TikTok has absolutely taken the world by storm since 2020. And it’s not just for the kids — with over 1 billion users, it’s popular across all demographics. User behavior on TikTok has been evolving as its popularity grows. We’ve seen the app go from dancing teenagers to influencing shopping behavior across the world. Now the next step for TikTok seems to be turning into the next big search engine. Is TikTok the new Google? Short answer: no. TikTok is an internal search engine for TikTok content. It’s dedicated to a particular area of focus and a particular format: video. There are a few different factors at play in how we choose the search engine to solve our need in the moment, but at the end of the day, TikTok and Google satisfy very different search intents. Why do users search on TikTok? We’re seeing TikTok take market share from Google in verticals such as food, gardening, and travel. These are low stakes searches where the outcome is unlikely to cause you harm . Since ...

Our inbound lead generation is highly dependent upon SEO — it’s how we get more than 70% of our leads. So, naturally, we got a tad nervous when we saw some of our top commercial landing pages dipping out of top-five positions for their targeted search terms. When we took to the SERPs to investigate who was unseating us, we discovered something equal parts unsettling and interesting: Our high-value, commercial-intent landing pages weren’t being displaced by competitors . They were being ousted by business directories and “listicles” that rank or compare multiple companies. In fact, an evaluation of seven of our most important commercial keywords demonstrates a 50% increase in the number of lists and directories in top-five organic SERP real estate year-over-year (excluding SERP features such as People Also Ask). Here’s an example for the keyword “SEO content writing services.” The image on the left is the SERP in 2022, and the one on the right is the SERP in 2021: Notice the diffe...

Competitive research and analysis is a critical component of your SEO strategy. You may have an idea of who your busines competitors are, but your real SEO competitors are the ones who target the same keywords, speak to the same audience, and solve for the same consumer needs.  In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Lidia Infante walks you through two approaches to find out who those competitors are. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Fridays. My name is Lidia Infante, and I'm the Senior SEO Manager at Sanity.io. Today, we're going to be talking about how to find your real SEO competitors. Competitor identification and competitor research is absolutely key to a good SEO strategy. And in order to nail it, you need to figure out who your competitors really are. So how do we know that someone is a competitor in search? Essentially, they need to m...

As franchises can have a large number of locations by nature, search marketers are faced with the ever present hurdle of scale. More locations means more content and landing pages to manage, and a much bigger chance of running into technical SEO issues. These challenges can be even more daunting when combined with an older CMS, franchisee-generated content, and tracking issues. At Go Fish Digital , we’ve been able to work with quite a few franchise businesses and advise on their SEO strategies. Over time, we’ve been able to identify common problems with these campaigns, and ways to solve these issues, the framework for which I’ll cover in this piece. What is franchise SEO? Franchise SEO is a set of initiatives to improve the search engine visibility of franchise websites, which are websites that promote an overall brand while at the same time offering localized pages for multiple locations of that brand. Strategies include scaling keyword research, creating localized landing pages, ...

As borders reopen and travel resumes, the stakes to make up for the time and revenue lost in 2020 and 2021 have never been higher. For many travel and hospitality organizations, there’s no question about it – the 2022-23 season must be a success. The good news is that hope is firmly on the horizon. US Travel’s latest data shows that, for the first time since the pandemic began, travel spending was above 2019 levels by 3%. While nearly 60% of US travelers note that rising gas prices will impact their upcoming travel decisions, more than a quarter plan to spend more money on vacations this summer than in 2019. We still live in uncertain times, especially with increasing costs in almost every industry a big concern for consumers. But for travel and tourism brands, now is the time to push forward with recovery and work with customers who, after two long years, are looking to finally take a trip away from home. Following many near-complete strategy and product pivots of 2020, there’s ...

Image credit: Fattoria la Maliosa In 2023, I’ll have been studying local SEO for 20 years, and I definitely still won’t know it all. If you’re just entering this fine and spacious field of local search marketing, welcome to what will be a habit of lifelong scholarship. In the next 20 years, you’ll see as many (or more) changes than we’ve witnessed in the nascent decades of this discipline. You’ll study how to lay a feast of options before the local businesses you market, regularly setting out new dishes as new promotional opportunities arise. Your education is what will keep this buffet fresh and hot while keeping you enthusiastic about your work. Here’s the view from my side of the table of what’s happened culturally over the past two decades in the industry: we started out from a real place – marketing quite actual local businesses – and have come to prize their qualities of realness more with each passing year as we’ve learned to prioritize owner expertise, their earned authori...