Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you so much, Miriam, this is very helpful!

Thanks Nick, good word: that valuable content and positive site-wide metrics should always benefit the site and brand in the long run.

Hey friends!

I work for a local digital marketing agency in Greenville, SC – serving primarily local small businesses. Over the past six months, we've increased our monthly organic traffic by almost 100%. The majority of this traffic is coming to blogs we've written over the past year on industry topics and trends. I love seeing our traffic increase, but it hasn't necessarily translated to more quality leads. Conversion numbers have largely remained the same. I think one reason is that a lot of this traffic isn't local.

Here's my question: as a local business, how valuable is content that ranks well and drives organic traffic, when the traffic isn't local, and from users we would never work with?

A lot of this content has earned links and grown our authority, so I suppose we've seen benefit, but I'm struggling to convince myself that it's really that valuable. I know local content is key, but it feels like what we want to educate on isn't searched locally.

Would love to hear your thoughts! Thanks!

Very helpful, I've never explored the lexical similarity within keyword suggestions.

Also – very much enjoyed your recent Whiteboard Friday on profiting as an agency.

Thanks Russ!

Hey friends,

I'm looking for a little keyword research direction here, specifically for keywords and phrases with low search volume. I'm just going to give a recent example:

I just finished a piece of content on customer experience. I began the process with some keyword research. Based on Moz's keyword explorer, "customer experience" has a monthly volume of 2.9k-4.3k. Sweet. So I move onto related queries and longer tail phrases to narrow my content approach. But just about any relevant phrase shows either a volume of 0-10 or 11-50 and very similar difficulty metrics, making it tough to choose a direction.

So "what is customer experience" shows a monthly volume of 0-10. SEM Rush reports ~350 searches a month. I understand SEM Rush uses broader match, but I guess what I'm asking is: how do I perform keyword research with such minuscule volumes and such little data to differentiate?

I've looked at Russ Jones' answer to a similar question here on how Keyword Explorer works: https://moz.com/community/q/what-is-a-good-keyword-volume-score ... but I still don't have a ton of clarity.

Any advice would be awesome!

In general, from what I know, the WordPress codex itself is relatively SEO friendly.

When we're talking about which theme to go with – it's true a custom built theme is probably going to be less bloated and provide faster site speed.

I would encourage you to audit (or have someone else audit) your competition. If you have similar content, similar link profiles, similar brand strength, etc... then site speed could be a factor that makes a difference – especially when Google issues a page speed update. However, if they have you beat on other fronts, I would put more effort into link building or content generation before worrying about which theme to go with. Does that make sense?

It depends on many factors, but I would estimate building a custom theme will be at least 2X the work of utilizing a theme. And yes, the maintenance of custom themes and custom plugins is a good bit more involved than simply updating pre-built themes and plugins.

I think Google is constantly testing for user intent: analyzing things like dwell time, bounce rate, and effectiveness of the results give users. For searches with higher search volumes, I would think some of the top players are more cemented, due to thousands of instances where a searcher landed on their result and seemingly had their query answered.

Whereas with a search query that has much lower search volume, the top results are probably less cemented, due to being less proven in the eyes of Google's algorithm. Therefore, it may not take as much time to prove that your result better answers the query.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is the case for other countries as well.

This is entirely assumption, I would love to hear others' thoughts.

Both backlinks and internal links are important for any kind of SEO, but in slightly different ways.

Internal links assist both users and search engines in navigating and crawling through your site.

Backlinks signal to Google that your site is credible and authoritative.

If you were to ask which is more important?

Say you have a service page, and are interested in it ranking better... Linking to it internally, say from your blog, with relevant anchor text will be helpful. But I think most would agree an outside backlink (a quality link earned ethically) linking to your service page would be much more valuable.

Hope that's helpful.

No need at all to apologize!

What you describe will help you determine how your site is currently performing, but may or may not help you determine the best keywords to target.

If you're just interested in learning how you currently rank for some keywords, you can utilize the Keyword Explorer, search by "root domain," enter your domain, and see how you're doing. Another approach, like you mentioned, is to add keywords within your campaign and begin tracking for them. Again, this will really only show you how your site is currently performing.

A really simple approach to determining the best keywords to target is what most people refer to as keyword research:

• Think through what it is that you do: look at your website pages, products, services, assets, etc and try to determine the best keywords, key phrases, and topics to target.
• Use Moz's Keyword Explorer, or a similar tool, to identify the keywords and key phrases with the most potential.
• A simple approach is to jot down a handful of words or phrases you think your audience might use to search for the given piece of content. Then, run each through Moz's keyword explorer, and do your best to find the words and phrases with high search volume, low difficulty, and highest organic CTR. Or utilize the "Priority" metric which more or less sums the others up.

In regards to your location, you may not be able to find super-accurate search data for your specific town or city, but you should be able to get a feel for searcher behavior by looking at the global numbers. You can use tools like Google Trends to hone in on your state and region if you'd like.

Moz has a "Beginner's Guide to SEO" that I would recommend. Though slightly outdated and currently being rewritten, there's a chapter on keyword research that has some great insight: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

Was that helpful?

Thanks for this, Miriam! I love that take on thinking big.

Hello Moz World!

My agency has never had a great strategy for reputation management, but have begun acquiring some Google reviews. We know it's best practice to respond – but I've never considered whether I should respond as an individual or with our company's GMB? The owner of our GMB is "Engenius" – a general admin account for our agency. I'm also a user on the account, as the "owner," but I'm technically not the owner of our company.

Should the owner be added as a user and respond directly? Or is it okay to respond as "Engenius" (the brand)? Or can I respond as the "owner," though I'm not technically?

I know ultimately it's probably not a huge deal, but any thoughts would be awesome! Thanks!

Hi Ruben,

So within your GMB profile, in your "Photos" tab, you should have "Cover," "Profile," and "Logo" photo options. Do you have these three set in your profile?

If so, I think my next question would be: are you sure you have the correct profile claimed, and might there be a duplicate profile for your business?

There is great benefit to utilizing internal links well in SEO. They establish site architecture and spread link equity across your site – as well as helping users navigate your site and find useful and relevant information.

Here's a good post from Moz: https://moz.com/blog/should-seos-care-about-internal-links-whiteboard-friday

Hope it's helpful!

I don't know if it's a good idea to go after all backlinks for your top competitors. I would recommend establishing for yourself some criteria (unless you have tons of time on your hands) – like I mentioned, maybe something along the lines of DA > 30. And then I would go after the lowest hanging fruit first. Having said that, it usually seems the be the case that the hardest links to earn are the most valuable ones.

As for the skyscraper technique, I don't know that current ranking for a given keyword should matter as much as other factors. Here is a really good Whiteboard Friday from Rand where he discusses why your link prospects don't always necessarily have to rank great: https://moz.com/blog/links-from-low-ranking-domains

While you have to have a physical address to create a listing, I do think it's possible to hide your address on Google My Business.

While editing Info > Address:

• Select 'Yes' to the prompt: I deliver goods and services to my customers at their location.
• Once you've done that, you will see a checkbox option for: I also serve customers at my business address. (Your address will be hidden from the public if this box isn't checked.) I believe if that is checked, your physical address will be hidden.

Additionally, I've found this article from Phil Rozek very helpful in identifying other local directories that allow you to hide your physical address, and help increase your local signals: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/22/private-local-citations-where-can-you-list-your-business-but-hide-your-address/

I hope that helps!

That's awesome! You're right, if you were utilizing a strict filtering criteria, you would have missed out!

I do typically filter backlink opportunities, but put a little more weight on domain authority than page authority. So for my agency personally, I'm usually looking for DA > 30, and usually don't place too much emphasis on PA. For instance, if I have an opportunity with a site that has a DA of 50, but the page I'm looking at only has a PA of 5, I would still very much be interested.

Having said that, I'm no link building expert, and I do know page authority is a factor. But at the end of the day, I think you have to consider what your link profile currently looks like, and what the link profiles of your competitors look like.

Hope that's helpful! And would love others' input on the importance of page authority.

I think the best practice is to first ask yourself: Could this page be valuable / helpful to users?

If yes, I think it's worth optimizing it: changing the title tag, meta description, and adding some copy specific to that tag. This should solve your duplicate content issue, and make the page more likely to appear in search results.

If no, I agree with EspresSEO above, it would probably make the most sense to no-index these pages.

I also saw a drop in many of my client's DA with the most recent indexing, but I would agree with Eli – I work with small businesses, and so few of their links are of high quality, meaning it's likely Moz's index will be leaving them out.

Like you said, you're going to want to redirect all http versions to https. And then redirect all www. to non-www – which you can usually accomplish by setting your non-www as the primary domain.

Depending on where your site is hosted / domains are registered, there will be a few different ways you might go about this. My agency uses WPEngine to host all of our sites, and they make it super easy. Regardless where my site is hosted / who my registrar is, I've always had a lot of luck chatting with their support team.

For more specific redirects, we utilize the Redirection plugin.

Is that helpful at all?

Here are my two favorite guides:

From Moz: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building

From Backlinko: https://backlinko.com/link-building

I definitely understand.

My agency works with premium themes / child themes and find that while many are very clunky and bloated, we don't notice any issues with the code not being clean enough. When using pre-built WordPress themes, we find it's important to utilize canonical tags when necessary, always check on page speed, and to noindex unnecessary pages. We also use Yoast SEO plugin, which will cover some themes' faults.

Having said that, I'm not a developer, but I'm sure there are themes out there with invalid or unfriendly code.

Yoast has a good post on choosing WP themes: https://yoast.com/perfect-wordpress-theme/

It's really hard to give a general price estimate for a custom theme v.s. using a WordPress theme and utilizing child themes.

I would say you can expect the custom theme to be at least double the cost, but again, there are countless factors to consider. You will most likely be looking at more maintenance with the custom theme, but it will largely depend on how your developer codes, how many plugins they utilize, whether they build custom plugins, etc...

Here are two (again very general) pricing guides that might be somewhat helpful:

• https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/resources/a-general-pricing-guide-for-wordpress-websites
• http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-much-does-a-custom-wordpress-theme-cost/

In general, I would say you should stick to one topic per heading, and utilize sub-headings for sub-topics.

For instance, a page title of "animals" might be an H1 heading. Beneath that H1, you might speak to different animal classes like "mammals" and "reptiles" under H2 headings. And beneath those H3 headings, you could talk about specific animals under H4 headings.

Having said that, based on quotes and tweets and Q&A sessions with Google staff and other experts that have floated around over the years, I wouldn't place too much weight on how you structure your headings, just as long as you're making your content as easy as possible for users to consume.

Here are some helpful articles:

• https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/headers/
• https://yoast.com/seo-basics-how-to-use-headings-on-your-site/

That makes a lot of sense if you have multiple photos for a single item – didn't consider that.

I've never encountered a request like this, and I've never heard that this could be considered a best practice.

I think you're right in saying the image size isn't necessarily helpful from an accessibility standpoint. And if it's not serving to make a web page more accessible, it's probably not necessary. I'd be interested to know your client's reasoning for the request.

I think there is a very slight different between Google's "People Also Search for" and "Related Searches" features.

It's my understanding that "Related Searches" is mostly fueled by current top searches and trending searches. Which may explain why a search query you're seeing doesn't yet have a very high search volume.

On the other hand, "People Also Search for" feature is powered by Google's Knowledge Graph.

I hope that's helpful!

Great question – I've noticed for Whiteboard Fridays that Moz will use Wistia to embed a video in their post, and then post a video to Youtube, like you are suggesting. I would bet Moz has put a lot of thought into their strategy for video.

Here's a post from a few years ago that should be helpful – not sure if it's the post you're referring to: https://moz.com/blog/video-seo-post-rich-snippets

Here's a good infographic from Marcus Miller on Search Engine Land: https://searchengineland.com/perfect-local-seo-landing-page-infographic-251604

And some more good information from SEMRush: https://www.semrush.com/blog/local-seo-for-multiple-locations-everything-you-need-to-know/

And of course, a solid Whiteboard Friday from Rand on the subject: https://moz.com/blog/scaling-geo-targeted-local-landing-pages-that-really-rank-and-convert-whiteboard-friday

Hello!

I imagine someone from the Moz product team will jump in here and give you the best answer soon.

My understanding is that the first from your team to set up the account will more than likely be the "Account Owner."

And your subscription will depend on whether you're paying monthly or yearly.

Hello!

It's important to note that Google does its best to give users exactly what they're searching for, and is aware of searchers location (for the most part). So a search for the query "tipi camping" from the lake district – if Google sees the search as a locally intended search – the searcher will more than likely see local results, like yourself.

So for starters, I would ask how you've seen Google treat those keyword searches – when you search for the query "tipi camping" from the lake district, do you see local results, or more general knowledge and national results?

Within your Moz campaign, I would make sure you're tracking for both "tipi camping lake district" nationally, and also "tipi camping" locally for your service area. If you're optimized well locally, and Google interprets the keywords you're seeking to optimize for (like "tipi camping") as a search with local intent, you most definitely have a shot at beating out those bigger brands.

So I would say not to worry too much about that search volume or the national competition for said keywords, but to put more focus on local optimization, citations, a stellar Google My Business profile, etc...

Is that helpful at all? Make sense?

Hmm, that's a legitimate point.

I haven't read anything on the importance or limit on # of links recently, but this Moz post from awhile back says you should usually aim to keep it below 100. It also has some good insight behind the reason that's the recommendation in regards to page rank, and creating a hierarchical structure that makes sense.

I'm interested to see if anyone else has any thoughts!

We just did this for many clients as well:

In general, for starters, I would say make sure you're forcing all traffic to https://

In Google Analytics: View Level > View Settings > Change the URL to https://

In Webmaster Tools (Search Console): In my opinion, I would create a property set for the client, and within it add your current http:// property as well as creating a new property for the https:// URL.

If you use other tools, I would just make sure you're linked with / tracking the https:// version of the site.

Hope that's helpful!

Hello!

In an ideal world, I would recommend looking at your analytics or interviewing customers to see how they interact with your site. Do they already know the exact product they're looking for? Or are they less familiar with the industry and in need of details and information on the over-arching category?

I personally like the idea of having a kind-of landing page for the product category – Solar Window Film – with some good quality content that answers frequently asked questions on the subject. From there, link to the individual products. This will help you rank for the more broad search term, while also allowing you to rank for the individual product.

As for whether or not to also display these as sub-nav items in your menu, I think you could do that as well if you like. To cater to the user who is already familiar and knows what they're looking for.

Hope that helps!

Hello!

To start, I love your flight animation on your homepage!

I'm sorry, but just to clarify: you were ranking very well for some keywords (results showing your site on page 1 or 2), but after just a short period of time, you are no longer ranking at all?

I will say, the only thing I've noticed on your website, without too much information, is that you have (from what I can tell) a very low domain authority. So I would assume you have very few links to your site, if any. Moz's Open Site Explorer doesn't show any backlinks. This is where I would start, to establish some credibility and authority.

If you can give any more information, I'd be happy to help you process further.

When you say "connected," you mean the blog lives ON your company site. For instance: your-site.com/blog

I would agree with ILNA and say, without any more information to go off of, it is more than likely worth it to clean up and continue to keep updated with quality and relevant content.

You once were able to "demote" certain pages from being listed in Google's sitelinks, but Search Console has since removed this feature. Google's algorithm does its best to cater your sitelinks to the searcher's intent. Check out their update here for some more insight.

I would first ask if you are ranking #1 for your brand name. If not, that's where I would start.

If you are, the next question I'd ask is have you submitted a sitemap to Search Console?

If you have submitted a sitemap, the next step would be to make sure your navigation and content structure is obvious, clear, and well-organized. I would also work to internally (and externally) link to the pages you'd most like to see in your sitelinks. Google will more than likely take this as a signal to know which of your pages are the most important. I'm sure there are many other factors that go into which sitelinks display, but those are the few that you have the most control over, in my opinion.

Hope this helps!

Man, that's tough. Just in general, I would say it's really tough to (ethically) guarantee page 1 results within 6 weeks - if at all.

I might recommend having a conversation with your client where you ask if they are aware of the kinds of tactics / activities these other agencies will be performing for them. Lay out your plan, and be up front about what kinds of results they can expect with a potential timeline. Encourage your client to ask the other agencies the same. In my personal opinion, if these other agencies might be doing unethical work, and your client is okay with that, that client may not be the best fit for you.

I'd be interested to hear what thoughts others have on client situations like this.

Right, I would go easy on your anchor text focus / continuing to add self-submitted links to your profile.

Like Igor said, I would recommend going after some natural links, using simple (but natural) link building strategies like pushing the page out on social media and sharing it with sites who write on similar topics. Perhaps searching the web with something like Fresh Web Explorer for opportunities to share your page with sites focused on a similar topic. You could also using something like Screaming Frog to identify broken links which were formerly pointing to a similar piece of content.

Lots of ways to go about link building, none are very easy, but I wouldn't recommend continuing to add low quality links to your backlink profile - even if they have optimal anchors.

At the moment, to my knowledge, Search Console does not necessarily show any local data.

However, like you mentioned, Google My Business has added some awesome data and insights over the past year. My agency has been loving the recent updates that show how many times your listing has appeared, how many users have asked for directions, how many users have called, and more!

I agree with Charles-Oliver, I would definitely document where these pages currently rank, and then assess after making your changes.

As long as you're not removing the keyword / key phrase you're ranking for from the title, or dramatically changing the intent, you probably don't have anything to worry about!

It's my understanding that simply having them in the same body copy, and perhaps in some headings as well, will suffice.

Moz Bar has a Keyword Difficulty tool that generates right on your SERP - if you don't have Moz Bar downloaded, I would highly recommend!

Hey David,

I apologize, help me understand. Your problem is that your new website's homepage is not at the root  (newdomain.co.uk) – and redirecting all URLs at the top level will not work because of this?

Hello!

I think what you're referring to is "semantic search," regarding searcher intent and closely related keywords.

Here is a fantastic Whiteboard Friday from Moz on the subject: https://moz.com/blog/related-topics-in-seo-whiteboard-friday

I would say the goal in any content writing is to provide quality content that thoroughly answers your users questions. Google's related searches and "People Also Ask" features are a great way to find out what kinds of questions your audience has regarding a given subject - like online spreadsheets.

All in all, I would say the answer to your question is yes: using keywords that Google considers closely related to your targeted keyword can make your post more helpful and thorough to users, thus more than likely increasing your chances of ranking highly.

Touching your bonus question:

GA will not tell you who your competitors are, however they did roll out a feature somewhat recently that allows you to see how you're doing in comparison to businesses in the same industry as you. You can find this:

Audience > Benchmarking > Channels

Select your industry vertical, region, and average number of daily sessions to find out how you stack up to what probably amounts to your competition.

Hope that's helpful!

I've personally found (legit) industry specific and city specific (for local businesses) directories to be very helpful.

I utilize these search commands pretty often:

• “industry” inurl:directory
• “industry” intitle:directory
• “city” inurl:directory
• “city” inurl:businesses
• “city” intitle:directory

Hope this helps!

Yeah I would highly recommend the Keyword Suggestions within Moz's Keyword Explorer.

Utilizing "People Also Ask" feature on a Google SERP can also be helpful for identifying semantic keywords.

Also, not entirely related, but found this recent twitter thread from Rand interesting on topical keywords / LSI: https://twitter.com/randfish/status/947959624858079232

I agree that voice search will only continue to grow and grow in 2018.

The results that are read aloud as answers are primarily featured snippets. So when you ask how to optimize for voice search, what you're really asking is how to optimize for featured snippets. A few optimization tips I've come across:

• Utilize a Q&A format: ask questions in your headings, and then include an explicit answer in the following paragraph.
• Use conversational language: seek to optimize for long tail conversational questions
• Consider frequently asked questions: by your customers, and other searchers (check out the "People Also Asked" section of the SERP when applicable)

Here's a post that answers your question as well.

Hope this is helpful!

Agreed.

I don't have any data to prove it's usefulness, but there's something really nice and satisfying about a solid, short, and effective meta description.

My agency just launched a new website and in the process updated many of our meta descriptions. Though in optimizing, we realized some really just didn't need to be any longer than 160ish characters.

However, for other pages, such as our services pages, the additional characters gave us a chance to introduce the page, detail what the user can find, and sort of "preview" the call to action.

We've already seen a little increase in CTR for some of our services pages.

Best of luck!