How to Invest in SEO

Testing out a new paid marketing channel is relatively easy. You can assign someone in-house, allocate some test budget, and pretty quickly quantify the return on your investment.

Testing out SEO can be quite a bit trickier:

• Results often take time (more than six months)

• If results do materialize, they’re often hard to quantify or attribute to any one project

• It’s more than just a financial investment — you'll usually need product resources as well

There are exceptions but most companies can’t say: "let's spend $10K on SEO over the next few months and see if there's potential there". You have to take a leap of faith, and weighing that leap of faith against very quantifiable, much more immediate projects isn't always easy.

I've seen this issue firsthand, first as a consultant at Distilled, then working in-house on SEO at Etsy, SeatGeek, and now Course Hero. So, here's my attempt at a framework for investing in SEO:

1. Should you invest in SEO in the first place?

2. How much should you invest in SEO?

3. How should you structure your SEO investment?

4. How should you measure your SEO investment?

This post will not cover what SEO work is actually worthwhile, or how to determine your SEO strategy, or how to hire the right SEO, or what tools to use, etc. Those are all aspects of investing in SEO that very much depend on your unique context. That said, hopefully this framework will help you navigate those questions.

Should you invest in SEO in the first place?

The most relevant question here is, how big is the addressable search market? A company like Slack will have a relatively small addressable search market (there aren't that many searches that Slack really wants to rank for), whereas a company like Expedia has an enormous addressable search market (flights from Vancouver to Toronto or Montreal or Calgary, hotels with free breakfast in Vancouver, cheap motels in Vancouver, car rentals in Vancouver, etc.).

Slack could always go all-in on content marketing and try ranking for top-of-funnel queries (anything related to communication, for example), but the intent of this traffic will usually be low.

All companies have the option of targeting a large range of top-of-funnel queries. For example, Away could write about travel tips, Warby Parker could write about eye health, Workday could write about hiring, etc. However, this traffic isn’t usually very transactional and therefore lower value (though not worthless).

The easiest way to estimate the size of your addressable search market is to look at competitors through a tool like Moz, SEMrush or SimilarWeb. To use an example, if I were at Tuft & Needle, I'd do something like this:

1. Look at organic search competitors within Moz’s True Competitor tool

2. Estimate the non-branded search traffic of those competitors with Similarweb or SEMrush

Non-branded SEO visits/year (millions)

Non-branded visits are visits that don't include the brand name (e.g. Casper). For instance, Casper receives 8.5 million visits per year from branded queries, but these don’t tell you much about your own search opportunity (though could be interesting from a brand perspective).

3. Assign a value to these visits by either using internal metrics (how much is a search visit worth to you?) or by considering the Adwords cost of this traffic via a tool like SEMrush:

Using the largest competitor from the competitive set above, sleepfoundation.org, we can see that if you were to purchase their monthly SEO traffic via search ads, you’d need to pay an estimated $10.9 million per month or $2.14 per visit ($10.9/5.1).

Therefore, by looking at these five competitors, we can conclude that:

• There are roughly 100 million search visits per year that are likely somewhat relevant to Tuft & Needle (the sum of search traffic to the five competitors).

• The value for each visit could be somewhere around $2.14

• The total value of search traffic available to Tuft & Needle could be somewhere around $214 million per year (100 million * $2.14)

The above exercise should help you decide:

1. Is SEO worth investing into in the first place? I’m certainly biased, but the answer to this will almost always be “yes”. It’s very unlikely that the right SEO investment won’t be ROI positive for most sites. I’d even posit that very few sites have ever over-invested in the right SEO to the point that their SEO investment dipped into ROI negative territory.

2. How should we prioritize our SEO investment relative to other opportunities?

3. How large should our SEO investment be?

Even if you’re confident the investment will be ROI positive, investing in SEO might still not make sense if:

• You can't afford to wait for the pay off (often over six months)

• You can't find the right SEO talent

• You have other, more compelling opportunities

• You can’t provide the necessary resources to SEO (more on this later)

How much should you invest in SEO?

Let’s dig into this a bit and stick with the same example. If Tuft & Needle believes:

• The actual search market is only 25% as large as what the above exercise suggests (about $50 million per year instead of $200 million per year)

• They can capture 5% of that market with the right SEO investment

• They need to maintain that investment to maintain their market share

They could justify spending $2.5 million per year on SEO (5% of $50 million). I don't know of many companies investing that amount into SEO — at $150,000 per person, that would be a 16-person SEO team. Therefore, I hope if nothing else, this exercise helps to illustrate how high the ceiling can be for even a non-SEO-centric company like Tuft & Needle.

But the more exciting calculations involve SEO-centric companies like Thumbtack, Etsy, Pinterest, SeatGeek, Expedia, etc. For companies like this, which operate in enormous search universes, it's almost impossible to invest too much into SEO. Let's do some thought exercises.

eBay's ceiling

According to SimilarWeb, SEO accounts for 22% of eBay's total site traffic. Let's say that it only accounts for half as much revenue since those visits are likely less valuable than direct or paid search visits. Based on their 2020 financials, that 11% (half of 22%) would amount to $280 million in net income per year (income not revenue):

Let's conservatively say that the right SEO investment can increase their search income by 5%, that would represent an impact of 5% multiplied by $280 million, or $14 million per year. How many SEOs and engineers could you hire for that amount?

Here's another thought: if eBay commissioned an SEO audit every single month, and each audit only produced one insight worth implementing, and that one insight increased their SEO income by only 0.1%, they could justify a price of $280,000 per audit ($3.3 million per year). Or forgetting about audits for a moment, do you think a team of SEOs ($3.3 mil can buy a lot of headcount) could generate one insight worth 0.1% in lift every month?

Here’s another example: eBay spent over $2.5 billion on sales and marketing in 2020:

And here is the rough breakdown of their traffic according to SimilarWeb:

Traffic/channel to eBay.com according to SimilarWeb

How much of that $2.5 billion should be spent on SEO? We can use our earlier estimate of SEO's 22% traffic share representing an 11% income share to guide this. Should SEO get 11% of eBay's marketing budget to match its share of income? 5%? 2%? At 1% that would represent an investment of $25 million per year.

What could you do with a $25 million per year investment into SEO?

• Hire a 50-person SEO team of engineers, analysts, and SEO experts at $200,000 per year each ($10 million)

• Hire five agencies on retainer at $50,000 per month each ($3 million)

• Hire a 50-person team of strong content writers at $100,000 per year each ($5 million)

• Spend $2 million a year on tooling

• Admire the remaining $5 million per year

Okay, last one! Here are some recent case studies from SearchPilot outlining the impact of relatively small SEO projects:

• Reprioritizing of content on the page = 16% lift

• Adding internal links = 7% lift

• Bringing content out of tabs = 12% lift

• Adding month and year to title tags = 5% lift

• Adding review schema markup = 20% lift

Let’s say:

• Those projects only affect 20% of the site (a lift of 10% would actually be a sitewide lift of 10% * 20%)

• 50% of your SEO work produces a lift

• The average lift is 5%

• You ship two projects per month

Those are pretty conservative assumptions, and yet would produce a sitewide SEO lift of 12% per year or about $34 million in income per year for eBay. The kicker to all of this is that the majority of SEO projects actually pay dividends for many years to come, so a 5% sitewide lift might be 5% per year for 3+ years.

Now to be clear, the quality of your SEO investment is much more important than the size of it. If you hire a terrible agency for $50,000 per month, then devote some engineers to shipping every single one of their recommendations, you might be "investing in SEO", but you certainly won't see the returns you're hoping for. In fact, you'll likely torpedo future SEO investments as the company gradually starts to look at SEO as a whole with skepticism.

Furthermore, a $25 million per year investment into SEO is overkill for all but a very small set of companies. In fact, I doubt there’s a single company in the world that invests more than $10 million per year in SEO (though some should). However, the above exercises are really to drive home two points:

• Even for a non-SEO-centric company (Tuft & Needle), the point at which their SEO investment turns ROI negative is likely quite far away.

• For an SEO-centric company (eBay), it’s almost impossible to over-invest in good SEO, one incremental insight is just too valuable to them.

How should you structure your SEO investment?

Now for the real question. By now you've hopefully bought into the case for investing in SEO, and are somewhat convinced by the previous exercises that you should probably do more than just commission a one-time SEO audit. But how do you actually structure your SEO investment?

The TL;DR is:

• Hire a very strong SEO (or team of SEOs if budgets permit)

• Provide them with the resources necessary to execute the roadmap they lay out

It really is that simple in theory, but both parts can often be hard in practice.

Hiring a very strong SEO

There is no surer way to sabotage an SEO program than to have the wrong person leading it. At minimum you'll be devoting resources to projects that don't drive much incremental traffic. At worst you'll give SEO a bad name within the rest of the organization and make it that much harder to invest in going forward. You'll end up with people who's framework for SEO is something along the lines of "I know SEO is important but I don't think anyone really knows how to influence rankings all that much". Good luck getting buy-in from those people.

So what should you look for? In a nutshell, you'll likely want a small baseline of SEO experience and a solid helping of:

• Data savviness

• Intelligence

• Web development knowledge

• Communication ability

I would much rather hire someone with one year of SEO experience and a healthy dose of the above attributes than someone with 10 years of SEO experience but little of the above.

In fact, I think many companies are better off turning someone with the above attributes into an SEO than trying to find an external SEO who meets those requirements. It is just so difficult to hire good SEO talent and it's not uncommon for roles to go unfilled for 1-2 years.

In response to the difficulty of hiring good SEOs, one route I've seen companies take is having an engineering or product manager learn SEO and take it over, this has a few benefits:

• They are sometimes technical enough to ship things themselves if necessary

• They can effectively communicate with engineers and already have relationships with them

• They have already been hired so are presumably a good fit for the non-SEO dimensions of the job (conscientiousness, work ethic, cultural fit etc.)

• Their product or engineering instincts will usually be very applicable to SEO

Plus the primary benefit being: it might actually be faster to have someone internal learn SEO than to find the right external SEO candidate.

Another approach to finding SEO talent if you yourself don’t have an SEO background would be to use a reputable SEO person in the interview process as a contractor.

Providing them with the necessary resources

There are many different types of resources your SEO program might depend on:

• Budget for tooling, working with an agency, hiring contractors etc.

• Writers for producing content

• Analysts for assessing the impact of SEO projects and monitoring the health of SEO metrics

• Designers for helping with any type of user facing change

• Product managers for managing SEO related product work

• Engineers for shipping product dependent SEO work

Some companies will need all of the above to really reach their SEO potential while others might only need one, you’ll need to work with your SEO team to figure out your unique resourcing needs. For reference though, the SEO opportunity for a company like Tuft & Needle will usually be very content oriented (writing articles to target top of funnel queries) whereas the opportunity for a company like Etsy will usually be very engineering dependent (never ending list of technical SEO opportunities). For the purpose of this discussion, we’ll focus on engineering resources but much of this can be applied to any type of SEO resource.

The typical approach is to not earmark/dedicate engineering time to SEO. In theory this makes sense, you'll consider SEO projects against all other engineering dependent projects and weigh them against each other when allocating your scarcest resource, engineering time. In practice what happens is a very haphazard investment in SEO. Here's a common way this plays out:

1. You decide to invest in SEO so you open an SEO role, you're able to fill it in 3 months

2. The SEO gets onboarded then does a site audit to generate an SEO roadmap, let’s say say this takes 2 months

3. The SEO is able to immediately pitch a couple projects from their roadmap (no delays waiting for quarterly planning to start or anything)

4. Two SEO projects are committed to in the upcoming quarter, work starts on them in a month and they take another month to actually ship

5. It takes another couple months to see results but both projects end up having a positive impact

The above, very optimistic, timeline is already 9 months long before you see any impact from investing in SEO and assumes:

• You fill the SEO role very quickly

• SEO projects are committed to immediately

• The initial SEO projects produce a positive impact

What if this quarter was particularly busy with other initiatives and you couldn't commit to SEO? Or the projects had made an impact but it was difficult to quantify? At minimum the whole timeline would have been elongated, at worst it would be harder to secure engineering resources going forward.

The alternative is dedicated engineers. You can have an SEO PM, you can have your own SEO department, you can have the SEO folks live on the product side or the marketing side etc. - all of those permutations can work. The important piece is that you have dedicated engineers to quickly and consistently invest into SEO.

As mentioned above, you can swap out “dedicated engineer” for “dedicated analyst” or “dedicated writer” and much of what was said still applies: figure out what resourcing your SEO strategy will require and make a long term commitment to provide those resources.

How should you measure your SEO investment?

SEO takes time. One of the most important requirements for SEO success is having appropriate expectations. You probably won't see results for 6+ months and some of those results will not be easy to quantify. BUT this should not be interpreted as a license for SEOs to never demonstrate their impact. It might take time but it shouldn't take over a year to start seeing some results and sure not all SEO projects will be quantifiable but many of them should be, especially early on when the credibility of your SEO efforts is most vulnerable.

The main decision you have here is whether to measure SEO success on a project by project basis or a site-wide basis. If you’re expecting >50% growth from SEO efforts then you can just look at overall SEO driven revenue to measure success because this level of growth should cut through any noise. Proxy metrics such as rankings or traffic are helpful to keep tabs on but you'll ultimately want to measure SEO driven revenue to understand the real impact of your SEO work. Acquiring irrelevant rankings or low intent traffic won't do much for your business.

For a site with a more established SEO traffic profile though, success might be a 20% lift in SEO traffic, or even less. The problem with using overall SEO driven revenue to evaluate this type of situation is that so many factors influence your SEO driven revenue that are outside the control of your SEO team:

• Competitive trends (SEO is zero sum, a new competitor will inevitably eat away at some of your traffic)

• Business trajectory generally (SEO isn't immune to a general decline in your business)

• Google changes (algorithm changes, new SERP features, increased ad prominence etc.)

• Search behavior changes (maybe the keywords you rank for are simply less popular now)

• etc.

Therefore, a 20% lift can easily get lost in the noise of all the above. For example, going from 40% YoY growth to 30% YoY growth might be a great success if the alternative was 10% YoY growth without SEO investment. The problem is knowing what growth would've been absent from your SEO investment. In such a situation, you'll want to lean more on the individual wins your SEO team is delivering rather than on overall traffic numbers. There are many ways to quantify individual SEO projects but in general, I’d recommend pairing your SEO team with some analytics support to measure individual projects and running SEO A/B tests when possible.

Even if you take the project by project approach, I wouldn’t ignore overall traffic numbers, I would just take them with a grain of salt given how much is outside of the SEO team’s control. The reason growth is down this month might be attributable to inaction on the part of your SEO team but it could just as easily be due to some of the factors listed above.

One approach you can take to contextualize overall traffic/revenue numbers is to compare your SEO growth rate to your "branded growth rate" to estimate your incremental SEO growth rate. Branded growth rate in this case would usually include any direct visits and any homepage visits (though you can include other brand heavy visits here, visits to your jobs page, about page etc.). By comparing your branded growth to your SEO growth, you can somewhat control for the non-SEO specific factors that might affect both:

• A new competitor should hurt both branded and SEO traffic

• A decline in the business or the quality of your inventory or the usability of your site should hurt both branded and SEO traffic

• A decline in demand for what you're selling should hurt both branded and SEO traffic

To recap:

• SEO should be held accountable to a measurable impact

• You should be patient (waiting >6 months to see progress is reasonable) but not too patient (waiting >1 year for any pay off is likely too long)

• If the expectation is that the impact will be large enough (>50%) to clearly cut through any variance in the data, then you can just look at overall SEO numbers to gauge success.

• If the expectation is that the impact might get lost in the variance of overall SEO numbers, I would focus more on the impact of individual SEO projects while still keeping a close eye on overall SEO numbers.

Conclusion

In summary, why investing in SEO can be hard:

• Results take a while

• Many results are unquantifiable (a 2% site-wide lift can be meaningful but also easily lost in the noise of traffic variance)

• The combination of the previous two points makes it hard to discern good SEO work from bad SEO work. Sure after a year of not seeing any results you might realize that the SEO direction you're on isn't working out but you've lost a year of potential SEO growth in the meantime.

• It usually requires your scarcest resource, engineering time

Or to put all of this another way, here's how not to invest in SEO:

• Hire someone with a ton of great SEO experience who doesn't seem that strong otherwise

• Do not allocate resourcing to SEO, put the onus entirely on your new SEO person to secure engineers or analysts or writers

• Expect the growth rate of overall SEO traffic or revenue to be meaningfully different within a few months of this person starting

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Daily SEO Fix: SEO Reporting Basics

A crucial aspect of improving your SEO performance is reporting. By reporting on what you’ve done, you can analyze the data you’ve collected, and learn from it. 

In this Daily Fix series, we’ll show you how to create clear, insightful reports that you can easily share with relevant stakeholders. These reports cover all of the key elements of SEO, and can be customized to suit your needs. 

If you’d like further assistance with creating custom reports, you can book a one-on-one walkthrough with a member of our Onboarding Team. We’ll guide you through how to create a personalized report that looks exactly like you want it to.

Book a walkthrough

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How do I set up a custom report?

Custom reports allow you to effectively communicate the SEO work you’ve been doing to clients, colleagues, or other stakeholders on a consistent basis.

In this Daily Fix video, Kerry will show you how to set one up when tracking your site in Moz Pro.

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Reporting on rankings changes monthly

Keeping tabs on how your rankings are changing month on month gives you a better insight into both short and long-term SEO performance. If your performance is changing, this type of report can give you an insight into why that might be.

Maddie shows you how you can create a custom rankings analysis report to suit your needs.

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Report branding/labelling your report

Branding a report helps to give it a polished, professional look that will impress your client. Moz Pro gives you the option of easily including your very own logo in your custom report.

In this video, Emilie guides you through adding some of the finishing touches to your report.

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Report links adding colleague as a user

When working on SEO as part of a team, it can be useful to share access to reports with your colleagues. You can manage who has access to your custom reports with Moz Pro by adding them as an additional user in your account.

In this Daily Fix, Jo goes through the steps you need to take to add your colleagues.

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General question about SEO reporting

In the final video, Varad discusses exporting data from Moz Pro as a PDF or CSV file. If you need to quickly extract data from specific sections of your campaign, you can do this by following this method. You can also create a single custom report that includes all of the data you want to include.

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Why Search Agencies Should Embrace the Adjacency of Email Marketing [Updated 2021]

I originally made this case back in January 2018, and it’s hard to believe that’s almost four years ago now. So much has happened since: the evolution of website platforms like Squarespace, Shopify, and Square/Weebly into full-blown digital operations hubs, the start of serious antitrust proceedings against Google and Facebook, and of course, a global pandemic. 

But if anything, the case for historically search-oriented agencies to add or expand their email marketing offerings has only strengthened. Email remains an under-appreciated and under-addressed channel among digital agencies of all stripes, even as “social media management” seems to have become an almost table-stakes-level offering.

Some of that prioritization of social media is understandable — social remains very much in-demand among small businesses. And yet, visibility and engagement for organic social media remains flat on Facebook and Twitter, and has started to decline on Instagram.

Meanwhile, email open and engagement rates have actually surged across many industries in the COVID era, and not just in the earliest days of the pandemic.

As the saying goes, there’s no time like the present to start an email offering. I hope I’ll convince you that email should be a natural and profitable complement to SEO, SEM, and SMM. And if you’re a local business reading this post, I hope many of these points convince you to take a look at email marketing yourselves!

Making the case for email

High ROI

With a return on investment (ROI) of 36:1, marketers consistently rate email as the top-performing channel. That’s down from 42:1 in 2019, but is directionally in the same ballpark. And the profitability of email remains particularly truefor B2B marketers. Email newsletters rate as the #1 channel to nurture leads. Despite the supposed unpopularity of email among millennials, it remains far and away the most-preferred channel by which to receive communication from a business — even for Millennials and Gen Z.

Just plain cheap

The fact that email’s so cheap helps the denominator of that 36:1 stat a bunch. MailerLite and SendinBlue offer free plans, Mailchimp offers a more limited free plan, and many other providers offer small plans under $10 per month depending on your number of subscribers. Comprehensive tools like Campaigner have starter plans beginning around $30, along with free one-month trials. 

It’s also cheap in terms of time cost. Unlike social media, where daily or even hourly presence performs best, email allows you to duck in and duck out as you have time.

And as I said in the intro, average email open rates far exceed social media reach on most platforms. And even if they don’t open, one-third of people report purchasing based on an email they received from a brand(!). 

As a result of Apple’s iOS15 privacy features, open rates are likely heading to the great analytics dashboard in the sky, but the word-of-mouth power of email will remain long after its trackability has eroded. Search provides better purchase intent, but the top-of-mind awareness and referral potential from email is unmatched.

Makes other channels more effective

Gathering customer email addresses is essential for other critical forms of local business marketing already — you need an email address to ask for a review, build lookalike audiences, and make customer intelligencesolutions or predictive analytics most effective.

The impending (though delayed) death of the third-party cookie means first-party opt-in emails will increase dramatically in value.

Actually offering something of value, whether that’s a discount code, loyalty program, whitepaper, or newsletter subscription, increases the odds of earning that email address for all of those purposes.

Last best option?

Frankly, the number of organic digital channels available to small businesses is shrinking.With each passing year, social media becomes more pay-to-play, and Google’s expansion of its Local Service Ad program is now nationwide in the United States and continues to add new verticals seemingly every quarter. Now is the time to start building an email program as these monetization pressures intensify.

Why agencies should offer email

Your customers know it works.

Local businesses might be more aware of email’s potency than some of the agencies that are serving them. Email consistently rates among the top three marketing channels in industry surveys — CampaignMonitor, TheManifest, and CallRail among others. (The CallRail study is a trove of market research for agencies, by the way.) 

At the very least, email requires barely any client education. Unlike the black box of SEO or the complexity of paid search, by and large, small businesses inherently understand email marketing. They know they should be sending emails to their customers, but many of them just aren’t doing it yet, or are doing it poorly.

It’s a concrete deliverable.

Unlike so much of the behind-the-scenes work that leads to success in SEO, clients can actually see an email campaign delivered to their inbox, as well as the results of that campaign: every major Email Service Provider tracks opens (again, less valuable post-iOS15) and clicks by default.

It leverages existing offerings.

I already mentioned some of the ways that email marketing complements other channels above. But it can tie in even more closely to an agency’s existing content offering: many of you are already developing full content calendars, or at the very least social content.

<pitch>(For those clients whom you’re helping with social media, their newsletter can be built using Tidings with no additional effort on your part.)</pitch>

Building email into your client content strategy can help their content reach a deeper audience, and possibly even a different audience.

It’s predictable.

Though you could argue that the Gmail and Apple Mail interface configurations are algorithms of a kind, generally speaking, email marketing is not subject to wild algorithmic changes or inexplicable ranking fluctuations.

And unlike Google’s unrealistic link building axiom that great content will naturally attract inbound links, great content actually does naturally attract more subscribers and more customers as they receive forwarded emails.

In fact, email newsletters are how many link creators actually discover interesting content to link to.

You can expand it over time.

Unlike SEO for local businesses, which generally includes relatively easy wins up front and gets progressively harder to deliver the same value over time, email marketing offers numerous opportunities to expand the scope of your engagement with a client.

Beyond fulfilling the emails themselves, there are plenty of other email-related services to offer, including managing and optimizing list sign-up, welcome emails and drip campaigns, A/B testing subject lines and content, and ongoing customer intelligence.

Tactical ingredients for success with email

Use a reputable Email Service Provider.

Running an email marketing program through Gmail or Outlook is an easy way to get your primary address blacklisted. You also won’t have access to open rate or click rate, nor an easy way to automate signups onto specific lists or segments.

Be consistent.

Setting expectations for your subscribers and then following through on those expectations is a particularly important practice for email newsletters, but also holds true for explicitly commercial emails and automated emails.

You should be generally consistent with the day on which you send weekly specials, appointment reminders, or service follow-ups. Consistency helps form a habit among your subscribers.

Consistency also applies to branding. It’s fine to A/B test subject lines and content types over time, but don’t shoot yourself in the foot from a brand perspective by designing every email you send from scratch. Leave that kind of advanced development to big brands with full in-house email teams.

The other reason to be consistent is that designing for email is really, really difficult — a lesson I learned the hard way last year prior to launching Tidings. Complex email clients like Microsoft Outlook use their own markup languages to render emails, and older email clients can’t interpret a lot of modern HTML or CSS declarations.

Choose a mobile-first template.

Make sure your layout renders well on phones, since that’s where most of your middle-age and younger subscribers will be opening your email. Two- or three-column layouts that force pinching and zooming on mobile devices are a no-no, and at this point, most subscribers are used to scrolling a bit to see content.

As long as your template reflects your brand accurately, the content of that layout is far more important than its design. Look no further than the simple email layouts chosen by some of the most successful companies in their respective industries, including Amazon, Kayak, and Fast Company.

Pick a layout that’s proven to work on phones and stick with it.

Include an email signup button or form prominently on your website.

It’s become a best practice to include social icons in the header and/or footer of your website. But there’s an obvious icon missing from so many sites!

An email icon should be the first one in the lineup, since it’s the channel where your audience is most likely to see your content.

Also consider using Privy or Mailmunch to embed a signup banner or popover on your website with minimal code.

The specific place of newsletters

Plenty of people way smarter than me are on the newsletter bandwagon (and joined it much earlier than I did). Moz has been sending a popular “Top 10” newsletter for years, Kick Point sends an excellent weekly synopsis, and StreetFight puts out a great daily roundup, just to name a few. As a subscriber, those companies are always top-of-mind for me as thought leaders with their fingers on the pulse of digital marketing.

But newsletters work far beyond the digital marketing industry, too.

Twitter, Facebook, and even Google have raced to build out or acquire their own newsletter platforms — partly driven by the success of Patreon and Substack among content creators.

Sam Dolnick, the man in charge of the New York Times’ digital initiatives, puts a lot of stock in newsletters as a cornerstone channel, calling them “a lo-fi way to form a deep relationship with readers.”

I love that description. I think of a newsletter as a more personalized social channel. In the ideal world it’s halfway between a 1:1 email and a broadcast on Facebook or Twitter.

Granted, a newsletter may not be right for every local business, and it’s far from the only kind of email marketing you should be doing. But it’s also one of the easiest ways to get started with email marketing, and as Sam Dolnick said, an easy-to-understand way to start building relationships with customers.

For more newsletter best practices, this ancient (1992!) article actually covers print newsletters but almost all of its advice applies equally well to digital versions!

A great option or a strategic imperative?

The graphic below is nearly five years old at this point, and despite my wildly incorrect prediction that voice search would become the dominant paradigm this year, Ads and Oneboxes have continued to eat more and more SERP real estate. And at least in terms of mobile search, the ⅓ traditional web result ratio I predicted seems to have held up pretty well.

Google and Facebook are both automating more and more ad features, and agencies simply can’t charge the margin to place paid ads that they can charge for organic work, particularly as Google and Facebook do a better and better job of optimizing low-budget campaigns. More ads, more Knowledge Panels, and more voice searches mean fewer organic winners at Google than ever before (though because overall search volume won’t decline, the winners will win bigger than ever).

Basic SEO blocking-and-tackling such as site architecture, title tags, and citation building will always be important services, but their impact for local businesses has declined overthe past decade, due to algorithmic sophistication, increased competition, and decreased organic real estate.

To grow or even maintain your client base, it’ll be critical for you as an agency to offer additional services that are just as effective and scalable as these techniques were 10-15 years ago.

As a concrete, high-margin, high-ROI deliverable, email should be a centerpiece of those additional services. And if it just doesn’t feel like something you’re ready to take on right now, Tidings is happy to handle your referrals :D!

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Performance as a Ranking Factor: The State of the Web and Core Web Vitals [Part 3]

In part one of this series, we talked about how Google and the web in general were not really ready for the Page Experience Update — Google’s CrUX data covered too few websites, the vast majority of which were not hitting the required thresholds. That was why, I suggested, the update had been so delayed and watered down.

In part two, we talked about the metrics themselves — their flimsiness, their arbitrariness, their openness to manipulation. This, too, I suggested, might be holding Google back.

However, the proof is in the pudding. Are Core Web Vitals, taken individually or as a whole, correlated with rankings? If so, is that any more true than it was before the Page Experience Update? In this third and final post of this series, we’ll see what the data tells us about the relationship between Core Web Vitals metrics and organic ranking performance.

Viewer discretion advised

This is, at most, a correlation study. There are many mechanisms by which something can be correlated with rankings without having directly influenced rankings.

For example, perhaps websites that take SEO seriously rank well, and also tend to work on their loading performance. If so, loading performance and ranking would be correlated even without any direct causal link.

We’ll talk through potential implications as we go, but please, proceed with caution!

Performance of passing vs. failing URLs

To start with, I decided to look only at the URLs that had CrUX data in the first place. You may remember from part two that, at the time of the update rolling out in August this year, that was some 38.3% of URLs. This is taken from the top 20 results for 10,000 MozCast keywords, across mobile and desktop device types.

Note that these URLs are all taken from the top 20, so it’s interesting that the averages are both well above the rank of 10.5 we’d expect. This is likely because higher traffic URLs are disproportionately likely to rank well, and also disproportionately likely to have CrUX data.

We see a solid 0.39 ranking position lead here for the URLs that pass all three CWV thresholds, above those that fail at least one.

Does that mean this is a ranking factor?

On the face of it, the above data looks very promising for CWV as a ranking factor. However, it’s worth tempering our excitement a bit.

Let’s have a look at the same data but from May, before the Page Experience update rolled out:

We can notice a few things here:

• The average rank of URLs with CrUX data was generally worse in August than in May. This is to be expected, as more URLs had CrUX data by August, so it had worked its way further down the rankings.

• URLs which pass the CWV thresholds already had a ranking difference even before the update. This suggests that perhaps URLs which pass the test were already better in other ways that already counted towards rankings (for example, perhaps rankings were rewarding URLs with a good user experience).

• The difference between URLs which passed the thresholds and those which did not has grown from 0.38 in May to 0.39 in August — although this is probably very easily within the margin of error.

It’s also interesting to contrast with a performance metric which was not part of the Page Experience update: Speed Index, as reported in Lighthouse lab results.

As “passing” the three thresholds for CWV represents being in the top 36.3% of URLs by that metric, we can compare what ranking difference is associated with being in the top 36.3% for Speed Index.

We can see in this chart that Speed Index, despite not being an explicit ranking factor, has a modest improvement in average rank associated with this percentile breakdown (0.17, vs. 0.39 for passing all three CWV thresholds). This doesn’t mean that Speed Index is a ranking factor, it just means that these things can be related in more complex ways.

(If you’re a mathematics nerd like me and you’ve just noticed the weighted average rank of the two groups is not the same, that’s because there are a tiny number of URLs for which I was able to obtain CrUX data, but not lab data, due to server errors, etc.)

So did anything happen?

Actually, yes. But it’s more subtle.

The real impact was felt for URLs that failed all three tests. Although these URLs often started out ranking best of all (probably because they disproportionately represent some important, household name brands) they’ve taken a hit with the update. These URLs have had a 1.15 position ranking drop, compared to around 0.2 for URLs with CrUX data taken as a whole.

This, as I mentioned in part one, is different to what Google set out to do. Back in the original FAQs for the update in 2020, Google said:

"If a page hits the recommended targets for all three metrics, it passes the web vitals assessment… The page experience ranking impact will be the same for all pages that are in the good range for all Core Web Vitals, irrespective of their individual Core Web Vitals scores."

(emphasis mine, original source here)

For all the data reasons I covered in part one, likely they weren’t able to do this, and had to improvise a bit, instead only applying the relative penalty (or absence of a boost) for URLs that failed all metrics, rather than for URLs that failed one or more.

Wait, so all I need to do is pass one metric?

Well, no, that’s not quite the attitude. There are still lots of other reasons to want to pass all three, and more importantly, to have a generally good page experience. Google is only going to be looking for more ways to augment and ramp up these factors over time.

Also, the rest of SEO still counts. Check out the rather more pronounced difference associated with Page Authority, for example:

Good luck out there :)

---

Ready to see if your site's pages are passing one CWV or none? Head over to Moz Pro and check out the Performance Metrics beta within our Site Crawl toolset.

Sign up for Moz Pro to access the beta!

Already a Moz Pro customer? Log in to access the beta!

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10-Minute Sales Research with True Competitor

Your sales team has just asked you to hop on a call in 30 minutes with a new prospect, ClowdFyre. Not wanting to sound like an idiot, you pull up ClowdFyre.com and see the following: “ClowdFyre leverages the cloud to ignite blockchain synergies.” Cool, cool… hold on, there’s some sort of diagram. Surely, this will give you some insights:

Or maybe not. I’m exaggerating, of course, but having lived through Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and whatever it is we’re doing now, sometimes this feels a little too close to the truth. Maybe the simpler truth is that we’re just running out of names and the world is changing too fast.

So, how can you hope to quickly figure out what ClowdFyre is all about and sound like you did your homework? I’m going to present two real-world examples of how you can use Moz’s True Competitor research tool to solve this problem in under 10 minutes.

Case #1: From Xero to hero

Xero is a good example of a perfectly nice company with a perfectly uninformative name. Their tagline is: “Accounting software to do your to-do.” Okay, I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I understand what accounting software is.

Let’s see what I can learn from their competitive landscape. I plug them into True Competitor...

…and quickly get back something like this (edited down to the top 10):

For reference, we’ve got the Domain Authority (DA) of Xero.com and the DA, keyword Overlap, and Rivalry (a Moz metric that balances three factors, including DA and Overlap) of each of the top 10 organic search competitors. I can quickly spot a couple of things:

FreshBooks and QuickBooks immediately stand out as familiar brands in the accounting software space, and FreshBooks is in a very similar DA range. These are very likely product competitors and give us a talking point during the call. In addition, note these competitors:

These are content competitors that have significant overlap with Xero and are competing for organic traffic. Our prospect may not think of NerdWallet (just to pick one) as a competitor, but their content could provide key insights into questions potential buyers are asking.

If any are unfamiliar, I can click on them to visit the site. For example, I see that Wave (waveapps.com) is an up-and-coming competitor in the space. I could even feed a couple of these competitors back into True Competitor to paint a more complex picture.

In just a few minutes, I’ve got a sense of Xero’s product competitors, content competitors, and a couple of talking points. At the very least, I hopefully won’t sound like an idiot.

Case #2: A Missguided example

You might not know it from the name, but Missguided is a fashion brand focused on Gen-Z and Millennial women. Let’s put them into True Competitor and see what we can learn.

I’ll skip right to the insights (note that MissguidedUS.com has a DA of 64). I can see right away that Missguided is up against some big players in the retail space, including high-end department stores and Amazon. These competitors are aspirational and might not be a realistic focus, but this is a great topic for conversation. Who do they aspire to compete against and how do they face the reality of being in a market with these big players?

Let’s look at a somewhat different set of competitors:

I don’t know anything about these sites/brands, but my immediate sense is that they’re smaller brands (a sense that’s bolstered by their DA scores) and are trying to evoke an edgier vibe. That raises an interesting talking point — who are the most relevant competitors in this target market of Millennial and Gen-Z women, and what unique challenges does that market pose?

With a couple of clicks through to their sites (and less than a minute of work), I can also see that Aritzia and Tobi seem to be targeting a similar demographic and are likely direct competitors (they’re also much more realistic competitors than Macy’s or Amazon).

Glancing at my watch, I’ve still got a couple of minutes before the meeting, so let’s try something fun (well, I think it’s fun, anyway) — let’s click on those two “edgy” brands and use the [+ Analyze Competitors] feature. I’ll request the full keyword intersect…

… and I can immediately get a quick view of what keywords these sites share:

Obviously, five keywords (or even 500) is just a piece of the puzzle, but in a few minutes I’ve gathered enough pieces to have an intelligent conversation and help seal the deal.

Data-assisted human intelligence

From a product perspective, I believe that the most powerful thing we can do is to assist your human intelligence and help drive insights. Tools like True Competitor are never going to replace your own (or the client’s) industry knowledge, but I hope that — as they continue to evolve — we can empower faster and better decisions that help you do what you’re best at.

Ultimately, you’re not going to be able to spend hours researching every sales call — even if you want to. But by using True Competitor, you can make the little time you do have more productive.

I’d love to hear from anyone who puts this to work in their sales pitches (hit me up on Twitter @dr_pete) or about any ways that research tools help make your SEO prospecting easier.

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The ROI of SEO

Search marketers can't get our important work implemented if we can't prove that it's worth the investment to our higher-ups. 

With that in mind, Moz’s own SEO Manager, Kavi Kardos, is going to give you the numbers and the talking points you need to justify the return on investment of your SEO work.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Kavi Kardos. I'm the SEO Manager here at Moz, which means I'm responsible for Moz.com's own SEO strategy and implementation along with the other SEO subject matter experts who you've seen many times before here on Whiteboard Friday.

The ROI of SEO

I'm going to talk to you today about the ROI of SEO, which is an important topic for website and business owners themselves to understand, but maybe even more important for the in-house and agency marketers who work on those websites to understand. The reason for that, as you probably are already well familiar with if you are one of those in-house or agency marketers with managers or clients to answer to, is that we as search marketers can't get our important and lucrative work implemented if we can't prove that it is lucrative.

People in positions like a CMO or a head of the marketing department or a small business owner have a lot to worry about all the time, and they often have to make really tough decisions about how to allocate really limited budget or other resources. So if I'm talking to you as the person who is responsible for making those tough decisions yourself, I'm going to help you understand why SEO is worth that resource expenditure.

If you're the person who has to do the convincing, I'm going to give you the numbers and the talking points you need to justify that return on investment. 

Calculating potential profit

So I mentioned numbers, and you can see that there is some math going on, on this whiteboard behind me, but don't freak out. I am not a math person myself, but I do understand that a head of marketing or a small business owner, who has a really tight budget to deal with, needs to understand the actual potential profit if they're going to go all in on an SEO strategy.

Even here, working at an organization whose entire jam is SEO, I still have to justify the SEO projects I want to work on, the experiments I want to run, and the tools I want to use in terms of their potential to actually generate revenue, either directly or indirectly. You can do the same thing if you can identify a fairly solid key performance indicator for whatever it is you're proposing with some math that's actually pretty simple.

So let's look at our example website, widgets.com, which is currently ranking number three in this SERP for one of their most relevant and lucrative search terms "extra fine blue widgets." So we know that on average the organic click-through rate for a web page that's sitting in the third position on a SERP for a transactional search query like this is about 7%.

In this example, our KPIs are organic SERP ranking and also click-through rate. Yours might be slightly different, but those are pretty average concerns for SEOs. So right now, with that 7% click-through rate, this page is generating 500 monthly organic click-throughs on average, and once a customer actually arrives on that product page, they have about a 3% tendency to convert or actually purchase that widget.

That's on the high end of average for e-commerce. With that widget costing $50, we are looking at an average monthly revenue from organic search of $750 a month currently for that page. 

So this is the beginning of our math. I hope you're still with me. 

Chelsea, the SEO manager for widgets.com, wants to convince her boss to subscribe to an all-in-one SEO tool that's going to help her do in-depth keyword research, competitive analysis, identify potential link targets, and that's going to help her write some really solid on-page content, run her technical audits, and maybe earn some new, high-quality links pointing to the entire website and this product page in particular.

So her boss, of course, wants to know how much this is going to cost the company. So Chelsea does her research and finds a tool that can do all of that for $179 per month. So she gets to work after her boss signs off on that, and she is able to bump this page in the SERPs from the third position for this query, "extra fine blue widgets," up to position number two.

Now, we know that a transactional search query like this, the page that's in the second position in the SERP earns about an 11% organic click-through. So now this page is drawing in 785 organic click-throughs per month. We're going to keep this 3% conversion rate once the customer is on the page constant, just for simplicity's sake.

But, of course, we know that Chelsea's good work on that product description and user experience on the page could very well bump up that conversion rate too, which is great. But just to keep it simple, we'll leave that conversion rate constant. It still costs $50 to buy this widget. So now this page is bringing in $1,200 from organic search every month. That is currently a $450 increase per month over when this page was ranking number three. If we take out the cost of the tool that Chelsea is using, we end up with a profit per month of $270, and that works out to about $3,000 in profits per year.

We can run those numbers again and assume that Chelsea is able to get this page to rank number one for this particular SERP, thereby earning it a 22% average click-through rate.

If she can do that, then that much greater increase in organic click-throughs, with that constant conversion rate and the price of the widget, is going to get us an extra $1,600 per month in profits. Again, if we take out the cost of that tool, that is going to come out to $17,000 per year. 

So now $179 a month for some tool sounds pretty good, right?

I know that's a lot of math that I just threw at you. But imagine if widgets.com sells hundreds of products and she's able to get even a small percentage of those to improve in search ranking. Even if you have glazed over the specifics a little bit, you can sort of get the idea here. 

So in reality, the average return on investment in SEO for an e-commerce company is about $2.75 for every dollar that you spend.

Your mileage is obviously going to vary based on your industry and the website metrics that you have to start out with in actuality and your competitive landscape. If you're working on a website that is not e-commerce, it's going to be a little bit harder sometimes to work out the dollar value of the work that you're doing. If you're working on a lead gen site, you'll need to figure out an approximate dollar value for every lead that you generate.

Or if it's a content publisher, maybe it's the ad space that you were able to sell or whatever your site's moneymaker is. But this basic model will work regardless of industry or your competitive landscape. 

Forecasting and proving ROI

So moving over here, I want to remind you that one of the most useful and effective tools that you have in your toolkit for forecasting and proving return on investment is something that you're probably already using for SEO, and that is Google Analytics.

So if you don't have your Analytics account set up to track the goals and conversions that are important to your business, you're missing out on a free and relatively simple way of showing exactly how much your SEO work is affecting your bottom line. You can set up your goals in your View Settings of your Google Analytics account, and you can customize those so that every time a user completes an action, like scrolling down a page to a certain point, clicking on a button, or obviously making a purchase, that gets recorded as a goal completion in Analytics.

You can see all of your goal completions for whatever time period you want within the Conversions menu of your dashboard. If you have a dollar value attached to some or all of those goals, you can filter this down to just organic traffic so that you can see exactly how much money each of those goal completions is bringing in per month.

This can still work if you're able to attach some kind of dollar value to your completions or your goals even if they're not e-commerce related necessarily. If you do sell products, though, the E-commerce menu under Conversions is going to have some other really great insights, like how well each of your products is performing each month and which of your coupon or affiliate codes is performing the best month over month.

Compared to the competition

So sometimes the best way to convince yourself or your managers that investing in something like SEO is a good idea is by talking about it in terms of dollars and profits, like we just did. But sometimes you want to recognize that your competition is already doing this thing that you're considering and already seeing success.

At this point, any organization with a website that's not investing in SEO is far behind the curve. So 60% of marketers currently say that SEO is their number one concern when it comes to inbound marketing. Forbes tells us that over $80 billion is being spent each year just in the U.S. on SEO, and that number is going up all the time.

So, obviously, if you want to contend with your competitors who are taking up space in those SERPs, you need to be able and willing to play the same game as they are. 

But here's something else that's interesting. We saw a recent study that said that only 49% of small businesses say that they invest in SEO. So this is interesting because almost 100% of purchases these days involve organic search in some way, and yet less than half of American small businesses are doing the work that it takes to become part of that buyer journey. So if you are a small business or if you're an agency that works with SMBs, then, yes, your biggest competitors are absolutely already investing in SEO.

But if you join them, you may be able to beat out some of those smaller guys who didn't make the smart choice to invest. There is a lot of opportunity in this statistic. 

Cost of inaction

So the opposite of return on investment is the cost of not investing or the cost of inaction. We just went over one of those costs — losing out in the SERPs to your competition.

But another cost that you face if you choose not to invest in that tool suite, not to hire the SEO agency, or not to let your team focus on SEO work is letting your website stagnate or at worst letting your website deteriorate as a result of lack of attention being paid to routine SEO maintenance. Your internal links can quickly become outdated if products get removed from your catalog.

On-page content can also really easily become outdated. If you had some valuable traffic being sent to your website from other sites that were linking to you externally, if your site changes, then those links could become outdated, or they might just choose to remove them and you wouldn't even notice. If you have to go through something like an entire site migration or a restructuring of your internal architecture, those results can be disastrous if you don't pay attention to the important SEO concerns that are at play there.

So if you were ever considering hiring an in-house SEO or an agency, it's probably because you knew that you didn't have time to pay attention to that kind of routine maintenance on your own. So the odds are that if you don't make the commitment to that investment and get someone in there to help you, your site is going to suffer.

Final thoughts

So the most important caveat in all of this, to remind yourself or to convey to your managers, is that SEO, of course, takes time. It can be really exciting when you're thinking about dollars and projecting those profits to get excited about the potential results. But remember that in our example earlier it took time for Chelsea to do the work that was necessary to improve those pages that she was working on.

Then it took even more time for Google to do its job and for that work to actually affect those SERP rankings and the click-through rate as a result. So there's a gap between where we spent the money on that tool suite and where we actually saw the return. That can be really frustrating for business owners and especially for the SEOs who are trying to justify their work.

That's why it's so important to manage expectations around timing and the plausibility of your results during that sign-off process, before that check is signed, so that you can minimize the frustration that can come from waiting. But if you can get your stakeholders on the same page as you are about your SEO work and use all the really great tactics that you've learned to get the best and most effective results possible, you will earn that buy-in, you will make your bosses happy, and it will be that much easier for them to sign off on the next project that you propose.

So thank you so much again for watching this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I hope this was useful to you. Again, I'm Kavi Kardos. You can find me on LinkedIn under my name or on Twitter @therarevos and tell me your favorite ways to demonstrate ROI. I'll see you next time.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com. 

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Indented Results Roll Out at 40% of SERPs

Recently, after months of testing, Google pushed a full roll-out of indented results. These are groups of organic results from the same domain, such as this result on a search for “Halloween stores”:

Just to make life confusing, indented results are different from expanded sitelinks (in the #1 ranking position), such as these on a search for “Spirit Halloween”:

So, why should we care about indented results? To begin with, they seem to be appearing at a surprisingly high rate on page one. Here’s the prevalence since we started tracking them on MozCast (across 10,000 competitive keywords):

For the 13 days for which we currently have data, the prevalence of indented results on page one Google SERPs in MozCast has been stable at around 40%. Since we often see new features roll out at single-digit percentages, this is a significant development.

Note that the MozCast 10,000-keyword data set skews toward high-competition “head” terms and may not represent the entire universe of Google searches.

Did indented results replace sitelinks?

While Google was testing indented results, we initially wondered if they would replace expanded sitelinks. This does not seem to be the case. While expanded sitelinks only appear in the #1 position and seem to be limited to navigational or “brand” searches, indented results appear on a much broader mix. For example, here’s an indented result for the search “Halloween costumes”:

There’s clearly no brand or navigational intent around Good Housekeeping in play here — Google simply decided to surface two topical articles from their site. In addition, we’re seeing SERPs with both expanded sitelinks and indented results. Here’s the breakdown of the two features:

On October 12th, 23% of SERPs in our data set had expanded sitelinks, 39% had indented results, and roughly 8% had both features. Clearly, these are two distinct features with unique intent.

How many indented results can there be?

One domain can display up to three indented results, and more than one domain can have indented results on any given SERP (although it’s fairly rare on page one). In our data set, here’s the breakdown by result count:

About 28% of SERPs in our data set had one indented result on page one, 8% had two indented results, and the rest (3-5 indented results) accounted for just over 2% of SERPs. Here’s a screen capture of the organic results for a search for “The MLS online” in Hartford, Connecticut:

While this is a brand-like search, multiple sites surface the MLS database  and none of them appear to be official, leaving Google in a bit of a quandary. Interestingly, the third domain has three indented results. Notice that the total organic results (regular + indented) on this page still add up to ten.

What should you do about all of this?

While a surprisingly high number of SERPs have indented results, these aren’t something you can easily control — there’s no schema or mark-up that activates indented results. We also don’t have the data yet to understand how these results impact click-through rates (CTRs) and other metrics.

It does appear, anecdotally, that Google may be elevating indented results from lower in the rankings, which suggests that those results could be getting an artificial ranking boost. Targeting this boost will require ranking multiple pages for the same search queries, though, which is probably not a good return on investment for most queries.

For now, it’s probably best to start monitoring these results on your most critical keywords and begin to track if and when they’re impacting your rankings and CTRs. We hope to have more news soon about tracking these results in our toolset.

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Flimsy Metrics: The State of the Web & Core Web Vitals [Part 2]

In the first post in this series, I talked about how relatively few URLs on the web are currently clearing the double-hurdle required for a maximum CWV (Core Web Vitals) ranking boost:

• Passing the threshold for all three CWV metrics

• Actually having CrUX data available so Google knows you’ve passed said thresholds

For Google’s original rollout timeline in May, we would have had 9% of URLs clearing this bar. By August 2021, this had hit 14%.

This alone may have been enough for Google to delay, downplay, and dilute their own update. But there’s another critical issue that I believe may have undermined Google’s ability to introduce Page Experience as a major ranking factor: flimsy metrics.

Flimsy metrics

It’s a challenging brief to capture the frustrations of millions of disparate users’ experiences with a handful of simple metrics. Perhaps an impossible one. In any case, Google’s choices are certainly not without their quirks. My principle charge is that many frustrating website behaviors are not only left unnoticed by the three new metrics, but actively incentivized.

To be clear, I’m sure experience as measured by CWV is broadly correlated with good page experience. But the more room for maneuver there is, and the fuzzier the data is, the less weight Google can apply to page experience as a ranking factor. If I can be accused of holding Google up to an unrealistic standard here, then I’d view that as a bed of their own making.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

This perhaps feels the safest of the three new metrics, being essentially a proxy for page loading speed. Specifically, though, it measures the time taken for the largest element to finish loading. That “largest element” is the bit that raises all manner of issues.

Take a look at the Moz Blog homepage, for example. Here’s a screenshot from a day close to the original, planned CWV launch:

What would you say is the largest element here? The hero images perhaps? The blog post titles, or blurbs?

For real world data in the CrUX dataset, of course, the largest element may vary by device type. But for a standard smartphone user agent (Moz Pro uses a Moto G4 as its mobile user agent), it’s the passage at the top (“The industry’s top wizards, doctors, and other experts…”). On desktop, it’s sometimes the page titles — depending on what the length of the two most recent titles happens to be. Of course, that’s part of the catch here: you have to remember to take a look with the right device. But even if you do, it’s not exactly obvious.

(If you don't believe me, you can set up a campaign for Moz.com in Moz Pro, and check for yourself in the Performance Metrics feature within the Site Crawl tool.)

There are two reasons this ends up being a particularly unhelpful comparison metric.

1. Pages have very different structures

The importance of the “largest element” varies hugely from one page to another. Sometimes, it’s an insignificant text block, like with Moz above. Sometimes it’s the actual main feature of the page. Sometimes it’s a cookie overlay, like this example from Ebuyer:

This becomes a rather unfair, apples to oranges, comparison, and encourages focusing on arbitrary elements in many cases.

2. Easy manipulation

When the largest few elements are similar in size (as with Moz above), there’s an incentive to make the quickest one just a bit larger. This has no real improvement to user experience, but will improve LCP.

First Input Delay (FID)

First Input Delay is a much less intuitive metric. This records the amount of time it takes to process the user's first interaction (counting clicks on interactive elements, but not scrolls or zooms) from when the browser starts to process that interaction. So the actual time taken to finish processing is irrelevant — it’s just the delay between a user action and the start of processing.

Naturally, if the user tries to click something whilst the page is still loading, this lag will be considerable. On the other hand, if that click happens much later, it’s likely the page will be in a good position to respond quickly.

The incentive here, then, is to delay the user’s first click. Although this is counterintuitive, it can actually be a good thing, because it pushes us away from having pop-ups and other elements that block access to content. However, if we really wanted to be cynical, then we could actually optimize for this metric by making elements harder to click, or initially non-interactive. By making navigation elements a more frustrating experience, we would buy time for the page to finish loading.

On top of this, it’s worth remembering that FID cannot be measured in the lab, because it requires that human element. Instead, Moz Pro and other lab suites (including Google’s) use Total Blocking Time, which is closer to approximating what would happen if a user immediately tried to click something.

Overall, I think this metric isn’t as unfair a comparison as Largest Contentful Paint, because gaming the system here is slightly more of a shot in one’s own foot. It’s still potentially an unfair comparison, in that navigational pages will have a harder time than content pages (because on a navigational, hub, or category page, users want to click quite soon). But it could be argued that navigation pages are worse search results anyway, so perhaps, giving Google an XXL serving of the benefit of the doubt, that could be deliberate.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

And lastly, there’s Cumulative Layout Shift, another metric which seems intuitively good — we all hate it when pages shift around whilst we’re trying to read or click something. The devil, though, is once again in the details, because CLS records the maximum change in a 5-second “session” window.

Ignoring the issue with the use of the word “session” that is confusingly nothing to do with Google’s definition of the same word in other contexts, the issue here is that some of the worst offenders for a jarring web experience won’t actually register on this metric.

Namely:

1. Mid-article adverts, social media embeds, and so on, are often below the fold, so have no impact whatsoever.

2. Annoying pop-ups and the like often arrive after a delay, so not during the 5-second window. (And, in any case, can be configured to not count towards layout shift!)

At MozCon earlier this year, I shared this example from the Guardian, which has zero impact on their (rather good) CLS score:

So in the best case, this metric is oblivious to the worst offenders of the kind of bad experience it is surely trying to capture. And in the worst case, it again could incentivize behavior that is actively bad. For example, I might delay some annoying element of my page so that it arrives outside of the initial 5-second window. This would make it even more annoying, but improve my score.

What next?

As I mentioned in part one, Google has been a bit hesitant and timid with the rollout of Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor, and issues like those I’ve covered here might be part of the reason why. In future, we should expect Google to keep tweaking these metrics, and to add new ones.

Indeed, Google themselves said last May that they planned to incorporate more signals on a yearly basis, and improvements to responsiveness metrics are being openly discussed. This ultimately means you shouldn’t try to over-optimize, or cynically manipulate the current metrics — you’re likely to suffer for it down the line.

As I mentioned in the first article in this series, if you're curious about where you stand for your site's CWV thresholds today, Moz has a tool for it currently in beta with the official launch coming later this year.

Sign up for Moz Pro to access the beta!

Already a Moz Pro customer? Log in to access the beta!

In the third and final part of this series, we’ll cover the impact of CWV on rankings so far, so we can see together how much attention to pay to the various “tiebreaker” equivocations.

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