State of Enterprise SEO 2017: Overworked SEOs Need Direction

Posted by NorthStarInbound

This survey and its analysis was co-authored with North Star Inbound’s senior creative strategist, Andrea Pretorian.

In the spring of 2017, North Star Inbound partnered up with seoClarity and BuzzStream to survey the state of enterprise SEO. We had a fair share of anecdotal evidence from our clients, but we wanted a more objective measurement of how SEO teams are assembled, what resources are allocated to them, what methods they use, and how they perform.

We hadn’t seen such data collected, particularly for enterprise SEO. We found this surprising given its significance, evident even in the number of “enterprise SEO tools” and solutions being marketed.

What is enterprise SEO?

There is no single fixed-industry definition of “enterprise” beyond “large business.” For the purposes of this survey, we defined enterprise businesses as being comprised of 500 or more employees. “Small enterprise” means 500–1000 employees, while “large enterprise” means over 1000 employees.

Industry discussion often points to the number of pages as being a potential defining factor for enterprise SEO, but even that is not necessarily a reliable measure.

What was our survey methodology?

We developed the widest enterprise SEO survey to date, made up of 29 questions that delved into every aspect of the enterprise SEO practice. From tools and tactics to content development, keyword strategy, and more, we left no stone unturned. We then picked the brains of 240 SEO specialists across the country. You can check out our complete survey, methodology, and results here.

Team size matters — or does it?

Let’s start by looking at enterprise team size and the resources allocated to them. We focused on companies with an in-house SEO team, and broke them down in terms of small (500–1000 employees) and large enterprise (>1000 employees).

We found that 76% of small enterprise companies have in-house SEO teams of 5 people or less, but were surprised that 68% of large enterprise companies also had teams of this size. We expected a more pronounced shift into larger team sizes paralleling the larger size of their parent company; we did not expect to see roughly the same team size across small and large enterprise companies.

Interestingly, in larger companies we also see less confidence in the team’s experience in SEO. Of the companies with in-house SEO, only 31.67% of large enterprise teams called themselves “leaders” in the SEO space, which was defined in this survey as part of a team engaged broadly and critically within the business. 40% of small enterprise teams called themselves “leaders.” In terms of viewing themselves more positively (leaders, visionaries) or less (SEO pioneers in their company or else new SEO teams), we did not notice a big difference between small or large enterprise in-house SEO teams.

Large enterprise companies should have more resources at their disposal — HR teams to hire the best talent, reliable onboarding practices in place, access to more sophisticated project management tools, and more experience managing teams — which makes these results surprising. Why are large enterprise companies not more confident about their SEO skills and experience?

Before going too far in making assumptions about their increased resources, we made sure to ask our survey-takers about this. Specifically, we asked for how much budget is allocated to SEO activity per month — not including the cost of employees’ salaries, or the overhead costs of keeping the lights on — since this would result in a figure easier to report consistently across all survey takers.

It turns out that 57% of large enterprise companies had over $10K dedicated strictly to SEO activity each month, in contrast to just 24% of small enterprise companies allocating this much budget. 40% of large enterprise had over $20K dedicated to SEO activity each month, suggesting that SEO is a huge priority for them. And yet, as we saw earlier, they are not sold on their team having reached leader status.

Enterprise SEO managers in large companies value being scalable and repeatable

We asked survey takers to rate the success of their current SEO strategy, per the scale mapped below, and here are the results:

A smaller percentage of large enterprise SEOs had a clearly positive rating of the current success of their SEO strategy than did small enterprise SEOs. We even see more large enterprise SEOs “on the fence” about their strategy’s performance as opposed to small. This suggests that, from the enterprise SEOs we surveyed, the ones who work for smaller companies tend to be slightly more optimistic about their campaigns’ performance than the larger ones.

What’s notable about the responses to this question is that 18.33% of managers at large enterprise companies would rate themselves as successful — calling themselves “scalable and repeatable.” No one at a small enterprise selected this to describe their strategy. We clearly tapped into an important value for these teams, who use it enough to measure their performance that it’s a value they can report on to others as a benchmark of their success.

Anyone seeking to work with large enterprise clients needs to make sure their processes are scalable and repeatable. This also suggests that one way for a growing company to step up its SEO team’s game as it grows is by achieving these results. This would be a good topic for us to address in greater detail in articles, webinars, and other industry communication.

Agencies know best? (Agencies think they know best.)

Regardless of the resources available to them, across the board we see that in-house SEOs do not show as much confidence as agencies. Agencies are far more likely to rate their SEO strategy as successful: 43% of survey takers who worked for agencies rated their strategy as outright successful, as opposed to only 13% of in-house SEOs. That’s huge!

While nobody said their strategy was a total disaster — we clearly keep awesome company — 7% of in-house SEOs expressed frustration with their strategy, as opposed to only 1% of agencies.

Putting our bias as a link building agency aside, we would expect in-house SEO enterprise teams to work like in-house agencies. With the ability to hire top talent and purchase enterprise software solutions to automate and track campaigns, we expect them to have the appropriate tools and resources at their disposal to generate the same results and confidence as any agency.

So why the discrepancy? It’s hard to say for sure. One theory might be that those scalable, repeatable results we found earlier that serve as benchmarks for enterprise are difficult to attain, but the way agencies evolve might serve them better. Agencies tend to develop somewhat organically — expanding their processes over time and focusing on SEO from day one — as opposed to an in-house team in a company, which rarely was there from day one and, more often than not, sprouted up when the company’s growth made it such that marketing became a priority.

One clue for answering this question might come from examining the differences between how agencies and in-house SEO teams responded to the question asking them what they find to be the top two most difficult SEO obstacles they are currently facing.

Agencies have direction, need budget; in-house teams have budget, need direction

If we look at the top three obstacles faced by agencies and in-house teams, both of them place finding SEO talent up there. Both groups also say that demonstrating ROI is an issue, although it’s more of an obstacle for agencies rather than in-house SEO teams.

When we look at the third obstacles, we find the biggest reveal. While agencies find themselves hindered by trying to secure enough budget, in-house SEO teams struggle to develop the right content; this seems in line with the point we made in the previous section comparing agency versus in-house success. Agencies have the processes down, but need to work hard to fit their clients’ budgets. In-house teams have the budget they need, but have trouble lining them up to the exact processes their company needs to grow as desired. The fact that almost half of the in-house SEOs would rank developing the right content as their biggest obstacle — as opposed to just over a quarter of agencies — further supports this, particularly given how important content is to any marketing campaign.

Now, let’s take a step back and dig deeper into that second obstacle we noted: demonstrating ROI.

Everyone seems to be measuring success differently

One question that we asked of survey takers was about the top two technical SEO issues they monitor:

The spread across the different factors were roughly the same across the two different groups. The most notable difference between the two groups was that even more in-house SEO teams looked at page speed, although this was the top factor for both groups. Indexation was the second biggest factor for both groups, followed by duplicate content. There seems to be some general consensus about monitoring technical SEO issues.

But when we asked everyone what their top two factors are when reviewing their rankings, we got these results:

For both agencies and in-house SEO teams, national-level keywords were the top factor, although this was true for almost-three quarters of in-house SEOs and about half of agencies. Interestingly, agencies focused a bit more on geo/local keywords as well as mobile. From when we first opened this data we found this striking, because it suggests a narrative where in-house SEO teams focus on more conservative, “seasoned” methods, while agencies are more likely to stay on the cutting-edge.

Looking at the “Other” responses (free response), we had several write-ins from both subgroups who answered that traffic and leads were important to them. One agency survey-taker brought up a good point: that what they monitor “differs by client.” We would be remiss if we did not mention the importance of vertical-specific and client-specific approaches — even if you are working in-house, and your only client is your company. From this angle, it makes sense that everyone is measuring rankings and SEO differently.

However, we would like to see a bit more clarity within the community on setting these parameters, and we hope that these results will foster that sort of discussion. Please do feel free to reply in the comments:

• How do you measure ROI on your SEO efforts?
• How do you show your campaigns’ value?
• What would you change about how you’re currently measuring the success of your efforts?

So what’s next?

We’d love to hear about your experiences, in-house or agency, and how you’ve been able to demonstrate ROI on your campaigns.

We’re going to repeat this survey again next year, so stay tuned. We hope to survey a larger audience so that we can break down the groups we examine further and analyze response trends among the resulting subgroups. We wanted to do this here in this round of analysis, but were hesitant because of how small the resulting sample size would be.

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How to Compete with Big Spenders in AdWords (Without Spending More $)

I’ve got good news and bad news. In traditional fashion, let’s start with the bad news.

By almost every metric, businesses with big budgets are doing better in Google AdWords than lower spenders. Maybe not surprising, but it still hurts. The rich get richer while us little guys get left in the dust.

How do we know? We looked at 18,037 reports from our AdWords Performance Grader and compared performance between advertisers spending more than $50K a month and everyone else. And big spenders really came out ahead.

But wait! Don’t leave in despair just yet. The truth is, you can emulate a lot of what those bigger advertisers with deeper pockets are doing, without spending more money. In AdWords, success is often just a matter of getting more active and actually doing more stuff in your account! This is your good news.

Big spenders know this because there’s so much money on the line, they can’t afford to mess around. They can’t half-ass it or leave their account untouched for a month. Instead, they stay on top of their performance and make optimizations every week.

You can do that too – and get WAY better results, without just pouring more budget into your account.

In this article, we’ll show you the top nine things that big AdWords spenders are doing that you’re not, so you can compete with the big guys even on a smaller budget.

#1. Big Spenders ALWAYS Use Conversion Tracking

We think it’s crazy that anyone spending money in AdWords wouldn’t enable conversion tracking, but it does happen.

Not to big spenders though.

Fully 100% of advertisers spending more than $50K per month have conversion tracking on. Because OF COURSE they do!

If you’re not seeing your conversion volume creep up and to the right, how on Earth can you be expected to optimize for success? A 75% CTR sounds great, but if you can’t tie all those clicks back to conversions, you’re burning cash.

Luckily, most advertisers realize they need to track conversions in some fashion, and that’s reflected in our data. Only 7% of the lower spenders don’t have conversion tracking enabled. But there’s no reason both numbers couldn’t be 100%.

Even if you’re spending less money on AdWords than Coca-Cola, you should care about ROI.

Getting conversion tracking set up on your website is relatively simple and completely free (unless you need a developer’s assistance, in which case it’ll cost you a bit but it’s still more than worth it)! That $500 or $10,000 or however much you’re spending on AdWords ads each month can significantly impact your business. Learning how and why is paramount to your success in AdWords. That starts with conversion tracking.

#2. Big Spenders Have More Landing Pages

Even with conversion tracking enabled and a structurally sound account in place, there’s a factor outside of AdWords that can have a profound impact on performance. I’m talking about those action-inducing corners of your website to which you send paid traffic. I’m talking, of course, about landing pages.

Big-budget advertisers know that if you have multiple ads and multiple offers, you need multiple landing pages too. That’s because your prospects will respond much better to specific, tailored messaging that matches the ad they clicked very closely. If you’re sending all your traffic to one generic landing page (or worse, your home page!) they’re going to get confused and bounce.

More than 1 in 4 (26%) of lower-budget AdWords accounts only have a single active landing page, compared to just 4% of top-spending accounts.

You need to fix this!

We know the challenge here. When you’re small, you don’t have a fleet of designers and developers at the ready to build new landing pages at the drop of a hat.

But at the very least, you can duplicate your current design and begin testing images and copy. If your AdWords campaigns are built out logically and you’re currently using a single landing page across your whole account, make a duplicate version for each campaign.

This will allow you to optimize the language on each page for the subset of keywords you’re bidding on, improving relevance for both the user and the Quality Score algorithm (in an ideal world, you can do this ad the ad group level. But hey, I know you’re busy).

Regardless of which direction you take your landing page testing in, make sure there’s more than one! If you need any more proof that this is crucial to compete with the big guys, take a look at our next graph…

#3. On Average, Big Spenders Have a 17% Higher Conversion Rate

The average click-to-conversion rate of our top-spender accounts is 10.5%; in lower-spending accounts, the average conversion rate is 9.0%.

That may not sound like a big difference, but it means the money guys are getting 17% more conversions out of the same number of clicks, without having to spend more for more clicks.

How are they doing it?

Well, see above. Part of the reason that big spenders have more landing pages is because they prioritize conversion rate optimization.

When you start considering CRO, it’s tempting to skip right to your landing pages (if you have more than one!) and start fiddling with button colors and graphic elements. Don’t do that. Or, rather, do that later. But start at the beginning.

Make sure the keywords you’re bidding on relate to your business. Broad terms might bring in a ton of traffic, but paying for superfluous clicks is a waste of your budget. We recommend allocating more than half of your budget to high-intent, top-converting keywords.

You also need to make sure that the offers you’re pointing people to are truly compelling. A better offer can raise your conversion rates much more than a better button.

Once it comes time to address your landing pages, your goal should be to ensure a positive, useful, and speedy experience for visitors. You can do this by:

• Writing compelling headlines (just like your ads!)
• Using concise, targeted body copy
• Testing to uncover the most eye-catching, enticing CTA for your offer
• Designing a user-friendly form (making the journey from ad to purchase as frictionless as possible)
• A fast-loading, mobile-friendly design
• Advanced class: Try to affect your readers on an emotional level

It should come as no surprise that everything you can do to bolster conversion rates in your account has already been mentioned elsewhere in this post. It’s as if a small, focused subset of account activity yields the best possible return on your time and bottom line.

Who’d have thought…

Now, let’s remember that before conversion rates even come into play, searchers need to click on your ads in the first place. Well, big spenders have you beat there too…

#4. Top Spenders Have 38% Higher Click-Through Rates

We’ve often extolled the virtues of optimizing for clickability. Having a super-high CTR ultimately means that your ads are appealing to your prospects, and Google loves that.

Getting complete strangers to click on your ads is part art, part science. As you may have guessed, top-spenders tend to nail both sides of the CTR coin.

Top-spending AdWords accounts have an average CTR of almost 7%, whereas low spenders have an average CTR of 5%.That’s a 38% difference, a chasm in a world where a few measly percentage points can mean the difference between profitability and boarding your doors.

So how are the big guys doing it? The truth is, bidding more isn’t going to make your ads more clickable. The ads at the top of the SERP are generally the ones with the highest Quality Scores, which correlates highly with relevance and better-than-expected click-through rate. If your ads really resonate with users, you can get high CTR even if you’re bidding less than bigger advertisers!

If you’re not spending tons of dough in AdWords, you can compete with the big guys by spending more time on your ad copy, and by getting creative. Here are some of our best guides to writing effective PPC ads that earn lots of clicks:

• 7 Best Practices for Expanded Text Ads
• How to Create Expanded Text Ads [Guide + Free Template]
• Our 8 Best Ad Copywriting Tips EVER!
• The 4 Emotions that Make the Best Emotional Ads
• 4 Simple but Powerful Tactics for Writing Compelling Ad Copy

Most people don’t read past the headline; thanks to expanded text ads, AdWords now gives you two of them to work with. By improving relevance (leveraging your target keyword) and including a call to action in one of your headlines, you can improve your CTRs without having to crack your piggy bank open.

#5. Big Spenders Are Using More Ad Extensions (4,631% More)

What if I told you there’s an extremely easy, totally FREE way to raise the CTR of your ads without even having to get creative?

That method is ad extensions.

Where top-spenders have an average of 31 ad extensions for every text ad in their accounts, low-spenders tend to operate at a one-to-one ratio.

Framed another way, there were 4,631% more ad extensions in the set of 450 top-spending accounts we analyzed than in the 17,587 low-spending accounts.

Further, top spenders have extensions enabled on about half of their ads (48%), while the lower spenders only have extensions enabled on 17% of their ads, leaving 83% of their ads extensionless.

Yikes.

When it comes to PPC ads, size matters, and these top spenders know that you can use every ad extension in the book to make your Expanded Text Ads big enough to blot out the sun (or at least the rest of the SERP).

Provided your ads are served in the top three positions, there are a dozen extensions you can use to increase both value and ad real estate (and that doesn’t even include the automated extensions Google’s wont to sling your way just because it’s a Wednesday afternoon).

We get it. If you’re a one-man-band, routine optimization and writing ads is time-consuming enough; worrying about optional ad extensions probably feels like a waste of time.

I assure you, it isn’t.

Depending which one’s served, ad extensions have the chance to improve your CTR six-fold. Why? Because in concert with the additional value and information they provide your prospects, ad extensions also push your competitor’s ads and organic listing further down the SERP; if there’s only one gas station in town, that’s where everybody’s going to fuel up.

Now, if what you just read has inspired you to open another browser and add more ad extensions to your own AdWords account, do me this one favor: apply them to every campaign!

Per WordStream’s own Mark Irvine, 13.5% of AdWords accounts don’t have their sitelink extensions applied to every campaign. If this is the case for the hyper-valuable sitelink extension, I can only imagine it’s the same—if not worse— for the rest of ‘em.

Ad extensions get people to notice your ad faster, and even if they don’t drive direct clicks, you’ll certainly notice more clicks on the main headline when an ad extension is showing; take a page out of the big boys’ playbook and implement them today!

#6. Big Spenders Add (a Lot) More Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are the offensive line of any high-functioning AdWords account: you know they’re there, but you only really think about them when something’s their fault.

If you’re bidding on the perfect keywords (high intent! relevant! volumetrically salient!) but you can’t seem to earn a conversion to save your life, it’s probably not because your prospects don’t like you. Provided you’re tracking conversions, it’s likely that either…

• A lack of negative keywords is causing a deluge of superfluous impressions, many of which are stealing budget away from those interested in your offer
• Overzealous negative keywords are impeding your ability to enter auctions for relevant search queries

If you operate with a lean marketing budget, I’m willing to wager that it’s the former. Why?

Because 8% of low-spending AdWords accounts have no negative keywords at all, and 62% have less than 250; 98% of top-spending accounts have more than 250 negative keywords.

Let’s say you sell crocodile loafers and you’re bidding on the keyword +men’s +shoes.  How many of these terms do you want to serve ads for?

Many of them are simply too broad to justify paying for (see: “shoes”). Others may be off-brand (“sneakers” or “cheap shoes”). Paired with the sky-high monthly search volume on some of these, you’d be out of budget before you could blink.

Large advertisers have already figured this out, and devote a little time each week to reviewing their search query reports, between visits to the Ping-Pong table and chocolate fountain.

For the rest of us, by simply jumping into the search terms report available in AdWords, filtering out terms that converted, and sorting by impressions, we’re able to discern whether a search query is making us money or costing us money. While doing so, it’s well worth the little extra elbow grease to add negative keywords frequently if you want to maximize your ad spend.

(P.S. Note that shuffling this process a bit and filtering explicitly for converting search queries can be a greatway to uncover new keywords for your account.)

#7. Big Spenders Have 1,448% More Expanded Text Ads

Per the illustrious Mark Irvine (again – useful guy), wholesale expanded text ad (ETA) adoption across AdWords accounts (regardless of size and monthly spend) is at 71%; better still, a mere 5% of advertisers are completely stuck in the past, subsisting on the vastly inferior standard text ad format alone.

Advertisers, rejoice!

Hold that thought.

Our new research indicates that, when we look at ETA adoption in high-spend vs. low-spend accounts, the disparity is far greater. In fact, there were 1,448% more Expanded Text Ads in top-spending accounts than their lower-spending counterparts.

When ETA’s first came on the scene, pausing standard text ads and replacing them completely was considered passé. As such, many advertisers opted to rotate their top performing standard ad against a new ETA. When the STA inevitably outperformed the ETA (thanks, historical data!), advertisers paused the big, shiny ETA . Hell, we did this in our own account: Why ostensibly waste ad spend?

These tests were misleading, though. Really misleading. Eventually, those still leaning on shorter ads are going to be left in the dust. If maximizing SERP real estate with ad extensions is recommended, doing so with your ad copy alone should be required.

As usual, the disparity probably stems from larger advertisers having the resources to continue testing new ads and smaller advertisers, well, not. While top-spenders have spent the better part of a year replacing old ads with new ones and removing even top-performing standard ads from their ad rotation, smaller advertisers are lagging behind.

The solution? Simple.

Taker everything you’ve learned from this post so far and use it to roll out a wave of killer Expanded Text Ads. Like most of our advice here, it won’t cost you anything but a little effort. The big boys on the SERP won’t know what hit ‘em.

#8. High Spenders Have Higher Quality Scores

Once upon a time, there was a unicorn-loving digital marketing personality who believed in the value of Quality Score above all. His name was Larry. Maybe you’re familiar with him?

Our founder’s obsession with Quality Score is understandable. I mean, it’s a valuable metric that, despite countless think pieces, is still shrouded in secrecy. What we do know about QS is that it can significantly impact your CPC.

As you can see, Quality Score can drastically raise or reduce your average CPC.

A perfect Quality Score can discount your CPC by about 50%; a heinous Quality Score can increase costs by 400%. At that point, you’re either bidding on the wrong keywords or there’s some serious work to be done on your ads and landing pages.

Anyway…

Impression-weighted Quality Score is a variation on the QS metric that’s available to you in AdWords. The difference is straightforward: it adjusts for the number of impressions (shocking, I know), giving you some much needed context. Impression-weighted Quality score isn’t a KPI, per se, but it is an indicator of health. Like an AdWords thermometer.

According to our new research, top-spenders have an average impression-weighted Quality Score of 6.3, where low-spenders average just 5.6.

That 12% difference might not sound like much, but in reality, it represents unneeded budget inefficiency that small businesses simply cannot sustain. If you’ve got a lower budget, you need to do everything in your power to make sure you’re spending it efficiently.

To determine the impression-weighted Quality Score of a given ad group or campaign use the following formula:

(Impressions * Quality Score) / Impressions  

Once you’ve got a handle on your impression-weighted Quality Score, it’s time to pull some levers to improve it. The factors that impact Quality Score the most are:

• That all-important CTR
• Ad relevance
• Landing page experience

These should all look familiar.

Again, improving ad copy and landing page quality are the most direct ways to close the gap between the average joe and the multi-national conglomerate (at least when it comes to AdWords).

#9. Big Spenders Take More Actions in Their Accounts

If you’re not familiar with the AdWords Performance Grader, here’s a little primer: It’s a free tool that runs a quick audit on your AdWords account, checking for many of the best practices outlined above (Quality Score, negative keywords, account activity, etc.) and gives you an overall grade based on your performance.

The Grader also checks for account activity, because in our experience, strong performance correlates highly with doing stuff – logging into your account and making adjustments for improvement. If you don’t even look at your account for weeks at a time, how are you going to improve anything?

Unsurprisingly, we found that the $50K-and-up crowd aren’t just spending more money in their accounts; they’re also spending more time there. Check it out:

The big spenders group is WAY more active – 1196% more active. They’re getting in there and actually doing all the stuff we talked about above.

What Does It All Mean?

Money can’t buy happiness and it can’t buy you a perfect AdWords account.

However, with great budgets comes great responsibility. Businesses that spend a lot on their online advertising take their account performance very seriously, so they invest time and attention in their accounts, not just money.

Even if you can’t raise your budget significantly, you can make like a big spender and commit to more activity in your account: adding new keywords and negative keywords, testing new ads, building dedicated landing pages, enabling every ad extension under the sun.

We promise, if you spend a month or two working diligently on your account, without spending a penny more, you’ll see your own AdWords Grader score go up too.

Data Sources

We pulled all the data collected from AdWords Performance Grader reports in the last quarter (Q2 2017), excluding duplicate reports from users who had previously run a report and users with $0 in spend. We separately analyzed accounts spending $50,000 per month and up, and accounts spending $1-$49,999 per month. We only looked at advertisers bidding in USD, AUD, CAD, EUR and ZAR.

Thanks to Meg Lister, Kate Lindsay, and Elisa Gabbert for their work on this group effort.

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How to Diagnose Pages that Rank in One Geography But Not Another – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Are you ranking pretty well in one locale, only to find out your rankings tank in another? It’s not uncommon, even for sites without an intent to capture local queries. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows you how to diagnose the issue with a few clever SEO tricks, then identify the right strategy to get back on top.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to this edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about rankings that differ from geography to geography. Many of you might see that you are ranking particularly well in one city, but when you perform that search in another city or in another country perhaps, that still speaks the same language and has very similar traits, that maybe you’re not performing well.

Maybe you do well in Canada, but you don’t do well in the United States. Maybe you do well in Portland, Oregon, but you do poorly in San Diego, California. Sometimes you might be thinking to yourself, “Well, wait, this search is not particularly local, or at least I didn’t think of it as being particularly local. Why am I ranking in one and not the other?” So here’s a process that you can use to diagnose.

Confirm the rankings you see are accurate:

The first thing we need to do is confirm that the rankings you see or that you’ve heard about are accurate. This is actually much more difficult than it used to be. It used to be you could scroll to the bottom of Google and change your location to whatever you wanted. Now Google will geolocate you by your IP address or by a precise location on your mobile device, and unfortunately you can’t just specify one particular location or another — unless you know some of these SEO hacks.

A. Google’s AdPreview Tool – Google has an ad preview tool, where you can specify and set a particular location. That’s at AdWords.Google.com slash a bunch of junk slash ad preview. We’ll make sure that the link is down in the notes below.

B. The ampersand-near-equals parameter (&near=) – Now, some SEOs have said that this is not perfect, and I agree it is imperfect, but it is pretty close. We’ve done some comparisons here at Moz. I’ve done them while I’m traveling. It’s not bad. Occasionally, you’ll see one or two things that are not the same. The advertisements are frequently not the same. In fact, they don’t seem to work well. But the organic results look pretty darn close. The maps results look pretty darn close. So I think it’s a reasonable tool that you can use.

That is by basically changing the Google search query — so this is the URL in the search query — from Google.com/search?q= and then you might have ice+cream or WordPress+web+design, and then you use this, &near= and the city and state here in the United States or city and province in Canada or city and region in another country. In this case, I’m going with Portland+OR. This will change my results. You can give this a try yourself. You can see that you will see the ice cream places that are in Portland, Oregon, when you perform this search query.

For countries, you can use another one. You can either go directly to the country code Google, so for the UK Google.co.uk, or for New Zealand Google.co.nz, or for Canada Google.ca. Then you can type that in.You can also use this parameter &GL= instead of &near. This is global location equals the country code, and then you could put in CA for Canada or UK for the UK or NZ for New Zealand.

C. The Mozbar’s search profiles – You can also do this with the MozBar. The MozBar kind of hacks the near parameter for you, and you can just specify a location and create a search profile. Do that right inside the MozBar. That’s one of the very nice things about using it.

D. Rank tracking with a platform that supports location-specific rankings – Some of them don’t, some of them do. Moz does right now. I believe Searchmetrics does if you use the enterprise. Oh, I’m trying to remember if Rob Bucci said STAT does. Well, Rob will answer in the comments, and he’ll tell us whether STAT does. I think that they do.

Look at who IS ranking and what features they may have:

So next, once you’ve figured out whether this ranking anomaly that you perceive is real or not, you can step two look at who is ranking in the one where you’re not and figure out what factors they might have going for them.

• Have they gotten a lot of local links, location-specific links from these websites that are in that specific geography or serve that geography, local chambers of commerce, local directories, those kinds of things?
• Do they have a more hyper-local service area? On a map, if this is the city, do they serve that specific region? You serve a broad set of locations all over the place, and maybe you don’t have a geo-specific region that you’re serving.
• Do they have localized listings, listings in places like where Moz Local or a competitor like Yext or Whitespark might push all their data to? Those could be things like Google Maps and Bing Maps, directories, local data aggregators, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc., etc.
• Do they have rankings in Google Maps? If you go and look and you see that this website is ranking particularly well in Google Maps for that particular region and you are not, that might be another signal that hyper-local intent and hyper-local ranking signals, ranking algorithm is in play there.
• Are they running local AdWords ads? I know this might seem like, “Wait a minute. Rand, I thought ads were not directly connected to organic search results.” They’re not, but it tends to be the case that if you bid on AdWords, you tend to increase your organic click-through rate as well, because people see your ad up at the top, and then they see you again a second time, and so they’re a little more biased to click. Therefore, buying local ads can sometimes increase organic click-through rate as well. It can also brand people with your particular business. So that is one thing that might make a difference here.

Consider location-based searcher behaviors:

Now we’re not considering who is ranking, but we’re considering who is doing the searching, these location-based searchers and what their behavior is like.

• Are they less likely to search for your brand because you’re not as well known in that region?
• Are they less likely to click your site in the SERPs because you’re not as well known?
• Is their intent somehow different because of their geography? Maybe there’s a language issue or a regionalism of some kind. This could be a local language thing even here in the United States, where parts of the country say “soda” and parts of the country say “pop.” Maybe those mean two different things, and “pop” means, “Oh, it’s a popcorn store in Seattle,” because there’s the Pop brand, but in the Midwest, “pop” clearly refers to types of soda beverages.
• Are they more or less sensitive to a co-located solution? So it could be that in many geographies, a lot of your market doesn’t care about whether the solution that they’re getting is from their local region, and in others it does. A classic one on a country level is France, whose searchers tend to care tremendously more that they are getting .fr results and that the location of the business they are clicking on is in France versus other folks in Europe who might click a .com or a .co.uk with no problem.

Divide into three buckets:

You’re going to divide the search queries that you care about that have these challenges into three different types of buckets:

Bucket one: Hyper-geo-sensitive

This would be sort of the classic geo-specific search, where you see maps results right up at the top. The SERPs change completely from geo to geo. So if you perform the search in Portland and then you perform it in San Diego, you see very, very different results. Seven to nine of the top ten at least are changing up, and it’s the case that almost no non-local listings are showing in the top five results. When you see these, this is probably non-targetable without a physical location in that geography. So if you don’t have a physical location, you’re kind of out of business until you get there. If you do, then you can work on the local ranking signals that might be holding you back.

Bucket two: Semi-geo-sensitive

I’ve actually illustrated this one over here, because this can be a little bit challenging to describe. But basically, you’re getting a mix of geo-specific and global results. So, for example, I use the &near=Portland, Oregon, because I’m in Seattle and I want to see Portland’s results for WordPress web design.

WordPress web design, when I do the search all over the United States, the first one or two results are pretty much always the same. They’re always this Web Savvy Marketing link and this Creative Bloq, and they’re very broad. They are not specifically about a local provider of WordPress web design.

But then you get to number three and four and five, and the results change to be local-specific businesses. So in Portland, it’s these Mozak Design guys. Mozak, no relation to Moz, to my knowledge anyway. In San Diego, it’s Kristin Falkner, who’s ranking number three, and then other local San Diego WordPress web design businesses at four and five. So it’s kind of this mix of geo and non-geo. You can generally tell this by looking and changing your geography in this fashion seeing those different things.

Some of the top search results usually will be like this, and they’ll stay consistent from geography to geography. In these cases, what you want to do is work on boosting those local-specific signals. So if you are ranking number five or six and you want to be number three, go for that, or you can try and be in the global results, in which case you’re trying to boost the classic ranking signals, not the local ones so you can get up there.

Bucket three: Non-geo-sensitive

Those would be, “I do this search, and I don’t see any local-specific results.” It’s just a bunch of nationwide or worldwide brands. There are no maps, usually only one, maybe two geo-specific results in the top 10, and they tend to be further down, and the SERPs barely change from geo to geo. They’re pretty much the same throughout the country.

So once you put these into these three buckets, then you know which thing to do. Here, it’s pursue classic signals. You probably don’t need much of a local boost.

Here, you have the option of going one way or the other, boosting local signals to get into these rankings or boosting the classic signals to get into those global ones.

Here you’re going to need the physical business.

All right, everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.

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Landing Page Tests, Conversion Rate Stats, & More Top Stories from August

I know I say this every month, but man, there was a lot going on at the WordStream blog in August.

It might not have been the busiest month news-wise (though we did see some important changes to how ad rotation is handled in AdWords), but that didn’t stop us from publishing some very exciting content this month.

 

As we prepare to move into September, here’s a round-up of the most popular posts from the WordStream blog in August. We’ve got something for everyone this month, from actionable guides on tests you can run on your landing pages to an in-depth exploration of how to crush your competitors using Facebook Ads.

1. 6 Landing Page Test Ideas You Need to Try

Our most popular post of the month (by a fair country distance) was this guide to landing page test ideas, courtesy of Brad Smith.

 

Not content to merely suggest a list of vague tests you could try, Brad offers in-depth strategies for each test backed up by real-world examples of tests from well-known brands. If you’re as obsessed with landing page optimization as we are (and we know you are, nerds), you need to check out this post.

2. The Big, Easy Guide to Keyword Research for Businesses

First of all, Margot deserves extra credit for resisting the temptation to try and shoe-horn a Raymond Chandler reference into this post – bravo, Margot. Secondly, this guide provides you with everything you need to know about conducting thorough, competitive keyword research for your next campaign regardless of what kind of business you’re in. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or a complete newcomer, Margot’s got you covered.

3. 5 Ways to Use Facebook Ads to Take Down Your Competitors

Sometimes, it’s not enough to use Facebook to just reach new customers and grow your business. As a particularly famous barbarian once said, sometimes you need to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.

 

In this post, Allen shows you how to do precisely that using Facebook Ads. From creating custom remarketing audiences to building highly specific Facebook Ad conversion funnels, Allen offers five actionable strategies for crushing the competition. Essential reading.

4. These 4 Forgotten AdWords Best Practices Still Matter – Here’s Proof

One of the best things about AdWords is that the platform is constantly changing to offer advertisers more ways to connect with new customers. Unfortunately, this also means constantly having to adjust and respond to these changes on the fly – a considerable challenge for busy marketers. Fortunately, Mark is here to help, and in our fourth-most popular post from August, he outlines four important AdWords best practices that remain relevant today. How many of these are you still using?

5. The Google Fred Update: Why It Matters and What to Do

The Google search algorithm update that was deployed in early March sent SEOs the world over into a blind panic. Some sites saw overnight drops in traffic of up to 90%, while others actually noted increases in traffic after the update rolled out – but what was the “Fred” update, and why does it matter? In this post, yours truly explains what Google Fred was, what it did, and how you can prevent catastrophic traffic losses by future-proofing your site.

6. Positive vs. Negative Ads: Which Works Better?

We’ve been telling our readers for years that leveraging emotional triggers in your ads is one of the best ways to increase click-through rates. However, when it comes to which kinds of emotional triggers are most effective, things can get a little complicated. Is it better to appeal to positive emotional reactions in your ads, or pull those dastardly levers with negative emotional manipulation?

 

In our sixth-most popular post of the month, Allen examines the pros and cons of using positive and negative emotional triggers in your campaigns, and explains which you should consider using.

7. Google Announces Major Changes to Ad Rotation Settings

On September 25, Google will implement major new changes to how ad rotation is handled in AdWords. As one of the most fundamental aspects of the platform, this is a Very Big Deal. In this post, Mark explains what the changes will do, why Google is making them, and how you as an advertiser can position yourself to take advantage of the changes as soon as they’re live. If you use AdWords, you need to read this post.

8. 24 Instagram Marketing Tools for More Followers, Likes & Sales

Do you use Instagram as part of your social media marketing strategy? Would you like more followers, likes, and sales? Then you’re in luck!

 

In our eighth-most popular post from August, Mary lists 24 Instagram marketing tools that will help you attract more fans, boost engagement with your Instagram content, and ultimately drive more sales.

9. 33 CRO & Landing Page Optimization Stats to Fuel Your Strategy

Did you know that the average web form has 11(!) fields? Or that you can effectively double your conversion rates by eliminating the navigational elements from your landing pages?

These are just two of the 33 amazing conversion rate and landing page optimization stats from our penultimate post of this month’s round-up, courtesy of Mary. Seriously, some of these stats will blow your mind.

10. 10 Self-Editing Tips That Will Make You a Better Writer

Love it or hate it, editing remains one of the most crucial stages of the writing process. Although not everyone is comfortable self-editing their own work, learning to do so is one of the best things you can do to improve your skills as a writer, and in our final post of this month’s round-up, Elisa offers 10 excellent self-editing tips that will make you a better writer. If you’re looking for ways to gain an edge over all the other writers out there, this is a great place to start.

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