What Shifts in Product Demand Mean for SEO

Posted by SabrinaBomberger

If you’re working in e-commerce through the COVID-19 crisis, you’ve likely noticed some wild shifts in the way your products are viewed and consumed by the public. After all, the needs of the entire world have changed in some capacity. It makes sense that purchasing habits have, too.

This shift in demand might require an equal shift in your marketing strategy. As an SEO, you need to make sure that you understand the new demands on your product in the given market, and ensure any on-site changes are SEO-friendly.

These strategies apply not only in the midst of our current pandemic, but also during any rapid or unexpected change in product demand.

E-commerce sites are facing two very different scenarios

With my own e-commerce clients, and as a consumer myself, I’ve noticed two ways that the COVID-19 outbreak is affecting product demand:

1. Your product is suddenly a hot commodity and demand has skyrocketed.

Sporting goods, home office supplies, and backyard furniture have all exploded since social distancing guidelines were imposed.

Roller skates, for example, are having a moment. Lots of people (including me!) have turned to skating and other outdoor activities for recreation. And with many brick-and-mortar stores closed, we’re buying these items online.

[Alt text: Google Trends chart for the keyword “roller skates”, which shows relatively steady numbers until a sharp increase in March 2020]

2. Your product is suddenly less relevant to the market and demand has drastically decreased.

Items like apparel, shoes, and luxury goods are all experiencing this to a degree. Engagement rings — being expensive and tied to a major life event — saw a sharp decrease in search volume in March 2020.

[Alt text: Google Trends chart for the keyword “engagement rings”, which sees relatively steady numbers until a sharp decrease in March 2020.]

These examples fall on opposite ends of a demand spectrum. Take time to analyze your traffic and consider which side of the spectrum your product lands on, so you can make the best of your situation as an SEO and marketer.

If your product is more in demand than ever

You may think it’s all positive when your product is in a season of high demand, especially during an economic downturn. But an unexpected uptick in demand can cause a host of marketing and SEO challenges to contend with. Here are some of the most important considerations to take into account if your products are newly booming.

Manage temporary out-of-stock products

Disrupted supply chains paired with a demand increase is a recipe for an out-of-stock disaster, at least temporarily. If this isn’t something your site typically deals with, you may be the one who has to figure out what to do with these product pages while you wait for a restock.

Dr. Pete has a fantastic article about the best way to handle temporary out-of-stock that you should check out if this is your scenario.

Spoiler alert: please don’t 404 these pages if the product will be restocked. Also, make sure that you’re providing helpful information about where users can find the product in stores, or how they can be notified when it’s back in stock online.

Address common user questions

Given the extreme circumstances we’re collectively experiencing, customers need to be reassured about any contingencies they’ll face when ordering your product. It is critically important to address these pain points with on-site messaging during a sudden uptick in order volume for two reasons:

1. You are likely unprepared for a massive influx of customer service calls. Even if you are prepared, you should do what you can to spare your customer service reps!
2. Many customers don’t want to reach out to customer service to get a basic question answered. If they can’t find the information quickly on your site, they’re more likely to find another site to take their money.

If you don’t know what your customers are asking about, there are a few ways to find out:

• Talk to your customer service reps. They speak with your customers every day, and likely have answered the same questions over and over again. These are the questions to address on-site.
• Mine your chat logs for repeat questions.
• See what customers are asking about on social media — check your linked and unlinked mentions!
• Address anything you know to be a current concern: are there shipping delays? Back ups with your warehouse? Let people know about it up front to save yourself from angry customer messages later.

You can respond to these questions in several different ways on your site. Adding banners, pop-ups, and even prominently displaying your FAQ page are all options. Just make sure your message is easy to find without detracting from important product details.

Moxi Skates provides a great example of this strategy in action. On every product page, they include a “COVID Questions” tab to address changes in operations due to the pandemic. They also have a message directly under the “Add to Cart” button telling users how long they can expect to wait for their skates.

[Alt text: A product page from Moxi Skates that includes a “COVID Questions” tab, describing what customers need to know about the current shipping status of the product.]

Meet your users where they are

If your product is suddenly popular because of a lifestyle change for your customer (such as working from a home office instead of in-office), you could test new language and imagery to keep your products relevant in their new setting.

Vari makes desks and other office furniture, including popular standing desks. Before the pandemic, their homepage featured only in-office business imagery. Now, they prominently feature desk solutions for home learning and work-from-home. This didn’t replace their office-focused messaging, but supplemented it in a useful way.

Notice there’s no overdone “in these trying times” or “now more than ever” language. Rather they’re speaking directly to this newly popular use for their product.

[Alt text: A screen shot from Vari’s homepage that pictures a woman working at a desk. The main text says “Feel at Home Wherever You Work.”]

Find opportunities to create new indexed pages

With the advent of new concepts comes the opportunity for new indexed pages — both on the content and product side.

Five months ago, “social distance supplies” had no monthly search volume, and likely didn’t mean much to any of us. Yet now it’s the language we use to describe products like hand sanitizer, cleaning wipes, masks, and gloves.

Sure you could call those items “safety supplies”, “cleaning supplies”, or “PPE”, and you might still want to do that, but there’s a new opportunity to use “social distancing supplies” as another relevant semantic grouping that may capture additional search traffic.

Concepts like this can be slow to show promise in keyword research tools, but it’s important as SEOs to be on top of the language users are actually using to refer to new concepts related to our products.

Here are a few ways to spot trends before keyword research tools do:

1. Monitor internal site search for any novel concepts or terms.
2. Spend time where your users do — are they in parent groups on Facebook talking about pandemic pods and distance learning? If so, they were likely there discussing these concepts before they were trending in search tools.
3. Stay connected to the news and watch for anything that might be relevant to your products.

This “At-Home Learning” category page from Target pulls together products including desks and chairs, art supplies, computers, and more in one indexed page, providing a one-stop-shop for new homeschooling parents. At the time of this writing, this page is ranking in position six for the “at home learning” keyword in the United States, which is quite impressive for an e-commerce page in an information-dominated SERP.

[Alt text: A screenshot of Target’s At-Home Learning category. The main text says “Study from home - Find all the supplies, gadgets, furniture & more to help get into a remote learning routine.”]

If your product demand has suddenly decreased

Now we need to talk about the other side of the coin — what if demand for your product has drastically decreased?

Luxury goods, apparel, and anything that includes a “try in-store, buy online” model are struggling.

If you work in marketing at an e-commerce site that’s suffering through the COVID-19 crisis, it may feel like there’s nothing you can do. While you can’t change the market, there are still practical ways you can help your company make the most of the situation.

Highlight your most relevant products

Although some clothing retailers are struggling, many of them have leaned into the stay-at-home situation by creating a loungewear category and prominently featuring it in their marketing. Though loungewear isn’t the primary focus for many of these businesses, nor the most expensive clothing category, it’s more likely to be purchased while customers are staying at home.

Check out Google Trends for “loungewear” — you can see why retailers have heavily promoted this category for the last several months.

[Alt text: Google Trends chart of the keyword “loungewear,” which shows relatively steady numbers until a sharp increase in March 2020.]

Even if you’re not in the apparel business, you can employ this strategy by scanning your product catalog for any lesser-promoted products that could be more relevant in the current climate.

If you can’t find any, consider tweaking your messaging.

Craft messaging for the moment

If your typical brand messaging no longer makes sense given the change in your customers’ lifestyles, you need to update the language you’re using to communicate with them. It doesn’t do your users any good to pretend that we’re not in the middle of a pandemic.

Right now, messaging like “Look good for summer concerts, vacays, and nights out!” just makes me sad. Don’t remind your users that they can’t do those things right now.

Again, your messaging doesn’t have to be doom and gloom, but make sure it fits: “Look good for backyard hangouts, virtual happy hours, and Sunday drives!” is much more appropriate, and positions your product as relevant even in an upside-down world.

Replace in-person experiences with virtual try-ons

Businesses that employ a “try in-person, buy online” model are facing a unique challenge. How do you encourage customers to purchase something, like an engagement ring, without seeing it first in person? Though some users are growing more comfortable with a fully online experience, others still prefer to interact with a salesperson or stylist for this type of purchase.

Creating a virtual try-on experience can be useful in at least partially replacing that in-person component, and can be achieved with dedicated customer service and/or development resources.

Anna Sheffield, a fine jewelry designer, offers live virtual appointments that are prominently featured on their site. This service offers customers a personal touch, and gets them connected with a brand representative who can help encourage a confident purchase without leaving the house.

[Alt text: A screenshot of Anna Sheffield’s virtual appointment information, detailing how users can set up a consultation with a stylist.]

Brilliant Earth, another company that sells wedding rings, uses a tool that allows users to virtually try on rings from home. No additional customer service time required.

[Alt text: A screenshot of Brilliant Earth’s instructions for how to use their virtual engagement ring try on tool.]

Offer buy-now-pay-later

E-commerce sites have more options than ever to extend payment plans to their customers. Afterpay, Affirm, and Klarna are all popular extensions that allow you to offer credit to your customers easily and securely.

For users feeling nervous about buying something that they don’t strictly need during a recession, this could be the difference that causes them to convert.

Summing it up

Change in consumer demand is a challenge that all businesses face, and now more than ever (see what I did there), it’s important for e-commerce SEOs to be responsive to these changes. Although none of us could have predicted what 2020 had in store, we can assess how the market has responded to our products and act accordingly.

What pivots have you or your clients made in e-commerce business models this year? Let me know in the comments!

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How To Focus Your SEO Strategy: A Quick Guide for Businesses New to Online Optimization

Posted by AnnaleisMontgomery

With businesses making the move to serve their customers primarily online and the footfall of customers in physical stores dropping dramatically, the value of SEO has been rediscovered. Businesses are now paying closer attention to their online experience and how they can compete on the internet.

This post will offer a guide to businesses looking to enhance their organic reach and traffic, by providing some SEO solutions to issues they might be experiencing. This includes information suitable for businesses that haven’t engaged with SEO as a channel before, as well as those who have had more experience with it. The goal is to gain more traffic and increase conversions.

Scenario 1: You don’t know what keywords you should be ranking for

Targeting the right keywords is central to getting a return from SEO. Targeting the most valuable and relevant keywords to your product/service is crucial.

How to know what keywords to target:

• They should be relevant to your product/service offering
• They should have a search volume large enough to target an audience that is worthwhile. This can vary depending on the country, how specific your product/service is, and seasonality. Using your judgment is crucial here; your own knowledge about your specific industry and market will help you target the right keywords with the search demand relevant to your business.

Tools to conduct your keyword research:

1. Moz Keyword Explorer → a keyword research tool that offers access to millions of keywords that can help form your list. You can see keyword suggestions, current ranking websites, and all the metrics on the keyword itself.
   Cost: Create a free account to get you started.
2. Ahrefs ‘Keyword Explorer’ or ‘Keyword Generator’ → these tools are amazing for finding new keywords to target, variations, seeing their search volume, generating keyword ideas, and more. Cost: They offer a 7 day trial for $7.
3. Google Trends → is a platform that lets you look at the search trend for a select group of keywords. You can compare the keywords to each other, and look into the monthly search trends around the topic. Looking at these trends can also help you avoid targeting the wrong keywords. Sometimes, some keywords have a higher average monthly search volume when compared to another, however, the other keyword might suddenly receive a high search interest due to an emerging trend.
   Cost: It’s free!
4. Answer The Public → will let you view questions that are commonly searched for around your keyword. This can help with generating content ideas, as well as provide insight into the types of things people are searching for around your important keywords.
   Cost: It’s free!
5. Google Search Console → this tool helps you track the performance of your website in the organic search results, and is an excellent resource when it comes to SEO. It can be used to discover what keywords your website is currently ranking for, and what keywords are performing better/worse over a period of time. (If you haven’t already set this up for your site, please do so now!)
   Cost: It’s free!

After all this, you combine your keywords, de-dupe and filter them out accordingly, to keep relevant keywords that you want to target in a list.

What do I do once I have my list of keywords?

Optimize your website to include them! This can involve:

1. Updating your on-page metadata. 

• Page titles = should be unique to the page, clear and relevant, and under 60 characters (so it doesn't get cut off in the search results). 
• Meta Descriptions = include important keywords, without “keyword stuffing” (which is when you cram a lot of keywords in together and it doesn’t read well). This should be up to 150-160 characters to avoid it being cut off. 
• H1s = these are the on-page headings, typically displayed at the top of the page, These should be relevant to the page, as they provide structure to the article and context to Google and the user.

2. Create content around the keywords. Tools like Answer The Public will provide you with some ideas of questions/topics asked around important keywords. Make a blog post out of those! Make sure you have a title for it that includes those keywords, and is easily understandable. Internal linking is also an important factor in pages ranking well. Link important pages (these are usually the pages that are most linked to on your site, such as those included in your main navigation), to those that you want to rank well. Passing link equity between these pages signals to Google that these pages are worth showing to the user.

For more information on keyword research and implementation, be sure to read through The Keyword Research Master Guide from Moz.

Scenario 2: Your rankings have dropped

You’ve noticed that your website has dropped from the search results for a few key terms, however, you’re unsure of the reason. To be honest, this is a bit of a black hole as there could be numerous reasons. If you’d like to read further into this issue, a few articles I recommend are Tom Capper’s article “Organic traffic down YoY? It’s not what you think…”, as well as “Using the Flowchart Method for Diagnosing Ranking Drops — Best of Whiteboard Friday”. However, to keep things simple, I’ll detail a few options that can be checked and are fundamental to rankings.

How to identify this issue:

• Spot check → the keywords that you know your website ranks well for suddenly aren’t ranking your site in the same position.
• “Average position” in Google Search Console → this metric shows the average position ranking of your website as a whole, as well as having a table that displays various keyword ranks.
• Rank trackers → A tool called STAT lets you enter in a list of keywords, which you then “run” to track over a few days. Once it's finished tracking, you get access to up to date information on how keywords are ranking, for what pages and access to multiple reports surrounding the performance. This is a great tool to see what keywords are dropping in ranks, or increasing.

Ways to fix it:

1. Check robots.txt and sitemaps → to make sure Google is able to access them, and all pages that are included should be. (This is also included in a tech audit).
2. Technical SEO audit → will show you any technical issues that might be occurring on the site that have affected rankings. This can be done by running a crawl of your website (could use Screaming Frog or Deepcrawl, for example). Things that can arise are a group of 404 pages, noindex,nofollow directives, incorrect canonical tags, lack of internal linking, etc.
3. Errors and warnings → Google Search Console displays all the errors and warnings that are occurring on the site. These should be looked into, as they could affect the performance of pages.
4. Recent changes to your site → Changes such as redirects or rebranding can affect how your site performs in the search results. Depending on the scale of the change, organic performance can be expected to change, but if the pages are optimized and free of technical errors, no long term effect should occur.
5. Algorithm updates → As ranking algorithms determine how pages are ranked in the search engine result pages (SERPs), algorithm updates change the way your site adheres to their ranking guidelines and, as a result, how your pages rank. Keeping up to date with any algorithm announcements or glitches can help you keep track of your organic performance. Twitter is a good channel to get up-to-date industry news, and you can follow notable figures in the industry like Marie Haynes or Barry Shwartz (to name just a couple) for their commentary. In addition, tools like MozCast (free!) will show you the current level of volatility in the SERPs.
6. Make sure your key pages are being crawled and indexed → use the “Coverage” report in Google Search Console to check what pages are being indexed and what pages have warnings. You can also do a manual check on Google, by typing into the URL bar: site:yourwebsite.com/web-page-slug operator. No results will show up if your page isn’t indexed.

Scenario 3: Your user experience is poor

User experience has become more important than ever. Regardless of whether your website is ranking first for all important keywords (we’re talking in an ideal world), it won’t make a difference if users don’t know how to interact with your site once they’ve landed on it. They’ll drop off and go to your competitor. Ensuring you have a well developed user journey and usability on your website is critical to successful SEO.

How to identify this as an issue:

This is something that involves your judgement, as unfortunately there isn’t a tool that will tell you if your site is delivering a poor user experience. Generally, if you get frustrated when using your own site or there are some things that annoy you when you’re navigating other websites, that’s what we call a poor user experience. Some practices that can help highlight if this is an issue are:

• Run a survey to ask users about their experience on the site. For example, a common question to include would be, “Did you find what you were looking for?” This short but direct approach can facilitate a relevant and direct response from customers, which can be easily acted on. Some tools you can use for this include Google Forms, SurveyMonkey and WuFoo.

• Compare site speed with competitors. This can be done using a tool such as Crux, which can give you an indication of how fast/slow your site is in comparison.
• HotJar can show you how people navigate a page. This can highlight what areas they spend more time on, where they’re attracted to click, and what they’re missing.
• Google Tag Manager can record click tracking. This is helpful to see if people are acting on your calls to action, such as filling out a form or pressing a certain button.

Ways to fix it:

1. Optimize your on-page content. This involves updating any content on your website to ensure it’s relevant to your audience and up-to-date. Content should be easily read by someone who has no context to the product/services offered on the website. You can also:
   1. Optimise your content layout. For example, include a numbered list to show your content in a different form, which can help target featured snippets.
   2. Update any old blog posts with new, relevant information and optimize the meta data to include keywords.
   3. Make sure all metadata is relevant to the page and optimized.
2. Include CTAs. A clear call-to-action should be present on all pages. These could be included in the main navigation, so it appears on all pages, or placed near the top of each page. CTAs give direction and a point of action to the customer, ensuring that if they want to engage further, it’s easy to do so. For example, common CTAs include “Contact us”, “Sign up here”, or “Book Now”.
3. Is it easy to convert? When you land on the homepage, is the CTA clear? Are there any barriers that might stop a customer to complete that action (such as requiring a customer to login or register before a purchase)? Making the journey easy and clear from entering the site to converting is crucial, as obstacles can easily deter a potential customer.

Summary:

This guide discussed 3 common scenarios that digital marketers experience. Not knowing what keywords to target, or how to go about it can be difficult to navigate. By using the suggested tools and collecting relevant keywords to target your pages will help improve your rankings. The guide by Cyrus Shephard elaborates further on this. Similarly, being able to identify when your rankings have dropped is important to ensure you stay up to date with any issues that could be causing this fluctuation. If you’d like to read more about this, I recommend “SEO Rankings Drop: A Step-By-Step Guide to Recovery”. Lastly, serving a good user experience has become an important element in digital marketing. If you want to expand your knowledge on this, Rand Fishkin has more to share on this area. Hope this article was helpful and can provide some direction of areas that you can check when you’re faced with an issue and don’t know where to start!

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How to Prioritize Your Link Building Efforts & Opportunities — Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

We all know how effective link building efforts can be, but it can be an intimidating, frustrating process — and sometimes even a chore. In this popular Whiteboard Friday originally published in 2017, Rand Fishkin builds out a framework you can still use today to streamline and simplify the link building process for you, your teammates, and yes, even your interns.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. As you can see, I'm missing my moustache, but never mind. We've got tons of important things to get through, and so we'll leave the facial hair to the inevitable comments.

I want to talk today about how to prioritize your link building efforts and opportunities. I think this comes as a big challenge for many marketers and SEOs because link building can just seem so daunting. So it's tough to know how to get started, and then it's tough to know once you've gotten into the practice of link building, how do you build up a consistent, useful system to do it? That's what I want to walk you through today.

Step 1: Tie your goals to the link's potential value

So first off, step one. What I'm going to ask you to do is tie your SEO goals to the reasons that you're building links. So you have some reason that you want links. It is almost certainly to accomplish one of these five things. There might be other things on the list too, but it's almost always one of these areas.

• A) Rank higher for keyword X. You're trying to get links that point to a particular page on your site, that contain a particular anchor text, so that you can rank better for that. Makes total sense. There we go.
• B) You want to grow the ranking authority of a particular domain, your website, or maybe a subdomain on your website, or a subfolder of that website. Google does sort of have some separate considerations for different folders and subdomains. So you might be trying to earn links to those different sections to help grow those. Pretty similar to (A), but not necessarily as much of a need to get the direct link to the exact URL.
• C) Sending real high-value traffic from the ranking page. So maybe it's the case that this link you're going after is no followed or it doesn't pass ranking influence, for some reason — it's JavaScript or it's an advertising link or whatever it is — but it does pass real visitors who may buy from you, or amplify you, or be helpful to achieving your other business goals.
• D) Growing topical authority. So this is essentially saying, "Hey, around this subject area or keyword area, I know that my website needs some more authority. I'm not very influential in this space yet, at least not from Google's perspective. If I can get some of these links, I can help to prove to Google and, potentially, to some of these visitors, as well, that I have some subject matter authority in this space."
• E) I want to get some visibility to an amplification-likely or a high-value audience. So this would be things like a lot of social media sites, a lot of submission type sites, places like a Product Hunt or a Reddit, where you're trying to get in front of an audience, that then might come to your site and be likely to amplify it if they love what they see.

Okay. So these are our goals.

Step 2: Estimate the likelihood that the link target will influence that goal

Second, I'm going to ask you to estimate the likelihood that the link target will pass value to the page or to the section of your site. This relies on a bunch of different judgments.

You can choose whether you want to wrap these all up in sort of a single number that you estimate, maybe like a 0 to 10, where 0 is not at all valuable, and 10 is super, super valuable. Or you could even take a bunch of these metrics and actually use them directly, so things like domain authority, or linking root domains to the URL, or page authority, the content relevance.

You could be asking:

• Is this a nofollowed or a followed link?
• Is it passing the anchor text that I'm looking for or anchor text that I control or influence at all?
• Is it going to send me direct traffic?

If the answers to these are all positive, that's going to bump that up, and you might say, "Wow, this is high authority. It's passing great anchor text. It's sending me good traffic. It's a followed link. The relevance is high. I'm going to give this a 10."

Or that might not be the case. This might be low authority. Maybe it is followed, but the relevance is not quite there. You don't control the anchor text, and so anchor text is just the name of your brand, or it just says "site" or something like that. It's not going to send much traffic. Maybe that's more like a three.

Then you're going to ask a couple of questions about the page that they're linking to or your website.

• Is that the right page on your site? If so, that's going to bump up this number. If it's not, it might bring it down a little bit.
• Does it have high relevance? If not, you may need to make some modifications or change the link path.
• Is there any link risk around this? So if this is a — let's put it delicately — potentially valuable, but also potentially risky page, you might want to reduce the value in there.

I'll leave it up to you to determine how much link risk you're willing to take in your link building profile. Personally, I'm willing to accept none at all.

Step 3: Build a prioritization spreadsheet

Then step three, you build a prioritization spreadsheet that looks something like this. So you have which goal or goals are being accomplished by acquiring this link. You have the target and the page on your site. You've got your chance of earning that link. That's going to be something you estimate, and over time you'll get better and better at this estimation. Same with the value. We talked about using a number out of 10 over here. You can do that in this column, or you could just take a bunch of these metrics and shove them all into the spreadsheet if you prefer.

Then you have the tactic you're going to pursue. So this is direct outreach, this one's submit and hope that it does well, and who it's assigned to. Maybe it's only you because you're the only link builder, or maybe you have a number of people in your organization, or PR people who are going to do outreach, or someone, a founder or an executive who has a connection to some of these folks, and they're going to do the outreach, whatever the case.

Then you can start to prioritize. You can build that prioritization by doing one of a couple things. You could take some amalgamation of these numbers, so like a high chance of earning and a high estimated value. We'll do some simple multiplication, and we'll make that our prioritization. Or you might give different goals. Like you might say, "Hey, you know what? (A) is worth a lot more to me right now than (C). So, therefore, I'm going to rank the ones that are the (A) goal much higher up." That is a fine way to go about this as well. Then you can sort your spreadsheet in this fashion and go down the list. Start at the top, work your way down, and start checking off links as you get them or don't get them. That's a pretty high percentage, I'm doing real well here. But you get the idea.

This turns link building from this sort of questionable, frustrating, what should I do next, am I following the right path, into a simple process that not only can you follow, but you can train other people to follow. This is really important, because link building is an essential part of SEO, still a very valuable part of SEO, but it's also a slog. So, to the degree that you can leverage other help in your organization, hire an intern and help train them up, work with your PR teams and have them understand it, have multiple people in the organization all sharing this spreadsheet, all understanding what needs to be done next, that is a huge help.

I look forward to hearing about your link building prioritization, goals, what you've seen work well, what metrics you've used. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How to Choose Google My Business Categories (With Cool Tools!)

Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: Danny Sternfeld

In creating a Google My Business listing for your local business, making a data-based decision is one of the most important steps you’ll be taking. Just how influential are the categories you select?

Our recent State of the Local SEO Industry 2020 survey found that, out of all factors, GMB elements (which include categories) have the greatest impact on local pack rankings. Choose wisely, and these elements help ensure Google views you as a candidate for possible inclusion as a result for a set of search phrases. Choose wrongly and you can exclude yourself from this vital visibility.

Google categories can also play a role in determining which features will be available to you in your Google Business Profile/Google listing. For example, if you’re categorized as a “hotel”, you won’t be able to use Google Posts. If you’re categorized as an educational institution, you won’t be able to receive reviews. Meanwhile, if you’re categorizing your business in the auto dealership space, you’ll be allowed to have multiple listings for your departments and the car makes you vend.

Categories impact the attributes that will be associated with your business, the menus you can use, whether booking buttons are available to you, and whether you have primary or secondary hours of operation displayed.

In short, your choice of your primary and secondary categories contributes a lot to Google’s understanding and handling of your business. With so much riding on proper categorization, let’s empower you to research your options like a pro today!

When and where to choose Google categories

In creating a brand new Google My Business listing, one of the first thing Google asks you to do is to choose a category:

And, as Google says, you can change and add more categories later. Once you have access to your GMB dashboard, you’ll find your categories by clicking on the “Info” tab in the left menu and looking right below your business name, where the pencil icon will let you edit your categories:

You are allowed to select up to 10 categories. Your primary category is believed to have the greatest influence on your local rankings, and must be chosen with extra care:

You can edit your categories in the GMB dashboard any time you want to, with the understanding that doing so can substantially alter the rankings you’re experiencing for various search phrases.

How to choose Google categories

Here’s your step-by-step workflow for picking the Google categories that are best for your business, with the help of some great tools.

1) Determine your most important search phrases

First, create a list that includes:

• The type of business you operate (e.g. “supermarket” “medical center” “restaurant”) and its variants. For example, if you’re an attorney, list out the subtypes associated with your firm, such a “personal injury lawyer” or “tax attorney”. If you own a restaurant, include whether it’s an “Italian restaurant”, a “family restaurant” and other qualifiers. A supermarket might also be a “grocery store” or “natural foods store”.
• The full list of goods and services you offer. Your HVAC company offers heater repair, air conditioner repair, etc. Your landscaping company offers tree service, landscape design, yard work, etc. Your clothing store offers men’s clothing, shoes, jewelry, etc.

Next, take your list of keywords and enter them into your choice of free or paid keyword research tools to discover which terms have the highest potential search volume. For example, Moz’s Keyword Suggestions tool within Moz Keyword Explorer can help you determine the difference in search volume between two terms like “Mexican restaurant” vs. “taco shop”:

Note down the search volume for each term on your list.

Finally, refine your list down to a smaller set of terms that combine the highest search volume with being most relevant and important for your company. In most cases, this is the list you’ll move ahead with, although there are some cases in which you would choose to target lower volume search phrases because they are either a) less competitive, or b) a more exact description of what your business is.

2) Determine which categories your market competitors are using for your most important search phrases

Now, take your refined list of search phrases over to Google and begin searching for them in your local market. Your local market is made up of your customers’ locations in relationship to your business location. This could only be as large as your neighborhood, or it could include a whole city or several adjacent cities, depending on:

• Your business model
• The distance from which customers are willing to travel to get to your business
• The distance from which Google believes customers are willing to travel to get to your business

For example, a coffee shop might have quite a small local market if most of its customers arrive looking for a quick, convenient cup of coffee. Meanwhile, an amusement park might have a much larger local market because people are willing to go a greater distance to visit it. Google’s local results increasingly reflect their understanding of intent differently for different business models.

Here’s a screenshot of the market an Internet searcher in the North Beach district of San Francisco might see if they are looking for “pizza near me”:

Meanwhile, a searcher in California looking for a “sports arena” could be shown a market that encompasses more than half the state:

Now, make a list of all the competitors you discovered in your market while searching from the location of your business.

Next, be sure you’re using the Chrome browser and head over to Chrome webstore to download the awesome, free, new extension called GMBspy. Developed by George Nenni of Generations Digital, turning this extension on enables you to go to Google Maps, search for your market competitors and see their categories, like this:

You can look up competitors one by one, or just mouse around on the map to see the GMBspy extension data pop up. Google doesn’t automatically reveal all the categories a business is using and so this little tool saves so much time, and a lot of fiddling around with HTML to access that data. What a great development!

Note down all of the categories your market competitors are using. Pay special attention to the categories being used by the business ranking #1 for each of your refined search phrases.

3) Get category suggestions and leave no stone unturned

Your market might be full of highly active competitors who have wisely chosen the best categories, or it could be a less sophisticated scenario in which other companies are overlooking opportunities you might be able to discover.

Hop on over to PlePer’s GMB Category Helper and type in your business name and up to three comma separated search phrases. If you’ve not yet opened for business, you can just enter the street address of your proposed location instead of a business name. Then, go get a cup of tea or do a little exercise for five minutes and come back for this amazing data:

Based on your lat-long coordinates, PlePer shows you your current categories, the categories being used in your area, a list of category suggestions, and other useful information. Quite cool! The free version of this tool lets you do three such searches per day. Jot down any notable findings that were absent from using GMBspy.

And, finally, just to be sure you haven’t missed any potential opportunities, move over to PlePer’s full GMB category list:

It’s updated at least every 3 days, which is great because Google continuously adds and subtracts categories. Just select your language and country and hit the “fetch” button. This tool can be especially useful if you offer an unusual good or service and aren’t sure whether a category exists for it. Note down anything you feel might be relevant.

Finally, within the GMB dashboard, Google will also sometimes make suggestions about additional categories you might want to consider adding, like this:

In the above screenshot, you can see that our categorizing Moz as a software company is causing Google to suggest that we might also want to select “accounting software company”. In this case, the suggestion is irrelevant for Moz’s business model, but it’s a good idea to see if Google is making any valuable suggestions for your company.

You’ve now got all the data you need to make a selection, based on the categories that are applicable to your popular search phrases and that are being used (or overlooked) by your top market competitors. Well done!

A little extra GMB category savvy

Image credit: Thom Wong

Let’s boost your confidence about Google categories with a few more tips before you fill in your choices in the GMB dashboard. Answers to these FAQs could help you out with common predicaments:

1) How many GMB categories should I choose?

My best answer is: as many as are truly relevant to your business. Never add categories that don’t relate to your business. For example, if you’re marketing a pizza place, you obviously shouldn’t add hair salon as a category, or it can totally confuse Google, your customers, and even harm your rankings.

So long as each category is applicable, you should be fine. In the past, there has been much discussion about whether category dilution (choosing too many categories) could hurt your rankings.Local SEO Colan Neilsen’s recent study demonstrated the opposite — that adding more, relevant categories can positively impact your your visibility, rather than undermine it.

This is a good time to note that the Guidelines for representing your business on Google’s section on categories can be a bit confusing. It contains outdated information pertaining to a bygone era (pre-2013) in which businesses were allowed to custom create categories.

I don’t know why Google has never updated this section to remove the text about writing categories that describe what your business “is” rather than what your business “has”, since you’re automatically confined to choosing only Google’s own pre-approved categories, but, the odd state of this area of the guidelines has personally made me take the other recommendations in it with a grain of salt. For example, Google’s insistence that you should use as few categories as possible is somewhat dubious, though their recommendation that you only pick relevant categories makes perfect sense.

My advice is to experiment with any relevant category and see where it gets you in terms of visibility.

2) What should I do if Google doesn’t have a category I need?

Google has well over 3,000 categories for the US alone, and while this large index covers many business models, it’s not uncommon to find that something you offer isn’t represented. Sterling Sky founder, Joy Hawkins, recently highlighted a case in which a business owner went about requesting a new category from Google the right way, with abundant evidence of why a new option should be added. If a missing category is holding your business back, I recommend studying that GMB help forum thread and then creating one of your own, making the most convincing argument you can about why Google needs to include your category wish.

If, however, you can’t get Google to act on your request, your next best bet is to choose the category that most closely represents what your business is, and then use the business description field, images, and Google Posts to add more nuanced information about your goods and services.

3) How can I know if I’ve chosen the right categories?

This question most commonly arises in troubleshooting ranking failures. You think you’ve done all you can to rank for a particular search phrase in Google local packs/finders/maps, but you’re just not there. While there can be scores of factors contributing to that, it’s always smart to re-check that you haven’t excluded yourself by selecting the wrong category.

Go back to the map and fire up GMBspy again to see which categories the top ranking businesses are using. Do your categories match, or are you missing something?

Also, pay attention to your GMB Insights, Google Analytics and any other analysis software you’re using whenever you add or subtract a category from your GMB listing. If you see a sudden drop in any metric dating to changing your categories, you may have made a poor category alteration choice you will need to correct.

Finally, be aware that you’re not the only one controlling your categories. If you experience a drop in rankings and notice that your categories have been mysteriously altered, it could be stemming from a third-party edit or bad data out there on the local web. Local SEO Nikki Brown tells a scary story about a client whose rankings went from 1st to 31st due to an unexpected edit of their primary category, emphasizing the importance of making a category audit part of any rankings-related troubleshooting you engage in.

4) How should I use categories for a multi-entity business model?

Google’s guidelines allow some business models to have more than one listings for the same physical location of a business. These special scenarios include:

• Multi-department models, like a medical center with distinct departments for radiology, pediatrics, and emergency services
• Multi-practitioner models, like a real estate office with multiple agents, or a legal firm with multiple attorneys
• Multi-brand models, specific to the automotive industry, in which Google allows separate listings for dealerships that vend different makes of vehicles.

The guidelines recommend that each forward-facing department of a multi-department model should have distinct categories, and it’s considered a local SEO best practice to do the same for multi-practitioner scenarios, too. Diversifying your categories for multi-entity listings can sometimes lessen Google filtering some of your listings out of their results because you no longer have more than one entity competing for the same category terms.

A good way to think about category diversification for multi-entity models is that Google’s permission to have more than one listing is giving you the opportunity to increase the number of categories your overall brand can select. Instead of just having 10 categories, your total company could theoretically target 20, 30, 40, etc., substantially improving your potential visibility across a far wider array of search phrases.

5) When and why might I choose a less popular category?

There are scenarios in which you might encounter a set of local rankings you’re having extra trouble breaking into. For example, your physical location might put you just outside the map radius Google appears to be drawing for that search phrase, or your competitors may be discouragingly strong or dense on the ground.

In cases like this, you might want to experiment with going after a category that could be described as low hanging fruit —- something your keyword research and competitive audit showed you fewer people are searching for and fewer brands are employing. The foundational goal of managing Google My Business listings is to drive conversions/transactions for your company. If geography or competition are making it hard for you to win maximum revenue from a most popular category, you might find you can make up some of the difference by choosing a number of less popular categories that enable you to rank more easily or over a larger area of the map.

6) What about choosing categories beyond Google?

There’s a whole world of business listings beyond Google, and each directory or platform has its own system of categorization. Moz Local customers enjoy the tremendous convenience of selecting categories in the dashboard that automatically map to relevant categories across our partner network, but if you’re managing your listings manually, you will need to see what’s available on each site as you go.

To sum up

Your business will be best served by allocating time for the research and implementation phase of filling in the categories on your GMB listings. Don’t rush, be methodical, and you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you put in the work to make the best category choices. And check back periodically to see if new categories have become available that could win you new local SERP visibility and increased transactions.

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How to Create 10x Content — Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Have you ever tried to create 10x content? It's not easy, is it? Knowing how and where to start can often be the biggest obstacle you'll face. In this oldie-but-goodie episode of Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin talks about how you can develop your own 10x content to help your brand stand out.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about how to create 10x content.

Now, for those of you who might need a refresher or who haven't seen previous Whiteboard Fridays where we've talked about 10x content, this is the idea that, because of content saturation, content overload, the idea that there's just so much in our streams and standing out is so hard, we can't just say, "Hey, I want to be as good as the top 10 people in the search results for this particular keyword term or phrase." We have to say, "How can I create something 10 times better than what any of these folks are currently doing?" That's how we stand out.

What is 10x content?

10x content is content that is 10 times better than the highest ranking result for a given keyword(s). Here are 119 Examples of 10x Content.

Criteria for 10x content:

• It has to have great UI and UX on any device.
• That content is generally a combination of high quality, trustworthy, it's useful, interesting, and remarkable. It doesn't have to be all of those but some combination of them.
• It's got to be considerably different in scope and in detail from other works that are serving the same visitor or user intent.
• It's got to create an emotional response. I want to feel awe. I want to feel surprise. I want to feel joy, anticipation, or admiration for that piece of content in order for it to be considered 10x.
• It has to solve a problem or answer a question by providing comprehensive, accurate, exceptional information or resources.
• It's got to deliver content in a unique, remarkable, typically unexpectedly pleasurable style or medium.

If you hit all of these things, you probably have yourself a piece of 10x content. It's just very hard to do. That's what we're talking about today. What's a process by which we can get to checking off all these boxes?

Step 1 - Gain deep insight.

So let's start here. First off, when you have an issue, let's say you've got a piece of content that you know you want to create, a topic you know you're going to address that topic. We can talk about how to get to that topic in a future Whiteboard Friday, and we've had some in the past certainly around keyword research and choosing topics and that sort of thing. But if I know the topic, I need to first gain a deep, deep insight into the core of why people are interested in this subject.

So for example, let's do something simple, something we're all familiar with.

"I wonder what the most highly-rated new movies are out there." Essentially this is, "Well, okay, how do we get into this person's brain and try and answer the core of their question?" They're essentially asking, "Okay, how do I figure out . . . help me decide what to watch."

That could have a bunch of angles to it. It could be about user ratings, or it could be maybe about awards. Maybe it's about popularity. What are the most popular movies out there? It could be meta ratings. Maybe this person wants to see an aggregated list of all the data out there. It could be editorial or critic ratings. There's a bunch of angles there.

Step 2 - We have to get unique.

We know that uniqueness, being exceptional, not the same as everyone else but different from everyone else out there, is really important.

So as we brainstorm different ways that we might address the core of this user's problem, we might say, "All right, movie ratings, could we do a round-up?"

Well, that already exists at places like Metacritic. They sort of aggregate everything and then put it all together and tell us what critics versus audiences think across many, many different websites. So that's already been done.

Awards versus popularity, again, it's already been done in a number of places that do comparisons of here's the ones that had the highest box office versus here's the ones that won certain types of awards. Well, okay, so that's not particularly unique.

What about critics versus audiences? Again, this is done basically on every different website. Everyone shows me user ratings versus critic ratings.

What about by availability? Well, there's actually a bunch of sites that do this now where they show you this is on Netflix, this is on Hulu, this is on Amazon, this you can watch on Comcast or on demand, this you can see on YouTube. All right, so that's not unique either.

What about which ratings can I trust? Hang on a tick. That might not exist yet. That's a great, unique insight into this problem, because one of the challenges that I have when I want to say, "What should I decide to watch," is who should I trust and who should I believe. Can I go to Fandango or Amazon or Metacritic or Netflix? Whose ratings are actually trustworthy?

Well, now we've got something unique, and now we've got that core insight, that unique angle on it.

Step 3 - Uncover powerful methods to provide an answer.

Now we want to uncover a powerful, hard-to-replicate, high-quality method to provide an answer to that question.

In this case, that could be, "Well, you know what? We can do a statistical analysis." We get a sample set big enough, enough films, maybe 150 movies or so from the last year. We take a look at the ratings that each service provides, and we see if we can find patterns, patterns like: Who's high and low? Do some have different genre preferences? Which one is trustworthy? Does one correlate with awards and critics? Which ones are outliers? All of these are actually trying to get to the "which one can I trust" question.

I think we can answer that if we do this statistical analysis. It's a pain in the butt.

We have to go to all these sites. We have to collect all the data. We have to put it into a statistical model. We then have to run our model. We have to make sure that we have a big enough sample set. We've got to see what our correlations are. We have to check for outliers and distributions and all this kind of stuff. But once we do that and once we show our methodology, now all we have to do is...

Step 4 - Find a unique, powerful, exceptional way to present this content.

In fact, FiveThirtyEight.com did exactly this.

They took this statistical analysis. They looked at all of these different sites, Fandango and IMDB users versus critics versus Metacritic versus Rotten Tomatoes and a number of other sites. Then they had this one graph that shows essentially the star rating averages across I think it was 146 different films, which was the sample set that they determined was accurate enough.

Now they've created this piece of 10x content, and they've answered this unique take on the question, "Which rating service can I trust?" The answer is, "Don't trust Fandango," basically. But you can see more in there. Metacritic is pretty good. A couple of the other ones are decent.

Step 5 - Expect that you're going to do this 5 to 10 times before you have one hit.

The only way to get good at this, the only way to get good is experimentation and practice. You do this over and over again, and you start to develop a sixth sense for how you can uncover that unique element, how you can present it in a unique fashion, and how you can make it sing on the Web.

All right, everyone, I look forward to hearing your thoughts on 10x content. If you have any examples you'd like to share with us, please feel free to do so in the comments. No problem linking out. That's just fine. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How Your Brand Can Earn Media Coverage on NBC News, USA Today, CNBC, and More

Posted by amandamilligan

As you might imagine, it’s not easy to get your brand name mentioned in top media outlets.

But if you put in the work to engage in content marketing + digital PR, the benefits are massive:

• High-quality backlinks to your site
• A significant boost in brand awareness
• An increase in your brand’s authority
• Improved relationships with writers who loved your content

I’ll explain how you can earn this type of coverage and its corresponding benefits for your brand.

Step 1: Create newsworthy content

You probably have an instinctual sense of what qualifies as news, but some of the key newsworthy elements are timeliness, proximity, and significance.

Timeliness is tough. Hard news is usually covered by media outlets automatically anyway. However, there’s a way to create news — and it’s through data journalism.

By doing your own research, conducting your own studies, running your own surveys, and performing your own analyses, you’re effectively creating news by offering brand new stories.

For example, for our client Porch, we used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American FactFinder, Yelp, and Zillow to determine which cities are the best for young families.

This project is inherently location-based, which adds the proximity element as well. But even if your content isn’t location-based, explore whether you can take your data and localize it so that you cover multiple geographic areas. (Then, you can pitch local news in addition to national news!)

Significance is also an excellent element to keep in mind, especially during the ideation stage. It basically means: How many people are impacted by this news, and to what degree?

This is especially important if you’re aiming for national news publications, as they tend to have a wide audience. In this case, there are plenty of young families across the country, and CNBC saw that it could connect with this demographic.

When you combine all of these newsworthy elements, you can increase your chances of getting respectable news publications interested.

Step 2: Design and package the content for clarity

You need to present your data in a clear and compelling way. Easier said than done, though, right?

Here are common design pitfalls to watch out for:

• Over-designing. Instead, experiment with simplistic styles that match your branding and take more creative liberties with headers and where the data naturally lends itself to imagery.
• Over-branding. If you have your logo on all of the images, it might be a bit too much branding for some publishers. However, if you have a really authoritative brand, it can add authority to the content, too. Test both versions to see what works best for you.
• Over-labeling. Include all of the text and labels you need to make things clear, but don’t have too much repetition. The more there is to read, the more time it’ll take to understand what’s happening on the graph.

Finally, don’t be afraid to add the most interesting insights or context as callouts to the images. That way people can identify the most pertinent information immediately while still having more to explore if they want the full story.

Take, for example, one of the graphics we created for BestVPN for a project that got coverage on The Motley Fool, USA Today, Nasdaq and more. We don’t assume people will read text in an article to get relevant information, so we put it right on the image.

Here’s another example of a project image we created for Influence.co.

We included the callout at the bottom of the image and featured it in our pitch emails (more on that later) because we knew it was a compelling data point. Lo and behold, it became the headline for the Bustle coverage we secured.

Note: It’s entirely possible a news publication won’t run your images. That’s totally fine! Creating the images is still worth it, because they help everyone grasp your project more quickly (including writers), and when well done, they convey a sense of authority.

When you have all of your data visualized, we recommended creating a write-up that goes along with it. One objective of the article is to explain why you executed the project in the first place. What were you trying to discover? How is this information useful to your audience?

The other objective is to provide more color to the data. What are the implications of your findings? What could it mean to readers, and how can they apply the new knowledge to their lives, if applicable?

Include quotes from experts when appropriate, as this will be useful to publication writers as well.

Step 3: Write personalized pitches

I could create an entirely separate article about how to properly pitch top-tier publishers. But for our purposes, I do want to address two of the most important elements:

Treat writers like people

“You did something PR people never do — but should. Looked at my Twitter feed and made it personal. Nicely done!” — CNBC writer

Building real connections with people takes time and effort. If you’re going to pitch a writer, you need to do the following:

• Read their past work and fully understand their beat
• Understand how your work matches their beat
• Check out their social profiles to learn more about them as people

Some still swear by the templated approach. While it might work sometimes, we’ve found that because writers’ inboxes continue to be inundated with pitches, reaching out to them in a more personalized manner can not only increase our chances of getting emails opened, but also getting a genuinely appreciative response.

So, start your email with a personal connection. Reach out about something you have in common or something about them you admire. It will go a long way!

Include a list of the most relevant insights

“Wow these findings are super interesting and surprising. I will for sure include if I go ahead with this piece.” — The Wall Street Journal writer

Never assume a writer is going to click through to your project and read the entire thing before deciding if they want to cover it. In the pitch email, you need to spell out exactly what you think is the most interesting part about the project for their readers.

The key word being their readers. Sure, overall you probably have a few main takeaways in mind that are compelling, but there’s often nuance in which specific takeaways will be the most relevant to particular publishers.

We’ve seen this so many times, and it’s reflected in the resulting headlines. For example, for a project we created called Generational Knowledge Gaps, we surveyed nearly 1,000 people about their proficiency in hands-on tasks. Look at the news headlines on REALTOR Magazine and ZDNet, respectively:

While REALTOR Magazine went with a headline that captures the general spirit of the project, ZDNet’s is more honed in on what matters for their readers: the tech side of things. If we’d pitched to them the same way we’d pitched to REALTOR, they might not have covered the project at all.

So, after a personalization, include bullet points that say what the key data points are for their particular audience, wrap up the email with a question of whether they’re interested, and send it off.

Conclusion

It’s not an easy process to get the attention of top writers. You have to take time to develop high-quality content — it takes us at least a month — and then strategically promote it, which can also take at least another month to get as much coverage as you can. However, this investment can have major payoff, as you’ll be earning unparalleled brand awareness and high-value backlinks.

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Page Authority 2.0 Is Coming This Month: What’s Changing and Why

Posted by rjonesx.

Hey folks,

I'm Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist with Moz, and I'm proud to announce that this month we’ll be releasing a terrific update to our metric, Page Authority (PA).

Although Page Authority hasn't attracted the same attention as its sibling metric Domain Authority, PA has always correlated with SERPs much better than DA, serving as a strong predictor of ranking. While PA has always fluctuated with changes in the link graph, we’re introducing a whole new method of deriving the score.

Learn More About Page Authority 2.0

What's changing

Long gone are the days of just counting backlinks a couple of ways and hoping they correlate well with SERPs. As Moz tends to do, we’re pioneering a new manner of calculating Page Authority to produce superior results. Here are some of the ways we’re changing things up:

The training set

In the past, we used SERPs alone to train the Page Authority model. While this method was simple and direct, it left much to be desired. Our first step in addressing the new Page Authority is redefining the training set altogether.

Instead of modeling Page Authority based on one page's ability to outrank another page, we now train based on the cumulative value of a page based on a number of metrics including search traffic and CPC. While this is a bit of an oversimplification of what’s going on, this methodology allows us to better compare pages that don't appear in the SERPs together.

For example, imagine Page A is on one topic and Page B is on another topic. Historically, our model wouldn't get to compare these two pages because they never appear on the same SERP. This new methodology provides an abstract value to each page, such that they can be compared with any other page by the machine-learned model.

The re-training set

One of the biggest problems in building metrics is not what the models see, but what the models don't see.

Think about this for a minute: what types of URLs don't show up in the SERPs that the model will use to produce Page Authority? Well, for starters, there won't be many images or other binary files. There also won't be penalized pages. In order to address this problem, we now use a common solution of running the model, identifying outliers (high PA URLs which do not in fact have any search value), and then feeding those URLs back into the training set. We can then re-run the model such that it learns from its own mistakes. This can be repeated as many times as is necessary to reduce the number of outliers.

Ripping off the Band-Aid

Moz is always cognizant of the impact the changes to our metrics might have on our customers. There is a trade-off between continuity and accuracy. With Page Authority, we’re focusing on accuracy. This may cause larger-than-normal shifts in your Page Authority, so it’s more important than ever to think about Page Authority with respect to your competitors, not as a standalone number.

What actions should we take?

Communicate with stakeholders, team members, and clients about the update

Just like our upgrade to Domain Authority, some users will likely be surprised by changes in their PA. Make sure they understand that the new PA will be more accurate (and more useful!) and that the most important measurement is relative to their competitors. We won't release a Page Authority which isn't better than the previous version, so even if the results are disappointing, understand that you now have better insight than ever before into the performance of your pages in the SERPs.

Use PA as a relative metric, like DA

Page Authority is intrinsically comparative. A PA of 70 means nothing unless you know the PA of your competitors. It could be high enough to allow you to rank for every keyword you like, or it could be terribly low because your competitors are Wikipedia and Quora. The first thing you should do when analyzing the Page Authority of any URL is set it in the proper context of its competitor's URLs.

Expect PA to keep pace with Google

Just as we announced with Domain Authority, we’re not going to launch the new PA and just let it go. Our intent is to continue to improve upon the model as we discover new and better features and models. This volatility will mostly affect pages with unnatural link profiles, but we would rather stay up-to-date with Google's algorithms even if it means a bit of a bumpy ride.

When is it launching?

We’ll be rolling out the new Page Authority on September 30, 2020. Between now and then, we encourage you to explore our resources to help you prepare and facilitate conversations with clients and team members. Following the launch of the new PA, I’ll also be hosting a webinar on October 15 to discuss how to leverage the metric. We’re so excited about the new and improved PA and hope you’re looking forward to this update too.

If you have any questions, please comment below, reach out to me on Twitter @rjonesx, or email me at russ@moz.com.

To get prepared and learn more about the upcoming change to Page Authority, be sure to dig into our helpful resources:

Visit the PA Resource Center

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