The SEO Elevator Pitch - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

What is it you do again?

It's a question every SEO has had to answer at some point, whether to your family members over the holidays or to the developer who will eventually implement your suggestions. If you don't have a solid elevator pitch for describing your job, this is the Whiteboard Friday for you! Learn how to craft a concise, succinct description of life as an SEO without jargon, policing, or acting like a superhero.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey guys, welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and I work here at Moz. Today we're going to be talking about creating an SEO elevator pitch, what is it, why we need one, and what kind of prompted this whole idea for an SEO elevator pitch.

So essentially, a couple of weeks ago, I was on Twitter and I saw John Mueller. He tweeted, "Hey, I meet with a lot of developers, and a lot of times they don't really know what SEOs do." He was genuinely asking. He was asking, "Hey, SEO community, how do you describe what you do?" I'm scrolling through, and I'm seeing a lot of different answers, and all of them I'm resonating with.

They're all things that I would probably say myself. But it's just interesting how many different answers there were to the question, "What do SEOs do and what value do they provide?" So I kind of thought to myself, "Why is that? Why do we have so many different explanations for what SEO is and what we do?" So I thought about it, and I thought that it might be a good idea for myself and maybe other SEOs if you don't already have an elevator pitch ready.

What is an SEO elevator pitch?

Now, if you're not familiar with the concept of an elevator pitch, it's basically — I have a definition here — a succinct and persuasive speech that communicates your unique value as an SEO. It's called an elevator pitch essentially because it should take about the length of time it takes to ride the elevator with someone. So you want to be able to quickly and concisely answer someone's question when they ask you, "Oh, SEO, what is that?I think I've heard of that before. What do you do?"

Why is this so hard?

So let's dive right in. So I mentioned, in the beginning, how there are so many different answers to this "what do you say you do here" type question. I think it's hard to kind of come up with a concise explanation for a few different reasons. So I wanted to dive into that a little bit first.

1. Lots of specialties within SEO

So number one, there are lots of specialties within SEO.

As the industry has advanced over the last two plus decades, it has become very diverse, and there are lots of different facets in SEO. I found myself on quite a rabbit trail. I was on LinkedIn and I was kind of browsing SEO job descriptions. I wanted to see basically: What is it that people are looking for in an SEO?

How do they describe it? What are the characteristics? So basically, I found a lot of different things, but I found a few themes that emerged. So there are your content-focused SEOs, and those are people that are your keyword research aficionados. There are the people that write search engine optimized content to drive traffic to your website. You have your link builders, people that focus almost exclusively on that.

You have your local SEOs, and you have your analysts. You have your tech SEOs, people that either work on a dev team or closely with a dev team. So I think that's okay though. There are lots of different facets within SEO, and I think that's awesome. That's, to me, a sign of maturity in our industry. So when there are a lot of different specialties within SEO, I think it's right and good for all of our elevator pitches to differ.

So if you have a specialty within SEO, it can be different. It should kind of cater toward the unique brand of SEO that you do, and that's okay.

2. Different audiences

Number two, there are different audiences. We're not always going to be talking to the same kind of person. So maybe you're talking to your boss or a client. To me, those are more revenue-focused conversations.

They want to know: What's the value of what you do? How does it affect my bottom line? How does it help me run my business and stay afloat and stay profitable? If you're talking to a developer, that's going to be a slightly different conversation. So I think it's okay if we kind of tweak our elevator pitch to make it a little bit more palatable for the people that we're talking to.

3. Algorithm maturity

Three, why this is hard is there's been, obviously, a lot of changes all the time in the algorithm, and as it matures, it's going to look like the SEO's job is completely different than last year just because the algorithm keeps maturing and it looks like our jobs are changing all the time. So I think that's a reality that we have to live with, but I still think it's important, even though things are changing all the time, to have a baseline kind of pitch that we give people when they ask us what it is we do.

So that's why it's hard. That's what your elevator pitch is.

My elevator pitch: SEO is marketing, with search engines

Then, by way of example, I thought I'd just give you my SEO elevator pitch. Maybe it will spark your creativity. Maybe it will give you some ideas. Maybe you already have one, and that's okay. But the point is not to use mine.

The point is essentially to kind of take you through what mine looks like, hopefully get your creative juices flowing, and you can create your own. So let's dive right into my pitch.

So my pitch is SEO is marketing, just with search engines. So we have the funnel here — awareness, consideration, and decision.

Awareness: Rank and attract clicks for informational queries.

First of all, I think it's important to note that SEO can help you rank and attract clicks for informational queries.

Consideration: Rank and attract clicks for evaluation queries.

So when your audience is searching for information, they want to solve their pain points, they're not ready to buy, they're just searching, we're meeting them there with content that brings them to the site, informs them, and now they're familiar with our brand. Those are great assisted conversions. Rank and attract clicks for evaluation queries. When your audience is starting to compare their options, you want to be there. You want to meet them there, and we can do that with SEO.

Decision: Rank, attract clicks, and promote conversion for bottom-funnel queries

At the decision phase, you can rank and attract clicks and kind of promote conversions for bottom of funnel queries. When people are in their "I want to buy" stage, SEO can meet them there. So I think it's important to realize that SEO isn't kind of like a cost center and not a profit center. It's not like a bottom of funnel thing. I've heard that in a lot of places, and I think it's just important to kind of draw attention to the fact that SEO is integrated throughout your marketing funnel. It's not relegated to one stage or another.

But how?

We talked about rank and attract clicks and promote conversions. But how do we do that? That's the what it does.

But how do we do it? So this is how I explain it. I think really, for me, there are two sides to the SEO's coin. We have driving, and we have supporting.

1. Driving

So on the driving side, I would say something like this. When someone searches a phrase or a keyword in Google, I make sure the business' website shows up in the non-ad results. That's important because a lot of people are like, "Oh, do you bid on keywords?"

We're like, "No, no, that's PPC." So I always just throw in "non-ad" because people understand that. So I do that through content that answers people's questions, links that help search engines find my content and show signs of authority and popularity of my content, and accessibility. So that's kind of your technical foundation.

You're making sure that your website is crawlable and it that it's index the way that you want it to be indexed. When people get there, it works. It works on mobile and on desktop. It's fast. So I think these are really the three big pillars of driving SEO — content, links, and making sure your website is technically sound. So that's how I describe the driving, the proactive side of SEO.

2. Supporting

Then two, we have supporting, and I think this is kind of an underrated or maybe it's often seen as kind of an interruption to our jobs.

But I think it's important to actually call it what it is. It's a big part of what we do. So I think we should embrace it as SEOs.

A. Be the Google Magic 8-ball

For one, we can serve as the Google Magic 8-Ball. When people come to us in our organization and they say, "Hey, I'm going to make this change, or I'm thinking about making this change.Is this going to be good or bad for SEO?"

I think it's great that people are asking that question. Always be available and always make yourself ready to answer those types of questions for people. So I think on the reactionary side we can be that kind of person that helps guide people and understand what is going to affect your organic search presence.

B. Assist marketing

Two, we can assist marketing. So on this side of the coin, we're driving.

We can drive our own marketing strategies. As SEOs, we can see how SEO can drive all phases of the funnel. But I think it's important to note that we're not the only people in our organization. Often SEOs maybe they don't even live in the marketing department. Maybe they do and they report to a marketing lead. There are other initiatives that your marketing lead could be investigating.

Maybe they say, "Hey, we've just done some market research, and here's this plan." It could be our job as SEOs to take that plan, take that strategy and translate it into something digital. I think that's a really important value that SEOs can add. We can actually assist marketing as well as drive our own efforts.

C. Fix mistakes

Then number three here, I know this is another one that kind of makes people cringe, but we are here to fix mistakes when they happen and train people so that they don't happen again. So maybe we come in on a Monday morning and we're ready to face the week, and we see that traffic has taken a nosedive or something. We go, "Oh, no," and we dive in.

We try to see what happened. But I think that's really important. It's our job or it's part of our job to kind of dive in, diagnose what happened, and not only that but support and be there to help fix it or guide the fixes, and then train and educate and make sure that people know what it is that happened and how it shouldn't happen again.

You're there to help train them and guide them. I think that's another really important way that we can support as SEOs. So that's essentially how I describe it.

3 tips for coming up with your own pitch

Before I go, I just wanted to mention some tips when you're coming up with your own SEO elevator pitch. I think it's really important to just kind of stay away from certain language when you're crafting your own "this is what I do" speech.

So the three tips I have are:

1. Stay away from jargon.

If you're giving an SEO elevator pitch, it's to people that don't know what SEO is. So try to avoid jargon. I know it's really easy as SEOs. I find myself doing it all the time. There are things that I don't think are jargon.

But then I take a couple steps back and I realize, oh yeah, that's not layman's terms. So stay away from jargon if at all possible. You're not going to benefit anyone by confusing them.

2. Avoid policing.

It can be easy as SEOs I've found and I've found myself in this trap a couple of times where we kind of act as these traffic cops that are waiting around the corner, and when people make a mistake, we're there to wag our finger at them.

So avoid any language that makes it sound like the SEOs are just the police waiting to kind of punish people for wrongdoing. We are there to help fix mistakes, but it's in a guiding and educating and supporting, kind of collaborative manner and not like a policing type of manner. Number three, I would say is kind of similar, but a little different.

3. Avoid Supermanning.

I call this Supermanning because it's the type of language that makes it sound like SEOs are here to swoop in and save the day when something goes wrong. We do. We're superheroes a lot of times. There are things that happen and thank goodness there was an SEO there to help diagnose and fix that.

But I would avoid any kind of pitch that makes it sound like your entire job is just to kind of save people. There are other people in your organization that are super smart and talented at what they do. They probably wouldn't like it if you made it sound like you were there to help them all the time. So I just think that's important to keep in mind. Don't make it seem like you're the police waiting to wag your finger at them or you're the superhero that needs to save everyone from their mistakes.

So yeah, that's my SEO elevator pitch. That's why I think it's important to have one. If you've kind of crafted your own SEO elevator pitch, I would love to hear it, and I'm sure it would be great for other SEOs to hear it as well. It's great to information share. So drop that in the comments if you feel comfortable doing that. If you don't have one, hopefully this helps. So yeah, that's it for this week's Whiteboard Friday, and come back again next week for another one.

Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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

The SEO Elevator Pitch - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

What is it you do again?

It's a question every SEO has had to answer at some point, whether to your family members over the holidays or to the developer who will eventually implement your suggestions. If you don't have a solid elevator pitch for describing your job, this is the Whiteboard Friday for you! Learn how to craft a concise, succinct description of life as an SEO without jargon, policing, or acting like a superhero.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey guys, welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and I work here at Moz. Today we're going to be talking about creating an SEO elevator pitch, what is it, why we need one, and what kind of prompted this whole idea for an SEO elevator pitch.

So essentially, a couple of weeks ago, I was on Twitter and I saw John Mueller. He tweeted, "Hey, I meet with a lot of developers, and a lot of times they don't really know what SEOs do." He was genuinely asking. He was asking, "Hey, SEO community, how do you describe what you do?" I'm scrolling through, and I'm seeing a lot of different answers, and all of them I'm resonating with.

They're all things that I would probably say myself. But it's just interesting how many different answers there were to the question, "What do SEOs do and what value do they provide?" So I kind of thought to myself, "Why is that? Why do we have so many different explanations for what SEO is and what we do?" So I thought about it, and I thought that it might be a good idea for myself and maybe other SEOs if you don't already have an elevator pitch ready.

What is an SEO elevator pitch?

Now, if you're not familiar with the concept of an elevator pitch, it's basically — I have a definition here — a succinct and persuasive speech that communicates your unique value as an SEO. It's called an elevator pitch essentially because it should take about the length of time it takes to ride the elevator with someone. So you want to be able to quickly and concisely answer someone's question when they ask you, "Oh, SEO, what is that?I think I've heard of that before. What do you do?"

Why is this so hard?

So let's dive right in. So I mentioned, in the beginning, how there are so many different answers to this "what do you say you do here" type question. I think it's hard to kind of come up with a concise explanation for a few different reasons. So I wanted to dive into that a little bit first.

1. Lots of specialties within SEO

So number one, there are lots of specialties within SEO.

As the industry has advanced over the last two plus decades, it has become very diverse, and there are lots of different facets in SEO. I found myself on quite a rabbit trail. I was on LinkedIn and I was kind of browsing SEO job descriptions. I wanted to see basically: What is it that people are looking for in an SEO?

How do they describe it? What are the characteristics? So basically, I found a lot of different things, but I found a few themes that emerged. So there are your content-focused SEOs, and those are people that are your keyword research aficionados. There are the people that write search engine optimized content to drive traffic to your website. You have your link builders, people that focus almost exclusively on that.

You have your local SEOs, and you have your analysts. You have your tech SEOs, people that either work on a dev team or closely with a dev team. So I think that's okay though. There are lots of different facets within SEO, and I think that's awesome. That's, to me, a sign of maturity in our industry. So when there are a lot of different specialties within SEO, I think it's right and good for all of our elevator pitches to differ.

So if you have a specialty within SEO, it can be different. It should kind of cater toward the unique brand of SEO that you do, and that's okay.

2. Different audiences

Number two, there are different audiences. We're not always going to be talking to the same kind of person. So maybe you're talking to your boss or a client. To me, those are more revenue-focused conversations.

They want to know: What's the value of what you do? How does it affect my bottom line? How does it help me run my business and stay afloat and stay profitable? If you're talking to a developer, that's going to be a slightly different conversation. So I think it's okay if we kind of tweak our elevator pitch to make it a little bit more palatable for the people that we're talking to.

3. Algorithm maturity

Three, why this is hard is there's been, obviously, a lot of changes all the time in the algorithm, and as it matures, it's going to look like the SEO's job is completely different than last year just because the algorithm keeps maturing and it looks like our jobs are changing all the time. So I think that's a reality that we have to live with, but I still think it's important, even though things are changing all the time, to have a baseline kind of pitch that we give people when they ask us what it is we do.

So that's why it's hard. That's what your elevator pitch is.

My elevator pitch: SEO is marketing, with search engines

Then, by way of example, I thought I'd just give you my SEO elevator pitch. Maybe it will spark your creativity. Maybe it will give you some ideas. Maybe you already have one, and that's okay. But the point is not to use mine.

The point is essentially to kind of take you through what mine looks like, hopefully get your creative juices flowing, and you can create your own. So let's dive right into my pitch.

So my pitch is SEO is marketing, just with search engines. So we have the funnel here — awareness, consideration, and decision.

Awareness: Rank and attract clicks for informational queries.

First of all, I think it's important to note that SEO can help you rank and attract clicks for informational queries.

Consideration: Rank and attract clicks for evaluation queries.

So when your audience is searching for information, they want to solve their pain points, they're not ready to buy, they're just searching, we're meeting them there with content that brings them to the site, informs them, and now they're familiar with our brand. Those are great assisted conversions. Rank and attract clicks for evaluation queries. When your audience is starting to compare their options, you want to be there. You want to meet them there, and we can do that with SEO.

Decision: Rank, attract clicks, and promote conversion for bottom-funnel queries

At the decision phase, you can rank and attract clicks and kind of promote conversions for bottom of funnel queries. When people are in their "I want to buy" stage, SEO can meet them there. So I think it's important to realize that SEO isn't kind of like a cost center and not a profit center. It's not like a bottom of funnel thing. I've heard that in a lot of places, and I think it's just important to kind of draw attention to the fact that SEO is integrated throughout your marketing funnel. It's not relegated to one stage or another.

But how?

We talked about rank and attract clicks and promote conversions. But how do we do that? That's the what it does.

But how do we do it? So this is how I explain it. I think really, for me, there are two sides to the SEO's coin. We have driving, and we have supporting.

1. Driving

So on the driving side, I would say something like this. When someone searches a phrase or a keyword in Google, I make sure the business' website shows up in the non-ad results. That's important because a lot of people are like, "Oh, do you bid on keywords?"

We're like, "No, no, that's PPC." So I always just throw in "non-ad" because people understand that. So I do that through content that answers people's questions, links that help search engines find my content and show signs of authority and popularity of my content, and accessibility. So that's kind of your technical foundation.

You're making sure that your website is crawlable and it that it's index the way that you want it to be indexed. When people get there, it works. It works on mobile and on desktop. It's fast. So I think these are really the three big pillars of driving SEO — content, links, and making sure your website is technically sound. So that's how I describe the driving, the proactive side of SEO.

2. Supporting

Then two, we have supporting, and I think this is kind of an underrated or maybe it's often seen as kind of an interruption to our jobs.

But I think it's important to actually call it what it is. It's a big part of what we do. So I think we should embrace it as SEOs.

A. Be the Google Magic 8-ball

For one, we can serve as the Google Magic 8-Ball. When people come to us in our organization and they say, "Hey, I'm going to make this change, or I'm thinking about making this change.Is this going to be good or bad for SEO?"

I think it's great that people are asking that question. Always be available and always make yourself ready to answer those types of questions for people. So I think on the reactionary side we can be that kind of person that helps guide people and understand what is going to affect your organic search presence.

B. Assist marketing

Two, we can assist marketing. So on this side of the coin, we're driving.

We can drive our own marketing strategies. As SEOs, we can see how SEO can drive all phases of the funnel. But I think it's important to note that we're not the only people in our organization. Often SEOs maybe they don't even live in the marketing department. Maybe they do and they report to a marketing lead. There are other initiatives that your marketing lead could be investigating.

Maybe they say, "Hey, we've just done some market research, and here's this plan." It could be our job as SEOs to take that plan, take that strategy and translate it into something digital. I think that's a really important value that SEOs can add. We can actually assist marketing as well as drive our own efforts.

C. Fix mistakes

Then number three here, I know this is another one that kind of makes people cringe, but we are here to fix mistakes when they happen and train people so that they don't happen again. So maybe we come in on a Monday morning and we're ready to face the week, and we see that traffic has taken a nosedive or something. We go, "Oh, no," and we dive in.

We try to see what happened. But I think that's really important. It's our job or it's part of our job to kind of dive in, diagnose what happened, and not only that but support and be there to help fix it or guide the fixes, and then train and educate and make sure that people know what it is that happened and how it shouldn't happen again.

You're there to help train them and guide them. I think that's another really important way that we can support as SEOs. So that's essentially how I describe it.

3 tips for coming up with your own pitch

Before I go, I just wanted to mention some tips when you're coming up with your own SEO elevator pitch. I think it's really important to just kind of stay away from certain language when you're crafting your own "this is what I do" speech.

So the three tips I have are:

1. Stay away from jargon.

If you're giving an SEO elevator pitch, it's to people that don't know what SEO is. So try to avoid jargon. I know it's really easy as SEOs. I find myself doing it all the time. There are things that I don't think are jargon.

But then I take a couple steps back and I realize, oh yeah, that's not layman's terms. So stay away from jargon if at all possible. You're not going to benefit anyone by confusing them.

2. Avoid policing.

It can be easy as SEOs I've found and I've found myself in this trap a couple of times where we kind of act as these traffic cops that are waiting around the corner, and when people make a mistake, we're there to wag our finger at them.

So avoid any language that makes it sound like the SEOs are just the police waiting to kind of punish people for wrongdoing. We are there to help fix mistakes, but it's in a guiding and educating and supporting, kind of collaborative manner and not like a policing type of manner. Number three, I would say is kind of similar, but a little different.

3. Avoid Supermanning.

I call this Supermanning because it's the type of language that makes it sound like SEOs are here to swoop in and save the day when something goes wrong. We do. We're superheroes a lot of times. There are things that happen and thank goodness there was an SEO there to help diagnose and fix that.

But I would avoid any kind of pitch that makes it sound like your entire job is just to kind of save people. There are other people in your organization that are super smart and talented at what they do. They probably wouldn't like it if you made it sound like you were there to help them all the time. So I just think that's important to keep in mind. Don't make it seem like you're the police waiting to wag your finger at them or you're the superhero that needs to save everyone from their mistakes.

So yeah, that's my SEO elevator pitch. That's why I think it's important to have one. If you've kind of crafted your own SEO elevator pitch, I would love to hear it, and I'm sure it would be great for other SEOs to hear it as well. It's great to information share. So drop that in the comments if you feel comfortable doing that. If you don't have one, hopefully this helps. So yeah, that's it for this week's Whiteboard Friday, and come back again next week for another one.

Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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

3 Big Lessons from Interviewing John Mueller at SearchLove London - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by willcritchlow

When you've got one of Google's most helpful and empathetic voices willing to answer your most pressing SEO questions, what do you ask? Will Critchlow recently had the honor of interviewing Google's John Mueller at SearchLove London, and in this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday he shares his best lessons from that session, covering the concept of Domain Authority, the great subdomain versus subfolder debate, and a view into the technical workings of noindex/nofollow.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi, Whiteboard Friday fans. I'm Will Critchlow from Distilled, and I found myself in Seattle, wanted to record another Whiteboard Friday video and talk through some things that I learned recently when I got to sit down with John Mueller from Google at our SearchLove London conference recently.

So I got to interview John on stage, and, as many of you may know, John is a webmaster relations guy at Google and really a point of contact for many of us in the industry when there are technical questions or questions about how Google is treating different things. If you followed some of the stuff that I've written and talked about in the past, you'll know that I've always been a little bit suspicious of some of the official lines that come out of Google and felt like either we don't get the full story or we haven't been able to drill in deep enough and really figure out what's going on.

I was under no illusions that I might be able to completely fix this this in one go, but I did want to grill John on a couple of specific things where I felt like we hadn't maybe asked things clearly enough or got the full story. Today I wanted to run through a few things that I learned when John and I sat down together. A little side note, I found it really fascinating doing this kind of interview. I sat on stage in a kind of journalistic setting. I had never done this before. Maybe I'll do a follow-up Whiteboard Friday one day on things I learned and how to run interviews.

1. Does Google have a "Domain Authority" concept?

But the first thing that I wanted to quiz John about was this domain authority idea. So here we are on Moz. Moz has a proprietary metric called domain authority, DA. I feel like when, as an industry, we've asked Google, and John in particular, about this kind of thing in the past, does Google have a concept of domain authority, it's got bundled up with feeling like, oh, he's had an easy way out of being able to answer and say, "No, no, that's a proprietary Moz metric. We don't have that."

I felt like that had got a bit confusing, because our suspicion is that there is some kind of an authority or a trust metric that Google has and holds at a domain level. We think that's true, but we felt like they had always been able to wriggle out of answering the question. So I said to John, "Okay, I am not asking you do you use Moz's domain authority metric in your ranking factors. Like we know that isn't the case. But do you have something a little bit like it?"

Yes, Google has metrics that map into similar things

John said yes. He said yes, they have metrics that, his exact quote was, "map into similar things."My way of phrasing this was this is stuff that is at the domain level. It's based on things like link authority, and it is something that is used to understand performance or to rank content across an entire domain. John said yes, they have something similar to that.

New content inherits those metrics

They use it in particular when they discover new content on an existing domain. New content, in some sense, can inherit some of the authority from the domain, and this is part of the reason why we figured they must have something like this, because we've seen identical content perform differently on different sites. We know that there's something to this. So yes, John confirmed that until they have some of those metrics developed, when they've seen a bit of content for long enough, and it can have its own link metrics and usage metrics, in the intervening time up until that point it can inherit some of this stuff from the domain.

Not wholly link-based

He did also just confirm that it's not just link-based. This is not just a domain-level PageRank type thing.

2. Subdomains versus subfolders

This led me into the second thing that I really wanted to get out of him, which was — and when I raised this, I got kind of an eye roll, "Are we really going down this rabbit hole" — the subdomain versus subfolder question. You might have seen me talk about this. You might have seen people like Rand talk about this, where we've seen cases and we have case studies of moving blog.example.com to example.com/blog and changing nothing else and getting an uplift.

We know something must be going on, and yet the official line out of Google has for a very long time been: "We don't treat these things differently. There is nothing special about subfolders. We're perfectly happy with subdomains. Do whatever is right for your business." We've had this kind of back-and-forth a few times. The way I put it to John was I said, "We have seen these case studies. How would you explain this?"

They try to figure out what belongs to the site

To his credit, John said, "Yes, we've seen them as well." So he said, yes, Google has also seen these things. He acknowledged this is true. He acknowledged that it happens. The way he explained it connects back into this Domain Authority thing in my mind, which is to say that the way they think about it is: Are these pages on this subdomain part of the same website as things on the main domain?

That's kind of the main question. They try and figure out, as he put it, "what belongs to this site." We all know of sites where subdomains are entirely different sites. If you think about a blogspot.com or a WordPress.com domain, subdomains might be owned and managed by entirely different people, and there would be no reason for that authority to pass across. But what Google is trying to do and is trying to say, "Is this subdomain part of this main site?"

Sometimes this includes subdomains and sometimes not

He said sometimes they determine that it is, and sometimes they determine that it is not. If it is part of the site, in their estimation, then they will treat it as equivalent to a subfolder. This, for me, pretty much closes this loop. I think we understand each other now, which is Google is saying, in these certain circumstances, they will be treated identically, but there are circumstances where it can be treated differently.

My recommendation stays what it's always been, which is 100% if you're starting from the outset, put it on a subfolder. There's no upside to the subdomain. Why would you risk the fact that Google might treat it as a separate site? If it is currently on a subdomain, then it's a little trickier to make that case. I would personally be arguing for the integration and for making that move.

If it's treated as part of the site, a subdomain is equivalent to a subfolder

But unfortunately, but somewhat predictably, I couldn't tie John down to any particular way of telling if this is the case. If your content is currently on a subdomain, there isn't really any way of telling if Google is treating it differently, which is a shame, but it's somewhat predictable. But at least we understand each other now, and I think we've kind of got to the root of the confusion. These case studies are real. This is a real thing. Certainly in certain circumstances moving from the subdomain to the subfolder can improve performance.

3. Noindex's impact on nofollow

The third thing that I want to talk about is a little bit more geeked out and technical, and also, in some sense, it leads to some bigger picture lessons and thinking. A little while ago John kind of caught us out by talking about how if you have a page that you no index and keep it that way for a long time, that Google will eventually treat that equivalently to a no index, no follow.

In the long-run, a noindex page's links effectively become nofollow

In other words, the links off that page, even if you've got it as a no index, follow, the links off that page will be effectively no followed. We found that a little bit confusing and surprising. I mean I certainly felt like I had assumed it didn't work that way simply because they have the no index, follow directive, and the fact that that's a thing seems to suggest that it ought to work that way.

It's been this way for a long time

It wasn't really so much about the specifics of this, but more the like: How did we not know this? How did this come about and so forth? John talked about how, firstly, it has been this way for a long time. I think he was making the point none of you all noticed, so how big a deal can this really be? I put it back to him that this is kind of a subtle thing and very hard to test, very hard to extract out the different confounding factors that might be going on.

I'm not surprised that, as an industry, we missed it. But the point being it's been this way for a long time, and Google's view and certainly John's view was that this hadn't been hidden from us so much as the people who knew this hadn't realized that they needed to tell anyone. The actual engineers working on the search algorithm, they had a curse of knowledge.

The curse of knowledge: engineers didn't realize webmasters had the wrong idea

They knew it worked this way, and they had never realized that webmasters didn't know that or thought any differently. This was one of the things that I was kind of trying to push to John a little more was kind of saying, "More of this, please. Give us more access to the engineers. Give us more insight into their way of thinking. Get them to answer more questions, because then out of that we'll spot the stuff that we can be like, 'Oh, hey, that thing there, that was something I didn't know.' Then we can drill deeper into that."

That led us into a little bit of a conversation about how John operates when he doesn't know the answer, and so there were some bits and pieces that were new to me at least about how this works. John said he himself is generally not attending search quality meetings. The way he works is largely off his knowledge and knowledge base type of content, but he has access to engineers.

They're not dedicated to the webmaster relations operation. He's just going around the organization, finding individual Google engineers to answer these questions. It was somewhat interesting to me at least to find that out. I think hopefully, over time, we can generally push and say, "Let's look for those engineers. John, bring them to the front whenever they want to be visible, because they're able to answer these kinds of questions that might just be that curse of knowledge that they knew this all along and we as marketers hadn't figured out this was how things worked."

That was my quick run-through of some of the things that I learned when I interviewed John. We'll link over to more resources and transcripts and so forth. But it's been a blast. Take care.

• Further reading: Interviewing Google’s John Mueller at SearchLove: domain authority metrics, sub-domains vs. sub-folders and more

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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

3 Big Lessons from Interviewing John Mueller at SearchLove London - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by willcritchlow

When you've got one of Google's most helpful and empathetic voices willing to answer your most pressing SEO questions, what do you ask? Will Critchlow recently had the honor of interviewing Google's John Mueller at SearchLove London, and in this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday he shares his best lessons from that session, covering the concept of Domain Authority, the great subdomain versus subfolder debate, and a view into the technical workings of noindex/nofollow.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi, Whiteboard Friday fans. I'm Will Critchlow from Distilled, and I found myself in Seattle, wanted to record another Whiteboard Friday video and talk through some things that I learned recently when I got to sit down with John Mueller from Google at our SearchLove London conference recently.

So I got to interview John on stage, and, as many of you may know, John is a webmaster relations guy at Google and really a point of contact for many of us in the industry when there are technical questions or questions about how Google is treating different things. If you followed some of the stuff that I've written and talked about in the past, you'll know that I've always been a little bit suspicious of some of the official lines that come out of Google and felt like either we don't get the full story or we haven't been able to drill in deep enough and really figure out what's going on.

I was under no illusions that I might be able to completely fix this this in one go, but I did want to grill John on a couple of specific things where I felt like we hadn't maybe asked things clearly enough or got the full story. Today I wanted to run through a few things that I learned when John and I sat down together. A little side note, I found it really fascinating doing this kind of interview. I sat on stage in a kind of journalistic setting. I had never done this before. Maybe I'll do a follow-up Whiteboard Friday one day on things I learned and how to run interviews.

1. Does Google have a "Domain Authority" concept?

But the first thing that I wanted to quiz John about was this domain authority idea. So here we are on Moz. Moz has a proprietary metric called domain authority, DA. I feel like when, as an industry, we've asked Google, and John in particular, about this kind of thing in the past, does Google have a concept of domain authority, it's got bundled up with feeling like, oh, he's had an easy way out of being able to answer and say, "No, no, that's a proprietary Moz metric. We don't have that."

I felt like that had got a bit confusing, because our suspicion is that there is some kind of an authority or a trust metric that Google has and holds at a domain level. We think that's true, but we felt like they had always been able to wriggle out of answering the question. So I said to John, "Okay, I am not asking you do you use Moz's domain authority metric in your ranking factors. Like we know that isn't the case. But do you have something a little bit like it?"

Yes, Google has metrics that map into similar things

John said yes. He said yes, they have metrics that, his exact quote was, "map into similar things."My way of phrasing this was this is stuff that is at the domain level. It's based on things like link authority, and it is something that is used to understand performance or to rank content across an entire domain. John said yes, they have something similar to that.

New content inherits those metrics

They use it in particular when they discover new content on an existing domain. New content, in some sense, can inherit some of the authority from the domain, and this is part of the reason why we figured they must have something like this, because we've seen identical content perform differently on different sites. We know that there's something to this. So yes, John confirmed that until they have some of those metrics developed, when they've seen a bit of content for long enough, and it can have its own link metrics and usage metrics, in the intervening time up until that point it can inherit some of this stuff from the domain.

Not wholly link-based

He did also just confirm that it's not just link-based. This is not just a domain-level PageRank type thing.

2. Subdomains versus subfolders

This led me into the second thing that I really wanted to get out of him, which was — and when I raised this, I got kind of an eye roll, "Are we really going down this rabbit hole" — the subdomain versus subfolder question. You might have seen me talk about this. You might have seen people like Rand talk about this, where we've seen cases and we have case studies of moving blog.example.com to example.com/blog and changing nothing else and getting an uplift.

We know something must be going on, and yet the official line out of Google has for a very long time been: "We don't treat these things differently. There is nothing special about subfolders. We're perfectly happy with subdomains. Do whatever is right for your business." We've had this kind of back-and-forth a few times. The way I put it to John was I said, "We have seen these case studies. How would you explain this?"

They try to figure out what belongs to the site

To his credit, John said, "Yes, we've seen them as well." So he said, yes, Google has also seen these things. He acknowledged this is true. He acknowledged that it happens. The way he explained it connects back into this Domain Authority thing in my mind, which is to say that the way they think about it is: Are these pages on this subdomain part of the same website as things on the main domain?

That's kind of the main question. They try and figure out, as he put it, "what belongs to this site." We all know of sites where subdomains are entirely different sites. If you think about a blogspot.com or a WordPress.com domain, subdomains might be owned and managed by entirely different people, and there would be no reason for that authority to pass across. But what Google is trying to do and is trying to say, "Is this subdomain part of this main site?"

Sometimes this includes subdomains and sometimes not

He said sometimes they determine that it is, and sometimes they determine that it is not. If it is part of the site, in their estimation, then they will treat it as equivalent to a subfolder. This, for me, pretty much closes this loop. I think we understand each other now, which is Google is saying, in these certain circumstances, they will be treated identically, but there are circumstances where it can be treated differently.

My recommendation stays what it's always been, which is 100% if you're starting from the outset, put it on a subfolder. There's no upside to the subdomain. Why would you risk the fact that Google might treat it as a separate site? If it is currently on a subdomain, then it's a little trickier to make that case. I would personally be arguing for the integration and for making that move.

If it's treated as part of the site, a subdomain is equivalent to a subfolder

But unfortunately, but somewhat predictably, I couldn't tie John down to any particular way of telling if this is the case. If your content is currently on a subdomain, there isn't really any way of telling if Google is treating it differently, which is a shame, but it's somewhat predictable. But at least we understand each other now, and I think we've kind of got to the root of the confusion. These case studies are real. This is a real thing. Certainly in certain circumstances moving from the subdomain to the subfolder can improve performance.

3. Noindex's impact on nofollow

The third thing that I want to talk about is a little bit more geeked out and technical, and also, in some sense, it leads to some bigger picture lessons and thinking. A little while ago John kind of caught us out by talking about how if you have a page that you no index and keep it that way for a long time, that Google will eventually treat that equivalently to a no index, no follow.

In the long-run, a noindex page's links effectively become nofollow

In other words, the links off that page, even if you've got it as a no index, follow, the links off that page will be effectively no followed. We found that a little bit confusing and surprising. I mean I certainly felt like I had assumed it didn't work that way simply because they have the no index, follow directive, and the fact that that's a thing seems to suggest that it ought to work that way.

It's been this way for a long time

It wasn't really so much about the specifics of this, but more the like: How did we not know this? How did this come about and so forth? John talked about how, firstly, it has been this way for a long time. I think he was making the point none of you all noticed, so how big a deal can this really be? I put it back to him that this is kind of a subtle thing and very hard to test, very hard to extract out the different confounding factors that might be going on.

I'm not surprised that, as an industry, we missed it. But the point being it's been this way for a long time, and Google's view and certainly John's view was that this hadn't been hidden from us so much as the people who knew this hadn't realized that they needed to tell anyone. The actual engineers working on the search algorithm, they had a curse of knowledge.

The curse of knowledge: engineers didn't realize webmasters had the wrong idea

They knew it worked this way, and they had never realized that webmasters didn't know that or thought any differently. This was one of the things that I was kind of trying to push to John a little more was kind of saying, "More of this, please. Give us more access to the engineers. Give us more insight into their way of thinking. Get them to answer more questions, because then out of that we'll spot the stuff that we can be like, 'Oh, hey, that thing there, that was something I didn't know.' Then we can drill deeper into that."

That led us into a little bit of a conversation about how John operates when he doesn't know the answer, and so there were some bits and pieces that were new to me at least about how this works. John said he himself is generally not attending search quality meetings. The way he works is largely off his knowledge and knowledge base type of content, but he has access to engineers.

They're not dedicated to the webmaster relations operation. He's just going around the organization, finding individual Google engineers to answer these questions. It was somewhat interesting to me at least to find that out. I think hopefully, over time, we can generally push and say, "Let's look for those engineers. John, bring them to the front whenever they want to be visible, because they're able to answer these kinds of questions that might just be that curse of knowledge that they knew this all along and we as marketers hadn't figured out this was how things worked."

That was my quick run-through of some of the things that I learned when I interviewed John. We'll link over to more resources and transcripts and so forth. But it's been a blast. Take care.

• Further reading: Interviewing Google’s John Mueller at SearchLove: domain authority metrics, sub-domains vs. sub-folders and more

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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

Why Local Businesses Will Need Websites More than Ever in 2019

Posted by MiriamEllis

64% of 1,411 surveyed local business marketers agree that Google is becoming the new “homepage” for local businesses. Via Moz State of Local SEO Industry Report

...but please don’t come away with the wrong storyline from this statistic.

As local brands and their marketers watch Google play Trojan horse, shifting from top benefactor to top competitor by replacing former “free” publicity with paid packs, Local Service Ads, zero-click SERPs, and related structures, it’s no surprise to see forum members asking, “Do I even need a website anymore?”

Our answer to this question is,“Yes, you’ve never needed a website more than you will in 2019.” In this post, we’ll examine:

• Why it looks like local businesses don’t need websites
• Statistical proofs of why local businesses need websites now more than ever
• The current status of local business websites and most-needed improvements

How Google stopped bearing so many gifts

Within recent memory, a Google query with local intent brought up a big pack of ten nearby businesses, with each entry taking the user directly to these brands’ websites for all of their next steps. A modest amount of marketing effort was rewarded with a shower of Google gifts in the form of rankings, traffic, and conversions.

Then these generous SERPs shrank to seven spots, and then three, with the mobile sea change thrown into the bargain and consisting of layers and layers of Google-owned interfaces instead of direct-to-website links. In 2018, when we rustle through the wrapping paper, the presents we find from Google look cheaper, smaller, and less magnificent.

Consider these five key developments:

1) Zero-click mobile SERPs

This slide from a recent presentation by Rand Fishkin encapsulateshis findings regarding the growth of no-click SERPs between 2016–2018. Mobile users have experienced a 20% increase in delivery of search engine results that don’t require them to go any deeper than Google’s own interface.

2) The encroachment of paid ads into local packs

When Dr. Peter J. Myers surveyed 11,000 SERPs in 2018, he found that 35% of competitive local packs feature ads.

3) Google becoming a lead gen agency

At last count, Google’s Local Service Ads program via which they interposition themselves as the paid lead gen agent between businesses and consumers has taken over 23 business categories in 77 US cities.

4) Even your branded SERPs don’t belong to you

When a user specifically searches for your brand and your Google Knowledge Panel pops up, you can likely cope with the long-standing “People Also Search For” set of competitors at the bottom of it. But that’s not the same as Google allowing Groupon to advertise at the top of your KP, or putting lead gen from Doordash and GrubHub front and center to nickel and dime you on your own customers’ orders.

5) Google is being called the new “homepage” for local businesses

As highlighted at the beginning of this post, 64% of marketers agree that Google is becoming the new “homepage” for local businesses. This concept, coined by Mike Blumenthal, signifies that a user looking at a Google Knowledge Panel can get basic business info, make a phone call, get directions, book something, ask a question, take a virtual tour, read microblog posts, see hours of operation, thumb through photos, see busy times, read and leave reviews. Without ever having to click through to a brand’s domain, the user may be fully satisfied.

“Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.”
- Epicurus

There are many more examples we could gather, but they can all be summed up in one way: None of Google’s most recent local initiatives are about driving customers to brands’ own websites. Local SERPs have shrunk and have been re-engineered to keep users within Google’s platforms to generate maximum revenue for Google and their partners.

You may be as philosophical as Epicurus about this and say that Google has every right to be as profitable as they can with their own product, even if they don’t really need to siphon more revenue off local businesses. But if Google’s recent trajectory causes your brand or agency to conclude that websites have become obsolete in this heavily controlled environment, please keep reading.

Your website is your bedrock

“65% of 1,411 surveyed marketers observe strong correlation between organic and local rank.” - Via Moz State of Local SEO Industry Report

What this means is that businesses which rank highly organically are very likely to have high associated local pack rankings. In the following screenshot, if you take away the directory-type platforms, you will see how the brand websites ranking on page 1 for “deli athens ga” are also the two businesses that have made it into Google’s local pack:

How often do the top 3 Google local pack results also have a 1st page organic rankings?

In a small study, we looked at 15 head keywords across 7 US cities and towns. This yielded 315 possible entries in Google’s local pack. Of that 315, 235 of the businesses ranking in the local packs also had page 1 organic rankings. That’s a 75% correlation between organic website rankings and local pack presence.

*It’s worth noting that where local and organic results did not correlate, it was sometimes due the presence of spam GMB listings, or to mystery SERPs that did not make sense at first glance — perhaps as a result of Google testing, in some cases.

Additionally, many local businesses are not making it to the first page of Google anymore in some categories because the organic SERPs are inundated with best-of lists and directories. Often, local business websites were pushed down to the second page of the organic results. In other words, if spam, “best-ofs,” and mysteries were removed, the local-organic correlation would likely be much higher than 75%.

Further, one recent study found that even when Google’s Local Service Ads are present, 43.9% of clicks went to the organic SERPs. Obviously, if you can make it to the top of the organic SERPs, this puts you in very good CTR shape from a purely organic standpoint.

Your takeaway from this

The local businesses you market may not be able to stave off the onslaught of Google’s zero-click SERPs, paid SERPs, and lead gen features, but where “free” local 3-packs still exist, your very best bet for being included in them is to have the strongest possible website. Moreover, organic SERPs remain a substantial source of clicks.

Far from it being the case that websites have become obsolete, they are the firmest bedrock for maintaining free local SERP visibility amidst an increasing scarcity of opportunities.

This calls for an industry-wide doubling down on organic metrics that matter most.

Bridging the local-organic gap

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
- Aristotle

A 2017 CNBC survey found that 45% of small businesses have no website, and, while most large enterprises have websites, many local businesses qualify as “small.”

Moreover, a recent audit of 9,392 Google My Business listings found that 27% have no website link.

When asked which one task 1,411 marketers want clients to devote more resources to, it’s no coincidence that 66% listed a website-oriented asset. This includes local content development, on-site optimization, local link building, technical analysis of rankings/traffic/conversions, and website design as shown in the following Moz survey graphic:

In an environment in which websites are table stakes for competitive local pack rankings, virtually all local businesses not only need one, but they need it to be as strong as possible so that it achieves maximum organic rankings.

What makes a website strong?

The Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO offers incredibly detailed guidelines for creating the best possible website. While we recommend that everyone marketing a local business read through this in-depth guide, we can sum up its contents here by stating that strong websites combine:

• Technical basics
• Excellent usability
• On-site optimization
• Relevant content publication
• Publicity

For our present purpose, let’s take a special look at those last three elements.

On-site optimization and relevant content publication

There was a time when on-site SEO and content development were treated almost independently of one another. And while local businesses will need a make a little extra effort to put their basic contact information in prominent places on their websites (such as the footer and Contact Us page), publication and optimization should be viewed as a single topic. A modern strategy takes all of the following into account:

• Keyword and real-world research tell a local business what consumers want
• These consumer desires are then reflected in what the business publishes on its website, including its homepage, location landing pages, about page, blog and other components
• Full reflection of consumer desires includes ensuring that human language (discovered via keyword and real-world research) is implemented in all elements of each page, including its tags, headings, descriptions, text, and in some cases, markup

What we’re describing here isn’t a set of disconnected efforts. It’s a single effort that’s integral to researching, writing, and publishing the website. Far from stuffing keywords into a tag or a page’s content, focus has shifted to building topical authority in the eyes of search engines like Google by building an authoritative resource for a particular consumer demographic. The more closely a business is able to reflect customers’ needs (including the language of their needs), in every possible component of its website, the more relevant it becomes.

A hypothetical example of this would be a large medical clinic in Dallas. Last year, their phone staff was inundated with basic questions about flu shots, like where and when to get them, what they cost, would they cause side effects, what about side effects on people with pre-existing health conditions, etc. This year, the medical center’s marketing team took a look at Moz Keyword Explorer and saw that there’s an enormous volume of questions surrounding flu shots:

This tiny segment of the findings of the free keyword research tool, Answer the Public, further illustrates how many questions people have about flu shots:

The medical clinic need not compete nationally for these topics, but at a local level, a page on the website can answer nearly every question a nearby patient could have about this subject. The page, created properly, will reflect human language in its tags, headings, descriptions, text, and markup. It will tell all patients where to come and when to come for this procedure. It has the potential to cut down on time-consuming phone calls.

And, finally, it will build topical authority in the eyes of Google to strengthen the clinic’s chances of ranking well organically… which can then translate to improved local rankings.

It’s important to note that keyword research tools typically do not reflect location very accurately, so research is typically done at a national level, and then adjusted to reflect regional or local language differences and geographic terms, after the fact. In other words, a keyword tool may not accurately reflect exactly how many local consumers in Dallas are asking “Where do I get a flu shot?”, but keyword and real-world research signals that this type of question is definitely being asked. The local business website can reflect this question while also adding in the necessary geographic terms.

Local link building must be brought to the fore of publicity efforts

Moz’s industry survey found that more than one-third of respondents had no local link building strategy in place. Meanwhile, link building was listed as one of the top three tasks to which marketers want their clients to devote more resources. There’s clearly a disconnect going on here. Given the fundamental role links play in building Domain Authority, organic rankings, and subsequent local rankings, building strong websites means bridging this gap.

First, it might help to examine old prejudices that could cause local business marketers and their clients to feel dubious about link building. These most likely stem from link spam which has gotten so out of hand in the general world of SEO that Google has had to penalize it and filter it to the best of their ability.

Not long ago, many digital-only businesses were having a heyday with paid links, link farms, reciprocal links, abusive link anchor text and the like. An online company might accrue thousands of links from completely irrelevant sources, all in hopes of escalating rank. Clearly, these practices aren’t ones an ethical business can feel good about investing in, but they do serve as an interesting object lesson, especially when a local marketer can point out to a client, that best local links are typically going to result from real-world relationship-building.

Local businesses are truly special because they serve a distinct, physical community made up of their own neighbors. The more involved a local business is in its own community, the more naturally link opportunities arise from things like local:

• Sponsorships
• Event participation and hosting
• Online news
• Blogs
• Business associations
• B2B cross-promotions

There are so many ways a local business can build genuine topical and domain authority in a given community by dint of the relationships it develops with neighbors.

An excellent way to get started on this effort is to look at high-ranking local businesses in the same or similar business categories to discover what work they’ve put in to achieve a supportive backlink profile. Moz Link Intersect is an extremely actionable resource for this, enabling a business to input its top competitors to find who is linking to them.

In the following example, a small B&B in Albuquerque looks up two luxurious Tribal resorts in its city:

Link Intersect then lists out a blueprint of opportunities, showing which links one or both competitors have earned. Drilling down, the B&B finds that Marriott.com is linking to both Tribal resorts on an Albuquerque things-to-do page:

The small B&B can then try to earn a spot on that same page, because it hosts lavish tea parties as a thing-to-do. Outreach could depend on the B&B owner knowing someone who works at the local Marriott personally. It could include meeting with them in person, or on the phone, or even via email. If this outreach succeeds, an excellent, relevant link will have been earned to boost organic rank, underpinning local rank.

Then, repeat the process. Aristotle might well have been speaking of link building when he said we are what we repeatedly do and that excellence is a habit. Good marketers can teach customers to have excellent habits in recognizing a good link opportunity when they see it.

Taken altogether

Without a website, a local business lacks the brand-controlled publishing and link-earning platform that so strongly influences organic rankings. In the absence of this, the chances of ranking well in competitive local packs will be significantly less. Taken altogether, the case is clear for local businesses investing substantially in their websites.

Acting now is actually a strategy for the future

“There is nothing permanent except change.”
- Heraclitus

You’ve now determined that strong websites are fundamental to local rankings in competitive markets. You’ve absorbed numerous reasons to encourage local businesses you market to prioritize care of their domains. But there’s one more thing you’ll need to be able to convey, and that’s a sense of urgency.

Right now, every single customer you can still earn from a free local pack listing is immensely valuable for the future.

This isn’t a customer you’ve had to pay Google for, as you very well might six months, a year, or five years from now. Yes, you’ve had to invest plenty in developing the strong website that contributed to the high local ranking, but you haven’t paid a penny directly to Google for this particular lead. Soon, you may be having to fork over commissions to Google for a large portion of your new customers, so acting now is like insurance against future spend.

For this to work out properly, local businesses must take the leads Google is sending them right now for free, and convert them into long-term, loyal customers, with an ultimate value of multiple future transactions without Google as a the middle man. And if these freely won customers can be inspired to act as word-of-mouth advocates for your brand, you will have done something substantial to develop a stream of non-Google-dependent revenue.

This offer may well expire as time goes by. When it comes to the capricious local SERPs, marketers resemble the Greek philosophers who knew that change is the only constant. The Trojan horse has rolled into every US city, and it’s a gift with a questionable shelf life. We can’t predict if or when free packs might become obsolete, but we share your concerns about the way the wind is blowing.

What we can see clearly right now is that websites will be anything but obsolete in 2019. Rather, they are the building blocks of local rankings, precious free leads, and loyal revenue, regardless of how SERPs may alter in future.

For more insights into where local businesses should focus in 2019, be sure to explore the Moz State of Local SEO industry report:

Read the State of Local SEO industry report

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

Why Local Businesses Will Need Websites More than Ever in 2019

Posted by MiriamEllis

64% of 1,411 surveyed local business marketers agree that Google is becoming the new “homepage” for local businesses. Via Moz State of Local SEO Industry Report

...but please don’t come away with the wrong storyline from this statistic.

As local brands and their marketers watch Google play Trojan horse, shifting from top benefactor to top competitor by replacing former “free” publicity with paid packs, Local Service Ads, zero-click SERPs, and related structures, it’s no surprise to see forum members asking, “Do I even need a website anymore?”

Our answer to this question is,“Yes, you’ve never needed a website more than you will in 2019.” In this post, we’ll examine:

• Why it looks like local businesses don’t need websites
• Statistical proofs of why local businesses need websites now more than ever
• The current status of local business websites and most-needed improvements

How Google stopped bearing so many gifts

Within recent memory, a Google query with local intent brought up a big pack of ten nearby businesses, with each entry taking the user directly to these brands’ websites for all of their next steps. A modest amount of marketing effort was rewarded with a shower of Google gifts in the form of rankings, traffic, and conversions.

Then these generous SERPs shrank to seven spots, and then three, with the mobile sea change thrown into the bargain and consisting of layers and layers of Google-owned interfaces instead of direct-to-website links. In 2018, when we rustle through the wrapping paper, the presents we find from Google look cheaper, smaller, and less magnificent.

Consider these five key developments:

1) Zero-click mobile SERPs

This slide from a recent presentation by Rand Fishkin encapsulateshis findings regarding the growth of no-click SERPs between 2016–2018. Mobile users have experienced a 20% increase in delivery of search engine results that don’t require them to go any deeper than Google’s own interface.

2) The encroachment of paid ads into local packs

When Dr. Peter J. Myers surveyed 11,000 SERPs in 2018, he found that 35% of competitive local packs feature ads.

3) Google becoming a lead gen agency

At last count, Google’s Local Service Ads program via which they interposition themselves as the paid lead gen agent between businesses and consumers has taken over 23 business categories in 77 US cities.

4) Even your branded SERPs don’t belong to you

When a user specifically searches for your brand and your Google Knowledge Panel pops up, you can likely cope with the long-standing “People Also Search For” set of competitors at the bottom of it. But that’s not the same as Google allowing Groupon to advertise at the top of your KP, or putting lead gen from Doordash and GrubHub front and center to nickel and dime you on your own customers’ orders.

5) Google is being called the new “homepage” for local businesses

As highlighted at the beginning of this post, 64% of marketers agree that Google is becoming the new “homepage” for local businesses. This concept, coined by Mike Blumenthal, signifies that a user looking at a Google Knowledge Panel can get basic business info, make a phone call, get directions, book something, ask a question, take a virtual tour, read microblog posts, see hours of operation, thumb through photos, see busy times, read and leave reviews. Without ever having to click through to a brand’s domain, the user may be fully satisfied.

“Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.”
- Epicurus

There are many more examples we could gather, but they can all be summed up in one way: None of Google’s most recent local initiatives are about driving customers to brands’ own websites. Local SERPs have shrunk and have been re-engineered to keep users within Google’s platforms to generate maximum revenue for Google and their partners.

You may be as philosophical as Epicurus about this and say that Google has every right to be as profitable as they can with their own product, even if they don’t really need to siphon more revenue off local businesses. But if Google’s recent trajectory causes your brand or agency to conclude that websites have become obsolete in this heavily controlled environment, please keep reading.

Your website is your bedrock

“65% of 1,411 surveyed marketers observe strong correlation between organic and local rank.” - Via Moz State of Local SEO Industry Report

What this means is that businesses which rank highly organically are very likely to have high associated local pack rankings. In the following screenshot, if you take away the directory-type platforms, you will see how the brand websites ranking on page 1 for “deli athens ga” are also the two businesses that have made it into Google’s local pack:

How often do the top 3 Google local pack results also have a 1st page organic rankings?

In a small study, we looked at 15 head keywords across 7 US cities and towns. This yielded 315 possible entries in Google’s local pack. Of that 315, 235 of the businesses ranking in the local packs also had page 1 organic rankings. That’s a 75% correlation between organic website rankings and local pack presence.

*It’s worth noting that where local and organic results did not correlate, it was sometimes due the presence of spam GMB listings, or to mystery SERPs that did not make sense at first glance — perhaps as a result of Google testing, in some cases.

Additionally, many local businesses are not making it to the first page of Google anymore in some categories because the organic SERPs are inundated with best-of lists and directories. Often, local business websites were pushed down to the second page of the organic results. In other words, if spam, “best-ofs,” and mysteries were removed, the local-organic correlation would likely be much higher than 75%.

Further, one recent study found that even when Google’s Local Service Ads are present, 43.9% of clicks went to the organic SERPs. Obviously, if you can make it to the top of the organic SERPs, this puts you in very good CTR shape from a purely organic standpoint.

Your takeaway from this

The local businesses you market may not be able to stave off the onslaught of Google’s zero-click SERPs, paid SERPs, and lead gen features, but where “free” local 3-packs still exist, your very best bet for being included in them is to have the strongest possible website. Moreover, organic SERPs remain a substantial source of clicks.

Far from it being the case that websites have become obsolete, they are the firmest bedrock for maintaining free local SERP visibility amidst an increasing scarcity of opportunities.

This calls for an industry-wide doubling down on organic metrics that matter most.

Bridging the local-organic gap

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
- Aristotle

A 2017 CNBC survey found that 45% of small businesses have no website, and, while most large enterprises have websites, many local businesses qualify as “small.”

Moreover, a recent audit of 9,392 Google My Business listings found that 27% have no website link.

When asked which one task 1,411 marketers want clients to devote more resources to, it’s no coincidence that 66% listed a website-oriented asset. This includes local content development, on-site optimization, local link building, technical analysis of rankings/traffic/conversions, and website design as shown in the following Moz survey graphic:

In an environment in which websites are table stakes for competitive local pack rankings, virtually all local businesses not only need one, but they need it to be as strong as possible so that it achieves maximum organic rankings.

What makes a website strong?

The Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO offers incredibly detailed guidelines for creating the best possible website. While we recommend that everyone marketing a local business read through this in-depth guide, we can sum up its contents here by stating that strong websites combine:

• Technical basics
• Excellent usability
• On-site optimization
• Relevant content publication
• Publicity

For our present purpose, let’s take a special look at those last three elements.

On-site optimization and relevant content publication

There was a time when on-site SEO and content development were treated almost independently of one another. And while local businesses will need a make a little extra effort to put their basic contact information in prominent places on their websites (such as the footer and Contact Us page), publication and optimization should be viewed as a single topic. A modern strategy takes all of the following into account:

• Keyword and real-world research tell a local business what consumers want
• These consumer desires are then reflected in what the business publishes on its website, including its homepage, location landing pages, about page, blog and other components
• Full reflection of consumer desires includes ensuring that human language (discovered via keyword and real-world research) is implemented in all elements of each page, including its tags, headings, descriptions, text, and in some cases, markup

What we’re describing here isn’t a set of disconnected efforts. It’s a single effort that’s integral to researching, writing, and publishing the website. Far from stuffing keywords into a tag or a page’s content, focus has shifted to building topical authority in the eyes of search engines like Google by building an authoritative resource for a particular consumer demographic. The more closely a business is able to reflect customers’ needs (including the language of their needs), in every possible component of its website, the more relevant it becomes.

A hypothetical example of this would be a large medical clinic in Dallas. Last year, their phone staff was inundated with basic questions about flu shots, like where and when to get them, what they cost, would they cause side effects, what about side effects on people with pre-existing health conditions, etc. This year, the medical center’s marketing team took a look at Moz Keyword Explorer and saw that there’s an enormous volume of questions surrounding flu shots:

This tiny segment of the findings of the free keyword research tool, Answer the Public, further illustrates how many questions people have about flu shots:

The medical clinic need not compete nationally for these topics, but at a local level, a page on the website can answer nearly every question a nearby patient could have about this subject. The page, created properly, will reflect human language in its tags, headings, descriptions, text, and markup. It will tell all patients where to come and when to come for this procedure. It has the potential to cut down on time-consuming phone calls.

And, finally, it will build topical authority in the eyes of Google to strengthen the clinic’s chances of ranking well organically… which can then translate to improved local rankings.

It’s important to note that keyword research tools typically do not reflect location very accurately, so research is typically done at a national level, and then adjusted to reflect regional or local language differences and geographic terms, after the fact. In other words, a keyword tool may not accurately reflect exactly how many local consumers in Dallas are asking “Where do I get a flu shot?”, but keyword and real-world research signals that this type of question is definitely being asked. The local business website can reflect this question while also adding in the necessary geographic terms.

Local link building must be brought to the fore of publicity efforts

Moz’s industry survey found that more than one-third of respondents had no local link building strategy in place. Meanwhile, link building was listed as one of the top three tasks to which marketers want their clients to devote more resources. There’s clearly a disconnect going on here. Given the fundamental role links play in building Domain Authority, organic rankings, and subsequent local rankings, building strong websites means bridging this gap.

First, it might help to examine old prejudices that could cause local business marketers and their clients to feel dubious about link building. These most likely stem from link spam which has gotten so out of hand in the general world of SEO that Google has had to penalize it and filter it to the best of their ability.

Not long ago, many digital-only businesses were having a heyday with paid links, link farms, reciprocal links, abusive link anchor text and the like. An online company might accrue thousands of links from completely irrelevant sources, all in hopes of escalating rank. Clearly, these practices aren’t ones an ethical business can feel good about investing in, but they do serve as an interesting object lesson, especially when a local marketer can point out to a client, that best local links are typically going to result from real-world relationship-building.

Local businesses are truly special because they serve a distinct, physical community made up of their own neighbors. The more involved a local business is in its own community, the more naturally link opportunities arise from things like local:

• Sponsorships
• Event participation and hosting
• Online news
• Blogs
• Business associations
• B2B cross-promotions

There are so many ways a local business can build genuine topical and domain authority in a given community by dint of the relationships it develops with neighbors.

An excellent way to get started on this effort is to look at high-ranking local businesses in the same or similar business categories to discover what work they’ve put in to achieve a supportive backlink profile. Moz Link Intersect is an extremely actionable resource for this, enabling a business to input its top competitors to find who is linking to them.

In the following example, a small B&B in Albuquerque looks up two luxurious Tribal resorts in its city:

Link Intersect then lists out a blueprint of opportunities, showing which links one or both competitors have earned. Drilling down, the B&B finds that Marriott.com is linking to both Tribal resorts on an Albuquerque things-to-do page:

The small B&B can then try to earn a spot on that same page, because it hosts lavish tea parties as a thing-to-do. Outreach could depend on the B&B owner knowing someone who works at the local Marriott personally. It could include meeting with them in person, or on the phone, or even via email. If this outreach succeeds, an excellent, relevant link will have been earned to boost organic rank, underpinning local rank.

Then, repeat the process. Aristotle might well have been speaking of link building when he said we are what we repeatedly do and that excellence is a habit. Good marketers can teach customers to have excellent habits in recognizing a good link opportunity when they see it.

Taken altogether

Without a website, a local business lacks the brand-controlled publishing and link-earning platform that so strongly influences organic rankings. In the absence of this, the chances of ranking well in competitive local packs will be significantly less. Taken altogether, the case is clear for local businesses investing substantially in their websites.

Acting now is actually a strategy for the future

“There is nothing permanent except change.”
- Heraclitus

You’ve now determined that strong websites are fundamental to local rankings in competitive markets. You’ve absorbed numerous reasons to encourage local businesses you market to prioritize care of their domains. But there’s one more thing you’ll need to be able to convey, and that’s a sense of urgency.

Right now, every single customer you can still earn from a free local pack listing is immensely valuable for the future.

This isn’t a customer you’ve had to pay Google for, as you very well might six months, a year, or five years from now. Yes, you’ve had to invest plenty in developing the strong website that contributed to the high local ranking, but you haven’t paid a penny directly to Google for this particular lead. Soon, you may be having to fork over commissions to Google for a large portion of your new customers, so acting now is like insurance against future spend.

For this to work out properly, local businesses must take the leads Google is sending them right now for free, and convert them into long-term, loyal customers, with an ultimate value of multiple future transactions without Google as a the middle man. And if these freely won customers can be inspired to act as word-of-mouth advocates for your brand, you will have done something substantial to develop a stream of non-Google-dependent revenue.

This offer may well expire as time goes by. When it comes to the capricious local SERPs, marketers resemble the Greek philosophers who knew that change is the only constant. The Trojan horse has rolled into every US city, and it’s a gift with a questionable shelf life. We can’t predict if or when free packs might become obsolete, but we share your concerns about the way the wind is blowing.

What we can see clearly right now is that websites will be anything but obsolete in 2019. Rather, they are the building blocks of local rankings, precious free leads, and loyal revenue, regardless of how SERPs may alter in future.

For more insights into where local businesses should focus in 2019, be sure to explore the Moz State of Local SEO industry report:

Read the State of Local SEO industry report

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