Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today we're going to be talking about cannibalization, which here in the UK we spell like this: cannibalisation. With that out of the way, what do we mean by cannibalization?

What is cannibalization?

So this is basically where one site has two competing URLs and performs, we suspect, less well because of it. So maybe we think the site is splitting its equity between its two different URLs, or maybe Google is getting confused about which one to show. Or maybe Google considers it a duplicate content problem or something like that. One way or another, the site does less well as a result of having two URLs. 

So I've got this imaginary SERP here as an example. So imagine that Moz is trying to rank for the keyword "burgers." Just imagine that Moz has decided to take a wild tangent in its business model and we're going to try and rank for "burgers" now.

So in position one here, we've got Inferior Bergz, and we would hope to outrank these people really, but for some reason we're not doing. Then in position two, we've got Moz's Buy Burgers page on the moz.com/shop subdirectory, which obviously doesn't exist, but this is a hypothetical. This is a commercial landing page where you can go and purchase a burger. 

Then in position three, we've got this Best Burgers page on the Moz blog. It's more informational. It's telling you what are the attributes to a good burger, how can you identify a good burger, where should you go to acquire a good burger, all this kind of more neutral editorial information.

So we hypothesize in this situation that maybe if Moz only had one page going for this keyword, maybe it could actually supplant the top spot. If we think that's the case, then we would probably talk about this as cannibalization.

However, the alternative hypothesis is, well, actually there could be two intents here. It might be that Google wishes to show a commercial page and an informational page on this SERP, and it so happens that the second best commercial page is Moz's and the best informational page is also Moz's. We've heard Google talk in recent years or representatives of Google talk in recent years about having positions on search results that are sort of reserved for certain kinds of results, that might be reserved for an informational result or something like that. So this doesn't necessarily mean there's cannibalization. So we're going to talk a little bit later on about how we might sort of disambiguate a situation like this.

Classic cannibalization

First, though, let's talk about the classic case. So the classic, really clear-cut, really obvious case of cannibalization is where you see a graph like this one. 

So this is the kind of graph you would see a lot of rank tracking software. You can see time and the days of the week going along the bottom axis. Then we've got rank, and we obviously want to be as high as possible and close to position one.

Then we see the two URLS, which are color-coded, and are green and red here. When one of them ranks, the other just falls away to oblivion, isn't even in the top 100. There's only ever one appearing at the same time, and they sort of supplant each other in the SERP. When we see this kind of behavior, we can be pretty confident that what we're seeing is some kind of cannibalization.

Less-obvious cases

Sometimes it's less obvious though. So a good example that I found recently is if, or at least in my case, if I Google search Naples, as in the place name, I see Wikipedia ranking first and second. The Wikipedia page ranking first was about Naples, Italy, and the Wikipedia page at second was about Naples, Florida.

Now I do not think that Wikipedia is cannibalizing itself in that situation. I think that they just happen to have... Google had decided that this SERP is ambiguous and that this keyword "Naples" requires multiple intents to be served, and Wikipedia happens to be the best page for two of those intents.

So I wouldn't go to Wikipedia and say, "Oh, you need to combine these two pages into a Naples, Florida and Italy page" or something like that. That's clearly not necessary. 

Questions to ask 

So if you want to figure out in that kind of more ambiguous case whether there's cannibalization going on, then there are some questions we might ask ourselves.

1. Do we think we're underperforming? 

So one of the best questions we might ask, which is a difficult one in SEO, is: Do we think we're underperforming? So I know every SEO in the world feels like their site deserves to rank higher, well, maybe most. But do we have other examples of very similar keywords where we only have one page, where we're doing significantly better? Or was it the case that when we introduced the second page, we suddenly collapsed? Because if we see behavior like that, then that might,  you know, it's not clear-cut, but it might give us some suspicions. 

2. Do competing pages both appear? 

Similarly, if we look at examples of similar keywords that are less ambiguous in intent, so perhaps in the burgers case, if the SERP for "best burgers" and the SERP for "buy burgers," if those two keywords had completely different results in general, then we might think, oh, okay, we should have two separate pages here, and we just need to make sure that they're clearly differentiated.

But if actually it's the same pages appearing on all of those keywords, we might want to consider having one page as well because that seems to be what Google is preferring. It's not really separating out these intents. So that's the kind of thing we can look for is, like I say, not clear-cut but a bit of a hint. 

3. Consolidate or differentiate? 

Once we've figured out whether we want to have two pages or one, or whether we think the best solution in this case is to have two pages or one, we're going to want to either consolidate or differentiate.

So if we think there should only be one page, we might want to take our two pages, combine the best of the content, pick the strongest URL in terms of backlinks and history and so on, and redirect the other URL to this combined page that has the best content, that serves the slight variance of what we now know is one intent and so on and so forth.

If we want two pages, then obviously we don't want them to cannibalize. So we need to make sure that they're clearly differentiated. Now what often happens here is a commercial page, like this Buy Burgers page, ironically for SEO reasons, there might be a block of text at the bottom with a bunch of editorial or SEO text about burgers, and that can make it quite confusing what intent this page is serving.

Similarly, on this page, we might at some stage have decided that we want to feature some products on there or something. It might have started looking quite commercial. So we need to make sure that if we're going to have both of these, that they are very clearly speaking to separate intents and not containing the same information and the same keywords for the most part and that kind of thing.

Quick tip

Lastly, it would be better if we didn't get into the situation in the first place. So a quick tip that I would recommend, just as a last takeaway, is before you produce a piece of content, say for example before I produced this Whiteboard Friday, I did a site:moz.com cannibalization so I can see what content had previously existed on Moz.com that was about cannibalization.

I can see, oh, this piece is very old, so we might — it's a very old Whiteboard Friday, so we might consider redirecting it. This piece mentions cannibalization, so it's not really about that. It's maybe about something else. So as long as it's not targeting that keyword we should be fine and so on and so forth. Just think about what other pieces exist, because if there is something that's basically targeting the same keyword, then obviously you might want to consider consolidating or redirecting or maybe just updating the old piece.

That's all for today. Thank you very much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com. 

To that end, Moz's own Ola King walks you through the three main pillars, or as he calls them, "bosses", of SEO work. All of your SEO strategies feed into their demands, but they all need different things. 

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. I'm Ola King. I work at Moz, and I'm excited to join you today for this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I will be talking to you about the three bosses of SEO. 

Creating high quality content, making sure that you have a solid link building strategy, making sure your site is technically sound, these are great things to do when it comes to SEO. However, none of them would be as effective if you're not taking a look at things from a strategic, wider lens. Basically, it means you have to take a step back and look at what you're doing and why you're doing them in order for you to get the results that you need. 

So for SEO, there are three main pillars really to consider. I call them the three bosses of SEO. So that's really your business, your searchers, and your search engines. Each of these bosses have their own individual needs. 

Boss #1: Your business

So let's start with the business. So these are the needs of the business. This is by no means a comprehensive list. I'm sure there are things that I'm missing. So if there are things that you think should be here, please leave a comment and we can have a discussion on that so we can all learn from each other. But the whole idea of this is to get you thinking about things from a broader lens before you dive into tactics. 

Key metrics and goals

So the first one is the key metrics and goals. Any activity that is done without a goal is essentially a hobby, which is fine. However, if you want to do serious SEO work, you need to have a goal. In order to know what your goals are, I guess you have to look at your business goals.

Then that determines your marketing goals, which then determines your SEO goals. So understand what your KPIs are, understand what your priorities are, and that will then let you know what your next steps are. So, for example, if your goal is to get more traffic, you need to focus more on the top of funnel types of content, so like an ultimate guide for example.

If your goal is to get more leads, you might start looking at maybe your product comparison pages. Then if your goal is to have more sales, then it might be time to start optimizing your product pages for example. So always look at your key metrics and goals and then work from there. 

Competitors

So the competitors is also something you should really consider. A lot of people are very familiar with who their direct competitors are in terms of product or services.

But when it comes to SEO, there is also the informational competitors, so people that might not be doing the same thing as you, but they provide information to your ideal audience. So always keep an eye on those competitors as well. 

Resources

The resources. So look at the resources that you have in terms of time, budget, and personnel. If you don't have the time for SEO, you might be able to consider outsourcing it. Or if you don't have the right talent for link building, maybe you might want to partner up with an agency that does that. So always take stock of your resources before you start thinking of what you should do. 

Brand identity + recognition

The brand identity and recognition also determines the types of content that you go after. It doesn't matter if the content has a lot of volume and it's trendy. If it doesn't align with your brand in the long run, it's not really a very good use of your time.

Area of expertise

The area of expertise as well is very much related to this. So what are you an expert at? Try to lean on your expertise. If you don't have the expertise but you want to provide that information to your audience, maybe you might want to collaborate with other people that are better suited to that so that you can still complete your goal for your business and audience.

Strengths

Strengths is very related to expertise, but this is in terms of what talents, what skills do you have. Are you better at doing research and creating long-form content, or are you better at creating things that go viral and are more like listicles? Lean into your strengths and collaborate as needed with people that can help you with your weakness. 

Time in business

The time in business also the time is the approach you take for SEO. A brand-new website, what you would need would be completely different from a business that has been around for a long time, that has a great website, but they're just trying to do a refresh, which is also different from a business that has been around for a very long time but doesn't have a very good online presence.

All of this would affect the way you approach content, link building, and trying to rank for those tough content. So that's your business. As I mentioned, I'm sure there are things I'm missing. So I'm very curious to know the other things that you might come up with as well. 

Boss #2: Searchers

So next up let's look at the searchers. So these are the people that you are serving as a business. The first thing, when it comes to the searchers, is look at your persona. So what are the types of people that you're trying to attract into your website? There is no point in creating any piece of content if you don't even know who you are trying to attract with that content. So start with the persona. 

Search intent and relevance

Once you've identified the persona, you can then start looking at the search intent and relevance.

So what are they looking for? The good news is the answer is already right on your search engine results pages. Do a quick search for your ideal keyword and you'll be able to see the results that the search engines have deemed as the most appropriate for what your audience is looking for, which matches the search intent. Once you've done that, then you're going to want to create the right content to satisfy the searcher's intent.

Topics, not keywords

When you're creating content, focus on topics and not keywords. So gone are the days where you just want to create your page and stuff it with as many keywords as you can and you start ranking and print out dollars. Not so effective anymore. You basically want to look at each page on your site covering a topic that you have a focus.

While you're doing that, then you want to make sure that you have the most comprehensive page that answers that searcher's intent. Cyrus Shepard actually has a great [blog] on this, where he talked about you want to be the first click, the long click, and the last click. So be the most comprehensive page that satisfies the searcher's intent based on topic, not keywords.

Psychological and socioeconomic factors

So when you're creating your content or you're trying to devise your content strategy, always look at the emotion, psychology, social, and economic factors that are affecting your audience. It's easy to look at data on your site's traffic and obsess about what could have gone wrong in terms of your competitors or other factors. But you might also want to take a step back and look at what's happening in the lives of your audience, like what are they struggling with right now.

So in the past 18 months also, every one of us have been experiencing the pandemic. So that has changed the way people search for things. Searches for keywords like remote, things like delivery, those searches have gone up over the past few months, and that's based on the social factors that are affecting people. It means they can no longer do things that they were able to do before, so now they're having to adjust in different ways. So always look at what's happening to your audience and then react accordingly. 

Brand affinity and trust

The brand affinity and trust also affects the way people interact with your site. If people are familiar with a brand, they are more likely to trust them and interact with them more. 

So if you're a newer website or a brand, it might be a good idea to let the content speak for itself and not try to make your brand the front and center of attention. Whereas for a bigger brand, it might be a good idea to do the opposite. So a site like Amazon would do good to have their brand name in the title tag for example because people know their brand and they can trust them and click on the site, whereas a brand-new website it might be a good idea to not necessarily make that the focus of attention.

Trends and seasonality

So other things to look at are trends and seasonality. As you're looking at your SEO data, if you notice a dip, you might not be doing anything wrong. It could just mean that it's the nature of the time of the year. So I'm sure certain keywords would trend upward around the holiday season, for example, for things like electronics, video games, etc.

Then towards like February or March, maybe those searches might reduce. It doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. It's just the seasonality. 

Search behavior

So the search behavior as well. People's behavior changes over time. Humans are not robots. They are very dynamic.

Things change, things that they search for. As I mentioned before, when their emotional, psychological, social, and political factors are affected, it also changes how they search for things as well. So always try to react to that or pay attention to what people are doing. Try to understand what's changing in their search behavior and react to that accordingly.

Customer journey

The customer journey is very important. Always understand the touch points that your customers have with your business. Even outside of your business, look at their journey before they get to your business. This allows you to know the types of content you need to create to fill in the gap in their journey. This allows you to know who you might need to collaborate with, so other information sources that your audience has, where they hang out. You are able to understand those things and be able to create the perfect content for them and also promote it in the right places as well. 

Struggles

The struggles. What are the things keeping your audience up at night? What are they struggling with? Understanding this allows you to create content that no other person would be able to create. It would almost be to them like you have like some magic wand where you're able to predict what's going on with them.

Try to understand what are their struggles. You can find out the struggles by looking at questions that your audience asks your help team, for example. That's a good place to start and use SEO tools to do your keyword research to know what some of those questions that they're asking, that indicate struggles. Go on forums like Quora and Reddit. Those types of places allow you to find those struggles.

Location and language

Location and language affects how people search for things. Different locations have their own slangs, have their own culture, behaviors, and ways of doing things. Try to understand the location that you're targeting. Try to understand what the culture is like, what the language is, and try to create your content with that in mind. If you don't have that expertise or knowledge, it's a good idea to partner up with someone in those locations as well.

Also make sure that your site is internationalized as well if you're targeting multiple countries. There are lots of resources that teach you how to do this. You can find that in the Moz [SEO Learning Center] as well. 

Accessibility

Accessibility, different people search for things in different ways. People have different needs. So make sure that your site is universally accessible to everyone. So make sure it's mobile friendly. Make sure you don't have like annoying pop-ups everywhere. Make sure that you provide an alt tag for your images to make your content more accessible to all. 

So these are the factors that are affecting the searchers. There's a lot that I probably missed, so I would love to know what you think and also other ones that I forgot.

Boss #3: Search engines

So the last but not the least is the search engines. In order to win for SEO, you really need to understand that the search engines are businesses as well. 

Business model

So in order for them to rank your site, you have to be a site that is in line with their business. For Google, if you want to understand what their business model is, there is a video on YouTube that you should watch.

It's called "A Trillion Searches, No Easy Answers." It's a very interesting video that shows you the behind the scenes of how they think about things, what challenges they have, and the future of where they're heading. This would then allow you to be able to know where they might go next so that you can react accordingly. 

For Google, once again, I mean ultimately they are just trying to provide content to their searchers that is valuable, that is from sites that are indexable, that provides a good experience, and of course it has to be relevant content.

Natural language processing

They put a huge emphasis on relevant content. That leads us to the next one — NLP. So every additional change that Google has been making over the past few years is geared towards that goal of helping people get answers to things that they search for in a natural way, so making search basically more human.

That allows them to be able to help people find the relevant content to them by using more advancements in machine learning. So in order for you to do well for SEO, you need to understand what are they doing with these updates. Read the release notes. Try to understand what each update means and then try to cater your content to match that goal as well.

E-A-T

E-A-T, it means expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. Google is very strict on this when it comes to sites that are in the money or your life categories. So that's health, finance, and fitness, things like that. So make sure that your site is displaying the signals that they need for this authority.

There are a lot of resources out there. I wish I could spend more time to explain this, but we have limited time. But make sure you look into this so you can follow the right guidelines for the E-A-T. 

Links

The links, I don't need to explain this too much. Everyone that works in SEO is pretty much familiar with this. But links are basically the digital word of mouth. A lot of people are familiar with getting backlinks.

But just as important to getting backlinks, you also want to make sure that you're spreading internal links as well. So make sure that the pages on your site that are getting high traffic, you are also linking to pages on your site that might not be getting as much traffic, but they are just as important to you. 

Core web vitals

This is a recent update, the Core Web Vitals. So it's meant to basically build better websites in the world. A lot of people debate the effectiveness of this at this very moment. I would say you should do your best. Use tools like the Moz Performance Metrics Beta and try to improve your site as best as you can to at least be prepared when these changes do start affecting your ranking power.

Indexability

Indexability, of course make sure your site is indexable to the search engines. So the things like your robots.txt file is well set up. Make sure that there are no HTML or JavaScript errors. Make sure that you are reducing pages on your site that have no value so that you're not taking away from that crawl budget for the most important pages. Look at your site's architecture. Make sure things are set up correctly so it makes your site very indexable. 

Schema markup

Take advantage of schemas. These help the search engines understand your website very clearly. Having schemas doesn't mean you would always win the SERP features, but at least it gives you a fighting chance. So take advantage of them as well. 

Query deserves freshness

QDF is "query deserves freshness". So for certain queries, the search engines determine that more up-to-date information is more relevant than other types of content, so they refresh them more frequently. So if you notice that some of your content did not perform quite as well, it might just be because that they are outdated.

So a little quick refresh can help you take advantage of the opportunity to rank better. 

Ongoing updates

Last but not least, ongoing updates. SEO is not stagnant. It's continuously dynamic. It's moving, and things are changing. All the search engines are pushing dozens of updates on a daily basis.

So keep an eye on, like I said, their business model, try to understand where they are headed, and try to be able to predict where they're going. Keep on top of the updates and then adjust as you go. But yeah, so these are the three bosses of SEO, and these are all what they need.

As I mentioned, I probably missed a lot of things. But the whole idea is not for this to cover everything. The idea is just getting to think of SEO from a very holistic perspective. You might be wondering this is a lot. Where do I even start from? Well, the most important thing is your business. Try to make sure that you're doing the right thing for your business.

Then make sure you do the right thing for your searchers and then start satisfying the search engines to get results. But yeah, so that's all I have for you today. Leave your comments below. I would love to have a discussion with you and see what we can learn from each other as well. All right. See you next time.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com. 

Video Transcription

Hi, everybody. Welcome. My name is Cyrus. Today the thing I want to talk about is how to use STAT to find SEO opportunities at scale, and I mean massive scale. 

Now a lot of you have probably heard of STAT. You may know that it has an excellent reputation. But it's possible you haven't actually used it or have a very good understanding of what it actually does. 

So that's what I'm going to try to cover today and explain how powerful it is at discovering SEO opportunities in ways that can inform content strategy, competitive analysis, and a lot more. 

What is STAT?

So STAT, the full name of STAT is actually STAT Search Analytics. On the surface, what a lot of people understand is that it is a rank tracker, tracking thousands of keywords at a time anywhere across the globe. But underneath the hood, it's actually a lot more than a rank tracker. It's a rank tracker. It's a competitive landscape tool. It's SERP analysis and intent. It allows you to do some pretty incredible things once you dig into the data.

Keyword attribution

So let me dig into a little bit about how it actually works. So like a lot of keyword rank trackers, you start with keywords. But one of the differences is all the different attributes that you can assign to each of your keywords. 

So first is very familiar, the market or the search engine. So you want Canadian English results or Canadian French results. Any market in the world that's available it's pretty much available for you to use in STAT. 

The second is location, which is a slightly different concept. So you can define ZIP Codes, cities, be as specific as you want. This is very important for multiple location businesses or if you're running an advertising campaign in a certain part of the country and you want to track very specific results. But you can define location very specifically for each of your keywords. 

Third is device, mobile or desktop, especially important with mobile-first indexing and increasing mobile results. But also tags, smart tags, and this is where the true power of STAT comes in, the ways that you can use smart tagging. 

Smart tagging

So you can tag your keywords in multiple ways, assigning multiple tags to slice them and dice them any way you want. 

So different ways that you can tag keywords in STAT is anything that's important to your business. For example, you can create keyword groups based on what's important to you. On Moz, we tag keywords with "SEO" in it or anything that's important to your business that you want to create a keyword cohort out of. Or location, like we were talking about, if you're running an advertising campaign in Indiana and you want to tag certain keywords that you're targeting there, something like that. Or all your Kansas city keywords or your London or Berlin keywords. 

Product categories. So if you sell multiple categories, you sell TVs, books, dresses, anything you want, you might want to tag all of those into a particular keyword category. Or attributes, such as a 55-inch television versus a 48-inch television, when you want to get very, very specific across your product line.

Also your brand. At Moz, we track everything with the word "Moz" in it, or Nike or Apple or whatever your brand is or if you have multiple brands. Basically, anything that's important to your business, any KPI that you measure, anything that's relevant to your marketing department or finance or anything else like that, you can tag, and that's where the true power comes in, because once you tag, you've created a keyword cohort or a group.

Share of voice

Then you can see your share of voice across that entire market using just that group. So if you want to track yourself against a very specific set of keywords, you can see your share of voice, share of voice meaning how much visibility you have in Google search results, and STAT will show you your exact competitors and how you rank among those.

Generally, you want to see yourself going up and to the right. But if you're not, you can see exactly who's beating you and where their movement is, and how you're doing for that specific keyword group, which is incredibly valuable when you're working on a particular set of keywords or a campaign. 

SERP features + intent

But my favorite part — and this is where the true power comes in, because it can inform your content strategy and this is where the SEO opportunities are actually at — is the analysis of SERP features and intent. Because what STAT will do is, out of the thousands of keywords that you put into it, it will analyze the entire SERP of each of those and it will collect all the SERP features that it finds and tell you exactly what you own and don't own and where your opportunities are.

So let's give an example that's a little more concrete. So let's say you track a bunch of keywords within a particular cohort and you see that most of the results have a featured snippet. STAT will show you exactly what you own and what you don't own. Now what's cool about this is you can click into what you don't own and you can see the exact featured snippets that your competitors own that you can actually create some content strategy around and try and go steal those.

A different way is images or news. So let's say that you notice that you're selling TVs or something like that and almost all the SERPs have images and you don't own any of them. So something like that can inform your content strategy, where you go to your team and you say, "Hey, folks, we need to create more images, or we need better structured data to get Google to show the images because this is the intent for this type of keyword, and we're simply not owning it in this way."

Same thing with news. If you notice a lot of news results and you're not a news organization but you're competing for these keywords, that can inform your content strategy and maybe you need to go after those news keywords or try something else. Video is another one. More and more SERPs have video results with video carousel and things like that. You can see exactly what you own and what you don't own.

A lot of times you're going to find that certain domains are beating you on those videos and that may inform, especially for the high volume keywords that you want to go after, you may want to be creating more video content for that. But it all depends on the SERP, and you're going to find different feature sets and different combinations for every keyword cohort that you do.

So what's important to you and what's important to track it's going to show up differently every time, but it's going to show you exactly where the opportunities are. FAQs are another thing, rich snippets sort of results. You may find that your competitors are all using FAQ markup. You're not using any. That could inform your SEO strategy, and you might start incorporating more FAQs because Google is obviously rewarding those in the SERPs and your competitors are gaining those and not you.

Other things, virtually any SERP feature that's trackable. You can find local results. Twitter boxes. You may find that for certain queries Google is surfacing Twitter results and maybe that means you need to be on Twitter more than you actually are right now and see who's ranking for those results instead of something that you're doing on-site.

Maybe it's you need to do more YouTube. It's not all necessarily on your site. But this will tell you where you need to invest those opportunities. Review stars, podcasts, and more. All of this will tell you what's important and where the opportunities are and where you're winning and losing and the exact keywords that you can go after if you want to win and the exact feature sets where your competitors are getting traffic and you aren't.

So I use STAT, I love it, every week. It's a great tool. If you want to try it out, I encourage you to do so. That's it for me. Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com. 

Video Transcription

Hey there, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Austin Peachey, an SEO manager at Obility, a B2B-focused digital marketing agency based in Portland, Oregon. Today, I'd like to talk to you about conversion rate optimization, specifically optimizing sites for B2B organizations.

When compared to the offerings of a typical B2C business, the sales cycle in B2B means that users will be visiting your site multiple times throughout their sales cycle before making a final purchase, and it's necessary that you are reaching them at different stages in their journey. 

CTR optimization

The earliest and sometimes overlooked step in conversion rate optimization is actually click-through rate optimization.

Increasing the traffic to your site from Google search results can help grow your potential pipeline and increase total leads. Google Search Console is a fantastic tool to review and optimize your listings on search page results. Audit your queries and pages and find out which are the lowest performing. For example, pull in a report of all things that have a click-through rate of less than 1%.

Once you've targeted your underperformers, review the title tags and meta descriptions. Start out with the easy things, like are they getting truncated and your full message isn't showing up. But go beyond that and actually evaluate the language being used. Are you providing incentive for them to click on you versus a competitor? Is there a CTA? If not, try adding one. It can also be helpful to look at the pages that do have a high click-through rate and see what is written for their title and their description.

What's different and what could be moved from a high performer to a low performer to try to replicate those results? 

Know your audience

The next step in conversion rate optimization is to know your audience. This is especially important when it comes to B2B businesses as you have individuals from many different roles exploring your site, providing input and ultimately making critical decisions.

Don't make assumptions and let the data help you along the way. Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and heat mapping tools, like Hotjar and Crazy Egg, can provide valuable insights to your customers and how they interact with your website. When using a heat mapping tool, you can see how far users are typically scrolling down your page, and from that you can get a lot of different insights.

For example, if they don't get very far down your page, but all your CTAs are in the footer, try moving a second CTA mid-page that might capture more of the audience that isn't getting all the way to the bottom. You can also use heat mapping tools to see where users usually click on the site. If they continuously click on a piece of content that doesn't have a link, that continuous click most likely means that they want to click there and read more about it.

So you can improve the user experience by going in and adding one to the relevant content. Follow your user's journey with Google Analytics and see where in the funnel they might commonly drop off and is there an opportunity to shorten the time from entry to the site to where your site's conversion points are. A key point of knowing your audience is to be mindful of where they are in the buying process.

Take a look at the keywords that are driving traffic to that page using a tool like Moz's Keyword Explorer. If they are using long tail keywords, they're more likely a more seasoned user and are ready for a gated asset, like a white paper or a case study. But if it's short tail keywords, they're probably still in the discovery phase and just want to read a blog post or a recent article. Try not to think of things as a marketer, but instead put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers.

Figure out what they want and not what you want them to want. 

Solve for poor UX

Now that you know your audience, the next step is to solve for poor user experience on the website. User experience tip number one, please remove the pop-up from your website. No one wants to go to a page and immediately have a big ad block the content they're trying to see.

They're going to that page for a reason, and it's not to have them be redirected somewhere else on the site. Once you have gotten rid of all of the pop-ups, the next step is to optimize your top navigation of your site. Make sure it's easy to access all the different areas of your site's content and make sure that you have a CTA available in the header to easily send them to conversion points.

To help optimize your navigation, track what people are searching for using site search in Google Analytics and make sure the topics that they are searching for on a regular basis are easy enough to find. Next step is to review your content and add internal links to relevant pieces of content that may help the user with their decision-making process.

Technical health is also important. Make sure that your site loads quickly and users aren't running into broken links all the time that will then hinder them on their process of discovery and learning more about your product. The last thing I'd like to discuss, when it comes to user experience, are contact forms.

As mentioned before, you could have anyone from a small team manager to a C-suite executive looking through your site, and they want a form that's going to be quick and easy to use. Only collect the data that is needed to get the conversion and don't bog them down with extra form fields that don't mean anything. Now I wouldn't be talking about conversion rate optimization if I didn't mention optimizing your CTAs.

When it comes to CTAs, you want to make sure that they're unique and relevant to the content of the page. Skip out on the Contact Us and Learn More that's on every single site and really try and tailor it to what's happening. If your content is about the benefits of your software, say something like, "Don't believe the hype and try a demo to see for yourself." It's really going to push them to make that conversion more than just learn more.

Test everything

The final thing, when it comes to conversion rate optimization, is testing. Test everything. There's so much data being collected and analyzed, so there's no reason that you need to be making all of your changes just based on hunches. If you see something underperforming on your site, set up an A/B test or a multivariate test to gather information on what really works best for your users.

Software like Google Optimize or Optimizely let you easily conduct these tests and make strong, data-driven changes to your site. There are so many potential things you can test. Try different ways of saying things, different colors of buttons or components, or even entire layouts completely. But just as you're doing the testing, remember to go through the five phases of testing something.

One is the research phase. What can you learn from your data as it is right now? Two, the hypothesis phase, what educated ideas can you think of to potentially test? Three, the prioritization phase, what changes are going to have the biggest impact on your site and make sure you're doing those first to drive further conversions in the future.

Four, the testing phase, run and collect your data, whether it's an A/B test or a multivariate test, and make sure you can get some substantial evidence to make a permanent change on your site. Then five, the learning phase, what can you learn from these tests to make other further improvements in the future? Remember, the only failed test is one where you don't learn anything.

Well, that's it, everybody. That is our best tips for conversion rate optimization. Thank you for listening and I hope you all have a great day.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com. 

Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today's topic is going to be Google Discover. 

Now this is a massive opportunity that I think a lot of sites have been sleeping on. It's been out for about three years now, and the sites that are taking it seriously, I've seen quite a few recently that are now getting more traffic from Google Discover than they are from organic.

What is Google Discover? 

So hopefully that gives you some kind of idea of what you're missing out on. But in case you have been sort of living under a rock, completely oblivious to this, this is what Google Discover is. 

This is what it looks like. So basically, if you open up the Google app on Android or on iOS, you'll see, yes, there's a search bar that you normally expect with Google, but there's also, if you scroll down, by default at least, there's this list of recommended articles, very heavily personalized.

You can sort of scroll infinitely. They're based on your interests and sort of what Google has seen you searching for and looking for in the past basically. They're all articles. This isn't e-commerce or something like that for the most part.

How to be featured

Now I'm going to talk a little bit about what you need to do to be featured here. Indexing, at the basic level, works the same as regular Google organic.

There's no sort of special process like you might see with Google News or something like that. But there are a few hard requirements that you're going to need, and there's also a few sort of myths that I'm going to talk about. 

1. Schema markup

Now the first big hard requirement that I've seen completely ubiquitously is schema markup. So in my own Google Discover feed, everything that I've seen recommended to me is either marked up as schema in an article or schema in a news article. When I've looked at the analytics of sites I have access to and what they're getting featured in Google Discover, it's the same. It's all either article or news article markup. 

Now it might be possible that people are succeeding with maybe recipes or something like that and I've just not seen that. But definitely some kind of schema markup is required here. 

2. Unambiguous, broad topics

Now there's also sort of, like I say, a very heavy topics layer here and what people are being recommended based on their interests and so on. This is kind of surprisingly unsubtle as far as I can tell, or at least surprising if you're used to Google's organic algorithm and how sophisticated it is. 

So basically Google will cotton on very heavily to a few broad topics of things you're interested in, and sites that I've seen doing well and articles that I've seen doing well are very unambiguously about one of these sort of broad topics.

So, for example, the Moz Blog actually does quite well in Google Discover. I think that's because it's very unambiguously about SEO, and it's never really dangerous to recommend a Moz blog article to someone who's interested in SEO. Similarly, on some sites the articles I've seen doing very well are ones that prominently mention and clearly are about maybe a celebrity or a car brand or some other sort of broad topic like this. So this sort of unambiguous topic seems to be very important. 

3. Click-worthiness

The next requirement is more something you might be familiar with if you've optimized for YouTube or Twitter or Facebook or something like that, and it's this clickiness. And to be honest, I'm sorry to say kind of being click-baity. The articles that do best on Google Discover are ones that sort of hint at something salacious in the title but don't reveal it. So they're really drawing in that click, and it seems to really reward that. 

Now it's worth mentioning this title. This is not a title tag, like you might be used to from SEO, and it's also not an Open Graph title, like you might be used to from social media optimization. This is part of that schema markup. It's the headline in there. This needs to be no more than 110 characters. Ideally pretty close to that. There's also this image. This image needs to be 1,200 pixels wide, and again it's referenced in that schema markup. Again, that can be a very important way of drawing in that click. 

4. Speed

The last sort of big requirement that I noticed is speed.

It seems much more important for Google Discover than it is for Google organic to have fast loading pages, to such an extent that I've seen a lot of people out there sort of claiming that AMP is a hard requirement. 

Google Discover myths

Now we sort of get into the myths section or the urban myths. 

1. AMP

AMP is definitely not a hard requirement for Google Discover.

There are sites out there doing very well without AMP, even smaller, lesser-known sites doing very well without AMP. But you do need to be very fast. So I can see how people come to have that idea, and sure enough if you look in your own Google Discover, you'll probably see a lot of AMP pages. But it's definitely not a requirement. Indeed there are even some sites doing well with slower pages, but they tend to be more a household name or very authoritative brands within their space, which possibly compensates.

2. Link building

I think that's what leads people to think about this next myth, which is I've seen a lot of people recommending that you should do link building for the benefit of Google Discover. Maybe that does help. But compared to organic, I've seen sites DA 20 something doing very, very well, six-figure daily traffic through Google Discover. It's definitely not a hard requirement to have any substantial amount of links.

So maybe it helps, or maybe there are other ways that Google is measuring brand here, but this is not something I would focus on for Google Discover to start with. 

3. Knowledge graph

The last sort of myth that I've seen is I think it comes about because early on in Google Discover you could follow certain sites or brands if they were featured in the Knowledge Graph, and then you would supposedly see more content from that site.

That's no longer possible. But in any case, like I say, I've seen sites doing very, very well that not only have very few links, but also as a brand or as a site or as an entity are not in the Knowledge Graph. So what I think probably is working trying to get your brand featured in the Knowledge Graph and probably your brand already is featured in the Knowledge Graph if it's well-known.

This is definitely not something that's going to be a hard requirement for you to perform very, very well in Google Discover. 

Measuring success in Google Discover

Now the next step you're probably going to want to think about is how do you actually go about, once you're optimizing for Google Discover, how do you measure how well you've been doing so that you can sort of iterate and improve.

Now sadly this is a little bit messy. The most accurate data source you're going to have is Google Search Console. Similar to Google News, if you're getting any Google Discover traffic at all, you'll get this extra tab appear in Google Search Console that shows you your Discover traffic as separate to your web search traffic or your Google News traffic if you have that.

Again, the Google News thing only appears if you're getting Google News traffic. Obviously, Search Console data isn't ideal. It has some limitations. It's not tied up with data from your other channels. It's not tied up with your conversion data or your on-site analytics. But if you want to actually debug this in something like Google Analytics, it's very messy. 

So what I've seen when I found articles that according to Google Search Console are only getting Discover traffic, zero web search traffic whatsoever, they're just getting Discover traffic, and then I look at how that Discover traffic appears in Analytics, it sadly very spread out.

There used to be some ways of capturing this through basically a typo in the referral that Google Discover was sending. Sadly, that's no longer the case. So what you tend to see is the Google Discover traffic appears mostly as Google organic, sort of blended in with your other organic data. Then a good chunk of it, in my experience about 17%, will appear as direct.

So 15% to 20%. Seventeen is probably overly precise. Then you'll get a tiny sliver which is appearing as this googleapis.com referral traffic. Now if you're getting anything with googleapis.com referral as the source and medium, then you're definitely getting some Discover traffic, but it's a lot more than you would think from this green slice. This is just sort of the tip of the iceberg.

So hopefully you found all of that useful. I'd love to know your own tips if you can share them on social and tag me or tag Moz. This is an area that I think right now is relatively little explored by SEOs and by the industry. So yeah, I'd love to see what other people are doing and what's working for them. Thank you very much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Video Transcription

Hey there, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Austin Peachey, SEO manager at Obility, a Portland-based B2B marketing agency. 

Working for a B2B-focused agency, I know it can be hard to navigate the B2B marketing landscape. If you want to succeed in B2B SEO, you need to make sure you follow the proper steps. Today, I'm going to walk you through our roadmap for SEO success. 

Data collection

The first step on this road map is data collection. It's so important to have all the data you collect be clean and precise because it's going to help you make crucial decisions down the road. Three key pieces to that are tracking, filters, and goals.

Tracking

For tracking, you need to ensure that your scripts are properly set up so they're collecting data every day, and to minimize scripts on your website, try to implement as many as you can through Google Tag Manager. 

Filters

Filters are the next step that are really important for clean data. These will help you to remove website sessions that have no purpose in your analysis.

The three key filters to include would be: IP filters to remove traffic from your client, your office, or remote workers; domain filters to remove traffic from commonly known spam websites; and host names filters to ensure that the sessions are actually hitting your website. 

Goals

Lastly, it's very important to have your goals properly set up and you're not tracking things like bounce rate or time on site as a recorded goal.

These are good metrics to check in on the health of your site, but they're not going to be meaningful enough to make strategic changes on down the road. When it comes to B2B SEO, we focus on two different types of goals — micro and macro conversions. Micro conversions may be things like downloading a white paper or signing up for a newsletter. Macro conversions focus on bigger, lead-based goals, like form fills or demo requests.

The buyer's journey is so much longer when it comes to B2B versus B2C, and you need to make sure that you are there with conversion points no matter where in the cycle they are. 

Technical SEO

Once you get your data collection properly working, the next step is to look at the technical health of your website and anything that might impact your indexation or traffic coming into the site.

Focus first on critical crawler issues that may be bogging down your site. These could be 404 errors, duplicate content, and website speed performance. 404 errors affect the crawlability of your site as well as the user experience as they're actually going through your content. Duplicate content errors can be as major as having two full instances of your website available to crawl as well as something as small as just having a blog post posted twice on your website. Big or small, though, it's really important to have unique content throughout your entire site. 

Site speed and Core Web Vitals are important to both SEO and the user experience. Work with your web developer to minimize the scripts used on the site, optimize your images, and really just clean up the code. 

Once your main crawler issues have been addressed, you can start looking at creating well-optimized title tags and meta descriptions. Make sure these are written for the user and not the search engines. A title tag isn't going to make a difference in your position on Google, but it could make a difference in somebody clicking on your posting versus a competitor. 

The Moz crawler is a great tool to help you improve the health of your site. It provides an organized breakdown of all the issues your site might be having as well as tips on how to remedy those issues.

Keyword research

Now that your site is in tip-top shape, the next step is to move and do keyword research. 

When doing SEO for B2B companies, it's important to remember that the customer's journey is so much longer than in B2C. These purchases are larger, and there are more stakeholders that are part of the buying process. Because of this, when you're doing your keyword research, you need to think about keywords throughout the entire consumer's journey, targeting keywords at the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom of the funnel.

Think of it in this way. If your product is a software that does task management, you can't just focus on optimizing for the bottom of the funnel keywords, such as task management software or business organization tool. Instead think about the keywords that your user might be searching for just because they have a problem — what is the best way to keep my team organized or tips on how to meet deadlines on time.

Start your keyword research by reaching out to your client and seeing what keywords are important to them and what they want to focus on. Then once you have that seed list, expand that by exploring their site, competitor websites, Google Search Console, and keyword tools, like the Moz Keyword Explorer. 

Once you have this list, it's time to actually prioritize those keywords, and by prioritize, we don't just mean whatever has the highest volume on a monthly basis. It's much more about what is relevant to your product and your consumers and what will eventually drive conversions down the road. 

Create content

Then now that we know these keywords, our next stop is to actually focus on the content development that goes with these keywords. Evaluate the existing content on your website and determine whether you need to build something brand new, expand on what you already have, or more likely a combination of both of those things.

As you develop this content, you have to remember the golden rule — write for users, don't write for search engines. The best content is the content people actually find useful and answers their questions. Make sure your content is easy to read, links to other relevant topics within the content, and covers the keywords you're focusing on as effectively as possible.

That doesn't always mean writing the longest piece, but a piece that really delivers the content most effectively to the user. If you aren't sure what to write about, a good place to start is the search engine results for the keyword currently. What currently ranks well? What questions are they answering, and what was the intent of the user when they made that search? Answering these questions will really lead you to develop better content down the road. 

Now, as mentioned before, with your content like your keywords, you do need to follow the user through the funnel. Make sure you're providing content through every stage of where they might be in the buying cycle. So having top of funnel content, like strategies on how to meet deadlines, will be just as important as detailed content on the software you provide and the benefits it provides to the users. By doing this, your company will be seen and be a part of their decision-making process, whether they are just beginning to solve their problem or they're ready to go out and make a final purchase. 

Conversion rate optimization

The last stop on our journey is conversion rate optimization. You figured out your keywords. You have great content. But that really doesn't mean much if they're not coming in and actually purchasing your product.

There are multiple points of conversion rate optimization that you need to pay attention to — search engine page conversion optimization, information seeker optimization, and lead optimization. As mentioned in our technical health assessment, search engine conversion rate optimization comes from your title tags and your meta descriptions. These are the first things your users see as they kind of start on their journey searching and finding answers.

You need to make sure they're well-written and entice the user to actually click and learn more about you. Test out different wordings and see what really drives the most clicks. Information seeker conversion rate optimization is for those users that are really at the beginning of their journey and they just need information. They're probably gathering it from many different points, but you just need to provide them with more information about you, whether it's a case study, a white paper, a video, or it's signing up for your newsletter program.

Lead focus conversion rate optimization is really getting the user to perform the action, such as filling out a form, taking a product demo, anything that's kind of that final step before actually making a purchase. Maximizing these conversions is really what's going to help generate the most revenue for your business. The important thing to remember when doing conversion rate optimization is that you aren't just making guesses.

Use heat mapping tools or A/B tests to determine what is actually working the best and then make strategic changes to your site based on those results. Well, there you have it, folks. 

That is our road map to B2B SEO success. Thank you very much for listening and I hope you all have a great day. Thank you.

Editor's note: Beginning at 1:49, when Claire mentions "referral traffic", it should be "referral information". 

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Do you have a Google My Business listing or do you work with clients that have Google My Business listings, and do you want to know more about the value of the traffic that Google My Business drives to your website?

Well, if you do, this is the Whiteboard Friday for you. So I'm Claire Carlile, and I am a local search expert at BrightLocal, and today I'm going to speak about UTM tagging for Google My Business. 

What's a UTM tag?

So you might be asking, "What is a UTM tag?" If you are, you wouldn't be the first person to ask that question.

So UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. But if you just think of UTM tags as tracking codes that we add to the end of our external links that tell us more about where that traffic came from and how it got to our websites. So when someone clicks on a UTM tagged URL, details of the source, the medium, and the campaign that that website visit comes from get transferred over into Google Analytics.

Why add UTM tags?

So why would we want to add UTM tags to our GMB URLs? Well, without tagging, all of the traffic will end up in the Organic bucket. So that's fine, but what it won't tell us is whether that organic traffic came from the regular organic results or whether it came from Google My Business URLs in the business profile or in Google Maps.

Another reason is that many mobile apps and browsers don't give their referral traffic into Google Analytics, and that traffic is just going to end up in the Direct bucket. We're marketers. We're very used to having to demonstrate our value and the value of our services. So this is a great way for you to illustrate the value that you're adding to your client or to your organization.

We also often need to secure a budget. So whether that budget is for more of our time or it's for photos or videos for Google My Business, it also lets us understand the value of various Google My Business features so we can say Google Posts is more valuable to this client than Google products, or Google products refers less traffic but at a rate that converts higher.

Also, we'll get the Google Search Console data for those UTM tagged URLs. So we'll see the query data. We'll see what queries are actually driving impressions and clicks on these UTM tagged URLs. 

Where can you tag?

So let's think about what we can tag. We hear a lot about zero-click search, but that really isn't a new concept if you've been working in local search for a while, because from the business profile a potential customer can click to call a business, they can download driving directions, they can look at photos, they can read reviews, they can look at services, all without clicking through to the business website.

But that said, we do actually have a lot of opportunities in GMB to link back to our website and to drive traffic to the website. So what you have in GMB will be dependent upon your primary category. 

But most businesses will have a website link. They might have an appointment or a menu URL. They might have Google products. They might have Google Posts. You might be using the new follower offer, which not a lot of people know about and even less people are using, and it might actually die and end up in the Google graveyard, but it only takes 10 minutes to set up. So if you have the type of business that could attract a local following, then it's worth adding because you can see: Does it actually drive value for the business? What does that traffic do when they get to your website? What content are they looking at? Where are they moving, and how are they moving around? Is the traffic from GMB actually driving revenue? Are they buying things when they get to your website? Then we've got all of our conversions and micro conversions that hopefully we have set up so we can measure in Google Analytics.

So do we get click to call? Do we get click to email? Do they download a resource? Do they click through to our social media profiles? Do they fill in a form? Do they sign up for our newsletter? We can find out all of these things when we add UTM tagging.

UTM tagging tips

So I'm going to give you some UTM tagging tips because I think the most important thing is to be very, very consistent from the outset, because it's quite easy to get this wrong. 

So consistency being key, think about how you're going to separate out your words. I like to use a dash. Some people like to use an underscore. Whatever you use, just make it very consistent. 

Then we have uppercase and lowercase letters. So I always stick with lowercase letters, the reason being that Google Analytics is case sensitive in all of its reports. So if you're using a mix of uppercase and lowercase, Google is going to report upon that separately. If you don't get this right, you're going to be dealing with a lot of messy and bought data that you're going to have to sort out outside of Google Analytics, and you really don't want that. 

So another thing is if you get your source and your medium in a muddle, then that traffic is just going to end up in the Other bucket, which is pretty much totally sad times. So a way to avoid that is by thinking of the source as where the journey started or where that traffic came from and the medium as the method of transport. It's how that traffic got from A to B. 

Who manages the data?

So before we think about which URLs on our website we're going to tag up, we need to think about who is managing the data and reporting in our organization or in our client's organization, because the UTM tags and the framework that you set up need to play nicely and sit within their framework. You don't want to be robbing clicks from them if they're trying to demonstrate the value of something. 

Now you might find that when you work with small and medium-size businesses, no one is managing the data and reporting, in which case happy days, this will work absolutely fine. 

Which URLs do you tag? 

So which URL will you tag?

Well, there are some questions here. Do you have one location, or do you have many locations? So if it's just one location, you probably tag up your homepage. If it's many locations, you're going to be linking to your location landing pages. 

If you're using Google products, then you'll be wanting to link to your products or your services pages.

If you have an appointment URL, then you will be linking through to maybe the Contact Us page. If you have booking or appointment functionality on your website, you'll link to that page. 

Now, unsurprisingly, the menu URL will link to your menu page. 

If you're using Google Posts, have a think about where will you link to. If it's a special offer post, is there a special offer page that it will link to? When that special offer expires, what will you do with that page? Will it continue to resolve, or are you going to 301 it somewhere else? Plan all that out beforehand. Actually, you need to make sure that you check the URL that you're wanting to link to. Are you linking to the correct version? If you're on https, which I hope you are, you won't want to be linking to the http.

You need to look: Does that page resolve? Can you see everything on that page? Does that page give a 404, in which case obviously we're not going to want to link to it? Does that page go through a series of redirects? Now, a series of redirects is going to strip the UTM tagging off of that URL, and we really don't want that. 

How to tag

So once you've checked which URLs you need to link to, you're actually going to tag those up.

So for the source, I'm using Google. Some people like to use GMB. But whatever you choose, again, make sure it fits within this framework and be consistent from the outset. For medium, I'm using organic. Then for campaign, I'm using that field to describe the location of that link within Google My Business.

So it might be the primary website link, menu, products, or the appointment. If you're using the new follower offer, you have this. Then with Google Posts, I like to be a little bit more granular so I can see what type of posts might be working the best, and I can also track any changes when Google starts moving posts up and around inside the business profile.

So we've got the what's new post, the offer post, and the event post. Finally, for Google Posts, using the campaign content field to describe the actual content of that post. So if you work with a business which has lots of unique and interesting content, you might just need to describe that content, so summer-21-sale, free-giraffe-rides, curry-night-may-21, or you might just like to use the date there in the campaign content field.

So top tip is if you're using Posts, you have access to Posts, I hope you're using them, then using a Google Sheets add-on called Postamatic, which is brilliant, it allows you to schedule your posts, and it also automatically adds UTM tagging within this format. So it's very much recommended.

So you're going to tag up your GMB URLs and those links with UTM codes. So you might use something like Google's Campaign URL Builder, which is something that I used to use when I first started tagging up business profiles. But since then I've been working on my UTM Tagging Guide with the Google Sheet, which is basically my gift to you with love.

So you can use that to keep everything nice and tidy and everything in one place. It auto-generates the tag. So all you have to do is just drop your URL into the sheet, and then it will give you the UTM codes for those URLs. It's a good way to keep a record of what you're adding, and that might be Google Posts, if you're not using Postamatic.

It might be your Google products. You have a record then, and you can understand what type of content resonates, what doesn't, and what you could do better with your content. So you will find that guide and sheet here, on this URL. 

So that's it for today. I hope you found that useful and hopefully see you here again soon.

And don't forget to grab your ticket to see Dana's presentation, Build for Search: Modern Web Dev That Puts SEO First, along with our other amazing speakers on July 12-14: 

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. My name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm President and partner at Kick Point, and we're a digital marketing agency headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I'm going to be talking to you today about a question that I think many people have, which is how do you actually measure website engagement.

I think it's something a lot of people struggle with because you might be approaching a period with your website where you're thinking: Is time to redo the website? Is the website actually meeting our goals? But you may not have a lot of the things set up in order to measure engagement in a way that helps you answer those questions. A lot of times you might just be shooting in the dark and saying, "I think this is what's happening."

But is it truly what's happening? You may think you need to add an expensive tool, some sort of screen measurements or something like that in order to get what you need. But there's a lot you can do with basic setup in Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics to measure website engagement. So that's what I'm going to talk to you about today. So over here I have different ways to measure, and then here behind me I have different ways to improve.

Ways to measure website engagement

So we're going to start with the stuff we're going to measure, and then we're going to move on to the things we're going to improve. 

1. Scroll depth

So first off, think about scroll depth. This is one of the basic metrics that I think people think about but they don't really do a lot with. So one of the things that if you're using Google Analytics 4, there's a built-in scroll depth metric, which you might already be using, but that only measures 90% scroll and that might be too far for a lot of people.

What I would recommend is, if you're not using GA4 yet or if you're still using just Universal, even if you are using 4, make sure you're also measuring at least 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%. You can also measure 90%. You can also measure 10%. I've seen lots of different ways. You can measure 1%. It seems a little much, but you can do that too.

What you're looking for there is the idea of setting individual triggers for each of these scroll depths, because what you want to know is when that 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% is hit, but you don't just want to save them as events in Google Analytics, because there isn't a lot you can do with that in terms of math. What you want to do is you want to set each scroll depth as a custom metric.

If you aren't familiar with custom metrics, in Google Analytics there are dimensions and there are metrics. So a dimension is something like the city that people were from or the page that they were visiting. A metric is the number of page views or users that happened. So, in this case, it's the number of times that somebody viewed a page versus the number of times that people went 25% of the way down the page or 50% or 75%.

When you save those as custom metrics, then you can do some math to figure out what the average scroll depth is, for example, and that's a really nice way to figure out if people are actually looking at your stuff or if they are interested, or maybe there's a really interesting CTA that's driving them away, but then they're not seeing something even cooler further down, or maybe the page looks like it ends, so they're not going any further. There are lots of interesting things you can figure out from that. 

2. Was an important CTA viewed? 

The next thing is: Was an important CTA actually viewed? So I think this is a metric that not a lot of people really think about. You sprinkle CTAs all over your site, but you don't know if anyone is actually looking at them. A page view tells you nothing, because a page view is just I opened up the page and I might have done it accidentally.

Maybe I hit back right away. It's still a page view. I could have the tab open in my browser forever. Maybe I don't want to get rid of it yet. That's a page view too. It doesn't mean they actually saw anything useful or did anything with that information. So one of the things you can do in Google Tag Manager is you can create something called an element visibility trigger.

An element visibility trigger is basically what it sounds like. Was the element visible? So let's say, for example, you want to record each call to action, and each call to action is in a specific div called CTA, for example. So in Google Tag Manager, you would set up an element visibility trigger, and you would say every time the CTA is visible I want you to record an event, and then you would know how many times people actually saw that CTA.

Another example we've done for this is sometimes clients will have forms that are only open if you click a button, and so then we would record how many times people actually clicked that button to open the form, because your conversion rate, if you're just looking at page views, isn't really accurate. It's not actually seeing the form itself. So that way you're getting a much better sense of how many people are actually viewing the form and how many people are actually filling out the form, and that can also help you make some good user behavior decisions with regards to your website.

3. Form engagement

Now, moving on to form engagement, some other stuff that I think you should be measuring is people, how they engage with forms, because, let's be honest, that required thing, it sucks. I know a lot of people are like, "Well, not all the fields are required. Look at this huge form that we have, but only 6 fields of the 18 are required." That's still not a great experience.

We've had forms for a long time now. Not a lot of people still know that the little star means required. They think they have to fill everything out. It seems intimidating. They walk away. I think it's pretty well-accepted knowledge by now, but I also think a lot of people are like, "Oh, but we have to have this big form for reasons." So what you want to know is how people are engaging with that form.

Again, in Google Tag Manager, there is a piece of JavaScript you can run that will record when people enter a form field and then did they fill it out or did they skip it, as in they just clicked into it and they clicked out of it. So I'm going to link in the transcript for this to a JavaScript recipe, made by the company Bounteous, that you can put into Google Tag Manager to record this information.

I find it really useful, particularly when you're in that situation where you're saying to a client or your team, "I think we have too many fields in this form." They're like, "No, everybody uses them." You're like, "Do they?" Now you'll know through this engagement trigger. 

4. Google Translate usage

Something else that I like to check too is Google Translate usage, because again maybe your site is just in English, but you maybe are wondering, "Is it worth translating our site into Spanish or French?"

There are more languages than English in the world. So one of the things you can check is if people are using Google Translate to view your website. Again, in the transcript, I will link to a recipe for Google Tag Manager to actually check if people are using Google Translate to view your site, which is really interesting and frankly pretty eye-opening for clients a lot of the time. So I recommend using that as well. 

5. Accessibility tool use

Then accessibility tool use. Accessibility is a conversation that I think every company should be having with regards to their website, because people use assistive devices to manage their website usage and how they're actually engaging with websites. Not a lot of websites really make accessible experiences unfortunately. So one of the tools that we use is called Monsido Page Assist.

If you go to our website at kickpoint.ca, you'll see this little widget down in the corner, and then if you click that, then we record that, yes, somebody actually engaged with this. Then we can see what percentage of people on our site are using that widget in order to make their experience better, and then we know maybe we need to improve something or maybe this is just them changing the fonts or whatever it might be.

So that's another really good thing that you might want to measure when you take a look at your website. 

Ways to improve website engagement

So I've given you some ideas of stuff you can measure. Now, how are ways that you can improve just generally with this data or overall in terms of your website? So this is this section over here, the ways to improve section. 

1. Tie metrics to your revenue and conversion goals

So the first thing obviously, and I always talk about this in every talk, is you really need to make sure to tie these metrics to your revenue goals.

I think that is just one of the biggest mistakes that people make, when reporting in Analytics or really anything, is you're not tying it to anything. You're measuring for the sake of measuring, but you're not saying what the impact of this is. So, for example, visitors who see this call to action are 90% more likely to convert than people who don't. Being able to measure that and being able to say that stat with confidence, maybe not that stat specifically, but a stat, when thing A happens, we make more money, that is how you get changes done, and that's one of the best ways to communicate this.

So if you can take any of this measurement stuff and communicate it in a way that really gets it across to whoever is the decision-maker, if it isn't you, that if you make this change, you're going to make more money, hit your goals, get to your revenue goals faster, that is a really easy way to make sure that this stuff happens. 

2. Record the full referrer path

Next thing, one of the things that I think, and again I'll link in the transcript to this — it's a lot of JavaScript and stuff, so I don't necessarily want to write JavaScript out on my whiteboard here — is recording the full referrer path.

Now you might know that in Google Analytics there is a dimension called referrer path, but it isn't necessarily useful. The full referrer path is something that's available in the browser a lot of the time, but it isn't something that is captured by default in Google Analytics. By capturing that full referrer path, you can get a little bit more information about exactly where people are coming from.

I find that that is also really helpful information because it can help you sort of segment out a little bit better and say it isn't just people from say Reddit who are coming to the site. It's people coming from Reddit from this specific subreddit, and those are the people buying our stuff. That is additional information that you didn't necessarily have available to you. So that, I call it the "complete referrer," is a nice custom dimension to add into your Google Analytics implementation to just get that little bit more information to help you make better decisions and figure out ways to improve.

3. Use a ?subscriber=yes parameter

Then the third thing, this is like a personal pet peeve of mine. If I'm already on your newsletter, don't show me a giant pop-up asking me to sign up for your newsletter when I click a link in your newsletter to get to your website. People think, "Well, I don't know how to do this." So here's how you do it. You can add a parameter to your URLs. It's like ?subscriber=yes, for example.

Then when you deliver that popover CTA, don't deliver it if that parameter exists in the URL that the person is viewing. That means they're already on the list. You can show them something saying, "Thank you for being a subscriber." It might be a little bit creepy, because people may not know how you know that they're a subscriber. But that's one of the ways that you can just generally improve things for your user experience.

So only show the CTA to the people who could conceivably convert, because otherwise you're just wasting bandwidth. I'm already on your mailing list. Stop trying to sell me. You already sold me. So I would really recommend adding this parameter. You can think about it for others CTAs as well. So, for example, if someone comes to the website via a link in an invoice or a receipt, like they bought something, then don't try to sell them the thing that they just bought.

There are lots of things you can do with Google Tag Manager and reading different parameter outputs in URLs and then making decisions based on what's shown or not shown based on what's in those URLs. That's again an easy way to improve things without necessarily having to measure a lot of engagement. It's just using the tools that you already have access to in order to make the user experience better for the people coming to your website.

Conclusion

So hopefully some of this measurement stuff, the ways to measure and the ways to improve, will help you build a better website experience. Maybe you still do need a new website. Maybe the website you have is difficult to manage and it's really expensive, or it's a big old flaming pile of trash. Who knows what could be wrong with it? But don't throw it out just yet.

If you're not sure, measure some stuff first and then make a call whether or not it's time to do your website. Thank you.

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A great way for B2B companies to fill this gap is by creating pillar pages. To help get you started, in today's Whiteboard Friday, guest host Carly Schoonhoven of Obility walks you through a simple strategy for employing pillar pages on your website. Enjoy! 

Video Transcription

Hello and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Carly Schoonhoven, and I'm a senior SEO manager here at Obility. We're a digital marketing agency focused on B2B in beautiful Portland, Oregon.

Now one of the biggest struggles I find that B2B companies have, when working on a content strategy, is how to create content that's able to effectively rank for those top-of-funnel, higher search volume, more conversational queries. A lot of times B2B companies are really focused on mid-funnel. They've got great e-books, lots of good data content, but they tend to neglect the top-of-the-funnel content.

However, that type of content is so important because it allows for your potential customers to perform self-discovery and really learn more about your brand, learn more about the industry you're in before they're ready to take a more meaningful step, like filling out a form or requesting a demo. So one great content strategy for a B2B company is creating a pillar page.

What are pillar pages? 

Pillar pages, you might have heard them referred to as hub and spoke content or umbrella content, but whatever you want to call it, it's essentially the same thing. So the idea is that you start with your pillar page. So this is one large piece of content that's really optimized for one very broad topic that's really relevant to your business.

Then it internally links out to your cluster pages, which are targeted at those longer tail, secondary keywords and really well-optimized to answer the questions that your customers may have. It's so important that you're linking back from the cluster pages to the pillar page and from the pillar page out to your clusters.

Again, this has multiple benefits. One that your customers are able to navigate to this content and get their questions answered themselves. Then, at the same time, it's great for SEO because it's so easy for Google to tell what this content is about since it's all internally linked to each other and it's all focused on one specific topic. So if this sounds like something for you, I'm going to walk you through step by step how to go about creating a pillar content strategy.

1. Pick a topic

So Step 1, of course, is you have to pick a topic. So there are a couple things you want to keep in mind when you're doing this, one of which is that you want it to be broad but not too broad. So obviously it has to be somewhat broad because you need to be able to find enough secondary keywords that also have search volume that it's worth your time putting the work in.

But if it's too broad, it's going to be really difficult to create one piece of content that covers everything you need to cover in this content. So, for example, a pillar page about SEO as a whole, that might be a little bit too broad. There's a lot of stuff you're going to have to cover, and it's going to be really difficult to rank for a lot of those keywords. But something like SEO content strategy, that's a little bit more focused, there's still a lot of potential there.

You can talk about ideating content for B2B. You can talk about on-site optimization. So something that is definitely broad, has lots of keywords, but not so broad you're biting off more than you can chew. 

2. Keyword research

So speaking of keywords, obviously you have to do keyword research. This is SEO.

It's so important. So you can start with that one topic, but then you really need to expand your list of keywords to find all of those secondary keywords that you want to include. Moz's Keyword Explorer is a great tool for this because you're able to put in your topic and then it will generate all of those related keywords for you, along with things like search volume and keyword difficulty. I also love that you can filter down to just the keywords that are questions, because again it's so important to make sure that you're answering your potential customers' questions in your content. 

3. Look at your existing content

So you've got your list, you've got your keywords, but don't forget to look at your existing content as well. So you're going to be putting a lot of work in. Find ways you can save yourself time. Maybe you'll have some content buried in your blog or buried in your resource section that you can repurpose and include as part of this strategy. Definitely make sure you're not neglecting content that you already have. 

4. Plan URL structure

Up next, planning your structure. So you're going to be creating a great new piece of content. You need to know where you're going to put it. You can just link to it in your top navigation, or maybe you just want to feature it on your resources section. But one thing to keep in mind is that you want to make sure that your cluster pages are in a subfolder of your pillar page.

5. Start writing (clusters first)

All right, Step 5, start writing. You actually get to start putting these pieces together. So ultimately, what do you want them to look like? Now ideally, for your main pillar page, what you want is to have sort of just an introductory section talking about the topic area as a whole, but really this page serves as that hub that links out to all of your other secondary pages.

So you want to make it really easy to navigate. You want to make sure you're including lots of mid-funnel CTAs within that content, because ultimately this is that hub piece of content where everyone is going to navigate to from those cluster pages. So start with your intro and then have a nice table of contents and then a little header for each of your cluster pages with a little bit of a summary, but then that ultimately links out to those cluster pages so that someone can visit that page if they really want to learn more and get more in depth into that topic.

As far as your cluster pages, this is where you really want to get in depth, spend a lot of time putting your content together and make sure you're covering it. I think that the question-and-answer format is a really good approach for this type of content because it really helps you optimize for featured snippets or for the people also ask feature. So you want to make sure that you're putting your question in the header, and then summarize the answer to that question in about 40 to 50 words if you're optimizing for a snippet.

6. Promotion

All right. Number 6 is promotion. So you've created your content. You've figured out where to put it. You've published it. You did all of this work. You want to make sure people see it.

So promote it internally. Make sure you're sharing it on your social media. Share it with your team. But then also flex your link building skills and reach out to anyone in your industry who you think would benefit from this content or be willing to share it as well. 

7. Measure everything

Number 7 is measure. So, of course, you put all this work in and you want to see how does it do. Did it perform well?

So you have your list of keywords, so use Moz to track your keyword rankings. Take a look to see if there are new keywords you weren't expecting to rank for. Obviously, keywords are super important. Also, look at Google Analytics. Check out your landing page report. Are you getting organic traffic? Are people actually converting?

See what you can learn from that, if you need to make tweaks, swap out your CTAs. Just make sure you're measuring and you don't let this content go to waste. You're bringing in this new traffic. Make sure you're converting those people. 

8. Repeat

Step 8, repeat. So once you have the process down, do it again. Find other topics that are really relevant to your industry you can create a pillar page about.

When you do, tell me about it. I really hope that this was helpful for you, and I hope you go out there and create some pillar content. So thank you so much.

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Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. I am Amanda Milligan, the Growth Director at Fractl, and today I want to talk to you about how to make newsworthy content. My career has been in marketing and communications, but my degree was in journalism. So this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. 

So my MozCon presentation is actually on how to perform a link gap analysis, which basically means how to find out who your competitors are getting links from and then how to brainstorm how you can get similar links. Well, when it comes to actually building those links, newsworthy content is the best way to do that. I'm going to talk to you about some of the elements that are really important in creating that type of content. 

Data

So first, data. Data is really crucial to this process because most of us do not have breaking news operations or full news rooms for our brand. We are not actual reporters.

This is not our full-time job. So we can't be just reporting on the newest thing that's happening. We almost have to create our own news by digging in and investigating topics that are interesting to us. 

Internal data

So original data is a great way to do that. You can start with seeing if you actually have any internal data at your company that would be of interest to relevant publications. A lot of companies overlook this aspect.

Obviously, you have to have permission to do so. But you might have information that would be really interesting. Or maybe you have an email list or an audience that's pretty active that you can survey or poll and find out some information that would be appealing to people. So that's a good place to start. 

Public data

Otherwise, there's public data available. The government alone has tons and tons of publicly available datasets that you can use and even combine different datasets to see some really interesting things.

An example of a combination of that is for our client Porch.com. We looked at information about how much different household chores, no, not chores, but home improvement projects cost, and then we surveyed people to ask how often they did those home improvement projects. We were able to see the cost of home improvement over many years of time. So that's an example of using two different datasets combining for new insights.

Surveys

Thirdly, surveys and other types of data collection are great if you don't have the answer and data yet. Maybe you can run a survey. Maybe you can scrape social media. Maybe there is another way. We've done germ swabbing. Anything you can do to collect data. Basically a good way to think about it is ask yourself a question that's interesting to you and would be interesting to your audience or think about what's interesting to your audience.

If there is no answer, ask yourself how you can find it. Then this piece will make the rest of the process exponentially easier, because when you go to pitch a reporter, you're going to say, "I have exclusive research, new data that no one else has really talked about before." That is hugely appealing to the media. 

Emotion

The second component here is emotion. Is what you're working on going to make somebody feel something? Now I actually have a sample headline down here from TechRepublic. This is actual coverage from a piece that we pitched.

It says: "Your Zoom background may not make you look as professional as you think." Now you read that, and you're like, "Wait. What?" We're all on Zoom. That's not good. So that has an element of surprise to it, right? The reason why I say to think about this, it comes sometimes inherently, when you're coming up with ideas, we all tend to think of things that are going to have some kind of an emotional resonance.

But if you think about this stuff from the beginning and you imagine maybe what a headline might look like or what's going to be the interesting takeaway from something, you can really focus in on the interesting parts of a project. You can also see here -- so this headline is from a survey that we did I believe — more original data. So they're able to say some new claim that they weren't able to say before.

So emotion. If you are not really sure which direction to go in, try surprise, focus on surprise, because a lot of journalists like to focus on things that are new and unexpected. Also we did a study many years ago, I think 2013, where we looked at all the viral images of that year, and we polled people on what emotions were most present.

Surprise was the most present one. So it's actually very prevalent in viral content. But we're not even talking about viral content. We're talking about anything that does well in digital PR. Surprise is a really great way to do that. So as you're creating a piece of content or a project, ask yourself as you're doing it, like what do you expect and did the results come back that way.

Obviously, you have to work with what the data gives you. But if you found it surprising, odds are someone else is going to find it surprising. Make sure that's highlighted in the results. When you pitch it, make sure it's highlighted in the body of your pitch. 

Impact

Thirdly, impact. Impact, it has some other names. Sometimes we talk about newsworthiness.

Prominence is one of them. Basically, is it actually affecting the audience? When a journalist decides what to write, they want to know: Does this impact my readers? How does this affect their daily lives? So if you look back at this headline example, TechRepublic, their audience most likely has been on a lot of Zoom calls in the last year or so.

So they know, when they saw this pitch, this is going to be interesting to a lot of people. This is more in the general audience bucket. You can do projects and I have another video about tangential content, which you can check out, that's along these lines. But you can think, "What impacts a wide audience?" If you're trying to get national news coverage or appeal to a pretty general audience, you have to think about what's going to impact a lot of folks.

What do we have in common? What is something that we're going to be able to all relate to? Or you can still apply this in a niche perspective. You don't always have to appeal everybody. But if you're going to do that, then you need to focus in and think, "How is this going to impact that specific person that I have in mind, that set of people?" If you're able to do that and explain in your pitch to the journalists I think this insight is interesting because XYZ, and they see that it has an impact for their audience, they're going to be more likely to cover it, because it's in their interest not only to get their audience to click on these stories but to inform them about things that they might be interested about.

In this case, it's that they might not look as professional as they thought. I put this headline here because it's an example of all three of these things. We often like to think we have our digital PR perspective involved from the very beginning of creating content. You don't want to have them separate. You don't want to create something and then have somebody pitch it later and have no idea kind of where it came from or why you went that direction.

Think about: What is it that we're trying to get out of this? What's the question we're trying to answer? If you have a thesis, is it correct? Are you proving it wrong? Those are going to be the interesting bits that are going to lead you to getting the coverage like this. So I went through a lot very quickly. The whole point of this is if you come up with something newsworthy, if it's appealing to a certain group of people, if it's original information, and it has a lot of emotional resonance, you're going to be able to pitch that to the media and hopefully get media coverage for your brand, which not only gets you brand awareness and a very authoritative positioning, because your brand is being mentioned alongside original research that your brand did, but also incredible backlinks, which again ties into the whole backlink analysis side of things.

SEOs are really always looking for ways to get excellent links, but you have to earn those links and you have to earn it through creating newsworthy content. So thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you taking the time and best of luck out there.

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