Recorded at SearchLove London in October — in the wake of three Google updates — Tom presents a different take on core updates in this Whiteboard Friday.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Happy Friday, Moz fans. So I’m here at SearchLove London recording this Whiteboard Friday. I don’t know when it will reach you, but this is a bit of a different take on how to think about core updates. So obviously, I’m filming this in October. We’ve just had three updates back-to-back in quick succession.
I think it’s quite interesting that we had three updates and they were described in very different ways. So we had a helpful content update, a core update, and a product update or a product review update. It’s interesting that sometimes Google talks about updates very specifically. So I think the best examples are things like HTTPS, or Core Web Vitals, page experience update, where they’re very concrete about what they’re going to do, how they’re going to do it, how they’re going to measure it, and how it’s going to impact the algorithm.
Then you have core updates, where they do say things, but they tend to be kind of saying the same thing every time. So every single core update, they’ve said make good content, work on your expertise, authoritativeness, trust. This isn’t very concrete. It’s not very specific about what they’ve changed this particular time.
Indeed, if you’re a site that’s affected by these updates, it can feel quite random. It can feel like you’re just going upwards or downwards. There’s no particular rhyme or reason. So how can that be? So I want to give you some different ways to think about that.
A refresh
So the two different ways that I’d like to focus on, one of them is this concept of a refresh. So Google used to talk a lot about algorithm refreshers. This is up till about 2012. What they meant was this is something that was different to an algorithm update. So it wasn’t called an update. It was called a refresh, as distinct. They were trying to say that this would kind of be like a mini reset of how the algorithm was thinking about certain things.
If you look at how they talk about core updates in their documentation, they say things like this, “So your site might not recover until the next core update.” So you’d have situations where this is your rankings in blue. This is your competitor’s rankings in red. You get to a point where they’ve improved their site over time gradually. They’ve not been recognized for it, and then a core update comes along and suddenly they go up. So your position, you go down, and you’re left thinking, “Oh, that was a little bit random.” But, of course, it wasn’t random. It was just that they were gradually being recognized for things they’ve worked on or suddenly being recognized for things they’ve worked on gradually over time.
Testing
The other concept I’d like to talk about is the extent to which Google is testing. They’re iteratively testing over time. Again, they talk about this in their own documentation. There’s an article that I’ve come back to quite a few times, back in 2018, it’ll probably be linked beneath, where they invited some journalists to a meeting of their search engineering team. In that meeting, they were talking about how they were thinking about some changes they were making to the SERPs, and they talked a lot about how they were going to run some things as a test and look at certain metrics, see how they were improved. So it’s important to think that Google has their own metrics that they’re iterating towards, and they’re not necessarily saying, “Oh, your site is bad,” or, “There’s something wrong with your site.” They might be saying, “Oh, well, what we’re aiming for at this point could be more beneficially affecting some sites than others. Ultimately, if someone comes up, someone else has to go down.”
Indeed, in MozCast data, if we look at sites that were affected by at least four updates, so this is looking since Medic, technically there were some core updates before Medic, but I think the industry has been very focused on this since Medic, if we look at the core updates, of which there have been 12 now, and the sites that were affected by at least 4 of them, the vast majority in MozCast data had both some major positive movements and some major negative movements. So this tiny green slice represents the sites that only saw positive movements, and this red slice, the sites that only saw negative movements. So it’s incredibly unusual to have mono-directional movement, which just shows that people are winning and losing as Google tests different things. It’s not necessarily that some sites are just better suited to core updates and win every time. That’s very, very rare.
Longer term
I also want to talk a little bit about the longer term. I think it’s important, when we think about these updates, to zoom out of it because these short-term effects can seem more random, harder to explain, harder to predict. So I’ve looked at a lot of sites again in the MozCast data over time and how they’ve been impacted by each update.
So this is an example, and obviously, it’s drawn on a whiteboard, so it’s not super precise. But this example I’ve attempted to illustrate here is actually Reuters, the news organization. I’ve chosen them because this is a site that obviously produces a lot of original content. It’s very authoritative. It’s hard to criticize it from the regards that Google likes to talk about in its core updates discussions and announcement. These bars represent how it was affected by each core update over a period of time. So it had some big negative hits, not many serious gains from these updates. So this doesn’t look very good. But if you track how their traffic grew or their visibility grew within MozCast over time, it looks a little bit different. So it sort of gradually grows over time. So what this means is even though on the days of the specific updates they were taking sometimes negative hits, like if we look at the week before and the week afterwards, sometimes they took big hits. Obviously, there’s long periods of time between these updates, so they might still be able to grow.
So say there might be three months between these bars, and even though they took a big hit here, they’re growing over the next three months. Maybe over here, they take this big hit, but they’ve more than recovered it by the time they get to the next update, take this hit, more than recovered it by the time they get to the next one. That could be that their SEO team is working some magic behind the scenes, but this is quite a consistent trend. This happens to a lot of sites. What I would suspect is actually happening is Google, when they launched the core update, they’re, to some degree, resetting certain things, looking at things afresh, valuing different metrics. Then over time, whatever historically was making that site perform will creep back in and start to be considered again.
So I hope that was interesting. That’s just a few different ways to think about core updates besides the usual messaging that we get, which is very consistently just E-A-T, good content. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do those things. Those are important. This longer-term trend that you get with a lot of sites that do do those things shows how important it is. But I think when you look at individual updates, you have to keep in mind that it’s not necessarily that Google is suddenly optimizing for these things more. They’re just iterating over time. That’s all from me. Thanks.
Ready for a deep dive into 40+ common features found on Google Business Profiles (GBPs) and the New Merchant Experience (NMX)? Here we go!
You may feel daunted by the fact that GBPs are major assets you rent from rather than owning because Google has always taken a crowdsourced approach to vital information that represents your company. You may also be disgruntled right now because you had gotten used to managing your listings in the historic Google Business Profile Manager dashboard, like this:
And now Google has ousted you from the familiar dashboard and tossed you into the chilly, unfamiliar pool of in-SERP listings management which we’re calling the New Merchant Experience and which looks like this:
You might rightly remark that major change was the last thing you needed right now as a local business owner or marketer. But, deep down, you know you’re going to have to get the hang of this sometime, and this column is here to help you with that. After all, with estimates as high as 70% – 80% of local business leads happening right within Google’s interface, you can’t ignore GBP. Instead, you’ve got to learn to control every bit of it that you can. This article will take you through the most common features of these listings, explain what you can and can’t control on them, and teach you how to manage controllable features in the NMX.
If, after reading this cheat sheet, you find you just can’t stand the clutter of trying to manage your listings via the NMX amid the crowded organic SERPs, remember that listings management software like Moz Local still offers the niceties of a clean, organized dashboard for those who require a quieter workspace.
Core features on most Google Business Profiles and NMX interfaces
There is significant variation of Google Business Profile and NMX features based on business industry and category. For example, hotel listings have elements that aren’t included in listings for plumbers or grocery stores. Google is continually experimenting with new features while demoting others. This section will cover some of the commonest elements available to most businesses.
Before we look at our graphic and key, it will help you to know that you can access the New Merchant Experience by searching within Google’s organic SERPs for the name of your business, or the name of your business + its city, or for the phrase “my business” while logged into your Google account.
1. See Photos
When clicked on, this takes the user to both owner and user-generated photos in a set. Photos significantly impact CTR. Photos must be monitored for spam. You can also upload videos to your photos section, but try to post more than 2 videos so that you’ll get a separate mobile video subtab. It’s also important to know that previous versions of Google’s local product offered an analytical feature called “Photo Insights” but this no longer exists in the NMX.
Controllable?
Partly — photos are both an owner and crowdsourced element.
Where to control?
By clicking on the “Add Photo” link in the listing or the NMX, you will be taken to the following wizard for uploading different types of photos.
If you wish to view all your photos for the purpose of identifying user-uploaded spam, click on the image, itself, in the listing, rather than the “add photos” link, and you will be taken to the interface where you can both see and flag photos.
2. Maps
When clicked on, this takes the user to the Maps-based listing accompanied by map with pin. Be sure your map marker is correctly placed.
Controllable?
Partly — owner can correct misplaced map marker, but users can submit placement edits, too.
Where to control?
If your map pin is in the wrong place, click on the “Edit Profile” link in the new interface, then click the “Location” tab at the top of the “Business Information” pop-up, then click on the map.
3. See Outside
When clicked on, this takes the public to an interactive Google Street View visual of the business. When you are logged in, clicking on the feature takes you to this interface for uploading your own exterior imagery:
Controllable?
Partly — the owner can upload their own exterior shots, but cannot control StreetView. You can flag issues.
Where to control?
Click on the “see outside” section of the Google Business Profile to upload photos.
4. Business name
This must reflect the real-world name of the business and be formatted according to Google’s guidelines. If you’re marketing a service area business like a plumbing franchise without storefronts, your name should match what appears on your website.
Controllable?
Yes — the business owner provides, though the public can suggest edits to this feature.
Where to control?
In the NMX, click the Edit Profile link and mouse over your name in this popup to edit it in the About section:
5. Website
This link takes you to whichever page of your website you’ve designated as the Google Business Profile landing page.
Controllable?
Yes — owner provides, though the public can edit.
Where to control?
In the NMX, click the Edit Profile link and mouse over your name in this popup to edit it in the Location section:
6. Directions
This link takes you to the maps-based driving directions from the user’s location to the place of business.
Controllable?
No. This experience is created by Google. However, see earlier advice if you need to move your map pin.
7. Save
When a user is logged into their Google account, clicking the “Save” button brings up the above pop-up, enabling them to store the business in their favorites or other areas like places they want to go or are planning to travel to.
Controllable?
No — Businesses do not control whether customers utilize the “Save” function.
8. Call
On mobile devices, clicking the “call” button automatically triggers a phone call to the business. On desktop, it brings up this popup asking the user to pick an app with which to start the call.
Controllable?
No — beyond ensuring that your phone number is accurate, this is not an area controlled by the business.
9. Star Rating
Google uses a simple mathematical average to calculate the overall rating of a business on the basis of all the star ratings reviewers have given the business. The star rating is considered the #1 review factor that customers use to differentiate one local business from another.
Controllable?
No — businesses cannot directly control or alter the star ratings they receive. Providing excellent customer experiences is the best way to earn the kind of reputation that results in a high Google Business Profile star rating.
10. Review Count
This is a simple count of the total number of Google-based reviews the business has received. Surveys indicate that consumers can become suspicious when any local business has either too few or too many reviews compared to its competitors. When clicked on, the review count takes the user to the main review overlay, which we will cover in full below.
Controllable?
No — the business cannot directly alter the count of its reviews, but can implement a review acquisition program to increase its total number of reviews over time.
11. Editorial Summary
This is one of the more diverse elements of the GBP. In our initial example, a common format is shown of Google taking the primary category and combining it with location information, like this, near the top of the listing:
However, other iterations may also be considered editorial summaries, including this example which cites a third party like Wikipedia and may appear further down in the listing:
And there is at least one other version that may appear within the reviews section of the listing, specifically cite Google as the originator of the summary, like this:
The nomenclature for these elements is loose, and Google may well have unique internal names for all three instances.
Controllable?
Partly — in the case where the primary category is included in the summary along with location information, the business is contributing the information that yields that summary, and in the case of well-known entities that have control of a Wikipedia page, there would be some editorial control built into the source from which Google is deriving the description, but overall, it is Google who generates these summaries.
12. Further Directional Cues
This is a feature which only appears on some Google Business Profiles. In this example, the user is being given information about the walking distance to nearby major local attractions with embedded links to those venues.
Controllable?
No, but do be sure your map pin is correctly located so that Google can easily identify whether your business is located near to local attractions.
13. Address
For brick-and-mortar businesses, this line must display a genuine, physical address that complies with Google’s extensive guidelines. For service area businesses that don’t serve customers at the company’s premises, Google wants the address to be hidden, and instead of showing a street address, an “area served” section like this will typically be shown:
From the NMX, click on “Edit Profile” and then the “Location” tab to edit your address. This is also where the toggle is located to hide or display your address.
For service area businesses, the place to edit your information is also located in the “Location” tab of the NMX. You can add up to 20 locations describing your service area, but its overall boundaries shouldn’t extend beyond about 2 hours of driving time.
14. Hours of operation
One of the key ways in which Google Business Profiles provide customer service is via the presence of accurate hours of operation. Be sure yours are kept up-to-date at all times, so no customer is inconvenienced by arriving at your premises to be greeted by a “closed” sign.
Controllable?
Yes — businesses add their hours, though the public can edit them. Businesses can also set special hours for holidays.
Where to control?
From the NMX, click on “Edit Profile” and then the “hours” tab to edit your information. You will also find a feature there for adding further special hours:
15. Phone
You can add a primary phone numbers and additional phone numbers to your listing. Google prefers that you use a local phone number rather than a call center helpline whenever possible, and they want your listed number to be in the direct control of your business. Your number can be either a landline or cell phone number, and it’s a best practice to be sure that whatever number you list is answered by staff who say the name of the business when they pick up. It’s not a good practice to have more than one business share the same phone number. For example, if you own both a Christmas tree farm and a woodworking studio on the same property and are listing each business separately, each business should have it’s own phone number. Premium-rate telephone numbers that charge callers high rates aren’t allowed.
Controllable? Yes — the business lists their numbers, but the public can suggest edits to them.
Where to control?
In the NMX, click “Edit Profile” and then “Contact” to see and edit your phone numbers. Related to this, the NMX also has a button labeled “Call”. When clicked on, this button will ask you if you want to enable Google’s call history feature, which you can read more about here:
16. Further Location Information
In our example, Google is providing additional location information. Some listings will have a province or county listed in this area. Others will have a different special feature called “located in” that can appear when a business or department is contained within another entity, like the parts department inside an automotive dealership:
Controllable?
Partly — the information about your province or county relates to the physical address you provide, but the separate “located in” feature can only be edited via Google Maps. If you wish to edit this feature, find your listing on Google Maps, click the “suggest an edit” button, and look for the “located within” area of the editor:
17. Suggest an edit
This function is available to any member of the public who wishes to suggest an edit to the listing. For example, an individual can let Google know they think your address, or hours of operation, or phone number is wrong.
Controllable?
No. Unfortunately, the suggest an edit feature is a cause of confusion and stress for many local business owners who have no control over whether or not members of the public suggest edits to listings. The difficulty of the scenario is summed up well by this Diamond Product Expert in Google’s help forum:
18. Own this business?
If you see this link on a listing, you either haven’t claimed the listing in question or are not logged into the account you used to claim the listing. Claiming a listing is the terminology for verifying with Google that you are authorized to take control of the management of a listing for a specific business. If, however, you are logged in properly and have already claimed the listing, you should see this link, instead:
Controllable?
Yes — you can claim listings you have the authority to represent and once you have claimed them, you can use the edit link to be taken to the NMX to edit your listing at any time.
19. Products
You can greatly enhance your listing by adding products to it representing key offerings in your inventory. These can be physical products, like retail goods, digital products, like software, or intangible products, like home services. You can add a price, description, buttons, and links for more information.
Controllable?
Yes — you can add products.
Where to control?
In the NMX, click “Edit Products” then click, “Add product” to be taken to the product editor.
20. Questions & Answers
Businesses are permitted to use this feature to upload questions they commonly receive and answer them. The public can also ask questions and answer the queries others have submitted. It’s important to continuously monitor this area of the GBP to be sure that questions from the public are receiving timely, authoritative answers from your brand, rather than random answers from the public which may or may not accurately reflect the business.
Controllable?
Partly — you can ask and answer questions but the public can also both ask and answer.
Where to control?
To add and answer questions, click the “Q&A” link in the NMX and you’ll be taken to this interface where you can either ask or answer questions.
21. Reviews
Reviews and owner responses are some of the key features that turn a static local business listing into an interactive two-way medium. For deep insight into the best strategies for review management, read The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior | SEO Industry Report, but in brief, reviews are the main online seat of local business reputation, they influence local search rankings, and ratings, review text, and owner responses all have significant impacts on customer journeys. To avoid reputation damage and litigation, all review management practices must align with platform guidelines, like Google’s content guidelines, as well as the laws, like FTC guidelines, governing your country.
Controllable?
Partly — you can request reviews and respond to reviews, but you cannot control whether customers leave you reviews and you are not permitted to review your own business or incentives others to do so. Fraudulent reviews can be reported to Google in hopes of removal.
Where to control?
The NMX has several different menu items related to reviews, including “read reviews” and “ask for reviews”. Clicking on the former will take you to the entire review overlay, with “reply” functionality so that you can respond to each review or rating you receive:
Clicking on the latter will take you to a popup that generates a handy link to your review profile, with prompts to share that link via vehicles like email, WhatsApp or Facebook:
22. Updates (formerly known as Google Posts)
This feature is like a microblogging function located directly within your Google Business profile. It enables you to post new content to your listing on a regular business.
Controllable?
Yes, most business types (with some exceptions) can write updates.
Where to control?
Click the “add update” link in the NMX and you’ll be shown three types of posts you can write: updates, offers, and events. The first lets you add an image, a description, and a linked button and will stay live for six months before being archived. The second includes all these fields, plus a date range setting for the period in which your offer is live, and additional informational fields to further explain the terms of your offer. The third type includes fields for information like when your event starts and ends. Some listings may also feature discontinued post types.
23. People Also Search For
This is one of those areas that makes it clear that local business rent space from Google rather than owning it. Chances are, if you owned your Google Business Profile, you wouldn’t feature your competitors on it, but this is just what Google does.
Controllable?
No — you have no control over which competitors Google shows in this section of your listing.
Additional GBP and NMX Features
Some business categories have unique Google Business Profile features or elements we haven’t yet covered. The New Merchant Experience also includes some other functions we’ve yet to explore. Let’s dive back in!
Categories
Categories may be the most important feature that you control when it comes to the search phrases you want to rank for, and categories also determine many of the fields you’ll have in your Google Business profile. Your primary category may appear on its own near the top of your GBP, but it also may appear as part of your editorial summary. In order to see all of your categories live, you have to head over to Google Maps. There, by using a Chrome extension like GMBSpy, you can see all the categories both you and your competitors are using.
Controllable? Yes — businesses can choose primary and secondary categories.
Where to control? Click on “Edit Profile” in the NMX and edit your categories under the “About” tab.
Attributes
This is an experimental area of GBPs to which Google is always adding so that both businesses and the public can further define the characteristics of the business. Attributes can include information about who owns the business, or amenities, such as whether a building has gender-neutral restrooms, or protocols, such as whether an appointment is required to visit a business, or layout information, such as the presence of wheelchair-accessible entrances.
Controllable? Partly — businesses can add a great many attributes by clicking the “Business Information” tab in the NMX and then going to the “More” section. However, Google also crowdsources attributes from the public.
Description
Local businesses can write a 750 character description of themselves.
Price Summary
Some business listings display a pricing overview of 1-4 dollar signs.
Controllable?
Controllable?
Unknown – Google asks reviewers to evaluate the prices they’ve paid at businesses, as seen above. There has been past debate over whether the prices published by local businesses on their digital menus influence these attributes, but Diamond Product Expert Ben Fisher has confirmed with Google that these elements stem entirely from UGC.
Menu links
Google offers a variety of menu options for businesses. Food and drink businesses have a standard menu that can link to a page on their website or a third-party platform, and menus can be created within Google itself, including menus with photos added to them. Additionally, some businesses can create service menus in Google.
Controllable?
Yes — where relevant, businesses can create or link to menus of goods and services.
Where to control?
With thanks to Damian Rollison, logged in owners of food and drink establishments should see edit menu links in the NMX, as shown above.
Businesses offering a menu of services can edit them under the “Edit Services” link in the NMX, including adding custom services.
Booking
Businesses can feature several different booking and appointment functions on their listings, powered by a provider. For example, this instance on the listing of a dental practice stems from ZocDoc:
Controllable? Yes, relevant businesses can add booking and appointment features.
Where to control?
With thanks to Petra Kraft for the screenshot, applicable businesses should see a booking button in the NMX, as shown above. Businesses wishing to enable booking and appointment features must follow these instructions and can learn more about the Reserve With Google system here. Also pictured here is the “Waitlists” function tied to the Reserve with Google program for managing queues of potential diners.
See what’s in store
The See What’s In Store feature shows up on the Google Business Profiles of companies that have integrated the Pointy device into their point of sales system.
Controllable? Yes, if you are in the US, UK, CA, IE, or AU, have an appropriate point of sales system, and vend items with standard barcodes, you can apply to become part of this program.
Where to control? Google’s documentation states that, depending on how you signed up to be part of their See What’s in Store program, you will either be managing your inventory directly via Pointy or within your Google Business Profile.
Order online
Some GBPs may feature an order online button . When clicked on, it brings up a list comprised of the brand as well as third-party services that facilitate taking digital payments in exchange for goods that can then be picked up or delivered.
Controllable? Partly — business owners can opt into this, but there has been considerable controversy over the years about whether third-party providers in the delivery business are more of a bane or blessing to local brands, and whether or not its right for Google to promote these types of services on GBPs.
Reviews from the web
This features a rating summary and links to relevant third-party review sources, determined by Google.
Controllable?
Partly — owners can’t dictate which 3rd parties Google chooses, but they can work to build up positive reviews on featured sources.
Profiles
Google business profiles can feature icon-based links to major social media sites where the company has established a presence.
Controllable? No — there is no field in the NMX for adding your social media profiles, but best practice advice is to be sure they are featured on your website so that Google can easily associate them with the business.
Popular times
This Google Business Profile information is drawn from users who have opted into Google Location History. It’s meant to help users plan visits. It’s conceivable that this could be utilized as a ranking factor.
Controllable?
No.
Chat/Messaging
This feature enables customers to leave messages for businesses and receive responses.
Controllable? Yes — businesses can choose to opt into this.
Where to control? Google’s branding of this feature is messy. In the NMX it is labeled Messages, but when opting into the program, you will be shown a popup asking if you want to turn on “chat”, and customers will see buttons labeled “chat”. You can read more about this feature here.
Performance
The performance tab in the NMX takes you to the analytics data historically known as Insights. This is where Google reports on how the public is interacting with your listing.
Controllable? No — apart from changing the date ranges in this interface, this is not data you can edit.
Advertise
This link in the NMX takes you to where you can sign up to run paid advertising.
Controllable: Yes — local businesses can opt into Google Ads.
Admission
Some attractions feature admissions information on the Google Business Profile, with price comparisons for tickets.
Controllable? Not directly, though attractions can be sure pricing information is clear on their websites. This is a controversial feature, because Google states the following:
“Tickets are ranked based on several factors, but mainly by price. Official tickets are given preference in the ranking. Ticket suppliers don’t pay Google to appear in these search results and can’t pay to influence their ranking. Prices are based on standard adult entry and may vary depending on the specific ticket types, dates or eligibility for other discounts. Displayed currencies may differ from the currencies used to purchase tickets.”
However, as can be seen in my above example of the GBP of the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco, the official website of the attraction is being outranked in the Admissions results by an entity that is not official and is also more expensive, contrary to Google’s statement of how this feature should work.
Experiences
Some Google Business Profiles may included nearby experiences. This screenshot is also from the GBP of the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco, and is displaying other things to do in Golden Gate Park.
Controllable? No — this information is provided by Google, not the business owner.
Opening date
It has been some time since I have seen an opening date featured on a GBP, though I frequently spot them in local pack results, but businesses do have the ability to tell Google the month and year in which they were founded.
Controllable? Yes — businesses can provide this information.
Where to control?
In the NMX, click on “Edit Profile” and then click on “Contact” to find the field for adding your founding date.
Lodging listings
Hotel profiles are unique to the point of being almost a different style of Google listing. They feature many distinct elements including price comparison, environmental practices, availability-based booking, and other features.
Controllable?
Mostly — owners have a variety of features they can enable and manage, though Google pulls in many elements from third parties including the public.
Hopefully, this guide will act as a trusty flotation device the next time you need to manage something in your Google Business Profile via the New Merchant Experience. What I’ve learned from writing it is that if you click around long enough in the NMX, you can find most things, with a few exceptions like those that have been noted by friends like Damian Rollison and the good folks over at BrightLocal and Online Ownership.
This column has covered what the main features are and where to control them, but if you’re ready to move on to making the most of each element, read the popular Beginner’s Guide to Google Business Profiles for optimization and marketing tips. If you want to understand where GBPs fit within the larger framework of local search marketing, read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide for nine chapters of free, expert advice. Or, if you feel you’d benefit from investing in a more guided experience, consider registering for our video-based Local SEO Certification. Google will just keep changing – that’s a guarantee! Our best strategy, then, is to embrace continuing education. With determination and knowledge, we can all swim these laps for the win!
There was a pre-search-engine age. It’s hard to conceive of now, but there was. Even in the early days of search engines, when Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, and Excite still competed for the crown, I can remember web portals. Pages that I’d start at, in the “computer room” at school, to navigate and explore the web not by searching, but by clicking on organized links.
In the beginning, there were web portals. The internet was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.
These were already the death throes of a previous internet age. Search engine dominance, and specifically Google dominance, has been the norm for this kind of journey for decades now. It’s all that many SEOs have ever known.
But what comes next?
People have talked for a long time about existential threats to Google’s dominance, and often, implicitly, by extension, SEO. You’ll have heard the claims that Amazon or YouTube are now preferred engines for certain kinds of search, or that Google is going to struggle against the unique technological advantages of Apple, AI chatbots, the unique regional advantages of Baidu, or the unique format advantages of TikTok. Or maybe you’ve even heard that people prefer to restrict their searches only to Reddit. Even mainstream outlets are suggesting that Google search quality may be in decline.
This post is not about the health of Google search as a product, or about the implications of improving AI products for your SEO strategy right now. (Although, I know of at least one post for this blog being written on that topic!) Instead, this post is about which of these threats, if any, actually stand a chance of unseating Google’s dominance.
In what capacity?
To ask what might take Google’s role, we must first ask what role it is that we’re interested in. Google is many things, and possibly part of the reason Google’s doom is so often predicted is that we’re not always talking about the same specific things.
What exactly is it that search engines as a genre, and then Google, have dominated? Perhaps we might mean:
The place you’d start to find a web page on a site you’ve not yet discovered? For example, you might not know yet what the best site is for a given topic.
The place you’d start to find a web page on a site you’re already familiar with? Perhaps you’re searching on Google hoping to see a result from Reddit, or from Wikipedia.
The place you’d start to answer a given question? So maybe you’d be happy with a non-web result as long as it answered your question.
The place you’d start to complete a task? So, again, the best answer might not be a web page at all.
The truth is that the present reality blurs these use cases to the point of it not being useful to separate them. But for Google to be replaced by something that maintains this close alignment, it’d have to be a close peer competitor.
The obvious pretenders
There are two that come to mind, as similarly resourced companies trying similar things via a similar method (a web index): Bing and Apple.
I don’t want to be dismissive of Bing, or of the value of someone — anyone — else maintaining a similar enough competitor to keep Google somewhat honest. Although it’s often mocked in SEO circles, Bing in reality is not so many years behind Google at any given point. But, really, it’s hard to see the events that could lead to Bing supplanting Google at its own game. It’s just too similar for people to make the switch. One possibility based on recent news is for Bing to become less similar, pursuing one of the precise alternatives I’ll cover below – but more on that when we get to it.
Apple, on the other hand, is doing something similar, but with some unique advantages. I must credit my former colleague (and 2023 Mozcon speaker) Tom Anthony who has been very prescient around Apple’s moves in this space, going so far as to backward-engineer Apple search results that weren’t supposed to be publicly available. Apple can do things that Bing can’t, leveraging Apple’s app ecosystem and device integration to provide search results that skip certain steps of a user journey in ways that Google cannot, or will not.
The trouble with Apple as a Google search competitor is obvious, though. The unique advantages, as I said, are to do with apps and hardware. Apple devices are expensive — prohibitively so. (This varies by market – in the US, with the base price of a phone contract being so high, iPhones are more palatable and have a notably higher market share than in Europe, for example. But, that’s a topic for another day – either way…). There is a fairly hard cap on the market share of a search engine that is only superior on high-end devices, and not only that, but ones from a specific brand.
So could Apple take a big chunk out of Google? Yes, it may already quietly have done so with various iOS changes pushing the prevalence of Apple’s own search results. But totally replace Google? Very unlikely.
You can say the same for regional competitors like Baidu, Yandex, or Naver. These may well consistently beat out Google in their own backyards, and perhaps even spread to nearby countries and regions, but it’s hard to see them beating Google in its own backyard(s).
Revolution, not evolution
So what about competitors that replace Google by doing something totally different, to solve the same problems? The reality is that a lot of the problems we solve right now with web search, are not actually well suited to web search. The fact that something like a Google Home will often answer your questions by essentially reading out a featured snippet is a symptom of Google’s dominance, not a symptom of web search being well suited to that use case. Even Google themselves recognize this, and betray that in tools like Google Translate, clocks, calculators, and so on, embedded in SERPs. So who might the more disruptive threats be?
One name that came up a lot in 2022 is TikTok, and I’d point you to this excellent post by Lidia Infante on this very blog. To sum up her argument, TikTok can take market share from Google, but it can’t replace Google entirely. TikTok is too specialized (in video format and certain topic areas), and the quality assurance is too weak. So, again, we have a competitor that chips away at Google without replacing it.
Then of course, most recently, SEOs of Twitter have been right to point out that for many queries, ChatGPT produces better responses than Google. Take this example, “excel query for extraction the domain name from a url”:
The ChatGPT result above is far more informative and easy to follow. However, like TikTok, this only works for certain things. ChatGPT is not a web search engine:
So you have to be willing to abandon the premise that your result should be a web page. Which, in this context, comes down to: do you trust an answer if you don’t know who wrote it? ChatGTP and similar technologies have access to “knowledge” sourced from the web, like Google, but they don’t cite a source. Indeed, it would be immensely difficult to trace the source of their various claims, some of which seem quite… odd.
Similar to TikTok, then, this is something I might prefer to Google for a specific kind of query. In this particular case, the kind of query that previously took me to StackOverflow. But I’m not going to ask it for mortgage advice.
I noted above that Bing is rumored to be integrating ChatGPT with its own search product. This enlarges the threat to Google in that it makes this technology more accessible, but really, the same qualms apply – there are many, many queries for which this is not helpful. Even if Bing can hybridize these technologies into a “best of both” of traditional web search and NLP, well – that’s already the road Google is going down.
The other challenge with this “ChatAI as search” model is an economic one. Google and Amazon have both already come to the conclusion that the type of queries asked of their personal assistant devices are barely, if at all, economic to run – because of the limited monetization opportunities for purely informational queries. Perhaps my distinction above, about what we mean by replacing Google, is very relevant here – some of our use cases of Google as a search engine are actually just a loss leader for others. As such, perhaps this bundling of disparate uses is necessary.
The King is dea… wait, wait, he’s still breathing
Number of explicit core search queries powered by search engines in the United States as of January 2022 – via Statista
Ultimately, these threats look set to chip away at Google, not replace it. At worst, a broad monopoly will be sliced up and shrunk, and that doesn’t feel like any great evil. For SEOs, we should be aware of these new search engines, and these new “search engines”, and of the risks attached to being locked into the Google ecosystem. But don’t forget the chart above: the original pie is not going anywhere. The Google SEO game is still not a bad game to be playing.
Business blogging is an interesting concept. Many businesses have a blog, and yet, in most cases, there isn’t much planning going into how those blogs fit into larger business goals. Someone on the team is just assigned to publish content regularly, and that’s what they do.
A business blog is usually an island within a company: There’s likely, not much measuring, so no one has any idea if it is generating any traffic, sales, or rankings.
And yet, despite a lack of planning or measuring, there may be some good traffic coming.
Blogging is a good way to achieve “aссidental rankings” (those you didn’t necessarily plan for) and discover more search-driven sales channels. But many business owners or marketing managers have no idea what their blogs are ranking for. Consequently, there’s no buying journey set up for someone who lands on a blog post.
Clicks may come, but a blog remains an island. So, how can you include your blog in your overall marketing strategy to convert those clicks?
Step 1: Identify your blog’s current rankings that may bring sales
In other words, let’s see if there’s anything to worry about in the first place. Normally, the good old 20/80 rule works for blogs as well: About 20% of your content will be bringing 80% of your traffic. So, you need to know what 20% of your blog content actually does bring traffic.
Navigate Performance > Create a filter to see all the pages that contain “blog” (or whatever domain or subdomain you have your blog at) and click on the “Pages” tab.
The list is going to be sorted by the number of clicks your blog is driving.
Don’t forget to use Moz Pro’s rank tracker to set up position monitoring of those pages that are driving organic traffic.
Step 2: Plan your buying journeys from your blog
Make sure your blog makes it clear that this is a business blog and you are selling something. Define the major conversion funnels for your readers to follow.
At the very least, there should be a site-wide call to action (CTA) inviting readers to check your product or products, but the best idea is to create contextual CTAs and lead generation forms, which could better align with the searchers’ intent.
Hubspot is a great example of contextual CTAs that differ in each article and engage readers by providing “upgrades” to the article content:
There are many more content-based B2B lead generation strategies, but contextual CTAs work in e-commerce and retail as well.
HomeDepot is another prime example of including contextual CTAs (and automating them). They always show related products right next to each of their guides. Not only are these products actually helpful for following the tutorial and solving the searcher’s problem, they also create the right expectation that this content has a business behind it:
Look at your blog and open any individual article. Do you offer readers ways from that blog to follow the sales funnel? You may also want to set up a heat-map and button click tracking to better understand what your blog readers interact with on your blog post.
Step 3: Revive lost rankings
An important reminder: Blogs inevitably lose rankings.
The essence of any blog is that the more content you add, the further your older content is moving down the archive, away from the home page. And gradually, but inevitably, that content is going to lose rankings.
Thus, checking your blog’s traffic and rankings should be done regularly because blogs tend to lose rankings over time. You can do that using the same tools. Search Console has a “Compare” option allowing you to see pages losing clicks…
Click the “Click difference” header twice to sort by pages that lost the most clicks. You can only go as far as 16 months back, though.
And again, once you set up tracking, the Moz Pro rank tracker will tell you exactly which keywords are losing rankings. You can compare your current positions to what you had when we first started recording any particular keyword.
So now that you have a list of articles that are losing rankings, what to do with those?
Is this something that can be saved?
First of all, figure out if this is something worth saving. There will always be rankings that you can just let go of. These include old news or press releases, articles that stand no chance of converting readers into buyers, expired product reviews or listicles, etc.
Update the content
If it looks like a page that is ranked for something with transactional potential, think about whether you should update that content to align it better to those keywords as well as relevant contextual CTAs. Maybe there’s a new video you created after writing that article, so now you can add it there.
Also, study your organic competitors to see where they might be better. You can use IMN’s Side-by-Side Tool to see the content of pages that gained rankings that you lost. The tool will compare various important on-page elements like titles, subheadings, keyword usage, etc. This will give you lots of clues about what needs to be expanded, added to, and improved.
SE Ranking on-page SEO checker is another great tool to see where your content needs to be updated and optimized better based on your competitor research:
Using SEO change monitoring, you can also be on top of your competitors’ content updates so that you can timely update yours and avoid losing rankings.
WebCEO is another cool tool that analyzes around 30 competing URLs for your target search queries and suggests what needs to be added for your content to catch up with your competitors:
Next, republish your refreshed content with a new date to push that article back to the top of your blog’s archive. For seasonal content, it’s especially important to time those content updates with the upcoming holiday or season.
Depending on those keywords (i.e. their relevancy and search volume), you may want to make that page more evergreen and prevent it from ever getting lost in your blog’s archives. Internal linking is one way to do that.
You can link to that page from relevant static landing pages that always remain at the same level in the site structure. Or include static site-wide or blog-wide “Featured guides” sections linking to those important blog posts. Here’s an example of a product category page linking to related guides:
Not only do these links help buyers make more informed decisions, they also help those linked guides maintain more consistent and long-term rankings.
What if your blog has no traffic at all?
But there’s another possibility, a bigger and broader one that probably deserves a separate discussion: What if your blog doesn’t rank at all, and there’s no organic traffic to convert? Sometimes those unexpected rankings never come, so what can you do?
Ask yourself why you have a blog in the first place and what you’d like to achieve with it. Is it sales? Then research your keywords and create effective contextual CTAs. If it’s links and connections? Then research journalists in your niche and what they are interested in, to better create content for successful outreach.
Researching your keywords and aligning your content to your goals is a huge topic, which is covered in-depth in Moz’s Keyword Research Master Guide, so start there.
Make your blog part of your whole company
The above steps help you revive and improve your blog’s rankings and utilize those clicks better. But without solving an underlying issue, you won’t see your blogging strategy succeed in the long run.
You need to integrate blogging into your company’s life and marketing strategy. Let your whole company submit content ideas for your blog, encourage everyone to share those articles that go live, and invite your current employees to write articles and create graphics for your blog.
Make sure your blog writers talk to your customer support and sales teams because those talk to your actual customers, so they will have a lot of insight into what those people are struggling with and how to help them. Give your blog writers access to your CRM to be able to assign certain clients’ questions and interactions to them as content ideas.
Keep an eye on your blog’s metrics and share important milestones with your company. A blog can make a big difference to your company’s bottom line, but only if you are taking it seriously.
Welcome to 2023! In the first Whiteboard Friday of the new year, Paddy walks through three methods to evolve your link building efforts — not reinventing the wheel, but by improving what you currently do.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hi, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Paddy Moogan. I’m the CEO of Aira. Today, we’re going to talk about link building and how to evolve your link building to its next phase and to improve what you do at the moment.
So we’re going to talk through three methods to improve your link building and evolve it and improve the results you get for clients.
1. Use the customer journey to generate ideas
So firstly, number one, there is a bit of an issue sometimes with link building and the relevance of the content that we produce for link building. So one way we can actually improve that and make our content as relevant as possible is to use the customer journey to generate link building ideas.
Now, there’s lots of different ways of thinking about the customer journey, different funnels, different methodologies. One thing we use at Aira for this is the awareness, consideration, and decision phases, where the customer goes from being aware of the problem, the pain points, something they want to fix, then looking at their options and trying to figure out, “Okay, who should I choose to solve that problem?”
And then, finally, maybe getting their credit card out, picking up the phone, emailing, that kind of stuff to actually decide who they’re going to go with. Now, we can use this model to actually come up with link building ideas. I’m going to share how we do this at Aira. So there’s four pillars we can use to try and figure out content ideas that are relevant to our customers. Firstly, we start with the audience themselves.
So who are our audience? Who are we trying to speak to? Who are our ideal buyers for the products and services that we sell? So that’s where we start. We then move on to the pain points of our audience. So what kinds of things do they struggle with? What kind of triggers can actually make them start to look for a product such as yours or a service such as yours?
And then thirdly, what solutions do you offer as a brand or a website to try and fix those pain points for those customers and trying to connect those things together? Fourthly, what keywords are you trying to rank for? What are you trying to rank for in Google? How does that connect back to your service and your product? And what that allows you to do is to tie together these stages into actual rankings, actual keywords that you’re trying to improve with your link building and your content.
The nice thing about using these four areas to try and come up with content ideas for link building is that it forces relevance. It’s really hard to actually do this. If you stray too far away from it, you come up with ideas that aren’t very relevant. So if you stick really closer to it, it’s a bit harder. That’s kind of the point. What you’re trying to do here is strike that balance between ideas that can get links, but also content ideas that are very relevant to your audience and who you’re trying to sell your products or your services to.
So try and use these four points here to come up with your ideas, and make sure the ideas you come up with are truly relevant to your customer and not just being done purely for link building.
2. Move beyond campaigns
Second point, second thing we can do to evolve our link building is to move beyond big, shiny, interactive link building campaigns. Now, we’ve built hundreds of these over the years at Aira. We will continue to build them.
I love a good, shiny, interactive hero campaign. But I believe there’s more we can do when it comes to content-led link building. So there’s four things we can do here. So firstly, try and make any campaigns, any content that you come up with evergreen. What I mean by that is it shouldn’t be a start and a stop campaign, where you launch a campaign, do your outreach, and then forget about it and move on to the next one.
Try and create ideas and campaigns that you can outreach and promote over and over and over again. If you can do that, it continues to be relevant throughout the year, across multiple years. It isn’t just a one-off campaign that you’re hoping will get links before you move on to the next one. The second thing you can do is actually not to stop the outreach. So most SEOs actually will outreach a campaign and then stop once that campaign is finished and move on to the next one.
What you should be trying to do instead is create campaigns that you can always outreach and always promote. So try not to stop your outreach, and what happens over time is you build up multiple campaigns, multiple content pieces, and you end up with a nice, big bank of content that you can continually outreach and get links to. It’s not relying upon one campaign after another to get links.
3. Aim for links you didn’t ask for
Third point we can do is to look at existing content.
So again, when you’re thinking about creating link building campaigns, the natural tendency is to think of something new, to think about, “Okay, what can we create that’s brand new, hasn’t been done before, completely new campaign for a website or a client?” Well, actually, that’s absolutely fine, but there may be some existing content on that website that is link-worthy. So make sure, when you start working with a website or a new brand, look at what they’ve got already, see which content they’ve got that might be link-worthy, may have gotten links in the past, and try and outreach and promote that content whilst you’re building new campaigns.
This works really well particularly for agencies, because when you’re launching a campaign, it takes a bit of time to come up with ideas, do the production, do the design. Whilst you’re doing all of that, if you can find existing content on that website that is link-worthy, you can promote that and get links to that whilst you’re building the big campaign. And you’re offsetting the risk there as well and getting links in the short term as well as the long term.
Fourthly, simplify your execution. Not every content piece has to be big, shiny, interactive, full-page takeovers. It can be as simple as a blog post. It could be a small, mini infographic. Try not to worry too much about big, fancy executions. Let the idea lead the execution. And if that means that you write just a very, very simple blog post with a couple of images, maybe lots of copy and bullet points, that’s absolutely fine.
If that’s the best way to execute your idea, then that’s what you should go with and not worry too much about making something interactive or big just for the sake of it. So thirdly, the third thing we can do to elevate our link building is to aim for links that you didn’t ask for. So a lot of the time with link building techniques they rely upon outreach, and outreach means sending emails, trying to get in touch with webmasters and link prospects and get links from them.
That’s absolutely fine. We should continue doing that. But one place you want to try and get to is to create content where it naturally gets links on its own. So you may well do outreach and get links for that content. But as well as that, you’re also getting people who link to that content naturally, so you’re not relying too much just on the outreach. Now there’s three examples here of content you can create that actually will do this. Now the first thing to remember is actually content that ranks tends to get links, because when people are doing research into different areas and trying to write about certain industries, they may look for content they can also link to.
So, for example, if you have a page that’s about statistics and trends in your industry, and someone is writing an article about your industry and trends in 2022, if they find your content, there’s a good chance that they will link to it as well in the content they’re producing. But if it ranks, they’ve got more chance of finding it. The second area is long-form guides, really in-depth, really detailed content. If you can find some good topic ideas to write about in the long-form way, long-form guides tend to rank for a lot of long-tail and mid-tail keywords.
Again, if it ranks really well, it’s very detailed, very techy, this works really well for very technical products and very technical services. If you can create content about your product or service that’s quite technical, it’s got a good chance of ranking well and also being referenced and linked to by other websites. And thirdly, industry reports. So actually, we do this ourselves at Aira.
We produced a State of Link Building Report a few months ago. It’s a report that gets referenced a lot by our industry because it’s a standard in the industry for link building and people think of it when they’re writing their own content. So in your industry, if you can create industry benchmark reports, state of industry reports, surveys, that kind of stuff, that actually shares knowledge and shares information with the industry, it’s easy for people to reference that in their own content that they produce as well.
But again, it needs to rank well for people to find it in the first place. So there’s three ways to actually evolve your link building and try to elevate it to the next level beyond campaigns, beyond outreach, and actually trying to get links that you didn’t ask for. So that’s Whiteboard Friday for me. I’m Paddy Moogan. If you’ve got any questions, drop them into the comments below. I’ll be happy to get back to you.
Over the past twenty years, I’ve probably answered tens of thousands of questions relating to local search marketing. I’m sure I’ve gotten it wrong lots of times, but one thing that’s never happened is that the people requesting my consultation have mistaken me for an omniscient entity. Local business owners and marketers in fora, email, DM, and on the phone understand that I am just a person doing my best to give them good advice. Concerns arise when I consider what applications like ChatGPT may be mistaken for – an expert, a genius, a demigod?
Let’s do an experiment today to see what happens when we ask ChatGPT some of the commonest local SEO questions that humans like me are used to fielding, and let’s imagine what would happen to local business owners if they built their marketing strategy on the advice received.
The Local SEO ChatGPT Experiment
In which ChatGPT merrily instructs me to set about building GBPs for virtual offices
Contrary to ChatGPT’s answer, the guidelines for representing your business on Google prohibit the creation of listings for virtual offices. Unfortunately, our hypothetical local business owner has just built one on the strength of this bot’s advice.
2. In which ChatGPT encourages me to violate Yelp’s guidelines
Yelp specifically states, “Don’t ask for reviews,” but our hypothetical local business owner is out there right now disregarding this policy, thanks to ChatGPT’s advice.
3. In which ChatGPT promulgates one of the most persistent local SEO myths of all time
It must be one of the oldest myths in local SEO, and it’s one that marketers have to keep refuting because it keeps floating around out there in the ether. With AI promoting this myth, our hypothetical local business owner will now spend hours geotagging all of their imagery for its promised ranking benefits.
4. In which the suite number myth lives on
Every local SEO will immediately recognize this situational question in which the inquirer is trying to differentiate one business from another at the same address, and wanting to know if adding a real or fictitious suite number will help Google separate out the entities. What people like Joy Hawkins know that ChatGPT doesn’t is that Google ignores suite numbers, but the myths persist.
5. In which the robot starts to head down a better path and then goes totally awry
Initially, I was worried that our hypothetical local business owner asking whether they can create a Google Business Profile for a lead gen business wasn’t receiving a ChatGPT answer that began with, “No!” Google’s guidelines specifically list lead gen companies as being ineligible. ChatGPT ignores this, and proceeds to instruct the inquirer on how to create a forbidden listing.
A brief ray of hope shone out for me when the ten-step instructions were followed by the warning that (correctly) explains that you shouldn’t create GBPs for businesses that lack physical locations. “Good,” I thought. “This will cause the lead gen practitioner to pause and adhere to guidelines.”
My hopes, however, were short-lived when the bot followed this up with the head-slapping suggestion that the lead gen brand resolve their dilemma with the creation of a virtual office! We’re back to square one with ChatGPT causing users to fall afoul of Google’s most basic guidelines.
The Results of a ChatGPT-led Local SEO Strategy
Let’s imagine that our fictitious local business owner has mistaken ChatGPT for an expert, and has acted on this advice. What happens next:
The Google Business Profile for the virtual office is hard-suspended and likely permanently removed for guideline violations, negating any investment the owner had made in creating the listing.
The hours invested in geotagging images are all wasted, and have eaten up valuable time the business owner could have spent in pursuing tactics that do influence search engine rankings.
The business owner who may already have been heading down the wrong path in hoping that fictitious suite numbers will make Google believe that the separate categories of a single business each deserve to have their own listing will experience suspension of one or both listings sooner or later.
The lead gen business owner will be suspended on two counts: 1) for listing a lead gen business in the first place, and 2) for listing a virtual office.
Once they are caught, the business name is mud on Yelp, where their profile is stamped with an ugly public warning for engaging in prohibited practices.
What we have here, then, is not a local SEO strategy, but the shreds and tatters of disinformation that could result in reputational damage, loss of time, and wasted marketing budget. These are significant real-world consequences.
A Mind of Metal and Wheels
Last year, I was invited to contribute an article to a large publication, commenting on the subject of how writers like myself feel about the intrusion of AI into our craft. I wrote a thoughtful essay entitled Art Vs. The Machine, in which I drew on J.R.R. Tolkien’s philosophy of the gifted human use of tools vs. the coercion of wills that underlie the development of much machinery. My essay remains unpublished, as yet, because the publisher rejected it in favor of an ode to AI that admonished writers to sublimate our fears and get with the program.
My heartfelt sentiments were clearly not a good match for the publisher’s agenda, and the debate about AI should absolutely include all voices and viewpoints – some people are very excited about the arrival of ChatGPT and will laud Google’s analog, if and when it arrives, but others are not applauding. Teachers, for example, appear not to feel that you get the world’s next Tolkien when machines do the “thinking”. My own take at present is that, if I were to use the present incarnation of ChatGPT to write my Moz Blog column, all of you would be reading local search marketing disinformation right now. I strongly hold that you deserve better than that from me.
In fairness, I want to conclude that ChatGPT got some answers to my local SEO questions right, correctly referencing sections of the all-powerful Google guidelines. I was pleased when it was able to talk to me in Swedish, and was surprised when it managed to respond to me in Irish Gaelic. But the bot lacks the art of Elvish. I asked a question in Sindarin, and ChatGPT had no idea what I was saying:
When I translated my question into English (Westron, for all you Tolkien philologists), ChatGPT understood what I wanted, and its reply contained a revealing proviso that should be a reminder to all AI users about a critical difference between the machines and us.
For now, I’ll be continuing to write my column in the old-fashioned human way, remembering specific (and wonderful!) interactions I’ve had with local business owners and industry colleagues, and drawing continuously on my personal experiences.
Six in ten consumers require a minimum 4+ star rating in order to consider patronizing a local business and over ⅓ say it’s the star rating that is the key differentiator between local brands. If you’re marketing a company that is just starting out or an established business that has hit a reputational rough patch and your overall ratings fall below this magic threshold, revenue is being lost.
But hope is not lost!
In today’s column, you will find a set of sensible, actionable steps you can take to raise your Google Business Profile star ratings, improve your reviews, and begin developing the good online reputation you need in order to realize the full profit potential of the local businesses you market.
Defining local business reputation
In this context, a local business has both an offline reputation that resides in the word-of-mouth sentiments expressed by members of the community it serves and an online reputation that is most visible within the rating and review systems of platforms like Google Business Profile, Yelp, Nextdoor, TripAdvisor, etc. This article focuses specifically on Google, but its advice can be applied to most platforms that host local business reviews.
For detailed, original data on the many dynamic aspects of online reviews, read Moz’s formal review survey report but for today’s topic, it’s important to know that just 13% of consumers insist on a perfect 5-star rating to consider doing business with a company and that a dominant 51% will consider a brand with a 4-star overall rating. Thus, both 4 and 5-star ratings are considered a great or good reputation by the majority of consumers.
Yet, hope can be found in the fact that about ⅓ of consumers may still give you a try if your organization’s overall reputation is only 3 stars. This could give you the grace period you need to keep the lights on while you strategically improve your operations to start winning more trust and business in your community. We’ll grade a 3-star reputation as “needs improvement”. The work involved will be harder if the reputation has dropped to 2-or-less stars, as only 2% of the public is likely to consider patronizing you. This rating would be considered poor, but you can improve it with a serious commitment.
Task 1: Look your business up on Google and note down its overall rating and number of reviews.
How do Google ratings and reviews work?
Before you begin the necessary tasks for improving your reputation, it’s important to understand how Google’s system works. Local business ratings and reviews are part and parcel of Google Business Profiles as well as Local Finders and Google Maps. Reviews are text-based sentiments left by consumers, as shown above. Ratings are the 1-5 star symbology Google uses so that people can gauge a company’s reputation at a glance. The overall rating a business receives is based on Google’s average of all the individual ratings customers have left. As our example demonstrates, if a business has just two reviews, and one has a 1-star rating and the other has a 5-star rating, this averages out to an overall rating of 3.0 stars. Google users have the option to leave both a rating and text, or just a rating.
Because of Google’s averages, local business owners with less than a 4-star total rating frequently ask how many higher-star ratings they will need to earn before they see their overall rating improve. The answer depends on the total number of ratings the company has already earned, but by my calculation, if a business with ten reviews has earned an overall 3.0 star rating and wants to see that bump up to a much better 4.0 star average, they will need to earn ten new 5-star reviews to move the needle. Similarly, if the business begins with one hundred reviews and a 3.0 star rating, they will need to earn one hundred new 5-star reviews to move up to a 4.0 star average.
Over the years, different surveys have measured how conversions increase when star ratings improve, with a very good recent report finding that when a business succeeds in increasing its overall rating by one whole star (such as moving up from 3.0 to 4.0 stars), it can expect a 44% increase in Google Business Profile conversions. That’s a big number!
Improving the rating is work that must be paced over time to avoid having too many new reviews come in at once, triggering Google to filter them out. Note, too, that it can take up to two weeks for incoming reviews to update the overall average. Local businesses suffering from a poor online reputation, then, can look at the averages and estimate how many new high-star reviews they will need to earn to begin seeing the benefits to their conversions, transactions, revenue, and overall good name.
Identifying causes of reputational damage
There are at least 9 common contributors to the erosion of star ratings and reputation.
Too few reviews giving too much power to a small number of voices
Neglect of review responses
Neglect of local business listings resulting in false information online
Bad/rude customer service
Bad products
Poor work on a job
Spam from competitors, past employees, and personal adversaries
Spam from the business owner and their staff or marketers
Scandals
For all but the last of these bullet points, achievable fixes are right within reach. For the last bullet point, though, the degree of the scandal may take the business outside the scope of this article. When a local business scandal is severe, the owner may end up having to cope with litigation and damage too permanent to continue operations. For the other eight very common scenarios, however, all the steps for determined remediation are yours to take.
Task 2: Determine the key contributors to your low rating and document them. Read through the whole body of your reviews and make a note of each complaint, categorizing them based on the 9 types of problems listed above.
How to improve your local business reputation, step-by-step
In your first and second tasks, you noted down your overall rating and number of reviews, and you categorized the complaints you’ve received into some of the nine different categories. Now, you’re ready to start addressing any of the categories that fit your scenario.
Too few reviews giving too much power to a small number of voices
This is often the first and most obvious cause of a poor overall star rating. When a business has too few reviews, the weight given to each review is extraordinary. As we saw earlier, if your company has just one 1-star review and one 5-star review, your overall reputation is just 3.0 stars.
28% of consumers lose trust in a business when it has too few reviews compared to its competitors, and 70% will read between 5-20 reviews before deciding your company is worth a try. One of the best and most sensible efforts you can make, then, is to launch a review acquisition strategy that ensures you have a steady stream of incoming sentiment and that no single customer has too large a share of voice in your reputation narrative.
Neglect of review responses
40% of your customers expect you to write an owner response when they leave you a positive review. When the review is negative, 64% of your customers expect you to respond. The truth is, these expectations are low, and local businesses should be responding to every single review as it comes in. Just as you would never ignore a customer visiting your physical premises, don’t neglect anyone who is speaking to you online.
11% of people expect your response within 2 hours of their writing a review. 21% expect to hear back within 24 hours, and an additional 28% expect to hear back within 48 hours. From this day forward, make it a priority to use the owner response functionality either as soon as you realize you’ve received a new review or at a given time each day. If you are having trouble keeping on top of this, Moz Local will alert you to incoming reviews across multiple platforms. This is a good plan for going forward.
However, if your review corpus currently consists of months’ or years’ worth of reviews that have received no response, take the time now to go back through the last six months of your reviews and respond to them. While delayed responses are unlikely to re-engage the customers who left the reviews, you can at least begin signaling to the general public that you are implementing a new plan of active responsiveness.
If further coaching in how to respond well to both positive and negative reviews would help, read Chapter 4 of the Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, but in the meantime, here are quick facts to help you write excellent responses to negative reviews:
Do everything you can to solve a problem cited in a negative review, or 54% of consumers will avoid your business.
If you accuse a consumer of lying, 33% of customers will avoid your business, and if you argue with the reviewer, 46% will avoid your business. Keep your responses positive and professional, even if you think the customer is wrong.
Be sure your response to a negative review includes an apology, or 47% will avoid your business.
Know that 38% of consumers write reviews specifically to tell your business how it needs to improve – by fixing stated problems you are taking direct action to improve customer service and reputation.
Neglect of local business listings resulting in false information online
52% of local business review writers say they have written negative reviews as a result of encountering false or inaccurate information about local businesses online, including on local business listings. When business names, addresses, phone numbers, hours of operation, and other essential data are incorrect, it inconveniences, disappoints, and frustrates the public.
Fortunately, actively managing local business listings is one of the easiest steps you can take to safeguard and improve your reputation so that you are receiving zero negative reviews and poor ratings due to avoidable, basic errors. You have two options for this work:
1) Do a manual audit of Google’s organic search engine results for your business name and services, discover all the local business listing and review platforms on which you have a profile, audit those profiles for errors, claim and update them, and track them in a spreadsheet for regular updating whenever your business information changes. It’s a considerable workload.
2) Subscribe to a service like Moz Local which is designed to let you manage all of your listings on key platforms very quickly and effectively from a single dashboard, protecting accuracy and reducing negative customer experiences.
In addition to ensuring that your business information is accurate on formal listing platforms, it’s a good idea to see if other online mentions of your business (known as unstructured citations) contain inaccuracies. For example, if a local blogger wrote about your business two years ago and referenced your street address, and you have since moved, it’s important to search for such references and contact the publishers to request an update of their content whenever your business experiences a significant change.
Bad/rude customer service
65% of review writers have written negative reviews due to bad or rude customer service, making this scenario the dominant cause of negative online sentiment and low ratings. Unfortunately, if your worst reviews fall into this category, it may require structural rather than simple fixes. Every business scenario is different, but here are eight key questions to ask to help you determine the root causes of customers feeling poorly treated at a place of business:
Has every member of my public-facing staff received adequate training in company products, services and policies?
Are ongoing training sessions part of our program so that skills can be developed and improved?
Has every member of my staff received training in complaint identification and resolution so that problems are resolved at the time of service, rather than ending up online?
Is every member of my staff trusted and empowered to use their own initiative and creativity to relieve customer pain, and do they know the correct hierarchy of escalation for problems beyond their direct control?
Does every member of my staff earn a living wage, enabling them to bring resources of inner stability and happiness to the workplace?
Does every member of leadership role model company values to be emulated by employees?
Is a formal DEI council or policy in place to ensure that all staff and customers receive equal consideration, treatment, and service?
Has a policy of customer rights been created by the business, and is it adequately distributed to both the staff and the public?
If any of the answers you gave to the above questions is a “no”, then you have identified a possible cause of negative reviewers feeling that they have been treated poorly or rudely. By addressing the underlying causes of staff failing to convey professionalism, respect and happiness to customers, you will be fixing serious structural problems in your organization. When solutions are implemented, new higher ratings and better reviews should begin to outweigh negative ones over time. For a more in-depth look at the complete customer service ecosystem, return to chapter four of the Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.
Bad products
Planned obsolescence (manufacturing products that are intended to break) is making headlines and being outlawed in different places around the world, and it’s clear that paying good money for bad products is a sting keenly felt by consumers. 63% of reviewers say its a cause of them writing negative reviews, and for consumers aged 18-29, it is the #1 cause of such sentiment. In America, youngest people are also poorest, and it makes perfect sense that they would be the most distressed by spending hard-earned money on shoddy merchandise.
Supply chain breakages over the past few years have doubtless exacerbated this scenario, with local businesses often having to stock whatever they can access rather than what they know to be top quality. Sustainability, too, plays a key part in this conversation, as the public is reevaluating the climate impacts and pollution that result from a throwaway culture.
If some of your negative reviews fall into the “bad products” category, it could help to know that the latest marketing thought leadership envisions business owners as guardians and stewards who are responsible for offering the highest quality, most sustainable products to their communities. For local businesses, this could mean replacing remotely-sourced goods with more local inventory when better resources are available nearby. It could mean adding new steps to quality control processes. This is not an easy fix, particularly due to the effects of the pandemic on manufacturing, but it’s a problem that takes on extra relevance if you discover that your worst ratings stem from an inventory of poor-quality products that are undermining your reputation.
Poor work on a job
Even if weeks or months have gone by since a customer wrote a review complaining of something like a botched home improvement, an unsuccessful repair, or an unmet deadline, your best course for reputation restoration will be to directly contact the unhappy client and see if there is anything you can do to make them feel better. You may have to redo the work. You may have to refund their money. Or, a simple, heartfelt apology and request for a second chance to “get it right” may be enough to transform the relationship.
While you cannot offer any type of incentive to prompt a formerly-unhappy customer to update their negative rating and review, what you should look out for is the point at which your follow-up has resulted in customer satisfaction to the degree that they might amend their online sentiment if asked. You’ll enjoy two victories if you succeed. First, the original customer will think well of you again and hopefully continue to do business with you. Second, when a negative review is updated to reflect a subsequent better experience, it is no longer a barrier to further leads from the general public.
These two statistics should give you tremendous confidence for the uphill work ahead: 67% of negative reviewers had an improved opinion of a brand when the owner responded well, and 62% of negative reviewers would give a local brand a second chance after an owner response solves their problem.
Spam from competitors, past employees, and personal adversaries
Of all of the major review platforms, it has been proposed that Google has the biggest problem with review spam, with an estimated 10.7% of its review content being fraudulent. Every review platform has its own guidelines, and many countries have rulings regarding what constitutes review fraud, but a general definition of it would include these factors:
Reviews written in exchange for money, gifts, discounts, or other incentives.
Reviews that stem from competitors, owners of the business being reviewed, staff, and former staff, or other non-customers of the business
Reviews that are left on behalf of anyone instead of directly by the customer
Reviews that are manipulated (gated) so that only positive sentiment is displayed
Review removal requests in exchange for money, discounts, or other incentives
In the United States, review fraud is illegal. It is considered an unfair competitive practice that impacts consumers and businesses under section 5(a) of the US Federal Trade Commission Act. Unfortunately, Moz’s recent survey found that 40% of consumers have been offered money, discounts, or gifts in exchange for writing reviews. This could include brands and agencies paying members of the public to both positively review them and negatively review their competitors. An additional 11% admit to leaving negative reviews of their former employers. All of these practices are prohibited.
It’s important to know that Google will only consider removal of spam reviews if they demonstrably violate their stated guidelines, and Google typically won’t remove textless ratings. If you strongly believe that the erosion of your overall Google star rating is due, in part, to the presence of review fraud, you have three possible avenues toward resolution:
Log into your Google account and look up your business by name. Using the New Merchant Experience interface that should appear in the organic results, click on the “read reviews” tab. Find the fake review, and click the three dots to the right of it to report the review. Wait at least three days and then check to see if the review is gone. If not, you can try to report the problem via this live chat form. For more information on reporting review fraud, read this Google help doc.
If review fraud is stemming from a personal adversary or other known bad actor, you may need to seek legal advice regarding how to proceed toward resolution.
If Google fails to protect you from a large-scale review spam attack, a PR campaign may be your only hope of resolution. While Google will sometimes ignore individual reports of review spam, they have often acted once the scenario becomes a publicized scandal picked up by mainstream media. There have even been instances in which Google has shut off reviews during negative review attacks.
Spam from the business owner and their staff or marketers
50% of consumers lose trust if it looks like an owner or their employees are reviewing their own business. 44% are suspicious when an overall review profile consists of all-five-star reviews without any complaints. 39% are mistrustful when the profiles of those leaving reviews look suspect and 20% are wary when a local brand has too many reviews compared to its competitor.
A poor reputation doesn’t always equal a low star rating. It can, instead, stem from customers quietly walking away because they rightly suspect that the review profile is filled with fraud instigated by the business, itself. If the business you are marketing falls into this category, the above statistics paired with the illegality of these actions are all the persuasion that should be necessary to take immediate action to remove any reviews that violate platform guidelines and government regulations. Any review left by the business or its staff should be deleted. If fraudulent reviews stem from having hired a marketing firm that implemented this practice, your brand may need to seek legal advice in order to prompt the organization to delete this content. Only when you have removed as many spam reviews as possible will you be able to start building the legitimate reputation that supports customer satisfaction and brand longevity.
Task 3: Begin implementing the fixes for each category into which your negative reviews fall, prioritize acquiring new reviews, and then give it time for the expected rating improvements to materialize. If all goes well, you should start tracking a lift in engagements and revenue as the result of your higher overall rating.
Summing up
A low-star overall rating doesn’t feel good, and stands as a major obstacle to you running and marketing the local business of your dreams. However, because you can categorize the roots of negative consumer sentiment, you will typically have considerable powers of improvement on your side. It may take weeks, months, or even a year to implement better practices, services, and acquisition campaigns that culminate in a sterling rating, but such work has become primary to basic local business operations over the past twenty years.
For local businesses currently struggling with a reputation of 3-or-less stars, the main challenge will be to make improvements quickly and then actively acquire new sentiment at a steady rate so that future customers stop being turned away by the sight of a poor rating. It’s good to know that very few customers are looking for 5-star perfection and that, in fact, lots of people find flawlessness suspicious.
The ideal outlook is to utilize negative consumer sentiment as a valuable source of business intelligence which, at its best, tells you exactly what needs to be fixed so that customers are more satisfied. This is what makes review management an ongoing local search marketing task, and even a business with a good or great rating today can never stop working at reputational maintenance via stewardship of reviews.
Eager to learn more about local search and local business reputation? These resources are at your fingertips:
2023 will be a run-up to the Olympics for the world’s top athletes who will be competing in a variety of events to prove themselves ready to represent their countries in the Paris Games, and I have a strong hunch that the coming months will be a strenuous exercise in fortitude for local business owners and their marketers, as well.
Having weathered the extraordinary events that occurred in local search in the second half of 2022 – most particularly the deprecation of the historic Google Business Profile Manager Dashboard and a slew of business-impacting bugs – it’s my prediction that 2023 is going to be a year of notable change for the millions of local brands for whom Google’s local search interfaces have become integral to discovery, communications, and sales. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is stirring up the whole SEO industry, with many wondering how long a shadow AI will cast over work and life.
It’s my gut feeling that the developments we’ve seen over the past few months presage greater change ahead driven by Google’s attitude toward and handling of local and general search philosophy. Let’s prepare ourselves by getting an outlook on organic SEO (which bounds our local world) from Moz’s own Tom Capper and Dr. Peter J. Meyers. Then, let’s gather local wisdom from thoughtful industry commentators including Amanda Jordan, Ben Fisher, David Mihm, Garrett Sussman, Greg Sterling, and Mike Blumenthal. Finally, I’ll offer 3 areas of local search marketing I recommend focusing on in 2023.
Citius, Altius, Fortius
Image credit: St Dennis Band
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” ― Aristotle
We come running into the arena of 2023 carrying, as always, the bright torch of human intelligence, but this year, our steps are a little dogged; AI is on everyone’s mind. On our road to Paris, we can reflect on the Olympic motto that was first introduced in that city in the 1924 games: Swifter, Higher, Stronger. As a species, we are always hoping for improvements in ourselves and society. But, it was Aristotle who said that the mark of an educated mind was to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it, and right now, many of my SEO colleagues are questioning whether the rise of artificial intelligence and a life so ordered by machines is, in fact, anyone’s idea of a smart move. Simply said, just because people can do something, it doesn’t mean that they should.
I asked my fellow Subject Matter Experts here at Moz what is on their minds in organic SEO for the new year, and their answers help shed a particular light by which we can better see the larger stadium in which all businesses are competing.
The big SEO topic in the tail end of 2022 has been AI content – both ChatGPT and before that Google’s Helpful Content update bringing this topic to the front of people’s minds. Said update now looks rather prescient, with a new wave of increasingly coherent bot-written content surely to follow. Expect this to be a major battleground for Google in 2023. As I am writing this in the first week of December 2022, there is already an update to Google’s “Helpful Content system” rolling out – and that brings me to the other big change we’ll see more of. Ranking system updates. This is likely more of a terminology change than a practice change from Google, but I’d still expect it to somewhat shake up how SEOs think about and contextualise these updates — in my opinion, a shake-up that is long overdue.
Lastly, a carry over from my predictions for 2022 — I predicted an increasingly volatile SERP feature landscape, and I think that prediction has aged well. But it still stands. Again, as I write this, Google has just rolled out continuous scroll desktop SERPs in the US, and numerous feature changes in the last few weeks. There is nothing sacred here, from Google’s perspective, and with increasing threat from dissimilar competitors like Apple or AI assistants, they may feel like slightly less gradual change is justified.”
Echoing Tom, because it’s so important that I’m forced to agree with Tom, expect a flood of low-quality, machine-generated content in 2023 and a corresponding pushback from Google. Whether this will be part of the Helpful Content system updates or something entirely new remains to be seen, but creating Machine Learning content that doesn’t look like ML content will likely (and sadly) become a new obsession of some corners of the SEO industry.
This trend may force Google to re-evaluate E-A-T and/or more clearly define how they measure Expertise, Authority, and Trust, in order to encourage positive best practices. Google is aggressively experimenting with product listings, including the large-format product “grid” that seems to blur the lines between free and paid product listings. As Google seeks to compete with Amazon and other product searches (including an increasing amount of purchases driven by social platforms like TikTok), expect these lines to blur even more. Some competitive product search results are going to be unrecognizable from a traditional, organic SEO perspective.
My riskiest prediction — Expect Google to re-evaluate Featured Snippets, especially given quality concerns, both around trustworthiness of content (including disinformation) and the impact of low-value ML content. We’ve already seen snippets being pulled from a chunk of competitive queries in 2022, and I suspect Google may substantially re-invent the Featured Snippet or set a higher bar on when and how often they’re displayed.”
In sum, Tom and Pete are expecting volatility in the SERPs, including SERP features like local packs, which Moz has been tracking a decrease in the visibility of for some months. Both SMEs are looking closely at the disruption of AI and how it may impact search and searchers.
Local SEOs may well be feeling like they’ve already experienced quite enough change in recent times with the loss of the dashboard for managing Google listings and an onslaught of bugs, but when I asked my peers to look ahead, many of them predict significant challenges yet to come for local businesses and their marketers.
“I would say that while a lot of levers are being pulled getting the Search Interface (NMX) off the ground, it was a change that was totally unnecessary and brought with it both bugs and an attitude of total apathy towards the multi user/agency dashboard.
The other big, hardly reported on changes were the move to AI first moderation of reviews AND images, introducing GPB behaviors that are perceived as totally illogical by the small business community.
If the intention of the NMX was to simplify and engage, why layer on totally obtuse moderation decisions for reviews and images while providing no clear guidance as to what was happening and how to deal with it?”
“What Google is doing in Local is officially anyone’s guess at this point.
Regardless of the level of internal resources devoted to Google Business Profiles as a product (which clearly fell off a cliff beginning in late 2021), the current NMX/skeleton dashboard version of GBP lacks a coherent vision and a poor (any?) understanding of user needs and pain points. Not to mention myriad functional bugs including 404 errors when trying to upload photos, inability to save store codes on newly-created locations, and inability to deny (or even confirm, in many cases!) user-suggested edits.
As usual, there seems to be no institutional knowledge of Google’s long history of internal failures and weak spots in its Local product or Maps data, or anyone with power making a strong case for the centrality of GBP in the marketing ecosystem — even for large multi-location brands which are spending millions of dollars annually on Ads.
It feels to me as if Google’s “strategy,” such as it is, is to simply ignore SMBs as a meaningful source of data for Maps and Universal results, and to force multi-location brands to work with a partner like Yext/Uberall/etc. for a real product interface. Given that Big Tech is cutting headcount and investment across the board, I can’t imagine the situation will change for the better in 2023.”
“I expect to continue to see pretty drastic changes for local for at least the next couple of years. I think local has been under the radar for Google for awhile and COVID has really brought Google’s shortcomings for local to light. Now they are correcting the experience for SMBs who may have been neglecting SEO until they depended on it during COVID and were overwhelmed by GBP management. I think we’re going to see Google testing a lot of changes for local in SERPs. Local mobile SERPs will be one of the most interesting places to watch next year.”
Meanwhile, Greg Sterling offers a candid theory on why some of the local changes may be taking place:
“Google recognizes local content and maps remain critical for its users, especially mobile users. But the company is disappointed by the number of SMBs engaging with GBP, and GMB before it. Hence the move from the app to the web. In many ways Google has been less successful monetizing small businesses than Facebook, which doesn’t have a consumer-facing local product. GBP isn’t the onramp to ads Google had hoped. I believe, internally, there are now reduced expectations and support for local on the B2B side. NMX comes out of this larger context.”
I find all of the above comments to be probable, realistic, and insightful, but I also want to be sure to mention that there isn’t a complete consensus on trends. At least one respected colleague, Ben Fisher, has a more comforting view that we may already have weathered the biggest changes:
“The big stuff is behind us for now I think. Mainly the name change and in-Search experience.
The in-Search experience was planned for a long time and Google in their infinite wisdom decided it was the best route to go based on data. I think that with the rollout of this new in-Search experience that new ‘bugs’ and aggressive ‘features’ will come to pass.
Next year I think we are going to see ongoing tweaks. I would predict that the review filtering will probably get worse as we have seen with reviews leaking on a daily basis. Also it took over three months for reinstatements to go back to a normal timeframe. Next year I think we can expect this to go haywire again. It feels like it happens yearly.
One thing I think is certain: Google looks to fix problems at scale and all but ignores the little guy, and in some cases can cause horrible consequences to non-guilty merchants. That being said, one other thing is constant, they will do their best to ‘fix’ the issue.”
Finally, Garrett Sussman’s take on the impact of MUM should not be missed:
“In 2022, Local SEO has felt the impact of Google’s MUM algorithm more than anyone. A local search on a mobile device is sliced and diced by various contextual query refinements:
• Places • ‘Find places through photos’ • Google Explore • Deals
They’re all showing up and influencing every single local result. It forces local business owners to improve their content on their own site, build out their listings on review sites, and earn mentions in local media.
You can’t only focus on your Google Business Profile. But when people do search for your business specifically, you need to provide as much information as possible, because people expect it:
• You need your office hours to be accurate • You need fresh and positive reviews • You need photos of your business
It’s never been more important for a local business owner to have a digital presence on Google.”
Taken altogether, there is a high level of dissatisfaction with Google’s handling of local as we throw the discus into 2023, and there is a definite sense that there will be bug and feature hurdles all along our lane. Our expert commentary depicts Google local search in a marked state of flux. I personally find it counterintuitive that Google is shortchanging local right now, given that local data is the biggest ace the search titan has up its sleeve in its contest with Amazon. Whatever their motives, It’s not great news for our industry, but it’s vital to be real about the present state of local so that we can cut our coat to suit our cloth. Even amid volatility, good strategy is absolutely still possible.
Harnessing the human power of local in 2023
Image credit: Memories of Days Gone By
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” ― Socrates
When I consider the level of concern currently being expressed in the SEO industry over the rise of disinformation that may ensue as a result of inventions like ChatGPT, the pitfalls of programmatic moderation of key local content like reviews and images, and the failure of Google to adequately support the millions of local brands they represent on their platform, I think we have to dig deep into human resources to counterbalance the shortcomings of machines. Here are my top three recommendations for a smart local business strategy for 2023.
1. Shortcut the path to a real human in every way you can
I see signs everywhere that people are at a tipping point of fatigue over being “handled” by robots. Multi-step phone trees and long hold times are truly wearing. Chat functions that never result in human contact feel cold and impersonal. Websites that hinder rather than assist customer journeys are no-win on both sides of transactions.
In 2023, achieve the least possible distance between customers and live customer service with the following methodologies:
69% of surveyed American consumers prefer talking to a live person by phone for customer support. The majority list their top pain points as being long hold times, disconnects, and having to start over again with each phone agent so that issues take too long to get resolved. If short staffing is causing long hold times at your business, implement call-back technology so that the customer can go about their life while waiting to hear from a live person, and be sure that every public-facing staff member is well-trained in your products, services and policies so that a customer has to talk to the fewest possible people in your organization to get answers to their questions.
46% of customers believe businesses use chatbots to prevent them from reaching a live person and 60% would rather wait for a live person than talk to a bot. However, if you are using chatbots as after-hours support, it can be a useful tool. Just be sure your interface clearly identifies that it is automated, covers FAQs so that answers are provided in a pinch, and then capture customer contact information so that a human engagement can begin as quickly as possible following the chat.
If you’re using livechat, know that over ½ of customers expect a response within minutes. Applications like this must be staffed just as you would staff your phones to avoid customers feeling ignored and abandoning the brand.
44.5% of customers aged 35-54 say that texting is their preferred method of communicating with businesses and the previously-cited Leadferno study found that about ⅓ of people expect a response within a day when they text a company. Given the difference in expected response times, texting may be a better option for brands with minimal staff, so that customers aren’t being lost to unfulfilled expectations.
Email remains a key channel for customer support, but one survey found that 62% of companies don’t respond to email-based customer service requests, 90% don’t send an email confirming that the question has been received, and just 20% of businesses are able to provide a complete answer on the first reply. These are startling statistics that speak to the need to staff your inbox so that customers are receiving prompt, well-informed emails to every inquiry.
Finally, one of the greatest challenges of the past few years has been short staffing for local businesses due to the ongoing pandemic. Wherever doors are open, customers still want to be greeted and assisted by well-trained staff, but the realities of a labor shortage, COVID, and Long COVID mean businesses and customers need to lean more heavily on additional, non-human resources such as the answering of FAQs on in-store and storefront signage, company websites, and local business listings. We’ll examine these points next.
2. Let good tools come to your rescue in tough times
Regardless of what AI fans may say, there is no replacement for the human relationships that are the basis of doing business locally. That being said, when external conditions cause staffing shortages, it’s time to consider the long history of humans’ ingenious use of tools to aid labor. Like the sea otter and the heron, we can select props to make it easier to achieve our goals, and in 2023, local business owners should ensure that customers are being served even when a staff member isn’t immediately available. Focus on these areas:
The New Merchant Experience that replaced the former Google Business Profile dashboard in 2022 was widely judged to be a usability fiasco, particularly for multi-location brands. Restore ease of management by using software like Moz Local to regain the quiet, dedicated workspace you need to manage your listing on Google and on the most prevalent local business listing platforms, all in one place.
Be sure the listings you’ve created are fully filled out with accurate information so that customers get fast answers to common questions about your location, contact info, hours, services, products, and policies. Add your products, take more photos this year, and set yourself up to begin filming aspects of your business. Google has finally started featuring local business videos and I would recommend filming 30 second videos in which a friendly person from your company answers your top FAQs.
96% of your customers read reviews and 60% of review writers expect a response from your business within 2-or-less days. Make this the year you envision reviews as a two-way conversation, charged with the knowledge that when your responses resolve complaints, 63% of reviewers will update their negative review and 62% will give your business a second chance. Make 2023 your most communicative year yet by studying The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior. But, do be careful how you are asking for reviews this year, given recent research from Mike Blumenthal on the startling causes of reviews being filtered out by Google.
Broaden your communications channels. Try an after-hours text hotline if you’ve never had one before. Experiment with video-based support, live chat, and callbacks. Make 2023 the year you emphatically decide whether channels like TikTok or Instagram are a good fit for your customers and brand. The easier it is for people to discover and reach your business, the better.
These scenarios aren’t just about fighting the tide and daring to be different – they’re about daring to be human and to understand what people care about, need, and love. The people behind ideas like these really took time to understand the realities of a society longing to fight Climate Change, needing accessible vision care, and wanting to have low spirits raised by doing something special for a cherished pet. Having a real face (and a real heart behind it) in an increasingly automated, impersonalized world could be the thing that sets your local business apart in 2023.
In some executives’ strange dreams, human value is measured in the mass consumption of products, and now, of AI-driven content. Local business owners know better, from lived experience. In this new year, embrace the narrative of your business being operated by real people who serve real neighbors in real ways, with personality and charm that can’t be replaced by bots. This won’t be an easy race, but it’s worth running, whatever the odds.
In wishing you success in the local business year ahead, I’d like to close with the words of Wilma Rudolph, who overcame infantile paralysis caused by polio and went on to become an Olympic champion: “Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.”
We published 156 posts on the Moz Blog this year, and as is tradition, it’s time to look back at the most popular ones! You’ll find blogs on new findings in social media search, tips for e-commerce SEO, trends in technical and local SEO, and so much more.
Have a safe and happy new year, Moz friends! See you in 2023.
*The top 25 written posts published between January 1 – December 26, 2022, in order by pageviews generated during that timeframe.
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Shopify is an increasingly popular platform for e-commerce sites, but it’s not fully SEO-friendly out of the box. What’s the best way to optimize your Shopify experience for SEO?
Your SEO strategy should be one of the primary considerations before you even start your website. Instead of fighting to make your website SEO-ready later on, start with this holistic SEO checklist for new websites and save yourself valuable time and resources.
In this article, Alex shows you how and why to use Google Chrome (or Chrome Canary) to view a website as Googlebot. Viewing a website as Googlebot means we can see discrepancies between what a person sees and what a search bot sees – useful for technical SEO and content audits.
Google’s featured snippets started as an experiment almost a decade ago. They have since become an integral part of Google’s SERPs, showing up for lots of queries. In fact, featured snippets are now considered organic position #1, so making them part of your SEO strategy is essential to build more traffic.
Google wants to employ machine learning and AI to alter the hours of operation on twenty million Google Business Profiles as part of their project of creating a “self-updating map”. Google has good reason for pursuing accuracy in their local index, but local business owners have even better reason to be on top of this announcement and proactively safeguard the validity of their own data.
Last year was an incredible year for core updates, and for how SEOs improve page quality for users. Moving forward, we can expect to see increased diversification of SERPs — led by developments in Google’s algorithms — and new features from tools like Google Lens. These developments will change how we manage our SEO now and in the future.
User behavior on TikTok has been evolving as its popularity grows. We’ve seen the app go from dancing teenagers to influencing shopping behavior across the world. Now, the next step for TikTok seems to be turning into the next big search engine. What does it mean for SEOs?
How can SEOs possibly prove to Google, amid all the noise and competition and other experts out there, that their clients deserve a place on Page 1? To find out, Molly compared the top results on hundreds of SERPs to determine what actually proves E-A-T.
Charts and infographics can be pretty, but if they aren’t also properly breaking down data in a way that makes an impact on the audience, they are likely not worth the time and effort. Below, we discuss how storytelling ties into data visualization, and what tools can help you bring more data into your content.
Google search result pages are becoming more diverse and even interactive, which makes any click-through study out there much less reliable, because no two sets of search results are ever the same. So how much control do writers and content creators have over how their content is represented in search? As it turns out, quite a bit!
In this blog, Daniel shows you why you should do a keyword research working session with your clients to tap into their expert industry knowledge, and how these sessions helped his team deliver organic traffic growth for one of their new clients with low Domain Authority.
When there is a search query on Google, Google Ads runs a quick auction to determine which ads will show for that search query, and what the ad positions should be. This ad auction is repeated every time an ad is eligible to appear for a search term, and is an integral part of the SERP landscape. To help understand it, Tanuja covers the what, how, and why behind the Google Ads auction.
Both SEO and PPC are used for a common goal — search engine marketing (SEM) — and neither would survive without targeted keywords. Since both strategies have user intent and search demand in mind, you can use them to achieve both short-term and long-term business goals. When approached correctly, using SEO and PPC together can unlock significant opportunities for your brand, so let’s dig in!
Lydia shares the content update process she an her team at Tao Digital Marketing used to generate great results for a client in the financial services niche.
Unless you work for an agency or want to make a lifelong career out of SEO (an excellent choice), most folks don’t learn SEO for the sake of learning SEO, but want the same quick wins that professional SEOs look for. That’s why we created the Quick Start Guide to SEO, which includes seven days of actions to check the SEO health of your site while putting you on the path of sustained improvement. If you want something even more compact, we also created the SEO Quick Start Guide Cheat Sheet.
After working with a news organization and testing the learnings from that work on other sites, Chris and his team started to see the immense power that freshness updates could produce in SEO. In this post, he explains why the entire SEO community has underrated the concept of “freshness”, and how to start optimizing for it.
When it comes to SEO, especially technical SEO, we often talk about the importance of hard skills. And while there’s no doubt that vlookup and regex can be your best friends, there are some essential soft skills to learn that will help you excel in your role and progress in your career.
In this post, Tom expands on one of the points from his 2022 MozCon talk: that a lot of time spent on keyword research is wasted. He’ll go over the three main ways SEOs turn what should be an involved piece of strategic thinking into an overly time-consuming routine, along with what to focus on instead.
Google Business Profile is both a free tool and a suite of interfaces that encompasses a dashboard, in-SERP editing, local business profiles, and a volunteer-driven support forum with this branding. Google Business Profiles and the associated Google Maps make up the core of Google’s free local search marketing options for eligible local businesses. In this guide, we’re doing foundational learning! Share this simple, comprehensive article with incoming clients and team members to get off on the right foot with this important local business digital asset.
We had an amazing year of Whiteboard Friday episodes, ranging in topics from link building to content engines to even, basketball?
In case you missed them, here are the top 10 episodes from the year!
1. Estimating Search Opportunity with Robin Lord
Estimating the opportunities within your various SEO efforts is an important component of your analytics, not only to help determine where to focus your energy, but also to prove the potential value of your work to others. In this episode, Robin walks you through a good strategy for this all-important estimative work.
2. Advanced On-Page SEO Optimizations with Chris Long
Typically, when SEOs think about on-page optimizations, they’re thinking about core places to include their target keywords within their content. But how can you take your on-page optimizations to the next level and get beyond some of those basic tactics? In this Whiteboard Friday, Chris Long shows you how.
3. Moneyball is the Future of SEO with Will Critchlow
In our first episode of 2022, Will Critchlow shows you how, much like the NBA, SEO is undergoing an analytic revolution — and how you can make the most of it.
4. Top 4 Things to Know About GA4 with Dana DiTomaso
Dana brings you some details on the exciting new world of Google Analytics 4. Watch and learn how to talk about it when clients and coworkers are intimidated by the move.
5. A Content Engine that Drives Revenue with Ross Simmonds
In this episode, content marketing expert Ross Simmonds walks you through his method for creating a content marketing engine that will ultimately make you money, rooted in four simple steps: research, creation, distribution, and optimization.
6. How to Find Your Real SEO Competitors with Lidia Infante
Competitive research and analysis is a critical component of your SEO strategy. You may have an idea of who your business competitors are, but your real SEO competitors are the ones who target the same keywords, speak to the same audience, and solve for the same consumer needs. In this Whiteboard Friday, Lidia Infante walks you through two approaches to find out who those competitors are.
7. How to Measure Content Engagement with Dana DiTomaso
When it comes to content engagement, you can (and should) be measuring more than just page views. Analytics expert Dana DiTomaso summarizes her MozCon 2022 presentation by sharing the four things you should focus on to make sure your metrics are giving you the best picture of your content’s quality.
8. Metrics for Better Keyword Research with Tom Capper
Many SEOs think of keyword research as a very basic part of SEO, which can actually be a problem. In this episode, Tom explains some of the common mistakes SEOs make when doing keyword research that are easy to fix, many of which come from metrics like search volume, click-through rate, and difficulty.
9. Visual Search Optimization with Crystal Carter
In this episode, Crystal Carter talks you through the different optimizations that you can make for visual search, and the kinds of results that you might see for visual search content.
10. The Authoritative Content Funnel with Amanda Milligan
Finishing the top 10 list, digital marketing expert Amanda Milligan walks you through the three parts that make up a content funnel for building authority, as well as the types of content that fit into each one.
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