Now, whether that phrase takes you back to a simpler (maybe? I don’t know, I was born in the 80s) time of gold panning, Mark Twain, and metallurgical assay — or just makes you want some Velveeta shells and liquid gold (I also might be hungry) — the point is, there is a lot you can learn from analyzing search results.
Search engine results pages (SERPs) are the mountains we’re trying to climb as SEOs to reach the peak (number one position). But these mountains aren’t just for climbing — there are numerous “nuggets” of information to be mined from the SERPs that can help us on our journey to the mountaintop.
Earning page one rankings is difficult — to build optimized pages that can rank, you need comprehensive SEO strategy that includes:
Content audits
Keyword research
Competitive analysis
Technical SEO audits
Projections and forecasting
Niche and audience research
Content ideation and creation
Knowledge and an understanding of your (or your client’s) website’s history
And more.
A ton of work and research goes into successful SEO.
Fortunately, much of this information can be gleaned from the SERPs you’re targeting, that will in turn inform your strategy and help you make better decisions.
The three main areas of research that SERP analysis can benefit are:
Keyword research
Content creation
And competitive analysis.
So, get your pickaxe handy (or maybe just a notebook?) because we’re going to learn how to mine the SERPs for SEO gold!
Finding keyword research nuggets
Any sound SEO strategy is built on sound keyword research. Without keyword research, you’re just blindly creating pages and hoping Google ranks them. While we don’t fully understand or know every signal in Google’s search algorithm — I’m pretty confident your “hopes” aren’t one of them — you need keyword research to understand the opportunities as they exist.
And you can find some big nuggets of information right in the search results!
First off, SERP analysis will help you understand the intent (or at least the perceived intent by Google) behind your target keywords or phrases. Do you see product pages or informational content? Are there comparison or listicle type pages? Is there a variety of pages serving multiple potential intents? For example:
Examining these pages will tell you which page — either on your site or yet to be created — would be a good fit. For example, if the results are long-form guides, you’re not going to be able to make your product page rank there (unless of course the SERP serves multiple intents, including transactional). You should analyze search intent before you start optimizing for keywords, and there’s no better resource for gauging searcher intent than the search results themselves.
You can also learn a lot about the potential traffic you could receive from ranking in a given SERP by reviewing its makeup and the potential for clicks.
Of course, we all want to rank in position number one (and sometimes, position zero) as conventional wisdom points to this being our best chance to earn that valuable click-through. And, a recent study by SISTRIX confirmed as much, reporting that position one has an average click-through rate (CTR) of 28.5% — which is fairly larger than positions two (15.7%) and three (11%).
But the most interesting statistics within the study were regarding how SERP layout can impact CTR.
Some highlights from the study include:
SERPs that include sitelinks have a 12.7% increase in CTR, above average.
Position one in a SERP with a featured snippet has a 5.2% lower CTR than average.
Position one in SERPs that feature a knowledge panel see an 11.8% dip in CTR, below average.
SERPs with Google Shopping ads have the worst CTR: 14.8% below average.
SISTRIX found that overall, the more SERP elements present, the lower the CTR for the top organic position.
This is valuable information to discover during keyword research, particularly if you’re searching for opportunities that might bring organic traffic relatively quickly. For these opportunities, you’ll want to research less competitive keywords and phrases, as the SISTRIX report suggests that these long-tail terms have a larger proportion of “purely organic SERPs (e.g. ten blue links).
To see this in action, let’s compare two SERPs: “gold panning equipment” and “can I use a sluice box in California?”.
Here is the top of the SERP for “gold panning equipment”:
And here is the top of the SERP for “can I use a sluice box in California?”:
Based on what we know now, we can quickly assess that our potential CTR for “can I use a sluice box in California?” will be higher. Although featured snippets lower CTR for other results, there is the possibility to rank in the snippet, and the “gold panning equipment” SERP features shopping ads which have the most negative impact (-14.8%) on CTR.
Of course, CTR isn’t the only determining factor in how much traffic you’d potentially receive from ranking, as search volume also plays a role. Our example “can I use a sluice box in California?” has little to no search volume, so while the opportunity for click-throughs is high, there aren’t many searching this term and ranking wouldn’t bring much organic traffic — but if you’re a business that sells sluice boxes in California, this is absolutely a SERP where you should rank.
Keyword research sets the stage for any SEO campaign, and by mining existing SERPs, you can gain information that will guide the execution of your research.
Mining content creation nuggets
Of course, keyword research is only useful if you leverage it to create the right content. Fortunately, we can find big, glittering nuggets of content creation gold in the SERPs, too!
One the main bits of information from examining SERPs is which types of content are ranking — and since you want to rank there, too, this information is useful for your own page creation.
For example, if the SERP has a featured snippet, you know that Google wants to answer the query in a quick, succinct manner for searchers — do this on your page. Video results appearing on the SERP? You should probably include a video on your page if you want to rank there too. Image carousel at the top? Consider what images might be associated with your page and how they would be displayed.
You can also review the ranking pages to gain insight into what formats are performing well in that SERP. Are the ranking pages mostly guides? Comparison posts? FAQs or forums? News articles or interviews? Infographics? If you can identify a trend in format, you’ve already got a good idea of how you should structure (or re-structure) your page.
Some SERPs may serve multiple intents and display a mixture of the above types of pages. In these instances, consider which intent you want your page to serve and focus on the ranking page that serves that intent to glean content creation ideas.
Furthermore, you can leverage the SERP for topic ideation — starting with the People Also Ask (PAA) box. You should already have your primary topic (the main keyword you’re targeting), but the PAA can provide insight into related topics.
Here’s an example of a SERP for “modern gold mining techniques”:
Right there in the PAA box, I’ve got three solid ideas for sub-topics or sections of my page on “Modern Gold Mining”. These PAA boxes expand, too, and provide more potential sub-topics.
While thorough keyword research should uncover most long-tail keywords and phrases related to your target keyword, reviewing the People Also Ask box will ensure you haven’t missed anything.
Of course, understanding what types of formats, structures, topics, etc. perform well in a given SERP only gets you part of the way there. You still need to create something that is better than the pages currently ranking. And this brings us to the third type of wisdom nuggets you can mine from the SERPs — competitive analysis gold.
Extracting competitive analysis nuggets
With an understanding of the keywords and content types associated with your target SERP, you’re well on your way to staking your claim on the first page. Now it’s time to analyze the competition.
A quick glance at the SERP will quickly give you an idea of competition level and potential keyword difficulty. Look at the domains you see — are there recognizable brands? As a small or new e-commerce site, you can quickly toss out any keywords that have SERPs littered with pages from Amazon, eBay, and Wal-Mart. Conversely, if you see your direct competitors ranking and no large brands, you’ve likely found a good keyword set to target. Of course, you may come across SERPs that have major brands ranking along with your competitor — if your competitor is ranking there, it means you have a shot, too!
But this is just the surface SERP silt (say that five times fast). You need to mine a bit deeper to reach the big, golden competitive nuggets.
The next step is to click through to the pages and analyze them based on a variety of factors, including (in no particular order):
If the page is lacking in any, many, or all these areas, there is a strong opportunity your page can become the better result, and rank.
You should also review how many backlinks ranking pages have, to get an idea for the range of links you need to reach to be competitive. In addition, review the number of referring domains for each ranking domain — while you’re competing on a page-to-page level in the SERP, there’s no doubt that pages on more authoritative domains will benefit from that authority.
However, if you find a page that’s ranking from a relatively unknown or new site, and it has a substantial amount of backlinks, that’s likely why it’s ranking, and earning a similar amount of links will give your page a good chance to rank as well.
Lastly, take the time to dive into your competitor’s ranking pages (if they’re there). Examine their messaging and study how they’re talking to your shared audience to identify areas where your copy is suboptimal or completely missing the mark. Remember, these pages are ranking on page one, so they must be resonating in some way.
Conclusion
Successful SEO requires thorough research and analysis from a variety of sources. However, much of what you need can be found in the very SERPs for which you’re trying to rank. After all, you need to understand why the pages that rank are performing if you want your pages to appear there, too.
These SERPs are full of helpful takeaways in terms of:
Keyword research and analysis
Content ideation and strategy
And competitive analysis and review.
These golden nuggets are just there for the takin’ and you don’t need any tools other than Google and your analytical mind — well, and your metaphorical pickaxe.
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When you publish new content, you want users to find it ranking in search results as fast as possible. Fortunately, there are a number of tips and tricks in the SEO toolbox to help you accomplish this goal. Sit back, turn up your volume, and let Cyrus Shepard show you exactly how in this popular and informative episode of Whiteboard Friday.
[Note: #3 isn't covered in the video, but we've included in the post below. Enjoy!]
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard, back in front of the whiteboard. So excited to be here today. We're talking about ten tips to index and rank new content faster.
You publish some new content on your blog, on your website, and you sit around and you wait. You wait for it to be in Google's index. You wait for it to rank. It's a frustrating process that can take weeks or months to see those rankings increase. There are a few simple things we can do to help nudge Google along, to help them index it and rank it faster. Some very basic things and some more advanced things too. We're going to dive right in.
Indexing
1. URL Inspection / Fetch & Render
So basically, indexing content is not that hard in Google. Google provides us with a number of tools. The simplest and fastest is probably the URL Inspection tool. It's in the new Search Console, previously Fetch and Render. As of this filming, both tools still exist. They are depreciating Fetch and Render. The new URL Inspection tool allows you to submit a URL and tell Google to crawl it. When you do that, they put it in their priority crawl queue. That just simply means Google has a list of URLs to crawl. It goes into the priority, and it's going to get crawled faster and indexed faster.
2. Sitemaps!
Another common technique is simply using sitemaps. If you're not using sitemaps, it's one of the easiest, quickest ways to get your URLs indexed. When you have them in your sitemap, you want to let Google know that they're actually there. There's a number of different techniques that can actually optimize this process a little bit more.
The first and the most basic one that everybody talks about is simply putting it in your robots.txt file. In your robots.txt, you have a list of directives, and at the end of your robots.txt, you simply say sitemap and you tell Google where your sitemaps are. You can do that for sitemap index files. You can list multiple sitemaps. It's really easy.
You can also do it using the Search Console Sitemap Report, another report in the new Search Console. You can go in there and you can submit sitemaps. You can remove sitemaps, validate. You can also do this via the Search Console API.
But a really cool way of informing Google of your sitemaps, that a lot of people don't use, is simply pinging Google. You can do this in your browser URL. You simply type in google.com/ping, and you put in the sitemap with the URL. You can try this out right now with your current sitemaps. Type it into the browser bar and Google will instantly queue that sitemap for crawling, and all the URLs in there should get indexed quickly if they meet Google's quality standard.
(BONUS: This wasn’t in the video, but we wanted to include it because it’s pretty awesome)
Within the past few months, both Google and Bing have introduced new APIs to help speed up and automate the crawling and indexing of URLs.
Both of these solutions allow for the potential of massively speeding up indexing by submitting 100s or 1000s of URLs via an API.
While the Bing API is intended for any new/updated URL, Google states that their API is specifically for “either job posting or livestream structured data.” That said, many SEOs like David Sottimano have experimented with Google APIs and found it to work with a variety of content types.
If you want to use these indexing APIs yourself, you have a number of potential options:
Yoast announced they will soon support live indexing across both Google and Bing within their SEO Wordpress plugin.
Indexing & ranking
That's talking about indexing. Now there are some other ways that you can get your content indexed faster and help it to rank a little higher at the same time.
4. Links from important pages
When you publish new content, the basic, if you do nothing else, you want to make sure that you are linking from important pages. Important pages may be your homepage, adding links to the new content, your blog, your resources page. This is a basic step that you want to do. You don't want to orphan those pages on your site with no incoming links.
Adding the links tells Google two things. It says we need to crawl this link sometime in the future, and it gets put in the regular crawling queue. But it also makes the link more important. Google can say, "Well, we have important pages linking to this. We have some quality signals to help us determine how to rank it." So linking from important pages.
5. Update old content
But a step that people oftentimes forget is not only link from your important pages, but you want to go back to your older content and find relevant places to put those links. A lot of people use a link on their homepage or link to older articles, but they forget that step of going back to the older articles on your site and adding links to the new content.
Now what pages should you add from? One of my favorite techniques is to use this search operator here, where you type in the keywords that your content is about and then you do a site:example.com. This allows you to find relevant pages on your site that are about your target keywords, and those make really good targets to add those links to from your older content.
6. Share socially
Really obvious step, sharing socially. When you have new content, sharing socially, there's a high correlation between social shares and content ranking. But especially when you share on content aggregators, like Reddit, those create actual links for Google to crawl. Google can see those signals, see that social activity, sites like Reddit and Hacker News where they add actual links, and that does the same thing as adding links from your own content, except it's even a little better because it's external links. It's external signals.
7. Generate traffic to the URL
This is kind of an advanced technique, which is a little controversial in terms of its effectiveness, but we see it anecdotally working time and time again. That's simply generating traffic to the new content.
Now there is some debate whether traffic is a ranking signal. There are some old Google patents that talk about measuring traffic, and Google can certainly measure traffic using Chrome. They can see where those sites are coming from. But as an example, Facebook ads, you launch some new content and you drive a massive amount of traffic to it via Facebook ads. You're paying for that traffic, but in theory Google can see that traffic because they're measuring things using the Chrome browser.
When they see all that traffic going to a page, they can say, "Hey, maybe this is a page that we need to have in our index and maybe we need to rank it appropriately."
Ranking
Once we get our content indexed, talk about a few ideas for maybe ranking your content faster.
8. Generate search clicks
Along with generating traffic to the URL, you can actually generate search clicks.
Now what do I mean by that? So imagine you share a URL on Twitter. Instead of sharing directly to the URL, you share to a Google search result. People click the link, and you take them to a Google search result that has the keywords you're trying to rank for, and people will search and they click on your result.
You see television commercials do this, like in a Super Bowl commercial they'll say, "Go to Google and search for Toyota cars 2019." What this does is Google can see that searcher behavior. Instead of going directly to the page, they're seeing people click on Google and choosing your result.
This does a couple of things. It helps increase your click-through rate, which may or may not be a ranking signal. But it also helps you rank for auto-suggest queries. So when Google sees people search for "best cars 2019 Toyota," that might appear in the suggest bar, which also helps you to rank if you're ranking for those terms. So generating search clicks instead of linking directly to your URL is one of those advanced techniques that some SEOs use.
9. Target query deserves freshness
When you're creating the new content, you can help it to rank sooner if you pick terms that Google thinks deserve freshness. It's best maybe if I just use a couple of examples here.
Consider a user searching for the term "cafes open Christmas 2019." That's a result that Google wants to deliver a very fresh result for. You want the freshest news about cafes and restaurants that are going to be open Christmas 2019. Google is going to preference pages that are created more recently. So when you target those queries, you can maybe rank a little faster.
Compare that to a query like "history of the Bible." If you Google that right now, you'll probably find a lot of very old pages, Wikipedia pages. Those results don't update much, and that's going to be harder for you to crack into those SERPs with newer content.
The way to tell this is simply type in the queries that you're trying to rank for and see how old the most recent results are. That will give you an indication of what Google thinks how much freshness this query deserves. Choose queries that deserve a little more freshness and you might be able to get in a little sooner.
10. Leverage URL structure
Finally, last tip, this is something a lot of sites do and a lot of sites don't do because they're simply not aware of it. Leverage URL structure. When Google sees a new URL, a new page to index, they don't have all the signals yet to rank it. They have a lot of algorithms that try to guess where they should rank it. They've indicated in the past that they leverage the URL structure to determine some of that.
Consider The New York Times puts all its book reviews under the same URL, newyorktimes.com/book-reviews. They have a lot of established ranking signals for all of these URLs. When a new URL is published using the same structure, they can assign it some temporary signals to rank it appropriately.
If you have URLs that are high authority, maybe it's your blog, maybe it's your resources on your site, and you're leveraging an existing URL structure, new content published using the same structure might have a little bit of a ranking advantage, at least in the short run, until Google can figure these things out.
These are only a few of the ways to get your content indexed and ranking quicker. It is by no means a comprehensive list. There are a lot of other ways. We'd love to hear some of your ideas and tips. Please let us know in the comments below. If you like this video, please share it for me. Thanks, everybody.
Interested in building your own content strategy? Don't have a lot of time to spare? We collaborated with HubSpot Academy on their free Content Strategy course — check out the video to build a strong foundation of knowledge and equip yourself with actionable tools to get started!
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With listing and reputation management so essential for local businesses — especially in 2020 — we’re introducing new Moz Local plans that give you more options for review monitoring, review management, and social posting, depending on your needs.
While it’s always been important for local businesses to have accurate and complete online listings, it’s even more crucial in today’s environment. Google found that searches for “in stock” grew more than 70% globally in late Q1, indicating people were shopping locally more often, and Nextdoor found that 72% of their members believe they will frequent local businesses more after the crisis is over.
But consumers often rely on reviews of local businesses when deciding where to buy. High quality, positive reviews can improve your business visibility, and when you respond to reviews, it shows that you value your customers and their feedback.
The new Moz Local plans — Lite, Preferred, and Elite — are designed to offer more features and flexibility to better meet the needs of local businesses and their marketers. Our previous plans limited reputation management and social posting to only the top-tier plan, and we wanted to make these features more widely available.
Customers on any of the new plans can now monitor reviews via alerts, and depending on the plan, respond to reviews and take advantage of social posting. It’s never been more important to actively engage and listen to the needs and concerns of your current customers — and potential customers will take notice.
We also wanted to offer flexibility with respect to local business aggregator submissions. While all of the plans include Factual, US customers can choose to add the other two major aggregators if they desire broader reach.
What’s new?
The new plans will help you maximize your online presence and engage with consumers more easily. Here’s what’s new:
Review monitoring
All 3 plans allow you to receive alerts and read reviews posted on Google, Facebook, and other sites in our partner network through a central dashboard. Since 82% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses, you should be aware of what they’re saying.
Review management
Preferred and Elite subscribers can also respond to reviews posted on Google, Facebook, and select directories through the dashboard. Your ability to respond quickly can be the difference between keeping a customer or losing them to your competition. When it comes to negative reviews, 40% expect a response either immediately or within 24 hours.
Social posting
Preferred and Elite subscribers can share news, offers, and other content directly to Google, Facebook, and select directories from the dashboard.
For example, news posts can be shared on Facebook, and Questions & Answers and COVID-19 posts can be posted to your Google My Business page. Sharing news and offers enables you to engage proactively with consumers and attract new customers.
Local data aggregators
All three plans now include location data submission to Factual for broader location data distribution. Preferred and Elite subscribers in the US can add the other two data aggregators — Infogroup and Neustar Localeze — for $40 per year, per location.
Additional directories
The Elite plan includes a number of additional directories for listing management and location data distribution, such as Tupalo, Where To?, Brownbook, Opendi, iGlobal, Manta, and Cylex, to name a few. And each of the US, UK, and Canada plans include some local directories relevant to that region. For example, the US Elite plan includes Yellow Pages, Superpages, and DexKnows. A complete list can be found here.
The comparison grid below highlights the key features for each US plan. You can find all of the new US, UK, and Canada plans and pricing on our website.
How do these new plans impact current Moz Local customers?
If you’re a current Moz Local customer, you can either keep your existing plan or choose one of the new plans by clicking on “Change plan” and then “See plan options” in your Moz Local dashboard. Enterprise customers can contact their Account Manager to discuss the new plans.
Get started with Moz Local
The new Moz Local plans are designed to maximize your local online presence, increase consumer engagement, and enhance your visibility in local searches with minimal time and effort. You can get started with Moz Local for as little as $11 per month (billed annually). And if you want to learn more about best practices for listing and reputation management, check out our recent webinar on the ROI of Local Presence Management.
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In a world where search companies are a dime a dozen and brands tout bland "unique selling propositions" that aren't unique at all, how can you avoid drowning in the sea of sameness? What are you doing that's any different from every other SEO firm?
In this article, you'll learn how to find, activate, and articulate your competitive advantage. You’ll discover how to identify unique strengths and innovative offerings that equate to competitive advantage through real, working examples so you can bring them to life in search. And finally, you'll get actionable tips and homework to help your business stand out.
The state of our industry
“SEO is dead.” Have you ever heard this eye-roller before? This is a common refrain in the search industry every time Google takes more precious real estate into its clutches and away from website owners, when our tactics become less impactful, when Google increasingly automates answers and paid search efforts, or as we watch the internet become inundated with "content for SEO" that's drowning the best content out. It's enough to make any search expert feel like it's impossible to win.
But I argue that search and content marketing aren’t dead. Far from it. Google is still the main place people turn to for information and answers, and humans will continue to search. However, the industry is becoming increasingly commoditized, and it provides challenges and lessons that can change the landscape for our industry and many others.
I conducted an informal survey of more than 100 digital marketers around the globe, asking whether they believe our field is becoming commoditized. Of those, more than two-thirds said content marketing is moderately or highly commoditized, nearly 73% said the SEO industry is commoditized, and nearly three-quarters said the paid search space is becoming moderately or highly commoditized.
Barriers to competitive advantage
The trouble with the commoditization of an industry is that it makes it difficult for any business to stand out. It gets harder to stay competitive, which makes it harder for a business to grow. This isn’t entirely surprising, because achieving real, sustainable competitive advantage is no easy task.
The reasons people say it's hard to stay competitive in their industry range from knowing what opportunity is available to own, to challenges being able to innovate rapidly enough, to internal barriers like buy-in or fear of risk-taking. According to my survey, some of the most common barriers to competitive advantage are:
Knowing what opportunity makes sense to try to own
Prioritizing billable client work over non-billable brand-building work
Time, bandwidth, and budget
An internal fear of or aversion to taking risks
Cultural challenges like buy-in
Overcoming customer perception of the brand’s position
Lack of focus and slowness in innovation
Competitive advantage is a changing, moving target
While the survey I conducted was limited to digital marketers, nearly every business vertical experiences commoditization and competition. Our client brands are fighting it, too. But without truly understanding competitive advantage — much less how to find, prove and defend it — we risk drowning in that sea of sameness. I’ll continue to use digital marketing professions like search and content as working examples, but know that the principles here can benefit you, your clients, and your business, regardless of industry. It could even help you assess your individual competitive advantage to help you land a dream job or get that big promotion.
What is competitive advantage?
There are a few traits professionals agree on, but the open-ended survey answered revealed a lot of disparity and confusion. Let’s try to clear that up.
Often when we talk about a brand's competitive edge, we talk about mission and vision statements. But the sad truth is that many, many businesses are claiming competitive advantages in meaningless mission statements that aren't competitive advantages at all. Let’s look at an example: “Profitable growth through superior customer service, innovation, quality and commitment.”
This is a commonly used example of a bad mission statement for many reasons - it’s vague with no specificity whatsoever, it has a long list of intangible advantages with no focus, and these things every business should probably be doing. These are table stakes. You could copy and paste any brand name in front of this. In fact, I found a dozen companies in just the first two pages of search results that did exactly this, even though this is heralded as a prime example of a meaningless mission statement.
And if the meaningless mission statement wasn't persuasive enough, let's also examine what many brands consider their "unique selling propositions." I actually object to the "unique selling proposition" or "USP," because it's all about the brand. I much prefer "UCB,” or unique customer benefit, which puts the customer at the center, but I digress.
Let’s take a look at a few examples in the invoicing software space. In fairness, the brands below do list other benefits on their sites, and many are good, but this is often what they lead with. FreshBooks says they have invoice software that saves you time, Invoice2Go says they have time-saving features that keep you in control, and Sliq Tools can help you organize and speed up invoicing.
Saving customers time is important, but the problem is that none of these offerings aren’t unique. Nearly every invoicing software I looked at highlighted some version of speed, saving time, and getting paid faster. These are all valuable features, but what's the benefit that's going to make the customer choose you?
Let’s take a look at three more. Invoice Simple says you can invoice customers in seconds. Xero gives you a real-time view of your cash flow. Scoro says they can help you stop using and paying for six or more different tools.
These benefits are a lot more clear. Invoice Simple says they don’t just save you time, but they help you get invoices done in seconds. That specificity puts it over the edge. Xero’s real-time view of cash flow is incredibly important to businesses; the ability to see and make decisions from that information immediately is very valuable. And Scoro’s benefit of cutting back your tool stack really hit home. It's very common for SMBs to add one tool at a time over time and then find that they're drowning in accounting software, and maybe they're making more mistakes or just losing time to keeping up with it all.
5 components of competitive advantage
Start with your “est.” Best. Fastest. Smartest. Cheapest. Most innovative. Most horizontally integrated. What is something that better delivers more value to customers, or comparable value for a better price? This is a great brainstorming exercise to ask yourself initially what you are or want to be best at. Keep in mind, maybe it's not the "est" over all - maybe it's the "est" for a specific segment of your audience or need state of your customer or even just a geographic region. But then you have to check those "ests" against a few criteria to ensure it's really a competitive advantage.
Unique
Is your advantage unique? If anyone can claim the same thing, it's not unique. Your advantage should serve a unique need, a distinct audience, or deliver your product or service in a unique way. Dig deep to find something specific and tangible that sets you apart from your competition.
Defensible
A defensible advantage is a distinct, specific claim that is not generic or vague, and avoids superlatives. If you can copy and paste any brand name in place of yours, it's not defensible. Make sure your unique benefit or advantage is clear and specific. Avoid superlatives and hyperbolic language that can't be quantified in any way. The typical mistake I see is generic language that doesn't paint a picture for customers as to what makes you special.
Sustainable
Meaningful competitive advantage should be lasting and endure over a long period of time. I frequently heard in the survey that people believe they have competitive advantage for being first to market with their type of service. That does confer some benefits initially, but once the market figures out there's money to be made and little competition, that's when they swoop in to encroach. First mover advantage is a competitive advantage for a while, but it is not a sustainable competitive advantage. If you can't hold onto that competitive advantage for a while, it's too short-term.
Valuable
Something the customer feels is a greater value than competitors. If your customer doesn’t care about it, it’s not valuable, and thus it’s not a competitive advantage. What your business does isn’t solely defined by what you sell, but rather by what your customer actually wants. (And in the search business, that's especially true - if people aren't searching for it, it's not valuable to the business.) Your customer has to feel that what you offer is a greater value than your competitors. That can be a product, service or feature at a comparable price that excels, or it can be a comparable product, service or feature at a better price.
Consistent
Competitive advantage must be something you can bring to life in every aspect of your business. This is why typical CSR (corporate social responsibility) fails to be an adequate competitive advantage for many brands. They put a page on their website and maybe make a few donations, but they're not really living that purpose from top to bottom in their organization, and customers see right through it. It can't be a competitive advantage on the website that isn't also reflected at the C-level, with your sales reps who work with customers, in your factories, and so on.
For all their flaws and my moral beef with Jeff Bezos, Amazon was unwavering in their commitment to fast, affordable shipping. That's what turned them into the monolith they are today. People know that Ben & Jerry's is vocal and activist in all aspects of what they do, and they live up to the promises they make.
A competitive advantage framework
One of the most important attributes to understand about competitive advantage is that it’s temporary. It’s a moving target, so you can never get too comfortable. The moment you identify your competitive advantage and you're enjoying nice profit margins or share of voice in a space, competitors will start racing to take advantage of new learnings themselves. This leads to eventual parity among competitors, and the cycle starts again.
So you need to figure out where to evolve or re-invent to stay competitive. This is a handy little framework for finding, establishing, articulating and maintaining your competitive advantage. But note that this isn't purely linear -- once competitors encroach on your previous advantage you're at risk of losing it, so be sure to look ahead to what your next competitive advantage can be OR how you can elevate and defend the one you already have.
Discover: tools to find your competitive advantage
Discovering what makes you different is half the battle. In an increasingly crowded and commoditized competitive landscape, how do you figure out where you can win?
Ask
The number one recommendation from my survey is to ask. Tools from formal surveys to in-depth interviews, to casual feedback forms and ad hoc conversations can reveal some very insightful advantages. The objective is to figure out why you over someone else. A few things you might ask them:
Why did you hire us over another firm?
Why did you hire another firm over us?
Why did you choose to leave us and switch to another firm?
Why do you continue to work with us after all these years?
Look for patterns. Your competitive advantage might be hiding in there -- or insight into your competitor's advantage.
Listen
Try listening quietly, too. Check conversations on Reddit, Nextdoor or relevant forums where people have frank dialogue about problems they need solutions to, people recommending for or against brands, people are likely to be honest when helping their neighbors.
You can also read ratings and reviews on popular sites like Amazon or Yelp. Granted, it's easy to fake some of these, but look for patterns in what people say about your brand, your products and services, or your competitors. What are their common complaints? What do other brands do poorly or not at all, gaps that you can fill?
Workshop
Getting experts with multiple perspectives in a room to workshop and brainstorm can also help uncover your competitive advantage. Evaluate your brand, your customers, your competition, the industry, new developments, and more. Also look beyond your own industry - often great ideas can come from entirely different verticals outside your own. Ask yourself hard questions about who you are, what you can commit to, and what you can follow through on to offer customers. I’ll share just two of many possible competitive advantage workshop tools below.
SWOT analysis
Conduct a SWOT analysis of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats - do the same for competitors. This is best conducted with people across multiple disciplines to consider different angles. It's also key to do your research - look as closely at competitors as you do your own brand.
Strengths are the powerful capabilities and value you bring to the table. Weaknesses are the gaps in your resources or offerings that might hold you back from being best in class. Opportunities are untapped or unexplored areas of potential growth. Threats are outside forces or external factors that put your business at risk - like economic downturn and susceptibility global pandemic, for example, or the entry of a disruptive new competitor.
Porter’s 5 Forces Model
The second tool I want to introduce is Porter’s Five Forces model. Most folks who attend business school will learn about this, but you can also read about it in Michael Porter's book Competitive Advantage. It's a method to analyze the competitive pressures on your business. His model asserts that these five forces determine how intense the competition is, and thus, how attractive it is to enter an industry based on profitability. But it's also a very valuable critical thinking tool even if you're already in the industry to figure out where you can compete and edge out the opposition.
The first force at the center of the model is competitive rivalry. What is the quantity, quality, and diversity of your competitors in the space? How fast or slow is the industry currently growing? What's the growth potential in the future? Are customers typically loyal to a brand, or are they brand-agnostic, switching a round frequently in your industry?
Then we have to think about the toggle between new entrants into the market, or the threat of substitute products or services. For new entrants, is it an easy industry to enter, or are there high barriers to entry? A brand with high threat of new entrants (low barriers to entry) might be food trucks. With some good recipes, enough capital to set up a high cost to start up, and some elbow grease, you're in business. But industries with low threat of new entrants (high barriers to entry) might be things like airlines. It's very expensive to buy planes and hire qualified pilots, and it's an industry loaded with government regulations.
For the threat of substitutes, is there a high quantity of other products or services on the market your customer can choose from? Is it easy or hard to switch brands? Also, could there be an entirely alternative solution or abstention? For example, perhaps an alternative to highly commoditized toilet paper would be an alternative solution like a bidet like Tushy. Or perhaps a makeup brand like Sephora faces "substitution" from people who choose to abstain from wearing makeup at all.
And finally, we have to think about how well suppliers can bargain and how well buyers can bargain with your company. Every company has a supply chain, even service businesses like digital marketing.For manufacturing companies, suppliers might be the raw materials or transportation providers. For digital marketing companies, suppliers might be technology companies or the talent you hire to do the work.
If demand is greater than supply - either due to quantity of suppliers, the unique needs you have for securing that talent (like GMO-free, organic, locally sourced ingredients from companies that donate money to offset their carbon impact), this force has high-pressure. But if the resources you need are a dime a dozen (PC laptops come to mind), bargaining power of suppliers is low.
End users and buyers are part of your supply chain too. If they can easily "bargain" by choosing other competitors or driving down costs through competition, you have high pressure here. If you're truly the only player in the market, or one of few, who do what you do, then bargaining power of buyers is lower. Also consider the cost of someone switching to another company or a substitute.
Define: choose your competitive strategy
Once you have found the gap you want to fill, you need to choose your area of focus. Often we make the mistake of trying to be all things to all people all the time. Brands can't pull this off in a sustainable way forever. If you are trying to be adequate at everything, it's difficult to be great at anything.
While not impossible, it's very difficult to maintain deep focus on things when you are spread too thin. My MBA professors told me that smart strategy isn't just choosing what you will do, it's also choosing what you won't do. That has stuck with me ever since. We need to make hard choices about where to spend time, budget, energy and attention. To get truly great at something, and achieve competitive advantage, you need to set your sights on something specific.
One problematic example I heard from a big client was challenging our Paid and Organic Search teams to win at efficiency and return on ad spend, while also winning on volume and share-of-voice concurrently. Efficiency and ROAS focus on a selective approach to advertising on certain terms or topics to optimize for the most efficient acquisitions and cost savings, and it often results in a narrower reach but highly efficient use of advertising dollars. On the flip-side, focusing on volume or achieving the largest share-of-voice in a space typically requires casting a wider net, and that traffic may convert at a lower rate and profit margins and ROAS may be tighter.
Another common challenge is trying to be a company or person who is both broad and versatile, while also being deeply specialized. This isn't absolutely impossible, but maintenance and upkeep becomes challenging over time. If your brand wants to be perceived as the most versatile brand that can adapt to anything or meet everyone's needs, it's difficult to also be the brand that is perceived as deeply specialized in a certain field.
Let's use grocers as a working example. WalMart may be the generalist for being able to get just about anything you could possibly want in one place, while Natural Grocers might be the deeply specialized whole, organic, local foods shop. Far less variety and versatility, but you can be assured they hit on certain quality and sourcing criteria within their more curated selection.
Consider what that means for you as a business or an individual professional.
Examine your brand and narrow your focus.
Let's walk through a few of the questions you can ask yourself to closely examine your brand and narrow your strategic focus on a clear competitive advantage.
What are the core activities that make up your business? Think about your core products or services, core audiences you serve, and core problems you solve.
Who are the people the brand was created to serve? Consider the individuals, decision-makers, customers or firms you serve. Are they in certain industries or job titles? Where do they get their information? How can you best reach them where they are?
What do your potential customers, or a specific segment of them, want or need? How does your brand, product or service solve that need? What do you enable them to do? What keeps them up at night? What problems do they have to solve or decisions do they have to make that you can help with? What are points of friction or frustration that you or your business are uniquely equipped to alleviate?
What do your customers value? According to a book called The Purpose Advantage by Jeff Fromm and his team, the business you’re in is defined by what the customer wants, not by what you’re selling. Reflecting on this question can help you identify a higher purpose for the company through the eyes of the customer.
When customers have a huge range of choices, why should they choose you? What would they do if you didn't exist? You have to be able to answer the “why you” question with a unique and persuasive reason. If that doesn't immediately jump out at you, try the "Five Whys" exercise. This is an iterative technique that helps you dig deeper on cause-and-effect relationships. You work your way backwards, asking "why" time and again until you get to the core.
Five Whys exercise
Let’s try a quick example of the Five Whys exercise. The Ordinary is a makeup company that sells affordable, back-to-basics skin care products is growing incredibly fast. In the three years since parent company Deciem launched the brand, they grew to nearly $300M in sales last year. Brand name recognition and sales volume have spiked.
Why? The brand is taking off with budget-conscious Millennials over 30 who take interest in skincare.
Why? None of their products cost more than $15.
Why? Their products have only the most essential active ingredients - avoiding parabens, sulfates, mineral oil, formaldehyde, mercury, oxybenzone and a bunch of other ingredients I can't pronounce.
Why? This creates an affordable skin care regimen without scary unknown ingredients, all without animal testing, and without excess wasteful packaging.
Why? This hits on several core morals and values of the Millennial skin care audience who want to minimize their impact/footprint, but without paying a premium to do it.
Competitive advantage takes many forms
Once you have done the due diligence of truly reflecting on these questions, examine your answers. Look for clues and patterns and start to formulate a plan for which areas have the most unique value to your customers.
There are typically several avenues a brand can take to own a certain customer benefit, audience segment, industry, or price point. Here are a few clues to watch for in the patterns. Are you the most personalized brand in your space? Do you have an incredible community with loyal advocates and rich conversation that people want to be a part of? Brands like Moz and Tableau seem to have this advantage in their spaces. Do you have a reputation for constant innovation, rapid evolution, and generally outsmarting the competition or disrupting an industry? Tesla is iconic for its innovation. Also consider things like supply chain efficiencies, breadth or depth in certain markets, the ratio of cost to value, your ethics or commitment to certain causes, and more.
Write a brand statement
Now that you’ve done your due diligence, it’s time to boil it down to a simple brand statement to make it crystal clear what your competitive advantage will be. Please note that this should not be a simple exercise. If it's too easy, be skeptical of whether you have truly found your competitive advantage. Put in the work. Writing these statements is hard and takes time. And you should expect to revisit and revise over time as your competitive environment and customer preferences evolve.
Using the brand The Ordinary, I drafted an example competitive advantage statement: We, The Ordinary, create high-performing, minimalist skincare products so that cost- and cause-conscious skincare enthusiasts can have an ethical, effective skincare regimen without paying a premium price.
Then, check your work. Pressure test your brand statement. Does it meet the five criteria for competitive advantage? If not, keep digging. And once you have a clear competitive advantage statement, be sure to connect and reconnect with that intention, time and again.
Demonstrate: living your competitive advantage
Now that you've discovered your potential competitive advantage and chosen where to focus, it's time to bring it to life. The difference between the average brand which merely puts a mission statement on their website and a brand with true, sustainable competitive advantage, is whether they walk the talk in every single thing they do. It has to be consistent with your products and services. It has to happen at all levels of a company. It has to be true in every moment you communicate with customers.
Once again, we find ourselves pressure-testing the competitive advantage. Can you realistically live this across departments, offices, teams, roles, initiatives, processes, marketing efforts and everything in between? You can’t be casual about competitive advantage. You have to be obsessed. Let's talk about some questions you should ask yourself to activate your competitive advantage in every respect:
How does this affect existing ways of working? What changes do you need to make to how you operate to live it fully? If you're just now identifying your competitive advantage, which is totally ok!, you may have work to do in order to make sure it's consistent across the organization.
What are some things you won't do in support of your advantage? These could be things you choose not to focus on, or things you will actively avoid.
What team members can you bring together from across functions to activate this competitive advantage? Be sure to provide common language and targets for the team so you can all be united in action to drive better outcomes
How will you prove your commitment to the competitive advantage outside the organization? Your team from top to bottom needs to fully believe and commit to this mission. But your customers also need to believe in your mission. Ask yourself what proof looks like. How will everyone know you are in fact achieving the competitive advantage you claim?
What indicators can measure how you're putting your competitive advantage to work in action? Make sure to define what "winning" looks like and establish a baseline for how you and the competition are doing. Create metrics and rewards that support the new purpose. Is it a high win:loss ratio of winning new business? A company size or revenue growth rate? Is it share-of-voice in an industry or among a certain audience segment? Is it perhaps retention of ideal clients and high referral rates? Know what you want to achieve, know how the competition currently measures up, and revisit these measurements regularly.
Defend: evolving your competitive advantage
Remember: competitive advantage is temporary. It's a moving target, and that's why it's so difficult for brands to achieve and maintain. It’s important to understand the natural lifecycle of every business and industry.
The business lifecycle
I'll reference the typical product lifecycle here — another MBA classic — and stretch it a bit to fit my point about defending competitive advantage.
When a new brand emerges with a new product, service, audience, or competitive advantage, much of the effort and investment is spent raising awareness and amassing your first customers. Then you start to build up preference for your brand and increase your market share. Competition may be lower at this stage, and you're getting some scale, growing your audience. Then your steep growth trajectory starts to level off. The competition sees that you're onto a good thing and they start cutting into your piece of the pie. You may fight it by adding more features, or perhaps you lower your price.
In a typical business, this is the point where sales may even start to decline. You have a choice here. You can maintain your existing service and try to rejuvenate it. You can cut costs to stay competitive, though that cuts into your profit margin and makes it less worthwhile. Or perhaps you decide to get out of the game entirely because it's not financially attractive anymore.
Or, you can find new ways to achieve competitive advantage. You could explore new areas of expansion, or even completely reinvent yourself to renew your competitiveness. The cycle starts again, and once again you become the one that others want to catch up to.
Fight or flight or evolve?
You can only fight off the competition for so long doing the same things. Fighting isn't always the answer. At some point you may need to evolve, and there are a few ways you might do that.
You can explore new markets - are there under-served or untapped audiences you can reach?
You can expand new, closely related product lines or services
You can add new features or innovations to your existing service or product.
Similarly can also and enhance and elevate existing benefits
You can cut costs to produce or ship and find economies of scale, which drives price down, and makes your parity product more valuable relative to price.
Or you can go through mergers and acquisitions (join forces) or even divest certain pieces of the business (stop offering) to be able to focus on a new competitive advantage.
This is hardly an exhaustive list, just a few thought starters on what evolution might look like if you are at this stage of your career, or if your business is at this point in its natural lifecycle.
In order to create, keep and defend sustainable competitive advantage long-term, evolution is necessary. Keep rooting out the opportunity for renewed competitive advantage and master the art of reinvention. If you can adapt and transform, you can compete and survive.
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The golden rule of marketing has always been: Don’t leave your customer wondering, or you’ll lose them. This rule also applies very well to SEO: Unless Google can find an answer — and quickly — they’ll pick and feature your competitor.
One way to make sure that doesn’t happen is having a well set-up, well-optimized FAQ page. Your FAQ is the key to providing your customers and search engines with all the answers they might need about your brand.
Why create an FAQ page?
Decrease your customer support team’s workload. If you do it right, your FAQ page will be the first point of contact for your potential customers — before they need to contact you directly.
Shorten your customers’ buying journeys. If your site users can find all the answers without having to hear back from your team, they’ll buy right away.
Build trust signals. Covering your return policies, shipping processes, and being transparent with your site users will encourage them to put more trust into your brand. As always, if your site users trust your brand, so will Google.
Create a more effective sales funnel by including your business’s competitive advantages: What makes you better than your competitors?
Improve your site internal linking (meaningfully).
Capture more search visibility opportunities.
Feeling convinced? Then let’s move on from whys to hows.
Where to find questions to answer
I did a very detailed article on question research for Moz. It lists all kinds of tools — including SEO-driven (based on which question people type in Google’s search box) and People-Also-Ask-based (questions showing up in Google’s People Also Ask boxes) — that collect questions from online discussion boards, as well as tools that monitor Twitter and Reddit questions.
In addition, your customer support team is your most important resource. You need to know exactly what your customers are asking when they contact your company, and then use all the other sources to optimize those questions for organic rankings and expand your list where necessary.
Answers should be CCF (clear, concise, and factual)
(I have just made up this abbreviation, but it does a good job getting my point across.)
A good rule of thumb is to write short answers to each question — two to three paragraphs would make a good answer. If you go longer, the page will be too long and cluttered.
If you have more to say:
Write a standalone article explaining the process
Add a video
Creating a video to answer most of those questions is almost always a good idea. Videos make good promotional assets allowing your brand to be discovered on Youtube, as well as through Google’s video carousels.
And if video marketing seems too intimidating to you, there are quite a few tools that allow you to create videos on a budget without investing in expensive software (and training) or external services. I list some of those tools here.
Another video creation tool I discovered recently is called Renderforest. It offers some powerful explainer video templates that are perfect for answering questions.
Other ways to make answers shorter are:
Add intructural GIFs (I listed a few GIF creation tools here).
Create downloadable flowcharts and checklists (there are lots of online tools to put those together).
Overall, visuals have long been proven to improve engagement and make things easier to understand and remember, so why not use them on your FAQ page?
FAQ schema — use it!
Google loves featuring clear answers (which is also why creating a solid FAQ page is such a good idea). In fact, Google loves answers so much that there’s a separate schema type specifically for this content format: FAQPage schema.
By all means, use it. For Wordpress users, there’s a Wordpress plugin that helps markup content with FAQ schema.
It makes your FAQ page easier to understand for Google, and it helps your page stand out in search:
Quick tip: If you include an internal link inside your answer, it will populate in search results, too. More links in organic SERPs!
Internal linking: Use your FAQ as a sitemap
More links from your organic listing in search isn’t the only reason to link from your FAQ page. Your FAQ page is part of the customer journey, where each answer is an important step down the sales funnel. This is why adding internal links is key to ensuring that customer journey is continued.
But don’t think about these links from an SEO standpoint only. It’s not as important to create keyword-optimized link text here (although it’s still not a terrible idea — when it makes sense). The more important factor to think about here is user intent.
What is your site user likely to do next when they’re searching for a particular question?
If they have a question about your shipping costs, they’re probably close to buying, but need to know more about the final price. This is where you can brag about your awesome shipping partners and link straight to the product page (or list), as well as to the cart for them to complete the payment.
If they are asking how long shipping usually takes, they’re likely to be your current customer, so linking to your shipping info page would be more helpful.
Monitoring your FAQ page and user paths through it will give you more ideas on how to set up each answer better. More on this below.
If you need some inspiration on proper in-FAQ linking, check out Shopify, which does a pretty awesome job on matching various user intents via internal linking:
Structure is everything
There are web users who search and then there are those who browse.
Your FAQ page should accommodate both.
This means:
There should be search field suggestions to guide the user through the site effectively.
There should be clear categories (as subheads) for the page visitors to browse through and get a good idea of what your site does at a glance. This will help people who are still at the research phase make a buying decision faster.
To determine the best structure for the FAQ page, try Text Optimizer, which uses semantic analysis to come up with related questions. It makes catching some common keyword and question patterns easier:
When you have your FAQ content structure set up, create anchor links to allow users to quickly jump to the section they feel like browsing more. To see this on-page navigation in action, head to the Adobe FAQ page:
Making your FAQ page work: integrate, analyze, monitor
A well set-up FAQ page addresses multiple types of user intent and helps at various steps in a sales funnel. This makes monitoring the page closely a very essential task.
Here are a few ways to accomplish it:
1. Monitor in-FAQ search
If your site runs on Wordpress, there’s a variety of FAQ plugins (including this one) that come with advanced search functionality. The feature reports on:
Most popular searches, showing which product features or site sections cause the most confusion (these may signal some usability issues).
Empty searches, showing which users’ questions triggered no answers in your FAQ (these should go straight to your content team).
If you’re going with a no-plugin, custom solution, make sure to use Google Analytics to set up your in-FAQ search, which will allow you to monitor your site users’ searching patterns.
2. Track user paths through your FAQ page
Which pages (or off-site channels) tend to bring people to your FAQ page, and where do they usually go from there? These paths are important in understanding the role of the FAQ page in your sales funnel.
To track any page effectiveness in sending conversions, I tend to use Finteza, which allows you to create an unlimited number (unless I haven’t hit the limit yet) of sales funnels to monitor and compare different user paths through your site:
3. Monitor “People Also Ask” rankings
You’re most likely going to monitor this page traffic and its rankings anyway, but there’s one more thing to add here: “People Also Ask” positions.
As this page focuses on covering customers’ questions, Google’s “People Also Ask” positions are pretty indicative as to whether or not you’re doing a good job. SE Ranking is the only tool I’m aware of that can help you with that. It keeps track of most of Google’s search elements and reports your progress:
If you do things right, you’re likely to see your PPA positions growing.
4. Monitor customer feedback
Finally, collecting user feedback on every answer in your FAQ will help you create more helpful answers. Again, most pre-build FAQ solutions come with this option, but there are standalone plugins for it as well (like this one).
FAQ FAQs
There are a few common questions about building an FAQ page that keep floating the web (as well as Moz’s community forums). Let’s quickly address them here:
Is an FAQ section still a good idea?
Yes, by all means, but only if you take it seriously.
Should I employ “collapsible” answers to save space?
I don’t have any issues with this set-up (many brands choose to go this way), but SEOs believe that content hidden behind tabs or clicks holds less value than immediately-visible content.
Can I re-use select answers on other pages where these questions-and-answers make sense? Is this duplicate content?
It isn’t a “problematic” duplicate content issue (meaning Google will not penalize for that), but the best way to avoid duplicate content is to write new (original) answers for each page.
Should it be one page, or is it better to set up a multi-page knowledge base?
Depending on how much you have to say, either way is good.
Takeaways
Your FAQ page is an important step in the buying journey and a good organic search asset that can both bring and convert traffic.
Create concise, factual answers that will provide immediate help or guidelines. Videos and animated GIFs always make the FAQ section more helpful.
Link from your FAQ page to accommodate different user intents and help your site users continue their journey through the site.
Structure your FAQ page in a meaningful way to give site users some clues as to what is covered.
Monitor your site user journeys through your FAQ page closely to improve and expand it.
Have more tips for optimizing your FAQ? Let me know in the comments section.
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When business is struggling, budgets are tight, and resources limited, your company might be tempted to cut back or cut off SEO efforts to save time and money until things stabilize. But halting SEO altogether — even for a short time — is actually a bad idea, as it means more work for you and your business in the long run.
Dr. Pete is here with a brand new Whiteboard Friday to tell you why SEO should not be treated like an on/off switch, and provide some suggestions on what to do instead.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, everybody, Dr. Pete from Moz here. I want to welcome you to my first recording from Whiteboard Friday Studio Chicago, aka my basement. I want to thank the content team, first of all, for getting me set up with the equipment, but especially for their patience. I am not an AV guy, so this has taken a little while longer than I had hoped. You've already seen some remote Whiteboard Fridays from Russ and Britney and Cyrus, and they're doing a great job. So hopefully we can have some fun, and now I know the ropes and can get this going a little easier.
So I want to talk about a serious topic today. Obviously, we're going through some tough times. Budgets can be tight, and when that happens, you're tempted to scale back marketing. Obviously, we're in the business of selling SEO tools, and we don't want you to do that because that's where our food comes from and the roofs over our heads. I'll be transparent about that. But I do think there are some real dangers to treating SEO like it's an on/off switch. So I want to talk about the reality of that, and what can happen, and some of what to do to mitigate that.
You can't do more with less
A friend reached out to me and she said, "My boss is worried about budgets, and he wants to cut back paid search, and he wants to cut back content, and cut back social, but get the same results. What do we do?" Before the pandemic, I might have laughed at that. But it's a serious question and a serious situation, and the reality is there's no magic to this. We can't expect to do more with less.
It's a nice thing to say. But especially when people are struggling, and when our workers are having problems, and they're stressed, and their time is being taken up doing mundane things — like grocery shopping — that are three times harder now, we can't expect them to do more with less, and we can't expect to do nothing and get results. So what do we do, and how do we deal with this problem?
You can't treat organic like paid
So first of all, I just want to say that I think sometimes we look at the situation like this. If we scale back marketing, we can just wait until times are better, and then we can push it back up. So we turn on our search marketing. We get the traffic and things are great. We shut it off. Okay, that sucks. We don't get the traffic, but we're not paying. Turn it back on and boom the traffic is back.
That's not how it works, not even close.
This is more like how paid search works. I don't want to oversimplify. I used to work in paid search. Obviously, you're optimizing and improving and adding negative keywords and doing A/B testing and all these things to hopefully get better and better performance. But, generally speaking, one of the advantages of paid search is that when you turn it on, the leads come. You get traffic right away that day. When you turn it off, you get nothing. The money is not there. You don't get the leads. Okay, that's rough, but you expect that, right? But you turn it back on, the leads come back that day. So this is the double-edged sword in a sense. It's not that one is better than the other, but this is how paid search works. It's a machine that you can flip off and on.
That's not how organic works. Organic does take time. So what happens is you turn it on, and you see this gradual ramp-up. Finally, it starts to peak and level off, and then you turn it off. Let's say budgets are tight.
Okay, I understand that you're not producing new content and you're not optimizing. It's not a thing you can just turn off frankly. But you still see positive results. You still see that traffic until this starts to trail off over time. Now that's a good thing about SEO. It doesn't immediately turn off. You still continue to get that traffic.
But the problem with SEO is when you turn it back on and when the money comes back, you're going to have to go through this ramp-up again. The curve may be different shapes, and it may not go all the way down and it may not go back to where it was. But it's going to take time. There's going to be a lag, and it could be weeks or it could be months. So I think we make two mistakes. One we've already discussed.
One is number two ironically, that this is going to take time to come back. So if you count on just turning the switch back on and things recovering, you're going to be disappointed, right? That's going to take time. So it's not just a situation of a pandemic. Let's say you close down for remodeling or let's say you had some kind of flooding or some kind of damage or something you needed to do to shut down for a month or two.
You can't expect that, when you turn things back on, it will immediately come back. So you may have to get ahead of that. You may have to start spending again before things pick up. I know that's a difficult thing, but you have to anticipate this lag. You have to be realistic about that. The other problem, though, is I think sometimes we hit this point, and we shut off our efforts.
We cut down content production. We don't optimize. We switch agencies, whatever we do. We don't see an immediate drop, and so we start to say maybe this isn't really working. I think it's a bit like exercise. I have this habit certainly over the years. You get motivated.
You do really well for a few weeks or a couple of months. You're feeling good, and you start to plateau. You get a little frustrated, and then you stop. For a while, you still feel good, right? You have these dividends. That's how it works, and that's how organic search works. So you think, well, maybe it wasn't that big of a deal.
Maybe it wasn't really helping me. Until two or three or six months later, when you realize how much worse you feel. Then by then, to start back up again takes effort, right? You don't feel good when you start exercising again after that six weeks of sitting around. So it takes a couple of months to get back to where you were. So I don't want you to go through that, and I want you to be a bit careful about that.
What you can do
So what can we do? By the way, I have no artistic skills. This is from my 10-year-old daughter. Any drawings you see on my Whiteboard Fridays will be probably from her. So thank you, Jordan. So a couple suggestions I have that are general.
1. Have a pulse
First of all, and I mean this quite literally, you need to continue to have a pulse.
If you shut down your business or your marketing, you may just think, "Well, okay, we're going to get less leads. We're going to get less of a good thing, but nothing bad is going to happen".
But the problem is this may be the only place people see you, and this may be where they come looking for you. So if you disappear, and especially in an environment like the pandemic where businesses are going under, people may look at that and say, "Oh, I guess they're not around anymore. I guess they're gone."
They might not come back. They might not come looking for you again. I think there's a very real danger of that, especially for small local businesses. So you want to make sure that your presence at least continues to exist. You have that pulse.
It doesn't have to be as frequent — you don't have to do as much work, you don't have to put out as much content, you don't have to be as active on social — but I think you have to at least show people that you're still alive and kicking so that they know to come back when things improve. Otherwise, they might just forget and go somewhere else.
2. Tell your story
I think it's okay, especially during times like this — and really any time that something is kind of going wrong — if you're remodeling, you're going to be closed for a couple months. That's a real negative thing that's hard. It's okay to be personal. It's okay to tell some of that story.
My kids' orthodontist, they're a family-owned business locally here. They were really great when they were closed. They were closed for a couple of months, about two or three months. They were as responsible as I think they could be about it. They communicated their plans, but they talked to us. They sent emails. They told us about their story. They told us about being a family-owned business and why this was hard and why they thought it was the right thing to do. So when they reopened, there was a real trust there, and I was willing to send my oldest back and get her checked out and get the normal stuff done, that I might not have been if I wasn't sure what was going on.
But I knew their procedures. I knew their story. I empathized with them, and I think that was a big deal. That's something you should do. It's okay to tell that, "Hey, this is hard. This is what's going on. Here's what's going on with us. We hope you come back. We're still here."
3. Try new things
Then I think this is an interesting time to try new things. And maybe that sounds counterintuitive because when you have less money, trying something new seems like a bad idea.
But it's okay to try new things. Maybe not as well as you normally would have. Ironically, this is a problem we've had with Whiteboard Friday. I've been remote my whole time at Moz, and so I've had to fly to Seattle to do recordings. So you see very few Whiteboard Fridays from me. There's a handful over the years and one that gets repeated a bit. Because we have a studio there, we were afraid that the quality might not be as good.
It might not be up to par. It might hurt our brand, honestly. But when the pandemic came, we said, "Hey, you know what? Now we have no choice. The studio is closed. We can't go into the office for a while." Actually, currently we're moving the office, so again we're delayed. So it opened up this opportunity to try something new, try something different. Even with equipment, it costs less than one of us flying out there and staying for a few days one time.
So it made sense, and we realized that during this time people were going to naturally be forgiving. If we could get to 70% or 80% quality and improve back up over time, it was going to be okay. So I encourage you to do that. Try some formats you might not have tried before. Try some video. Use some basic equipment. We did home recordings for MozCon this year.
It was great. We had some basic equipment, Logitech web cam, a clip-on USB mic, much less sophisticated than what I'm using right now, a couple of ring lights. Maybe 200 bucks' worth of equipment and a backdrop that really I thought looked great. It was really professional once we got used to it. Try podcasting.
Try something you haven't tried before. Don't worry about it being perfect, because I think this is a time that people will be okay with that. You can try some new things and hopefully come out stronger and come out with a new thing and resume what you were doing and maybe be ahead of where you were. So again, I just don't want you to think that if you turn this thing off, you can flip it back on.
Be realistic. Don't disappear. Try something new. Tell people what you're going through. Be human. I hope you all get through this okay and that things are going all right. It's great to see you. Thank you.
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