Is TikTok Going to Replace Google?

TikTok has absolutely taken the world by storm since 2020. And it’s not just for the kids — with over 1 billion users, it’s popular across all demographics.

User behavior on TikTok has been evolving as its popularity grows. We’ve seen the app go from dancing teenagers to influencing shopping behavior across the world.

Now the next step for TikTok seems to be turning into the next big search engine.

Is TikTok the new Google?

Short answer: no.

TikTok is an internal search engine for TikTok content. It’s dedicated to a particular area of focus and a particular format: video.

There are a few different factors at play in how we choose the search engine to solve our need in the moment, but at the end of the day, TikTok and Google satisfy very different search intents.

Why do users search on TikTok?

We’re seeing TikTok take market share from Google in verticals such as food, gardening, and travel. These are low stakes searches where the outcome is unlikely to cause you harm. Since you don’t need a perfect or factual answer, you can use TikTok to find it.

TikTok’s video format makes a lot more sense if you’re looking for answers where the visual matters. Date spots in your city or a gardening tutorial are perfect searches for the platform.

Another reason users choose TikTok is that the answer will always be provided by a subject matter expert, not a niche blogger. Social proof abounds, as you can assess the expertise of your source by looking at the comments and number of views, likes, and followers.

A few concerns have been raised about the spread of misinformation on TikTok, as they have in most other content platforms. However, these are slightly more worrying on TikTok because it has an unprecedented potential for virality, and a large, young user base, who are more easily influenced during content discovery than during active search.

Users are even searching for TikTok content on Google, with queries such as “TikTok pasta”, amassing 1,778 searches per month in the US:

Branded queries on Google for TikTok content have a combined monthly search volume of 30.1 million in the US alone. But in the spirit of transparency, I’ll share that most of those are not PG (or even PG-13).

Active search vs. content discovery

There are two key behaviors on TikTok we must differentiate: active search and content discovery.

Content discovery

Content discovery is the main behavior on TikTok and it’s the one we’re most familiar with. It's when the user is scrolling through the app, passively hoping to find entertainment, financial advice, recipe ideas, or a new favorite beauty product.

Users have been enjoying a positive content discovery experience on TikTok for years. They have found new restaurants or a selfie angle that makes them look like Kylie Jenner.

This is the key to understanding TikTok’s rise as a search engine: This positive content discovery experience has earned the users’ trust. They know that the content they want to consume is on TikTok. So when the need arises, they turn to the video platform first.

Active search

This leads us into active search. Active search is when a user types a specific question into TikTok’s search box.

On TikTok, users can seamlessly scroll through all of the content that answers their query, without having to open multiple tabs on their browser. This improves user satisfaction, reduces friction and, most importantly, teaches TikTok the best answer. More on that later.

Let’s talk about psychology

Persuasion resistance is a natural psychological defense when we feel like someone is trying to manipulate us into buying, doing, or thinking something. We perceive persuasion as a threat and we try to move away from it or oppose it.

Over a decade ago, the online advertising industry started to worry about a decrease in the CTR of their display ads. Pop-ups got dismissed, banners went ignored. Users had caught onto advertisers: we were trying to sell them something.

This triggered a phenomenon known to psychologists as persuasion resistance. Advertisers called this response “banner blindness”. As an industry, we developed four different strategies to counter this resistance to persuasion.

1. First, we started making our ads look like they were part of the content. We called these “native ads”.

2. Then, we started placing the ads in unexpected places, where users were less likely to be bracing themselves to be sold to.

3. We started making ads a little bit more relevant to the context, so that they felt less intrusive.

4. Finally, we moved into social proof, and we started leveraging the power of trust. Thus influencer marketing was born.

TikTok leverages these four strategies to counter resistance to persuasion by design. How do they do it?

• Creators are paid for their content through the Creator Fund, based on how many views or engagement their videos get. They are incentivized to make quality, engaging content that users will enjoy, not just by making deals with brands.

• They regularly showcase their beauty routines, fashion, or home products, with or without a brand sponsorship. This makes affiliate or sponsored content look just like regular content.

• Their ads are served in exactly the same format as their regular content, with a small tag letting you know that it’s promoted content.

• All the videos have an identified creator, visible like and view counts, and open comments. Social proof abounds!

But SEO is not paid social or influencer marketing. So why should we care?

SEO is now omnichannel

Putting the right content in front of users at the right time is at the core of what we do. If we want to keep achieving this goal, we must provide content where the user is looking for it.

As technology integrates further into our lives, we’ve seen the rise of multisearch. Google created the term as a way to integrate their Google Lens functionality into the way we speak about search and SEO.

We now search by asking our home assistant devices questions or taking a picture of a tree we don’t recognize. We search on Google Maps, on Youtube, on Instagram and even on Amazon.

The days when SEO was about responding to a query in a search box are long gone.

By putting our content out on TikTok and optimizing it for search, we are helping users find our content when they need it, where they want it, and in the format they chose to consume it.

TikTok on the SERPs

An omnichannel SEO strategy will let you interact with your users beyond your own domain, and it can help your brand take up more real estate in the SERPs.

Google is trying to diversify the domains they show on search, so if you want to feature in the SERPs multiple times, you’ll have to distribute your brand’s content across different domains.

TikTok’s website has over 31 million pages built programmatically around topics, hashtags, and sounds:

Topic pages make up the most of their URLs and traffic, and seem to be built based on hashtags used, along with some form of machine learning consolidation of their variations. These include related videos, topics, users, hashtags, and sounds.

Based on the data available on different tools, we know that this section on TikTok’s website has about 157 million monthly organic clicks.

Based on the numbers alone, the benefit of having your content feature in these pages is obvious.

Industries that should be on TikTok

TikTok serves you content based on what the algorithm has determined you’ll enjoy, not based on who you follow. So users constantly discover new creators.

The TikTok algorithm does a genuinely good job at finding your interests or helping you discover stuff that you like. These topics of interest become small niches with their own name.

Much like a subreddit, TikTok has unofficial “toks”. You can find niches such as book-tok, finance-tok, food-tok, and many others.

Based on the data, case studies, and some expert opinions, there are industries that can truly benefit from being on the platform and surfacing content tagged for these various “toks”:

• Sports teams

• Streaming services and entertainers

• Fashion and beauty brands

• Restaurants and food bloggers

• Travel brands and influencers

• Home and DIY content creators and brands

If you think this list reminds you of the top industries on Pinterest, you are right.

TikTok and Pinterest have a lot in common. Both platforms prioritize content discovery based on your interests and serve mainly visual content.

When looking at suggested searches, the value becomes clear when I start typing keywords typically associated with an informational or commercial intent:

While these are personalized for each user, you can see that others are searching for content that brands or publishers have typically kept on their blogs and find valuable for their businesses.

Brands looking to increase their brand awareness can benefit from being on TikTok regardless of their industry. After all, nobody expected the success Duolingo has had on the platform.

@duolingo this dumpy is literally a single mom who works 2 jobs #Duolingo#fgoogletranslate#DuaLipa#Dulapeep#Dualingo#comedy#trend#twerkit_twerkit♬ Brujeria - ✿

Conclusion

Is TikTok threatening Google? No. Is it worth the attention of SEOs? Yes.

Over the next few months, keep an eye out for more pieces on how to make the most of this upstart and unlikely content discovery search engine. I will be writing about the TikTok algorithm, what the search experience looks like on TikTok, and how to make sure your videos rank.

Is TikTok Going to Replace Google?

TikTok has absolutely taken the world by storm since 2020. And it’s not just for the kids — with over 1 billion users, it’s popular across all demographics.

User behavior on TikTok has been evolving as its popularity grows. We’ve seen the app go from dancing teenagers to influencing shopping behavior across the world.

Now the next step for TikTok seems to be turning into the next big search engine.

Is TikTok the new Google?

Short answer: no.

TikTok is an internal search engine for TikTok content. It’s dedicated to a particular area of focus and a particular format: video.

There are a few different factors at play in how we choose the search engine to solve our need in the moment, but at the end of the day, TikTok and Google satisfy very different search intents.

Why do users search on TikTok?

We’re seeing TikTok take market share from Google in verticals such as food, gardening, and travel. These are low stakes searches where the outcome is unlikely to cause you harm. Since you don’t need a perfect or factual answer, you can use TikTok to find it.

TikTok’s video format makes a lot more sense if you’re looking for answers where the visual matters. Date spots in your city or a gardening tutorial are perfect searches for the platform.

Another reason users choose TikTok is that the answer will always be provided by a subject matter expert, not a niche blogger. Social proof abounds, as you can assess the expertise of your source by looking at the comments and number of views, likes, and followers.

A few concerns have been raised about the spread of misinformation on TikTok, as they have in most other content platforms. However, these are slightly more worrying on TikTok because it has an unprecedented potential for virality, and a large, young user base, who are more easily influenced during content discovery than during active search.

Users are even searching for TikTok content on Google, with queries such as “TikTok pasta”, amassing 1,778 searches per month in the US:

Branded queries on Google for TikTok content have a combined monthly search volume of 30.1 million in the US alone. But in the spirit of transparency, I’ll share that most of those are not PG (or even PG-13).

Active search vs. content discovery

There are two key behaviors on TikTok we must differentiate: active search and content discovery.

Content discovery

Content discovery is the main behavior on TikTok and it’s the one we’re most familiar with. It's when the user is scrolling through the app, passively hoping to find entertainment, financial advice, recipe ideas, or a new favorite beauty product.

Users have been enjoying a positive content discovery experience on TikTok for years. They have found new restaurants or a selfie angle that makes them look like Kylie Jenner.

This is the key to understanding TikTok’s rise as a search engine: This positive content discovery experience has earned the users’ trust. They know that the content they want to consume is on TikTok. So when the need arises, they turn to the video platform first.

Active search

This leads us into active search. Active search is when a user types a specific question into TikTok’s search box.

On TikTok, users can seamlessly scroll through all of the content that answers their query, without having to open multiple tabs on their browser. This improves user satisfaction, reduces friction and, most importantly, teaches TikTok the best answer. More on that later.

Let’s talk about psychology

Persuasion resistance is a natural psychological defense when we feel like someone is trying to manipulate us into buying, doing, or thinking something. We perceive persuasion as a threat and we try to move away from it or oppose it.

Over a decade ago, the online advertising industry started to worry about a decrease in the CTR of their display ads. Pop-ups got dismissed, banners went ignored. Users had caught onto advertisers: we were trying to sell them something.

This triggered a phenomenon known to psychologists as persuasion resistance. Advertisers called this response “banner blindness”. As an industry, we developed four different strategies to counter this resistance to persuasion.

1. First, we started making our ads look like they were part of the content. We called these “native ads”.

2. Then, we started placing the ads in unexpected places, where users were less likely to be bracing themselves to be sold to.

3. We started making ads a little bit more relevant to the context, so that they felt less intrusive.

4. Finally, we moved into social proof, and we started leveraging the power of trust. Thus influencer marketing was born.

TikTok leverages these four strategies to counter resistance to persuasion by design. How do they do it?

• Creators are paid for their content through the Creator Fund, based on how many views or engagement their videos get. They are incentivized to make quality, engaging content that users will enjoy, not just by making deals with brands.

• They regularly showcase their beauty routines, fashion, or home products, with or without a brand sponsorship. This makes affiliate or sponsored content look just like regular content.

• Their ads are served in exactly the same format as their regular content, with a small tag letting you know that it’s promoted content.

• All the videos have an identified creator, visible like and view counts, and open comments. Social proof abounds!

But SEO is not paid social or influencer marketing. So why should we care?

SEO is now omnichannel

Putting the right content in front of users at the right time is at the core of what we do. If we want to keep achieving this goal, we must provide content where the user is looking for it.

As technology integrates further into our lives, we’ve seen the rise of multisearch. Google created the term as a way to integrate their Google Lens functionality into the way we speak about search and SEO.

We now search by asking our home assistant devices questions or taking a picture of a tree we don’t recognize. We search on Google Maps, on Youtube, on Instagram and even on Amazon.

The days when SEO was about responding to a query in a search box are long gone.

By putting our content out on TikTok and optimizing it for search, we are helping users find our content when they need it, where they want it, and in the format they chose to consume it.

TikTok on the SERPs

An omnichannel SEO strategy will let you interact with your users beyond your own domain, and it can help your brand take up more real estate in the SERPs.

Google is trying to diversify the domains they show on search, so if you want to feature in the SERPs multiple times, you’ll have to distribute your brand’s content across different domains.

TikTok’s website has over 31 million pages built programmatically around topics, hashtags, and sounds:

Topic pages make up the most of their URLs and traffic, and seem to be built based on hashtags used, along with some form of machine learning consolidation of their variations. These include related videos, topics, users, hashtags, and sounds.

Based on the data available on different tools, we know that this section on TikTok’s website has about 157 million monthly organic clicks.

Based on the numbers alone, the benefit of having your content feature in these pages is obvious.

Industries that should be on TikTok

TikTok serves you content based on what the algorithm has determined you’ll enjoy, not based on who you follow. So users constantly discover new creators.

The TikTok algorithm does a genuinely good job at finding your interests or helping you discover stuff that you like. These topics of interest become small niches with their own name.

Much like a subreddit, TikTok has unofficial “toks”. You can find niches such as book-tok, finance-tok, food-tok, and many others.

Based on the data, case studies, and some expert opinions, there are industries that can truly benefit from being on the platform and surfacing content tagged for these various “toks”:

• Sports teams

• Streaming services and entertainers

• Fashion and beauty brands

• Restaurants and food bloggers

• Travel brands and influencers

• Home and DIY content creators and brands

If you think this list reminds you of the top industries on Pinterest, you are right.

TikTok and Pinterest have a lot in common. Both platforms prioritize content discovery based on your interests and serve mainly visual content.

When looking at suggested searches, the value becomes clear when I start typing keywords typically associated with an informational or commercial intent:

While these are personalized for each user, you can see that others are searching for content that brands or publishers have typically kept on their blogs and find valuable for their businesses.

Brands looking to increase their brand awareness can benefit from being on TikTok regardless of their industry. After all, nobody expected the success Duolingo has had on the platform.

@duolingo this dumpy is literally a single mom who works 2 jobs #Duolingo#fgoogletranslate#DuaLipa#Dulapeep#Dualingo#comedy#trend#twerkit_twerkit♬ Brujeria - ✿

Conclusion

Is TikTok threatening Google? No. Is it worth the attention of SEOs? Yes.

Over the next few months, keep an eye out for more pieces on how to make the most of this upstart and unlikely content discovery search engine. I will be writing about the TikTok algorithm, what the search experience looks like on TikTok, and how to make sure your videos rank.

Why It's Getting Harder to Rank for Some Commercial Keywords (+ What You Can Do About It)

Our inbound lead generation is highly dependent upon SEO — it’s how we get more than 70% of our leads. So, naturally, we got a tad nervous when we saw some of our top commercial landing pages dipping out of top-five positions for their targeted search terms.

When we took to the SERPs to investigate who was unseating us, we discovered something equal parts unsettling and interesting: Our high-value, commercial-intent landing pages weren’t being displaced by competitors. They were being ousted by business directories and “listicles” that rank or compare multiple companies.

In fact, an evaluation of seven of our most important commercial keywords demonstrates a 50% increase in the number of lists and directories in top-five organic SERP real estate year-over-year (excluding SERP features such as People Also Ask).

Here’s an example for the keyword “SEO content writing services.” The image on the left is the SERP in 2022, and the one on the right is the SERP in 2021:

Notice the difference? The Featured Snippet, which we owned in 2021, is gone, we’ve dropped to position 5, and there are now three lists in the top-5 organic results where there used to be none.

We saw this again and again, and it left us with three questions:

1. Is there, in fact, an intent shift happening here, where Google is favoring lists, directories, and company rankings (consciously or unconsciously) over traditional commercial landing pages?

2. If so, what can be done about it?

3. What does this mean for the future of SEO?

Let’s tackle them one at a time.

Part 1: Are there more lists in 2022 than in years prior?

The answer: Based on a random sampling of commercial-intent keywords, yes. To what extent and who is most affected are the key questions, though.

Let’s look at how we figured this out, and evaluate the evidence

First things first: What do we mean by “lists” in SERPs?

For our purposes, we’ll define a “list” as any Google search result that compares, ranks, or evaluates multiple businesses. An example is something like, “8 best coffee grinders of 2022.” A Clutch directory listing for “Top Content Marketing Agencies” would also apply.

These could be off-site content from a third party writing about other companies, or an on-site list in which the publisher shrewdly ranks multiple companies, including their own. Here is NP Digital doing that very thing:

These different formats of “lists” are unified by a comparison-type commercial intent.

Second: How do we see a SERP change over time?

If we want to see how SERPs have changed from one year to the next, we need to be able to see what today’s SERP for a certain keyword looked like a year ago.

Here’s what the SERP for “mesh wifi router” looked like in 2021, based on Ahrefs data:

Third: How exactly should you compare one year’s SERP to another?

For it to be a fair assessment, I’d have to select keywords completely at random and then see how their SERPS differ from 2021 to 2022. The problem with Ahrefs’ historical SERP data, however, is that it plays poorly with local search intent.

For instance, I noticed that the search for “Landscaping services” was showing me results from Los Angeles.

I conducted most of this study from the literal opposite side of the country (Portland, ME), and I most certainly never see Los Angeles-specific results when I search for services here.

I noticed this with several other local-intent terms, like roofing for instance. Why does it happen? I suspect it has something to do with how they scrape or archive data to give their best estimate of what a SERP looked like at a point in time. Regardless, this means that my selection of commercial keywords had to be limited to terms that don’t have a strong local leaning.

Here is what that random selection of 25 keywords ended up looking like:

1. Content marketing agency
2. Moving services
3. HR Services
4. Website hosting services
5. Graphic design services
6. Email marketing services
7. Shipping service
8. Cloud migration service
9. Data center services
10. Staffing agency
11. Supply chain software
12. Keyword research tool
13. EHR system
14. Architecture firm
15. Cloud hosting service
16. IT consulting company
17. Accounts payable software
18. Marketing consultancy
19. Small business loan
20. Affordable laptops
21. Mesh wifi router
22. Water pick
23. Small coffee grinder
24. Budget printer
25. B2B lead generation service

So what did I do with these keywords?

1. Determined whether more lists are showing up in 2022, 2021, or 2020 SERPs. I simply counted the number of “lists” in the SERP in 2022 and compared it to the years prior.

2. Determined whether more lists are ranking in the top five organic listings in 2022, 2021, or 2020. I did this, again, by counting the number of lists for each year that appear in the top five. The point here is to see not just if there are more lists in SERPs, but whether more of them are ranking higher in 2022.

Note that I did not count SERP features, as I was primarily concerned with the actual listings.

Disclaimer: This is by no means an exhaustive or completely conclusive study. It’s really more of a random sampling, or a “head count.”

Finally: What did the results say?

Let’s look at the numbers. Below is the total lists from the 25 SERPs I looked at:

Overall, there was an 8.5% increase in the number of lists between 2021 and 2022 (and the difference between 2020 and 2021 is nominal).

That might not seem groundbreaking, but the sample size is not insignificant: I looked at approximately 200 total listings (using 25 keywords, most of the SERPs had nine or 10 listings).

So that 8.5% increase carries some weight.

Things get more compelling when we look at the top five results:

The number of lists in the top five positions increased by 35.5% from 2021 to 2022. In this case, our sample size is a hard 125 listings, since we counted the first five organic results for every single one of our 25 keywords.

Again, not a nail in the coffin, but it is meaningful.

In summary

Here’s what we know:

• 2022 had more lists than 2021 and 2020.

• 2022 had double-digit percentage gains in terms of lists in the top-five results over both 2021 and 2022.

• But, 2021 actually has slightly fewer lists than 2020.

• And 2021 saw a decline in lists in top-five results of nearly 12% from 2020.

Here’s what it likely means:

• Overall, the number of total lists and top-five lists has trended upward since 2020, with the latter trending upward much more significantly.

• Pulling from this data pool, there is sufficient evidence showing that lists are more dominant in the top five positions on SERPs for commercial keywords in 2022 than either of the preceding years.

Here’s what it does not mean:

• That this trend is universal. After all, we left out local intent, which is a big deal for some companies. The data seems solid for non-location searches, but we can’t evaluate what we can’t reliably see (local-intent commercial searches).

This is what it all looks like visually:

So why the slight dip from 2020 to 2021? It reads like a blip in what is otherwise an upward trend, but we can only speculate. Three years of data, while not bad, isn’t enough to conclusively signify a long-term trend.

However, it’s more than enough of a change to affect any company that relied heavily on those top-five positions in 2021. If you’ve seen this change (like we have), you know how much it can hurt.

Which brings us to:

Part 2: What can be done about it?

The answer: Get listed in relevant directories, make your own lists, and infiltrate others’ lists.

Again, we’ll go one by one.

1. Get listed in relevant directories

If a directory is outranking your landing page for an important commercial term, you want to be on that directory, and as high up in it as possible. Invest time and energy into sourcing the reviews needed to improve your rank.

For several years, we more or less owned the number one spot for “content marketing agency.” Today, we’re ranking third, and we are only one of two commercial LPs on the entire SERP.

The number one spot is now held by Clutch. When we saw Clutch coming for us in 2020, we ramped up our efforts to acquire more reviews on the platform. This got us ranking highly in their directory.

The result: It’s one of our top sources of referral traffic and the top source of conversions from referral traffic.

Before pursuing paid options with business directories, I’d recommend doing everything possible to bring your organic ranking up, as many directories use organic rank as a tie-breaker in their “bidding.” I’ll add one extremely important note here: You never know which directory will be the next big winner in the SERPs. Sure, target most of your reviews for the ones that sustain a strong presence, but also scour the web for directories that list your competitors, but not you.

Link intersect tools from the likes of Moz can help you do this, and it’s so worth the time. Another way is to just explore SERPs of some of the relevant keywords in your industry.

In mid-2021, our link building specialist spent literally five minutes getting us listed in a directory called Growth Marketing Pro. As a result of those five minutes, we’ve since earned over 1,500 users, and 46 conversions.

Just look at all the keywords that directory is on page one for — not to mention some of that keyword volume:

It’s just such an easy win.

2. Make your own lists

We’ve only recently begun exploring this option, and as you can see, position 14 is nothing to really brag about.

But we’re playing a long game. Our post about content marketing platforms went live a few months ago. It hasn’t landed on page one yet, but our hope is that we’ve created something that will build backlinks over time, and that we can update and re-promote year after year. And each time we update it, we’ll optimize the on-page copy to make sure it’s strongly positioned to succeed in search.

As with most of the strategies referenced in this section, it’s still too soon to attribute success to this, but it’s something to think about. If other sites can create comprehensive lists that feature their own product, you can, too. It’s just a matter of creating said list strategically, and then promoting it and monitoring performance over time.

3. Infiltrate others’ lists

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Or at least try by brokering your media strengths in exchange for a spot on their page one listing.

We’ve had mixed success here. In some cases, the promise of a link exchange, a guest blog post, or a guest appearance on our podcast were enough to get us included on a strategic list.

Appearing on those lists is great, as it gives us more visibility on SERPs for high-value keywords. But much to our existential chagrin, publishers have (on more than one occasion) flat-out told us we need to pay to be listed on their site. I’ll save the far-reaching, philosophical implications of this for Part 3 of this post.

For now, my advice is to add what we’ll call “referral SEO” to your existing backlink efforts. Think of it as targeted brand mentions. Your targets are based on what list is ranking for a keyword that is highly important to you. Once you’ve earned your placement, keep an eye on your referral traffic from that source.

Part 3: What does this mean for the future of SEO?

Answer: It’s complicated — and a potentially explosive subject.

Off the cuff, there’s a few big questions to unpack:

1. As directories and lists capture more page one SERP territory, they’re looking to cash in. One publisher literally told us they’d consider putting us on one of their lists if we paid them $3,500. Does Google care about that? Worse, at what point does commercial SEO become a pay-to-play situation, whereby if you want your company on a SERP, you have to pay your way onto someone else’s page?

2. When should you stop investing in certain commercial landing pages? Like I said, commercial pages are going extinct on the SERP for one of our most important keywords, “content marketing agency.” For now, we’re in position three. But we’ve seen all but one of our competitors get knocked onto page two. What happens then?

I can’t answer these questions confidently, but here goes:

I like to think the answer to the first question is that Google will catch on to what’s happening here, and start penalizing lists and directories that are presenting results based on who’s paying them, as opposed to what might actually be the best, most meaningful result for that query. But I have no idea if or how Google will do that.

For the second question, we’d have to shift our keyword target. At some point, we may need to bow out and understand where we can’t compete with these directories head-on, and assess whether there’s another keyword of equal value that we should target instead.

My first answer is hopeful and tenuous, and my second opens the floodgates to a whole lot of future work. But unfortunately, that’s the best we can do right now.

The final takeaways

Yes, there is some evidence that lists are now more prominent on page one for commercial keywords.

Yes, there is something you can and should do about it — and as always with organic SEO, you have to keep playing the game and run alongside the SERPs. Improve your rankings in directories. Get listed in new directories. Make some lists. Trade some backlinks. Get wily and start infiltrating some SERPs.

And no, we don’t quite know what this means for the future of SEO.

All you can really do is stay informed, stay data-driven, and keep updating your strategies to have a fighting chance of maintaining some sort of presence on page one for your most important commercial keywords.

Why It's Getting Harder to Rank for Some Commercial Keywords (+ What You Can Do About It)

Our inbound lead generation is highly dependent upon SEO — it’s how we get more than 70% of our leads. So, naturally, we got a tad nervous when we saw some of our top commercial landing pages dipping out of top-five positions for their targeted search terms.

When we took to the SERPs to investigate who was unseating us, we discovered something equal parts unsettling and interesting: Our high-value, commercial-intent landing pages weren’t being displaced by competitors. They were being ousted by business directories and “listicles” that rank or compare multiple companies.

In fact, an evaluation of seven of our most important commercial keywords demonstrates a 50% increase in the number of lists and directories in top-five organic SERP real estate year-over-year (excluding SERP features such as People Also Ask).

Here’s an example for the keyword “SEO content writing services.” The image on the left is the SERP in 2022, and the one on the right is the SERP in 2021:

Notice the difference? The Featured Snippet, which we owned in 2021, is gone, we’ve dropped to position 5, and there are now three lists in the top-5 organic results where there used to be none.

We saw this again and again, and it left us with three questions:

1. Is there, in fact, an intent shift happening here, where Google is favoring lists, directories, and company rankings (consciously or unconsciously) over traditional commercial landing pages?

2. If so, what can be done about it?

3. What does this mean for the future of SEO?

Let’s tackle them one at a time.

Part 1: Are there more lists in 2022 than in years prior?

The answer: Based on a random sampling of commercial-intent keywords, yes. To what extent and who is most affected are the key questions, though.

Let’s look at how we figured this out, and evaluate the evidence

First things first: What do we mean by “lists” in SERPs?

For our purposes, we’ll define a “list” as any Google search result that compares, ranks, or evaluates multiple businesses. An example is something like, “8 best coffee grinders of 2022.” A Clutch directory listing for “Top Content Marketing Agencies” would also apply.

These could be off-site content from a third party writing about other companies, or an on-site list in which the publisher shrewdly ranks multiple companies, including their own. Here is NP Digital doing that very thing:

These different formats of “lists” are unified by a comparison-type commercial intent.

Second: How do we see a SERP change over time?

If we want to see how SERPs have changed from one year to the next, we need to be able to see what today’s SERP for a certain keyword looked like a year ago.

Here’s what the SERP for “mesh wifi router” looked like in 2021, based on Ahrefs data:

Third: How exactly should you compare one year’s SERP to another?

For it to be a fair assessment, I’d have to select keywords completely at random and then see how their SERPS differ from 2021 to 2022. The problem with Ahrefs’ historical SERP data, however, is that it plays poorly with local search intent.

For instance, I noticed that the search for “Landscaping services” was showing me results from Los Angeles.

I conducted most of this study from the literal opposite side of the country (Portland, ME), and I most certainly never see Los Angeles-specific results when I search for services here.

I noticed this with several other local-intent terms, like roofing for instance. Why does it happen? I suspect it has something to do with how they scrape or archive data to give their best estimate of what a SERP looked like at a point in time. Regardless, this means that my selection of commercial keywords had to be limited to terms that don’t have a strong local leaning.

Here is what that random selection of 25 keywords ended up looking like:

1. Content marketing agency
2. Moving services
3. HR Services
4. Website hosting services
5. Graphic design services
6. Email marketing services
7. Shipping service
8. Cloud migration service
9. Data center services
10. Staffing agency
11. Supply chain software
12. Keyword research tool
13. EHR system
14. Architecture firm
15. Cloud hosting service
16. IT consulting company
17. Accounts payable software
18. Marketing consultancy
19. Small business loan
20. Affordable laptops
21. Mesh wifi router
22. Water pick
23. Small coffee grinder
24. Budget printer
25. B2B lead generation service

So what did I do with these keywords?

1. Determined whether more lists are showing up in 2022, 2021, or 2020 SERPs. I simply counted the number of “lists” in the SERP in 2022 and compared it to the years prior.

2. Determined whether more lists are ranking in the top five organic listings in 2022, 2021, or 2020. I did this, again, by counting the number of lists for each year that appear in the top five. The point here is to see not just if there are more lists in SERPs, but whether more of them are ranking higher in 2022.

Note that I did not count SERP features, as I was primarily concerned with the actual listings.

Disclaimer: This is by no means an exhaustive or completely conclusive study. It’s really more of a random sampling, or a “head count.”

Finally: What did the results say?

Let’s look at the numbers. Below is the total lists from the 25 SERPs I looked at:

Overall, there was an 8.5% increase in the number of lists between 2021 and 2022 (and the difference between 2020 and 2021 is nominal).

That might not seem groundbreaking, but the sample size is not insignificant: I looked at approximately 200 total listings (using 25 keywords, most of the SERPs had nine or 10 listings).

So that 8.5% increase carries some weight.

Things get more compelling when we look at the top five results:

The number of lists in the top five positions increased by 35.5% from 2021 to 2022. In this case, our sample size is a hard 125 listings, since we counted the first five organic results for every single one of our 25 keywords.

Again, not a nail in the coffin, but it is meaningful.

In summary

Here’s what we know:

• 2022 had more lists than 2021 and 2020.

• 2022 had double-digit percentage gains in terms of lists in the top-five results over both 2021 and 2022.

• But, 2021 actually has slightly fewer lists than 2020.

• And 2021 saw a decline in lists in top-five results of nearly 12% from 2020.

Here’s what it likely means:

• Overall, the number of total lists and top-five lists has trended upward since 2020, with the latter trending upward much more significantly.

• Pulling from this data pool, there is sufficient evidence showing that lists are more dominant in the top five positions on SERPs for commercial keywords in 2022 than either of the preceding years.

Here’s what it does not mean:

• That this trend is universal. After all, we left out local intent, which is a big deal for some companies. The data seems solid for non-location searches, but we can’t evaluate what we can’t reliably see (local-intent commercial searches).

This is what it all looks like visually:

So why the slight dip from 2020 to 2021? It reads like a blip in what is otherwise an upward trend, but we can only speculate. Three years of data, while not bad, isn’t enough to conclusively signify a long-term trend.

However, it’s more than enough of a change to affect any company that relied heavily on those top-five positions in 2021. If you’ve seen this change (like we have), you know how much it can hurt.

Which brings us to:

Part 2: What can be done about it?

The answer: Get listed in relevant directories, make your own lists, and infiltrate others’ lists.

Again, we’ll go one by one.

1. Get listed in relevant directories

If a directory is outranking your landing page for an important commercial term, you want to be on that directory, and as high up in it as possible. Invest time and energy into sourcing the reviews needed to improve your rank.

For several years, we more or less owned the number one spot for “content marketing agency.” Today, we’re ranking third, and we are only one of two commercial LPs on the entire SERP.

The number one spot is now held by Clutch. When we saw Clutch coming for us in 2020, we ramped up our efforts to acquire more reviews on the platform. This got us ranking highly in their directory.

The result: It’s one of our top sources of referral traffic and the top source of conversions from referral traffic.

Before pursuing paid options with business directories, I’d recommend doing everything possible to bring your organic ranking up, as many directories use organic rank as a tie-breaker in their “bidding.” I’ll add one extremely important note here: You never know which directory will be the next big winner in the SERPs. Sure, target most of your reviews for the ones that sustain a strong presence, but also scour the web for directories that list your competitors, but not you.

Link intersect tools from the likes of Moz can help you do this, and it’s so worth the time. Another way is to just explore SERPs of some of the relevant keywords in your industry.

In mid-2021, our link building specialist spent literally five minutes getting us listed in a directory called Growth Marketing Pro. As a result of those five minutes, we’ve since earned over 1,500 users, and 46 conversions.

Just look at all the keywords that directory is on page one for — not to mention some of that keyword volume:

It’s just such an easy win.

2. Make your own lists

We’ve only recently begun exploring this option, and as you can see, position 14 is nothing to really brag about.

But we’re playing a long game. Our post about content marketing platforms went live a few months ago. It hasn’t landed on page one yet, but our hope is that we’ve created something that will build backlinks over time, and that we can update and re-promote year after year. And each time we update it, we’ll optimize the on-page copy to make sure it’s strongly positioned to succeed in search.

As with most of the strategies referenced in this section, it’s still too soon to attribute success to this, but it’s something to think about. If other sites can create comprehensive lists that feature their own product, you can, too. It’s just a matter of creating said list strategically, and then promoting it and monitoring performance over time.

3. Infiltrate others’ lists

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Or at least try by brokering your media strengths in exchange for a spot on their page one listing.

We’ve had mixed success here. In some cases, the promise of a link exchange, a guest blog post, or a guest appearance on our podcast were enough to get us included on a strategic list.

Appearing on those lists is great, as it gives us more visibility on SERPs for high-value keywords. But much to our existential chagrin, publishers have (on more than one occasion) flat-out told us we need to pay to be listed on their site. I’ll save the far-reaching, philosophical implications of this for Part 3 of this post.

For now, my advice is to add what we’ll call “referral SEO” to your existing backlink efforts. Think of it as targeted brand mentions. Your targets are based on what list is ranking for a keyword that is highly important to you. Once you’ve earned your placement, keep an eye on your referral traffic from that source.

Part 3: What does this mean for the future of SEO?

Answer: It’s complicated — and a potentially explosive subject.

Off the cuff, there’s a few big questions to unpack:

1. As directories and lists capture more page one SERP territory, they’re looking to cash in. One publisher literally told us they’d consider putting us on one of their lists if we paid them $3,500. Does Google care about that? Worse, at what point does commercial SEO become a pay-to-play situation, whereby if you want your company on a SERP, you have to pay your way onto someone else’s page?

2. When should you stop investing in certain commercial landing pages? Like I said, commercial pages are going extinct on the SERP for one of our most important keywords, “content marketing agency.” For now, we’re in position three. But we’ve seen all but one of our competitors get knocked onto page two. What happens then?

I can’t answer these questions confidently, but here goes:

I like to think the answer to the first question is that Google will catch on to what’s happening here, and start penalizing lists and directories that are presenting results based on who’s paying them, as opposed to what might actually be the best, most meaningful result for that query. But I have no idea if or how Google will do that.

For the second question, we’d have to shift our keyword target. At some point, we may need to bow out and understand where we can’t compete with these directories head-on, and assess whether there’s another keyword of equal value that we should target instead.

My first answer is hopeful and tenuous, and my second opens the floodgates to a whole lot of future work. But unfortunately, that’s the best we can do right now.

The final takeaways

Yes, there is some evidence that lists are now more prominent on page one for commercial keywords.

Yes, there is something you can and should do about it — and as always with organic SEO, you have to keep playing the game and run alongside the SERPs. Improve your rankings in directories. Get listed in new directories. Make some lists. Trade some backlinks. Get wily and start infiltrating some SERPs.

And no, we don’t quite know what this means for the future of SEO.

All you can really do is stay informed, stay data-driven, and keep updating your strategies to have a fighting chance of maintaining some sort of presence on page one for your most important commercial keywords.

How to Find Your Real SEO Competitors — Whiteboard Friday

Competitive research and analysis is a critical component of your SEO strategy. You may have an idea of who your busines competitors are, but your real SEO competitors are the ones who target the same keywords, speak to the same audience, and solve for the same consumer needs. 

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Lidia Infante walks you through two approaches to find out who those competitors are.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Fridays. My name is Lidia Infante, and I'm the Senior SEO Manager at Sanity.io. Today, we're going to be talking about how to find your real SEO competitors.

Competitor identification and competitor research is absolutely key to a good SEO strategy. And in order to nail it, you need to figure out who your competitors really are. So how do we know that someone is a competitor in search?

Essentially, they need to meet three criteria. They're targeting the same keywords as you, they're speaking to the same audience, and they solve for the same consumer need as you. That is, if your target audience goes with them, they have no more need for you.

There are essentially two approaches to identifying your competitors. You've got a top-down approach and you've got a bottom-up approach. 

Top-down approach to competitive research

So let's begin with this one. The very first thing you are going to do is contact other departments. Depending on where you are and the type of vertical that you're working in, you're going to want to talk to sales, you're going to want to talk to support, to customer success, to other areas of marketing, and even engineering, and ask them to provide a list of their perceived competitors. 

The next thing you're going to do is check an audience research tool. I recommend, for example, True Competitor by Moz, obviously. 

And then you're going to want to find the overlap between the two lists, right? So out of the list that your department and your colleagues say that are your competitors and the list that your tool says those are your competitors, you're going to want to find the overlap.

The advantages of this method is that it helps you get buy-in because other departments are going to recognize parts of their work into the output that you're going to present and build better connections with them. And it's really fast. You can get this done in a day, even less, depends on how long you're going to have to wait for that information from other departments. 

There are other aspects of it that are not as good. So, for example, it's not going to be the most accurate competitor research that you've ever had, and you're not going to be able to drill into competitors by topic.

However, this is best for performing sites. So if your site has been online for a while and you're ranking for a few of your target keywords, this is going to work really well for you. And going for the bottom-up framework might be overkill.

Bottom-up approach to competitive research

But then if you're starting a new site, or if you really, really want to dig into who your competitors are, you're going to want to do the bottom-up way. 

So the very first thing that we're going to do is we're going to identify what your target keywords are, and then we're going to cluster them into little topics. 

For each of those keywords, we're going to download the SERP results, the top 10, the first page. And we're going to analyze the competitor presence for each of your topics.

So if, let's say, Amazon shows up in 100% of your keywords for X topic, you know that this is very key for you. And then what you can do is drill down even further and identify the SERP features that are present in each topic.

You've already done the download. You already have the data. Just dig in a little deeper and you'll find out if you are best to attack these results with infographics, articles, video, any other format.

This is very accurate, but it can be really slow. The bottom-up framework is really good if you're starting a new site, or if you're not sure that the approach that you've had before is working. Since it's a little tricky, I have provided a free template that you can find linked in the text below. And you can find me on socials at @lidiainfante or my website, lidiainfante.com.

But before you go, to point two, I was using Moz's True Competitor tool, and it blew my mind. I recently joined a new company, Sanity.io, and I really wanted to figure out who my competitors are. I'm not an expert in headless CMSs and the structure content space, so I've been working on it for literal weeks. Just now, I was hanging out with the Moz team. They showed me the tool, and they immediately nailed my top five competitors on a click. What is that? Amazing.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

How to Find Your Real SEO Competitors — Whiteboard Friday

Competitive research and analysis is a critical component of your SEO strategy. You may have an idea of who your busines competitors are, but your real SEO competitors are the ones who target the same keywords, speak to the same audience, and solve for the same consumer needs. 

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Lidia Infante walks you through two approaches to find out who those competitors are.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Fridays. My name is Lidia Infante, and I'm the Senior SEO Manager at Sanity.io. Today, we're going to be talking about how to find your real SEO competitors.

Competitor identification and competitor research is absolutely key to a good SEO strategy. And in order to nail it, you need to figure out who your competitors really are. So how do we know that someone is a competitor in search?

Essentially, they need to meet three criteria. They're targeting the same keywords as you, they're speaking to the same audience, and they solve for the same consumer need as you. That is, if your target audience goes with them, they have no more need for you.

There are essentially two approaches to identifying your competitors. You've got a top-down approach and you've got a bottom-up approach. 

Top-down approach to competitive research

So let's begin with this one. The very first thing you are going to do is contact other departments. Depending on where you are and the type of vertical that you're working in, you're going to want to talk to sales, you're going to want to talk to support, to customer success, to other areas of marketing, and even engineering, and ask them to provide a list of their perceived competitors. 

The next thing you're going to do is check an audience research tool. I recommend, for example, True Competitor by Moz, obviously. 

And then you're going to want to find the overlap between the two lists, right? So out of the list that your department and your colleagues say that are your competitors and the list that your tool says those are your competitors, you're going to want to find the overlap.

The advantages of this method is that it helps you get buy-in because other departments are going to recognize parts of their work into the output that you're going to present and build better connections with them. And it's really fast. You can get this done in a day, even less, depends on how long you're going to have to wait for that information from other departments. 

There are other aspects of it that are not as good. So, for example, it's not going to be the most accurate competitor research that you've ever had, and you're not going to be able to drill into competitors by topic.

However, this is best for performing sites. So if your site has been online for a while and you're ranking for a few of your target keywords, this is going to work really well for you. And going for the bottom-up framework might be overkill.

Bottom-up approach to competitive research

But then if you're starting a new site, or if you really, really want to dig into who your competitors are, you're going to want to do the bottom-up way. 

So the very first thing that we're going to do is we're going to identify what your target keywords are, and then we're going to cluster them into little topics. 

For each of those keywords, we're going to download the SERP results, the top 10, the first page. And we're going to analyze the competitor presence for each of your topics.

So if, let's say, Amazon shows up in 100% of your keywords for X topic, you know that this is very key for you. And then what you can do is drill down even further and identify the SERP features that are present in each topic.

You've already done the download. You already have the data. Just dig in a little deeper and you'll find out if you are best to attack these results with infographics, articles, video, any other format.

This is very accurate, but it can be really slow. The bottom-up framework is really good if you're starting a new site, or if you're not sure that the approach that you've had before is working. Since it's a little tricky, I have provided a free template that you can find linked in the text below. And you can find me on socials at @lidiainfante or my website, lidiainfante.com.

But before you go, to point two, I was using Moz's True Competitor tool, and it blew my mind. I recently joined a new company, Sanity.io, and I really wanted to figure out who my competitors are. I'm not an expert in headless CMSs and the structure content space, so I've been working on it for literal weeks. Just now, I was hanging out with the Moz team. They showed me the tool, and they immediately nailed my top five competitors on a click. What is that? Amazing.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

A Guide to Franchise SEO

As franchises can have a large number of locations by nature, search marketers are faced with the ever present hurdle of scale. More locations means more content and landing pages to manage, and a much bigger chance of running into technical SEO issues. These challenges can be even more daunting when combined with an older CMS, franchisee-generated content, and tracking issues.

At Go Fish Digital, we’ve been able to work with quite a few franchise businesses and advise on their SEO strategies. Over time, we’ve been able to identify common problems with these campaigns, and ways to solve these issues, the framework for which I’ll cover in this piece.

What is franchise SEO?

Franchise SEO is a set of initiatives to improve the search engine visibility of franchise websites, which are websites that promote an overall brand while at the same time offering localized pages for multiple locations of that brand. Strategies include scaling keyword research, creating localized landing pages, and removing duplicate content.

Broadly, franchise SEOs need to always be thinking about scalable approaches, local page quality, and technical issues that are common on these types of sites. Below I’ll cover some of our favorite approaches when handling a franchise site.

Franchise SEO best practices

Scaling keyword research

To start your franchise SEO campaign, you’ll want to identify and track the keywords that are most valuable to your business. Tracking your core keywords will allow you to monitor a couple of things:

1. Visibility changes for individual keywords

2. Aggregate rankings to see the overall SEO health of your website

The issue that most franchises face is that they offer a wide variety of service offerings across a large number of geographic areas. For instance, a national plumber may provide 20 different types of services (water leaks, sump pumps, etc.) across 50 high priority markets. This can make keyword research extremely difficult, as you’ll want to be sure you're tracking your site’s visibility across all of these different service/geographic combinations.

For this type of analysis, we love using the tool MergeWords. Once you identify the combinations of services and locations, you can easily plug this information into the tool to ensure that you’re creating queries for every combination.

This process allows you to more easily scale the keyword research process to ensure that there are no gaps in your rank tracking data.

Localize and segment your keyword tracking

With franchises, there is no such thing as a “national” ranking. Even queries with geographic modifiers such as “commercial cleaning” will have inherent local intent. A search for a query like this will bring up results that are specific to your area without you having to specify that information to Google. Tracking your keywords at a “national” level won’t provide you much insight as to how visible you are when real users perform a search.

Most rank tracking solutions will come with some type of location feature that will allow you to monitor a particular keyword in a specific geographic area. Many tools will allow you to get as granular as defining the exact ZIP code of the area that you want to track. We enjoy using tools such as STAT (pictured here) for this type of rank tracking.

This can still be useful even if you’re a business that has customers in a wide geographic area, but don’t have a physical location in each one. For example, a cleaning business might only have a few locations, but serve an entire state. In these situations, it can be beneficial to identify your highest priority/highest populated areas and set up localized keyword tracking for each one.

If you wanted to track all across the state of North Carolina, you could track keywords in geographic areas such as:

1. Charlotte

2. Raleigh

3. Durham

4. Chapel Hill

5. Winston-Salem

Once tracking your geo-specific keywords, you can then utilize keyword segments to monitor how you perform in a specific location. Keyword segments will allow you to drill down to analyze aggregate local rankings. You can do this by creating a segment for all of the queries you’re monitoring for a particular location.

For example, here you can see how a particular site ranks on the first page in Chapel Hill, NC:

Review high priority geographic areas

Now with segmented rank tracking set up, you’ll be in a great position to benchmark where you stand across your different locations. Doing this can help you better analyze the highest priority geographical areas. This can help you better focus your strategy, even if you’re managing a large number of locations.

For example, in our location in Chapel Hill, NC, we can see that 67% of our tracked keywords are ranking on the first page:

However, when we look at visibility in Fairfax, VA, we can see that only 36% of our tracked queries rank in the same positions.

This data allows us to see that we don’t rank as well in Fairfax when compared to Chapel Hill. If Fairfax is a high priority area for us, we might want to focus our efforts specifically on reviews for this market. Maybe our content isn’t as strong here or maybe that landscape is much more competitive. Whatever the case is, keyword segmentation has given us the knowledge of where we need to focus our efforts moving forward.

Create location-based pages

Another critical element of a franchise SEO campaign is to ensure that you have built out location pages for every area that you serve. This will give your site the opportunity to appear for geo-specific queries for your core keywords. As previously mentioned, Google naturally localizes the results in many industries, which means these pages could also appear for general keywords that don’t utilize geographic modifiers (“lawn care services”).

Unfortunately, most franchises heavily underinvest in this area. The vast majority of local landing pages contain fairly generic content that doesn’t add much value for users. Oftentimes, this involves general descriptions of a particular area. Even worse, these pages are notorious for having the same templates with just the location name replaced.

Ideally, your location pages would contain the following elements:

1. Optimized title tags and content for that specific location

2. Customized on-page content for that area

3. The address, phone number, and contact information (if a physical address exists)

4. Structured data markup from the most specific category in the schema.org library

5. Reviews specific to that individual area

6. External links to relevant local resources

For example, the Lawn Love franchise does a really good job of creating local landing pages for each area that they’re active in.

As a result, they rank well for “lawn care service” queries in a large spread of markets such as Philadelphia, Raleigh, and Pittsburgh.

What if you don’t have physical locations in the area you serve?

Even if your brand doesn’t have physical locations in the geographic area you’re targeting, it’s still definitely encouraged to create localized landing pages, as long as you provide services to that specific area. This can be a really useful strategy, especially if you only have a small number of locations but serve a much larger geographic area such as an entire state.

Below you can see the “Locations” page of a social security lawyer based in Pittsburgh, PA. While they only have a single physical location in the city of Pittsburgh, their business is regional and extends beyond the city into other parts of western Pennsylvania and even Ohio.

To improve the reach of their business, they’ve created location-based pages for all of the most popular cities and towns that they serve in these areas.

This gives their SEO the ability to cover a much wider geographic area than they normally would be able to with just a single location.

When performing any multi-location SEO campaign, we recommend one of the first things you do is assess all the major geographic markets that you serve. Next, you should audit your existing landing pages assets to ensure that you have a location page mapped to any high priority area. You can use tools such as CRM data or conversions in Google Analytics to determine what your most important locations are.

However, if you don’t have this information, another way to do it would be by evaluating populations. If we were working with a business in Texas, we could utilize municipality population data in order to determine which landing pages need to be created first based on where the majority of people are located. This provides a data-based way of informing where to focus your content generation strategies.

Create and optimize Google Business Profiles

For any locations where you have a physical address, you’ll want to be sure that you’ve created and claimed a Google Business Profile (GBP). These profiles integrate directly with Google Maps and Google’s local 3-pack results. This means that in order to be eligible to rank in Google’s map packs, you’ll need to have an active GBP that’s been properly verified:

Across all of your physical locations, you’ll want to audit your GBPs to ensure that the following information is accurate:

1. Primary category (most important)

2. Secondary categories (filled out as completely as possible)

3. Name

4. Address

5. Phone number

6. Hours of operation

The most crucial part of this step is ensuring that your primary and secondary categories for each location are filled out as completely as possible. If your business isn’t categorized properly, you could potentially be missing out on local pack visibility for relevant search queries for your franchise. To get a better understanding of how to categorize your GBPs, you can read Miriam Ellis’s excellent guide.

Ensure NAP consistency

Another great step to optimize your local pack rankings is to ensure there’s NAP (name, address, phone number) consistency across all of your physical locations. The more consistent this information is across the web, the more likely you are to appear in the map pack results. Since franchises face the challenge of scale, doing this manually is out of the question. Tools like Moz Local can help automate this process by improving each location’s NAP consistency in the most prominent data aggregators.

E-A-T optimizations

If you’ve already set up location pages but are looking to take their on-page optimizations to the next level, you can look for ways to improve the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) of their content.

Google has a responsibility to try to improve the visibility of sites that they feel will provide accurate information to users. For this reason, it needs to factor in how trustworthy a particular source is. While optimizations for E-A-T will be most relevant to sites in the health and finance verticals, multi-location sites can also leverage these concepts to improve their on-page content.

Here are some of our favorite content elements to utilize E-A-T concepts on your franchise location pages:

1. Information about laws and government regulations

2. External links to helpful local resources

3. Facts about a particular geographic area

4. Data points relevant to the local area

5. Profiles and information about specific employees at that location

Going back to the Lawn Love example, on their location pages, they provide users with specific data points about a particular area such as mowing costs, average yard sizes, and how frequently lawns are mowed.

Looking at another industry, the chiropractor franchise The Joint provides biographies of each doctor for each individual location, as well as information such as how many years of experience they have:

On-page optimizations like this may help improve the trustworthiness of your content to both users and search engines. Utilizing original data, linking to trusted government sites, and providing information about your specific location are all potential ways of sending additional trust signals. This type of content helps demonstrate your business's knowledge of the local market and differentiate your website from competitors that will likely have generic information.

Structured data

You’ll want to be sure that you're marking up your location based landing pages with structured data. Structured data is simply code that you place on a website to give search engines a better understanding about the context or the intent of that page.

Generally, structured data will be placed on a particular page template, such as your location pages. This makes schema markup a great way to improve the optimization of a website at scale.

One of the best things about schema markup is that, depending on your business, there might already be a schema type that closely describes what your business does. The vast majority of franchises will use some subtype of LocalBusiness structured data to markup individual location pages. While there are too many to list, below you can see some of the most common types of schema for franchise businesses:

• Attorney

• AutoDealer

• AutoRepair

• DryCleaningOrLaundry

• Electrician

• FinancialService

• GeneralContractor

• MedicalBusiness

• MovingCompany

• Plumber

• ProfessionalService

You can see that Two Men and a Truck have marked up all of their “Moving” location pages with the MovingCompany structured data type that highlights information such as the name, address, phone number, hours, and reviews.

Which schema you choose will vary greatly depending on the overall topic of your business. Your franchise should definitely be reviewing the schema.org library to see what the most specific type of structured data is for your location pages.

Review duplicate content issues

One of the biggest technical issues with large franchise sites is duplicate content. This is more likely to happen when steps have been taken in order to scale localized content initiatives. If not done properly, this can lead to pages that are too thin to be indexed or that Google has identified as duplicate.

As an example, here you can see a franchise that’s using templated content across a variety of pages:

As a result, Google may choose to ignore these pages and exclude them from the index entirely. If your pages are based on a template with little variation in content, this review is absolutely critical. To find pages this might be impacting, you can perform the following steps:

1. Navigate to Google Search Console

2. Go to the “Coverage” report

3. Select the “Excluded” tab

4. Review both the “Crawled - currently not indexed” and “Discovered - currently not indexed” reports

If you see pages that are built from a template getting flagged in these reports, there is a good chance that it’s due to a duplicate or thin content issue. These can be great pages to prioritize new content creation on as these changes could result in high converting pages getting indexed by Google.

Another method is to use a tool like Siteliner to identify duplicate content at scale. Siteliner crawls through your site and flags any duplicate/similar content that it finds. Pages with high match percentages can be audited and potentially adjusted to be more unique.

Create content that solves user problems

A great long term approach to franchise SEO campaigns is to connect with your customers before they’re ready to make a purchase. An effective way to do this is to identify queries that users would be searching before engaging with your franchise, and then create a content strategy around targeting those topics.

For example, a common reason to go to an auto repair franchise would be when you see the ominous check engine light appear on your car. In this situation, it’s likely that the user would seek to learn more about the issue and even try to fix it themselves before enlisting the help of a service.

The company AutoZone wisely understands this trend, and has created a page that provides information about reasons why the check engine light may appear. As a result, they rank on the first page for the query “check engine light”:

When analyzing the data more closely, AutoZone has clearly been investing in this type of content in recent years. As a result, it’s estimated that they’re generating over 580,000 organic sessions a month to these types of pages:

A particular type of content that I believe franchise owners should be paying attention to is video. This is especially true if your franchise provides some type of service that would be considered DIY. More and more we’re seeing SERPs around DIY queries where the bulk of the first page results are YouTube videos.

If you’re a franchise with existing video assets, it’s worth ensuring that any content you’ve uploaded to YouTube is optimized for relevant keywords. Doing this could provide more visibility through both YouTube and the Google search results, as they’re becoming more and more integrated.

A brand that positioned themselves very well for this trend is Ace Hardware. They’ve built up an extensive catalog of videos that directly integrate their products and teach users how to accomplish different projects. As a result, they often receive an embedded result directly on the SERPs for queries around their core products.

A brief franchise SEO case study

Applying these frameworks can be extremely powerful for franchise businesses, and we’ve seen some strong results when doing so.

For one environmental services client, we were able to identify that they didn’t have localized landing page content that targeted many of their core geographic areas. As a result, they were extremely limited in the number of markets their content was able to appear in.

By reviewing old versions of the site, we were able to create a plan to recreate many localized landing pages that had once existed, and utilize local content best practices. Doing this allowed them to experience a +270% improvement in the number of tracked queries that were ranking on the first page in the span of two years. 

Conclusion

When working on franchise SEO, marketers need to be aware of the contextual and technical considerations that apply most to these sites. Franchises need to be aware of the technical issues that come along with multiple locations such as duplicate content, indexation consistency, structured data, and more.

Google is placing a greater emphasis on quality localized content and more brands are starting to invest in these initiatives. By following the steps above, hopefully you’re able to think about your franchise’s search initiatives in a different way, and strengthen the quality of your site.