Are you just getting started in managing an in-house SEO program for a brand or organization and not sure what SEO management tool to pick?

Many of my clients are managing a program that does not include local SEO elements and/or they are on a budget (or building a case for an enterprise level tool). Most of the time SEMRush, Ahrefs and Moz are on their short list.

If you’re in the same situation, this post will help you make a decision about which will work best for you.

There are SEO software comparison tools online, but I personally find them confusing to use and a bit cumbersome to sort through. If you’re an SEO consultant and wondering which of the three big (non-enterprise) SEO management tools are worth your monthly subscription, this post should be helpful.

Below you’ll find a comparison and analysis of the top three SEO tools that I tend to recommend to clients which cover the wide range of SEO tasks (not including local SEO management) and are offered at a reasonable monthly fee. These also happen to be the tools professional SEO use most often.

If you want more suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out and ping me directly.

Many SEOs use an SEO management tool to aid with the following tasks:

1. Monitor technical requirements/issues via regular site crawls
2. Monitor ranking changes
3. Monitor top pages/areas for improvement
4. Monitor overall backlink health
5. Search visibility vs competitors
6. Content ideation based on questions/topics
7. Automate some keyword research
8. On-page content suggestions

Based on the list above, the three best options for most companies that don’t have enterprise level budgets (and the SEO management tools used most by SEOs) are:

• Ahrefs
• SEMRush
• Moz

Reporting on Overall SEO Health

Each tool has a dashboard which gives a user an overall view of the site’s SEO health. I’ve outlined the features and user-friendliness of each below.

Ahref’s SEO Analytics/Dashboard

Pros:

• The ability to track overall website rank and authority
• Tracks the gain/loss of inbound links
• Tracks gain/loss of organic keywords and traffic over time (regardless of whether you add keywords into the dashboard, it will just pull all the terms you’re ranking for).
• Lists anchor text used in links to your site.

Additionally, inside the Ahrefs Site Explorer tool (the top search bar), you can look at the ranking history of the site and individual page over time, and you can view competitor pages that rank for a particular term.

Cons:

While Ahrefs has content improvement tools (like a keyword gap analysis), they tend to lead with link metrics and management.
There are no direct insights here to take action on (unlike Moz, see below).

Moz’s SEO Analytics/Dashboard

Moz’s Dashboard looks like this:

Pros:

• Tracking SERP visibility (only based on keywords you add to the tracking) and vs your competitors
• Desktop vs mobile visibility
• View overall organic visits and rankings
• Review number and sources of external links
• Copywriting tips/insights
• Shows overall domain authority

Cons:

• Reliance on the user uploading tracking for the keywords to track (which is limited per plan). This is in contrast with SEMRush and Ahrefs which both show organic performance for keywords based on software crawling and pulling all the top rankings regardless of whether those keywords were added individually to track their rankings.

SEMRush’s SEO Analytics/Dashboard

Pros:

• View organic and Paid search performance over time
• Highlights top organic keywords and position growth over time
• Shows top organic competitors and positioning
• Shows branded vs non-branded traffic percentages and trend
• View top backlinks and breakdown of backlinks by type
• View indexed pages with top backlinks

Here’s what the dashboard looks like:

Cons:

• There are many features in SEMRush, and it takes a while to learn where certain reports are and to remember how to navigate to them.

Keyword Research

It’s helpful to have data and information comparing the accuracy of research tools because if the tool isn’t accurate, it won’t be of very much use for you and your business. Here’s a recent report created by Brafton on the overall accuracy of the keyword research tools – how well the keyword research tools can predict where you will rank. Most of the time the tools call this a “keyword difficulty” metric.

Here are the results:

 

Here’s another analysis conducted by the founder of Authority Hacker, but take with a grain of salt as this was published on the Ahrefs blog. Here are the results of that particular study:

Ahrefs Keyword Research Tool

Pros:

Ahrefs tool not only shows you the estimated monthly volume for a keyword but also tells you what the click-through rate potential is for that keyword based on clickstream data (Moz does this as well). If you want to learn more about clickstream data, you can learn more here.

What Ahrefs includes in their keyword research tool is an estimate of how much traffic you will get for optimizing for a specific keyword, for each URL that is ranking in the top 10. That’s because each URL ranks for more than one keyword, so you could potentially get more volume for optimizing for that topic. Conversely, some users will NOT click on the SERPs indicating you probably don’t want to optimize for those keywords.
Ahrefs will also show you (like Moz) what the organic search opportunity is for a particular keyword – ie. how many people click when they use that query vs just overall search volume.

Ahrefs makes it incredibly easy to see the SERP features and has a visually attractive workflow for seeing the SERPs, which makes it easier to save keywords to lists.

Here’s what Ahref’s keyword research tool looks like:

Cons:

Ahrefs does not group keywords when you export, otherwise, it seems to show lower volume keywords than SEMRush.

SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool

Pros:

What I love about the SEMRush tool is that you can export the keywords with automatic keyword groupings, unlike Ahrefs.

Cons:

• If you use the “Keyword Overview” feature in SEMRush (the default search box at the top when you log in that lets you look up data per keyword or domain) to look up a keyword and its volume, you might get their error that they don’t have any information about that keyword in their Google database. But, if you use the Keyword Magic keyword, it will pull with volume.
• I personally find the SEMRush keyword tool not quite as easy to use (but that might be because I’m used to the Moz and Ahrefs tools). It’s a bit awkward to go from keyword to looking at the SERP, or seeing SERP features for that keyword at a glance. You can see that information when you click on their cached SERP per keyword.
• As you can see, it’s also heavily influenced by the fact that the tool supports paid search as well, as it lets you search by Broad, Phrase or Exact match. It also does not seem to have as many low volume keyword results as Ahrefs.

However, the related keywords option pulled in some useful results:

Moz: Keyword Explorer

Pros:

Moz’s tool provides an organic opportunity for each keyword. These are calculated based on the number of organic listings for that term (vs paid listings or an instant answer) and the amount of organic click through on the SERPs for that term.

Supposedly Moz’ data is more accurate due to its deeper methodology:

Our volume score is the first volume estimation metric we know of that goes beyond what AdWords reports. We do that using Russ Jones’ volume bucket methodology and adding in anonymized clickstream data from ~1 million real searchers in the US. From there, Russ has built a model that predicts the search volume range a keyword is likely to have with ~95% accuracy.

Cons:

• Moz doesn’t seem to have as many low volume, long tail, keywords.
• You also can’t export the keywords with grouping. The workflow of picking a keyword based on metrics, then looking at the SERPs to double check searcher’s intent before making a final selection seems cumbersome.
• All of the plans come with keyword query limits, and every time you put a keyword into the “keyword” search box you use up one of your queries – which is similar to Ahrefs.
• The keyword volume ranges are also harder to get used to if you’re familiar with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
• It’s easy to feel like Moz Pro is overwhelming because there is no clear user flow.

Finding Co-occurring Keywords

When optimizing a page for a topic, there’s a better chance of ranking if topic-related words and phrases are included with the target keyword. These phrases and additional words should line up with what Google would expect to see if you were covering the topic thoroughly. But how do you find those phrases? Each tool has a different approach.

Ahefs: Content Gap Tool

With Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool, you simply paste a few of the top‐ranking pages into Content Gap. It’s important that you leave the bottom field blank. Use the “Prefix” mode for all URLs, then hit “Show keywords.” You should see something like this:

Notice that these words and phrases aren’t synonyms but rather topically‐related terms.

Ahrefs: Organic Keyword Report

Run the Ahrefs Organic Keyword report, click on the drop-down next to the URL, then click on “Organic keywords.” Note the keywords that the page is ranking for. If the page does not include those phrases, simply edit the copy to include them (you can do this by looking at data inside Google Webmaster Tools Search Analytics report as well when you filter by page, then by queries).
You can also do this for existing pages that are ranking.

SEMRush: SEO Content Template

Once you put your keyword into this tool, it will generate complementary keywords that you should use in your copy based on the associated terms used in the pages ranking on Google’s page one. They will also pull the recommended text length and shared backlinks across those sites. A view of the SERP results at a glance is really helpful, which is exportable into a word template that looks like this.

It also has a “real-time content check” where you can paste your content into their tool to see if it’s meeting their recommendations:

SEMRush also has an On-Page SEO Checker:

The content improvement ideas look like this:

Moz: On-Page Grader

In Moz, you do this by using their on page grader where it will highlight the topics found on competitor pages that are ranking for that target term:

Monitoring Links and Brainstorming Link Building Opportunities.

If you need to conduct a full backlink analysis, Moz’s new Link Explorer is by far the most comprehensive. Just take a look at the discrepancy between the number of links found between the three tools:

Ahrefs Backlinks

Ahrefs will show you the best pages by link growth – which could help you find popular content on your site that you could boost with additional promotion.

Ahrefs Internal Links

Yes, you read that correctly. Ahrefs now has a tool to help you optimize internal links – and is the only tool out of the three that has this functionality. Here’s how to use the tool to find insights:

1. Run your competitor’s top pages by organic traffic and then pull both their internal and external link data. Then run your top ranking page and pull the internal and external ranking data. If you see that the competitor has pages that have high traffic but very few external links and few internal links, there’s a good chance that you can outperform that by building more internal or external links to YOUR page ranking for that term.
2. Put the exact URL in the search box to see how many backlinks you have to your high priority target pages:
3. Then pull your top competitor in for that term and see how many internal links they have to the page that is ranking:

While the keyword grouping feature seems amazing, it’s only available on the screen. You can’t export into an Excel sheet that includes the primary keyword and the grouped/semantically related keywords.

SEMRush Backlinks:

In SEMRush, you can run a backlinks gap analysis, an audit (to check for sketchy backlinks) and analytics on your backlinks to see which you’ve gained or lost. It’s nice that you can also compare competitors right in this interface.

Moz Backlinks:

Both Moz and Ahrefs have other tools in Link Explorer which are useful if you’re proactively building links (especially considering that they seem to discover the most links).

My favorite is the Moz Link Intersect tool. You can set up the tool to find sites/URLs that link to one domain (your competitor) but not another domain (you).

Tracking Your Rankings

Ahrefs

Ahrefs will track your overall position over time for all the keywords that it finds you ranking for:

It will also provide you with a report of the keywords that have gained or lost rankings:

It also lets you proactively track rankings for keywords you input in their “Rank Tracker”:

From there, you can modify the filters to see what keywords you rank for. For instance, in this example, there’s a Featured Snippet showing in the SERPs, but it’s not showing your domain as the Featured Snippet:

The filters can also answer questions like, “Which competitors have the most top rankings for my tracked keywords/”:

Or, “How volatile are some of my rankings?” with Ahrefs Grossing report:

I personally find that the workflow of Ahrefs is easy to learn and if you love to export data, then it’s good to know how easy it is to export from all of their reports.

*Note.: ALL of the tools will limit how many data rows you can export from your site.

Here’s an example of that limitation from Ahrefs. They have ranking data for HealthIT.gov for 53K US keywords. When you export, they will limit you to your plan, which is 50K rows of data in the Advanced level:

SEMRush

Here’s what SEMRush’s rank tracking looks like:

From that dashboard, you can slice the data to see how you’re ranking for target keywords. You can use that information to answer questions like, “Do I have more top rankings for these terms than my competitors?”:

You can also look at your keywords sliced by SERP feature to answer questions like, “How many featured snippets am I ranking for based on my target terms?”

Or, “What are my top performing landing pages, and what keywords are driving traffic to them?”

“Where are the opportunities where I could work to get a Featured Snippet?”:

SEMRush seems to have been spending quite a bit of time focused on content writing and improvement workflows. It shows in their tool as it’s really easy to find the data that is needed at each step of the content ideation and improvement stages.

Moz

With Moz, tracking keyword performance isn’t retroactive. Therefore, if you just submitted a keyword it’ll keep tabs going forward, but you can’t check your ranking performance prior to that date.

Here’s what the keyword tracking looks like:

However, Moz provides on page optimization suggestions in the ranking report better than the other options.

Keeping an Eye on Technical SEO Issues

Ahrefs

Ahrefs will let you crawl up to 100,000 URLs a month. For most companies, this will allow several crawls from a technical SEO perspective several times per month, but it depends on the size of your website. I have not found their crawl analysis to be as helpful as using ScreamingFrog or Deepcrawl, but both of those crawl tools are separate subscriptions and require additional technical know-how to use. In all of the tools, you can also schedule weekly crawls.

Ahrefs now has a “to do” option where you can create tasks for all of the issues in each Ahrefs screen. That list is then exportable, allowing you to send the list to your developers. When Ahrefs crawls the site again, it will check your “to dos” and create a report for you of the items that have been completed.

Here’s Ahrefs crawl report overview:

You can learn more about how to use their SEO site audit tool here.

SEMRush

Here’s what SEMRush’s site audit report looks like:

You can download the issues into excel as well as create Trello cards off of each ticket item right in the interface. The issues also have a “why” and “how to fix it” explanation for each issue, which I find incredibly useful.

You can also compare crawls to determine if items have been fixed. It also provides a graphic report of the major technical issues to help you prioritize:

Additionally, SEMRush now has a beta log file analyzer that’s free for subscribers to use:

Moz

Moz’s on-demand crawl lets you crawl 3,000 pages.

Data is exportable into Excel as well.

 

 

Alerts

If you’re responsible for managing your business or organization’s SEO program, you should set up weekly alerts in the tools that you use. I always encourage my clients to set up Google Analytics intelligence alerts to notify you of traffic decreases from particular marketing channels, but setting up alerts in your SEO tools is a good idea as well.

Some of the weekly alerts from the crawl portions of these tools can cause clients more alarm than is necessary. For instance, 404 (broken pages) happen all the time to websites and while you don’t want to break URLs that have inbound links to them, an alert (in red) telling you that your SEO is broken because of an overall increase in 404s can cause much more stress than is warranted. 404s are not a negative ranking factor and sometimes they are harmless.

If you’re going to set up these technical crawl alerts, make sure that they are going to you as the SEO manager so that you can investigate the issue prior to bringing it up with your CEO or manager. I would not set up the alerts for those people to get these alerts directly – it will just increase their stress unnecessarily.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs has alerts when you set up a project. It will monitor when your brand terms (or your competitors) are being used online and changes to your content rankings. This assists you with link building and online mentions.

SEMRush

SEMRush lets you set up flexible alerts related to ranking adjustments. You can set up to 10 different alert triggers.

Moz

Moz will send out emails based on your established campaigns. They include ranking and Fresh Web Explorer alerts (online mentions of your brand, a topic, unlinked mentions, or links to your competitors).

Pricing Comparison

One big factor in which tool is right for you is obviously pricing and what you get for your monthly subscription. The pricing differences are generally based on how much data you need to track or import per month.

You can see the pricing differences of each tool below (additional comparison info in the footnotes below comparison).

Which SEO Tool to Choose	SEMrush Pro – Business	Ahrefs Advanced	Moz Pro – Large
Pricing	$399.95/Month (E)	$399/Month	$249/month (D)
Number of Tracked Websites (projects)	200	25	25
Users Allowed	1	3	25
Tracked Keywords & Update Frequency	5,000	5,000 (every 3 days)	1,900 (see note)
Mobile Rank tracking	Y	Y (see note)	Y
Pages to crawl using Site Audit (Monthly)	1,000,000	1.25 million	3,000/60 times a month
Keyword Queries/mo	Daily: 100 keywords to analyze	15,000	15,000
Keyword lists		50	60
Scheduled reports	50	500 reports per day 10,000 rows per report	Y
Historical data	Y (see note)	Y	N

Note:

Moz will only show you data for the keywords that you choose to track for ranking purposes. When you put a domain in the Keyword Explorer tool, it will show you the keywords it finds where the domain is ranking, but as you can see, it found fewer ranking keywords than Ahrefs:

Compare Moz…

To Ahrefs…

Also,

At the $249/mo level, Moz is only going to let you proactively track 1,900 keywords. At the $399 level with Ahrefs, you can track 5,000.

And…

SEMRush lets you check your organic traffic data and ranking backward in time by a month. The other tools don’t let you do this for a website you haven’t already set up as a project.

Additionally, there are discounts when you commit for a year.

Moz Pro’s pricing ranges from $99 a month to $599 a month. If you pay yearly, you can save 20%. The most expensive plan gets you 100 tracked sites (campaigns); 7,500 tracked keywords, and 5 million pages crawled every week. You get white-labeled reporting and a premium level of support whenever requested within business hours.

SEMRush’s pricing ranges from $99 to $399 a month. You can save up to $800 on the top package (17%) if you pay yearly. The most expensive plan, the Business plan, includes 200 tracked sites, 5,000 tracked keywords, and 1 million page crawls.

Not all of them track mobile by default…

To get mobile rank tracking in Ahrefs, you need to have the advanced plan at $399/month. At that level, you can also track 5,000 keywords and you can see all of the organic keywords that Ahrefs finds in the Organic Keywords report.

Support Options and Ongoing Education

Learning a new tool takes time, patience, and there is always a learning curve. So what support and educational programs exist for each tool? Are they supportive, easy to use, and can you talk to a real human – or are forums the way to go? Let’s take a peek.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs has live chat, an active video channel with tutorials, a blog, a knowledge base, and a training series to help you learn its software. They also have a free browser plugin you can use that provide SERP overlays using their data. Ahrefs even has a video where they go over what they think makes them unique.

SEMRush

SEMRush has live chat, a sales team that does demos, a knowledge base, games and quizzes, ebooks, webinars, blog posts, a weekly Twitter chat, and a podcast to help you learn more about SEO in general. and specifically their tool. SEMRush also offers to ghostwrite for you based on your key terms.
Another bonus? They have common workflows mapped out for new users to learn more about how to use their tool in their everyday SEO work. They also have a free Chrome plugin that can run a full SEO audit of a webpage in your browser.

Moz

Moz has a blog, a forum, live chat, workshops, and training. I have to admit that I use the Moz toolbar more than most because I’ve been using the Moz tool longer. It provides an easy way to see meta title and descriptions along with canonical links and meta no-index information per URL. You can use this toolbar even if you’re just a (free) community member.

Summary

As you can see from this analysis, all three of these tools are powerful in their own right. Some are really strong in some areas and not as strong in others.

Picking a tool that works for you really depends on the type of site you’re working on and what area you’ll be focusing on the most when it comes to improving your SEO.

If your upcoming SEO work is link-focused (internal and external) I usually recommend Ahrefs. If you’re just starting out with a small site and want a user-friendly interface, I recommend Moz and if you’re content focused (constantly creating plans for writers or writing content for yourself) I recommend SEMRush.

If you’re servicing clients, it’s tough. I’ve had subscriptions to all three and always have at least 2 of these tools active at all times.

Good luck with your SEO tool selection!

 

 

I don’t know about you, but 2018 was quite a year. On both the work and home front, the pace was intense, sleep was limited, and I felt stretched most of the time.

But, I also learned a ton this year – both about running a business and SEO. And I wanted to share those personal “aha” moments with you in case they can help you in your career or business.

Here they are the top 11 things I learned about business and SEO in 2018:

1. No matter your industry – even if you’re a solo entrepreneur, you need help. Ask for it.

This was a year where I needed to remind myself that I not only need to take time for myself occasionally, but I also need to ask for help when I need it. Both of these are critical to maintaining business consistency and growth.

 

I started with a virtual assistant (VA) when my second daughter was born. I knew that coming off maternity leave that I would need an assist to double check my writing due to impending sleep deprivation if nothing else. That VA came in really handy when the same daughter was hospitalized this year for several days with breathing issues and my busy week had to be completely rescheduled. I could focus on my daughter and her healing, knowing my VA would handle what she could to keep the boat afloat until I could retake the helm. I now have two virtual assistants helping me keep things moving — freeing me up to write, speak and work on client strategy more.

2. Be as detailed as possible with your recommendations

When providing technical SEO recommendations (or really any recommendations) to developers, it’s important to be really clear about what the ideal outcome is for related Q&A tests.

I saw one case this year where the developers took liberties with deleting indexed pages – or adding the “noindex” meta tag to them – because of our recommendation to improve their thin content. These were pages that were already ranking for top terms. Luckily, we caught it before huge traffic losses, but my recommendations in the future will certainly make those kinds of things more clear to avoid confusion between the necessary teams to make the magic happen.

On the flip side, I also developed a video SEO guide this year that I think is much more prescriptive.

3. Robots.txt files need to be at the root level of your website – and can not redirect

It turns out that if robot.txt files redirect or are located anywhere but at the root level, Google will ignore them. During an audit earlier this year, I saw a client had a robots.txt in a subdirectory. Based on their Google Search Console URL parameter report, Google was hitting all of the parameters and file folders that should have been blocked in their Robots.txt.

Here’s a tweet from Gary Illyes confirming that Google ignores a robots.txt that redirects:

that's ignored afaik, it's treated as no robots.txt

— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) February 16, 2017

In this particular case, the client worked hard to set up their robots.txt to control the Google crawl – ensuring that Google was getting to the good content, ignoring the duplicative content and parameters, and not overloading their server, but all of those commands were ignored because of the redirect.

4. “Old school” HTML markup is important.

When doing some research for a client, I saw a competitor grab the Featured Snippet slot because the “answer” was wrapped in an H2 tag midway down the page. So, the takeaway is to make sure your writers use standard HTML formatting in their online writing.

Here’s an example:

First off, Google knows that “breast cancer causes” is the same as “risk factors.” You get that hint by looking at the first question under the People also ask section.

Secondly, that Featured Snippet is pulled from this page, which is labeled “causes of breast cancer. ” That particular snippet is pulled from a paragraph deep in the page (you need to scroll three times to see it). It looks like this:

Google is pulling it as a featured snippet because the header “Known Risk Factors” is an H2 tag.

5. You can tell Google that your old content is not updated to save crawl budget.

This is my favorite tip this year. I picked it up from here:

If you have old content that for various reasons you need to keep online AND need to keep indexed, consider a 304 – Content not updated. That HTML status can save your crawl budget.

It makes your server tell Googlebot:

“I have your request, but the information you want hasn’t changed since the last time you asked for it. Let’s not waste time; just get the file you downloaded last time.”

More from Google about using 304s here.

6. Rankings are different for high traffic head terms

I am lucky enough to be contracting for some large enterprise sites, and they rank for high volume keyword terms against other large, authoritative domains.

I’ve seen this phenomena live – that ranking when you’re at that level is just…different. The old ranking signals are not as important as the ones driven by RankBrain – pogo sticking, on page UX, etc.

This research was a real eye-opener for me when troubleshooting how to improve rankings when you’re playing ball at that level.

7. It is possible to create sub, sub, subdomains that are recognized by Google.

Mind you, I think these are more difficult for overall web maintenance and the user remembering, but I spotted these examples in the wild this year:

Https://response.restoration.noaa.gov and this one: https://www.galvestonlab.sefsc.noaa.gov/

8. Google is working quickly to roll out a search experience that mirrors the user’s journey.

This will highly influence your searcher’s click from SERPs, I think for the better. Here are some real examples I saw in recent history:

Google testing new SERPs for medical terms? A hint of what the searcher's journey might look like? #SEO. Notice the categorization at the top…you can just tab deeper into the topics you're interested in. pic.twitter.com/BZtHZJv0if

— Katherine Watier Ong (@kwatier) December 2, 2018

If you haven’t mapped your customer journey to your keyword research, or made sure your topics and subtopics on your site match a known ontology about your topic, then this might be the year to think through that transition. Resolve to put a plan in action if you want to retain your search traffic. Pro tip: if you’re looking for a keyword tool that will allow you to export your keywords already grouped into subtopics, check out SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool.

9. You can use Amazon service workers to implement SEO recommendations to bypass your developers

I am personally fond of developers. My brother is one. But sometimes it’s hard to get your SEO recommendations implemented by the development team. If you can’t get your developers to prioritize your fixes, you might want to check out this presentation from Dan Taylor at the SALT Agency won him the Technical SEO Research award.

Here’s more about using Cloudflare to manage your redirects and here about how to use Cloudflare workers to manage your Hreflang tags if you can’t get your dev team to help you.

And, if you have an A+ developer team who tirelessly works behind the scenes to support your SEO plan, make sure to let them know this year how much you appreciate their hard work.

10. Making it easier for Googlebot to discover your URLs can quickly lift traffic:

A picture is worth 1,000 words. By adjusting just two variables (homepage speed and URL discovery), we saw this VERY positive change in just three months with a recent client:

You can read the whole SEO case study here.

11. Automating your reporting can free up resources to help with your SEO efforts.

I’ll admit that this isn’t a new insight for me this year, but it was really fulfilling to help one of my clients move from manual Excel reporting that wasn’t focused on their SEO goals to an automated solution.

We not only cleaned up their Google Analytics installation (their data was misleading them) but we also helped them clarify their digital marketing goals and put in place a Google Data Studio set of dashboards that freed them up to ANALYZE the data accurately. This allowed them to make strategic digital marketing changes based on accurate data (the best kind!), vs spending time manually pulling reports together that were riddled with errors.

If you’re interested in clarifying your SEO goals and setting up an automated dashboard, you should check out my posts about how to set up your website goals and how to set up an actionable Google Data Studio dashboard.

So what did you learn about SEO this year? And what’s on your learning list for 2019?

I’m focused on learning more about machine learning and Power BI.

I’d love to hear about what’s on your list. Add them to the comments or drop me a note!

If you want to increase your video views AND brand exposure, this guide is for you.

This guide will walk you through how to have it all – how to optimize your onsite videos for discovery via the video tab in Google search, and how to optimize your YouTube videos for discovery in Google search and on YouTube. It’s comprehensive, so if you’d like to just download the whole guide, grab it here.

Let’s get started!

First, determine your video goals

Optimizing your videos for organic discovery requires two different efforts. The first is optimizing the video landing pages on your site for organic discovery in search (Google’s universal “all” tab and “video” tab). The second is to optimize for having your videos rank higher on YouTube’s platform, not Google Search. Let’s look at what those three ranking opportunities look like:

Goal 1: Optimize for organic search discovery, Google’s ALL tab (Google’s Universal Tab).

Goal 2: Optimize for organic discovery in search, Google’s VIDEO tab.

Goal 3: Optimizing for organic discovery directly in YouTube

Goal 1: Ranking in the Google universal tab

Most marketers want to rank in Google’s default “all tab” (universal results). We call that “Goal 1” in the first screenshot above. If that’s your focus, you need to be aware that the videos that are surfaced as a result in the top ten in Google (universal results) are actually links to YouTube videos. Some SEO studies have seen as much as 90% of the videos shown in search are YouTube videos.

Videos displayed in universal results can also be shown in a video carousel, in the top news stories, and/or as a featured video snippet.

It’s a competitive space to play in.

Goal 2: Ranking in the Google video tab

The second goal that you could set would be to rank in the Google “video tab” (screenshot #2 above). Both YouTube videos and videos from your website can rank in this tab. There is a benefit from getting your website, with an embed from a video management system like Wistia, ranking. The benefit is that your website URL will be displayed (not a YouTube URL) and those visitors will be directed to your site where there’s a greater chance of them converting to customers, signing up for your emails, discovering other content etc. As explained by says Wistia’s video SEO expert, Phil Nottingham:

All websites can rank in the video tab, but not all can rank in universal search with a video

Goal 3: Ranking in YouTube

The third goal is working on getting your YouTube videos ranking better in YouTube (screenshot #3 above). While those searchers who discover YouTube videos are not directed to your website, you will be able to increase the overall views of your videos. Only a low percentage of them will click to your website from YouTube, but you can encourage them to subscribe to your YouTube channel (where they will be notified of new videos). YouTube might not deliver clicks immediately, but it’s a great tool for driving overall brand awareness.

As you set your video optimization goals, it’s important to know that the top result in Google is usually NOT the top result in YouTube due to the difference in search intent. It’s best to think of Google results and YouTube results as two different beasts. There are different strategies required for ranking in Google with your video vs ranking in YouTube with your video.

Ultimately, if you want to both rank in Google Search and increase the views on the video in YouTube, you can follow the template set by Moz’s WhiteBoard Friday videos: They post a Wistia video on their site and then post a YouTube video.

Where do people search more – YouTube or Google?

If you’re trying to determine where searchers will discover your video more, it’s still going to be Google. While Youtube IS the 2nd largest search engine it is still overall only 2.9% of where searchers start their journey in the United States. Google is still the largest discovery engine. Here’s the most recent data from Sparktoro about where US searchers start their quest for more information:

And those searchers are searching more from their mobile devices. YouTube is similar to Google in that more than half of YouTube views come from mobile devices.

How to increase the discovery of your YouTube videos

If you want to rank on YouTube, you need to know how the algorithm works. YouTube wants to promote content that encourages more people to stay on YouTube so that they can show more ads.

Our goal is to get people to watch more videos that they enjoy so that they come back to YouTube regularly. – YouTube

Like Google’s search engine, search on YouTube strives to surface the most relevant results according to keyword queries. Ranking in YouTube is largely a black box. Its algorithm changes all the time (like Google’s) and they did 200+ updates in 2017 alone, AND use machine learning to surface videos for users. Other than the tutorials that you can find in the YouTube Academy, we are left with a few SEO industry studies.

The two most comprehensive studies about YouTube ranking factors are by Justin Briggs and Brian Dean’s.

 

Across both studies, you can boil down the most important YouTube Ranking Factors to the following:

1. Video Watch time
2. Exact match keyword targeting across title, description, and keyword tags
3. Shorter titles with keyword-rich descriptions
4. Channel authority
5. Positive sentiment & engagement

Video watch time

This is the amount of the video that a viewer has watched. If more people make it through your video than your competitors, then your video will perform better than your competitors.

YouTube Keyword Research

The first way for you to get started doing YouTube keyword research is to just start typing in the YouTube search bar.

Note what videos come up for the terms you are targeting. Do they have a huge number of views and come from channels with a large subscriber base? If so, then those terms might be too competitive for you to target. Also, take a look at what is ranking in YouTube in relation to content type and length of the video as it should tell you quite a bit about how you should structure your video to have the best chance for ranking.

Below is an example for the search “female business owners”. Note that the top ranking videos have thousands of views and come from established channels. The top video comes from a channel with over 1.5 million subscribers.

The top 4 channels all have over 50 million subscribers. If your channel doesn’t have that many subscribers, maybe you should target a different keyword.

Here are some other tools you can use to conduct YouTube keyword research.

Grepwords

Grepwords is $15 to start after a 2-week trial, and allows a user to extract:

• Commercial Intent Keywords
• Video Intent Keywords
• Suggestions for Vimeo
• Suggestions for YouTube

Keywordtool.io

Instead of manually entering keywords one-by-one, this tool searches for hundreds of variations of your keyword automatically, resulting in hundreds of autocomplete suggestions. To download your keyword options, you’re going to need to purchase a plan.

There are also keyword research functions built into two popular YouTube management systems: VidIQ, and YouTubeBuddy.

Keyword research for ranking videos in Google

Here’s where you would use your favorite keyword research tool. When you look for a keyword in Ahrefs, then sort by results that have either video or top results, it looks like this:

Then, you see a SERP like this (this was for “lifestyle business ideas”):

In SEMRush’s keyword magic tool, use the advanced features, then select “video”, “featured video”, “top stories” or “carousel” as a SERP feature. Now you have the keywords related to small business where a video result is triggered.

Note that the news result does not guarantee video results, but often news results include video.

Video Creation – Format

When you create your video, make sure that you’re recording it in HD and saving it in a format that can be played on mobile. The Backlinko study also found that high-definition videos dominate YouTube’s search results. In fact, 68.2% of videos on the first page of YouTube are in HD.

Keyword Placement

Once you have selected your target keyword:

• Put the keyword in your video script prior to recording, that way the transcript of the video will have your target keyword.
• Put the keyword on the video page – in the title of the video, the video description, and the “tags.”

Now, let’s look at how exactly you should craft those video titles and descriptions.

Keyword in Title Tag

Keyword matching seems to be more important in YouTube than it is in Google search. It seems that by using the exact match of the searcher’s query in your video title, you rank a bit better. To find those exact match keywords you need to conduct YouTube keyword research by using a tool that will provide you YouTube data (more on those tools later).

 

Note that shorter titles seem to rank better – around 50 characters. Here’s the data related to title length from Briggsby’s study:

 

YouTube Video Descriptions

Just like a meta description, this often gets pulled into your SERP snippet and can assist in driving click-through rate. It should be 300-350 words in the description to summarize and describe your video and should mention a broad match variation of your keyword 1 to 3 times, depending on length.

The description should list additional videos to watch, focused on your best content about the same or a similar subject matter as this video, creating recommendation clusters. It should also have a brief bio and/or list of social accounts, which can help build your distribution power.

Ideally, you should avoid exceeding 400 words without a good reason to do so, because the data shows that having a description that appears keyword stuffed or not focused can harm your performance. Here’s an example of an optimized description with calls to action from the late show:

Keyword Tags

These tags seem to help YouTube decide which videos to show as recommended videos. They are visible for the YouTube administrator but not to YouTube searchers. But when adding keyword tags:

•  Include broad match variations of your keyword.
•  Include keyword tags phrases that are 2-3 word phrases.

Here are a few more tips:

•  Justin’s dataset saw performing best were those with 31 to 40 unique tags, so go ahead and see as much of the character limit as you can without losing relevance.
• Keep keyword tags tightly focused around the topic.
• Search for relevant videos you’d like to appear next to as “Suggested” and analyze their tags, and use those keywords as your tags.

Video Thumbnail

Your video thumbnail is critical to the success of your video. It’s the only image that gives people a sense of what they’re about to invest their time in watching. It needs to look interesting and professional.

At Wistia, they found that videos with custom human thumbnails receive a 30% higher play rate than those without. “Your video thumbnail is more important than your title because it determines whether or not people will click,” says Nottingham.

Video Length

Video length matters. In 2015 Google was granted a patent for an algorithm that uses watch time as a ranking signal. This is also supported by both of the recent video SEO studies. This Feb 2017 study by Backlinko, which analyzed 1.3 million YouTube videos, found that longer videos significantly outperform shorter videos, as demonstrated in the chart below.

This focus on length also carries over to Google rankings. The average length of a YouTube video that is ranking on Google page one is 14:50 mins.

You can see that for the various terms below for keywords where videos are ranking. The top ranking video is almost an hour long:

Let’s try a different topic related to the benefits of registering as a women-owned small business:

The top ranking video is over one hour long.

If you’re looking for the barriers for female entrepreneurs, the top ranking video is almost 30 minutes:

But if you’re optimizing for YouTube views (vs likes and rankings), the research shows that videos around 4-6 minutes get the most views and videos under 2 minutes don’t perform well. The most liked YouTube videos (based on the Briggsby data) is around 10-16 minutes.

Videos under 2 minutes don’t perform well at all on YouTube.

Captioning

Did you know that In fact, 85% of videos on Facebook are watched without sound?
Discovery Digital Networks (DDN) performed an experiment on their YouTube channel, comparing videos with and without closed captions added. They found that captioned videos enjoyed 7.32% more views on average.

Captioning is really important in mobile video viewing environments where audio may be disruptive or inaccessible. Even Facebook found that captions increase video views by 12% compared with uncaptioned videos.

If you are looking for inspiration of how to create videos without sound, Hubspot has a great list.

Video Transcripts

Search engines can’t read the video but they do read the associated text. The transcript is critical. Here are a few tips:

• Don’t let YouTube translate your video. There are sure to be errors. Use a transcript service to ensure accuracy. Ideally, you would have put your target transcript into your video script. If you did that, those target terms are now in the video transcript! (Note: You can provide YouTube transcripts in more than one language.)
• Once you have a transcript, add to your website’s video landing page and upload to YouTube.

Here’s an example of a Video Transcript on YouTube:

Here’s an example of Video Transcript on Landing Page:

YouTube Cards

YouTube cards allow you to create scripted calls to action to link to other videos, playlists, associated websites or to prompt your audience to buy merchandise or support your crowdfunding campaign. Here’s what they look like:

You can have 5 cards per video. You can also use cards in older videos to highlight your most recent uploads, or to promote merchandise or fundraising campaigns. Here are some examples of how people have used YouTube cards:

YouTube End Screens

End screens appear for the last 5-20 seconds of a video and are shown on both desktop and mobile. They allow you to promote up to 4 elements and can include links to any of these:

• Videos
• Playlists
• Channels
• Promote Website
• Merchandise
• Crowdfunding

Since the end screen only appears for 20 seconds (which is quick), you need to make sure that you create an end screen that runs for 20 seconds, and add a card with your user instructions PRIOR to that end card appearing to give them time to click.

This is the perfect opportunity to get them to watch another video (since overall watch time influences your video and channel performance) as well as instructions on how to click back to your website for more information about the topic, as demonstrated at the end of this video.

If you are developing a specific playlist and want to direct traffic to it, you should add a link to that playlist in the end screen of as many related videos as possible.

Just make sure that your end screen is not displaying OVER your video’s content:

Increasing your video engagement

YouTube Channel Factors

First, consider the YouTube channel description. Based on the data, channel descriptions that have over 300 characters seem to perform better.

Channel subscribers and overall watch time

Channel subscribers have been shown to correlate with more engagement, which makes sense as channel subscribers get notified automatically by YouTube when a new video is posted. To encourage subscribing to your channel:

• Include a subscribe link in your videos using cards
• Include a subscribe link in the video description

Based on the Briggsby research, channels with under 1,000 subscribers perform significantly worse than those channels that are over that mark. Once you reach 1,000 subscribers, you can join the YouTube Partner program, so your goal should be to pass the 1,000 subscriber mark as fast as possible.

A quick side note:
You should make it easy for website visitors to subscribe when they visit your channel from their website! Use the YouTube provided channel link (instead of any other profile button) which sends the user to YouTube AND automatically subscribes them to your channel.

Other things that you can try to increase your subscribers:

• Use calls to action in your video and descriptions to improve subscription growth.
• Keep your video subject matter tightly focused to encourage people to subscribe.
• Flip the link on your website to the YouTube Subscribe button.
• Email you list and encourage subscribers.
•  Review your YouTube analytics to optimize subscription growth.

Additionally, overall watch time for all of your videos in your channel matter, so work to improve all of the video watch times. Consider de-publishing low performing videos.

Getting into your YouTube Subscriber’s Home Feed

Every YouTube user has a home feed that is personalized to them based on:

•  Performance: How well the video has engaged and satisfied similar viewers, among other factors.
• The viewer’s watch history and search history: how often the viewer watches a channel or topic and how many times we’ve already shown each video to the viewer

Here’s an example of a “home” feed:

This is all not to be confused by the user’s “Subscription” feed where they see videos from channels they have subscribed to. Here’s an example of the Subscribe feed:

Users actually get 2 different notifications based on their interests. Here’s more from YouTube:

Subscriptions feed, available on both mobile and desktop, is where you can see all recently uploaded videos from your subscriptions.

Notifications let you know when there are new videos and updates from your subscriptions via email or push notifications on mobile. When you subscribe to a channel, you’ll automatically get occasional notifications with highlights of activity. – Source

While you might think that all of your subscribers get your notifications, it’s important to know that notifications to your users are impacted by YouTube’s algorithm. YouTube employees recently posted an explainer video on Creator Inside explaining:

We don’t notify all of your subscribers….We notify all of your subscribers who have rung the bell and then your most active subscribers after that … If they don’t ring the bell and they’re just subscribers, then we put them in an ‘occasional notification’ state, so that means they get algorithmically determined notifications. Your most active subscribers, users who are watching your channel and your livestreams, are going to get notifications as soon as you go live.

To receive all notifications from a channel, users need to click on the bell icon to opt-in to receiving all notifications.

You can, however, as a channel owner post a message (with a link) which will show up in the subscriber’s “all activity feed.”

YouTube Shares

The number of people who share your video correlates to higher rankings. The study by Backlinko found that the number of shares a video generates is strongly tied to first page YouTube rankings:

This means that you want to encourage the share by asking your viewers to share – in the video itself, in the end-cards and description. Keep in mind the personal psychological reasons you viewers might share videos. Based on a study by Fractl people share to:

1. To bring valuable and entertaining content to others.
2. To express the issues that they care about.
3. To grow and nourish our relationships and evoke an emotional response.

Does your content support those desires?

YouTube Commenting

You can add cards throughout your videos that prompt viewers to comment on your videos.
It’s important to vote up and engage with people who comment on your videos. Video responses show YouTube that your video is popular and relevant. Replying demonstrates you’re approachable.

The Backlinko study also found a strong correlation between the number of comments on a video and its ranking:

Commenting Best Practices

Your focus should be improving the comment engagement by your viewers, as it drives overall YouTube views. You can do this by:

• Encourage comments by asking a specific question within your video.
• Explicitly ask people to comment.

You should also interact with your audience in comments regularly. If you have an engaged Twitter or Facebook audience, let them know that you are “hanging out” in the comments section of YouTube and invite them to come participate.

Once you get people commenting, make sure to mine your comments for market research on your audience. You can also use the content from the comments to develop other videos, either by featuring those comments and then answering them or using them to source topic ideas for future videos.

Keyword Optimized Playlists

If you have videos that naturally cluster around a particular topic, you should consolidate these into playlists.  Ideally, the labels for these playlists would be driven by keyword research. This allows you to try to rank for terms that you haven’t targeted with your individual videos.

Well-architected playlists perform well in search engines, can be shared and embedded into your site or others. They also show up in the recommended videos section of YouTube.

You can add both your videos and other videos to playlists, and the YouTube instructions on how to set them up are here. You can also add collaborators (other YouTube accounts) that can add videos to your playlist. Make sure to create a catchy (and optimized) title and description for your playlist.

Embedding YouTube Video Playlists

Here are two examples of what it looks like when you embed a playlist on your site:

Goal 2: Getting into Google’s Video Tab

There are variety of best practices you should follow so that Google can find the videos on your site and to increase your video ranking if you are embedding videos into your landing pages with a service like Wistia. Those best practices are as follows:

One Video Per Landing Page

Video pages without text can appear as thin content and potentially put your site at risk for a Google penalty. Each video landing page should have descriptive text, an optimized meta title and description, one embedded video, and a video transcript. If you are embedding a YouTube video, make sure to adjust your embed parameters to maximize watch time from your embeds by allowing related videos or defining the next video.

Transcripts Are Really Powerful Stuff

One study by Liveclicker compared 37 web pages before and after adding transcripts. Pages with transcripts earned on average 16% more revenue than they did before transcripts were added. This American Life (the radio show) enjoyed a similar boost. When they transcribed their entire audio archive and posted transcripts online, they found that 6.26% of all unique visitors who came from search traffic landed on a transcript page.

Video Schema Markup

All of the search engines use schema markup to understand the type of content you have on your pages. They also help you get a snippet in search that looks like this:

When you are embedding a video (whether from YouTube or Wistia) you should add Schema markup to help the search engine determine the content of the video.

•  The relevant markup includes URL, length, name, description, thumbnail, and upload date.
• Google’s Webmaster blog has a for a step-by-step implementation guide.

Note: Wistia automatically inserts SEO metadata (JSON-LD, which is the lightest weight and fastest) to up your likelihood of being indexed. (Source of image:  https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/video)

Video Sitemap

This is only required if videos are embedded using a service that is NOT YouTube. Once you create the XML sitemap file, upload it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Here‘s more about the proper format: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80471?hl=en

Promoting your videos to get more views and embeds

Inbound links to each video (the number of domains that link or embed your video) correlate with more video views and higher rankings. Here are our recommendations around how to effectively promote your videos to get additional views.

Email

Leveraging your email list to increase your video views is a no-brainer. We have personally observed that by simply adding “video” to the subject line, open rates have increased. Don’t take our anecdotal data on this as there are various studies that also support this phenomenon:

•  Using the word “video” in an email subject line was found to increase open rates by 19% and clickthrough rates by 65% (HubSpot)
• Adding video to emails can increase click-through rates anywhere from 200-300% (Forbes)

Tell your list about your new videos or your new playlists. Simply mention “video” in the subject line and encourage them to share!

As a side note, if you have an offer that would encourage someone to give you their email, you can also place links to that offer on your YouTube videos, descriptions, and end cards as a way to grow your email list.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn allows you to share both embeds of videos (from places like YouTube) but also will allow you to upload native videos. You can use your profile, LinkedIn Publisher and your updates as a way to share your videos to your LinkedIn followers.

Facebook

We would actually not recommend adding your YouTube videos on Facebook considering that uploading native videos perform better. Search Engine Journal ran a test to see if Facebook was favoring native videos over videos embedded from third-party video embeds. Their study concluded that native videos received twice the reach, get twice as many likes, three times more shares, and seven times more comments.

When you do upload natively to Facebook, make sure to use captioning: Facebook found that they increased view time by 12%!

Sharing to Forums

You should also use your videos as a part of an answer to a forum user’s question – you can link or embed your videos on places like Quora or Reddit to increase the number of embeds of that video and to increase its video views.

Paid Social Promotion – including YouTube

Pre-roll ads on YouTube, in particular, are a great way to spend your marketing budget as you only pay when someone watches part of your video ad. The activity off those ads (the watch time and engagement on your promoted videos) count toward your channels metrics, so they help boost your organic rankings too!

Measuring your Performance

First, tag links with UTM parameters

For your to analyze and optimize the performance of the click through to your website from YouTube, or the performance of your End Screens (or any other link you put on YouTube), you’ll want to keep track of all website visitors who come to your site through a link you add to YouTube.

To do that, just add a UTM parameter like this to the end of your website link:

?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=endscreen

Here’s a UTM parameter generator that can generate the links for you. Just keep in mind that Google analytics is not case sensitive, so you need to label each source and medium EXACTLY the same every time you generate a link that uses them. Otherwise, you create two lines in your Google Analytics report. You can learn more about the havoc that would create here. Once you’ve tagged your URLs, you can view that data in your Campaign reporting Google Analytics.

Watch your analytics and optimize for videos with best watch time.

You need to measure your performance to improve it.

For starters, we’d recommend your measure:

1. Track subscribers, shares, comments and likes
2. Video watch time and retention
3. Backlinks and embeds
4. Click through on your UTM tracked links to your website.
5. Rankings of your YouTube videos in Google Search and YouTube

If you’re looking to track your YouTube or Google rankings, you’ll need to purchase a tool. YouTube Buddy provides YouTube and Google keyword rankings. RankRanger will allow you to track the rankings of your YouTube videos on YouTube, Google web and video search.

You can also try this ad hoc YouTube Rank checking tool, for free.

To get started tracking your metrics monthly, it’s easiest to set up a dashboard, and you might want to check out and modify this Google Data Studio report.

Improving your watch time

Keep an eye on your watch time and work to improve it. First, run a report of the videos on your channel in your YouTube Creator Studio with the best watch time:

Then, to find the keywords driving traffic to a particular video, click on the video analytics.

“Analytics” → “Reach Viewers->Traffic Source Type, and you’ll see something like this:

If you click on YouTube search, you can see what keywords you’re ranking for.

If you add those “missing” keyword to your title and description, you can get even higher rankings for that term.

Improving your videos with low audience retention

You need to ensure that viewers watch as much of your videos as possible. Keep an eye on low performers and implement some of the techniques mentioned here to improve that metric.

Generally, you’re going to want to keep your videos concise and make sure that they answer your searcher’s intent. Consider starting the video with a summary of what the view is going to cover – your hook and get your audience engaged from the beginning.

Check to see when your audience drops off on your video. Are there moments when your energy dips and is that where your audience drops off?

Think about previewing things that will come up later in the video when you develop your video script. By providing little teasers, you should be able to keep your audience hooked and watching to find out the answer.

Similar to doing SEO for content you own that you want to rank in Google, increasing the views of your videos takes consistent work over time.

Let’s review how to get started on that journey:

Key Takeaways

1. Decide what your goal is for your video marketing strategy. Do you want to rank in Google (all or video tab), rank in YouTube, or just increase your number of video views?
2. Make sure to conduct keyword research and label your videos effectively: In the video description, title, and ideally video script before you record.
3. Encourage social engagement with your video. If the comments have been quiet for a few days, encourage your Facebook and Twitter followers to join you in the comments section to ask questions.
4. Channel engagement and watch time matters.
5. Work to grow your subscriptions to get over that 1,000 subscriber mark.
6. Monitor your video watch time and retention. YouTube places great importance on how long someone stays through to watch a video and longer videos tend to do better.
7. If you want to measure your rankings over time, you’ll need to invest in a tool.
8. Sign up for YouTube’s Creator Academy trainings and blog post updates to stay on top of changes.

PS: Thanks for taking the time out to read my post and geek out about SEO with me! I get my inspiration for post topics from other SEOs and in-house marketers struggling with SEO strategy and implementation questions, so if you like this post, please…

1) Leave a comment
2) Share it with your network
3) Follow me for future posts

 

Some of my clients are big federal agencies who are already ranking in Google’s top 10 for their content but are not being displayed in the top featured snippet. If you to are in the same boat, this writing guide is for you.

Note: this guide is a compilation of great tips and research by Moz, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Stone Temple Consulting, Izzi Smith’s great presentation at BrightonSEO and others.

Here’s my attempt to pull it all together in one location.

What’s a “snippet”:

In the SEO world, the term “snippet” is used for any set of text, image, URL, and video that is displayed in Google search. Over the years Google has created a number of ways that it might use data from your site or your social media properties and display it in search for a user.

What’s a “featured snippet”:

This article focuses on just those featured snippets. A featured snippet is an answer that ranks at the top of the search results (ranking 0) that link back to a website.

This is what a featured snippet looks like:

 

Google has a comprehensive guide now to what Featured Snippets are and how they are triggered that you should check out.

Do you really have to be on the first page of Google to qualify?

Yes.

According to research by Ahrefs, 99.58% of featured pages already rank on the first page of Google for that term. If your site is already ranking on Google page one for a query that could trigger a featured snippet, you should modify your copy to potentially rank in that coveted spot for higher brand recognition, and click through rate.

You can find that in Ahrefs by using their “Organic Keywords report”, which will show you the keywords that you rank for an if they have a Featured Snippet (even if you’re not the result). Here’s one for Climate.gov:

Why should you work on getting a featured snippet?

Feature snippets (with the right search intent) can drive significantly more click-throughs from SERPs to your landing page. Here are some recent studies that show the increase in CTR once you get a Featured Snippet:

• Hubspot’s own research shows that content that has received a featured snippet gets 2 times more click through from SERPs.
  
• Ben Goodsell has a case study where the CTR to the featured page increased from 2% to 8% once it was placed in a featured snippet box and it drove an increase in revenue from their organic traffic of 677%.
• Eric Enge has a case study showing a 20–30% increase in traffic for a client while they held the featured snippet for the query.
• Ahrefs has also run their own study on CTR and Featured Snippets which also showed an increase in CTR.

  

Featured Snippets also help with Voice SEO

Did you know the featured snippet is used to provide the answer when a user searches via voice? The head of Baidu search has estimated that voice and image search will be 50% of the search volume by the year 2020 which means that featured snippet carries a lot more weight. You can read my take on voice search (and voice search optimization) here.

A caveat…

Make sure that you’re optimizing for featured snippets that have click-through intent. You don’t want to appear for a featured snippet that decreases the amount of traffic to your site.

Types of featured snippets in 2018

Featured Snippet is just one kind of snippet, and there are many kinds of Featured Snippets. They include:

• Paragraph
• Numbered List
• Bulleted List
• Table
• Suggested Video
• Tabbed
• Expanded
• Doubel

Learn more about different types below as each is set up to answer a specific type of query.

Paragraph Featured Snippets

This snippet includes an answer given in text. It can be a box with text inside or a box with both text and image inside.

These are triggered from the following type of questions:

• Who is…
• What is…
• How (do/does something work)…
• Why is…

Here’s an example:

 

Here’s an example of a “do I” query:

Here’s another example with multiple images:

 

Here is another example triggered by a question that needs a full paragraph answer:

 

Numbered List

These tend to be triggered by queries where the answer is a step of instructions in order, so if you want to rank for “How do I” (do something) type queries, then you’ll need to format your content in a list format. So in your HTML either with the use of <ol>, <li> or with H2 or H3 subheaders for every time on your list.

Here is an example:

 

Bulleted List Featured Snippet

These are triggered when the answer is a list, but the order isn’t important. They tend to be triggered by ranked items or best of lists or features lists.

Here’s an example:

And here’s another:

In these cases, you’re going to want to code your HTML with <ul> (unordered list) and <li> (list item) or H2 and H3 subheaders for every item in your list.

 

Table Featured Snippet

These are answers given back to the searcher in a table format. Here’s an example:

 

If you have a page where the data needs to be presented in a table format, Google will pull the content through if you have it coded as a table in the HTML, or even better, you can mark it up with their dataset schema markup.

Suggested Video Clips Snippets

These are triggered when the query is instructional and would benefit from a video tutorial. They jump directly into a video result, are also a form of featured snippets.

 

The best guide on the Internet to know how to appear for video featured snippets is here. It ultimately requires a coordinated effort between your website landing page and your YouTube video.

Tabbed Featured Snippets

This was announced by Google, though I haven’t seen many of these in the wild. They are triggered when Google thinks that the searcher would benefit from more information about subtopics related to their query:

Here’s Google’s example:

 

Expanded Feature Snippets

These are related to the tabbed snippets above it was launched in August 2018, and it shows for queries where there are multiple search intents, and to provided useful information on subtopics.

Per Google’s blog post on the subject, published August 16, 2018:

“These new panels are automatically generated based on our understanding of these topics from content on the web, and we hope you find them useful as they roll out over the next few days. This update is the latest in a series of improvements we’ve been making to help you get information quickly with Search. As always, if you have any feedback on the information you see, please let us know via the feedback link at the bottom of the search results page”.

Here’s an example:

 

Double Featured Snippets

These are relatively new, and there’s a great analysis of their impact from a Stat report. It seems to be a format that Google is testing.

They seem to be triggered by noun heavy queries, and they look like this:

What type of content gets displayed most often?

Based on GetStat’s 2016 study, the following types of search queries get featured results most often:

• DIY processes
• Health
• Financial
• Mathematical
• Requirements
• Status
• Transitional

And GetStat even has a follow-up study about how to determine which queries that trigger featured snippets might drive the most click through to a website.

How do you get started?

Google has published a guide on featured snippets in January 2018, but it just provides you with examples of how to opt out of having Google using your web content for featured snippets.

If you are looking for tips on how to optimize your content for being displayed as a Featured Snippet, here’s your checklist:

1. Rank in the Top Page of Google

As I mentioned in the intro, featured snippets are only available to pages that already rank in the top 10 in Google (or page one). You get there by following good SEO technical practices, being mobile friendly and load quickly, on HTTPs, with good, high-quality inbound links, good EAT signals and happy website visitors. No small task.

If you’re not sure you meet some of those elements, here are some tips to check your technical status:

• Google’s Mobile Friendly test
• Chrome’s Lighthouse SEO audit tool
• And a good old fashioned SEO audit.

2. Answer the searcher’s intent

This is an important aspect of optimizing any web copy in 2018, but even more important if you want to be in the featured snippet. You need to answer the questions succinctly and completely. To figure that out, you need to look at the SERPs to see what the searcher’s intent is behind that query. Google has long ago moved from a keyword matching engine to an intent matching engine, and that’s even more clear with its featured snippet work.

It’s important to understand what type of content Google wants to show in the snippet. Looking at their Human Rater Guidelines, Google has indicated that a featured snippet would “fully meet” the criteria if:

“The user is looking for a very specific fact or piece of information and the result block provides the information immediately, thoroughly, accurately, and clearly. No other results would be needed.”

 

3. Evaluate if you are currently ranking for featured snippets

Most of the SEO ranking tools will provide you with this type of report. Here’s how to from Ahrefs and SEMRush.

There’s another way to see if you’re ranking for queries with volume. You need to use a bit of RegEx in your Google Analytics account (in the Google Search Console report for Queries). You set the search query matching RegEx ^why|^how^should^best:

 

This will allow you to see the queries you’re ranking for in Google that are question-related queries where you are already getting impressions or click through.

4. Find queries related to your service offering/products/organization where you should be ranking.

This is where good old fashioned keyword research comes in. For questions in particular, here are the places that are best to surface those:

AnswerthePublic

 

Look at forums at the real questions your searchers are asking related to their issue/burning questions behind their query:

 

Look at the People Also Ask:

 

Also, consider places like Reddit:

Seed Keywords:

This tool allows you to discover related keywords by having your friends and followers help. You simply create a search scenario. Then share it on social media and ask your followers to type in the keywords they would use to solve it.

5. Finding Supportive Keywords

There are a couple of ways to do research around the additional keywords that Google expects to find on your page if you’re covering the topic well.

You’re going to be using tools that help you find the semantics of the words – the meaning behind them and the additional words that will give the search engines clues to what exactly you mean in your copy.

Google Search Suggest

One easy way to do that is to use Google’s search suggestions on the bottom of each search page.

 

Or, check out Niche Laboratory (free):

This might be one of my favorite tools as it will help you find associated phrases, but will also pull popular forums on your topic.

 

You can also use SEMRush’s SEO Content Template:

 

Or Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool:

This Keyword Explorer tool lets you switch to “broadly related topics and synonyms, like this:

 

6. Find Supportive Topics

Make sure to look at the questions featured in the People Also Ask Boxes like this:

 

Often they provide great insight into that secondary question that the searcher has related to their query. Often if a user is answering that on your post, you’re more likely to be providing a comprehensive answer that Google will want to show as a featured snippet.

7. Change how you format your writing

As you’re editing the pages you’d like to have rank for a featured snippet, you need to do the following:

Create text at the top of the page for the snippet

That text needs to clearly answers the question in 40-60 words. SEMrush analyzed nearly 7 million Featured Snippets. And they found that the most Featured Snippets are 40-60 words long. 2.

HTML is your friend. Make sure to use it

Format your text with clear clear headers and subheaders (using H1s and H2s, etc) , or bulleted lists if that’s the type of snippet you’re going after.

Answer the question completely

Make sure that the page comprehensively answers the question and associated “people also ask questions” and supportive keywords. I love this question from Briggsby:

“Does this article answer all the subjects and questions a searcher might have when they search?”

Think about where Google is going with a focus on searcher’s journeys – if your page provides a complete answer to the searcher’s first query and second and third, do you think that Google will reward you with that top spot? You bet! If it makes sense to write a comprehensive answer on one landing page, do. If not, consider adding links to supportive content that answers that second and third natural question that comes out of the first query.

Create the BEST answer

The best answers should:

• Demonstrate that you’re an expert and highlight that you’re presenting factual data.
• Make sure to provide supporting references and sources.
• Use short and punchy sentences that provide direct answers.

Leave the user wanting more (so that they click through)

When possible, (especially when working on a list featured snippet) add more list items then will be shown – it creates a “more item” option at the bottom.

Include an optimized image or video

Most of the time, Google includes an image in a featured snippet. However, the image source can be pulled from a site that is not yours, so its best practice to include an optimized image that Google can use from your landing page.

The image needs to be:

• original (not a stock photo)
• topically relevant
• on the upper part of the page
• less than 600px, compressed
• have a 4:3 aspect ratio
• optimize the filename of the image, the alt text and the captions

Here’s more from Google about image optimization.

Format the content properly

The content should match the type of featured snippet box you want to rank for.

If you get a Featured Snippet, will you keep it?

Featured Snippets have a lot of churn as Google is using its RankBrain algorithm to determine if they are truly solving the searcher’s intent over time. Stone Temple found that there is quite a bit of volatility.

Here’s a chart from Izzy SMith, SEO Manager at Sixt related to keywords she is tracking:

 

Measuring your Featured Snippet dominance

Unfortunately, there’s no way to identify Featured Snippets in Search Console.You’re going to have to track your efforts with an SEO tool.

• Here’s how to set up that tracking in Ahrefs:
• And SEMRush has a full guide to setting up tracking in their tool.

Not quite ranking yet, but curious as to how close you are?

Curious about where you are in the featured snippet que? You just need to type in your target query, and remove the site that appears (-featuredsnippetdomain.com). Then add the second domain as well:

Keyword -featuredsnippetdomain.com AND -secondfeaturedsnippetdomain.com etc. H/T Izzi Smith (@izzionfire) via Source.

Future of Featured Snippets

They are not going away, Google during their 20th anniversary birthday announced that they are focused on providing search journeys (directing a user’s search behavior) and featured snippets are a part of that effort. And Bing is also now getting ot the effort with their own testing of Featured Snippets with tabs.

What has your success been in getting Featured Snippets? Share in the comments below.

PS: Thanks for taking the time out to read my post and geek out about SEO with me!  I get my inspiration for post topics from other SEOs and in-house marketers struggling with SEO strategy and implementation questions, so if you like this post, please…

1) Leave a comment

2) Share it with your network

3) Follow me for future posts

I have had a host of clients throughout my SEO career – .govs, medically-oriented associations and businesses, scientists, big brands, reporters, and nonprofits looking to boost their SEO.

The one complaint I hear EVERY time I conduct an SEO copywriting training is their frustration with having to modify their writing style for online reading and SEO.

I have to admit, I’m more of a geek about online reading and usability than most. My father was a sign shop owner (see photo below), so at an early age, I was being taught about how things like kerning and leading can impact readability. This is especially relevant when creating signs designed to give information as you drive by at 50 mph.

I also dove deep into the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) when I was working on my master’s thesis on consumer adoption of wearable computers.  But,  regardless of my over-zealousness of the topic, online formatting matters.

It matters for your readers. It matters for SEO. It matters for conversions.

Hopefully, this post will convince you. In this post we are going to walk through:

1. How online reading behavior is different than offline
2. Why it’s important to format appropriately
3. How you can use online formatting to make you a better online writer

Here’s why reading online is different than offline.

It’s hard to read long text online

There is a swath of evidence from laboratory experiments and consumer research which highlight that screens fail to recreate the same experience as paper.  Screens actually prevent people from reading a long text in a way in which they retain the information and physically enjoy the experience.

Online reading is mentally draining

It turns out that compared to reading on paper, reading on a screen (computer or phone) may also drain more of our mental resources and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done.

Offline searching behavior influences online searching

“Information scent theory” is based on research conducted by Peter Pirolli, Ph.D. at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He is a cognitive psychologist and an expert on human-computer interaction who has spent the past two decades studying the strategies people use to navigate and gather information online. It turns out that we look for information online similarly as to how we look for items in the real world.

Yet, often the online experience does not support this hardwired way of finding information.

Here are the key takeaways from that research:

Humans look for information on the web with the same food-gathering techniques used by animals.  Animals follow a physical scent to look for food. Humans, similarly, follow an online “scent” trail that is made up of keywords, images, and other cues.When those words and images are closely related to the information we’re seeking, the scent is strong and we continue on that path. When it is not, we abandon our path or start over.

The impact on you and your online content? People don’t click links with poor information scent.

So you need to provide people with information scent on the page from search related to their original query or, they could:

• Bounce back to search (a negative ranking signal)
• Not click on another page on your site – resulting in low dwell time on the page
• Return back to search (also a negative ranking signal)

You want searchers to visit your organic landing pages, stay and visit more of your site, which is why Information scent is important to tackle.

Users make up their mind quickly.

How quickly? Most of them very quickly.

55% of search visitors will spend fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page they click to from the search engine result pages before returning to the search results to start over.

Academic research supports this point too. As humans from an evolutionary perspective (as pointed out by the Nielsen Norman Group) are working to get the maximum benefit for the least effort.

When someone visits your page from Google, you have 10 seconds on average to convince them to stick around.

In 10 seconds, those visitors are scanning. Not reading.

 

How does this impact your writing?

It’s essential to grab someone’s attention with an answer to their question above the fold (the part of the screen you can see without scrolling).Even on mobile devices (where scrolling is easier) people still look more above the fold than below it.

Let’s talk about why Google needs formatting.

 

Headings, line breaks, lists and nearness of particular keywords all convey to Google an additional understanding of the text. For example, as highlighted by Briggsy in his post about Natural Language Processing:

If text appears in an HTML ordered list or a series of headings with numbers in front of them, it’s likely a process or ranking.

Still not convinced that Google needs you to format your text?

Here’s Google’s John Mueller explaining how Google uses semantic markup to understand your text during a recent Webmaster Hangouts:

And here are the lines directly from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide related to formatting the content on your page:

How does formatting impact Google’s understanding?

Properly structured headings can help with navigation and Google’s understanding of your text, and subheadings should really be thought of as sub-articles within the main article.

Subheads also have a parent->child relationship. H1 is the top main heading (and ideally should be used once on the page), and H2s are next, then H3s etc.

When you use, ordered lists, keep in mind that they imply rankings, order, or process. You can also use short bolded “labels” or “summary” phrases at the start of each paragraph can function as a list.

When you use tables, keep in mind that they imply that the data has a row/column relationship.

OK, but how do I apply this to my writing?

I am so glad you asked! This brings us to the techniques that we can use to help the online reader and Google understand our content.

1. Write in an inverted pyramid style

The inverted pyramid style works like this:

• You hook the reader and provide the Who, What, When, Where, Why.
• Provide a supportive narrative that is less important.
• Finish out the story with the least important details.

You need to start with the key point and give the reader only what they need. Content has different meanings based on how far down the page it appears.

Go ahead and listen to the Mohawk College Journalism Professor Kurt Muller explain how to write in an inverted pyramid style:

 

2. Format your Text for Scanning and Task Completion

Even if they decide to stay, most users only spend 37 seconds on your page.  You can see this behavior reflected more recently in a Slate.com study. In fact, Slate even demonstrates the ideal way to format for online reading in this spoof article.

And our scanning behavior depends on the task we are hoping to complete on the site.

So when writing online, you’ll want to:

• Quickly reassure the searcher that they are in the right place related to their burning searcher’s intent/ question within the first paragraph or so of text to keep them.
• Make sure that links and category labels explicitly describe what users will find at those destinations.
• Use your headers to describe the takeaway in the paragraph below and start each paragraph with a sentence that sets the context.
• Test your final text with users if possible to see if they take away the main points from your content. Or track their click behavior in aggregate by using a tool like CrazyEgg or Hotjar.
• Check to see what terms it’s ranking for (via Google Search Console) and improve your meta title and description with those terms to improve its CTR and potential task completion after the page is live.

3. Use Chunking

In the field of user-experience design, ‘chunking’ usually refers to breaking up content into small, distinct units of information (or ‘chunks’), as opposed to presenting an undifferentiated mess of atomic information items.

You’re probably familiar with the saying that you can only hold 7 things in active memory at one time? That was first identified by George A. Miller in his article: “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.”

Keep in mind-

• Long copy is more memorable when it divided up with headers, images, bulleted lists, and short paragraphs
• Consider making “chunks” of 5-8 different topic areas.

4. Experiment with Bucket Brigades

This term was coined by Brian Dean of Backlinko and it’s proven to be an effective technique for both his posts and time on page testing, but others as well.

Check him out explaining it here:

As he explains it:

it opens up an information gap in your mind and you can’t help but read the next one. If people are about to get bored anywhere in your post, add a bucket brigade.

Here are the examples that he uses of bucket brigades:

• Here’s the deal…
• But there’s a catch…
• What’s the real story?
• How can you actually use this?
• The best part?
• Why does this matter?
• That’s not all.

5. Use white space

Today in 2018, there are more mobile internet users than desktop users. Most US web readers are viewing content on their phones.

Especially on mobile devices, where a thumb is considered 44 pixels, your text needs to have white space to allow for effective navigation. White space also allows for visual relaxation.

[White space] has been shown to increase comprehension by up to 20% – Dmitry Fadeyev.

Cognitive Load
It turns out the power of white space comes from the limits of human attention and memory. The amount of strain an interface design creates is called “cognitive load.” If this is new to you, I would recommend that you check out Steve Krug’s book, “Don’t Make Me Think”.

 

6. Use video and videos

We are more likely to remember content if it includes images or video because images are processed 6,000 times faster than text.

This might be why users spend on average 2.6X more time on landing pages with video than without. Adding pictures to your page can also increase the length of time a visitor stays on your page – by as much as 21%!

In summary:

To make your content “easy on the eyes” (and effective for SEO), you need to:

• Support the visitor’s “information scent” by using their keyword in key areas to encourage them to stay.
• Support users scanning behavior with formatting.
• Use headers, bullets, and numbered lists to “chunk” your information to support scanning.
• Write in an inverted pyramid style.
• Fall in love with white space. It helps the user absorb your copy.
• Experiment with bucket brigades.
• Support your content with videos and images to encourage more time on space and help them absorb the information.

PS: Thanks for taking the time out to read my post and geek out about SEO with me!  I get my inspiration for post topics from other SEOs and in-house marketers struggling with SEO strategy and implementation questions, so if you like this post, please…

1) Leave a comment

2.) Share it with your network

3.) Follow me for future posts