SEO

Marketing Analytics: The Simple Guide

Published

2 years ago

February 24, 2022

Marketing analytics is the measurement and analysis of marketing data to seek patterns and insights that can improve marketing performance.

If you’re doing digital marketing, you’re swimming in a vast pool of actionable data. But if you’re not using tools and techniques to discover, analyze, and interpret this data, then you’re swimming with your eyes closed.

To help you learn what marketing analytics can do, we’ll cover the following:

First, marketing analytics can answer questions vital to any business, no matter the size. Here are a few common questions: How are our campaigns performing? Are we spending money on the right marketing channels? How do we compare to our competitors?

Knowing those things is great, but it gets even better. Measuring marketing performance opens the door to improving it. For instance, if you notice your PPC campaigns on Facebook are starting to bring less traffic, you can do something about it. You can try improving the ads or even moving your marketing budget elsewhere and then comparing results.

Or maybe you’re in a situation where you need to set goals for yourself, your team, or your contractors. You can base those goals on an analysis of past performance and get a quantifiable reference point. How else will you know if, let’s say, increasing website traffic by 15% in one month is enough or even doable?

Finally, data can help you get your point across because numbers are persuasive. You can use real numbers from your past marketing efforts to prove that you’re positively impacting the business. Marketing analytics can also help make well-grounded predictions that you can use to fuel your marketing strategy, e.g., securing a higher budget for the next quarter.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can use marketing analytics for business growth.

Report on the past

The past is super important to marketers. It’s because the story with marketing usually goes like this: First, you use some marketing tactic. Then you give it some time to generate results. Finally, you check on those results.

On that note, marketing analytics will help you answer questions such as:

How much organic traffic did our content generate last quarter?
How many new leads did Campaign A generate compared to Campaign B?
What was the conversion rate from trial sign-ups to paid subscriptions?
What was the average cart abandonment rate last year?

The good news is that more often than not, marketing analytics software does the tracking and measuring of the most popular metrics automatically. But the important thing is to set up those tools as soon as possible to avoid data gaps.

Analyze the present

Marketing analytics can answer some more “timely” questions too, such as things related to patterns in customer behaviors, trends, current budget spending, etc. For example:

Why is organic traffic to our blog decreasing?
What percentage of our customers use the [feature] of our product?
What is the lifetime value of our customers?
What is our current ranking for [query] in Google?

And when you’ve got insights into your past performance and present state of affairs, you’re all set to take on a task that marketers are asked to do (but few can deliver) all the time: predict the future.

Predict the future

Enter predictive analytics or, in other words, making data-driven assumptions about what can happen in the future. Predicting the future is why marketers are not simply reporting for reporting’s sake.

For example, if a marketer is able to prove a positive return on investment of a given marketing tactic based on past performance, they can forecast the future performance quite accurately. Often, this is enough to get the marketing budget they need.

Here, we also enter the realm of prescriptive analytics, the type of analytics that answers the question, “What should be done?” For example:

Which type of page layout should we use? You can use an A/B testing software to test your options.
What type of message should we send to a prospect to increase our chances of converting them? Marketers can build models of optimal conversion paths and then test them by setting up automated email workflows.
What keywords should we target in our content? SEOs and content marketers do keyword research for that.

Compare with competitors

Marketing analytics can help you turn your competitors into allies (almost). Thanks to data from various competitive analysis methods, it’s possible to learn from someone’s mistakes or emulate someone’s success.

For example, to identify gaps in your content, you can run a content gap analysis using Ahrefs in just a few clicks and see what keywords your competitors rank for that you don’t.

Whether you want to perform ad hoc analytics or develop a set of metrics that will appear in recurring reports, this simple four-step process will help you focus on what’s most important.

1. Identify what you want to measure

As you can see in the paragraphs above, there are a lot of different things that marketing analytics software can track and measure for you. But this creates a temptation to just dive in and look for any kind of insight.

While you may find some this way, it’s more effective to determine what you’ll be looking for first and leave less to chance. In other words, if your analytics tool were a person, what questions would you like them to answer?

For example, let’s say you’re investing heavily in creating content designed to rank on Google Search. Since your competitors are doing the same thing, you’ll want to know this: How visible is my content on the SERPs compared to them? This is a metric known as the share of voice (SOV).

So now that we have our sample research question in place, we can move on to the next step.

2. Assess your capabilities

There are two questions to ask here:

Do you have access to quality data?
Do you have the skill to extract and process the data?

And there is no other way to answer these than to learn more about your research question.

This step may sound trivial, but it’s actually a critical one. Because if you dive headfirst into an analytics problem that is best left to someone else (e.g., a data scientist or an external consultant), chances are you will just waste time instead of better spending it on something else.

And this is a common problem among marketing teams. A study revealed that only 1.9% of marketing leaders reported their companies have the right talent to leverage marketing analytics.

Whatever your research question may be, just try Googling it first. It’s likely someone has already created a product or service to solve your problem. For instance, a basic query like “share of voice” could lead you to our how-to article.

3. Gather data using marketing analytics tools

Continuing our example of calculating SOV, we learn (after doing some quick research online) that you can solve this problem without any special skills by using an SEO tool like Ahrefs. To illustrate, one of the methods consists of three steps:

Set keywords you want to track and paste them into Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker
Set competitors’ domains you want to match against
Go to the Competitors report and see your data automatically calculated and visualized in the “Visibility” tab

Visibility report showing key data. Below is a line graph of the key data on Ahrefs and its competitors

The Visibility report shows what percentage of all clicks for the tracked keywords land on the target websites.

4. Draw conclusions

Rank Tracker’s Visibility report allows you to analyze the present by making comparisons to your competitors, and it even lets you report on the past SOV. You can do even more if you try to find the reasons behind those numbers and come up with some solutions for future improvements. This is even if you’re generally outperforming your competitors at the moment.

Right below the Visibility report, you can see a report of keyword positions in comparison to your competitors’. And if you sort the results by one of your competitors, you will see keywords for which they perform better than you.

That knowledge is a great starting point for pinpointing underperforming content and then using SEO tactics to improve rankings. Examples:

Getting more backlinks
Updating content
Optimizing page speed
Boosting pages with internal links

Basically, in our four-step process, we went from an idea on what to measure to finding exact areas of improvement in our marketing efforts. And that’s the heart of marketing analytics.

Data is at the core of Ahrefs’ marketing activities. And as with most SaaS companies, our martech stack consists of many different tools. Here are some that we use for marketing analytics.

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is our all-in-one SEO toolset that helps millions of marketers to optimize their content to rank higher and get more traffic from search engines. And since our core marketing tactic is content marketing, Ahrefs is a tool we can’t live without. We use it mainly for:

Finding topics to write about.
Studying how to structure our blog posts.
Choosing which articles to update.
Finding outreach prospects.
Studying competitors.
Monitoring our performance on search engines.
Finding technical SEO issues.

To illustrate, let’s take a closer look at the first point from the above list.

We want to help people get better at SEO and marketing, so we create educational content. We study what people want to learn, the traffic potential of those topics, and how hard it would be to rank our content on Google to get that traffic.

Let’s look at an example. Here, we can see that if we write an article about B2B marketing, we will be looking at an estimated monthly organic traffic of 2K in the U.S. alone. We will also likely need links from about 81 websites to rank in the top 10 in that country. And just like that, we have found a data-driven premise to decide whether to target that keyword or not.

If you’re curious about the details of the keyword research process, check out the video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMJQPqG2Uas

2. Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free SEO tool designed for monitoring and troubleshooting websites’ appearances in search results.

Among many features, GSC shows the exact number of visits from Google’s SERPs to a website. Since only Google can do that with this accuracy (other tools use estimates), we use GSC to mainly monitor the exact amount of organic traffic coming from Google Search to our pages.

With this knowledge, we can improve pages that are decreasing in traffic or try to improve the CTRs of pages that are ranking high but don’t get clicked on as often as they should (in our opinion).

Query "diy seo" with corresponding data, including CTR and position

Thanks to data from GSC, we can easily identify pages with high keyword rankings but low CTRs. For example, an article targeting the keyword “diy seo” could probably do better based on its position.

3. Matomo

Matomo is a web analytics tool that is often regarded as the “ethical alternative” to Google Analytics, as it takes a more progressive stance toward data ownership and privacy. This is also one of the reasons we chose this tool.

Matomo has all the standard features you’ll expect to help you understand where users come from and how they interact with your website. Things like traffic sources, channel attributions, user flows, goal conversions, cohorts, etc. What’s more, it hosts some tools that you can’t find in other popular alternatives.

For example, we found Matomo to be helpful in an experiment where we compared different banner placements on our website. Instead of guessing the best placement, we appended tracking parameters to some links to see the click performance and decide where would make the most sense to keep the banner.

Banner of Ahrefs' SEO course on our "Free Keyword Generator" page

Is this a good spot to place this banner? We let our users decide.

Table showing results of click performances of some pages

Results of our quick experiment. Conclusion: turn off the banner on the worst-performing page.

Final thoughts

In this article, I aimed for a quick, digestible introduction to the world of marketing analytics. And I hope it is enough to get you interested in learning more about this topic. After all, digital marketing is virtually impossible to do without it.

As you dive deeper into marketing analytics, it will get more complicated than what we’ve discussed here. But on the other hand, it gets more interesting too. For example, there are methods where you can use machine learning for prescriptive analytics to uncover areas of improvement.

Also, if you’re interested in data analysis and want to make it one of the pillars of your marketing career, here’s some good news for you: Data-driven marketing is an important trend in the industry; in my opinion, it’s most likely here to stay. So getting some kind of data analytics certification relevant to your specialization is probably a good idea.

On a final note, to implement marketing analytics effectively (especially the more advanced type) in your organization, you will need the buy-in of other stakeholders. In other words, you will need a favorable company culture, aka data culture. Obviously, it’s not the data that matters the most, but what you do with it.

Got questions or comments? Ping me on Twitter.

Related Topics:analytics Guide Marketing Simple

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SEO

An In-Depth Guide And Best Practices For Mobile SEO

Published

17 hours ago

April 18, 2024

Max

Mobile SEO: An In-Depth Guide And Best Practices

Over the years, search engines have encouraged businesses to improve mobile experience on their websites. More than 60% of web traffic comes from mobile, and in some cases based on the industry, mobile traffic can reach up to 90%.

Since Google has completed its switch to mobile-first indexing, the question is no longer “if” your website should be optimized for mobile, but how well it is adapted to meet these criteria. A new challenge has emerged for SEO professionals with the introduction of Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which replaced First Input Delay (FID) starting March, 12 2024.

Thus, understanding mobile SEO’s latest advancements, especially with the shift to INP, is crucial. This guide offers practical steps to optimize your site effectively for today’s mobile-focused SEO requirements.

What Is Mobile SEO And Why Is It Important?

The goal of mobile SEO is to optimize your website to attain better visibility in search engine results specifically tailored for mobile devices.

This form of SEO not only aims to boost search engine rankings, but also prioritizes enhancing mobile user experience through both content and technology.

While, in many ways, mobile SEO and traditional SEO share similar practices, additional steps related to site rendering and content are required to meet the needs of mobile users and the speed requirements of mobile devices.

Does this need to be a priority for your website? How urgent is it?

Consider this: 58% of the world’s web traffic comes from mobile devices.

If you aren’t focused on mobile users, there is a good chance you’re missing out on a tremendous amount of traffic.

Mobile-First Indexing

Additionally, as of 2023, Google has switched its crawlers to a mobile-first indexing priority.

This means that the mobile experience of your site is critical to maintaining efficient indexing, which is the step before ranking algorithms come into play.

How Much Of Your Traffic Is From Mobile?

How much traffic potential you have with mobile users can depend on various factors, including your industry (B2B sites might attract primarily desktop users, for example) and the search intent your content addresses (users might prefer desktop for larger purchases, for example).

Regardless of where your industry and the search intent of your users might be, the future will demand that you optimize your site experience for mobile devices.

How can you assess your current mix of mobile vs. desktop users?

An easy way to see what percentage of your users is on mobile is to go into Google Analytics 4.

Click Reports in the left column.
Click on the Insights icon on the right side of the screen.
Scroll down to Suggested Questions and click on it.
Click on Technology.
Click on Top Device model by Users.
Then click on Top Device category by Users under Related Results.
The breakdown of Top Device category will match the date range selected at the top of GA4.

Screenshot from GA4, March 2024

You can also set up a report in Looker Studio.

Add your site to the Data source.
Add Device category to the Dimension field.
Add 30-day active users to the Metric field.
Click on Chart to select the view that works best for you.

A screen capture from Looker Studio showing a pie chart with a breakdown of mobile, desktop, tablet, and Smart TV users for a site

Screenshot from Looker Studio, March 2024

You can add more Dimensions to really dig into the data to see which pages attract which type of users, what the mobile-to-desktop mix is by country, which search engines send the most mobile users, and so much more.

How To Check If Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly

Now that you know how to build a report on mobile and desktop usage, you need to figure out if your site is optimized for mobile traffic.

While Google removed the mobile-friendly testing tool from Google Search Console in December 2023, there are still a number of useful tools for evaluating your site for mobile users.

Bing still has a mobile-friendly testing tool that will tell you the following:

Viewport is configured correctly.
Page content fits device width.
Text on the page is readable.
Links and tap targets are sufficiently large and touch-friendly.
Any other issues detected.

Google’s Lighthouse Chrome extension provides you with an evaluation of your site’s performance across several factors, including load times, accessibility, and SEO.

To use, install the Lighthouse Chrome extension.

Go to your website in your browser.
Click on the orange lighthouse icon in your browser’s address bar.
Click Generate Report.
A new tab will open and display your scores once the evaluation is complete.

An image showing the Lighthouse Scores for a website.

Screenshot from Lighthouse, March 2024

You can also use the Lighthouse report in Developer Tools in Chrome.

Simply click on the three dots next to the address bar.
Select “More Tools.”
Select Developer Tools.
Click on the Lighthouse tab.
Choose “Mobile” and click the “Analyze page load” button.

An image showing how to get to Lighthouse within Google Chrome Developer Tools.

Screenshot from Lighthouse, March 2024

Another option that Google offers is the PageSpeed Insights (PSI) tool. Simply add your URL into the field and click Analyze.

PSI will integrate any Core Web Vitals scores into the resulting view so you can see what your users are experiencing when they come to your site.

An image showing the PageSpeed Insights scores for a website.

Screenshot from PageSpeed Insights, March 2024

Other tools, like WebPageTest.org, will graphically display the processes and load times for everything it takes to display your webpages.

With this information, you can see which processes block the loading of your pages, which ones take the longest to load, and how this affects your overall page load times.

You can also emulate the mobile experience by using Developer Tools in Chrome, which allows you to switch back and forth between a desktop and mobile experience.

An image showing how to change the device emulation for a site within Google Chrome Developer Tools

Screenshot from Google Chrome Developer Tools, March 2024

Lastly, use your own mobile device to load and navigate your website:

Does it take forever to load?
Are you able to navigate your site to find the most important information?
Is it easy to add something to cart?
Can you read the text?

How To Optimize Your Site Mobile-First

With all these tools, keep an eye on the Performance and Accessibility scores, as these directly affect mobile users.

Expand each section within the PageSpeed Insights report to see what elements are affecting your score.

These sections can give your developers their marching orders for optimizing the mobile experience.

While mobile speeds for cellular networks have steadily improved around the world (the average speed in the U.S. has jumped to 27.06 Mbps from 11.14 Mbps in just eight years), speed and usability for mobile users are at a premium.

Best Practices For Mobile Optimization

Unlike traditional SEO, which can focus heavily on ensuring that you are using the language of your users as it relates to the intersection of your products/services and their needs, optimizing for mobile SEO can seem very technical SEO-heavy.

While you still need to be focused on matching your content with the needs of the user, mobile search optimization will require the aid of your developers and designers to be fully effective.

Below are several key factors in mobile SEO to keep in mind as you’re optimizing your site.

Site Rendering

How your site responds to different devices is one of the most important elements in mobile SEO.

The two most common approaches to this are responsive design and dynamic serving.

Responsive design is the most common of the two options.

Using your site’s cascading style sheets (CSS) and flexible layouts, as well as responsive content delivery networks (CDN) and modern image file types, responsive design allows your site to adjust to a variety of screen sizes, orientations, and resolutions.

With the responsive design, elements on the page adjust in size and location based on the size of the screen.

You can simply resize the window of your desktop browser and see how this works.

An image showing the difference between Web.dev in a full desktop display vs. a mobile display using responsive design.

Screenshot from web.dev, March 2024

This is the approach that Google recommends.

Adaptive design, also known as dynamic serving, consists of multiple fixed layouts that are dynamically served to the user based on their device.

Sites can have a separate layout for desktop, smartphone, and tablet users. Each design can be modified to remove functionality that may not make sense for certain device types.

This is a less efficient approach, but it does give sites more control over what each device sees.

While these will not be covered here, two other options:

Progressive Web Apps (PWA), which can seamlessly integrate into a mobile app.
Separate mobile site/URL (which is no longer recommended).

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

Google has introduced Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a more comprehensive measure of user experience, succeeding First Input Delay. While FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with your page (e.g., clicking a link, tapping a button) to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. INP, on the other hand, broadens the scope by measuring the responsiveness of a website throughout the entire lifespan of a page, not just first interaction.

Note that actions such as hovering and scrolling do not influence INP, however, keyboard-driven scrolling or navigational actions are considered keystrokes that may activate events measured by INP but not scrolling which is happeing due to interaction.

Scrolling may indirectly affect INP, for example in scenarios where users scroll through content, and additional content is lazy-loaded from the API. While the act of scrolling itself isn’t included in the INP calculation, the processing, necessary for loading additional content, can create contention on the main thread, thereby increasing interaction latency and adversely affecting the INP score.

What qualifies as an optimal INP score?

An INP under 200ms indicates good responsiveness.
Between 200ms and 500ms needs improvement.
Over 500ms means page has poor responsiveness.

and these are common issues causing poor INP scores:

Long JavaScript Tasks: Heavy JavaScript execution can block the main thread, delaying the browser’s ability to respond to user interactions. Thus break long JS tasks into smaller chunks by using scheduler API.
Large DOM (HTML) Size: A large DOM ( starting from 1500 elements) can severely impact a website’s interactive performance. Every additional DOM element increases the work required to render pages and respond to user interactions.
Inefficient Event Callbacks: Event handlers that execute lengthy or complex operations can significantly affect INP scores. Poorly optimized callbacks attached to user interactions, like clicks, keypress or taps, can block the main thread, delaying the browser’s ability to render visual feedback promptly. For example when handlers perform heavy computations or initiate synchronous network requests such on clicks.

and you can troubleshoot INP issues using free and paid tools.

As a good starting point I would recommend to check your INP scores by geos via treo.sh which will give you a great high level insights where you struggle with most.

INP scores by Geos

Image Optimization

Images add a lot of value to the content on your site and can greatly affect the user experience.

From page speeds to image quality, you could adversely affect the user experience if you haven’t optimized your images.

This is especially true for the mobile experience. Images need to adjust to smaller screens, varying resolutions, and screen orientation.

Use responsive images
Implement lazy loading
Compress your images (use WebP)
Add your images into sitemap

Optimizing images is an entire science, and I advise you to read our comprehensive guide on image SEO how to implement the mentioned recommendations.

Avoid Intrusive Interstitials

Google rarely uses concrete language to state that something is a ranking factor or will result in a penalty, so you know it means business about intrusive interstitials in the mobile experience.

Intrusive interstitials are basically pop-ups on a page that prevent the user from seeing content on the page.

John Mueller, Google’s Senior Search Analyst, stated that they are specifically interested in the first interaction a user has after clicking on a search result.

Examples of intrusive interstitial pop-ups on a mobile site according to Google.

Not all pop-ups are considered bad. Interstitial types that are considered “intrusive” by Google include:

Pop-ups that cover most or all of the page content.
Non-responsive interstitials or pop-ups that are impossible for mobile users to close.
Pop-ups that are not triggered by a user action, such as a scroll or a click.

Structured Data

Most of the tips provided in this guide so far are focused on usability and speed and have an additive effect, but there are changes that can directly influence how your site appears in mobile search results.

Search engine results pages (SERPs) haven’t been the “10 blue links” in a very long time.

They now reflect the diversity of search intent, showing a variety of different sections to meet the needs of users. Local Pack, shopping listing ads, video content, and more dominate the mobile search experience.

As a result, it’s more important than ever to provide structured data markup to the search engines, so they can display rich results for users.

In this example, you can see that both Zojirushi and Amazon have included structured data for their rice cookers, and Google is displaying rich results for both.

An image of a search result for Japanese rice cookers that shows rich results for Zojirushi and Amazon.

Screenshot from search for [Japanese rice cookers], Google, March 2024

Adding structured data markup to your site can influence how well your site shows up for local searches and product-related searches.

Using JSON-LD, you can mark up the business, product, and services data on your pages in Schema markup.

If you use WordPress as the content management system for your site, there are several plugins available that will automatically mark up your content with structured data.

Content Style

When you think about your mobile users and the screens on their devices, this can greatly influence how you write your content.

Rather than long, detailed paragraphs, mobile users prefer concise writing styles for mobile reading.

Each key point in your content should be a single line of text that easily fits on a mobile screen.

Your font sizes should adjust to the screen’s resolution to avoid eye strain for your users.

If possible, allow for a dark or dim mode for your site to further reduce eye strain.

Headers should be concise and address the searcher’s intent. Rather than lengthy section headers, keep it simple.

Finally, make sure that your text renders in a font size that’s readable.

Tap Targets

As important as text size, the tap targets on your pages should be sized and laid out appropriately.

Tap targets include navigation elements, links, form fields, and buttons like “Add to Cart” buttons.

Targets smaller than 48 pixels by 48 pixels and targets that overlap or are overlapped by other page elements will be called out in the Lighthouse report.

Tap targets are essential to the mobile user experience, especially for ecommerce websites, so optimizing them is vital to the health of your online business.

Prioritizing These Tips

If you have delayed making your site mobile-friendly until now, this guide may feel overwhelming. As a result, you may not know what to prioritize first.

As with so many other optimizations in SEO, it’s important to understand which changes will have the greatest impact, and this is just as true for mobile SEO.

Think of SEO as a framework in which your site’s technical aspects are the foundation of your content. Without a solid foundation, even the best content may struggle to rank.

Responsive or Dynamic Rendering: If your site requires the user to zoom and scroll right or left to read the content on your pages, no number of other optimizations can help you. This should be first on your list.
Content Style: Rethink how your users will consume your content online. Avoid very long paragraphs. “Brevity is the soul of wit,” to quote Shakespeare.
Image Optimization: Begin migrating your images to next-gen image formats and optimize your content display network for speed and responsiveness.
Tap Targets: A site that prevents users from navigating or converting into sales won’t be in business long. Make navigation, links, and buttons usable for them.
Structured Data: While this element ranks last in priority on this list, rich results can improve your chances of receiving traffic from a search engine, so add this to your to-do list once you’ve completed the other optimizations.

Summary

From How Search Works, “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

If Google’s primary mission is focused on making all the world’s information accessible and useful, then you know they will prefer surfacing sites that align with that vision.

Since a growing percentage of users are on mobile devices, you may want to infer the word “everywhere” added to the end of the mission statement.

Are you missing out on traffic from mobile devices because of a poor mobile experience?

If you hope to remain relevant, make mobile SEO a priority now.

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

SEO

HARO Has Been Dead for a While

Published

21 hours ago

April 17, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Every SEO’s favorite ~~link-building~~ collaboration tool, HARO, was officially killed off for good last week by Cision. It’s now been wrapped into a new product: Connectively.

I know nothing about the new tool. I haven’t tried it. But after trying to use HARO recently, I can’t say I’m surprised or saddened by its death. It’s been a walking corpse for a while.

I used HARO way back in the day to build links. It worked. But a couple of months ago, I experienced the platform from the other side when I decided to try to source some “expert” insights for our posts.

After just a few minutes of work, I got hundreds of pitches:

So, I grabbed a cup of coffee and began to work through them. It didn’t take long before I lost the will to live. Every other pitch seemed like nothing more than lazy AI-generated nonsense from someone who definitely wasn’t an expert.

Here’s one of them:

Example of an AI-generated pitch in HARO

Seriously. Who writes like that? I’m a self-confessed dullard (any fellow Dull Men’s Club members here?), and even I’m not that dull…

I don’t think I looked through more than 30-40 of the responses. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt like having a conversation with ChatGPT… and not a very good one!

Despite only reviewing a few dozen of the many pitches I received, one stood out to me:

Example HARO pitch that caught my attention

Believe it or not, this response came from a past client of mine who runs an SEO agency in the UK. Given how knowledgeable and experienced he is (he actually taught me a lot about SEO back in the day when I used to hassle him with questions on Skype), this pitch rang alarm bells for two reasons:

I truly doubt he spends his time replying to HARO queries
I know for a fact he’s no fan of Neil Patel (sorry, Neil, but I’m sure you’re aware of your reputation at this point!)

So… I decided to confront him 😉

Here’s what he said:

Shocker.

I pressed him for more details:

I’m getting a really good deal and paying per link rather than the typical £xxxx per month for X number of pitches. […] The responses as you’ve seen are not ideal but that’s a risk I’m prepared to take as realistically I dont have the time to do it myself. He’s not native english, but I have had to have a word with him a few times about clearly using AI. On the low cost ones I don’t care but on authority sites it needs to be more refined.

I think this pretty much sums up the state of HARO before its death. Most “pitches” were just AI answers from SEOs trying to build links for their clients.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not throwing shade here. I know that good links are hard to come by, so you have to do what works. And the reality is that HARO did work. Just look at the example below. You can tell from the anchor and surrounding text in Ahrefs that these links were almost certainly built with HARO:

Example of links build with HARO, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

But this was the problem. HARO worked so well back in the day that it was only a matter of time before spammers and the #scale crew ruined it for everyone. That’s what happened, and now HARO is no more. So…

If you’re a link builder, I think it’s time to admit that HARO link building is dead and move on.

No tactic works well forever. It’s the law of sh**ty clickthroughs. This is why you don’t see SEOs having huge success with tactics like broken link building anymore. They’ve moved on to more innovative tactics or, dare I say it, are just buying links.

Sidenote.

Talking of buying links, here’s something to ponder: if Connectively charges for pitches, are links built through those pitches technically paid? If so, do they violate Google’s spam policies? It’s a murky old world this SEO lark, eh?

If you’re a journalist, Connectively might be worth a shot. But with experts being charged for pitches, you probably won’t get as many responses. That might be a good thing. You might get less spam. Or you might just get spammed by SEOs with deep pockets. The jury’s out for now.

My advice? Look for alternative methods like finding and reaching out to experts directly. You can easily use tools like Content Explorer to find folks who’ve written lots of content about the topic and are likely to be experts.

For example, if you look for content with “backlinks” in the title and go to the Authors tab, you might see a familiar name. 😉

Finding people to request insights from in Ahrefs' Content Explorer

I don’t know if I’d call myself an expert, but I’d be happy to give you a quote if you reached out on social media or emailed me (here’s how to find my email address).

Alternatively, you can bait your audience into giving you their insights on social media. I did this recently with a poll on X and included many of the responses in my guide to toxic backlinks.

Me, indirectly sourcing insights on social media

Either of these options is quicker than using HARO because you don’t have to sift through hundreds of responses looking for a needle in a haystack. If you disagree with me and still love HARO, feel free to tell me why on X 😉

SEO

Google Clarifies Vacation Rental Structured Data

Published

2 days ago

April 17, 2024

Max

Google updates their vacation rental structured data documentation

Google’s structured data documentation for vacation rentals was recently updated to require more specific data in a change that is more of a clarification than it is a change in requirements. This change was made without any formal announcement or notation in the developer pages changelog.

Vacation Rentals Structured Data

These specific structured data types makes vacation rental information eligible for rich results that are specific to these kinds of rentals. However it’s not available to all websites. Vacation rental owners are required to be connected to a Google Technical Account Manager and have access to the Google Hotel Center platform.

VacationRental Structured Data Type Definitions

The primary changes were made to the structured data property type definitions where Google defines what the required and recommended property types are.

The changes to the documentation is in the section governing the Recommended properties and represents a clarification of the recommendations rather than a change in what Google requires.

The primary changes were made to the structured data type definitions where Google defines what the required and recommended property types are.

The changes to the documentation is in the section governing the Recommended properties and represents a clarification of the recommendations rather than a change in what Google requires.

Address Schema.org property

This is a subtle change but it’s important because it now represents a recommendation that requires more precise data.

This is what was recommended before:

“streetAddress”: “1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy.”

This is what it now recommends:

“streetAddress”: “1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Unit 6E”

Address Property Change Description

The most substantial change is to the description of what the “address” property is, becoming more descriptive and precise about what is recommended.

The description before the change:

PostalAddress
Information about the street address of the listing. Include all properties that apply to your country.

The description after the change:

PostalAddress
The full, physical location of the vacation rental.
Provide the street address, city, state or region, and postal code for the vacation rental. If applicable, provide the unit or apartment number.
Note that P.O. boxes or other mailing-only addresses are not considered full, physical addresses.

This is repeated in the section for address.streetAddress property

This is what it recommended before:

address.streetAddress Text
The full street address of your vacation listing.

And this is what it recommends now:

address.streetAddress Text
The full street address of your vacation listing, including the unit or apartment number if applicable.

Clarification And Not A Change

Although these updates don’t represent a change in Google’s guidance they are nonetheless important because they offer clearer guidance with less ambiguity as to what is recommended.

Read the updated structured data guidance:

Vacation rental (VacationRental) structured data

Featured Image by Shutterstock/New Africa