Category: Digital Marketing

12 billion, 3 billion, 1 billion. That’s the number of searches made in some of the top alternative search engines monthly.

While Google still holds more than 80% of the market share, ignoring search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo can make you lose out on relevant traffic. So don’t limit yourself to Google’s algorithm as you plan the next year’s SEO strategy.

In order to grow in the digital economy, we have to diversify our efforts. What better way to do that than by making sure that you rank on all the top search engines relevant for your audience?

Generally, there’s two reasons why your audience would choose an alternative search engine over Google: geopolitical reasons and/or privacy concerns.

As such, I’ve categorized the search engines below by global market share and by data privacy.

Top alternative search engines by global market share

When analyzing the global desktop market share of search engines throughout the last decade, there are a few small but mighty search engines that stand out. These are:

1) Bing

2) Yahoo

3) Yandex

4) DuckDuckGo

5) Baidu

These are the engines you want to give extra consideration if you intend to expand internationally. They all have their own unique search algorithms that are in many ways as complex and developed as Google’s.

Why they matter and how to rank on them

If you’re like me a few years ago, a die-hard Apple fan remarkably repulsed by Microsoft’s products (I’ve now converted to the seamless team of PC), you might think prioritizing resources to optimize content for Bing or other engines is a waste of time. What I failed to consider then, and what you might be overlooking, is geographic segmentation.

Do you want to reach the American audience using voice search? Consider Bing.

Are you expanding into China? Check out Baidu.

Each search engine matters because of its unique user types. Regardless of how small that market share might look on a global scale, if there’s regional search volume from your target audience, it’s worth the optimization.

Let’s go through them one by one.

Bing and Yahoo

Since 2018, Yahoo is exclusively powered by Bing Search. So as long as you rank in Bing, you’ll rank in Yahoo.

Bing Search, in combination with Yahoo, is without a doubt the strongest player after Google. Together, they have more than 10% of the global market share for desktop.

Now, some say that Bing’s market share will increase due to mergers and acquisitions, while others argue for its decline due to the death of Internet Explorer.

Still, all Microsoft browsers, such as Microsoft Edge Legacy and Chromium-based Microsoft Edge, have Bing as the default search engine, making Bing Search the natural choice for Microsoft product users. Yahoo, which is powered by Bing Search, is the default search engine for Mozilla’s browser Firefox, adding billions of impressions to Bing’s search results each year.

If we look at the United States alone, Microsoft sites own over 18% of the market share.

This is much due to their partnership with Amazon, where all voice-activated searches on Amazon Echo and Alexa are made with Bing Search.

Microsoft also pushes Bing further by offering easy rewards for searches and more advanced image search capabilities than Google.

Although the algorithms differ, optimizing for Bing search results is not much different than optimizing for Google. With a bit of fine tuning, it’s more than possible to come up with a strategy that allows for high rankings on both.

To rank on Bing, and thus Yahoo, make sure to do the following:

1. List your business on Bing Places

Bing Places is the equivalent of Google My Business and is the fastest way to get your business ranking for local seo. Many even consider Bing Places to favor small business owners as Bing puts their information more prominently on display.

2. Upload an XML Sitemap using Bing’s Webmaster Tools

While the debate on how much sitemaps really do matter for Google SEO continues, uploading one with Bing’s Webmaster Tool for XML Sitemaps allows the algorithm to better categorize and manage your content, making it more visible and relevant to the search audience.

3. Match keywords in your content

Check that the exact keyword match can be found in your page titles, meta descriptions and overall content. It’s known that the impact of on-page tactics as a ranking factor is much greater in Bing than Google.

4. Keep your social media profiles up to date

Go social! Bing considers your social media presence more than any other search engine. The Webmaster Guidelines specifically states that Bing considers social signals from third-party platforms to rank your content. Bing might even extract certain information directly from your Facebook company page to your Bing Places display.

5. Use high-quality images to enhance your content

Bing’s image search is much more advanced than Google’s. If you want your landing page to rank, add high-quality design assets to showcase your offerings. If you want your blog to rank, attach too-long-to-read infographics to highlight your points. Like the one above.

Yandex

Second to Bing is Yandex, having a total of 1.5% of the market share in global desktop search.

While it looks a lot like Google, its algorithm is different in many ways. Most prominent is the way Yandex indexes pages. Unlike Google’s almost continuous indexation, Yandex indexes pages sporadically. That means that you might have to wait around for a while before your site shows up on Yandex.

Despite this, it is still possible to rank on Yandex. You just need to have a bit more patience.

While waiting for your site to be indexed, take a look at the following:

1. Focus on tags over internal site structure

According to The Ultimate Guide to Yandex SEO, your header tag, title tag and slug are way more important than your internal site structure. In fact, it was only recently that Yandex started to support hreflang tags. Before that, Yandex only allowed the <head> hreflang implementation.

2. Consider search intent to rank

Some argue that Yandex meets search intent better than Google. The modern ICS score, which replaced the Thematic Index Citation, is determined by how relevant a site is to the query. Yandex uses its own version of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T) test to determine relevance.

3. Eliminate toxic links

Many do not know this, but Yandex was actually the first search engine to roll out a link-based algorithm. Already in 2005, 7 years before Google’s Penguin algorithm, Yandex introduced the Nepot filter, which specifically looked at the impact of toxic link exchanges and spam links.

Baidu

With over 3 billion searches daily, Baidu is the Google of China. If you want to do business in China, it’s the place to be.

While the site is available worldwide, the site predominantly favors simplified Chinese. So before taking any other steps, hire a native speaker to help you along the way. To win at global, you have to ditch translations.

Here’s a few steps to get your content ranking.

1. Localize your keywords and content appropriately

As with all multilingual SEO, you need to work with a native language expert to ensure proper keyword localization and content optimization. If your site experiences high bounce rates, Baidu will tank your rankings immediately. As with any search experience, localization matters.

2. Position relevant content and keywords to the top of the page

Baidu favors a completely opposite layout than the Westernized one. The sooner you get to the point the better. Therefore, it is important to position your keywords as early as possible in the text and introduce all relevant content already in the top of the page to rank.

3. Obtain a verification level and get certified

By registering and paying a small fee you can obtain a verification level to improve your domain authority and rankings on Baidu. If you want to secure top ratings, you can get certified and obtain an ICP license, which is much more difficult than getting verified.

Top alternative search engines by data privacy

While most of the search engines mentioned above are tied to big corporations or political forces, global initiatives are setting the stage for more privacy-focused search engines. Among these is DuckDuckGo, the forefront runner with over 130 billion searches processed since launch.

Why they matter and how to rank on them

In many ways, the movement is a response to Google’s invasiveness on privacy. Many are fed up with how they are capitalizing on personal data and controlling the narrative with targeted search.

On a macro scale, the European Union continues to protect data privacy with strict GDPR regulations and the California Consumer Privacy Act indicates similar trends for Americans.

From a micro perspective, documentaries such as The Great Hack shine a light on how global companies monetize on personal data. As a result, privacy-safe search engines continue to rise.

If you’re working for an innovative SaaS startup, there’s a high chance your ideal customer persona is using one of these search engines.

Let’s go through how you rank on DuckDuckGo and two alternative equivalents.

DuckDuckGo

Screenshot of duckduckgo.com, November 2022

DuckDuckGo aims to make your search experience as simple and true to its cause as possible, i.e. no tracking for personalized search results and filter bubbles. Instead it uses semantic search to determine search intent for your queries from over 400 sources.

Consequently, this attracts tech-savvy experts with a lower bounce rate. Once they commit to a search, they stay.

Here’s how to optimize for it:

1. Sharpen Your User Experience

UX continues to make an impact on SEO, not to mention for DuckDuckGo. Make your content easily scannable and stay away from intrusive pop ups that harm your users’ experience and ease of navigation.

2. Focus on High-Quality Backlinks

As with any SEO, high-quality backlinks play a huge role for ranking. If you already have a solid backlink profile from your Google strategy, you should be good to go. If your backlink profile has a high level of toxicity, do some cleansing.

3. Rethink Local SEO

Since there’s no location tracking available for searches, location-specific searches such as “services near me” don’t work. If you like to rank for these types of searches, include a specific location in your keyword strategy. Otherwise, you won’t be able to optimize for local seo.

Startpage

Startpage could be my personal favorite among the alternative search engines. It basically is Google without the tracking.

And while many consider DuckDuckGo to be the forefront runner of the privacy-focused search movement, many forget how Startpage ‘blazed the trail in 2006’. Offering a search experience without IP recording or tracking back when it was more or less unheard of. Now, it is the common denominator among all privacy-safe search engines.

So, how do you rank in Startpage? Simple. You rank in Google.

SwissCows

There are many more privacy-safe alternatives to search engines than the two mentioned above. Perhaps one without equal is SwissCows – a search engine that prides itself on being the only family-friendly, privacy-safe semantic search engine available on the web.

This means that any intrusive search results, like adult entertainment or offensive content, is naturally censored from the search results. At the same time, they never store any data nor track user specific information.

SwissCows SERPs bring up organic results and paid ads directly from Bing so in order to rank in SwissCows, you need to rank in Bing. Just make sure to omit any content that’s not PG-13.

What do they all have in common?

In the end, none of these alternative search engines can replace Google. As an SEO, I’ll never advise starting out with anything other than a Google strategy.

But when you are ready to branch out and extend your reach, give these alternatives a try. Analyze where your target audience hangs out and optimize thereafter.

Many of the privacy-focused search engines require little optimization as they pull their search results directly from other sources anyways. Simply do a quick check to see how you rank on each one.

And who knows, perhaps Microsoft will continue to steal more of the global search landscape. If that happens, you’ll be there — ranking in first position, ready to reap the rewards of your diversified efforts in an ever-changing search landscape.

source https://moz.com/blog/alternative-search-engines-why-they-matter-and-how-to-rank-on-them

MozCon is bringing the Future of Search to Seattle this August 7-8, and we’re excited to announce the return of our annual call for up-and-coming community speakers!

Every year, we take great pride in reserving space on our stage exclusively for new voices. Are you the person that everyone in your network looks to for digital marketing advice? Perhaps you’ve been honing your voice on podcasts or blogs, all the while dreaming of stepping onto the big stage to share your innovative ideas? Now’s your chance to submit your pitch for the opportunity to join industry leaders on the MozCon stage in front of 1,500 of your peers. (No pressure!)

Not sure what a community speaker is?

At MozCon, we have a speaker selection committee that identifies practitioners at the top of their professional field with a mean speaking game. But these spots are by invite only, and we know the community is bursting at the seams with hidden gems ready to share groundbreaking research, hot tips, and SEO tests that drive results.

Cue our MozCon community speaker program!

We’ve reserved two 15-minute community speaker slots throughout our conference for fresh faces to shine on the big stage. We encourage anyone in the SEO community to submit their best and most exciting presentation ideas for a chance to be selected as a community speaker at MozCon. Not only are these sessions incredibly well-received by our attendees, but they’re also a fantastic way to get your foot in the door when it comes to the SEO speaking circuit.

Interested in pitching your own idea? Read on for everything you need to know:

How to submit

To submit a pitch, fill out the community speaker submission form. Only submit one talk! We want the one you’re most passionate about. Talks must be related to digital marketing and be a topic you can cover in 15 minutes.

[Pro tip: Keep it actionable and be sure to include 3-5 key learning outcomes the audience will come away with from your session in the pitch.]

Submissions close on Tuesday, February 28th at 5pm PDT — no exceptions!

If chosen, you’ll be required to present your talk in person at MozCon in Seattle, WA on August 7-8, 2023. Incomplete submissions will not be considered, and all decisions are final. All speakers must adhere to the MozCon Code of Conduct.

Submit my pitch!

If you submit a pitch, you’ll hear back from us regardless of your acceptance status, so please be patient until you hear back — we’ll work hard to make our decisions as quickly as we can! Please note that due to the volume of submissions we typically receive, we’re unable to provide specific feedback on individual applications.

What do speakers receive?

As a community speaker you will receive:

• 15 minutes on the MozCon stage for a keynote-style presentation

• A free ticket to MozCon (we can issue a refund or transfer if you’ve already purchased yours)

• Travel and accommodations during MozCon

• Support and feedback as you build your final presentation deck to make sure you deliver the talk of your life on our stage.

• And a few more surprises…

How we select our speakers

We have an internal committee of experienced Moz team members, speakers and subject matter experts that review every pitch. We analyze each topic to make sure there’s no overlap and to confirm that it’s a good fit for our audience and conference focus – for 2023, our content theme is The Future of Search.

Next, we look at the entirety of the pitch to help us get a comprehensive idea of what to expect from your talk on the MozCon stage and how it might be received by the audience. This is where links to previous decks, content, and videos of past presentations are helpful (but aren’t required).

Here’s how to make your pitch stand out:

• Keep your pitch focused on digital marketing. SEO topics are great but we also love topics that compliment or sit adjacent to SEO. The more actionable the pitch, the better.

• Be focused and concise. What value does your talk provide? We want to hear the actual takeaways our audience will be learning about and why it’s important — not just a vague reference to them. Remember, we receive a ton of pitches, so the more clearly you can explain the tactical steps and learning objectives for the audience, the better you’ll stand out.

• Do your research! Review the topics presented at past MozCons, on the Moz Blog and in our Whiteboard Friday videos for a sense of what resonates with our audience— we’re looking for fresh, new presentations that round out our agenda to add to the stage.

• Brush up on how to prepare for speaking.

• No pitches will be evaluated in advance, so please don’t ask 🙂

• Using social media to lobby your pitch won’t help. Instead, put your time and energy into the actual pitch itself!

• Linking to a previous example of a slide deck or presentation isn’t required, but it does help the committee.

Leading up to MozCon

If your pitch is selected, the MozCon team is here to support you along the way. It’s our goal to make sure this is your best talk to date, whether it’s your first time under those bright stage lights or you’re a seasoned speaker who feels perfectly at home in front of a big crowd. We’ll answer any questions you may have and work with you to deliver a talk you’ll be proud of. Here are just a handful of ways that we’re here to help:

• Topic refinement

• Helping with your presentation title and description

• Reviewing your presentation outlines and drafts

• Providing plenty of tips around best practices — specifically with the MozCon stage and audience in mind

• Comprehensive show guide

• Being available to listen to you practice your talk

• Reviewing your final deck

• A full stage tour on the Sunday before MozCon to meet our A/V crew, see your presentation on the big screen, and get a feel for the show

• An amazing 15-person A/V team to support your presentation every second it’s on the big screen and beyond

We’ve got our fingers crossed for you. Good luck!

Submit my pitch!

source https://moz.com/blog/mozcon-community-speaker-pitches

In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Mozzer Meghan Pahinui takes you through the process we use to implement customer feedback, in the hopes that you can take it and apply it to your own content creation and maintenance strategies.

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

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome back to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Meghan, and I’m on the Learning team here at Moz. Today, I’m going to talk to you about harnessing the power of feedback when it comes to content iteration.

So one of the projects that I contribute to in my position here is taking care of our customer help center, which we call the Help Hub. If you’re not familiar with the Help Hub, this is where we house all of our how-to guides, tips and tricks, workflows, and troubleshooting guides for the Moz tools. I do encourage you to check it out if you have some time later or if you have questions about the tools.

A key part of maintaining the Help Hub includes gathering, monitoring, and implementing customer feedback, and this is a crucial component for us. Why is that? Well, because we want to be sure that we’re providing quality, helpful content to our customers. In addition, this process allows our customers to find answers to their questions quickly and easily at any time. It does take some of the lift of our Help team as well by reducing the number of tickets that they receive asking these very questions. So I’m going to go ahead and take you through the process that we use to implement customer feedback, in hopes that you can take it and apply it to your own content creation and maintenance strategies.

Gather data

So what is the first step? Well, first, we gather data, because we don’t know what feedback people have if we don’t ask for it, right? So if you are familiar with the Moz Help Hub, you may have seen our surveys that are at the bottom of all of our articles. Here, we ask if the article was helpful, and we do this with a series of emojis that indicate if it met their needs or not. If the customer indicates that it did not, they do have the option to enter a comment letting us know why.

When it comes to gathering data on your own content, you may opt to add a survey like this, or there are plenty of other ways that you can start to gather data to work with. So if you have a social media presence, you can start keeping track of feedback there or ask your followers directly for insight into what they find most helpful and least helpful about your content. Or you can send a survey out via email, ask your customer service team for feedback, look at customer emails and tickets to see what questions the customers may be asking, which you’re not currently answering on your site. We do that as well. We work closely with our Help team to ensure that everything that we can answer is answered in the Help Hub.

Analyze

So once you have that data to work with, it’s time to analyze it. So we review both vote counts, meaning helpful versus not helpful, as well as comments here at Moz. When comments are left, we look to see if there’s an opportunity to implement a change in that guide based on the feedback. Additionally, if we’re seeing a trend in votes for a particular page or section, we will take a look at how we can improve or reword, update the content to better serve the customer.

One thing to keep in mind during this step, however, is that not all feedback you receive will be actionable, and that’s okay. A few questions that I like to ask myself when looking at feedback for an article are: Was the customer on the right page to find their answer? If not, how did they get to this page? Is there an opportunity to help them find their way to the correct page, whether that’s through links or additional resources, etc.? Is there a question that I can answer on this page, or should this question have its own dedicated page? Sometimes we end up writing whole new guides based on feedback that we get from customers. What was the customer trying to achieve? How did this guide fall short in helping them achieve that goal?

Implement change

So now that we’ve identified areas for improvement, it’s time to implement changes to that content. So this may be as simple as adding an FAQ to answer a specific question or as involved as writing a new workflow or troubleshooting guide, as I mentioned previously. Just as an example, some specific things, some specific changes that we implemented based on customer feedback include adding quick links to all of our pages for easier navigation, creating separate pages for each of our keyword metrics, and building out multiple workflows based on questions that customers have asked.

This step in the process may look different depending on the type of content that you create and the type of feedback that you receive. For example, if you primarily work in creating video content and you receive feedback that customers wish the videos had subtitles, you may opt to implement those on past videos as well as any that you release moving forward. However, if you have a blog or a newsletter or some other type of long-form content, it may not make sense to use resources to update older pieces of content. Instead, you may opt to start implementing those changes in your content moving forward. It may be a combination of those. Maybe you have some really popular articles that can be updated from the past and start implementing those changes in your content moving forward.

Track results

So after implementing your changes, you want to be sure to track your results. We track our votes and survey responses regularly to help monitor for update opportunities and to see if the responses have changed for that particular piece of content.

Finally, we start the cycle all over again, gathering more data, analyzing it, implementing changes, and then tracking the results.

Implementing this process here at Moz has allowed us to see a correlation between changes that we’ve made to the Help Hub content and the number of helpful votes that we receive. We treat this part of our content library as a living document that is always evolving to not only account for tool changes but also to take into account customer feedback. Gathering feedback on your content can help to identify trends in what your customers are engaging with and how you can further improve your offerings moving forward. That’s key. You want to always be improving.

It can also help to identify resources that may need updating or ideas for future content. For example, if you have a blog post about how to bake a cake and your readers are commenting that they don’t know how to pick the right kind of pan for the recipe, there may be an opportunity to publish a new blog post about the best types of cake pans. Or if you publish help guides, like myself, if a customer says they couldn’t find the answer to their question in that article, there may be an opportunity to look into questions like the ones that we outlined earlier in our analyze step. What are they trying to achieve? How did they end up on this page? How can I help them to reach their goal?

I hope that you found this helpful and that you’re ready to get out there and start harnessing the power of feedback. Thank you so much, Moz fans. We’ll see you next time.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

source https://moz.com/blog/harnessing-power-of-feedback-whiteboard-friday

We’re back with another SEO recap with Tom Capper! As you’ve probably noticed, ChatGPT has taken the search world by storm. But does GPT-3 mean the end of SEO as we know it, or are there ways to incorporate the AI model into our daily work?

Tom tries to tackle this question by demonstrating how he plans to use ChatGPT, along with other natural language processing systems, in his own work.

Be sure to check out the commentary on ChatGPT from our other Moz subject matter experts, Dr. Pete Meyers and Miriam Ellis:

• ChatGPT Won’t Replace Google Search (Yet)

• 5 Times ChatGPT Steered Me Wrong in Local SEO

Video Transcription

Hello, I’m Tom Capper from Moz, and today I want to talk about how I’m going to use ChatGPT and NLP, natural language processing apps in general in my day-to-day SEO tasks. This has been a big topic recently. I’ve seen a lot of people tweeting about this. Some people saying SEO is dead. This is the beginning of the end. As always, I think that’s maybe a bit too dramatic, but there are some big ways that this can be useful and that this will affect SEOs in their industry I think.

The first question I want to ask is, “Can we use this instead of Google? Are people going to start using NLP-powered assistants instead of search engines in a big way?”

So just being meta here, I asked ChatGPT to write a song about Google’s search results being ruined by an influx of AI content. This is obviously something that Google themselves is really concerned about, right? They talked about it with the helpful content update. Now I think the fact that we can be concerned about AI content ruining search results suggests there might be some problem with an AI-powered search engine, right?

No, AI powered is maybe the wrong term because, obviously, Google themselves are at some degree AI powered, but I mean pure, AI-written results. So for example, I stole this from a tweet and I’ve credited the account below, but if you ask it, “What is the fastest marine mammal,” the fastest marine mammal is the peregrine falcon. That is not a mammal.

Then it mentions the sailfish, which is not a mammal, and marlin, which is not a mammal. This is a particularly bad result. Whereas if I google this, great, that is an example of a fast mammal. We’re at least on the right track. Similarly, if I’m looking for a specific article on a specific web page, I’ve searched Atlantic article about the declining quality of search results, and even though clearly, if you look at the other information that it surfaces, clearly this has consumed some kind of selection of web pages, it’s refusing to acknowledge that here.

Whereas obviously, if I google that, very easy. I can find what I’m looking for straightaway. So yeah, maybe I’m not going to just replace Google with ChatGPT just yet. What about writing copy though? What about I’m fed up of having to manually write blog posts about content that I want to rank for or that I think my audience want to hear about?

So I’m just going to outsource it to a robot. Well, here’s an example. “Write a blog post about the future of NLP in SEO.” Now, at first glance, this looks okay. But actually, when you look a little bit closer, it’s a bluff. It’s vapid. It doesn’t really use any concrete examples.

It doesn’t really read the room. It doesn’t talk about sort of how our industry might be affected more broadly. It just uses some quick tactical examples. It’s not the worst article you could find. I’m sure if you pulled a teenager off the street who knew nothing about this and asked them to write about it, they would probably produce something worse than this.

But on the other hand, if you saw an article on the Moz blog or on another industry credible source, you’d expect something better than this. So yeah, I don’t think that we’re going to be using ChatGPT as our copywriter right away, but there may be some nuance, which I’ll get to in just a bit. What about writing descriptions though?

I thought this was pretty good. “Write a meta description for my Moz blog post about SEO predictions in 2023.” Now I could do a lot better with the query here. I could tell it what my post is going to be about for starters so that it could write a more specific description. But this is already quite good. It’s the right length for a meta description. It covers the bases.

It’s inviting people to click. It makes it sound exciting. This is pretty good. Now you’d obviously want a human to review these for the factual issues we talked about before. But I think a human plus the AI is going to be more effective here than just the human or at least more time efficient. So that’s a potential use case.

What about ideating copy? So I said that the pure ChatGPT written blog post wasn’t great. But one thing I could do is get it to give me a list of subtopics or subheadings that I might want to include in my own post. So here, although it is not the best blog post in the world, it has covered some topics that I might not have thought about.

So I might want to include those in my own post. So instead of asking it “write a blog post about the future of NLP in SEO,” I could say, “Write a bullet point list of ways NLP might affect SEO.” Then I could steal some of those, if I hadn’t thought of them myself, as potential topics that my own ideation had missed. Similarly you could use that as a copywriter’s brief or something like that, again in addition to human participation.

My favorite use case so far though is coding. So personally, I’m not a developer by trade, but often, like many SEOs, I have to interact with SQL, with JavaScript, with Excel, and these kinds of things. That often results in a lot of googling from first principles for someone less experienced in those areas.

Even experienced coders often find themselves falling back to Stack Overflow and this kind of thing. So here’s an example. “Write an SQL query that extracts all the rows from table2 where column A also exists as a row in table1.” So that’s quite complex. I’ve not really made an effort to make that query very easy to understand, but the result is actually pretty good.

It’s a working piece of SQL with an explanation below. This is much quicker than me figuring this out from first principles, and I can take that myself and work it into something good. So again, this is AI plus human rather than just AI or just human being the most effective. I could get a lot of value out of this, and I definitely will. I think in the future, rather than starting by going to Stack Overflow or googling something where I hope to see a Stack Overflow result, I think I would start just by asking here and then work from there.

That’s all. So that’s how I think I’m going to be using ChatGPT in my day-to-day SEO tasks. I’d love to hear what you’ve got planned. Let me know. Thanks.

source https://moz.com/blog/seo-recap-chatgpt

In a recent study, we found that our pillar pages are magnets for links, organic traffic, and newsletter subscribers — especially compared to regular blog posts. Here are the results that both types of SEO content generated over the course of a year:

Do these results mean you should ditch your blog strategy in favor of pillar pages? Not exactly.

Here’s the catch: You really can’t have one without the other, and it all comes down to content mapping. I’ll explain exactly what I mean in this article.

What is a pillar page?

A pillar page is a piece of content that comprehensively covers a broad topic. Pillar page — also sometimes referred to as hub and spoke — content weaves together a wide range of relevant subtopics (spokes), organizes them all in one place (hub), and effectively showcases your subject matter expertise for the broad topic.

Pillar page content should be easy to navigate for readers looking to learn — at a high level — about a particular topic, but should also offer relevant resources for them to dive deeper. 

It’s kind of like the choose-your-own-adventure of content marketing.

Topical authority: why it’s important

When it comes to content creation for SEO and digital marketing, you don’t want to create content around any old topic. Instead, you want to reinforce your brand’s topical authority with every new piece of content you create (be it a blog, a pillar page, an eBook, etc.).

Let’s put it this way: If you’re in the business of selling mechanical keyboards, it doesn’t make sense to publish a blog article about the best recipes for a summer BBQ. Unless you’re recommending that your customers grill and eat their mechanical keyboards, which is (highly) unlikely.

Instead, it’s more helpful to your brand — and your audience — if you cover topics related to mechanical keyboards, like:

• What is a mechanical keyboard?

• Mechanical keyboards vs. regular keyboards.

• Custom mechanical keyboards.

• How to transition to a mechanical keyboard.

• Pros and cons of a mechanical keyboard.

By covering as many topics related to mechanical keyboards as possible, you’re building a foundation of informational content that tells search engines: “Hey, I know a lot about mechanical keyboards!”

And the more content you have that starts to rank for important search terms related to mechanical keyboards, the more likely searchers will see you as an authority on the subject. Ideally, they will start coming back to your content when they need to learn more about this specific topic.

Pillar pages + blogs = a match made in content marketing heaven

A well-executed and organized pillar page is one of the best ways to showcase to your audience (and search engines) that you have topical authority in a specific area. Blog posts help you achieve topical authority by allowing you to cover a wide range of relevant subtopics in great detail, and pillar pages organize all of that content into a nice, user-friendly package.

Let’s take a look at this tactic in action.

We built our content marketing guide as a pillar page, which allowed us to cover a slew of subtopics related to the broader topic of content marketing, all in one piece of collateral. 

All of these subtopics are organized into sections on the page, with a hyperlinked table of contents at the top to allow readers to pick and choose exactly what they’d like to learn about:

Then, throughout the page, we offer readers the opportunity to go deeper and learn more about each subtopic by linking to relevant blog content:

What is content mapping?

A pillar page is a great tactic if you’ve got a lot of existing blog content all focused on a particular parent topic. It’s one of our favorite ways at Brafton to repurpose and repromote our blogs.

But you can also create a pillar page with all brand-new content — it’ll just take more research, planning, and production time to complete.

Enter: content mapping.

Content mapping is the process of assessing your target audience, understanding what they are trying to achieve, and helping them along that journey with branded educational and commercial content. Its scope can span the entirety of your content marketing strategy or a single piece of pillar page content.

Why content mapping matters in content marketing

The planning (or content mapping) of a pillar page is just as important as the research done to choose the correct keyword to target for your business.

Pillar pages are kind of like the books of the marketing world. If you were an expert birder, for example, you wouldn’t set out to write a book about bird-watching without doing any research. Especially if you’ve spent a lot of time writing and publishing articles about bird-watching on your blog. You’d want to understand a few things before starting that book, like:

1. Which of my blog posts generated the most interest from new and returning readers? (i.e. pages with the most new and returning visitors, as seen in your web analytics tool).

2. Which blogs kept readers coming back for more? (i.e. pages with the most newsletter subscriptions, or the best newsletter subscription rates).

3. Which blogs did my industry peers find most useful? (i.e. pages with the greatest number of high-quality referring domains and backlinks).

These questions can be answered by looking through your web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics and Moz Pro.

You’d also want to understand what the competition looks like before you spend dozens of hours writing thousands of words to fill a book.

You’d want to answer questions, like:

1. What do my competitors’ books on bird-watching look like? (i.e. the types of bird-watching subtopics the page 1 results cover).

2. What does Google think searchers want to see when they search for bird-watching? (i.e. the types of content that are found on page 1 for your target keyword — and surprise! it might not be books).

3. How long and detailed are my competitors’ books? (i.e. the level of complexity and comprehensiveness of the content ranking on page 1).

These questions can be answered by manually reviewing relevant SERPs and utilizing TF-IDF tools like Clearscope or MarketMuse to understand the breadth of subtopics and types of content ranking on the first page.

Once you understand which of your content performs best and which content Google and other search engines prefer to rank highly for your target keyword, you can start piecing together a plan for your pillar page.

A note about internal linking

Before we dive into the how-to portion of this piece, we should also acknowledge the importance of internal linking to this whole process.

And I’m not just talking about throwing in a link to a related product/service at the end of the page and calling it a day. The internal linking structure of your pillar page is literally the glue that holds the whole thing together. It helps readers easily navigate to related resources to continue learning from your brand. And it helps search engines understand the relationship between your pillar page content and the additional content you’re highlighting on the page.

But when it comes to internal linking, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Including too many internal links throughout your content can cause a frustrating user experience or look spammy, so use caution and make sure the only internal linking you do on the page is extremely relevant to the parent topic.

If you’re unsure whether or not you’ve got too many internal links on the page, you can run it through Moz’s On-Page Grader tool, which automatically counts the number of links on your page and flags if you’ve got too many.

Tip: Keep in mind that this tool will count ALL links found on the page, including those in your main navigation and footer, so the “Too Many Links” warning could be a false positive.

As Moz explains: Google recommends you don’t go over 100 internal links per page, because it can dilute the SEO value sent from the pillar page to the linked pages, and it can also make it more challenging for users and crawlers to navigate all of the content.

Two data-led ways to map out content for a pillar page

There are a couple of different ways to approach the construction of this type of content, but they each rely on organic search data to lead the way.

1. Planning a pillar page and related resources (all from scratch)

Let’s pretend you don’t have any prior content created about a particular topic. You’re basically starting from scratch. Let’s also assume the topic you’ve selected is both core and commercially valuable to your business, and that your domain realistically has a chance of ranking on page 1 for that keyword.

Let’s say you’re a pet food company and one of your main products is cat dental treats. Once you’ve determined that this is the exact keyword you want to target (“cat dental treats”), it’s time to start your research.

Step 1: Manually inspect SERP to understand searcher intent

First, we’ll start by manually inspecting the first SERP for this keyword, and answering the following questions:

1. What types of content are on the first page of results?

2. Why are people searching for “cat dental treats”?

By answering these two questions in our SERP analysis, we’ll make sure that our plan for creating a pillar page to rank actually makes sense and it’s what searchers want to see on the SERP. We’ll also better understand all the reasons behind why someone might search this keyword (and we can then address those reasons in the content we create).

So let’s answer these questions:

Question 1: What types of content are on the first page of results?

Answer 1: The first SERP includes a variety of product ads, a People Also Ask section, and a selection of organic blogs and product pages.

Question 2: Why are people searching for “cat dental treats”?

Answer 2: From a quick analysis of the SERP, we can deduce that people want to know why and how cat dental treats are important to a cat’s health, and they also want to know which cat dental treats work best. Perhaps most importantly, it’s highly likely that they plan to purchase cat dental treats for their furry companion(s) in the near future.

Step 2: Select related keyword ideas for blog content

Since you don’t just want to create a pillar page for just the primary keyword, you also want to pinpoint a selection of related subtopics to be written as blog content.

For this part of the process, head over to your keyword research tool, plug in your target keyword and (with an eye for topics that you’re well-suited to cover), jot down a list of keywords and phrases.

Here’s our list of potential blog topics:

• Best cat dental treats.

• How do cat dental treats work?

• What to look for in cat dental treats.

• Do cat dental treats work?

• Can cat dental treats replace brushing?

• Vet recommended cat dental treats.

• Grain-free cat dental treats.

Step 3: Choose subtopics to cover in your pillar page content

Next, you’ll want to review the subtopics mentioned in the top ranking results. While this process can be done manually (by clicking into each result on the SERP and jotting down the topics mentioned), a TF-IDF tool like MarketMuse makes this part of the process much quicker:

These TF-IDF tools analyze the top 10-20 results for your target keyword and automatically present the common subtopics mentioned in each piece. This gives you a very good understanding of what you’ll also need to cover in your piece to compete for a top-ranking spot.

Here’s the list of subtopics we’ll want to cover in this pillar page, based on our MarketMuse data:

• Cat dental treats.

• Clean teeth.

• Purina dentalife.

• Feline greenies.

• Fresh breath.

• Natural ingredients.

• Veterinary oral health council.

• Best cat dental treats.

• Artificial flavors.

• Cats dental health.

Step 4: Create your outline and plan content

Now it’s time to connect the dots from your research. The best way to do this is to start by structuring your pillar page outline, and then going back in and filling in the areas where you want to create supporting blog content.

Here’s an example of what the end result might look like:

H1: The Complete Guide to Cat Dental Treats: For a Fresh-Breath Feline Friend

H2: What are cat dental treats and how do they work?

• Topics to cover: Cat dental treats
• Blog post to support section:
  Title: How Cat Dental Treats Work (& Why Your Kitty Needs Them)
  Keyword: how do cat dental treats work

H2: What are the benefits of cat dental treats?

• Topics to cover: Clean teeth, fresh breath
• Blog post to support section:
  Title: Do Cat Dental Treats Really Work? (Here’s What The Experts Say)
  Keyword: do cat dental treats work

H2: Are cat dental treats an acceptable alternative to brushing?

• Topics to cover: Cats dental health
• Blog post to support section:
  Title: Cat Dental Treats Vs Brushing: Everything You Need To Know
  Keyword: can cat dental treats replace brushing

H2: Do vets recommend using cat dental treats?

• Topics to cover: Veterinary oral health council
• Blog post to support section:
  Title: Vets Recommend Using Cat Dental Treats — Here’s Why
  Keyword: vet recommended cat dental treats

H2: The best cat dental treats to try

• Topics to cover: Purina dentalife, Feline greenies, natural ingredients, artificial flavors.
• Blog post to support section:
  Title: 5 Of The Best Cat Dental Treats & Why We Love Them
  Keyword: best cat dental treats
• Blog post #2 to support section:
  Title: What To Look For In Cat Dental Treats
  Keyword: what to look for in cat dental treats

Creating an outline for a pillar page isn’t easy, but once laid out, it helps us understand the content that needs to be produced to bring the whole thing to life.

Here is our list of content to create (based on our outline):

1. Pillar page: The Complete Guide to Cat Dental Treats: For a Fresh-Breath Feline Friend

2. Blog #1: How Cat Dental Treats Work (& Why Your Kitty Needs Them)

3. Blog #2: Do Cat Dental Treats Really Work? (Here’s What The Experts Say)

4. Blog #3: Cat Dental Treats Vs Brushing: Everything You Need To Know

5. Blog #4: Vets Recommend Using Cat Dental Treats — Here’s Why

6. Blog #5: 5 Of The Best Cat Dental Treats & Why We Love Them

7. Blog #6: What To Look For In Cat Dental Treats

The best way to tackle this list of content is to create and publish the six blog posts first, then once they are live, you can write the pillar page content, placing hyperlinks to the supporting blog posts directly in the copy.

2. Planning a pillar page from top performing content

For this next method, let’s say you already have a ton of published content about a particular topic, and you’d like to reuse and repromote that content within a pillar page dedicated to that topic.

All of the steps in the previous process apply, but for Step 2 (Select Related Keyword Ideas for Blog Content), do the following:

First, you’ll want to understand which of your existing pieces generates the most interest from your audience. Let’s use our web analytics data for this. In this example, we’ll look at Google Search Console data because it shows the actual search performance of our website content.

Let’s use the topic of “content creation” as our desired pillar page keyword. Search for the query in Google Search Console (choose the “Queries containing” option): 

Pull all of the pages currently generating impressions and clicks from terms containing your topic, placing those with the highest clicks and impressions at the top of your list. Here’s what this might look like: 

As you can see, most of the content we’ve created that also ranks for keywords containing “content creation” is blog content. These will be highly useful as related resources on our pillar page.

Now, go back to your TF-IDF tool and select the subtopics related to “content creation” that you want to cover in your pillar page. Example:

• Social media content

• Content creation tool

• Content creators

• Content strategy

• Content creation process

Finally, map your existing blog content to those “content creation” subtopics. The initial mapping may look something like this:

You may not be able to map each blog perfectly to the subtopic you’re covering in your pillar page, but that’s  OK. What’s important is that you’re providing readers with relevant content (where applicable) and that content, as you’ve seen in your Search Console data, is already proven to perform well with your organic search audience.

Pillar page planning templates and resources

Pillar pages take an incredible amount of time and planning to execute, but they are worth every penny.

Here’s an example of the success we saw after producing one of our more recent pillar pages, “How to Rank on Google:”

Here’s a template of the outline used to bring the page to life (and you can use it for your own pillar page). Just make a copy and off you go. Good luck!

source https://moz.com/blog/how-to-use-pillar-pages-in-content-strategy

Whether it’s a new year, new team or the same year, same team, it’s important to set yourself up for success. Every team has their own unique challenges when it comes to productivity and standardizing processes, but there are definitely a few steps you can take to mitigate them.

Before launching into a new project, new year, or new process, be sure everyone on your team has the tool access they need and is ready to tackle any task that comes their way. To that end, here are seven steps to get your team ready for a productive year using the Moz suite of tools!

1. Verify who manages your account (and subscription)

When it comes to ensuring things go smoothly, a critical step is knowing who manages, or owns, your Moz account. Account owners are able to manage subscriptions, add seated users, access invoices, update payment methods, and more.

So why is this step one on our list? When it comes to team success, it’s imperative to know who to reach out to when there’s an issue. For example, if you need to upgrade your subscription level or purchase add-ons, you will need to know who on your team is able to take care of those changes. Or, if you have a new team member who needs to be onboarded with the Moz tools, the account owner will need to add them as a seated user on your account.

Touch base with your team and verify who has owner access to your Moz subscription. If you’re not sure if you have owner access or not, log into your Moz account and head to Account and Billing. If you are the subscription owner, you’ll see your Moz Pro subscription, along with pricing and renewal date, listed under Moz Pro.

From the Account & Billing section of your account, if you do not see the price and renewal date for the subscription and you see Shared Subscriptions as a view option, this indicates you are a seated user on the account and do not have access to subscription management or seated user management.

2. Add seats to your account

Ensuring your team has access to the tools they need is imperative when it comes to setting them up for success. Adding seated users to your subscription allows them to customize the types of emails they receive, which Campaigns they follow, interact in the Q&A forum, and sign up for Moz Academy courses. All around, it’s a great idea for each person to have their own login and tool access.

Once you know who is managing your Moz Pro subscription, be sure to add your teammates as seated users. Only the owner of the account can add seated users, so if you’re not in charge of your subscription, be sure to reach out to the owner to get those teammates added. Additionally, if you don’t already have one in place, this would be a great time to define a process for requesting the addition and removal of seated users from your account.

You can add seated users to your subscription at any time via the Manage Seats section of Account & Billing.

3. Check your subscription limits

It’s a good idea to get in the habit of regularly checking your subscription limits. Are you close to maxing out your tracked keywords limit? Are you making more Link Explorer queries? Or maybe you’re nearing the top end of your Campaign limit? By keeping an eye on your subscription limits and how you’re using them, you can stay on top of your team’s needs throughout the year. That way, when it’s time to onboard a new client or do a deep dive into competitive research, you’re not scrambling to make changes to your subscription.

A quick reminder here: only the owner of the account can upgrade and/or purchase add-ons for your subscription. Just like with adding seats, this would be the perfect time to outline a procedure for requesting and implementing subscription changes that accounts for necessary budget approval timelines.

To check your subscription limits for your Moz Pro Campaigns, head to the Manage Your Campaigns screen. Your limits (also known as allowances), and how much you’re using of each, will be noted at the top of the page.

4. Follow (or unfollow) campaigns

Sharing a subscription with multiple team members may mean having multiple Campaigns. And Campaigns may be set up for different clients, markets, or tasks based on your team’s responsibilities and projects. When it comes to staying productive and keeping on task, you may opt to adjust which Campaigns you get emails for each week. Your current project may not require you to stay up to speed with your colleague’s client rankings, or you may be jumping in to help out with site audits of a high-value client while a teammate is out of the office. Regardless of the situation, be sure you and your team are taking advantage of the ability to customize which Campaigns you follow and, as a result, receive emails for.

In Moz Pro, following a Campaign means you will receive insight and update emails from the tool on a regular basis. You can follow and unfollow Campaigns from either the Manage Your Campaigns screen or from your Campaign Settings. From the Manage Your Campaigns screen, use the checkbox in the last column titled Following to change your settings. Or from within Campaign Settings, use the checkbox under General > Site Basics.

You can update your follow status at any time, which can allow for flexibility around projects and clients. Additionally, follow status is login specific which means each seated user can pick and choose which Campaigns to follow based on their needs.

5. Automate reporting

Whether you regularly send updates to clients, need to keep key stakeholders informed, or you just want to stay on top of important initiatives, you likely send reports regularly. Rather than taking the time to manually generate a new report every week or month, why not automate the process? Using Moz Pro’s Custom Reports feature can help you to streamline your reporting and send updates to whoever you choose on the regular.

Depending on your team’s needs and the projects you’re working on, you may opt to set up team-specific or task-specific reports:

• Team-specific reports may include overviews of various aspects of a Campaign such as the Dashboard view, Site Crawl Overview, and Rankings Overview to give a birds-eye view of the overall health of a client’s site. You can then set this up to send directly to your client, other members of your team, or your boss so they can stay up to speed.

• Task-specific reports take a deeper dive into a particular area of your Campaign. For example, you may be focused on improving a client’s crawlability or improving their rankings for a subset of keywords and decide to set up reports specific to those areas.

Regardless of the type of report you need to send, the Custom Report builder in Moz Pro will tell you how to get it set up and scheduled for regular delivery, right to the inboxes of the interested parties. You can choose a report template or build a report from scratch to make sure your report includes everything you need. You can even check out our Daily SEO Fix series for additional ideas, just in case you’re looking for a little extra guidance.

6. Enroll team members in free Moz Academy courses

Have new team members who aren’t familiar with the Moz tools? Or do you need a reminder about the metrics and functionalities of the tools? We’ve got you covered. Moz Academy offers two free tool-specific courses to help you get off on the right foot (or regain your footing if you just need a quick refresh).

The first is How to Use Moz Pro which is an in-depth overview of all the primary tools included in your Moz Pro subscription. Learn all about how to use Moz tools so you can hit the ground running. It includes detailed information about each aspect of the tools along with the metrics included and lessons to practice what you’ve learned.

The second is The Insider’s Guide to Moz Pro: Your 4-Week SEO Game Plan which combines videos, tasks, and additional resources to help you implement an SEO strategy with the Moz Pro tools.

Both of these courses are fully on-demand, instructor-led, and self-paced. You can refer back to these lessons over and over in case you have a “how do I do that again?” moment, and they both offer additional learning resources throughout.

7. Get Certified!

Nothing can help a team be more productive and successful quite like being on the same page regarding processes and task management. And being up to speed on best practices, tips and tricks, and practical application is a critical component of that. It’s almost like the table of contents to the book of strategy — it gets you all to the right place where you can get down to business!

Moz Academy offers five different certifications, which can help get your team acquainted with various aspects of SEO strategy and implementation. We offer certifications in SEO Essentials, Technical SEO, Keyword Research, Competitive Analysis, and Local SEO. If you have the budget for team development, these courses can help make sure everyone on your team is ready to tackle any task. Once a certification is completed, you also receive a downloadable certificate and the opportunity to add a badge to your LinkedIn profile to show off your newly acquired skills.

Conclusion

Ensuring you and your team have the access and knowledge they need to be productive will help minimize hiccups throughout the year. By performing these steps up front, you’ll be able to onboard clients, perform research, and accomplish more in less time. After all, success is when preparation meets opportunity.

And with that, you’re ready to hit the ground running with your Moz account for any and all SEO projects you have coming up. If you’re looking to learn even more, don’t forget to keep an eye on the Moz Tools category of the Moz Blog for future Next Level posts as well as the Daily SEO Fix series.

source https://moz.com/blog/get-your-team-ready-for-productive-year

Happy Friday, Moz fans! In today’s Whiteboard Friday episode, Tom digs into his research on Apple’s moves in search, specifically their recent launch of what he believes is a search engine, how it works, and how they could possibly hope to compete with Google in the future.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. We’re here today to talk about an Apple search engine. There have been rumors circulating for a couple of years now that Apple are building a search engine. I’m here to convince you I think they are building a search engine and I think they’ve already launched it.

“Apple won’t be building a search engine”

But before we get into what does that look like, let’s start off by talking about the common reasons people say, “Apple won’t be building a search engine.” The first is that we know that Google pay Apple something in the order of $18 billion to $20 billion dollars a year to be the default search engine on Apple devices. That’s a lot of cash.

But if you consider Apple makes more than a billion dollars a day, probably not such a big idea as we think it is. But more importantly, in 2020, the Department of Justice in the U.S. said that they were going to be suing Google for monopoly practices. One of the four bullet points they listed as their reasons was that they don’t want Apple being paid by Google to be the default search engine. They believe that’s a monopoly practice.

They want it to stop. So even if Apple do care about the cash, it might be going away anyway. So then it was not necessarily a surprise, in 2018, we saw the head of search at Google leave and go to Apple. Apple hired the head of search. That’s a very suspicious thing to do if you’re not building a search engine. We also saw at the same time they started listing job listings for hundreds and hundreds of search engineers, which all adds up to building something search related.

Apple has launched a search engine

So rumors circulated, oh, Apple are going to build a search engine. It flew under the radar a little bit, but Apple already launched a web search engine. In iOS 14, we’re on iOS 16 now, iOS 14 launched September 2020, Apple made a change where if you do a search in the iOS default search screen, the Siri suggested websites used to be powered by Google’s web index, iOS 14 changed it to Apple’s own web index.

They’ve already got a web index, and they’ve got a page on their website where they tell us about that web index. On that page, they describe how their Applebot works. They’ve got a web crawler that for the last three years or so can already render JavaScript, something that took Google 20 years or so before they had that. So they’ve got a mature crawler. On that page, they also outline their search ranking factors, their top five search ranking factors they have.

It’s things like links, web page design characteristics, which sounds like Core Web Vitals and PageRank. So the search ranking factors look very similar to Google. They’ve got a crawler very similar to Google. On their page, they talk about how if you’ve got no Applebot specific rules in your robots.txt file, they’ll follow Googlebot rules. So you can see the direction of travel.

They’re trying to crawl the web in a similar shape to Google. But I think that’s a distraction. I think there are several things that they could do differently if they wanted to build a bigger search engine, and we’re going to talk about the three differences I think they could have that would allow them to build a search engine in a very novel way that would compete with Google in a way that we haven’t necessarily fully understood.

Federated search

So let’s talk about that. So the first thing is federated search. Consider how you do a search on Google. You type in “Madrid,” and it goes and it looks in Google’s one giant database. That database has a web index and a knowledge index and all of that stuff. But it’s essentially looking in Google’s own singular database. With Apple, it’s tempting to think, okay, well, they’ve got a much smaller web index than Google.

They can just go and look in that. But what I actually think is they’ll use a federated search approach. Federated search is when you delegate a search to multiple different providers and then aggregate the results. In Apple’s case, I think they can delegate the search to all the apps on your device. Basically, you do a search for “Madrid,” and rather than just looking in the web index, it might say, well, this Madrid search, the intent might be to book a hotel, so I’m going to look in the Hotels.com app.

The intent might be to book a flight, so I’m going to look in the Skyscanner or the Lufthansa app. It might be learn a language, Duolingo. It might get a travel guide, so you look at the Lonely Planet app. The point being that they would ask all of these devices and then blend the results from multiple different sources together. But how would they know what apps are on your device and cater to what intents?

Mobile native

In 2020, they rolled out a change to the operating system that allowed apps being installed on your device to register a list of intents that they can cater to, which is very interesting. It seems like 2020 is the year where they started launching a lot of these things and setting up for this potential search engine. So you would get a search that went to their web index, but also searched through the apps on your device and blended those results together.

As further evidence that they will blend these results, Apple managed to reverse engineer the API they use for their web index, and when you do searches, you get one list of results. You don’t get web results and knowledge results. You get one big list of results, sorted by relevancy, and it might be news, web, web, maps, whatever .

The point being it shows Apple’s thinking. They’re concerned more with relevancy than where the results came from, and they’re happy to blend them together. Okay, so they’ve got this federated search approach. So let’s talk about how these searches can also have custom UIs. So when they rolled out the change to allow an app to cater to specific intents, that app can also tell the phone, oh, when you’re catering to this specific intent, here’s a snippet of user interface you can use outside of the app to cater to that in the best possible way.

As an example, if you ask Siri to split a check, it understands that the calculator app on your phone can cater to that intent. But it doesn’t send you to the calculator app. Instead it shows a little custom UI snippet right there, in the search results, where it shows you how to split that check. So apps that have been installed on your phone can say, “I can deal with this sort of intent, and this is the best way to present that result to users.”

It goes one step further. At the same time, they also launched App Clips. App Clips are what Apple describe as small parts of an app. What’s important about App Clips is that they get streamed to your device. So you can scan a QR code or click a link and it will go straight into the App Clip. There’s no need to install a full application on your device.

App Clips are designed to do one small part of what a full app would do, but basically frictionless in loading them up. So an example might be imagine you arrive in a city and you’ve not been there before. You’re running late. So you do a search for “scooter,” and rather than just searching the apps on your device, because Apple have got this database of App Clips and they’ve got almost 2.5 million apps in their App Store, they could also serve that intent.

So you search for “scooter,” Apple say, “Yes, here’s an App Clip that can help you with that.” You press the button and you go straight into the app. It directs you to a nearby scooter. You pay for it with Apple Pay. You get on the scooter and off you go. This is a mobile native experience. You didn’t go to any website. You didn’t install an app. Everything happened right inside the search results. So Google have been moving to this mobile first paradigm, but it’s still web first. With Apple, there’s a potential for a mobile native experience. This is something that Google could only dream of. What is also true is that this federated search approach would allow Apple to completely bypass Google’s strengths.

Google’s strengths are the fact that they’ve got this huge web index and they’ve been building that for 25 years or whatever. With a federated search approach, Apple can cater to many of the same intents without needing to replicate Google’s web index and their rankings and all of that magic. So if you’re going to build a search engine, you probably also want to be able to personalize results.

Private personalization

How are Apple going to do that especially considering that they position themselves as the sort of privacy-centric tech company? So first thing, quickly consider the difference between Google Photos and Apple Photos. On Google Photos, they will do machine learning of all of your photos on their servers in the cloud, allowing you to say, “Oh, show me my photos of animals,” for example.

You can also do “show me my photos of animals” with Apple Photos, but all of the machine learning happens on your device. It shows the two different paradigms. So when you do a search, Google will serve you some personalized search results based on your history or whatever it might be, but it’s all happening in the cloud. What I think Apple will do is serve you a list of potential results from their web index, and then User A and User B would see a different subset of those chosen by their phone using the machine learning on the device, which understands your preferences, your history, what apps you’ve got installed, etc.

The final thing is that, in terms of personalization, Apple have a potential advantage here too because with the federated search approach, Apple can do what I call fully authenticated personalization. If you do a recipe search for a schnitzel recipe on Google, you’ll get some personalized results, but it will be from the web index. If you do a schnitzel recipe search on your device, this federated search approach will allow Apple to look into your “private” databases.

If you’ve got the Recipe Keeper app, it will see, oh, yes, you’ve got a schnitzel recipe in the app. I’m going to pull that out. It might see that your mom sent you a message on Facebook about the best way to make schnitzel, so it will pull that out. This is stuff that Google can’t do. Google can’t look behind the curtain into your “private” databases. Over the last few years, I think Apple have been playing a slow game, laying the pieces to move towards this mobile native sort of experience.

So when I first started talking about this research in mid-2022, at the SearchLove Philadelphia conference, I predicted that Apple would move the search field onto the iOS home screen in order to try to change user behavior and push them towards doing this mobile native sort of search rather than having users go into a web browser to do a search.

Then a couple of weeks later, Apple announced they were doing exactly that, and that rolled out in iOS 16. September 2022 Apple made it so that the search field is right there on your home screen now, trying to push people towards doing this sort of search. What that means for us as SEOs is yet to be seen, whether they move in this sort of direction, but all the pieces seem to line up.

If you’ve got an app, this is definitely something that you should be thinking about. Otherwise, we should all be thinking about what this means for us over the next couple of years as Apple try to shift the user behavior. What that means is still to be seen. Thank you so much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

source https://moz.com/blog/apple-search-engine-whiteboard-friday

Technology can be a conductor or a barrier. Everything we do to market local businesses is meant to culminate in a human encounter. When we get our part right (and external forces smile upon us), technology connects us. When we get our part wrong (or external forces impede us), technology can have the frustrating effect of sundering local brands from their customers, with everybody losing out on the deal.

The modern phenomenon of local search exemplifies the concept of a “mixed blessing”. Loss of control over significant parts of the customer journey can be a source of legitimate stress for owners and marketers. Stress isn’t good for us, of course, and that’s why I’m hoping this message brings some welcome relief: control of the most important aspects of the consumer journeys remains strongly on your side, and you can thrive without the parts you have to give up. We’ve got data to back this up, thanks to Moz’s recent report, The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior, and I’m hoping today’s column will lift some burdens that may have been weighing you down.

The data

Let’s start out by taking a moment to really reflect on what it means that 96% of adults read local business reviews. Basically almost everyone in your community is perusing this content, making it the widest possible road to your front door, but the truth is that it exists in a space you only partially control. Given that only 11% of review-readers trust brand messaging over public opinion, reviews matter greatly, and it’s a tough reality that they mainly happen in digital spaces you rent rather than own.

If something goes wrong with your reviews on third party platforms like Google, Nextdoor, or Yelp, such as a spam attack, or the random disappearance of your reviews due to a bug or update, or a single irate customer shouting half-truths or downright falsehoods through a megaphone amid a small number of reviews, you have limited direct recourse for resolution. Platforms may or may not respond to your pleas for help, and some customers may ignore even your best offers to resolve their complaints – the sense of lost control is not imaginary.

Here is the good news: for 91% of your potential customers, the very next step they take after reading reviews will land them in spaces you own. 51% will head to your website, which you fully control, 27% will visit your place of business, which you also fully control, and 13% will contact you, and it’s you who control your phone and text lines, your email, forms, and live chat. Apart from the 8% that will move from reviews to the profiles you rent on social media platforms, management of customer experiences is almost all on your side and in your house.

Barring mishaps like your website being infected with malware, a temporary closure of your premises due to illness, or a power outage bringing down your phone lines, it turns out that you remain in charge of key customer/brand experiences during nearly all of the post-review consumer journey. Great news, indeed! But it carries some big responsibilities with it.

Converting on the next step after reviews

The wide funnel begins to narrow as consumers transition from reading reviews to their next steps. Winning maximum conversions from their next actions depends on having the right welcome in place in all three of these spaces:

The local business website

Whether customers click from the review profile to your website homepage, or to a landing page your listing is linked to, prepare this welcome for them:

• An accessible, secure, technically-clean, optimized website housing the multi-media content and features the customer needs to take their next steps towards a transaction.

• Highly visible information on every way in which the customer can contact and visit you, including phone, text, chat, messaging, email, forms, hours of operation, maps, and written directions.

• Additional first-party reviews to provide further proofs of your good reputation and tide you over in times when bugs make your third-party reviews go missing.

• A unique selling proposition to seal the deal.

Your place of business

Whether your place of business is your physical premises, or your clients’ locations, you can shine on this main stage with the following:

• Exceptional customer service based on the training of your staff and good management of the entire customer service ecosystem. With 65% of review writers saying they’ve written negative reviews because of experiencing bad or rude customer service, building an employee-centric company that radiates both happiness and helpfulness is your best bet for building an excellent reputation.

• Careful guardianship of your supply chain. 63% of review writers say they’ve written negative reviews after purchasing bad products. The quality of your inventory supports both repeat purchases and high ratings.

• Accurate online local business listings. 52% of survey respondents have written negative reviews after encountering incorrect business information on the Internet. Use of listings management software like Moz Local can ensure that what’s published about your business online (like hours of operation, addresses, and key services) matches what the customer will experience in the real world, preventing inconvenience and disappointment.

Your contact options

Whether a review reader turns next to your phone line, text line, live chat, website form, or email, assist them towards a next conversion by:

• Reducing on-hold times on your phone line to the bare minimum

• Ensuring all public-facing representatives of the business are well-trained in your products, services and policies

• Providing realistic estimates of when a customer will hear back if they are required to leave an email address on chat instead of speaking immediately to a live person

• Reducing the number of form fields the customer is required to fill out before reaching you

• Offering an after-hours support option

• And, of course, for the 8% who will visit your rented spaces on social media platforms as their next step after reading reviews, be sure your full contact information is included on your profiles.

Despite the market disruption of the Internet, so much about local businesses remains the same

While technological innovations are ongoing, it’s apparent that deeply-rooted consumer behaviors continue to follow a traditional pattern that’s existed for hundreds of years. In summary, people in your town want to know what others say about your business >>> people want to connect with your business for a possible transaction >>> people then tell others about what they experienced with your business. All of this cycle has always happened offline, and the only real change is that the means for some of this communication has partly transitioned online.

Just as business owners always had to do without the ability of controlling the word-of-mouth reputation their community was creating for them on front porches and over fences, modern business owners can live without directly controlling the online brand sentiment that exists in spaces they have to rent rather than owning. While it’s true that traditional PR may have had more power to shape public perception before online local business reviews made individual consumer voices so loud, the not-so-secret ingredient to brand longevity and loyalty remains unaltered: great customer experiences at and around the time of service are the foundation of success.

What every local business needs today is a thoughtful plan for managing the digital assets that now contribute to these positive consumer experiences. The winning recipe, then, is developing high standards for the spaces you own (your website, place of business, and most contact methodologies) and being as hands-on as possible in the spaces you rent (the online profiles containing your local business information, reviews, and social content). With a workable strategy and good quality tools for managing this ecosystem, the development of your good name in the community you serve will follow.

Knowledge is power; read Moz’s full survey report: The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior

source https://moz.com/blog/post-review-local-consumer-journey

Even in the relentless news and noise of early 2023, you’ve probably heard about ChatGPT, the GPT-3-powered (technically, 3.5) chatbot that’s eerily able to simulate human-like responses. Consider, for example, this question and answer (created by GPT-3):

Is ChatGPT a search engine?

No, ChatGPT is not a search engine. It is an artificial intelligence chatbot that uses natural language processing to understand and respond to user input.

That’s not bad, and it sounds like something an actual human would write. 

GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) is a deep learning system that generates text based on predicting language patterns after being pre-trained with a large set of documents. For this post, I’ll be using OpenAI’s Playground with the “text-davinci-003” GPT-3 model, which can be programmed to produce shorter answers and is more reliable than the ChatGPT Beta.

The current models are genuinely impressive, including parsing complex questions:

How would you explain ChatGPT to a 5 year old?

ChatGPT is like a robot friend who can talk to you and answer your questions. It’s like having a friend who knows a lot about different things and can help you learn new things.

GPT can even mimic human creativity, and make us start questioning our own talents:

Write a slogan for a Mars-themed restaurant run by lizard people, in the style of Edgar Allen Poe.

“Lizards of Mars, Dine Here In Splendor, Where Dreams Unfurl And Palates Render!”

By now, you’ve probably seen dozens of examples, so what does all of this have to do with Google Search and our jobs as search marketers?

Google and the era of natural language

In the early days of search, search engines were built to index words and short phrases and had no ability to process natural language. If you were looking for a new laptop, you might search for something like “laptop” or “buy laptop.” I sometimes joke that, if you walked into Best Buy and just started shouting “laptop!”, you’d probably be escorted out by security. We humans adapted to early search, though, and we dumbed down our language.

As search became more sophisticated, we learned that we could use more complex queries, and, especially with the advent of voice search, we experimented with something closer to natural language. As Google adapted, something interesting happened: our queries became questions, prompting Google to realize that sometimes we don’t want a link to a resource — we want an answer.

Google has evolved a great deal as an “answer engine,” including building out the Knowledge Graph and surfacing web results as direct answers known as Featured Snippets. If, for example, you search for “How does Google search work?”, you might get back a Featured Snippet (essentially, an attributed answer) like this:

This particular example is a little clunky, but it illustrates how the algorithm works. Google is looking for bits and pieces of documents that might answer the question. In this case, it’s obvious that the extracted passage isn’t really a complete answer.

Now, consider the same question posed to GPT-3:

How does Google search work?

Google Search works by crawling the web and indexing websites. When a user searches for something, Google looks through its index and returns the most relevant results. It uses a combination of algorithms and other techniques to determine the relevance of the results. These algorithms take into account factors such as the words used in the query, the freshness of the content, the popularity of the website, and the location of the user.

I can nitpick this answer, but all in all, it’s pretty good, and it’s a much more complete answer than an excerpt from a website. The GPT-3 engine has essentially summarized multiple sources.

It’s easy to see how this could start to make Google nervous.

Trust and the attribution problem

On the surface, GPT-3 (and especially ChatGPT) can return some pretty human-looking responses. Putting aside ethical questions (including plagiarism and bias, which I’ll cover briefly later), there are some serious practical problems.

The Google “answer” has one major advantage: attribution. We can easily go to the source page. This not only provides us more information, but it provides more context, including details about the source itself. Those details can help us trust (or, in some cases, distrust) the answer.

Consider, for example, another answer GPT-3 returned for the question above:

How does Google search work?

Google Search works by using a combination of algorithms and programs to analyze the content of web pages and other online content to determine its relevance to a user’s search query. Google Search algorithms look for a variety of factors, including keyword density, freshness, and the number of other sites that link to the page. Google also uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve its search results.

This answer also sounds plausible, except that most SEOs would cringe at the mention of keyword density (underlining added by me), widely considered a myth. It’s entirely possible that this piece of information came from an entirely different source, but without attribution, we can’t validate it.

While this is a complex problem (machine-generated text doesn’t use sources in quite the same way a human dozen, or might use dozens or hundreds of sources), hybrid approaches that reduce the number of sources and provide attribution are possible.

Consider this answer from Neeva — an alternative search engine focused on privacy (hat tip to Greg Sterling) — for “Should I get a tall latte or a grande?”:

While this functionality is in beta and is obviously not operating at Google scale, Neeva attempts to provide primary sources. I’ve purposely chosen a ridiculous example because the stakes are low. Imagine a question squarely in what Google’s calls the YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) realm, such as “Is Bitcoin or Dogecoin better?”:

This is a question that could seriously impact my financial future, and knowing where the answer is coming from makes a big difference and allows me to dig deeper and either establish trust or reject those sources.

Related to trust is a deeper, ethical issue of whether machine-generated text is a form of plagiarism. While traditional plagiarism generally requires intent and copying sizable chunks of text, machine-generated text is still being built off of the backs of writers and content creators, without — at least in the case of ChatGPT — any clear attribution. In Google’s case, overuse of machine-generated text could discourage content creators and cause us to question whether we want to contribute our efforts to someone else’s machine.

Hallucinations and machine dreams

Without careful constraints, machine learning systems are prone to hallucination. In the case of ChatGPT, that essentially means that the system can generate answers that are not rooted in reality. Simply put, ChatGPT doesn’t understand anything it’s saying — it’s creating new patterns based on human language. Consider this nonsense question I posed to GPT-3:

What is Mozart’s 1976 hit “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” about?

Mozart’s 1976 hit “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” is not related to the 2006 film of the same name. It is an instrumental piece that captures the frenetic energy of Tokyo’s streets at night. The song is built around a catchy, syncopated piano line and a driving, upbeat rhythm.

While intriguing, there is no such instrumental piece. I’ve asked a nonsensical question and GPT-3 has obliged me with a nonsensical answer (Nonsense In, Nonsense Out).

I should point out that ChatGPT already has some constraints built in that address problems like this, and complex models (including OpenAI’s GPT-3 interface) allow you to control “randomness” (high randomness = less constraints), but the core problem is challenging.

Again, consider a higher-risk financial question:

What’s more popular: Dogecoin, Bassetcoin, or Norwegianlundehundcoin?

Dogecoin is by far the most popular of the three coins, with a current market capitalization of over $9 billion. Bassetcoin and Norwegianlundehundcoin are much smaller coins with market caps of only a few hundred thousand dollars each.

A market cap of a few hundred thousand dollars each is pretty impressive for two cryptocurrencies that (as of this writing) don’t exist. I’m sorry to say that I started this example with Labradoodlecoin, only to discover that Labradoodlecoin actually exists.

I’m pushing the engine pretty hard to prove a point here, and modern machine-generated text is much less prone to hallucination than previous iterations. That said, any time you combine multiple sources without regard to their veracity or completeness, there’s a real risk that the end result will be plausible-sounding nonsense.

Scale and the real-time internet

This one’s pretty straightforward: What works at beta scale may not work at Google scale. As the late Bill Slawski would point out, just because Google has an idea — or even patents an idea — doesn’t mean that they implement that idea in search (for many reasons).

Another issue is the sheer speed of the internet. ChatGPT is trained on a static corpus — a moment in time. Google crawls and indexes the internet very quickly and can return information that is recent, localized, and even personalized.

It’s worth noting that Google has invested massive amounts of money into machine learning. Google’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is capable of generating complex, human-like text. Google is well aware of the limitations and costs of these models. If they’ve moved slowly in deploying them across search, there are probably good reasons.

While the topic of bias is far beyond the scope of this article, scale also contributes to bias issues. Once you move on from a static, controlled corpus and open up machine learning models to the entire world of real-time content, human bias creeps in quickly (including racism, sexism, homophobia, and other destructive biases). At Google scale, reducing bias is a problem that requires a lot of human intervention and resources.

Code red and future threats

None of this is to suggest that Google doesn’t take GPT (including ChatGPT) seriously. Google reportedly issued a “code red” after ChatGPT went viral. While Google is understandably quiet about their internal reactions, it is almost certain that recent developments are accelerating discussions and developments in Mountain View.

Another clear threat is that Microsoft is an investor (to the tune of $1 billion) in OpenAI (and, with it, ChatGPT), and rumors are circulating that they may invest billions more. Microsoft has also announced that they will start integrating ChatGPT into Bing search before the end of March, although it’s unclear what from that initial rollout will take.

One of the biggest long-term impacts of models like ChatGPT and LaMDA will be in conversational search (including, but not limited to, voice search). Consider the following “conversation” I had with ChatGPT (edited for length):

What are the top five three-row SUVs?

It’s difficult to say which are the top five three-row SUVs as it can be subjective and depend on factors such as personal preference, budget, and location. However, some three-row SUVs that are often considered to be among the best in their class include:

• Honda Pilot

• Toyota Highlander

• Kia Telluride

• Hyundai Palisade

• Subaru Ascent

Which of them is the least expensive?

Out of the five SUVs that I mentioned, the Subaru Ascent tends to be the least expensive with a starting price around $32,295. The other SUVs that I mentioned have a starting price around $32,000 – $38,000. However, it’s important to note that the final price can vary depending on the specific trim level and options that are selected.

Is the Subaru generally considered reliable?

Subaru is generally considered to be a reliable automaker, with many of their vehicles receiving high marks for dependability. The Subaru Ascent, in particular, has a reputation for being a reliable vehicle with a comfortable interior and good fuel economy. According to Consumer Reports, the Ascent gets an above-average reliability score.

Sorry, ChatGPT can definitely get chatty (and this is the edited version). Note the follow-up questions and how I didn’t need to repeat information or provide context. ChatGPT understood that I wanted to build on previous answers.

While this model won’t serve all of the use cases of search, there are definitely situations where the ability to easily and conversationally refine a query could be revolutionary, especially for complex questions, and, yes, complex purchases. Imagine Google being able to serve different ads at each step on this journey toward a purchase.

Unfortunately, the biggest short-term threat to Google is that people and companies will likely use ChatGPT to churn out mountains of low-quality content, costing Google time and money and likely resulting in major, reactive algorithm updates. This will also be a serious headache for search marketers, who will have to react to those updates.

What’s certain for 2023 is that the popularity of ChatGPT and its accessibility to the general public is going to cause an explosion of investment (for better or worse) and accelerate development. While Google isn’t going anywhere, we can expect the landscape of search to change in unexpected (and occasionally unwanted) ways in the next year.

source https://moz.com/blog/chatgpt-replace-google

Keyword cannibalization occurs when a website has too many similar keywords spread throughout the various pages on that site. This can harm the SEO potential of the pages involved, and can quite often go unnoticed for some time. When more than one page has the same, or a similar keyword target, those pages will then start to compete with each other, also creating confusion in the eyes of the search engine, resulting in a struggle to decide which page to rank for what term.

Remember: a single URL can rank for multiple keywords, which is 100% fine. The problem of keyword cannibalization occurs when two or more separateURLs are all competing for the same keyword.

To ensure that a website’s best content is ranking well, you should identify which of your pages are targeting the same keywords. You can then put together a strategy for monitoring and fixing these issues on a regular basis.

In this Daily SEO Fix edition, we take you through what keyword cannibalization is, how to investigate it on your own website, and how to solve any potential issues your site may have. 

Buckle up!

Learn More in Moz Academy’s Keyword Research Certification

What is Keyword Cannibalization?

First, Samantha will define keyword cannibalization, and explain why it should ultimately be avoided.

Use Moz Tools to Investigate Keyword Cannibalization

In this video, Emilie will talk through how to investigate potential keyword cannibalization issues with Moz Pro’s Keyword Explorer tool.

Solutions for Cannibalization

In this video, Emilie will discuss potential solutions to tackle cannibalization issues.

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Learn more about keyword cannibalization:

• Whiteboard Friday: Keyword Cannibalization
• How to Identify and Tackle Keyword Cannibalization

source https://moz.com/blog/daily-seo-fix-investigating-keyword-cannibalization