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Google Shopping now free globally

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Google takes Local Services Ads to Europe

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Blog Page Posts Not Getting Index and Crawl Since a Month

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Page Authority 2.0: An Update on Testing and Timing

Posted by rjonesx.

One of the most difficult decisions to make in any field is to consciously choose to miss a deadline. Over the last several months, a team of some of the brightest engineers, data scientists, project managers, editors, and marketers have worked towards a release date of the new Page Authority (PA) on September 30, 2020. The new model is exceptional in nearly every way to the current PA, but our last quality control measure revealed an anomaly that we could not ignore.

As a result, we’ve made the tough decision to delay the launch of Page Authority 2.0. So, let me take a moment to retrace our steps as to how we got here, where that leaves us, and how we intend to proceed.

Seeing an old problem with fresh eyes

Historically, Moz has used the same method over and over again to build a Page Authority model (as well as Domain Authority). This model's advantage was its simplicity, but it left much to be desired.

Previous Page Authority models trained against SERPs, trying to predict whether one URL would rank over another, based on a set of link metrics calculated from the Link Explorer backlink index. A key issue with this type of model was that it couldn’t meaningfully address the maximum strength of a particular set of link metrics.

For example, imagine the most powerful URLs on the Internet in terms of links: the homepages of Google, Youtube, Facebook, or the share URLs of followed social network buttons. There are no SERPs that pit these URLs against one another. Instead, these extremely powerful URLs often rank #1 followed by pages with dramatically lower metrics. Imagine if Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Lebron James each scrimaged one-on-one against high school players. Each would win every time. But we would have great difficulty extrapolating from those results whether Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, or Lebron James would win in one-on-one contests against each other.

When tasked with revisiting Domain Authority, we ultimately chose a model with which we had a great deal of experience: the original SERPs training method (although with a number of tweaks). With Page Authority, we decided to go with a different training method altogether by predicting which page would have more total organic traffic. This model presented several promising qualities like being able to compare URLs that don’t occur on the same SERP, but also presented other difficulties, like a page having high link equity but simply being in an infrequently-searched topic area. We addressed many of these concerns, such as enhancing the training set, to account for competitiveness using a non-link metric.

Measuring the quality of the new Page Authority

The results were — and are — very promising.

First, the new model obviously predicted the likelihood that one page would have more valuable organic traffic than another. This was expected, because the new model was directed at this particular goal, while the current Page Authority merely attempted to predict whether one page would rank over another.

Second, we found that the new model predicted whether one page would rank over another better than the previous Page Authority. This was especially pleasing, as it laid to rest many of our concerns that the new model would underperform on old quality controls due to the new training model.

How much better is the new model at predicting SERPs than the current PA? At every interval — all the way down to position 4 vs 5 — the new model tied or out-performs the current model. It never lost.

Everything was looking great. We then started analyzing outliers. I like to call this the “does anything look stupid?” test. Machine learning makes mistakes, just as humans can, but humans tend to make mistakes in a very particular manner. When a human makes a mistake, we often understand exactly why the mistake was made. This isn’t the case for ML, especially Neural Nets; we pulled URLs with high Page Authorities under the new model that happened to have zero organic traffic, and included them in the training set to learn for those errors. We quickly saw bizarre 90+ PAs drop down to much more reasonable 60s and 70s… another win.

We were down to one last test.

The problem with branded search

Some of the most popular keywords on the web are navigational. People search Google for Facebook, Youtube, and even Google itself. These keywords are searched an astronomical number of times relative to other keywords. Subsequently, a handful of highly powerful brands can have an enormous impact on a model that looks at total search volume as part of its core training target.

The last test involves comparing the current Page Authority to the new Page Authority, in order to determine if there are any bizarre outliers (where PA shifted dramatically and without obvious reason). First, let’s look at a simple comparison of the LOG of Linking Root Domains compared to the Page Authority.

Not too shabby. We see a generally positive correlation between Linking Root Domains and Page Authority. But can you spot the oddities? Go ahead and take a minute…

There are two anomalies that stand out in this chart:

1. There is a curious gap separating the main distribution of URLs and the outliers above and below.
2. The largest variance for a single score is at PA 99. There are an awful lot of PA 99s with a wide range of Linking Root Domains.

Here is a visualization that will help draw out these anomalies:



The gray spaces between the green and red represent this odd gap between the bulk of the distribution and the outliers. The outliers (in red) tend to clump together, especially above the main distribution. And, of course, we can see the poor distribution at the top of PA 99s.

Bear in mind that these issues are not sufficient to make the new Page Authority model less accurate than the current model. However, upon further examination, we found that the errors the model did produce were significant enough that they could adversely influence the decisions of our customers. It’s better to have a model that is off by a little everywhere (because the adjustments SEOs make are not incredibly fine-tuned) than it is to have a model that is right mostly everywhere but bizarrely wrong in a limited number of cases.

Luckily, we’re fairly confident as to what the problem is. It seems that homepage PAs are disproportionately inflated, and that the likely culprit is the training set. We can’t be certain this is the cause until we complete retraining, but it is a strong lead.

The good news and the bad news

We are in good shape insofar as we have multiple candidate models that outperform the existing Page Authority. We’re at the point of bug squashing, not model building. However, we are not going to ship a new score until we are confident that it will steer our customers in the right direction. We are highly conscientious of the decisions our customers make based on our metrics, not just whether the metrics meet some statistical criteria.

Given all of this, we have decided to delay the launch of Page Authority 2.0. This will give us the necessary time to address these primary concerns and produce a stellar metric. Frustrating? Yes, but also necessary.

As always, we thank you for your patience, and we look forward to producing the best Page Authority metric we have ever released.

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Marketers hopeful for late 2021 in-person conferences

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Video: Drew Madore on how “black hat SEO” has changed over the years

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My 8 Best Local SEO Tips for the 2020 Holidays

Posted by MiriamEllis



Image credit: DoSchu

“No place like home for the holidays.” This will be the refrain for the majority of your customers as we reach 2020’s peak shopping season. I can’t think of another year in which it’s been more important for local businesses to plan and implement a seasonal marketing strategy extra early, to connect up with customers who will be traveling less and seeking ways to celebrate at home.

Recently, it’s become trendy in multiple countries to try to capture the old Danish spirit of hygge, which the OED defines as: A quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.

While this sometimes-elusive state of being isn’t something you can buy direct from a store, and while some shoppers are still unfamiliar with hygge by name, many will be trying to create it at home this year. Denmark buys more candles than any other nation, and across Scandinavia, fondness for flowers, warming foods, cozy drinks, and time with loved ones characterizes the work of weaving a gentle web of happiness into even the darkest of winters.

Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.

1) Survey customers now and provide what they want

Reasonably-priced survey software is worth every penny in 2020. For as little as $20/month, your local business can understand exactly how much your customers’ needs have changed this past year by surveying:

• Which products locals are having trouble locating
• Which products/services they most want for the holidays
• Which method of shopping/delivery would be most convenient for them
• Which hours of operation would be most helpful
• Which safety measures are must-haves for them to transact with a business
• Which payment methods are current top choices

Doubtless, you can think of many questions like these to help you glean the most possible insight into local needs. Poll your customer email/text database and keep your surveys on the short side to avoid abandonment.

Don’t have the necessary tools to poll people at-the-ready? Check out Zapier’s roundup of the 10 Best Online Survey Apps in 2020 and craft a concise survey geared to deliver insights into customers’ wishes.

2) Put your company’s whole heart into affinity

If I could gift every local business owner with a mantra to carry them through not just the 2020 holiday shopping season, but into 2021, it would be this:

It’s not enough to have customers discover my brand — I need them to like my brand.

Chances are, you can call to mind some brands of which you’re highly aware but would never shop with because they don’t meet your personal or business standards in some way. You’ve discovered these brands, but you don’t like them. In 2020, you may even have silently or overtly boycotted them.

On the opposite side of this scenario are the local brands you love. I can wax poetic about my local independent grocery store, stocking its shelves with sustainable products from local farmers, flying its Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ flags with pride from its storefront, and treating every customer like a cherished neighbor.

For many years, our SEO industry has put great effort into and emphasis on the discovery phase of the consumer journey, but my little country-town grocer has gone leaps and bounds beyond this by demonstrating affinity with the things my household cares about. The owners can consider us lifetime loyal customers for the ways they are going above-and-beyond in terms of empathy, diversity, and care for our community.

I vigorously encourage your business to put customer-brand affinity at the heart of its holiday strategy. Brainstorm how you can make meaningful changes that declare your company’s commitment to being part of the work of positive social change.

3) Be as accessible and communicative as possible

Once you’ve accomplished the above two goals, open the lines of communication about what your brand offers and the people-friendly aspects of how you operate across as many of the following as possible:

• Website
• Local business listings
• Email
• Social channels
• Forms
• Texts/Messaging
• Phone on-hold marketing
• Storefront and in-store signage
• Local news, radio, and TV media

In my 17 years as a local SEO, I can confidently say that local business listings have never been a greater potential asset than they will be this holiday season. Google My Business listings, in particular, are an interface that can answer almost any customer who-what-where-when-why — if your business is managing these properly, whether manually or via software like Moz Local.

Anywhere a customer might be looking for what you offer, be there with accurate and abundant information about identity, location, hours of operation, policies, culture, and offerings. From setting special hours for each of your locations, to embracing Google Posts to microblog holiday content, to ensuring your website and social profiles are publicizing your USP, make your biggest communications effort ever this year.

At the same time, be sure you’re meeting Google’s mobile-friendly standards, and that your website is ADA-compliant so that no customer is left out. Provide a fast, intuitive, and inclusive experience to keep customers engaged.

With the pandemic necessitating social distancing, make the Internet your workhorse for connecting up with and provisioning your community as much as you can.

4) Embrace local e-commerce and product listings

Digital Commerce 360 has done a good job charting the 30%+ rise in online sales in the first half or 2020, largely resulting from the pandemic. The same publication summarizes the collective 19% leap in traffic to North America’s largest retailers. At the local business level, implementing even basic e-commerce function in advance of the holiday season could make a major difference, if you can find the most-desired methods of delivery. These could include:

• Buy-online, pick up in-store (BOPIS)
• Buy-online, pick up curbside
• Buy online for postal delivery
• Buy online for direct home delivery by in-house or third-party drivers

Here’s an extensive comparison of popular e-commerce solutions, including which ones have free trials, and the e-commerce column of the Moz blog is a free library of expert advice on optimizing digital sales.

Put your products everywhere you can. Don’t forget that this past April, Google surprised everybody by offering free product listings, and that they also recently acquired the Pointy device, which lets you transform scanned barcodes into online inventory pages.

Additionally, in mid-September, Google took their next big product-related step by adding a “nearby” filter to Google Shopping, taking us closer and closer to the search engine becoming a source for real-time local inventory, as I’ve been predicting here in my column for several years.

Implement the public safety protocols that review research from GatherUp shows consumers are demanding, get your inventory onto the web, identify the most convenient ways to get purchases from your storefront into the customer’s hands, and your efforts could pave the way for increased Q4 profits.

5) Reinvent window shopping with QR codes

“How can I do what I want to do?” asked Jennifer Bolin, owner of Clover Toys in Seattle.

What she wanted to do was use her storefront window to sell merchandise to patrons who were no longer able to walk into her store. When a staff member mentioned that you could use a QR code generator like this one to load inventory onto pedestrians’ cell phones, she decided to give it a try.

Just a generation or two ago, many Americans cherished the tradition of going to town or heading downtown to enjoy the lavish holiday window displays crafted by local retailers. The mercantile goal of this form of entertainment was to entice passersby indoors for a shopping spree. It’s time to bring this back in 2020, with the twist of labeling products with QR codes and pairing them with desirable methods of delivery, whether through a drive-up window, curbside, or delivery.

“We’ve even gotten late night sales,” Bolin told me when I spoke with her after my colleague Rob Ousbey pointed out this charming and smart independent retail shop to me.

If your business locations are in good areas for foot traffic, think of how a 24/7 asset like an actionable, goodie-packed window display could boost your sales.

6) Tie in with DIY, and consider kits

With so many customers housebound, anything your business can do to support activities and deliver supplies for domestic merrymaking is worth considering. Can your business tie in with decorating, baking, cooking, crafting, handmade gift-giving, home entertainment, or related themes? If so, create video tutorials, blog posts, GMB posts, social media tips, or other content to engage a local audience.

One complaint I am encountering frequently is that shoppers are feeling tired trying to piecemeal together components from the internet for something they want to make or do. Unsurprisingly, many people are longing for the days when they could leisurely browse local businesses in-person, taking inspiration from their hands-on interaction with merchandise. I think kits could offer a stopgap solution in some cases. If relevant to your business, consider bundling items that could provide everything a household needs to:

• Prepare a special holiday meal
• Bake treats
• Outfit a yard for winter play
• Trim a tree or decorate a home
• Build a fire
• Create a night of fun for children of various age groups
• Dress appropriately for warmth and safety, based on region
• Create a handmade gift, craft, or garment
• Winter prep a home or vehicle
• Create a complete home spa/health/beauty experience
• Plant a spring garden

Kits could be a welcome all-in-one resource for many shoppers. Determine whether your brand has the components to offer one.

7) Manage reviews meticulously

Free, near-real-time quality control data from your holiday efforts can most easily be found in your review profiles. Use software like Moz Local to keep a running tally of your incoming new reviews, or assign a staff member at each location of your business to monitor your local business profiles daily for any complaints or questions.

If you can quickly solve problems people cite in their reviews, your chances are good of retaining the customer and demonstrating responsiveness to all your profiles’ visitors. You may even find that reviews turn up additional, unmet local needs your formal survey missed. Acting quickly to fulfill these requests could win you additional business in Q4 and beyond.

8) Highly publicize one extra reason to shop local this year

“72% of respondents...are likely or very likely to continue to shop at independent stores, either locally or online, above larger retailers such as Amazon.” — Bazaarvoice

I highly recommend reading the entire survey of 12,000 global respondents by Bazaarvoice, quantifying how substantially shopping behaviors have changed in 2020. It’s very good news for local business owners that so many customers want to keep transacting with nearby independents, but the Amazon dilemma remains.

Above, we discussed the fatigue that can result from trying to cobble together a bunch of different resources to check everything off a shopping list. This can drive people to online “everything stores”, in the same way that department stores, supermarkets, and malls have historically drawn in shoppers with the promise of convenience.

A question every local brand should do their best to ask and answer in the runup to the holidays is: What’s to prevent my community from simply taking their whole holiday shopping list to Amazon, or Walmart, or Target this year?

Whatever your business can offer to support local shoppers’ aspirations for a safe, comfortable, happy holiday season at home is commendable at the end of a very challenging 2020. I hope these eight local search marketing tips will help you make good connections that serve your customers — and your business — well into the new year.

My completely personal answer to this question is that I want my town’s local business district, with its local flavor and diversity of shops, to still be there after a vaccine is hopefully developed for COVID-19. But that’s just me. Inspiring your customers’ allegiance to keeping your business going might be best supported by publicizing some of the following:

• The economic, societal, and mental health benefits proven to stem from the presence of small, local businesses in a community.
• Your philanthropic tie-ins, such as generating a percentage of sales to worthy local causes — there are so many ways to contribute this year.
• The historic role your business has played in making your community a good place to live, particularly if your brand is an older, well-established one. I hear nostalgia is a strong influencer in 2020, and old images of your community and company through the years could be engaging content.
• Any recent improvements you’ve made to ensure fast home delivery, whether by postal mail or via local drivers who can get gifts right to people’s doors.
• Uplifting content that simply makes the day a bit brighter for a shopper. We’re all looking for a little extra support these days to keep our spirits bright.

Be intentional about maximizing local publicity of your “extra reason” to shop with you. Your local newspaper is doubtless running a stream of commentary about the economic picture in your city, and if your special efforts are newsworthy, a few mentions could do you a lot of good.

Don’t underestimate just how reliant people have become on the recommendations of friends, family, and online platforms for sourcing even the basics of life these days. In my own circle, everyone is now regularly telling everyone else where to find items from hand sanitizer to decent potatoes. Networking will be happening around gifts, too, so anything you get noticed for could support extensive word-of-mouth information sharing.

I want to close by thanking you for being in or marketing businesses that will help us all celebrate the many upcoming holidays in our own ways. Your efforts are appreciated, and I’m wishing you a peaceful, profitable, and hyggelig finish to 2020.

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Social Shorts: Facebook’s 20% rule, Pinterest Story Pins, Reddit brand safety options

The social media marketing week in review: A round up of news and announcements you may have missed.

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