Welcome to the Q&A Forum

To be honest, I tend to take Moz's page optimisation tool with a pinch of salt. In my opinion, it's great for bringing things to your attention, but shouldn't be taken as gospel. It's up to you to use Moz's suggestions for improvement, and consider each point for yourself and whether it actually does need attention or not. If you're still unsure, just try it out and play with it, watch carefully for its effect and reverse should you need to.

I think the interesting thing about Facebook is that it's become more than just a social media platform to post. I've been hearing from more people that sometimes when they're on Facebook, and they're looking for a particular business or service, they'll search directly within Facebook itself rather than on Google. Since they are, at that moment, already signed in and actively on Facebook. Simply having an informational Facebook page could be the difference between a potential customer clicking on your name or someone else's from the dropdown or the search results.

I've also been seeing in the past month or so with every client I manage, their Facebook is now showing in their knowledge graph where it wasn't before, and showing their reviews/rating for their Facebook, Yelp, Yell, etc. Google seems to be getting more adept at finding business' social profiles and displaying their individual ratings right there in the SERPs. (Which makes me wonder if they have started using these external ratings as a ranking factor for local, organic or maybe even both. Even Moz Local takes into account your Facebook page.) I sometimes struggle to get clients to obtain or even understand how Google reviews work. Facebook, on the other hand, they find it easier to acquire Facebook reviews, without having to ask or explain to their customers. They already get it.

So beyond looking at Facebook as just a social media platform, are they just as necessary as any other large local directory listing like Yell and Yelp? Even if there is no real social content, does its existence alone still provide value to the user?

This sounds like to me that it would depend largely on the website/business. Great if you have interesting content, even if it may look a little automated but potentially followers might appreciate being able to keep up to date with the website in this way, but if you're a b2b ecommerce website with no blog in a "boring" industry... would it be better to have a Facebook page to have a place on Facebook but no activity and no followers, rather than a seemingly active Facebook page with no followers?

I find that it's difficult to give advice for questions like these, as different types of local queries can give different local pack results. Your location as well. If I search for something on one side of town, with or without the town name in the search, I'll get different local results to when I search for the same thing on the other side of town.

Or maybe you just need to work some more on the local SEO? Another reason you may not be showing in the local pack is that you share address/building/phone as another business which is ranking. Even if you're two completely different businesses.

Sorry, I can't be of more help. It's a bit vague.

I don't know your website, so I don't know your content or audience or anything. But do you not wonder if there's more traffic to be had from social media, which in turn would increase your ad revenue? Or would it not be significant enough ROI?

What's your social traffic like currently? Like, if it's already high proving you have shareable content, would it not be beneficial to boost that traffic through your own channels?

I personally have no passion for social media at all beyond maintaining my personal Twitter, so I'm not trying to sell you on the idea of starting, but I can definitely see the value in it for some businesses. Just not sure if it's expected these days for every business to have a Facebook page even if it's little more than a directory listing rather than a real social platform.

Thanks, Erin!

I'm confused though. Are Moz Perks different to the MozPoints Benefits? What exactly is being sunsetted? (My life goal is to finally get a Rogerbot vinyl figurine of my very own, to take travelling around the world... I'm so close to getting one of Rogerbot's babies!  I will hug him, and pet him, and squeeze him...)

Hi Donald,

Thanks for your response. With the vast majority of businesses I have worked with, I would absolutely recommend Facebook. But if the business can't dedicate much time to maintaining a Facebook page, should one be created anyway as a "placeholder"? Is it not embarrassing to link an infrequently updated Facebook to the website?

Ideally, of course, the Facebook would be updated frequently with the intention of building a following.

Even a couple of years ago, I would have told people that they don't _need _a Facebook page for their business if they don't plan on posting regularly and don't expect many Likes.

In 2016, has this changed? Is it weird now for a business not to have a Facebook page, even if it's not particularly active? Is it just widely expected now for every business to have a Facebook page? Even if it's just used for brand awareness/visibility or as a popular directory listing simply to occupy more results on the first page for a branded search?

I never received my tweet from Roger either, although I did get my awesome Moz t-shirt! The funny thing is when I posted a cheeky tweet to @Moz prompting for my tweet from Roger, they Liked it but still no tweet XD

Hi Bob,

The URL that displays next to the keyword and ranking will be the page of your website that ranks highest for that keyword. This isn't always necessarily the page that you want to be ranking, and may commonly be the homepage instead of the target landing page. You will have to use your own insight, data and SEO skills to decide whether the target landing page should be ranking instead of the homepage - and strategise a way to optimise your landing page and deoptimise the homepage for that keyword.

Good Answer received!

Thank you very much, and good luck with the landing pages!

This is fine too. But when landing pages have a much higher conversion rate than the homepage for its target keywords, than naturally you will want the landing page to rank instead of the homepage. And in some cases I've found, as soon as the homepage is out of the picture the landing page is able to rank higher for the query than the homepage ever did.

So how much effort, if any, you'd put into doing this should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis really.

I've had this with a couple of clients' websites recently. What worked for me was to (in this order):

1. Ensure that the landing pages are well optimised for the target keyword.
2. Anchor text from other pages, including homepage, of the site make use of keyword.
3. Build a couple of good links to each landing page.
4. Watch and wait for landing pages to start climbing position a little in SERPs, even if not overtaking the homepage.
5. De-optimise the homepage for the product variant keywords, keeping it broad only.

It seems too simple and straight forward, but this has worked twice for me now. Hopefully it works for you too. But I would be careful not to de-optimise the homepage if the landing pages are nowhere near within sight yet in the SERPs.

I haven't personally noticed anything that stands out particularly over the past weekend, fortunately or unfortunately.

John Mueller keeps insisting that it's not Penguin-related, and there doesn't seem to be any definitive conclusion as to what the recent updates are targeting.

I can only suggest at this point, hanging around in the comments sections of blogs like www.seroundtable.com when they post about the latest Google updates. Lots of people reporting changes that they've been seeing for their campaigns. Just make sure to bring a tinfoil hat.

We're unlikely to receive anything concrete from John Mueller besides "there are hundreds of updates every year, there's nothing to worry about"...

But the temperature has been pretty high with stormy weathers for the past month on Mozcast: http://mozcast.com

Whatever's happening, one of my ecommerce clients seem to be benefiting from these changes.

There's no manipulation whatsoever. In fact, Google encourage website developers and SEOs to optimise/tidy their code and keep a good code-to-content ratio. This is why Google gives us so many tools in order to do so. It makes our sites easier to crawl for Google, and in return Google may even like us more for it!

Just found an article that sums it up quite nicely:

"Essentially what is being stated is a fairly logical conclusion: reduce the amount of code on your page and the content (you know, the place where your keywords are) takes a higher priority. Additionally compliance will, by necessity, make your site easy to crawl and, additionally, allow you greater control over which portions of your content are given more weight by the search engines. The thinking behind validating code for SEO benefits is that, once you have a compliant site, not only will your site be a better user experience on a much larger number of browsers, but you’ll have a site with far less code, that will rank higher on the search engines because of it."

- http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/official-google-prefers-valid-html-css/

But going back to your original post, "above-the-fold is dead", yadda yadda... So long as your content in the source is metaphorically "above the fold" and not drowning in heavy code, on the page itself just worry about giving your users the "experience" that they're looking for. And not how many pixels from the top of the browser your content is. Hope that makes more sense!

I feel prioritising elements to be "above the fold" is a bit of an outdated concept these days.

Where is the fold? Different devices and screen resolutions will have different folds, and more websites are being designed now to make the traditional "above the fold" section more visually interesting and designed for user experience, rather than packed full of content.

The higher the content is in the source code itself, the more weight it will have on the page. This doesn't necessarily translate to the "visually higher the content is on the page". Google is going to be reading from top to bottom of your code, so naturally you want the most important content/links to be found first. As long as you meet (or exceed!) the user's expectation of the content upon arrival, and you keep the code tidy in terms of how much Google has to read before it gets to the real valuable content, I doubt Google's going to worry about whether users have to scroll a little to get to it.

Thanks for the tip! Definitely need to sit down and have a real brainstorm.

Fantastic resources, thank you so much.

I can understand Facebook's issue with ads that may be perceived as negatively portraying being a certain physical conditions (weight, facial features, complexions, etc). But it just seems a little overkill at times. I'll try your suggestion of a more medical/factual approach rather than promotional, and more "beautiful people" type imagery. If the "beautiful people" goes down better with Facebook, it would be kind of ironic as currently the imagery they're turning down is of real people. Real clients that have volunteered their photos to be used for marketing. Not models.

I foresee a lot of trial and error trying to satisfy Facebook's regulations and get a good CTR.

I have a client who owns a cosmetic dermatology clinic. Recently he's been trying to work more on his Facebook page, and has been attempting to boost his posts but they keep getting declined for this, that and the other. "No before and after photos", "Ad is sensitive in nature", etc.

Nothing shady, he's a registered doctor and a member of the Royal College of Physicians in London and the Royal College of General Practitioners. Main treatments offered are things like Botox (which I know he can't legally advertise due to strict advertising standards in the UK), dermal fillers, lip fillers, non-surgical lifts. Just general non-surgical prescription-level cosmetic treatments.

I don't have much experience in Facebook advertising, but this line of work seems particularly challenging to advertise on Facebook. Does anyone who has experience in advertising this type of business on Facebook have any general advice on what sorts of posts/ads have worked with them before?