In episode 252 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked if one should hide or show a fake GMB address of a verified GMB page.
The exact question was:
Hey guys. I am curious about ranking in Google my business with a verified address that you end up hiding because its not a real address. Do we need to have that address showing? or can we do it without the address
In episode 252 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if Google prefers HTML sites over WordPress when it comes to ranking.
The exact question was:
By the way, I’ve read previously that Google loves WordPress and if you want to rank on the first page more easily you must use WordPress, but lately I’ve been reading that Google now loves HTML sites much better and that is what we should be using. What is the real truth? … Thanks again
Posted by MrLukeCarthy
From e-commerce to listings sites to real estate and myriad verticals beyond, the data you can harness using custom extraction via crawler tools is worth its weight in revenue. With a greater granularity of data at your fingertips, you can uncover CRO and user experience insights that can inform your optimizations and transform your customer experience.
In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, we're delighted to welcome Luke Carthy to share actionable wisdom from his recent MozCon 2019 presentation, Killer CRO and UX Wins Using an SEO Crawler.
Hey, Moz. What's up? Wow, can I just say it's incredible I'm here in Seattle right now doing a Whiteboard Friday? I can't wait to share this cool stuff with you. So thanks for joining me.
My name is Luke Carthy. As you can probably tell, I'm from the UK, and I want to talk to you about custom extraction, specifically in the world of e-commerce. However, what I will say is this works beautifully well in many of the verticals as well, so real estate, in job listings. In fact, any website that can pretty much spit out HTML in a web crawler, you can use custom extraction.
Let's get started. What is custom extraction? Well, as I kind of just alluded to, it allows you, when you're crawling using like Screaming Frog, for example, or DeepCrawl or whatever it is you want to use, it allows you to grab and extract specific parts of the HTML and export it to a file, a CSV, in Excel, or whatever you prefer.
As a principle, okay, great, but I'm going to give you some really good examples of how you can really leverage that. So e-commerce, right here we've got a product page that I've beautifully drawn, and everything in red is something that you can potentially extract. Although, as I said, anything on the page you can. These are just some good examples.
Think about this for a moment. You're an e-commerce website, you're a listing site, and of course you have listing pages, you have product pages. Wouldn't it be great if you could very quickly, at scale, understand all of your products' pricing, whether you've got stock, whether it's got an image, whether it's got a description, how many reviews it has, and of the reviews, what's the aggregate score, whether it's four stars, five stars, whatever it is?
That's really powerful because you can then start to understand how good pages perform based upon the information that they have, based upon traffic, conversion, customer feedback, and all sorts of great stuff, all using custom extraction and spitting it out on say a CSV or an Excel spreadsheet file.
But where it gets super powerful and you get a lot of insight from is when you start to turn the lens to your competitors and you think about ways in which you can get those really good insights. You may have three competitors. You may have some aspirational competitors. You may have a site that you don't necessarily compete with, but you use them on a day-to-day basis or you admire how easy their site was to use, and you can go away and do that.
You can fire up a crawl, and there's no reason why you couldn't extract that same information from other competitors and see what's going on, to see what pricing your competitors are selling an item at, do they have that in stock or not, what are the reviews like, what FAQs do people have, can you then leverage that in your own content.
Let me give you a perfect example of how I've managed to use this.
I've managed to identify that a competitor doesn't have a specific product in stock, and, as a result of that, I've been able to increase our prices because they didn't sell it. We did at that specific time, and we could identify the price point, the fact that they didn't have any stock, and it was awesome. Think about that. Really powerful insights at massive amounts of scale.
Another example I wanted to talk to you about. Category pages, again incredibly gorgeous illustrations. So category pages, we have filters, we have a category page, and just to switch things up a little bit I've also got like a listings page as well, so whether it's, as I said, real estate, jobs, or anything in that environment.
If you think about the competition again for a second, there is no reason why you wouldn't be able to extract via custom extraction the best filters that people use, the top filters, the top facets that people like to select and understand. So you can then see whether you're using the same kind of combinations of features and facets on your site and maybe improve that.
Equally, you can then start to understand what specific features correlate to sales and performance and impacts and really start to improve the performance of how your website performs and behaves for your customers. The same thing applies to both environments here.
If you are a listing site and you list jobs or you list products or classified ads, is it location filters that they have at the top? Is it availability? Is it reviews? Is it scores? You can crawl a number of your competitors across a number of areas and identify whether there's a pattern, see a theme, and then see whether you can leverage and better that and take advantage of that. That's a great way in which you can use it.
But on top of that and the one that I am most fascinated with is by far recommendations.
In the MozCon talk I did earlier I had a statistic, and I think I can recall it. It was 35% of what people buy on Amazon comes from recommendations, and 75% of what people watch on Netflix comes from suggestions, from recommendations.
Think about how powerful that is. You can crawl your own site, understand your own recommendations at scale, identify the stock of those recommendations, the price, whether they have images, in what order they are, and you can start to build a really vivid picture as to what products people associate with your items. You can do that on a global scale. You can crawl the entire of your product portfolio or your listing portfolio and get that.
But again, back to powerful intelligence, your competitors, especially when you have competitors that might have multivariable facets or multivariable recommendations. What I mean by that is we've all seen sites where you've got multiple carousels. So you've got Recommended for You.
You might have People Also Bought, alternative suggestions. The more different types of recommendations you have, the more data you have, the more intelligence you have, the more insight you have. Going back to say a real estate example, you might be looking at a property here. It's at this price. What is your main aspirational real estate competitor recommending to you that you may not be aware of?
Then you can think about whether the focus is on location, whether it's on price, whether it's on number of bedrooms, etc., and you can start to understand and behave how that can work and get some really powerful insights from that.
To summarize and bring it all to a close, custom extraction is all about great granular data at scale. The really powerful thing about it is you can do all of this yourself, so there's no need to have to have meetings, send elaborate emails, get permission from somebody.
Fire up Screaming Frog, fire up DeepCrawl, fire up whatever kind of crawler you want to use, have a look at custom extraction, and see how you can make your business more efficient, find out how you can get some really cool competitive insights, and yeah, hopefully, fingers crossed that works for you guys. Thank you very much.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
This is a meaty topic, we know — if you enjoyed this Whiteboard Friday and find yourself eager to know more, you're in luck! Luke's full presentation at MozCon 2019 goes even more in-depth into what custom extraction can do for you. Catch his talk along with 26 other forward-thinking topics from our amazing speakers in the MozCon video bundle:
We recommend sharing them with your team and spreading the learning love. Happy watching!
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In the 252nd episode of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if adding a call tracking phone number in GMB could trigger a suspension.
The exact question was:
Hi Guys, … Thanks again for helping us customers on Hump Day , your generosity is GREATLY appreciated (smile) … . I know that edits on GMB listings can now cause suspensions, but, in your expert opinion, if you just add a “”call tracking phone number”” to a GMB listing but leave the original phone number as an alternate number ( but no longer the primary number), do you think that will still be considered sufficient of an “”edit”” that could put the listing at risk of suspension? … . and, for a client’s listing, if doing that is a risk, is having that “”proof of results”” worth the risk? … . Also, I think in the past you mentioned that if we do change the “”primary”” phone number in a GMB listing to a “”call tracking phone number”” but leave the original number in the “”alternate number”” position, there will be no negative ranking effects even though all the citations only have the original number, is that correct?
In episode 252 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked if MGYB plans to offer content curation services.
The exact question was:
HI guys, does MGYB plan on offering content curation services? It seems to be the one main thing missing from your store. I’ve heard you mention content kingpin but I have a client that needs articles now so there is no time for kingpin training and finding a VA to do it. we tried iwriter but output was garbage and textbroker didnt work out either as nobody bid on our project. Can you recommend a quality curation service? thanks
Posted by MiriamEllis
Right now, the shoppers nearest you are making some pretty long gift lists. US holiday sales are predicted to surpass $1.1 trillion, with 4.5–5% growth between November–January. That’s a lot of gadgets, garments, games, goodies, and gizmos to bought and sold.
Winter weather and long lines will be braved, traffic endured, tired feet soaked, and patience tested in the search for the perfect gift for everyone on everyone’s list. Holiday shopping can and should be cheery, but sometimes it can be a bit of an overload. The end of the year can put local businesses back in the black, but it can be kind of stressful, too.
And that’s why local business marketers need a list of their own. Your agency can be holiday heroes, both to clients and their customers. An organized approach can ensure that no mom with three kids in tow is inconvenienced by a wrong address on a Facebook listing, and no dad is doomed to wander lonely aisles for hours with no help in sight. Strategic planning can save your clients, too, from total holiday frazzle.
Be of good cheer! Download the Moz Holiday Local SEO Checklist, share it with each of your clients, and plan for reputation, rankings, and revenue to rise as a result of your well-orchestrated campaign:
The local business owner provides the basic, raw materials and agrees to being ready with:
Your agency knits up the online picture of local businesses and is ready with:
The shopper is aided along their merry way by:
A lot of time and care goes into crafting happy holiday customers. Ready for a detailed list of the finer points that could take your agency’s reputation to heroic proportions as we put a bow on 2019?
Download the holiday checklist!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
In episode 252 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked about the content, scheduling, and linking of properties to a syndication network.
The exact question was:
I have a basic knowledge of the big syndication and IFTTT picture, and how it works, but still have a lots of gaps in my understanding which I hope you can demystify for me. 1. Would it be best to syndicate just my own posts and curated posts to my syndication network, or would it be better to also include other related RSS feeds? 2. How long should my content be (an article or article curation approximation)? 3. How regularly should I post to my syndication? 4. How many back links to my properties should my articles contain? 5. Is the main purpose of syndication for driving traffic or gaining back links? 6. Are my syndication properties likely to get banned?
