthetics, sounds, and topics. The app tries to keep things fresh by avoiding content repetition, so you’re unlikely to see two videos by the same creator or using the same sound in a row.
Another interesting incorporation into the algorithm is showing you fresh content that has not had any engagement yet. If you’re a TikTok user, I’m sure you have noticed this.
Is this enough to prevent creating echo chambers? Probably not. Familiarity or the mere exposure effect will make you engage with the content you see most frequently, so there’s still a pretty high chance of developing echo chambers.
According to the teachings of one of my favorite psychology textbooks, we’d need to see about 50% of this random content on our feed to break the behavioral learning and bias towards what we already like. Obviously that would be against the business interests of most social media platforms, so it seems unlikely to happen.
With this background and context in mind, let’s dig into TikTok’s ranking factors.
TikTok ranking factors
As I mentioned above, this list of ranking factors is based on a mix of TikTok-confirmed features as well as unofficial sources and general social media practices.
1. Video engagement
One TikTok ranking factor is engagement, which includes likes and comments as well as watch time and profile visits. When a TikTok video has a high level of engagement, it means people are taking the time to interact and engage with the content.
This also includes replays, follows, bookmarks, and tagging a video as "not interested" (which affects your video negatively, of course). Engagement shows TikTok that the content is worth pushing out to more users, thereby helping it rank higher on TikTok's algorithm.
Not all forms of engagement are created equal, of course. A comment or share are stronger engagement indicators than a like. We see this on TikTok’s documentation and it’s true in many other social media platforms too.
According to TikTok’s documentation, engagement is measured at video level, not at account level.
The profiles a user follows on TikTok also contribute to determining the user’s interest profile. Following gardening accounts indicates to the algorithm even further that you’re interested in gardening videos.
The follower count or the previous performance of an account doesn’t directly impact the rankings of their videos. However, having a high follower count can indirectly help your videos perform better, as it will expose them to more eyes through your followers. If your followers engage with your content, that engagement can help you reach bigger audiences.
This is a big shift from classic forms of social media marketing, were the previous performance of posts on a profile are thought to influence the reach that future posts will have.
2. Discover tab engagement
Another way in which TikTok determines a user’s potential interest in a video is by analyzing their interactions with TikTok content beyond just video. Searching, clicking on a hashtag, exploring a trending topic, or viewing videos from a specific sound will weigh towards the video recommendations that users receive on their For You feed.
3. The content of the videos
As an SEO, I can’t help but draw a parallel between on-page SEO and the TikTok ranking factors within the video content.
For the platform to be able to recommend videos of topics that you like, it needs to understand what each of the videos are about.
There are several elements within the uploaded videos that help the app understand what topic and emotional tone each video has. Let’s take a look at what those elements are:
The video’s visuals. According to their privacy policy, TikTok can “detect and collect characteristics and features about the video and audio recordings” by identifying objects, scenery, and what body parts are present in your video. This is used for content moderation and to power their recommendations algorithm.
The audio. The platform can process the “text of words spoken” within your videos to further understand what they’re about.
Text over the video. Using text over the video also contributes to that understanding of the content. Adding the text natively within the platform might provide a stronger signal, based on the way other content ranking algorithms work.
Title and hashtags. This is the OG signal for TikTok and it’s the one they’ve publicly discussed the most. The title and hashtags used in the video help tell TikTok what the video is about, but they can also influence rankings indirectly by affecting engagement and discovery.
TikTok sounds. The sound being used in a video is a ranking factor on its own, as it helps the platform understand a video’s content. But the biggest way in which sounds affect your content’s performance is jumping on a trend. Trending sounds get a ranking boost for a short while, since they can predict user engagement.
4. Content language
There are three language preferences you can set in your account: app language, preferred languages, and translation language. This should be pretty self-explanatory, but there is an interesting aspect to explore here.
You can select several preferred languages and TikTok prompts you to select the languages you understand. However, you can only select one language for your app and one for your automatic content translations. It would not surprise me if TikTok used those settings to establish which of your preferred languages is actually your favorite.
5. Device suitability
TikTok explains in their documentation that the user’s device matters in the videos that users get shown, but they have not specified exactly how.
According to TikTok, the information they receive about your device is anything from user agent, mobile carrier, time zone settings, model and operating system,and network type to screen resolution, battery state, or audio settings.
My guess is that older and slower devices get shown shorter and lighter videos more often, to prevent disrupting the user experience if the phone’s performance can’t keep up.
6. Creator locality
There is one line on TikTok’s official documentation that really caught my eye:
“A strong indicator of interest, such as whether a user finishes watching a longer video from beginning to end, would receive greater weight than a weak indicator, such as whether the video's viewer and creator are both in the same country.”
There isn’t a lot of clarity about how location is used as a ranking factor, but we know it exists. We can understand that proximity between viewers and creators helps in ranking, but we don’t know at what level this is measured.
TikTok tracks user location through SIM card information, IP address, and, if you give your permission, GPS.
7. Ineligible content
TikTok has two ways of moderating content: removing it or making it ineligible to rank. These include your usual suspects such as violence, nudity, and hate speech, along with some others.
Content uploaded by users under 16 — so don’t use your company’s actual age to make an account.
Content that includes QR codes — TikTok wants to know what you’re linking out to and get a piece of the cake if it’s a product recommendation.
Content that manipulates users into engaging with the video or user — all that “tap the screen twice to see something magical” stays on Instagram.
Duplicated content from TikTok or other platforms where the user doesn’t add any significant creative edits.
Dangerous stunts not performed by professionals.
Content that features tobacco.
8. Native content creation
I am pretty confident that building content using TikTok’s native tooling can help boost your content ranking. Other social media platforms tend to favor native content and native content creation in their algorithm, so it would make sense for TikTok to do the same. For the sake of transparency, this is just an educated guess and not an official ranking factor.
TikTok’s own analysis shows that companies who used their native creative tools saw 14 times more engagement than those who didn’t.
There is an indirect mechanism that could lead to native TikTok videos performing better: the familiarity of users with the type of content the app can produce natively. Users are very quick to spot an overproduced video as an ad and will tend to engage with it a lot less. This blog post on TikTok for Business supports that theory, by telling brands: “don’t make ads, make TikToks”.
TL;DR
In conclusion, the TikTok algorithm aims to show you content you’ll find interesting while avoiding filter bubbles.
Based on the user's interactions with the app, TikTok is able to suggest videos that the user might be interested in. This is done through analyzing likes, comments, watch time, replays, follows, and bookmarks. The app is also able to understand the content of the videos through visuals, audio, text, and hashtags. Additionally, TikTok takes into account the language preferences, device information, and locations of both the user and the creator when suggesting videos.
What unique strategies have you implemented to perform well on TikTok? Share with us @LidiaInfanteM and @Moz on Twitter, and be on the lookout for part three of this TikTok SEO series: how to rank in 2022.
I like nothing better than using this annual local SEO holiday column as a greeting card with messages of good cheer, great strategy, and healthy profit penned inside. With economists caroling “austere” and “scary” in their predictions for 2022’s 4th quarter shopping season, however, it’s not easy to be jolly. Doomsayers’ dirges have their point, but we’re in this together, and here’s my own ditty for courage, set to the chorus of Jingle Bells:
Big brands (particularly those that trade in the trends of electronics) are not expecting a banner year for people buying new TVs or surveillance technology. Yet, if what your local business offers is help with basic needs and modest comforts, 2022’s holiday sales can be decent, if not a phenomenal spree. Let’s look at a solid strategy for stocking what folks want and communicating that you’re here to serve.
Food, warmth, wellness, and deals
Image credit: Michael Li
“Heat or eat” is the troubling slogan I’m hearing in multiple countries where economics have been allowed to create an artificial scarcity of energy resources on the back of a quite legitimate shortage of labor due to the pandemic. Until we all have our own nearby solar, wind and water power, we’ll continue to face fossil fuel-foolery that will eat up our paychecks and leave many in the cold this winter. All of us non-wealthy folk are feeling the pinch. We’ll be looking at the circle of our loved ones and deciding that instead of giving our favorite nephew electronics this winter, we will either pay part of his heating bill or knit him a very warm scarf.
A story I read recently in the Los Angeles Times sums this moment up well: a seller who previously dealt in luxury cosmetic gift baskets has altered his inventory to offer snack boxes. It makes sense in a time in which shoppers will be looking for ways to ensure that their friends and family have the necessary calories – not the curlicues – of life. This same vendor has also changed his marketing agency’s slogan from “we grow sales” to “we deliver peace of mind”.
2022 is the year to take a very close look at how much of your winter inventory and strategy can be rejigged to focus on food, warmth, wellness, and deals. Get a sense of the shopping season ahead from these eight points:
1. People are longing for health and strength
Fitness and gym membership sales are up as much as 20% as people try to become healthier to weather the extreme vagaries of recent modern life; gift cards that support wellness could do well.
2. Having enough to eat has become a major priority
The US food index increased 11.4% over the past year, with prices on some foods increasing by as much as 38%, meaning that gifts of food may be about as big of a luxury as many of your customers can afford to give this year. Could the brand you’re marketing partner with a local food producer for a selection of edible gifts?
3. Any source of warmth is cherished
Meanwhile, with utility bills off the charts around the world, items on lists like this one of how to stay warm without turning on the heater could make utilitarian items like layered clothing, warmer socks, thick hats, flannel robes, microwavable heat packs, hot water bottles, hot drinks, and soups attractive gifts for caring holiday shoppers. Skew your stock towards thoughtful essentials to be where your customers are this year.
4. Wise young folk are serious about de-consumption
It’s no accident that younger people are responding to the climate instability and energy catastrophe being created by the fossil fuel industry with the caring decision to reduce consumption. 50% of younger shoppers expect to buy more secondhand items as we close out the year. Assess whether re-stored, recycled, and thrift items could make up part of your inventory.
5. Reduced staff necessitates cutbacks and creativity
A challenge for local businesses in 2022 is the pattern we’ve been in since the pandemic began: labor shortages. If some staff are sick and others have quit to seek employment elsewhere, hours of operation may need to be cut. In that event, consider whether an after-hours kiosk outside the place of business could assist. If it’s honor-system based, you’ll need to trust that your community will pay for what they take. It could help you make a few additional sales in this extra challenging season.
6. Early shopping helps spread out purchases
Another trend that’s being widely-reported is of more than 1 in 10 customers shopping earlier this year. That’s a small percentage, of course, but it’s important to know that some of your customers could be trying to spread out their holiday purchases across the paychecks of multiple months, due to financial insecurity. This means that in-store and online features of holiday products could be helpful to some as early as the beginning of the 4th quarter.
7. Insecurity sometimes leads to splurging
I don’t have a statistic for this one, but I’m seeing talk around social media of some shoppers splurging in 2022 because they don’t know if they’ll be able to in 2023. I’m also noticing credit card offers ramping up. Anyone who grew up in the plastic-finance-fueled 80s can see the possibility of people spending what they don’t have as a way to comfort themselves and their loved ones, meaning some indulgent gifts may still sell well. I wouldn’t bet the house on this, though; it was noted that basic necessities were among the top sellers of the recent “Prime” day over at Amazon, with people buying diapers, toothpaste, and lunchboxes.
8. Deals are more welcome than any time in recent years
Finally, due to inflation and fears of recession, the majority of people are eager for deals and coupons, and local retailers may actually be in a good position to offer them this year. In 2021, one of the most significant challenges for nearly all businesses was shortages resulting from a very broken supply chain. While this issue persists in 2022, vendors in many industries are reporting a glut of inventory they need to move. In response, they are lowering prices and promoting coupons to catch the attention of shoppers who will be using the Internet over the next few months to find the best offers in town.
And that brings us to our strategic marketing checklist.
The Holiday Local Search Marketing Checklist
Image credit: Naotake Murayama
With your mindfully-curated inventory in place, you’re ready to serve up your offering to your community, and you have an absolute feast of options at your fingertips for getting the word out. Consider all of the following methodologies for promoting your local business this holiday shopping season:
✅ Website
Now is the time to be sure your website is offering maximum information in abundance:
Update hours of operation to reflect holiday hours.
Double check that store location info is correct in every place it is listed on the site, including headers/footers/side bars, contact pages, location landing pages, and about pages.
Highlight every possible contact methodology, including phone, text, chat, forms, messaging, social and email.
Highlight all fulfillment options, including in-store, buy-online-pick-up-in-store, curbside, home delivery, and shipping.
Don’t buy the hype that COVID is “over”; feature your safest protocols and requirements to serve the maximum number of people in your community, including elders and the immune compromised.
Audit all product landing pages to be sure that they are discoverable via site search and/or menu navigation and that shopping cart functionality is as simple as possible; to avoid cart abandonment, be up front about shipping/handling charges.
Create sitewide or page-specific banners for your best deals of the season (coupons, free shipping, discounts, etc.) as customers will be looking for the least expensive options more than usual this year.
Feature first and third-party reviews on key pages of the site (location or product landing pages) to let the public do the selling for you.
Highlight when items that need to be custom made or shipped must be ordered to reach recipients before a specified holiday date.
Highlight the greenest practices and most important community initiatives in which your local business is participating. Even in hard times, there is a growing trend of people shopping their values. Be sure to publicize if a percentage of your profits support local institutions like food banks, heat for elders, and other worthy causes.
Consider creating an essentials guide section of the website to showcase inventory that meets the goals of providing warmth, nourishment, and comfort. Depending on your industry, consider creating a re-stored/recycled guide, too, for younger shoppers.
✅ Google Business Profile and other local business listings
Full-featured listings will be the online doorway to your offline business, with Google Business Profiles driving as much as 70%-80% of leads:
Be sure fundamental contact information, holiday hours of operation, and branding are accurate across all business listings. Messy and time-consuming? Check out Moz Local for help across the board.
Retroactively respond to any reviews that have been ignored in Q3 and make a schedule for daily checks of incoming reviews over the next few months. Respond with empathetic solutions to cited problems and grow your reputation for customer service excellence. Do not incentivize requests for customers to remove negative reviews.
Integrate Pointy into your point-of-sales system if your inventory is made up of common, branded products, and be present in Google’s shopping platform which customers could be using this year like never before to compare prices. Remember that 2022 is the year in which Google confirmed that in-store product availability is a local visibility factor.
Photograph key lines of your inventory as well as the exterior and interior of your store, and upload these images to your listings. Don’t have time to do it all? Get started by photographing stock that meets the food-warmth-wellness-deals criteria.
Add your holiday-focused products to the Products section of your Google Business Profile.
Throughout the holiday shopping season, publish a variety of Google Posts featuring your inventory and special deals.
Pre-populate the Q&A section of your Google Business Profile with holiday-specific questions and answers such as “are you open on New Year’s Eve?” or “do you have candy canes?”
Speaking of Q&A, Google Messaging now allows you to enter ten questions for providing automated answers. If you have messaging turned on, this is a great opportunity to respond promptly to common queries about your holiday offerings, even when short-staffed. Nice to know that this feature can also include links to pages of your website for more information.
Video content just keeps getting more popular. Make a short holiday offers video and publish it to your listings.
Be sure listing menus reflect holiday-related services and inventory.
Look at the attribute section of your Google Business Profile, and add as many relevant signals (like Black-owned or wheelchair accessible) as possible.
Google has confoundingly removed COVID safety information from their listings just in time for the holiday flu season. If you know health and safety are a priority for your customers, consider adding your sanitary measures to the business description or Posts.
Google Business Profiles tend to steal the show, but in 2022, I would also recommend keeping a special eye on your listings on Nextdoor and Facebook.
✅ Social
Special thanks to my teammate, Senior Learning and Development Specialist Meghan Pahinui, for these timely and trending social media tips:
Regularly share hours of operation on social platforms whether you’re offering special holiday hours or not.
Share information about gift cards or gift certificates you offer along with how to purchase them.
Share any information about sales, specials, or promotions you’re running in-store.
Feature visual buying guides on platforms like Instagram or Twitter. For example, “gifts for dad” or “gifts for college students” which feature products you know are popular among those demographics.
Create “behind the scenes” videos for TikTok and Instagram which feature how a product is made or how your business prepares for the holidays.
Create a hashtag and post it near checkout or on bag inserts encouraging customers to share their purchases. Be sure to include that their posts may be featured on your own social media accounts as UGC.
Tweet to your followers asking them to share their recent purchases or meals. Be sure to interact with the posts and engage in conversation with your community.
Create fun photo-ops in stores with backdrops or merchandise displays. Place a sign near these photo-ops encouraging people to share their photos on social media to generate buzz and foot traffic for others wanting to participate. Be sure you’re following along online, as well, so you can engage with the posts.
Tweet to your followers asking what they are excited about for the holiday season and then reply with recommendations from your business. For example, someone may say they are excited to visit family and friends to which you may recommend travel accessories, games to play in a group, or gift cards they can purchase for those they are visiting.
✅ Real world
Small business owners are the backbone of the US economy. You are essential and heroic for keeping communities supplied over the past few years of extraordinary challenge, and your real-world efforts deserve recognition and huge praise. Here are a few activities that could bring more attention and customers your way.
If a Buy Local association doesn’t exist yet in your town, contact the American Independent Business Association to ask about how to start one, and take part in the growing Shop Indie Local movement. Send business to your peers and turn to them for support in trying times.
If your town or county still has a local newspaper, reach out to reporters there with your business story, including tips for holiday shoppers who need help celebrating on a budget. Never undersell the expertise you’ve earned when it comes to serving the public in good times and bad.
Your voice as a business owner matters in speeding up our transition to affordable, sustainable energy. Coordinate with other local business owners in your community to let local officials know you are done with the instability of the fossil fuel economy and all the problems it is creating for your business and want your city to transition now. Then, team up with other towns in your state and take your lobby to the state level.
Finally, remember that economists like all those I’ve linked to today, and marketing commentators like myself, are just regular people without any special powers over the future you are writing for your business. Predictions matter, but local business owners possess a hardihood and greatness that defies odds, again, and again, and again.
I want to close with the story of Yvon Choiunard, who set up a blacksmith’s shop in his parents’ chicken coop to forge pitons for mountain climbers, which he sold for $1.50 each in 1950s money. He wanted to work at a job he was excited about and that would let him and his staff go surfing when the waves were right. This holiday season, the 83-year-old Chouinard is giving away all the shares of his $3 billion company, Patagonia, to a climate action trust, declaring, “Earth is now our only shareholder.”
It’s the kind of story only a small business owner would be daring enough to write, and as we close out 2022 with eyes open and fingers crossed, I am wishing you Chouinardian grit, innovation, vision, and success.
The level of trust users have in your brand’s expertise is an important component when vying for that #1 spot, but Google has been ambiguous about what E-A-T (expertise-authoritativeness-trustworthiness) actually is, and how it plays into your SERP rankings. In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Lily Ray discusses the ways in which you can prove that all important “E” – expertise.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hi, there. My name is Lily Ray, and today we're going to be talking about E-A-T — expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. We're particularly going to be focusing on the E component, expertise.
What is E-A-T?
So just to take a step back, E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It comes directly from Google's Quality Rater Guidelines, which is a document that they use to train human search quality evaluators that they use to conduct tests thousands of times every year to basically benchmark and see how well Google is doing in terms of meeting the expectations of its users. Throughout this document, Google uses E-A-T pretty much synonymously with good content quality, but they're looking for the raters to describe how well the content creators and the sites are meeting the expectations of users in terms of demonstrating good expertise, authority, and trust.
Google also has a document that's related to learning SEO. So if you go on Google Search Central, they have documentation related to how you can learn SEO, and they explicitly say that you should be providing content that has a lot of great expertise. In Google's documentation about core updates, they have an article that's called "What Webmasters Should Know About Core Updates." They share this article every time a new core update is rolled out, several times per year, and they explicitly say that you should get to know the Search Quality Rater Guidelines and particularly you should get to know E-A-T.
Google also owns YouTube, and YouTube has its own documentation about particularly how it elevates high-quality information in the video results. There's one section that's dedicated to how it combats misinformation on YouTube, and in that section, they talk a lot about the importance of authoritativeness in YouTube rankings. Google, also, in its documents about Google News and Google Discover, they talk about the importance of E-A-T.
So if you're a brand that wants to rank in Google News or Google Discover, Google extensively describes the importance of demonstrating good E-A-T throughout your content.
Product reviews updates
The product reviews updates are a new series of updates that Google started to roll out in the past year. In these updates, sites that do product reviews or companies that do reviews of different products, Google is saying that in order to rank really well for this type of content, they're expecting to see expert-level content, and basically experts and enthusiasts who know the products really well are the ones that are going to rank a little bit better than people that are just maybe reviewing products that they haven't actually tried or spent time with.
Can you measure E-A-T?
So a lot of people in the SEO industry are curious how do we measure E-A-T because Google tends to be pretty ambiguous about what E-A-T actually is, how it's measured. So it's not a direct ranking factor. It's really important to understand that, unlike something like page speed or Core Web Vitals, which is very measurable, there's no E-A-T score. There's no way to know, on a scale of 1 to 100, how good is my E-A-T.
The only factors that Google has explicitly confirmed as ranking factors that contribute to E-A-T are PageRank and links. That being said, there's a lot of ways that E-A-T plays into the algorithms indirectly and a lot of things that Google has said that we can piece together to understand the role that E-A-T plays in the algorithms.
Google's expertise patents
So, for example, there's a variety of different patents that I've been researching with the patent expert, Bill Slawski, rest in peace, late patent expert Bill Slawski. Basically, there's a variety of different patents that describe the role that authoritativeness might play in the search results. So, for example, starting way back in 2007, Google registered for a patent that allows it to understand who the author is of a given piece of content and to rank that content according to the authoritativeness of that author.
More recently, there's a patent called website representation vectors, which Google applied for in 2018, and this patent allows Google to understand how authoritative a piece of content is or how authoritative a brand is and to rank that content accordingly. They also have a couple of different patents to identify who authors and experts are either by their writing style or by their tone of voice or their accent.
So Google is doing a lot of work to really kind of get an understanding of who everybody is and to understand the areas where they're credible or where they demonstrate expertise. The results of this is what Google has been doing across a lot of different products and throughout the course of many years in the SEO space, which is really trying to get an understanding of who the authors are, why they can be trusted, why they're credible.
There's a lot of different examples, for example dating back to Author Rank and Agent Rank, which was something around 2007. It's been a very big project for Google. Later, they had rel=author. They've had a lot of different manifestations of how they're basically identifying different authors in the search results and ranking content according to their authoritativeness. But what this boils down to is the role of experts in SEO.
I believe that this is where Google is really going. They're trying to get an understanding of who the authors are, why they can be trusted, what are the areas where they specialize, and what is the subject matter where they demonstrate true expertise. I believe that with the product reviews updates, which are relatively new updates by Google, this is an update where they're algorithmically trying to understand who is a true subject matter expert, who has actually done the work of putting together the research because they've actually spent a lot of time reviewing the products.
I believe that they're taking this type of approach to a lot of the different algorithms that they're using where they're trying to understand who's an expert that's actually done the research, they've spent time in the field, they've done a lot of this work. They're not just SEO people or content marketers who are doing keyword research and reverse engineering what's already ranking and kind of saying the same thing as everybody else.
In fact, there's another patent that Google has, which basically enables them to identify, when they have a bunch of pieces of content that talk about the same thing, if there's one piece of content that has something new, they're able to basically elevate the rankings of that piece of content because it's introducing something new to the conversation.
What Google is doing with entities
So with all these patents and the ability to identify individual experts, we have to remember what Google is doing on a larger scale with entities.
So particularly with something like Google's Knowledge Graph, which allows them to understand 500 billion facts about 5 billion entities online, this is a way that Google can basically say, "This is a person, place, or thing. We know all these different information about them, and we know how they're connected to other entities." So this is a visualization of what that might look like.
There's a variety of different tools that are available online to visualize how these entities are understood, all the different attributes that might relate to these entities. So in this example, we have Joe Smith, and perhaps we know that Joe Smith has a certain hometown. He has a certain age. This is his career. This is the name of his wife.
These are the awards that he's won. This is the skills that he has. Google is able to start building out that profile for that entity, and that could play into, potentially, the way that Joe Smith ranks for different content that he's found in or perhaps how he's displayed in Google Knowledge Graph or Google Scholar. I personally believe that Google is connecting the dots between all these different Google products and evaluating E-A-T across all these different products when they're looking for somebody to rank on YouTube or somebody to rank on Google, depending on the query itself, depending on how much E-A-T is required for that query.
So if it's something where what we call your money or your life, it's very much related to health, it's related to finances, security, E-A-T is going to be much more important for those queries, and they're going to do this evaluation to say, "We know that we have all these different authors that we can choose from and different brands that we can choose from. We have this understanding of E-A-T on the entity level."
Incorporate experts into your SEO strategy
That's going to play a role in who they choose to rank for certain queries. So how can we factor this into our SEO strategy? Well, I think it's very important to focus on incorporating experts into your content strategy. So what my team and I do, for example, is we might work with a bona fide expert in a different area, bring that person into the conversation in terms of creating content.
There are also many examples where the expert themselves actually creates the content or starts a blog. I've seen, in my research, many, many examples of experts who are providing first-hand information about their area of expertise. In many cases, they're not necessarily linking out to other sites when they're citing their sources in terms of how they're putting together information.
They're actually breaking the news. They're providing the information. They're talking about what it's like to work in their respective fields. So they offer first-hand experience, and I strongly believe that Google is algorithmically trying to identify where that first-hand experience exists. They're providing original research, which is something that Google has been elevating algorithmically.
Google has actually said in the past couple of years that they're going to elevate the rankings of content that provides original research above the other people that are maybe linking back to that original research or citing it. There's nothing wrong with citing that research. It's just that Google is going to now kind of reward the source that's breaking the news. There's also, in the case of top stories for news sites, Google can apply a label that says "Highly cited," if it's the piece of news that all the other news sites are linking to.
In the case of experts, other people are often linking to them. So while it's definitely a best practice in SEO to link out to other sites and to cite your sources and to link to all the places that are helping you provide information, in the case of using expert-driven content, many people are linking to the expert. So you don't necessarily need to link out that much if you're the expert writing the content, because you're just sharing what you know about the area where you actually demonstrate expertise.
In the case of the experts that are doing very well with SEO, you can look at the link profile, and you can notice they're the ones breaking the information, and other sites are referencing them with links. They're also very focused on their niche.
So one thing that Google is doing a lot of is that they are basically evaluating E-A-T on the website level, on the domain level. This is something that my team and I notice in our research. You can basically take something like a website's categories, a website's tags, a website's breadcrumbs. You can collect all that information, cross-reference it with the performance of how the site is doing for SEO with using Google Search Console or Google Analytics or another analytics tool, and you can start to visualize the different categories and subcategories and topics where a site tends to demonstrate a lot of expertise, where it tends to drive a lot of traffic.
You might notice that there are other areas or other topics or breadcrumbs or subcategories where your site is unable to rank. This is especially true for your money or your life sites. There are often cases where you're able to maybe perform well on topics related to like fitness and nutrition but maybe not as much when you talk about medical conditions or health conditions. Also, with expert sites, it's really important to include author bios.
So you want to talk about who that expert is. You should include their name in the content. If you have somebody else writing the content, try to incorporate the expert into that content strategy. So you can say, "This article was written by Sarah, but the expert reviewer was Joe Smith, and he came in to basically review the content." So that's a nice way to incorporate experts into your content strategy, and you can basically, with any of the clients that you work with or your company that you work with, work with the people who are actually the bona fide experts at your company and see if you can incorporate them into your content strategy even if it's just to say, "Can you please review this content and make sure it makes sense, make sure it's factually accurate? Can we include your name on it?"
In some cases, they might be skeptical to say, "Why do you want to include my name in your content? Why is the marketing team involving me in this process?" One thing that I've found very effective is to talk to them and say, "This is actually a personal branding strategy for you. If we put your name behind this, if we build this really nice profile for you on the website, you're probably going to have a really nice listing on Google that ranks for your name."
That often gets their attention, and that's something that they want to participate in. So that's kind of in line with what we call like a brand SERP. You can have the expert Google their own name, and you can say, "Are you satisfied with the way that it looks on Google?" We can influence that. If you really go deep into this strategy, you can ultimately help them get included in Google's Knowledge Graph, which is definitely something people love to show off.
When you Google your name, you get all this great information directly on Google about the expert. I believe that, tying it all together, when you have experts who Google understands who they are, Google understands all these attributes about them, and how much they can be trusted in a certain area, I believe that that process is something that Google is more and more incorporating into its evaluation in who gets to rank for certain keywords.
Conclusion
So tying it all together, I think expertise is becoming increasingly important. E-A-T is extremely important, especially for your money or your life websites. It's not going anywhere. It's something that Google references throughout much of its documentation. So think about not taking shortcuts when it comes to demonstrating E-A-T but really kind of doing an overhaul of your content strategy to make sure that real experts are collaborating with you in the content process.
So I hope you enjoyed the talk. My name is Lily Ray, and my Twitter handle is @lilyraynyc. So feel free to get in touch with me and enjoy the rest of your day.
There’s a fine line between optimizations and experiments. Testing something is an exercise in curiosity, whereas optimizing a thing is an act of certainty.
If we know the outcome of a given activity before we perform that activity, we’re in optimization territory. For example, if you’ve discovered a load of orphaned pages, then the act of internally linking to those pages is highly likely to result in a positive outcome. We can deem this scenario, “untestworthy” (yes, I know that’s actually a word).
But, as we’ll discuss here, SEO includes a vast array of activities where the outcomes of our work are either uncertain or difficult to predict. Think about the last time you experienced a site migration. Were you certain that the new site would perform better than the original? This might be a scenario that we’ll deem, “testworthy.”
In short, a testworthy activity is one where we don’t know the ending until we measure our outcomes with data.
Measuring our SEO tests
The step-by-step measurement processes and techniques for conducting SEO experiments fall outside the scope of this article, so if you’re reading this and asking yourself, “how exactly do I run an SEO experiment from start to finish?”, here are a couple links to resources that can assist you in learning the nitty-gritty specifics of setting up and measuring SEO experiments:
For each of the experiments below, I will assume a time-based measurement technique. Although some of the ideas here can be tested using an A/B split testing technique, not all of them can.
Curious about time-based techniques? I cover them in detail in this guide.
A word on statistical significance
One final note to remember. Statistical significance, i.e. when your results can be confidently attributed to your testing criteria, is a sexy concept, but one sobering reality of SEO testing is that statistical significance can only be achieved through rigorously advanced split testing.
Time-based SEO experiments provide us with directional learnings, not absolute conclusions. Advantages of experimenting in this way include the ability to react more quickly, use up fewer resources, and the flexibility to experiment in nearly all search environments where split testing cannot.
Here’s one way to visualize how non-significant tests remain valuable. On the left end of the spectrum, there are the crapshoot experiments: low confidence, low investment initiatives that provide less reliable insights. Further to the right, we can begin categorizing experiments according to higher confidence intervals and higher resource investments. Somewhere in the middle, there are a great many SEO tests that provide directional insights, even when our directional insights aren’t guaranteed with the promise of scientific certainty.
With this in mind, I’ve put together a list of five inconspicuous SEO tests that appear “untestworthy,” but are actually SEO tests disguised as optimizations.
Test in disguise #1: URL switching
A URL switch test is really very similar to SEO title testing. The idea behind URL switch tests is simple: like page titles, we know that URLs are heavily weighted ranking factors, so if we find that there are URLs that look under-optimized or misaligned with our target terms and search intents, then we can build a hypotheses for testing a new URL and redirecting the original URL.
Some of you might be silently blowing a fuse right about now, and for good reason. URL switch tests can be very risky. If your original URL has already generated a substantial number of links (internal or external) I would exercise extreme caution before running a URL switch test.
As you probably know by now, redirects have the potential to backfire, and if your test fails, cannot be rolled back to the original URL variant as easily as a title test can be rolled back.
But this shouldn’t scare you if you are running a URL switch test in lower-risk scenarios. I have seen many successful URL switch tests in scenarios where the target URL was either freshly-launched, had too few links pointing to it, or where the URL was so ineffective that an experiment was justifiably worth the risk.
How to run a URL switch test
Check the URL’s current traffic levels. Higher traffic levels = higher risk.
Check the URL’s internal and external links. Internal links can be updated, but external links can still lose strength as you pass them through a 302/301.
If the risk is within your level of tolerability, clarify what your new hypothesis and URL test variation will be.
Example hypothesis: Changing the URL string from a partial match string to an exact match string will align our page more closely with the target keyword and increase rankings and clicks for the target keyword.
Change the URL from the control URL to the variation URL.
Add a 302 temporary redirect from the control to the variation, submit the URL for re-indexation in Google Search Console (GSC), and benchmark the date that this is completed on.
Wait 2-6 weeks to measure the clicks before vs. clicks after for equal time durations and days of the week in GSC.
For example: If your measurement period (after data) begins on a Thursday and ends on a Sunday, then I recommend comparing with an equivalent time duration in GSC that also begins on a Tuesday and ends on a Sunday just prior to the experiment launch date (before data). For most websites, the click patterns on weekends will be lower than on weekdays. Using the same days of the week and time durations allows you to control for these differences in daily click patterns.
The optimal time-range is situation-dependent. Pages that generate high click volumes can be measured closer to the two-week time-frame, while pages that generate lower click-volumes will need to run longer.
Caution: If the risk to this page is high, you may want to check in periodically during the first few days to make sure that performance doesn’t drop unexpectedly.
When measuring performance, use the “compare URLs” feature in GSC. This lets you check both the control URL and the variation URL simultaneously.
After you’ve gathered enough data to make a directionally-sound judgment call about which URL performs better, do one of the following:
If the new variation performed better: Change the 302 temporary redirect to a 301 permanent redirect and update all internal links to reflect the new URL.
If the original control URL performed better: Remove the 302 redirect. [Optional: you may want to add a new redirect from the failed variation URL back to the original control URL to speed up the re-indexation process.]
Resubmit the final URL in Google Search Console and periodically monitor the performance after the test has ended to ensure that performance remains positive.
Test in disguise #2: Content refreshes
Isn’t a content refresh a given? We know that refreshing content is good for SEO, so why does it need testing?
Yes, content refreshes are incredibly important and this is an activity that has been proven successful time and time again. However, not every content refresh yields positive results.
Even though it isn’t the norm, content refresh projects can occasionally result in traffic losses, and perhaps equally frustrating, many refresh projects can turn out neutral results. This means that all of that precious time and energy that we spent rewriting and republishing a piece of content failed to produce the outcome that we intended.
For these reasons, it’s important to figure out if our investments in these projects have achieved their desired positive outcomes or not. That’s where SEO testing comes into play.
How to run a content refresh SEO test
Perform your content refresh project exactly as you otherwise would, according to your own content team’s workflow. Make sure to save all of the original files, in case you need to revert back to the original content.
On the date of republication, submit the page URL to Google Search Console to be re-indexed and benchmark the date.
Wait 2-6 weeks to measure the clicks before vs. clicks after in GSC.
Once again, keep in mind that the best time duration will vary based on the click volumes that each page receives.
After you’ve gathered enough data to make a directionally-sound judgment call about which URL performs better, do one of the following:
If the variation performed better: Congrats! Report the results to your team and keep the change.
If the control performed better: Reinstate the original content and files. Then, re-index the page and continue monitoring performance to look for rebounding traffic.
Test in disguise #3: Section rearrangement
A section rearrange test is just what it sounds like. The hypothesis for these experiments is that if we can reprioritize some of the on-page content, elements, or components, then we might be able to influence the page’s rankings and traffic coming in.
This can work particularly well, if the page section that addresses our audiences’ main search intents is either buried deep below the fold, or if it requires extra steps for the user to access that content.
For simplicity's sake, let’s use the example keyword: “email ideas for cold outreach.”
This keyword appears to have a lot of demand from users who are looking for specific email templates and phrasings that they can use in their outreach campaigns.
Now, let's assume that you’ve got a blog post on this exact topic, but the exact email templates and scripts that users are searching for are buried at the end of your posts, well past a dozen other sections of content that don’t satisfy their search demand. This might be a great case for running a section rearrange test.
The idea is, if you can reprioritize those pieces of information that users are looking for from the bottom of your page to the top of your page, Google is likely to notice the prioritized content as a better match for users to quickly access the information they want. Thus, rankings and traffic may improve in the same way they might improve with a content refresh project.
Added bonus: it’s faster than rewriting new content!
How to run a section rearrange SEO test
Look for pages that are underperforming, and that have addressed a users’ primary search intent somewhere deep within the page.
Rearrange the page sections in a way that might create a better experience or flow for the readers.
Launch the new page (but remember to save the original control page files), re-index in Google Search Console, and benchmark the date.
Wait 2-6 weeks to measure the clicks before vs. clicks after in GSC.
Again, keep in mind that the best time duration will vary based on the click volumes that each page receives.
After you’ve gathered enough data to make a directionally-sound judgment call about which URL performs better, do one of the following:
If the variation performed better: Congrats! Report the results to your team and keep the changes.
If the control performed better: Reinstate the original content and files. Then, re-index the page and continue monitoring performance to look for rebounding traffic.
Test in disguise #4: Content removal
This test is the SEO-equivalent of what CRO professionals call “a takeaway test.”
In digital marketing, there are times when less really is more, so the idea for this experiment is, if we just trim out certain items — whether those might be page elements, or less-helpful content sections — then the removal process could lend itself to creating a tighter, stronger webpage.
In a CRO-driven takeaway experiment, a CRO professional might notice certain elements that distract users or get in the way of a conversion path.
This concept works just a little bit differently for SEO if our goal is to improve rankings and traffic performance. For SEO, content removal experiments are just a matter of “trimming the fat” from our content and page elements.
When analyzing your top pages, ask yourself if you see any sections, paragraphs, or sentences which deviate from the information that the search audience really came for. You might be surprised to see how much of the content we create is actually worthless for our users.
How to run a content removal SEO test
Scan for high-value pages and posts that may be hitting a wall with rankings and traffic performance.
Make sure to analyze the top keywords and SERPs so that you can get very clear on which primary and secondary search intents the users predominantly wish to see and read about.
Scan your page’s content with a dose of radical honesty to look for content that diverges from the information that you might want to see if you were a reader.
If your investigation turns up content and/or elements that don’t help the users, remove them and make sure to save the original control page files, just in case the experiment results are negative.
Launch the new page, re-index in Google Search Console, and benchmark the date.
Wait 2-6 weeks to measure the clicks before vs clicks after in GSC.
Again, keep in mind that the best time duration will vary based on the click volumes that each page receives.
After you’ve gathered enough data to make a directionally-sound judgment call about which URL performs better, do one of the following:
If the variation performed better: Congrats! Report the results to your team and keep the changes.
If the control performed better: Reinstate the original content and files. Then, re-index the page and continue monitoring performance to look for rebounding traffic.
Test in disguise #5: Featured snippets
This activity is one of my all-time favorites.
Treating our featured snippet answers like an SEO test is one of the ways that my teams have been able to accrue competitively high volumes of traffic and clicks in recent years.
When our team began to treat our featured snippets as experiments, rather than optimizations, we were able to learn much more about how to write better answers, and we were able to create processes for scaling up to higher quantities of featured snippet experiments. This meant more “at bats” for acquiring the answer box rankings, which meant faster traffic growth.
Much has already been covered about how to optimize for featured snippets. I’ll simply add a process for testing your featured snippet copy.
What’s more, featured snippet tests are one of the rare instances where statistical significance is undeniably attainable because the success measurement is binary. Either your experiment resulted in acquiring the featured snippet, or it did not. (Caveat: Some longer tail featured snippets may also be impacted by your experiments, but the impacts are generally negligible if you are targeting a strong primary keyword.)
How to run featured snippet tests
Identify opportunities where featured snippets are appearing in the SERPs, and where one of your pages ranks within the top 5 positions but is not occupying the answer box. (Tip: some of the current rank tracking solutions such as STAT make featured snippet identification much easier.)
Sort and prioritize featured snippet opportunities according to the opportunities that represent the highest value to your website. I recommend considering the traffic’s audience and conversion potential alongside the potential search volume.
Rewrite the portion of your article where the featured snippet is being targeted. This step is another one where the full context of featured snippet practices span outside the scope of this article, so you may want to check out resources like this if you’re not already familiar with featured snippet rewriting.
Periodically check in on your target answer box(s) and traffic over the next several weeks.
If at first you don’t succeed, test again! The great part about answer box testing is that you rarely need to revert to your control, and you can keep swinging until you hit the home run. In some cases, we’ve had to make as many as ten or more rewrite attempts before successfully capturing the featured snippet.
Repeat this process to run more experiments the remaining featured snippet opportunities that were identified in step one.
More SEO tests in disguise
This list is far from exhaustive.
As I alluded to earlier in the piece, I think that just about anything which requires measurement is a form of testing to some degree, regardless of whether or not this activity can be measured to true statistical significance.
If your team is investing any serious resources into activities like core web vitals, internal linking, E-A-T enhancements, site migrations, Schema markup, or UX changes, it’s usually wise to do a retrospective before and after analysis on whether or not that investment yielded a positive payoff.
Stacking up those experiments to figure out where your bets are paying off, versus where they are not paying off will start to steer your strategy and SEO knowledge toward more profitable outcomes.
