Một vài năm gần đây, nhu cầu mua sắm trong siêu thị tăng đột biến, người tiêu dùng quan tâm nhiều hơn tới chất lượng an toàn thực phẩm. Họ cho rằng mua hàng trong siêu thị sẽ được bảo đảm tính an toàn, nguồn gốc xuất xứ. Nhưng đối thủ kinh doanh siêu thị mini cũng không phải là ít. Nhìn ngang ngó dọc xung quanh, bạn có thể thấy các ông lớn như Vinmart hay Kmart, Circle K, Shop & Go…
Nói đến đây chắc nhiều người cảm thấy lo lắng liệu mình có cạnh tranh nổi với những thương hiệu lớn như trên không. Câu trả lời là hoàn toàn có thể. Hiện nay rất nhiều cửa hàng tiện lợi chung mặt hàng và khách hàng với mô hình siêu thị mini. Và bạn tương lai sẽ là một trong số đó. Đầu tiên hãy dành thời gian nghiên cứu lập kế hoạch kinh doanh siêu thị mini một cách đầy đủ chi tiết nhất. Nó sẽ giúp cho các nhà đầu tư giảm thiểu tối đa rủi ro trong quá trình hoạt động. Vậy mở siêu thị mini cần gì, thủ tục mở siêu thị mini ra sao, mở siêu thị mini cần bao nhiêu vốn? Tất cả những điều đó sẽ được giải đáp trong bài viết ngày hôm nay. Mời các bạn cùng theo dõi.
[caption id="attachment_4639" align="aligncenter" width="800"]Lập kế hoạch kinh doanh siêu thị mini như thế nào?[/caption]
1. Mở siêu thị mini cần thủ tục gì?
Giấy phép kinh doanh
Giấy vệ sinh an toàn thực phẩm
Chứng nhận phòng cháy chữa cháy
Các giấy phép với ngành hàng đặc biệt
[caption id="attachment_4640" align="aligncenter" width="800"]Tìm hiểu thị trường kinh doanh siêu thị mini cần phân tích yếu tố nào?[/caption]
2. Tìm hiểu thị trường để lập kế hoạch kinh doanh siêu thị mini
Để lập kế hoạch kinh doanh siêu thị mini thành công thì bước phân tích đánh giá thị trường là điều bắt buộc. Cụ thể trong giai đoạn này cần tìm hiểu những vấn đề gì?
Xác định đối tượng khách hàng
Việc xác định đối tượng khách hàng trước khi quá trình mua bán xảy ra giúp bạn tiếp cận khách hàng tiềm năng một cách dễ dàng. Từ đó có chiến lược về giá, mặt hàng sản phẩm, chiến dịch marketing phù hợp. Đối với mô hình kinh doanh siêu thị mini thì bạn nên mở một cuộc khảo sát để phân loại khách hàng thành từng nhóm riêng (sinh viên, hộ gia đình..).
Xác định nhu cầu trong quá khứ và hiện tại
Khi mở siêu thị mini bạn cần tìm hiểu xem từng nhóm đối tượng khách hàng có khả năng và nhu cầu chi tiêu theo từng ngày, từng năm là bao nhiêu trong ba năm gần đây nhất. Để có số liệu chính xác thì tốt nhất là làm khảo sát với tập mẫu càng lớn càng tốt. Nhìn vào kết quả này bạn sẽ biết đâu là đối tượng khách hàng tiềm năng của mình, đồng thời hiểu rõ hơn về nhu cầu của họ để lên kế hoạch cung ứng hàng hóa.
Xác định nguồn cung trong quá khứ và hiện tại
Đây là bước quan trọng cần lưu ý trong quá trình lập kế hoạch kinh doanh siêu thị mini. Xác định nguồn cung trong quá khứ và hiện tại sẽ giúp bạn liệt kê những đối thủ trong khu vực mà mình định kinh doanh. Tại bước này bạn cần thống kê chính xác số siêu thị mini được mở ra trong 3 năm trở lại đây, lượng khách trung bình theo ngày, năm của họ.
Dự báo lượng khách đến siêu thị
Trong cuộc khảo sát về nhu cầu tiêu dùng bạn có thể lồng ghép thêm một số câu hỏi về thói quen, tần suất mua sắm tại siêu thị của từng đối tượng khách hàng là bao nhiêu, từ đó dự báo lượng người mua tối đa. Tuy nhiên, đây chỉ là con số lý tưởng, bạn phải trừ bớt đi do yếu tố cạnh tranh và siêu thị chỉ mới khai trương chưa đủ sức thu hút.
Phân tích điểm mạnh điểm yếu của siêu thị mini
Nếu đã hiểu rõ các yếu tố bên ngoài thì tiếp theo bạn cần tìm hiểu những yếu tố bên trong khi mở siêu thị mini bằng việc phân tích điểm mạnh, điểm yếu, cơ hội và thách thức để từ đó đưa ra chiến lược phù hợp. Hãy lập bảng ma trận SWOT, kết hợp chéo các yếu tố, như vậy bạn sẽ có cái nhìn tổng thể về kế hoạch của mình hơn.
3. Chốt địa điểm mở siêu thị mini
Phục vụ các mặt hàng thiết yếu vì vậy mà khách hàng tiềm năng của mô hình siêu thị mini hầu như có ở khắp mọi nơi. Tuy nhiên vẫn nên chọn ở các khu vụ đông dân cư, ngay gần các tuyến phố lớn để di chuyện thuận tiện thì càng tốt. Ngoài ra, bạn cũng không nên chọn những địa điểm đã có mật độ dày đặc các siêu thị mini khác để giảm thiểu mức độ cạnh tranh. Với diện tích từ 70m2 tới 120m2 sẽ là không gian vừa đủ để bắt đầu kinh doanh.
4. Tìm nguồn hàng đáng tin cậy
Nguồn vốn và doanh thu bị ảnh hưởng bởi yếu tố nguồn hàng, do đó các chủ đầu tư cần dành thời gian tìm hiểu kỹ lưỡng cho bước này. Hãy liên hệ tới các đại lý phân phối lớn như BigC Metro để nhập hàng trong giai đoạn đầu. Bằng cách này bạn sẽ được cung cấp giá sỉ, nhận trực tiếp các ưu đãi về giá, các chương trình quảng cáo, khuyến mại. Trong quá trình làm việc với đại lý phân phối bạn cần quan tâm tới chính sách của họ nhé. Ví dụ như hình thức giao hàng, thanh toán, đổi trả hàng, chất lượng sản phẩm…
Ngoài ra các chợ đầu mối cũng là một nguồn nhập hàng tiềm năng. Ở miền Bắc có thể kể đến: Chợ Đầu Mối Phía Bắc (cửa khâu Long Biên), chợ Đầu Mối Phía Nam (Đền Lừ), chợ Đồng Xuân, chợ La Phù, chợ Thổ Tang (Vĩnh Phúc). Ở miền Nam thì có chợ Tân Bình, chợ An Đông, chợ Kim Biên, chợ Bà Chiểu,…. Đây đều là những địa chỉ cung cấp hàng tiêu dùng lớn với giá sỉ tốt.
[caption id="attachment_4641" align="aligncenter" width="800"]Một số trang thiết bị cần có trong siêu thị mini là gì?[/caption]
5. Mua sắm trang thiết bị bán hàng
Một phần mềm quản lý bán hàng: Với hàng trăm hàng nghìn mặt hàng cần phải quản lý và chúng ta không thể nhớ hết tất cả mọi thứ liên quan tới sản phẩm được. Càng không thể kiểm soát xem mặt hàng này đã bán được bao nhiêu con bao nhiêu nếu không có phần mềm quản lý bán hàng. Bạn sẽ gặp rắc rối cực kỳ lớn, vì vậy trang bị nó trước khi bán hàng bạn nhé.
Một máy in hóa đơn: Khách hàng rất cần hóa đơn để tiện theo dõi đơn hàng của mình xem thừa thiếu thế nào. Nên bạn bắt buộc phải có một máy in hóa đơn.
Một đầu đọc mã vạch: Với đầu đọc mã vạch thì giúp bạn bán hàng nhanh hơn thông qua mã vạch và cũng giúp bạn quản lý hàng hóa theo mã vạch tránh nhầm lẫn
Một ngăn kéo đựng tiền: Nếu bạn không muốn mất mát trong quá trình thu tiền và quản trị tiền một cách cẩn thận hơn thì nên đầu tư vì chi phí khá rẻ. Xem thêm ngăn kéo đựng tiền.
Một bàn, quầy thu ngân: Bạn cần phải đầu tư một quầy thu ngân ở gần cửa chính để thu ngân cho khách hàng
Vậy với thực phẩm cần bảo quản lạnh thì sao? ví dụ như kem, thịt xúc xích, rau củ quả....Tham khảo bài viết sau: Tủ mát siêu thị, Siêu thị mini nên chọn loại tủ mát trưng bày nào?
còn một số thiết bị làm lành cho thực phẩm cần bảo quản lạnh: Tủ mát siêu thị,
6. Chiến lược tiếp thị
Thị trường cạnh tranh ngày càng khốc liệt. Số lượng siêu thị mini tăng lên từng ngày. Người tiêu dùng sẽ có nhiều sự lựa chọn hơn cả về giá, mặt hàng, địa điểm. Vì vậy bạn cần xây dựng kế hoạch marketing cho cửa hàng để thu hút và giữ chân khách hàng. Khi xây dựng chiến lược tiếp thị bạn nên lưu ý đến ngân sách và các kênh tiếp cận, vì hiện nay bên cạnh hình thức tiếp thị truyền thống thì các phương pháp trực tuyến cũng đem lại hiệu quả rất cao. Các hoạt động Marketing hỗ trợ bán hàng mà bạn có thể thực hiện gồm có:
Tích lũy điểm, tặng quà theo tuần, tháng
Chiết khấu, giảm giá bán cho khách hàng thân quen
Mở dịch vụ đặt hàng, mua hàng trên mạng tăng sự tiện lợi cho khách hàng
Trên đây là những bước cần có khi lập kế hoạch kinh doanh siêu thị mini mà Tủ Trưng Bày đã tích lũy được từ thực tế để chia sẻ với các bạn. Hi vọng bài viết đã mang tới nhiều thông tin hữu ích và phần nào giải đáp thắc mắc của các chủ đầu tư. Chúc các bạn thành công với ý tưởng tuyệt vời này nhé!
Chi tiết liên hệ:
Địa chỉ: Số 447, Đường Phúc Diễn, P.Xuân Phương, Q.Nam Từ Liêm, Tp.Hà Nội.
Hotline: 0979.184.688 – 0979.184.888
Theo bạn mở siêu thị mini cần bao nhiêu vốn? Đây là chủ đề được bàn luận rất nhiều tại các buổi hội thảo về lĩnh vực đầu tư và kinh doanh. Còn bạn thì sao? Đáp án cho câu hỏi trên là gì?
Như các bạn đã thấy, để bắt đầu vận hành một siêu thị mini, chúng ta cần chuẩn bị khá nhiều thứ. Bên cạnh giấy tờ pháp lý, hệ thống trang thiết bị, hàng hóa…thì ở giai đoạn đầu cần xác định mình có bao nhiêu vốn và có thể xoay chuyển nó như thế nào. Quy mô, hình thức kinh doanh, số lượng hàng hóa, vị trí tọa lạc…sẽ là các yếu tố chính phụ thuộc rất nhiều vào nguồn vốn. Nói đến đây chắc các bạn đã bắt đầu cảm thấy hoang mang rồi đúng không nào. Tuy nhiên, đừng vội lo lắng, những chia sẻ hướng dẫn chi tiết dưới đây sẽ cởi từng nút thắt cho bạn. Đào sâu nó cùng với Tủ Trưng Bày trong chủ đề Mở siêu thị mini cần bao nhiêu vốn nhé.
[caption id="attachment_4631" align="aligncenter" width="800"]Cần đầu tư bao nhiêu vốn để siêu thị mini được đi vào hoạt động?[/caption]
1. Chi phí ban đầu
1.1. Chi phí setup
Đây là các chi phí cơ bản nhất để bắt đầu kinh doanh siêu thị mini. Đó có thể là: việc đặt tên, làm nhãn hiệu, chi phí sửa chữa, sơn, chạy lại đường điện, nước. Tùy vào việc mặt bằng bạn có cũ hay mới, thiết bị đầy đủ hay chưa mà chi phí này thay đổi trong từng trường hợp. Theo kinh nghiêm của tôi để sở hữu một mặt bằng đẹp bạn cần bỏ ra từ 100-250 triệu. Căn cứ vào ví tiền của bạn sẽ setup các yếu tố này sao cho hợp lý với tổng thể của cả cửa hàng. Có những siêu thị mini chỉ cần đầu tư 30-50 triệu cũng ổn nhưng để tạo ấn tượng, sự khác biệt thì rất khó.
1.2. Chi phí phần mềm quản lý siêu thị mini
Chi phí phần mềm quản lý là yếu tố cần phải điểm danh khi được hỏi mở siêu thị mini cần bao nhiêu vốn? Với hàng nghìn mã hàng, date phức tạp và khác nhau, cập nhật hàng ngày, hàng giờ, việc không có phần mềm quản lý siêu thị khiến kho của bạn sẽ trở thành kho chứa đồ lộn xộn chỉ trong 1 tuần. Nếu quá trình quản lý lỏng lẻo, bạn sẽ nhanh chóng rơi vào trạng thái ngợp, mất kiểm soát, căng thẳng với mớ lộn xộn trên. Hằng ngày đối diện với tá câu hỏi như sản phẩm này còn hay hết hàng? Còn thì còn bao nhiêu? Hết từ khi nào? Ngày nhập về là ngày nào?...Để giải quyết vấn đề đó thì việc sử dụng phần mềm quản lý siêu thị mini gần như bắt buộc. Hơn nữa, bạn sẽ giảm 1 khoản chi phí đáng kể cho việc bảo quản, thất thoát, hư hỏng.
1.3. Chi phí cơ sở vật chất hạ tầng
Cơ sở vật chất là khoản chi phí tương thích đối với từng siêu thị, gồm có những thứ như: điều hòa, bàn thu ngân, quầy kệ, quạt cắt gió, tủ đông siêu thị,tủ mát siêu thị, tủ mát trưng bày trái cây, máy tính, máy in bill, máy quét mã vạch, máy in, máy in mã vạch, máy in tem phụ, cân điện tử, tem giá, handhel, tuy nhiên khuyến cáo các cơ sở vật chất bắt buộc phải có ngoài quầy kệ là điều hòa và tem giá. Các loại tủ như tủ nước, tủ sữa chua, tủ kem nhà cung cấp có thể cung cấp cho bạn mượn với điều kiện bạn đạt mức doanh số đề ra và đảm bảo không có nhãn hàng khác được trưng bày trong tủ.
2. Chi phí hàng tháng
[caption id="attachment_4632" align="aligncenter" width="800"]Các chi phí hàng tháng bao gồm mặt bằng, nhân sự, vận hành bạn cần quan tâm khi mở siêu thị mini[/caption]
2.1. Chi phí mặt bằng
Chi phí thuê nhà sẽ quyết định khá nhiều tới việc “mở siêu thị mini cần bao nhiêu vốn?”. Thông thường số tiền bỏ ra cho mặt bằng khá lớn vì bạn phải trả theo một kỳ dài hạn. Nếu địa điểm là trung tâm nội thành thì chi phí càng đẩy lên rất nhiều. Chính vì thế cần tính toán kỹ lưỡng trước khi ký kết hợp đồng. Một lưu ý quan trọng đó là vấn đề cân đối và duy trì đến điểm hòa vốn sẽ phụ thuộc vào tiền thuê nhà của bạn. Ngoài ra, bạn cần cân nhắc tới trường hợp cửa hàng sẽ tồn tại trong lâu nếu không bán được tốt như kỳ vọng?
Chi phí thuê mặt bằng được coi là chi phí không không hoàn. Có nghĩa là khi thời gian trôi đi, bạn thuê 3 tháng, 6 tháng, 1 năm thì một khi đã chi ra thì không có cách nào để cắt lỗ hay thu hồi giảm thiểu mất mát. Và bạn cần phải tính thêm vào chi phí này khoản phần trăm lãi so với gửi ngân hàng. Khoản này tuy nhỏ nhưng cũng ảnh hưởng đến hạch toán của bạn. Trường hợp có sẵn mặt bằng thì cần quy đổi mặt bằng đó ra chi phí thuê, tránh hoạt động sinh lãi nhưng là lãi từ tiền thuê mặt bằng mà thực tế là đang lỗ
2.2. Chi phí nhân sự
Tương tự như chi phí thuê mặt bằng, nhân sự là một trong 3 yếu tố chính cần list vào trong bản kế hoạch về mở siêu thị mini cần bao nhiêu vốn? Để một cửa hàng hoạt động ổn định cần tối thiểu 2 nhân viên và dao động từ 15 triệu mỗi tháng. Để tiết kiệm chi phí này, bạn có thể cắt giảm nhân sự khi chính bạn kiêm luôn vị trí nhân viên đó. Có thể vừa làm thu ngân vừa bán hàng. Nhưng để đánh giá chính xác hoạt động kinh doanh thì cần phải tính cả lương của bạn vào trong đó.
2.3. Chi phí vận hành
Tiền dành cho việc chi trả điện, nước, các loại thuế phí đi kèm được coi là chi phí vận hành. Loại chi phí này nhiều hay ít phụ thuộc vào hệ thống cơ sở hạ tầng của siêu thị. Nếu quy mô lớn thì có thể lên tới hàng chục triệu mỗi tháng. Đơn giản các thiết bị làm lạnh như tủ kem, tủ trưng bày nước ngọt, điều hòa…ngốn khá nhiều điện năng. Bạn nên dự trù dư một chút cho khoản vận hành này để tránh trường hợp không đủ khả năng quay vòng vốn.
Cụ thể hơn cho bạn: Với diện tích siêu thị mini dưới 100m2, cơ sở vật chất dành cho siêu thị mini với diện tích này chỉ cần 1 điều hòa, 1 tủ mát, 1 tủ kem thì tiền điện chỉ rơi vào khoảng 5 đến 6 triệu mỗi tháng, những với những siêu thị mini có diện tích lớn, tập trung vào dòng hàng fresh, vận hành có thể lên tới 2, 3 điều hòa, 2 tủ kem, 2 tủ nước, 1 tủ mát để trái cây, 1 tủ mát bơ sữa thì tiền điện hàng tháng có thể lên tới 25 đến 30 triệu mỗi tháng.
3. Chi phí phát sinh cần thiết
[caption id="attachment_4633" align="aligncenter" width="800"]Có những loại chi phí phát sinh nào cần liệt kê trong bản kế hoạch vốn kinh doanh siêu thị mini?[/caption]
3.1. Chi phí nhập hàng
Cuối cùng, hàng hóa sẽ là yếu tố thứ 3 để quyết định xem mở siêu thị mini cần bao nhiêu vốn? Ban đầu cần đầu tư rất lớn vào nguồn hàng để chuẩn bị của buổi khai trương, sau khi đi vào hoạt động thì mới điều chỉnh lên xuống khi mặt hàng đó hết. Với những siêu thị mini diện tích từ 70m2 đến 160m2 số lượng mã hàng nhập vào chỉ nên từ 1800 đến 3000 mã hàng. Dao động từ 300 tới 500 triệu cho số hàng cần nhập này. Một lưu ý dành cho các chủ kinh doanh đó là số tiền nhập hàng để quay vòng cần chuẩn bị hàng tuần bằng 1.5 lần doanh số nhập của lượng hàng bán trong tuần.
3.2. Chi phí trang trí thời vụ
Để gây ấn tượng hơn trong mắt người tiêu dùng buộc phải bạn phải đầu tư 1 khoản chi phí cho việc thay đổi bộ mặt siêu thị. Một năm có các sự kiện đáng chú ý để thúc đẩy doanh thu như: Tết, 14/2, 8/3, 1/6, trung thu, 20/10, Noel. Tùy vào tầm quan trọng, việc chi phí và thời gian chi phí cho các sự kiện này kéo dài từ 1 tháng đến 3 tháng. Nếu chi li, các bạn có thể tính cả chi phí tồn kho hàng thời vụ vào mục chi phí này. Ví dụ khi nhập cây thông noel về để bán noel, bạn cần trưng bày sản phẩm từ 15/10 trên kệ hàng nhưng phải đến 15/11 khách hàng mới bắt đầu mua sản phẩm và đến 10/12 mới đạt được điểm rơi bán hàng. Việc đặt cây thông noel từ 15/10 sẽ khiến siêu thị mini của bạn mất một khoảng không gian trưng bày sản phẩm khác, tuy nhiên nếu không trưng bày như vậy, siêu thị của bạn sẽ bị khách hàng gạt ra khỏi nhận định mua cây thông noel ngày 20/12.
3.3. Chi phí hư hỏng hao hụt hàng hóa
Bạn có biết rằng kiểm soát tốt chi phí hư hỏng hao hụt hàng hóa sẽ giúp siêu thi không bị hao mòn vốn quá mức? 2% doanh thu sẽ là con số lý tưởng cần đầu tư cho loại chi phí hao hụt này. Giải pháp đó là hãy đầu tư vào phần mềm quản lý, hạ tầng số để trường hợp hàng hóa quá hạn, cận ngày. Khi đó siêu thị buộc phải giảm giá hoặc hủy bỏ, như vậy doanh thu sẽ bị thâm hụt rất lớn. Chắc hẳn không ai mong muốn điều đó đúng không nào?
Hiện nay người tiêu dùng ngày càng quan tâm tới vấn đề vệ sinh an toàn thực phẩm. Vì thế mà mô hình kinh doanh siêu thị mini cũng từ đó mà phát triển. Và câu hỏi mở siêu thị mini cần bao nhiêu vốn là hoàn toàn dễ hiểu. Nếu bạn có đam mê kinh doanh, yêu thích mô hình này đừng chần chừ lên kế hoạch cho nó ngay hôm nay. Với sự phân tích chia sẻ chi tiết như trên thì Tủ Trưng Bày hi vọng bạn đã có cái nhìn tổng quát hơn về số vốn. Nếu vẫn còn lo lắng hay băn khoăn gì đừng ngần ngại, hãy chia sẻ nó ở dưới phần comment nhé. Xin cảm ơn!
We've all been there. You're the SEO on point for a project, and you're also the one tasked with getting great content written well and quickly. And if you don't have an expert at your disposal, great content can seem out of reach.
It doesn't have to be. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Russ Jones arms you with the tools and processes to expand your content from prompt to paragraph to published piece.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, folks, great to be back here with you on Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to be talking about content expansion. It's a term you probably haven't heard before because I just made it up. So hopefully, it will be useful in the future for you. But I think you'll get the gist of exactly what we're trying to accomplish here.
How do SEOs produce great content when they're not subject matter experts?
You see, search engine optimizers have this really bizarre responsibility. We are often asked by our clients to produce content about things we have no business writing about. As a search engine optimizer, we know exactly the kinds of things that make content good for Google, but that doesn't mean we have any domain knowledge about whatever it is our customer does.
Maybe your customer is an artist of some sort or your customer runs a restaurant. You might not know anything about it, but you still might have a deadline to hit in order to get good content that talks in depth about some sort of topic which really isn't in your wheelhouse. Today I'm going to talk about a couple of tricks that you can use in order to go from a prompt to a couple of paragraphs and then ultimately to a published page, to a good piece of content.
Caveat: If an expert can create the content, they should
Now I want to step back for a second and just make one thing clear. This is not the preferred way to produce content. If you can have an expert produce the content, by all means have the expert produce the content, and then you go to work optimizing that content to make it the best it possibly can be. That's the way it ought to be done whenever possible.
But we know that's not the case. The truth is that most small business owners don't have the time to write lengthy articles about their services and their offerings and what makes them special and the kinds of things that their customers might need. They have a business to run. There's nothing unethical about taking the time to actually try and write a good piece of content for that customer.
But if you're going to do it, you really should try and create something that's of value. Hopefully this is going to help you do exactly that. I call this content expansion because the whole purpose is to start from one small prompt and then to expand it a little and expand it a little and expand it even more until eventually you are at something that's very thorough and useful and valuable for the customers who are reading that content.
Each one of the individual steps is just sort of like taking a breath and blowing it into a balloon to make it a little bigger. Each step is manageable as we expand that content.
1. Start with a prompt
First, we have to start with some sort of topic or prompt. In this example, I've decided just bike safety off the top of my head. I'm here in Seattle and there are bikes everywhere.
It's completely different from North Carolina, where I'm from, where you've got to get in a car to go anywhere. But with the prompt bike safety, we now have to come up with what are we going to talk about with regard to bike safety. We pretty much know off the top of our heads that helmets matter and signaling and things of that sort.
Find the questions people are asking
But what are people actually asking? What's the information they want to know? Well, there are a couple of ways we can get at that, and that's by looking exactly for those questions that they're searching. One would be to just type in "bike safety" into Google and look for PAAs or People Also Ask. That's the SERP feature that you'll see about halfway down the page, which often has a couple of questions and you can click on it and there will be a little featured snippet or paragraph of text that will help you answer it.
Another would be to use a tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, where you could put in "bike safety" and then just select from one of the drop-downs "are questions" and it would then just show you all the questions people are asking about bike safety. Once you do that, you'll get back a handful of questions that people are asking about bike safety.
In this case, the three that came up from the PAA for just bike safety were:
Is riding a bike safe?
How can I improve safety?
Why is bike safety important?
What this does is start to get us into a position where now we're building out some sort of outline of the content that we're going to be building.
Build the outline for your content
We've just expanded from a title that said bike safety to now an outline that has a couple of questions that we want to answer. Well, here's the catch. Bike safety, sure, we've got some ideas off the top of our heads about what's important for bike safety. But the real thing that we're trying to get at here is authoritative or valuablecontent.
Well, Google is telling you what that is. When you press the button to show you what the answer is to the question, that's Google telling you this is the best answer we could find on the internet for that question. What I would recommend you do is you take the time to just copy the answer to that PAA, to that question. Why is bike safety important?
You click the button and it would show you the answer. Then you would write down the citation as well. But if you think about it, this is exactly the way you would write papers in college. If you were writing a paper in college about bike safety, you would go into the library, identify books on safety studies, etc. Then you would go through and then you would probably have note cards pulled out.
You would find a particular page that has an important paragraph. You would write a paraphrase down, and then you would write the citation down. This is the exact same thing. I'm not telling you to copy content. That's not what we're going to be doing in the end. But at the same time, it is the way that we take that next step of expanding the content. What we've done here is we've now gone from a topic to a couple of questions.
Now for each of those questions, we've kind of got an idea of what the target answer is. But, of course, the featured snippet isn't the whole answer. The featured snippet is just the most specific answer to the question, but not the thorough one. It doesn't cover all the bases. So what are some of the things we can do to expand this even further?
2. Extract & explain entities
This is where I really like to take advantage of NLP technologies, natural language programming technologies that are going to allow us to be able to expand that content in a way that adds value to the user and in particular explains to the user concepts that both you, as the writer in this particular case, and they, as the reader, might not know.
My favorite is a site called dandelion.eu. It's completely free for a certain amount of uses. But if you're going to be producing a lot of content, I would highly recommend you sign up for their API services. What you're going to do is extract and explain entities.
Imagine you've got this featured snippet here and it's talking about bike safety. It answers the question, "Why is bike safety important?" It says that bicyclists who wear their helmets are 50% less likely to suffer traumatic brain injuries in a wreck or something of that sort. That's the answer in the featured snippet that's been given to you.
Well, perhaps you don't know what a traumatic brain injury is, and perhaps your readers don't know what that is and why it's important to know that one thing protects you so much from the other.
Identify and expand upon terminology for your questions
That's where entity extraction can be really important. What dandelion.eu is going to do is it's going to identify that noun phrase. It's going to identify the phrase "traumatic brain injury," and then it's going to give you a description of exactly what that is. Now you can expand that paragraph that you originally pulled from the featured snippet and add into it a citation about exactly what traumatic brain injury is.
This will happen for all the questions. You'll find different terminology that your reader might not know and then be able to expand upon that terminology.
3. Create novel research
Now the one thing that I want to do here in this process is not just take advantage of content other people have written about, but try and do some novel research. As you know, Google Trends is probably my favorite place to do novel research, because if there is any topic in the world, somebody is searching about it and we can learn things about the way people search.
Use Google Trends
For example, in this Google Trends that I did, I can't remember the exact products that I was looking up, but they were specific bike safety products, like, for example, bike lights, bike mirrors, bike video cameras or bike cameras, etc. In fact, I'm almost positive that the red one had to do with bicycle cameras because they were becoming cheaper and more easily accessible to bicyclists. They've become more popular over time. Well, that's novel research.
Bring insights, graphs, and talking points from your novel research into your writing
When you're writing this article here about bike safety, you can include in it far more than just what other people have said. You can say of the variety of ways of improving your bike safety, the use of a bike camera has increased dramatically over time.
4. Pull it all together
All right. So now that you've got some of this novel research, including even graphs that you can put into the content, we've got to pull this all together. We started with the prompt, and then we moved into some topics or questions to answer. Then we've answered those questions, and then we've expanded them by giving clarity and definitions to terms that people might not understand and we've also added some novel research.
Rewrite for relevancy
So what's next? The next step is that we need to rewrite for relevancy. This is a really important part of the process. You see chances are, when you write about a topic that you are not familiar with, you will not use the correct language to describe what's going on. I think a good example might be if you're writing about golf, for example, and you don't know what it means to accidentally hit a golf ball that goes to the right or to the left.
Find relevant words and phrases with nTopic
Which one is a hook and a slice? Now, those of you who play golf I'm sure know right off the top of your head. But you wouldn't know to use that kind of terminology if you weren't actually a golfer. Well, if you use a tool like nTopic — it's at nTopic.org — and you write your content and place it in there and then give bike safety as the keyword you want to optimize for, it will tell you all of the relevant words and phrases you ought to be using in the content.
In doing so, you'll be able to expand your content even further, not just with further language and definitions that you know, but with the actual language that experts are using right now whenever they're talking about bike safety or whatever topic it is.
Examine (and improve) your writing quality with the Hemingway app
The next thing that I would say is that you really should pull things back and take a chance to look at the quality of the writing that you're producing.
This whole time we've been talking mostly about making sure the content is in-depth and thorough and covers a lot of issues and areas and uses the right language. But we haven't spent any time at all talking about is this actually written well. There's a fantastic free app out there called Hemingway app.
If you haven't heard of it, this is going to make your day. [Editor's note: It made mine!] Every writer in the world should be using a tool like this. You just drop your content in there, and it's going to give you all sorts of recommendations, from correcting grammar to using different words, shortening sentences, passive and active voice, making sure that you have the right verb tenses, etc. It's just incredibly useful for writing quality content.
Two important things to remember:
Now there are two things at the end that matter, and one is really, really important in my opinion and that is to cite.
1. Cite your sources — even if they're competitors!
You see, when you've done all of this work, you need to let the world know that this work, one, isn't only created by you but, two, is backed up by research and information provided by other professionals.
There is no shame whatsoever in citing even competitors who have produced good content that has helped you produce the content that you are now putting up. So cite. Put citations directly in. Look, Wikipedia ranks for everything, and every second sentence is cited and links off to another website. It's insane.
But Google doesn't really care about the citation in the sense that somebody else has written about this. What you're really interested in is showing the users that you did your homework.
2. Take pride in what you've accomplished!
Then finally, once you're all done, you can publish this great piece of content that is thorough and exceptional and uniquely valuable, written well in the language and words that it should use, cited properly, and be proud of the content that you've produced at the end of the day, even though you weren't an expert in the first place.
Hopefully, some of these techniques will help you out in the long run. I look forward to seeing you in the comments and maybe we'll have some questions that I can give you some other ideas. Thanks again.
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For a while now, I’ve been disappointed with the People Also Ask (PAAs) feature in Google’s search results. My disappointment is not due to the vast amount of space they take up on the SERPs (that’s another post entirely), but more that the quality is never where I expect it to be.
The quality issue I’m running into is that I still find several obscure PAA questions and results or content from other countries.
When I run searches that have a universal answer, such as “can you eat raw chicken?”, the answer is universally correct so there is no issue with the results. But when I run a search that should return local (UK) content, such as “car insurance”, I’m finding a heavy influence from the US — especially around YMYL queries.
I wanted to find out how much of an issue this actually is, so my team and I analyzed over 1,000 of the most-searched-for keywords in the finance industry, where we would expect UK PAA results.
Before we dig in, my fundamental question going into this research was: “Should a financial query originating in the UK, whose products are governed within UK regulations, return related questions that contain UK content?”
I believe that they should and I hope that by the end of this post, you agree, too.
Our methodology
To conduct our analysis, we followed these steps:
1. Tag keywords by category and sub-category:
2. Remove keywords where you would expect a universal result, e.g. “insurance definition”.
3. Extract PAAs and the respective ranking URLs using STAT.
4. Identify country origin through manual review: are we seeing correct results?
Our findings
55.1% of the 4,507 available financial PAAs returned non-UK content. US content was served 50.5% of the time, while the remaining 4.6% was made up of sites from India, Australia, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, Spain, and Singapore.
Results by category
Breaking it down by category, we see that personal finance keywords bring back a UK PAA 33.72% of the time, insurance keywords 52.10%, utilities keywords 64.89%, and business keywords 38.76%.
Personal finance
Digging into the most competitive products in the UK, personal finance, we found that a significant percentage of PAAs brought back US or Indian content in the results.
Out of the 558 personal finance keywords, 186 keywords didn’t bring back a single UK PAA result, including:
financial advisor
first credit card
best car loans
balance transfer cards
how to buy a house
best payday loans
cheap car finance
loan calculator
Credit cards
17.41% of credit card PAAs were showing UK-specific PAAs, with the US taking just over four out of every five. That’s huge.
Another surprising find is that 61 out of 104 credit card keywords didn’t bring back a single UK PAA. I find this remarkable given the fact that the credit card queries originated in the UK.
Loans
Only 15.8% of searches returned a UK PAA result with over 75% coming from the US. We also saw highly-competitive and scrutinized searches for keywords like “payday loans” generate several non-UK results.
Mortgages
While the UK holds the majority of PAA results for mortgage-related keywords at 53.53%, there are still some major keywords (like “mortgages”) that only bring back a single UK result. If you’re searching for “mortgages” in the UK, then you want to see information about UK mortgages, but instead Google serves up mainly US results.
Insurance
Insurance results weren’t as bad as personal finance. However, there was still a big swing towards the US for some products, such as life insurance.
Out of the 350 insurance keywords tested, there were 64 keywords that didn’t bring back a single UK PAA result, including:
pet insurance
cheap home insurance
life insurance comparison
car insurance for teens
cheap dog insurance
types of car insurance
Car insurance
60.54% of car insurance PAAs were showing UK-specific PAAs, with the US taking 36.97%. Out of the 132 keywords that were in this sub-category, UK sites were present for 118, which is better than the personal finance sub-categories.
Home insurance
As one of the most competitive spaces in the finance sector, it was really surprising to see that only 56.25% of results for home insurance queries returned a UK PAA. There are nuances to policies across different markets, so this is a frustrating and potentially harmful experience for searchers.
Utilities
Although we see a majority of PAAs in this keyword category return UK results, there are quite a few more specific searches for which you would absolutely be looking for a UK result (e.g. “unlimited data phone contracts”) but that bring back only one UK result.
One interesting find is that this UKPower page has captured 35 PAAs for the 49 keywords it ranks for. That’s an impressive 71.43% — the highest rating we’ve seen across our analysis.
Business
At the time of our analysis, we found that 36.7% of business-related PAAs were from the UK. One of the keywords with the lowest representation in this category was "business loans", which generated only 6.25% UK results. While the volume of keywords are smaller in this category, there is more potential for harm with serving international content for queries relating to UK businesses.
What pages generate the most PAA results?
To make this post a little more actionable, I aggregated which URLs generated the most PAAs across some of the most competitive financial products in the UK.
Ironically, four out of the top 10 were US-based (cars.news.com manages to generate 32 PAAs across one of the most competitive industries in UK financial searches: car insurance). A hat tip to ukpower.co.uk, which ranked #1 in our list, generating 35 results in the energy space.
To summarize the above analysis, it’s clear that there is too much dominance from non-UK sites in finance searches. While there are a handful of UK sites doing well, there are UK queries being searched for that are bringing back clearly irrelevant information.
As an industry, we have been pushed to improve quality — whether it’s increasing our relevancy or the expertise of our content — so findings like these show that Google could be doing more themselves.
What does this mean for your SEO strategy?
For the purpose of this research, we only looked at financial terms, so whilst we can’t categorically say this is the same for all industries, if Google is missing this much across financial YMYL terms then it doesn’t look good for other categories.
My advice would be that if you are investing any time optimizing for PAAs, then you should spend your time elsewhere, for now, since the cards in finance niches are stacked against you.
Featured Snippets are still the prime real estate for SEOs and (anecdotally, anyway) don’t seem to suffer from this geo-skew like PAAs do, so go for Featured Snippets instead.
Have you got any thoughts on the quality of PAAs across your SERPs? Let me know in the comments below!
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Google’s Index Coverage report is absolutely fantastic because it gives SEOs clearer insights into Google’s crawling and indexing decisions. Since its roll-out, we use it almost daily at Go Fish Digital to diagnose technical issues at scale for our clients.
Within the report, there are many different “statuses” that provide webmasters with information about how Google is handling their site content. While many of the statuses provide some context around Google’s crawling and indexation decisions, one remains unclear: “Crawled — currently not indexed”.
Since seeing the “Crawled — currently not indexed” status reported, we’ve heard from several site owners inquiring about its meaning. One of the benefits of working at an agency is being able to get in front of a lot of data, and because we’ve seen this message across multiple accounts, we’ve begun to pick up on trends from reported URLs.
Google’s definition
Let’s start with the official definition. According to Google’s official documentation, this status means: “The page was crawled by Google, but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.”
So, essentially what we know is that:
Google is able to access the page
Google took time to crawl the page
After crawling, Google decided not to include it in the index
The key to understanding this status is to think of reasons why Google would “consciously” decide against indexation. We know that Google isn’t having trouble finding the page, but for some reason it feels users wouldn’t benefit from finding it.
This can be quite frustrating, as you might not know why your content isn’t getting indexed. Below I’ll detail some of the most common reasons our team has seen to explain why this mysterious status might be affecting your website.
1. False positives
Priority: Low
Our first step is to always perform a few spot checks of URLs flagged in the “Crawled — currently not indexed” section for indexation. It’s not uncommon to find URLs that are getting reported as excluded but turn out to be in Google’s index after all.
For example, here’s a URL that’s getting flagged in the report for our website: https://ift.tt/2IsfU2O
However, when using a site search operator, we can see that the URL is actually included in Google’s index. You can do this by appending the text “site:” before the URL.
If you’re seeing URLs reported under this status, I recommend starting by using the site search operator to determine whether the URL is indexed or not. Sometimes, these turn out to be false positives.
Solution: Do nothing! You’re good.
2. RSS feed URLs
Priority: Low
This is one of the most common examples that we see. If your site utilizes an RSS feed, you might be finding URLs appearing in Google’s “Crawled — currently not indexed” report. Many times these URLs will have the “/feed/” string appended to the end. They can appear in the report like this:
Google finding these RSS feed URLs linked from the primary page. They’ll often be linked to using a "rel=alternate" element. WordPress plugins such as Yoast can automatically generate these URLs.
Solution: Do nothing! You're good.
Google is likely selectively choosing not to index these URLs, and for good reason. If you navigate to an RSS feed URL, you’ll see an XML document like the one below:
While this XML document is useful for RSS feeds, there’s no need for Google to include it in the index. This would provide a very poor experience as the content is not meant for users.
3. Paginated URLs
Priority: Low
Another extremely common reason for the “Crawled — currently not indexed” exclusion is pagination. We will often see a good number of paginated URLs appear in this report. Here we can see some paginated URLs appearing from a very large e-commerce site:
Solution: Do nothing! You’re good.
Google will need to crawl through paginated URLs to get a complete crawl of the site. This is its pathway to content such as deeper category pages or product description pages. However, while Google uses the pagination as a pathway to access the content, it doesn’t necessarily need to index the paginated URLs themselves.
If anything, make sure that you don’t do anything to impact the crawling of the individual pagination. Ensure that all of your pagination contains a self-referential canonical tag and is free of any “nofollow” tags. This pagination acts as an avenue for Google to crawl other key pages on your site so you’ll definitely want Google to continue crawling it.
4. Expired products
Priority: Medium
When spot-checking individual pages that are listed in the report, a common problem we see across clients is URLs that contain text noting “expired” or “out of stock” products. Especially on e-commerce sites, it appears that Google checks to see the availability of a particular product. If it determines that a product is not available, it proceeds to exclude that product from the index.
This makes sense from a UX perspective as Google might not want to include content in the index that users aren’t able to purchase.
However, if these products are actually available on your site, this could result in a lot of missed SEO opportunity. By excluding the pages from the index, your content isn’t given a chance to rank at all.
In addition, Google doesn’t just check the visible content on the page. There have been instances where we’ve found no indication within the visible content that the product is not available. However, when checking the structured data, we can see that the “availability” property is set to “OutOfStock”.
It appears that Google is taking clues from both the visible content and structured data about a particular product's availability. Thus, it’s important that you check both the content and schema.
Solution: Check your inventory availability.
If you’re finding products that are actually available getting listed in this report, you’ll want to check all of your products that may be incorrectly listed as unavailable. Perform a crawl of your site and use a custom extraction tool like Screaming Frog's to scrape data from your product pages.
For instance, if you want to see at scale all of your URLs with schema set to “OutOfStock”, you can set the “Regex” to: "availability":"<="" p="">
You can export this list and cross-reference with inventory data using Excel or business intelligence tools. This should quickly allow you to find discrepancies between the structured data on your site and products that are actually available. The same process can be repeated to find instances where your visible content indicates that products are expired.
5. 301 redirects
Priority: Medium
One interesting example we’ve seen appear under this status is destination URLs of redirected pages. Often, we’ll see that Google is crawling the destination URL but not including it in the index. However, upon looking at the SERP, we find that Google is indexing a redirecting URL. Since the redirecting URL is the one indexed, the destination URL is thrown into the “Crawled — currently not indexed” report.
The issue here is that Google may not be recognizing the redirect yet. As a result, it sees the destination URL as a “duplicate” because it is still indexing the redirecting URL.
Solution: Create a temporary sitemap.xml.
If this is occurring on a large number of URLs, it is worth taking steps to send stronger consolidation signals to Google. This issue could indicate that Google isn’t recognizing your redirects in a timely manner, leading to unconsolidated content signals.
One option might be setting up a “temporary sitemap”. This is a sitemap that you can create to expedite the crawling of these redirected URLs. This is a strategy that John Mueller has previously recommended.
To create one, you will need to reverse-engineer redirects that you have created in the past:
Export all of the URLs from the “Crawled — currently not indexed” report.
Match them up in Excel with redirects that have been previously set up.
Find all of the redirects that have a destination URL in the “Crawled — currently not indexed” bucket.
Create a static sitemap.xml of these URLs with Screaming Frog.
Upload the sitemap and monitor the “Crawled — currently not indexed” report in Search Console.
The goal here is for Google to crawl the URLs in the temporary sitemap.xml more frequently than it otherwise would have. This will lead to faster consolidation of these redirects.
6. Thin content
Priority: Medium
Sometimes we see URLs included in this report that are extremely thin on content. These pages may have all of the technical elements set up correctly and may even be properly internally linked to, however, when Google runs into these URLs, there is very little actual content on the page. Below is an example of a product category page where there is very little unique text:
This product listing page was flagged as “Crawled — Currently Not Indexed”. This may be due to very thin content on the page.
This page is likely either too thin for Google to think it’s useful or there is so little content that Google considers it to be a duplicate of another page. The result is Google removing the content from the index.
Here is another example: Google was able to crawl a testimonial component page on the Go Fish Digital site (shown above). While this content is unique to our site, Google probably doesn’t believe that the single sentence testimonial should stand alone as an indexable page.
Once again, Google has made the executive decision to exclude the page from the index due to a lack of quality.
Solution: Add more content or adjust indexation signals.
Next steps will depend on how important it is for you to index these pages.
If you believe that the page should definitely be included in the index, consider adding additional content. This will help Google see the page as providing a better experience to users.
If indexation is unnecessary for the content you're finding, the bigger question becomes whether or not you should take the additional steps to strongly signal that this content shouldn’t be indexed. The “Crawled —currently not indexed” report is indicating that the content is eligible to appear in Google’s index, but Google is electing not to include it.
There also could be other low quality pages to which Google is not applying this logic. You can perform a general “site:” search to find indexed content that meets the same criteria as the examples above. If you’re finding that a large number of these pages are appearing in the index, you might want to consider stronger initiatives to ensure these pages are removed from the index such as a “noindex” tag, 404 error, or removing them from your internal linking structure completely.
7. Duplicate content
Priority: High
When evaluating this exclusion across a large number of clients, this is the highest priority we’ve seen. If Google sees your content as duplicate, it may crawl the content but elect not to include it in the index. This is one of the ways that Google avoids SERP duplication. By removing duplicate content from the index, Google ensures that users have a larger variety of unique pages to interact with. Sometimes the report will label these URLs with a “Duplicate” status (“Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user”). However, this is not always the case.
This is a high priority issue, especially on a lot of e-commerce sites. Key pages such as product description pages often include the same or similar product descriptions as many other results across the Web. If Google recognizes these as too similar to other pages internally or externally, it might exclude them from the index all together.
Solution: Add unique elements to the duplicate content.
If you think that this situation applies to your site, here’s how you test for it:
Take a snippet of the potential duplicate text and paste it into Google.
In the SERP URL, append the following string to the end: “#=100”. This will show you the top 100 results.
Use your browser’s “Find” function to see if your result appears in the top 100 results. If it doesn’t, your result might be getting filtered out of the index.
Go back to the SERP URL and append the following string to the end: “&filter=0”. This should show you Google’s unfiltered result (thanks, Patrick Stox, for the tip).
Use the “Find” function to search for your URL. If you see your page now appearing, this is a good indication that your content is getting filtered out of the index.
Repeat this process for a few URLs with potential duplicate or very similar content you’re seeing in the “Crawled — currently not indexed” report.
If you’re consistently seeing your URLs getting filtered out of the index, you’ll need to take steps to make your content more unique.
While there is no one-size-fits-all standard for achieving this, here are some options:
Rewrite the content to be more unique on high-priority pages.
Use dynamic properties to automatically inject unique content onto the page.
Remove large amounts of unnecessary boilerplate content. Pages with more templated text than unique text might be getting read as duplicate.
If your site is dependent on user-generated content, inform contributors that all provided content should be unique. This may help prevent instances where contributors use the same content across multiple pages or domains.
8. Private-facing content
Priority: High
There are some instances where Google’s crawlers gain access to content that they shouldn’t have access to. If Google is finding dev environments, it could include those URLs in this report. We’ve even seen examples of Google crawling a particular client’s subdomain that is set up for JIRA tickets. This caused an explosive crawl of the site, which focused on URLs that shouldn’t ever be considered for indexation.
The issue here is that Google’s crawl of the site isn’t focused, and it’s spending time crawling (and potentially indexing) URLs that aren’t meant for searchers. This can have massive ramifications for a site’s crawl budget.
Solution: Adjust your crawling and indexing initiatives.
This solution is going to be entirely dependent on the situation and what Google is able to access. Typically, the first thing you want to do is determine how Google is able to discover these private-facing URLs, especially if it’s via your internal linking structure.
Start a crawl from the home page of your primary subdomain and see if any undesirable subdomains are able to be accessed by Screaming Frog through a standard crawl. If so, it’s safe to say that Googlebot might be finding those exact same pathways. You’ll want to remove any internal links to this content to cut Google’s access.
The next step is to check the indexation status of the URLs that should be excluded. Is Google sufficiently keeping all of them out of the index, or were some caught in the index? If Google isn’t indexing a large amount of this content, you might consider adjusting your robots.txt file to block crawling immediately. If not, “noindex” tags, canonicals, and password protected pages are all on the table.
Case study: duplicate user-generated content
For a real-world example, this is an instance where we diagnosed the issue on a client site. This client is similar to an e-commerce site as a lot of their content is made up of product description pages. However, these product description pages are all user-generated content.
Essentially, third parties are allowed to create listings on this site. However, the third parties were often adding very short descriptions to their pages, resulting in thin content. The issue occurring frequently was that these user-generated product description pages were getting caught in the “Crawled — currently not indexed” report. This resulted in missed SEO opportunity as pages that were capable of generating organic traffic were completely excluded from the index.
When going through the process above, we found that the client’s product description pages were quite thin in terms of unique content. The pages that were getting excluded only appeared to have a paragraph or less of unique text. In addition, the bulk of on-page content was templated text that existed across all of these page types. Since there was very little unique content on the page, the templated content might have caused Google to view these pages as duplicates. The result was that Google excluded these pages from the index, citing the “Crawled — currently not indexed” status.
To solve for these issues, we worked with the client to determine which of the templated content didn’t need to exist on each product description page. We were able to remove the unnecessary templated content from thousands of URLs. This resulted in a significant decrease in “Crawled — currently not indexed” pages as Google began to see each page as more unique.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this helps search marketers better understand the mysterious “Crawled — currently not indexed” status in the Index Coverage report. Of course, there are likely many other reasons that Google would choose to categorize URLs like this, but these are the most common instances we’ve seen with our clients to date.
Overall, the Index Coverage report is one of the most powerful tools in Search Console. I would highly encourage search marketers to get familiar with the data and reports as we routinely find suboptimal crawling and indexing behavior, especially on larger sites. If you’ve seen other examples of URLs in the “Crawled — currently not indexed” report, let me know in the comments!
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Negative SEO can hurt your website and your work in search, even when your rankings are unaffected by it. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, search expert Russ Jones dives into what negative SEO is, what it can affect beyond rankings, and tips on how to fight it.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
All right, folks. Russ Jones here and I am so excited just to have the opportunity to do any kind of presentation with the title "Defense Against the Dark Arts." I'm not going to pretend like I'm a huge Harry Potter fan, but anyway, this is just going to be fun.
But what I want to talk about today is actually pretty bad. It's the reality that negative SEO, even if it is completely ineffective at doing its primary goal, which is to knock your website out of the rankings, will still play havoc on your website and the likelihood that you or your customers will be able to make correct decisions in the future and improve your rankings.
Today I'm going to talk about why negative SEO still matters even if your rankings are unaffected, and then I'm going to talk about a couple of techniques that you can use that will help abate some of the negative SEO techniques and also potentially make it so that whoever is attacking you gets hurt a little bit in the process, maybe. Let's talk a little bit about negative SEO.
What is negative SEO?
The most common form of negative SEO is someone who would go out and purchase tens of thousands of spammy links or hundreds of thousands even, using all sorts of different software, and point them to your site with the hope of what we used to call "Google bowling," which is to knock you out of the search results the same way you would knock down a pin with a bowling ball.
The hope is that it's sort of like a false flag campaign, that Google thinks that you went out and got all of those spammy links to try to improve your rankings, and now Google has caught you and so you're penalized. But in reality, it was someone else who acquired those links. Now to their credit, Google actually has done a pretty good job of ignoring those types of links.
It's been my experience that, in most cases, negative SEO campaigns don't really affect rankings the way they're intended to in most cases, and I give a lot of caveats there because I've seen it be effective certainly. But in the majority of cases all of those spammy links are just ignored by Google. But that's not it. That's not the complete story.
Problem #1: Corrupt data
You see, the first problem is that if you get 100,000 links pointing to your site, what's really going on in the background is that there's this corruption of data that's important to making decisions about search results.
Pushes you over data limits in GSC
For example, if you get 100,000 links pointing to your site, it is going to push you over the limit of the number of links that Google Search Console will give back to you in the various reports about links.
Pushes out the good links
This means that in the second case there are probably links, that you should know about or care about, that don't show up in the report simply because Google cuts off at 100,000 total links in the export.
Well, that's a big deal, because if you're trying to make decisions about how to improve your rankings and you can't get to the link data you need because it's been replaced with hundreds of thousands of spammy links, then you're not going to be able to make the right decision.
Increased cost to see all your data
The other big issue here is that there are ways around it.
You can get the data for more than 100,000 links pointing to your site. You're just going to have to pay for it. You could come to Moz and use our Link Explorer tool for example. But you'll have to increase the amount of money that you're spending in order to get access to the accounts that will actually deliver all of that data.
The one big issue sitting behind all of this is that even though we know Google is ignoring most of these links, they don't label that for us in any kind of useful fashion. Even after we can get access to all of that link data, all of those hundreds of thousands of spammy links, we still can't be certain which ones matter and which ones don't.
Problem #2: Copied content
That's not the only type of negative SEO that there is out there. It's the most common by far, but there are other types. Another common type is to take the content that you have and distribute it across the web in the way that article syndication used to work. So if you're fairly new to SEO, one of the old methodologies of improving rankings was to write an article on your site, but then syndicate that article to a number of article websites and these sites would then post your article and that article would link back to you.
Now the reason why these sites would do this is because they would hope that, in some cases, they would outrank your website and in doing so they would get some traffic and maybe earn some AdSense money. But for the most part, that kind of industry has died down because it hasn't been effective in quite some time. But once again, that's not the whole picture.
No attribution
If all of your content is being distributed to all of these other sites, even if it doesn't affect your rankings, it still means there's the possibility that somebody is getting access to your quality content without any kind of attribution whatsoever.
If they've stripped out all of the links and stripped out all of the names and all of the bylines, then your hard earned work is actually getting taken advantage of, even if Google isn't really the arbiter anymore of whether or not traffic gets to that article.
Internal links become syndicated links
Then on the flip side of it, if they don't remove the attribution, all the various internal links that you had in that article in the first place that point to other pages on your site, those now become syndicated links, which are part of the link schemes that Google has historically gone after.
In the same sort of situation, it's not really just about the intent behind the type of negative SEO campaign. It's the impact that it has on your data, because if somebody syndicates an article of yours that has let's say eight links to other internal pages and they syndicate it to 10,000 websites, well, then you've just got 80,000 new what should have been internal links, now external links pointing to your site.
We actually do know just a couple of years back several pretty strong brands got in trouble for syndicating their news content to other news websites. Now I'm not saying that negative SEO would necessarily trigger that same sort of penalty, but there's the possibility. Even if it doesn't trigger that penalty, chances are it's going to sully the waters in terms of your link data.
Problem #3: Nofollowed malware links & hacked content
There are a couple of other miscellaneous types of negative SEO that don't get really talked about a lot.
Nofollowed malware links in UGC
For example, if you have any kind of user-generated content on your site, like let's say you have comments for example, even if you nofollow those comments, the links that are included in there might point to things like malware.
We know that Google will ultimately identify your site as not being safe if it finds these types of links.
Hacked content
Unfortunately, in some cases, there are ways to make it look like there are links on your site that aren't really under your control through things like HTML injection. For example, you can actually do this to Google right now.
You can inject HTML onto the page of part of their website that makes it look like they're linking to someone else. If Google actually crawled itself, which luckily they don't in this case, if they crawled that page and found that malware link, the whole domain in the Google search results would likely start to show that this site might not be safe.
Of course, there's always the issue with hacked content, which is becoming more and more popular.
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt
All of this really boils down to this concept of FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt. You see it's not so much about bowling you out of the search engines. It's about making it so that SEO just isn't workable anymore.
1. Lose access to critical data
Now it's been at least a decade since everybody started saying that they used data-driven SEO tactics, data-driven SEO strategies. Well, if your data is corrupted, if you lose access to critical data, you will not be able to make smart decisions. How will you know whether or not the reason your page has lost rankings to another has anything to do with links if you can't get to the link data that you need because it's been filled with 100,000 spammy links?
2. Impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost
This leads to number two. It's impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost. It could be duplicate content. It could be an issue with these hundreds of thousands of links. It could be something completely different. But because the waters have been muddied so much, it makes it very difficult to determine exactly what's going on, and this of course then makes SEO less certain.
3. Makes SEO uncertain
The less certain it becomes, the more other advertising channels become valuable. Paid search becomes more valuable. Social media becomes more valuable. That's a problem if you're a search engine optimization agency or a consultant, because you have the real likelihood of losing clients because you can't make smart decisions for them anymore because their data has been damaged by negative SEO.
It would be really wonderful if Google would actually show us in Google Search Console what links they're ignoring and then would allow us to export only the ones they care about. But something tells me that that's probably beyond what Google is willing to share. So do we have any kind of way to fight back? There are a couple.
How do you fight back against negative SEO?
1. Canonical burn pages
Chances are if you've seen some of my other Whiteboard Fridays, you've heard me talk about canonical burn pages. Real simply, when you have an important page on your site that you intend to rank, you should create another version of it that is identical and that has a canonical link pointing back to the original. Any kind of link building that you do, you should point to that canonical page.
The reason is simple. If somebody does negative SEO, they're going to have two choices. They're either going to do it to the page that's getting linked to, or they're going to do it to the page that's getting ranked. Normally, they'll do it to the one that's getting ranked. Well, if they do, then you can get rid of that page and just hold on to the canonical burn page because it doesn't have any of these negative links.
Or if they choose the canonical burn page, you can get rid of that one and just keep your original page. Yes, it means you sacrifice the hard earned links that you acquired in the first place, but it's better than losing the possibility in the future altogether.
2. Embedded styled attribution
Another opportunity here, which I think is kind of sneaky and fun, is what I call embedded styled attribution.
You can imagine that my content might say "Russ Jones says so and so and so and so." Well, imagine surrounding "Russ Jones" by H1 tags and then surrounding that by a span tag with a class that makes it so that the H1 tag that's under it is the normal-sized text.
Well, chances are if they're using one of these copied content techniques, they're not copying your CSS style sheet as well. When that gets published to all of these other sites, in giant, big letters it has your name or any other phrase that you really want. Now this isn't actually going to solve your problem, other than just really frustrate the hell out of whoever is trying to screw with you.
But sometimes that's enough to get them to stop.
3. Link Lists
The third one, the one that I really recommend is Link Lists. This is a feature inside of Moz's Link Explorer, which allows you to track the links that are pointing to your site. As you get links, real links, good links, add them to a Link List, and that way you will always have a list of links that you know are good, that you can compare against the list of links that might be sullied by a negative SEO campaign.
By using the Link lists, you can discern the difference between what's actually being ignored by Google, at least to some degree, and what actually matters. I hope this is helpful to some degree. But unfortunately, I've got to say, at the end of the day, a sufficiently well-run negative SEO campaign can make the difference in whether or not you use SEO in the future at all.
It might not knock you out of Google, but it might make it so that other types of marketing are just better choices. So hopefully this has been some help. I'd love to talk you in the comments about different ways of dealing with negative SEO, like how to track down who is responsible. So just go ahead and fill those comments up with any questions or ideas.
I would love to hear them. Thanks again and I look forward to talking to you in another Whiteboard Friday.
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You’ve produced a piece of content you thought was going to be a huge success, but the results were underwhelming.
You double and triple checked the content for all the crucial elements: it’s newsworthy, data-driven, emotional, and even a bit controversial, but it failed to “go viral”. Your digital PR team set out to pitch it, but writers didn’t bite.
So, what's next?
Two questions you might ask yourself are:
Do I have unrealistic link expectations for my link-building content?
Is my definition of success backed by data-driven evidence?
Fractl has produced thousands of content marketing campaigns across every topic — sports, entertainment, fashion, home improvement, relationships — you name it. We also have several years’ worth of campaign performance data that we use to learn from our successes and mistakes.
In this article, I’m going to explain how businesses and agencies across seven different niches can set realistic expectations for their link-building content based on the performance of 626 content projects Fractl has produced and promoted in the last five years. I’ll also walk through some best practices for ensuring your content reaches its highest potential.
Managing expectations across verticals
You can’t compare apples to oranges. Each beat has its own unique challenges and advantages. Content for each vertical has to be produced with expert-level knowledge of how publishers within each vertical behave.
We selected the following common verticals for analysis:
Health and fitness
Travel
Sex and relationships
Finance
Technology
Sports
Food and drink
Across the entire sample of 626 content projects, on average, a project received 23 dofollow links and 88 press mentions in total. Some individual vertical averages didn’t deviate much from these averages, while others niches did.
Of course, you can’t necessarily expect these numbers when you just start dipping your toes in content marketing or digital PR. It’s a long-term investment, and it usually takes at least six months to a year before you get the results you’re looking for.
A “press mention” refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. A press mention could involve any type of link (dofollow, nofollow, simple text attribution, etc.). We also looked at dofollow links individually, as they provide more value than a nofollow link or text attribution. For campaigns that went “viral” and performed well above the norm, we excluded them in the calculation so as not to skew the averages higher.
Based on averages from these 626 campaigns, are your performance expectations too high or too low?
Vertical-specific content considerations
Of course, there are universal principles that you should apply to all content no matter the vertical. The data needs to be sound. The graphic assets need to be pleasing to the eye and easy to understand. The information needs to be surprising and informative.
But when it comes to vertical-specific content considerations, what should you pay attention to? What tactics or guidelines apply to one niche that you can disregard for other niches? I solicited advice from the senior team at Fractl and asked what they look out for when making content for different verticals. All have several years of experience producing and promoting content across every vertical and niche. Here’s what they said:
Sex and dating
For content relating to sex and relationships, it’s important to err on the side of caution.
“Be careful not to cross the line between ‘sexy’ content and raunchy content,” says Angela Skane, Creative Strategy. “The internet can be an exciting place, but if something is too out-there or too descriptive, publishers are going to be turned off from covering your content.”
Even magazine websites like Cosmopolitan — a publication known for its sex content — have editorial standards to make sure lines aren’t crossed. For example, when pitching a particularly risqué project exploring bedroom habits of men and women, we learned that just because a project is doing well over at Playboy or Maxim doesn’t mean it would resonate with the primarily female audience over at Cosmopolitan.
Especially be aware of anything that could be construed as misogynistic or pin women against each other. It’s likely not the message your client will want to promote, anyway.
Finance
Given the fact that money is frequently touted as one of the topics you avoid over polite dinner conversation, there's no doubt that talking and thinking about money evokes a lot of emotion in people.
“Finance can seem dry at first glance, but mentions of money can evoke strong emotions. Tapping into financial frustrations, regrets, and mistakes makes for highly entertaining and even educational content,” says Corie Colliton, Creative Strategy. “For example, one of my best finance campaigns featured the purchases people felt their partners wasted money on. Another showed the amount people spend on holiday gifts — and the number who were in debt for a full year after the holidays as a result.”
Emotion is one of the drivers of social sharing, so use it to your advantage when producing finance-related content.
We also heard from Chris Lewis, Account Strategy: “Relate to your audience. Readers will often try to use financial content marketing campaigns as a way to benchmark their own financial well-being, so giving people lots of data about potential new norms helps readers relate to your content.”
People want to read content and be able to picture themselves within it. How do they compare to the rest of America, or their state, or their age group? Relatability is key in finance-related content.
Sports
A little healthy competition never hurt anyone, and that’s why Tyler Burchett, Promotions Strategy, thinks you should always utilize fan bases when creating sports content: “Get samples from different fan bases when possible. Writers like to pit fans against each other, and fans take pride in seeing how they rank.”
Food and drink
According to Chris Lewis, don’t forgo design when creating marketing campaigns about food: “Make sure to include good visuals. People eat with their eyes!”
If the topic for which you’re creating content typically has visual appeal, it’s best to take advantage of that to draw people into your content. Have you ever bought a recipe book that didn’t include photos of the food?
Technology
Think tech campaigns are just about tech? Think again. Matt Gillespie, Data Science, says: “Technology campaigns are always culture and human behavior campaigns. Comparing devices, social media usage, or more nuanced topics like privacy and security, can only resonate with a general audience if it ties to more common themes like connection, safety, or shared experience — tech savvy without being overly technical.”
Travel
When creating content for travel, it’s important to make sure there are actionable takeaways in the content. If there aren’t, it can be hard for publishers to justify covering it.
“Travel writers love to extract ‘tips’ from the content they're provided. If your project provides helpful information to travelers or little-known statistics on flights and amenities, you're likely to gain a lot of traction in the travel vertical,” says Delaney Kline, Brand Promotions. “Come up with these ideal statistics before creating your project and use them as a template for your work.”
Health and fitness
In the health and wellness world, it can seem like everyone is giving advice. If you’re not a doctor, however, err on the side of caution when speaking about specific topics. Try not to pit any particular standard against another. Be careful around diet culture and mental health topics, specifically.
“Try striking a balance between physical and mental well-being, particularly being careful to not glorify or objectify one standard while demeaning others,” says Matt Gillespie, Data Science. “Emphasize overall wellness as opposed to focus on a single area. In this vertical, you need to be especially careful with whatever is trending. Do the legwork to understand the research, or lack thereof, behind the big topics of the moment.”
Improving content in any vertical
While you can certainly tailor your content production and promotion to your specific niche, there are also some guidelines you can follow to improve the chances that you’ll get more media coverage for your content overall.
Create content with a headline in mind
When you begin mapping out your content, identify what you want the outcome to look like. Before you even begin, ask yourself: what do you want people to learn from your content? What are the elements of the content you’re producing that journalists will find compelling for their audiences?
For example, we wrote a survey in which we wanted to compare the levels of cooking experience across different generations. We hypothesized that we’d see some discrepancies between boomers and millennials specifically, and given that millennials ruin everything, it was a good time to join the discussion.
As it turns out, only 64% of millennials could correctly identify a butter knife. Publishers jumped at the stats revealing millennials have a tough time in the kitchen. Having a thesis and an idea of what we wanted the project to look like in advance had a tremendous positive impact on our results.
Appeal to the emotionality of people
In past research on the emotions that make content go viral, we learned that negative content may have a better chance of going viral if it is also surprising. Nothing embodies this combination of emotional drivers than a project we did for a travel client in which we used germ swabs to determine the dirtiest surfaces on airplanes.
This campaign did so well (and continues to earn links to this day) that it’s actually excluded from our vertical benchmarks analysis as we consider it a viral outlier.
Why did this idea work? Most people travel via plane at least once a year, and everyone wants to avoid getting sick while traveling. So, a data-backed report like this one that also yielded some click-worthy headlines is sure to exceed your outreach goals.
Evergreen content wins (sometimes)
You may have noticed from the analysis above that, of the seven topics we chose to look at, the sports vertical has the lowest average dofollows and total press mentions of any other category.
For seasoned content marketers, this is very understandable. Unlike the other verticals, the sports beat is an ever-changing and fast-paced news cycle that’s hard for content marketers to have a presence in. However, for our sports clients we achieve success by understanding this system and working with it — not trying to be louder than it.
One technique we’ve found that works for sports campaigns (as well as other sectors with fast-paced news cycles such as entertainment or politics) is to come up with content that is both timely and evergreen. By capitalizing on the current interests around major sporting events (timely) and creating an idea that would work on any given day of the year (evergreen) we can produce content that's the best of both worlds, and that will still have legs once the timeliness wears off.
In a series of campaigns for one sports client, we took a look at the evolution of sports jerseys and chose teams with loyal fan bases such as the New York Yankees, Carolina Panthers, Denver Broncos, and Chicago Bears.
The sports niche has an ongoing, fast-paced news cycle that changes every day, if not every hour. Reporters are busy covering by-the-minute breaking news, games, statistics, rankings, trades, personal player news, and injuries. This makes it one of the most challenging verticals to compete in. By capitalizing on teams of interest throughout the year, we were able to squeeze projects into tight editorial calendars and earn our client some press.
For example, timing couldn’t have been better when we pitched “Evolution of the Football Jersey”. We pitched this campaign to USA Today right before the tenacious playoffs in which the Steelers and the Redskins played. Time was of the essence — the editor wrote and published this article within 24 hours and our client enjoyed a lot of good syndication from the powerful publication. In total, the one placement resulted in 15 dofollow links and over 45 press mentions. Not bad for a few transforming GIFs!
Top it off with the best practices in pitching
If you have great content and you have a set of realistic expectations for that content, all that’s left is to distribute it and collect those links and press mentions.
In a survey of over 500 journalists in 2019, I asked online editors and writers what their biggest PR pitch pet peeves were. When you conduct content marketing outreach, avoid these top-listed items and you’ll be good to go:
While you might get away with sending one too many follow-ups, most of the offenses on this list are just that — totally offensive to the writer you’re trying to pitch.
Avoid mass email blasts, personalize your pitch, and triple-check that the person you're contacting is receptive to your content before you hit send.
Conclusion
While there are certainly some characteristics that all great content should have, there are ways to increase the chances your content will be engaging within a specific vertical. Research what your particular audience is interested in, and be sure to measure your results realistically based on how content generally performs in your space.
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