In the 276th episode of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked about the team’s thoughts on Magic PR.
The exact question was:
Hey all, great show as always! I wanted to ask if you have heard of Magic PR? I have heard good things in FB groups and some of the Skype groups. I just wanted to hear your opinion on their service or if you have used them?
Posted by morgan.mcmurray
For the last few weeks, you’ve probably experienced an influx of emails from companies detailing how COVID-19 is affecting them and thus you, their customer. It's... a lot, isn't it? So today, we want to take a departure from the world of "how this affects us" and focus instead on actionable things we can all do to make things brighter for ourselves and our communities. This won't be your regularly scheduled programming — we won't be discussing SEO or marketing. Instead, we're sharing ideas and advice from the folks at Moz who've been finding ways to be helpers as we all navigate this new normal.
For those who have steady income during this time of economic uncertainty, it’s more important than ever to support local businesses and charitable organizations. Many employers, Moz included, offer charitable donation matching to make use of as well.
You can donate money or call local organizations (like homeless shelters, food banks, and animal rescues) to see what items they most need. Mozzers have found several creative ways to contribute, including a super helpful spreadsheet of all the food banks in our area shared by Britney Muller. A few of us have volunteered to be pet foster parents, and Skye Stewart has even seen neighbors turn their “little free libraries” into pantries for those in need!
If you’re healthy and able, consider signing up to donate blood. The blood banks in our area have received so many volunteers that they’re scheduling appointments weeks in advance — what a fantastic show of community support!
All of our favorite local salons, restaurants, bars, or home goods stores are likely suffering from recent closures. Gift cards give them support now and give you the option to shop later (or have your holiday shopping done a little early). Many local businesses also have online shops for you to browse from home. Shipping times are likely impacted, though, so be understanding!
Local restaurants are shifting to take-out and to-go order business models. If you can’t go pick up food, apps like DoorDash and Grubhub are offering no-contact delivery options.
Stock up only with what you need for two or three weeks for yourself. You can also volunteer, like Mozzer Hayley Sherman, to make grocery runs for at-risk friends or family.
This sounds like a no-brainer — of course we’re all trying to stay healthy! But it has to be said, as now we have to be a bit more creative to keep up our healthy habits.
With recent closures, local gyms and studios are offering online classes. Have you ever wondered what a yoga or dance class is like via Zoom? A few of us at Moz have found out, and it’s definitely different — but also surprisingly fun — to connect with all the other students in this new way.
We’ve been enjoying some unseasonable sunshine in the Pacific Northwest, making it the perfect time to fight cabin fever with a walk or run outside. Weather permitting, you can do the same! Just make sure to maintain social distance from other walkers and runners (even if they have a cute puppy with them — tough, we know).
Meditation can help calm the anxiety many of us might be feeling right now. Dr. Pete recommends the Ten Percent Happier app for assistance, and apps like Insight Timer and Calm have dozens of free meditation options for you to choose from, too.
While it’s tempting to only stock up on non-perishable food like mac and cheese (I’m guilty of having several boxes stored in my pantry) and rely on supplements or Emergen-C, fresh produce is still one of the best options to get necessary vitamins and boost your immunity.
Several of us at Moz have found it helpful to disconnect from the news cycle for a while every day, and we try to only pay attention to news from reputable sources. With so many voices in the conversation, this can be hard, which is why going offline can be so helpful.
Human connection remains important for maintaining morale and good humor, even if we can’t share the same physical space.
Call people you would normally see regularly, and reach out to those you haven’t seen in awhile. Mozzers are staying connected by calling into morning coffee hangouts and virtual team lunches — it’s been great to see everyone’s smiling faces!
You might start a weekly virtual happy hour or book club using free video conferencing software like Google Hangouts or Skype, or schedule some time to watch movies together with the new Netflix Party extension.
Social media groups or apps like Nextdoor allow you to meet your neighbors, share memes, and check to see if anyone needs anything like a grocery run, medicine, or just a virtual hug.
We’ve created channels in our company Slack for topics like parenting, wellness, gardening, and just general fun. These groups have really helped bring light and friendship to our shared situation. In the parenting channel, specifically, Moz parents have banded together to share resources and suggestions to help support each other in this new world of homeschooling.
We're living through an unprecedented time, and one of the best things we can do is understand that sometimes, humans just need to be human. If you're leading a team that's working from home, you might find your employees keeping unorthodox working hours with school closures, disrupted schedules, and technical difficulties. Flex your empathy muscle, and consider enacting flexible policies that will reduce stress on your employees while making sure the work still gets done.
Let everyone know it’s okay to sign off during normal working hours to prioritize family time and child care. You can also schedule non-work-related check-ins, or build relaxation time into your schedules. Moz CEO Sarah Bird gave all employees a “Take a Breather” day to give everyone time to relax, make “quarantinis”, and adjust to our current reality. We all really appreciated that time!
We're committed to keeping as much normalcy in the routines of our community as possible, and that includes minimizing the impact of this crisis on our customers and employees. There will be no interruptions to our tool functionality or to our support team’s ability to serve our customers. We will also continue to publish helpful, actionable content — even if that means you see a few Whiteboard Fridays from the living rooms of our experts!
Employees at Moz have already been trained as a distributed team, which has prepared us well for a life of working from home — now a mandatory policy. We're also given paid time off, including sick leave, and are encouraged to sign off from work when we’re feeling under the weather to rest and recuperate.
This list of ways to help is by no means exhaustive, and we’d love to hear your ideas! Leave a comment or send us a tweet. We’re in this together.
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In episode 279 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked how to handle the covid-19 situation in the months ahead as digital marketers.
The exact question was:
2) How should we handle the COVID-19 situation in the months ahead? While I haven’t lost anyone yet, I have a feeling clients will be more inclined to stop as lockdowns get worse. And prospecting could get harder too. I’m kinda lost on the best course of action so I’d love to know how the SM crew is planning for it.
In episode 276 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked if having a branded syndication network and RYS stack help in ranking videos.
The exact question was:
2) Does a branded syndication (only branded – without 2nd tier) & RYS stack will rank videos? Or it is better to do tiered syndications for that?
Posted by Dr-Pete
The next few months are going to be uncharted territory for all of us, with serious challenges for both brick-and-mortar and online businesses. Many e-commerce sites are already facing a unique situation right now, and it looks something like this:
These are hand sanitizer results from Staples.com, and this screenshot is just a portion of the first page. I'm not picking on Staples — this page is representative of a problem across every major e-retailer right now. While there are many ways to handle out-of-stock and discontinued items under normal conditions, this situation is very specific:
From an SEO standpoint, it's essential that these pages continue to rank, both for consumers and retailers, but in the short-term, the experience is also frustrating for consumers and can drive them to other sites.
The short answer is: not really. We want these pages to continue to rank — they're just not very useful in the short-term. Let's take a quick look at the usual toolbox to see what applies.
This one's easy. Do not 404 these pages. These products are coming back and you want to sell them. What's more, you want to be able to act quickly when they're back in stock. If you remove the page and then put it back (and then, most likely, remove it again and put it back again), it can take Google a lot of time to reconcile those signals, to the point where the page is out of sync with reality. In other words, by the time the page starts ranking again, the product might already be out of stock again.
As tools go, 301s still have a special place in our tool belts, but they're not a good bet here. First, the product still exists. We don't really want to move it in any permanent sense. Second, reversing a 301 can be a time-consuming process. So, just like with 404s, we're likely to shoot ourselves in the foot. The only exception would be if a product went out of stock and that prompted the manufacturer to permanently replace it with a similar product. Let's say Acme Essentials ran out of the 10-ounce Mountain Fresh hand sanitizer, so decided just to do away with that product and replace it with the 12-ounce option. In that case, by all means 301-redirect, but that's going to be a fairly rare situation.
This has got to be the one, right? Unfortunately, we're still stuck with the timing problem if this product comes back in stock for a short period of time. Let's say you're out of the Acme Essentials 10-ounce Mountain Fresh, but you've got the Trapper Moe's 10-ounce Spring Breeze in stock. Could you temporarily swap in the latter product from a search perspective? Maybe, if you could get the timing right, but now imagine the visitor experience. People would potentially still be able to search (on-site) for the Acme Essentials product, but then would be redirected to the Trapper Moe's product, which could seem deceptive and is likely to harm conversion.
You can use the [availability] property in product-offer schemas to set options including: InStock, InStoreOnly, OutOfStock, and SoldOut. Google may choose to display this information as part of your organic result, such as this one (thanks to Claire Carlisle for this great example):
Good news — sloths are still in stock. Unfortunately, there are two challenges to this approach. First, while searchers may appreciate your honesty, you may not be keen to display "Out of stock" on your search result when everyone else is displaying nothing at all. Second, we've still got the timing issue. You can automate flipping from "In stock" to "Out of stock" in real time, but Google still has to crawl and update that information, and that takes time.
If it seems like I've just ruled out all of the options, it's because fundamentally I don't believe this specific case is an SEO problem. Removing or redirecting pages in a volatile situation where products may go out of stock and come back into stock on a daily basis requires timing Google's processes in a way that's extremely risky.
So, if we're going to keep these pages indexed and (hopefully) ranking, the key is to make sure that they continue to give value to your search visitors, and this is primarily a user experience problem.
Here's an example of what not to do (sorry, unnamed big-box retailer):
Shipping is unavailable, but at least I can pick this up in the store, right? Nope, and for some reason they've auto-selected this non-option for me. If I accept the pre-selected unavailable option, I'm taken to a new screen telling me that yes, it is in fact unavailable. There's absolutely no value here for a search visitor.
Here's another example that might not seem so different, but is much more useful. Please note, while all of these elements are taken from real e-commerce sites, I've simplified the pages quite a bit:
The product is out of stock at my local store and not available for delivery, but it is available at a nearby store. That's not ideal, and under normal circumstances I'd probably go somewhere else, but in the current environment it's at least a viable option. A viable option is a potential sale.
Here's an approach that gives search visitors another viable option:
It's not the most visually-appealing layout, but that [Notify Me] button expands into a quick, single-field email form that gives visitors an immediate alternative. Even if they don't buy from this store today, they might still enter their email and end up ordering later, especially at a time when supplies are low everywhere and people want alternatives.
This same page had another option I really like, an "Also available in" pull-down:
Unfortunately, these other options were also out of stock, but if this feature could be tuned up to only reflect similar, in-stock products, it could present an immediate purchase option. In this unique scenario, where demand massively outpaces supply, consumers are going to be much more amenable to similar products.
Obviously, these features represent a lot more work than a few 301 redirects, but we're looking at a situation that could last for weeks or months. A few enhancements that give visitors viable options could be worth many thousands of dollars and could also help maintain search rankings.
Obviously, the experience at the top of this post is less than ideal for internal search users, but should you remove those products from being displayed temporarily? From an SEO perspective, this is a bit tricky. If you block those products from being shown, then you're also blocking the internal link equity temporarily, which could impact your rankings. In addition, you may end up with a blank page that doesn't accurately represent your usual inventory. I think there are two options that are worth considering (both of which will require investment):
I know that e-commerce sites are reluctant to hide products and want to maintain the perception of having a lot of available items, but they're useless if none of those items are actually available. If you allow customers to easily filter out out-of-stock products, you address both problems above. First, visitors will get to see the full list initially and know which products you normally carry. Second, you can make the filter unavailable to search bots so that they continue to pass link equity to all products.
I'm not usually a fan of overriding search filters, as it can be confusing to visitors, but another option would be to push out-of-stock products to the bottom of internal search results, maintaining filters and sorts within the stocked and out-of-stock groups. This lets people see the entire list and also gives search bots access, but brings available products to the forefront. Visitors aren't going to wade through pages of out-of-stock inventory to find the one available item.
I wish I could give you the magic HTML tag or line of .htaccess that would solve this problem, but when the situation is changing day-by-day or even hour-by-hour, many of our best practices fall apart. We can't apply ordinary solutions to extraordinary problems.
In this unique case, I think the most important thing, from an SEO standpoint, is to maintain the ranking power of the page, and that probably means leaving it alone. Any technical wizardry we can perform ends at the point that search bots take over, and the process of re-crawling and re-caching a page takes time. Our best bet is to provide an experience that gives search visitors options and maintains the page's value. While this will require investment in the short-term, these changes could equate to thousands of dollars in revenue and will continue to produce benefits even when life returns to normal.
As a Seattle-based company, Moz is painfully aware of the disruptions so many businesses and individuals are facing right now. How can we help you during this difficult period? Are there unique SEO challenges that you've never faced before? In the spirit of we're-all-in-this-together, we'd like to help and commit content resources toward addressing the immediate problems our customers and readers are facing. Please tell us about your current challenges in the comments.
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In episode 276 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked how to rank a long tail keyword.
The exact question was:
Hi: 1) how to rank a keyword and a long tail version of it? I would like to do it with long form content but it doesn’t help even thought it suppose to be in the same post.
Posted by Roger-MozBot
The well-being of our community — from our customers to our readers to our team members — is of the utmost importance to us here at Moz. The ongoing situation around the spread of COVID-19 is ever-changing. Many of you are experiencing the impact of this pandemic, and we want to address the difficulties you’re facing and acknowledge how you might be feeling.
The state of the world and current events bring significant, often crushing, impact to businesses large and small. While it can be really hard to focus on work and on what is happening in the SEO industry during this difficult time, we also know that your work can’t stop.
Whether you’re reading this as a small business owner concerned about your traffic, or an agency with clients who are hurting financially — we’re here to support you.
Today through May 31, you’ll be able to access the courses in Moz Academy for free. Hopefully you can use this resource to level up your skills, learn a new discipline, or simply channel your energy into a productive distraction.
There's something for everyone:
If you’re already a Moz customer or community member, you can head straight to academy.moz.com. As long as you’re logged in, you’ll be good to go. Just pick the courses you want to take part in and apply promo code “wegotthis” at checkout.
If you’re not a Moz customer or community member, simply create a free account with us to get started.
We love you, we’re here for you, and we’re in this together.
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!
