Footprint Project used Solar Energy International (SEI) curriculum to train workers from Puerto Rico communities in the design and installation of a 2.5KW PV battery system, to help with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief efforts after hurricane Maria.
We talked with the Founder and Director of Footprint Project, William Heegaard to learn more about the experience and their future efforts on the island.
Can you tell us more about how this project started?
We’ve been supporting Mutual Aid Centers in Puerto Rico in collaboration with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief which is a small non-profit in Tampa. Since the hurricane, we have gotten some funding and volunteers to help with the installs this October. We were contact by the the Mutual Aid Center as they said that they just didn’t want the system installed, they wanted training on how to operate and maintain the system. We’ve noticed is a big problem particularly with all the solar batteries system that had been installed since Maria. There’s a lot of community groups and other facilities that received solar battery equipment, and put the lights on, but they didn’t receive any long-term maintenance training for the system. They asked us to give a weekend-long awareness training while the installation was going on. So that is when I reach out to a SEI to see if there was any Spanish language curriculum that we could work with to develop a shorter version of the solar battery training. We were able to get at least 2 or 3 modules of the curriculum and cut them down with the help of Bosque Modelo.
Where was the installation and training done?
The training and the installation was done at Centro De Apoyo Mutuo in Las Marias, Puerto Rico. It’s a small mountain community, on the west side of the Island, and it is located in a town called CAMBU Las Marias, which is actually a smaller town outside Las Marias call Bucarabones. So CAMBU Las Marias received the space of an oldschool that was no longer being used and abandoned for many years, and they built it into a community resilience center after Hurricane Maria. They’ve been doing mutual aid work out of the building for the last 2 years, so we did the installation of the solar system and the 48 hours wrapped solar battery training there.
What is a relationship with Bosque Modelo?
Bosque Modelo has the license to do Solar Energy International (SEI) curriculum training in Puerto Rico. We signed an MOU with Bosque Modelo and SEI to work on cutting down the FV203 curriculum into a more accessible version for folks that had received solar battery systems in Puerto Rico but are not installers.
What would this system provide energy for?
The center needed power for lighting, refrigeration, computers, electronics. They have a partnership with another group that is called Rock Spring UCC, which is a church out of Virginia. They are setting up a longer-term volunteer service project with CAMBU Las Marias. They are going to come back in January and retropair all the outlets, the lighting, and the current, all the interior wiring needs to be redone. We brought in the solar system, and provided outlets so they can at least have guaranteed power for their services through an extension cord. And the church is going to come back next year and do all the interior rewire.
What was the feedback of the students?
We had about 10 to 14 students across the two days, so it was a small group, which was really helpful. We were pleasantly surprised with the reviews on the follow-up session we had on Sunday night. It is so much content to take 203, and for people that have very limited engagement with solar battery systems in the past, to try to condense all that, it was a pretty big lift. The students said that they were happy with both the amount of content and the hands-on pieces. We did one day of mostly lecture and one day of hands on, they said they were really happy with the hands on, and said presentations were really helpful. My favorite quote was from a community worker in Lares, that came for the training in Las Marias, he said that it was the best solar workshop he has ever attended so far.
While there’s a lot to improve on, I was really happy with how it turned out. We were able to get the system up, we were able to get the participant straightened out, and I think everyone left exhausted, but content.
Is Footprint Project planning to do another workshops like that on the future?
Yes, we are hoping to, and we definitely have a lot of requests now. The challenge is always time, money and energy. The students are requesting more training in their own communities because a couple came from different Centros de Apoyo Mutua in Lares, El Rincon, Utuado, so they are requesting training in those areas, in a similar type of wrapped, accessible hands on training. We’re trying to replicate that kind of training, we just need to put the pieces together.
Thank you Will for your time. We certainly hope to continue supporting Footprint Project efforts on the island, as they continue to empower more and more people with SEI solar education.
Check footprintproject.org to learn how to collaborate or volunteer for their projects.
The IMF recently released a new study pushing for governments around the world to implement “a global carbon tax” that would rise to $75/ton by 2030, in order to limit global warming to at most the “safe” ceiling of 2 degrees Celsius. In order to reassure the alarmed reader that such a carbon tax is feasible, the IMF’s blog post on the new study explained, “Sweden has set a good example. Its carbon tax is $127 per ton and has reduced emissions 25 percent since 1995, while the economy has expanded 75 percent since then.”
In a future article I will dissect the IMF proposal more thoroughly, but in this initial post, I will focus just on the example of Sweden. Since the IMF writers themselves have held it up as a “good example” of how carbon taxes work, by all means let’s analyze the situation more closely. We’ll see that the United States has had comparable “success” in reducing emissions while maintaining economic growth, even though it has had much more modest government curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. The case of Sweden, far from proving the benefits of the IMF’s desired global carbon tax, if anything shows that a new carbon tax will be mostly pain and little gain.
The Carbon Tax in Sweden
The government of Sweden itself is very proud of its carbon tax, which was introduced in 1991 at a level of SEK 250 (about 24 euros at that time), and which has risen to SEK 1180 in 2019, which is about 114 euros or $126 at current exchanges rates. The Swedish government posts this graphic that illustrates the same claims made in the IMF post:
The moral is clear: Even with what seems to be a pretty aggressive carbon tax, the economy still expanded 78% between 1990 and 2017, while greenhouse gas emissions are down about a quarter. Doesn’t this prove the naysayers wrong? With the appropriate political will—so it seems—you can get significant emissions cuts without destroying the economy. Take that, Fox News!
Sweden vs. the United States
But hold on a second. What if we run the same metrics on the United States?
Well, from 1990 through 2017, its real GDP expanded 93 percent, compared to Sweden’s 78 percent.
Now it’s true that the U.S. didn’t experience a drop in emissions, but even though output almost doubled, emissions were just about flat during this time period, as this chart from the EPA shows:
Specifically, of the greenhouse gases tracked by EPA in this chart, total annual emissions (in CO2-eq terms) from 1990-2017 only increased 1 percent.
Does that surprise readers? I bet most Americans had no idea that US annual contributions to atmospheric greenhouse gases has been roughly flat for two decades running.
Combining the Measures
So now let’s ask how Sweden and the U.S. did, when we combine the two metrics. That is, we will ask how well Sweden and the U.S. did in reducing greenhouse emissions per unit of real GDP.
In the case of Sweden, recall that its emissions dropped 26 percent while its economy grew in real terms by 78 percent. So Swedish emissions/GDP dropped 58 percent from 1990 to 2017.
In the case of the United States, its emissions increased 1 percent while its real GDP increased 93 percent. So American emissions/GDP dropped 48 percent.
And there you have it: Despite Sweden’s relatively draconian carbon tax that now stands at $126/ton—the equivalent of about $1.10 per gallon in extra tax at the gasoline pump—its progress in reducing emissions while balancing economic growth hasn’t been much better than the United States’ experience. To repeat, Sweden in the last two decades has reduced its emissions/output by 58 percent, while the US has reduced them by 48 percent.
Other Countries
We can get a better perspective by looking at the World Bank’s charts, showing CO2 emissions divided by economic output. (Note that these World Bank charts just include carbon dioxide, not other greenhouse gases, and also that their economic baselines are possibly different than in the calculations we just made, but what’s important is the relative progress among different countries. Also, the World Bank data only goes through 2014.)
First, we’ll have the World Bank generate a chart just showing Sweden, the United States, and also Germany, which has a reputation of being a strong fighter against climate change and a responsible global citizen:
So yes, the United States emits more carbon dioxide per unit of economic output than Germany or Sweden. (This isn’t surprising, when you keep in mind how big the U.S. is, and how much more its people would like to drive, compared to Europeans.) But on the other hand, it has also made the most progress of the three countries in reducing that measure, measured in absolute terms.
Even if these three government “did nothing” more and history repeated itself, the gap would probably continue to shrink. The reason the United States would still emit more (in absolute terms) than Sweden or Germany, would be that its economy produced more stuff.
Once China is included, we see that the United States looks even more like Germany and Sweden. It also shows why, if environmental activists are going to be lecturing governments on restraining their emissions, they should be focusing on China, where there are the largest “gains” still to be had.
Conclusion
This post might seem very defeatist to the climate activists. And yes, I do think the case for a carbon tax is weak. On the other hand, my post should be very optimistic for those who think climate change is a serious problem, but who aren’t wedded to political solutions. As the above charts show, normal economic growth naturally brings down emissions per unit of output, and the “improvement” has been faster in the U.S. and China than it has been in the most regulated Western countries.
To get a better sense of why Sweden, for example, hasn’t seen sharper emissions drops but also hasn’t seen an economic collapse, consider this table from page 3 of the IMF study:
So even though it currently has a carbon tax of about $127 (using their currency conversions), notice that that relatively draconian tax only applies to 40 percent of Sweden’s greenhouse gas emissions. In terms of textbook theory, it would make more sense—both economically and in terms of reducing humans’ carbon footprint—to apply a lower carbon tax rate to a wider base. And yet, political realities have limited the effectiveness of the carbon tax, even in Sweden.
Despite the IMF’s claims to the contrary, the case of Sweden actually shows that a political “solution” to climate change is ineffective. Even though certain segments of the Swedish economy have been slammed with a punitive tax, overall progress on reducing emissions while maintaining growth has been only modestly better than in the United States. And no matter what the West does, the real action on greenhouse gas emissions in the coming century will occur in China.
All in all, the case of Sweden reinforces my overall view, that human-caused climate change, though something to be monitored, is not an immediate crisis. It is a very conservative, sensible strategy to foster general economic growth, with various teams of scientists working on different strategies for dealing with climate change should they be necessary decades (or centuries) hence.
Kenny Stein, IER’s Policy Director, provided testimony before Indiana’s 21st Century Energy Policy Development Task Force on 10/17/19 on the dangers of adding unwarranted renewables to the electric grid.
MozCon 2019 was an absolute blast. There were endless snacks. There were Roger hugs. There were networking opportunities and Birds of a Feather tables and search epiphanies galore. And there were a ton of folks in our community who watched it all unfold from the perspective of a Twitter hashtag — fun to follow along with, but not quite the same impact as seeing the talks unfold in real-time.
If you're still wishing you could've joined us in Seattle this past July, you’ll be happy to know that you can recreate the MozCon experience from the comfort of your home or office (or your home office, but hopefully not your office-home — seriously, Karen, the quarterly reports will still be there in the morning!).
Yep, you got it: the MozCon 2019 Video Bundle is available for your purchasing and viewing pleasure!
For those of you who attended in-person, good news: you've already got access! The video bundle is always included in the price of your MozCon ticket, so you can relive your three jam-packed days of learning as many times as you want — and if you aren't too bummed that they already made you share your MozCon swag with them, be sure to share the vids with your team!
For the rest of us, the video bundle lets us enjoy the presentations at our own pace. It's condensed MozCon-caliber information in a neat, on-demand package that you can — have we mentioned this? — share with your team. Seriously, we think they'll like it. We were humbled to host some of the very brightest minds in SEO and digital marketing on our stage. With topics ranging from content marketing to technical SEO, PPC to local SEO, and just about everything in between, there are presentations to inspire just about any role in marketing (and your web dev just might be interested in a few talks, too).
What's covered in the videos:
The Golden Age of Search, Sarah Bird
Web Search 2019: The Essential Data Marketers Need, Rand Fishkin
Human > Machine > Human: Understanding Human-Readable Quality Signals and Their Machine-Readable Equivalents, Ruth Burr Reedy
Improved Reporting & Analytics Within Google Tools, Dana DiTomaso
Local Market Analytics: The Challenges and Opportunities, Rob Bucci
Keywords Aren't Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing, Ross Simmonds
How to Supercharge Link Building with a Digital PR Newsroom, Shannon McGuirk
From Zero to Local Ranking Hero, Darren Shaw
Esse Quam Videri: When Faking it is Harder than Making It, Russ Jones
Building a Discoverability Powerhouse: Lessons From Merging an Organic, Paid, & Content Practice, Heather Physioc
Brand Is King: How to Rule in the New Era of Local Search, Mary Bowling
Making Memories: Creating Content People Remember, Casie Gillette
20 Years in Search & I Don't Trust My Gut or Google, Wil Reynolds
Super-Practical Tips for Improving Your Site's E-A-T, Marie Haynes
Fixing the Indexability Challenge: A Data-Based Framework, Areej AbuAli
What Voice Means for Search Marketers: Top Findings from the 2019 Report, Christi Olson
Redefining Technical SEO, Paul Shapiro
How Many Words Is a Question Worth?, Dr. Peter J. Meyers
Fraggles, Mobile-First Indexing, & the SERP of the Future, Cindy Krum
Killer E-commerce CRO and UX Wins Using A SEO Crawler, Luke Carthy
Content, Rankings, and Lead Generation: A Breakdown of the 1% Content Strategy, Andy Crestodina
Running Your Own SEO Tests: Why It Matters & How to Do It Right, Rob Ousbey
Dark Helmet's Guide to Local Domination with Google Posts and Q&A, Greg Gifford
How to Audit for Inclusive Content, Emily Triplett Lentz
Factors that Affect the Local Algorithm that Don't Impact Organic, Joy Hawkins
Featured Snippets: Essentials to Know & How to Target, Britney Muller
What you’ll get:
For just $299, you'll get all of the MozCon education and inspiration with none of the air travel or traffic. The bundle includes:
27 full-length presentation videos chock full of leading SEO innovations, thought leadership, and tips & tricks
Instant downloads and streaming to your computer, tablet, or mobile device
Downloadable slide decks for all presentations
If we could include a download of a Top Pot doughnut and some piping hot Starbucks, we would in a heartbeat. Alas, they don't have the technology for that... yet.
Free preview - Running Your Own SEO Tests: Why It Matters & How to Do It Right by Rob Ousbey
Speaking of doughnuts, we wouldn't expect you to buy a dozen sweet treats without taking a little taste first to see if you like 'em. It's important to know that your doughnuts are both delicious, shareable, and relevant to your everyday work as an SEO — almost exactly like the MozCon video bundle. And just like the feeling of warmth and goodwill you receive when you come back to the office with a fragrant baker's dozen, your teammates will thank you when you've got twenty-seven highly actionable talks to share with them — presentations that'll hone your skills and level up your understanding of modern SEO and digital marketing.
That's why we've released a talk we're super proud of as your free preview of all the juicy goodness you can look forward to in the video bundle: Running Your Own SEO Tests: Why It Matters & How to Do It Right, presentedby our very own Rob Ousbey.
Google's algorithms have undergone significant changes in recent years. Traditional ranking signals don't hold the same sway they used to, and they're being usurped by factors like UX and brand that are becoming more important than ever before. What's an SEO to do? The answer lies in testing. Sharing original data and results from clients, Rob highlights the necessity of testing, learning, and iterating your work, from traditional UX testing to weighing the impact of technical SEO changes, tweaking on-page elements, and changing up content on key pages. Actionable processes and real-world results abound in this thoughtful presentation on why you should be testing SEO changes, how and where to run them, and what kinds of tests you ought to consider for your circumstances.
Gather the team, grab some snacks, and get ready to binge these presentations Netflix-Original-Series-style.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Can franchises make good digital marketing agency clients? There are almost 750,000 of them in the US alone, employing some 9 million Americans. Chances are good you’ll have the opportunity to market a business with this specialized model at some point. In this structure:
The Franchisor grants permission to others to operate under its trademark, selling approved goods and services supported by an operating system and marketing.
The Franchisee is the person or group paying the franchisor for the right to use the trademark and the benefits of the operating system and marketing.
Seems simple enough. But it’s this structure that gives franchise marketing its unique complexities. For your agency, the challenge is that you can’t enter these marketing relationships equipped solely with your knowledge of corporate or local search marketing.
You need to deeply understand the setup to avoid bewilderment over why implementation bogs down with franchise clients and why players lose track of their roles, or even overwrite one another’s efforts.
In this post, we’ll give you some quick and useful coaching on the franchise model, but if your agency just got a phone call from Orangetheory or Smoothie King, you can get the bigger playbook right away.
Imagine a post-game locker room scene. On the field, all players seemed united by the goal of winning. But now, at different press conferences, the owner is saying the coach failed to meet standards, the coach is saying the owner should keep his opinions to himself, and several of the star players are saying they didn’t get the ball enough.
Franchises can be just like that when there’s confusion over roles and goals. Read on to get a peek into the playbook we've prepared to help the team as a whole work better together:
Franchise marketing is a unique kind of activity. It does share a lot of qualities with corporate marketing (on the awareness side) and with SMB marketing (on the local side) but as we noted earlier, it’s sort of a joint custody arrangement that — like all custody arrangements — can get contentious at times.
Everyone wants the best for the brand, but everyone’s “best” is very much a matter of their own perspective and goals. Typically in this arrangement, there are at least two stakeholders, though sometimes there are more. The stakeholders and their goals tend to play out as follows:
Corporate Franchisor goals
Creating a strong brand to license more franchisors.
Controlling that brand so it isn’t negatively impacted.
Supporting franchisees with strong branding and resources so they succeed.
Master Franchisor goals
Working with corporate to protect the brand.
Licensing more local franchisors.
Supporting franchisees with resources so they succeed.
Regional or Area Franchisee goals
Driving customer traffic and revenue at individual locations.
Growing their portfolio of locations.
Supporting location managers with resources so they succeed.
Owner/Operator Franchisee goals
Increasing location(s) foot traffic.
Increasing location(s) revenue.
Building customer loyalty at the location(s).
In what ways is franchise marketing different from corporate or standard SMB marketing? There are some unique challenges that franchisors and franchisees face which are worth unpacking. Some of them are:
Conflicting goals between franchisor/franchisee
Faster turnover of locations and addresses
Different opening hours, menus and promotions from location to location
Unique local sales and marketing opportunities and challenges
Competitors on both the brand side but also among local SMBs
Lack of clearly defined marketing roles causing work to be overwritten, duplicated, or even neglected
Your agency can be a better coach to franchises by having a playbook that respects how they differ from corporate or SMB clients at the very outset. But differences don’t have to equal weaknesses. Are you ready to draft a game plan that draws from the strengths of both franchisors and franchisees?
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
We couldn’t do it without you! In 2018, over 1,400 marketers responded to our State of Local SEO industry survey. We all learned so much from your responses about the day-to-day realities of marketing local businesses. This year, we can do even better because your answers will give us all valuable comparative data to analyze, YoY.
Who can take the survey?
Anyone who markets local businesses in any way is eagerly invited. Whether you market a single location, work for an agency with some local business clients, or are an in-house SEO for a brand with thousands of locations, we would love your participation! Whether you do just a little local search marketing or a lot, are a novice or an adept, your insights have value.
What is the survey about?
Unlike a typical local ranking factors poll, The Local Search Marketing Industry Survey digs deep into marketers’ experiences with tactics, challenges, clients, Google, and the working environment. For example, we learned last year that:
90% of respondents felt Google’s emphasis on proximity was detrimental to SERP quality
62% felt there aren’t enough quality local search marketing training materials available
60% lacked a comprehensive review management strategy
49% felt utilization of Google Business Profile features were impacting local rank
35% had no link building strategy in place
17% of enterprises had no in-house SEO staff
With your help, we’ll see what’s changed and what hasn’t. There are fresh questions, too, which we hope will uncover new stories to spark new strategies for local brands and their marketers.
There will be four lucky winners!
Everyone is a winner with access to the data we’ll be sharing from this large survey. But we’d like to offer a little extra thank-you for your time and knowledge.
Every respondent who completes the full survey will be automatically entered for a chance to win one of four $50 Visa gift cards. Winners will be selected at random, and we hope they will use these gift cards to shop someplace local and awesome this holiday season!
Look forward to seeing the results in early 2020, when we compile them into our State of Local SEO 2020 Industry Report. Curious about last year's insights? Check them out here, and thank you for participating!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Repeatedly this month in California, Pacific Gas & Electric has cut off electricity to more than a million subscribers due to high winds and dry conditions that could cause a fire on its lines. In New York, National Grid has placed a moratorium on new natural gas hook ups because there is insufficient pipeline infrastructure to bring natural gas to homes and businesses. In both these cases, state politicians are mostly to blame, but they refuse to accept responsibility for the failures.
California
In early October, Pacific Gas & Electric instituted a fire-prevention power outage—California’s largest-ever “public safety power shutoff.” PG&E’s phased outages across more than 30 Northern California counties affected over 2 million people covering several days. PG&E warned its customers that it would cut power when there are sustained winds of 25 miles an hour and gusts of 45 miles an hour. Once winds subside, it would then need to inspect equipment before restoring power. But again in the final week of the month, a similar situation unfolded with high winds and more shutoffs.
Uncomfortable with the response from subscribers who were cut off from power, California’s Governor Newsom proposed the utility pay as many as 738,000 customers who lost power an automatic rebate of $100 per residential customer and $250 per business customer as “compensation for their hardships,” and ordered the California Public Utility Commission to investigate.
PG&E is blamed for two dozen or so wildfires in the past few years and under state law is responsible for tens of billions of dollars in damages, which forced the company to file for bankruptcy earlier this year. For years, the state made the utility spend billions on wind and solar power and electric-car subsidies when it should have been inspecting and clearing lines. Credit Suisse estimated that the utility’s long-term contracts with renewable developers cost the utility $2.2 billion annually above current market power rates.
California’s residential electricity rates are the third highest in the continental United States at almost 21 cents per kilowatt-hour. But, for PG&E to inspect all of its 100,000 or so miles of power lines and clear downed or intrusive trees would require rates to increase by over 400 percent. Insurance rates for tree trimmers have also increased due to California’s litigation-friendly laws, making it hard to find workers, whose numbers have already been decimated by decades of anti-forest management policies in the state. Opposition to logging and prescribed burns in California’s forests has resulted in 147 million dead trees that make for combustible fuel under dry conditions, and there are fewer people in the business of cutting wood, which is contributing to the problem.
New York
Governor Cuomo of New York will not allow permits to build natural gas pipelines from Pennsylvania into the Empire State to bring much needed natural gas for heating, electric generation, and industrial uses. Besides barring new pipeline infrastructure, the state has banned hydraulic fracturing in the state, thus not allowing for its own natural gas deposits to be produced which are just over the border from Pennsylvania’s booming Marcellus operations. As a result, two of the state’s natural gas utilities have had to place a ban on new hook ups, causing a protest from the state’s constituents, particularly those in the process of refurbishment and procuring natural gas technology before the ban went into effect. National Grid, for example, rejected more than 2,600 applications for natural gas service to 20,000 commercial and residential units in Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island since mid-May.
Rather than face his own follies, Governor Cuomo ordered the state Public Utility Commission to institute millions of dollars in penalties unless National Grid agreed to provide natural gas hookups to more than a 1,100 New York customers that had been denied service by mid-November.
According to National Grid, to meet the extra demand, the state must reverse its rejection of the nearly $1 billion natural gas pipeline—the Northeast Expansion Project–that would stretch from Pennsylvania to Rockaway Beach—a total of 24 miles. New York State rejected needed permits for the pipeline project twice, leading National Grid to enact the moratorium on all new requests for service earlier this year. The move has affected business and residential development projects and stopped thousands of conversions from fuel oil to natural gas that take place each year. Those trying to convert from heating oil to cleaner and cheaper natural gas are being denied access, resulting in more carbon dioxide and criteria pollutants being emitted in New York State.
The utility’s analysis indicates that there are very real gas supply constraints in the northeast and it is working to identify unprecedented temporary solutions to help mitigate this situation.
Conclusion
New York and California are at the forefront of denying energy to their consumers due to renewable mandates and subsidies, bans on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas production, and denying permits for natural gas pipelines. Due to these and other state laws and regulations, electric and natural gas utilities have been forced to deny or shut off service to their states’ residents and businesses. These states need to reassess their policies and programs unless they want to mimic Venezuela’s problems and harm their consumers further.
Earlier this week, I hosted a webinar all about featured snippets covering essential background info, brand-new research we've done, the results of all the tests I've performed, and key takeaways. Things didn't quite go as planned, though. We had technical difficulties that interfered with our ability to broadcast live, and lots of folks were left with questions after the recording that we weren't able to answer in a follow-up Q&A.
The next best thing to a live webinar Q&A? A digital one that you can bookmark and come back to over and over again! We asked our incredibly patient, phenomenally smart attendees to submit their questions via email and promised to answer them in an upcoming blog post. We've pulled out the top recurring questions and themes from those submissions and addressed them below. If you had a question and missed the submission window, don't worry!Ask it down in the comments and we'll keep the conversation going.
If you didn't get a chance to sign up for the original webinar, you can register for it on-demand here:
And if you're here to grab the free featured snippets cheat sheet we put together, look no further — download the PDF directly here. Print it off, tape it to your office wall, and keep featured snippets top-of-mind as you create and optimize your site content.
Now, let's get to those juicy questions!
1. Can I win a featured snippet with a brand-new website?
If you rank on page one for a keyword that triggers a featured snippet (in positions 1–10), you're a contender for stealing that featured snippet. It might be tougher with a new website, but you're in a position to be competitive if you're on page one — regardless of how established your site is.
We've got some great Whiteboard Fridays that cover how to set a new site up for success:
2. Does Google provide a tag that identifies traffic sources from featured snippets? Is there a GTM tag for this?
Unfortunately, Google does not provide a tag to help identify traffic from featured snippets. I'm not aware of a GTM tag that helps with this, either, but would love to hear any community suggestions or ideas in the comments!
It's worth noting that it's currently impossible to determine what percentage of your traffic comes from the featured snippet versus the duplicate organic URL below the featured snippet.
3. Do you think it's worth targeting longer-tail question-based queries that have very low monthly searches to gain a featured snippet?
Great question! My advice is this: don’t sleep on low-search-volume keywords. They often convert really well and in aggregate they can do wonders for a website. I suggest prioritizing long tail keywords that you foresee providing a high potential ROI.
For example, there are millions of searches a month for the keyword “shoes.” Very competitive, but that query is pretty vague. In contrast, the keyword “size 6 red womens nike running shoes” is very specific. This searcher knows what they want and they're dialing in their search to find it. This is a great example of a long tail keyword phrase that could provide direct conversions.
4. What's the best keyword strategy for determining which queries are worth creating featured snippet-optimized content for?
Dr. Pete wrote a great blog post outlining how to perform keyword research for featured snippets back in 2016. Once you've narrowed down your list of likely queries, you need to look at keywords that you rank on page one for, that trigger a snippet, and that you don't yet own. Next, narrow your list down further by what you envision will have the highest ROI for your goals. Are you trying to drive conversions? Attract top-of-funnel site visitors? Make sure the queries you target align with your business goals, and go from there. Both Moz Pro and STAT can be a big help with this process.
A tactical pro tip: Use the featured snippet carousel queries as a starting point. For instance, if there's a snippet for the query "car insurance" with a carousel of "in Florida," "in Michigan," and so on, you might consider writing about state-specific topics to win those carousel snippets. For this technique, the bonus is that you don't really need to be on page one for the root term (or ranking at all) — often, carousel snippets are taken from off-SERP links.
5. Do featured snippets fluctuate according to language, i.e. if I have several versions of my site in different languages, will the snippet display for each version?
This is a great question! Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to do international/multi-language featured snippet research just yet, but hope to in the future. I would suspect the featured snippet could change depending on language and search variation. The best way to explore this is to do a search in an incognito (and un-logged-in) browser window of Google Chrome.
If you've performed research along these lines, let us know what you found out down in the comments!
6. Why do featured snippet opportunities fluctuate in number from day to day?
Change really is the only constant in search. In the webinar, I discussed the various tests I did that caused Moz to lose a formerly won featured snippet (and what helped it reappear once again). Changes as simple as an extra period at the end of a sentence were enough to lose us the snippet. With content across the web constantly being created and edited and deprecated and in its own state of change, it's no wonder that it's tough to win and keep a featured snippet — sometimes even from one day to the next.
The SERPs are incredibly volatile things, with Google making updates multiple times every day. But when it comes down to the facts, there are a few things that reliably cause volatility (is that an oxymoron?):
If a snippet is pulling from a lower-ranking URL (not positions 1–3); this could mean Google is testing the best answer for the query
Google regularly changing which scraped content is used in each snippet
Featured snippet carousel topics changing
The best way to change-proof yourself is to become an authority in your particular niche (E-A-T, remember?) and strive to rank higher to increase your chances of capturing and keeping a featured snippet.
7. How can I use Keyword Lists to find missed SERP feature opportunities? What's the best way to use them to identify keyword gaps?
Keyword Lists are a wonderful area to uncover feature snippet (and other SERP feature) opportunity gaps. My favorite way to do this is to filter the Keyword List by your desired SERP feature. We’ll use featured snippets as an example. Next, sort by your website’s current rank (1–10) to determine your primary featured snippet gaps and opportunities.
The filters are another great way to tease out additional gaps:
Which keywords have high search volume and low competition?
Which keywords have high organic CTR that you currently rank just off page one for?
8. What are best practices around reviewing the structure of content that's won a snippet, and how do I know whether it's worth replicating?
Content that has won a featured snippet is definitely worth reviewing (even if it doesn’t hold the featured snippet over time). Consider why Google might have provided this as a featured snippet:
Does it succinctly answer the query?
Might it sound good as a voice answer?
Is it comprehensive for someone looking for additional information?
Does the page provide additional answers or information around the topic?
Are there visual elements?
It’s best to put on your detective hat and try to uncover why a piece of content might be ranking for a particular featured snippet:
What part of the page is Google pulling that featured snippet content from?
Is it marked up in a certain way?
What other elements are on the page?
Is there a common theme?
What additional value can you glean from the ranking featured snippet?
9. Does Google identify and prioritize informational websites for featured snippets, or are they determined by a correlation between pages with useful information and frequency of snippets?
In other words, would being an e-commerce site harm your chances of winning featured snippets, all other factors being the same?
I’m not sure whether Google explicitly categorizes informational websites. They likely establish a trust metric of sorts for domains and then seek out information or content that most succinctly answers queries within their trust parameters, but this is just a hypothesis.
While informational sites tend to do overwhelmingly better than other types of websites, it’s absolutely possible for an e-commerce website to find creative ways of snagging featured snippets.
It’s fascinating how various e-commerce websites have found their way into current featured snippets in extremely savvy ways. Here's a super relevant example: after our webinar experienced issues and wasn't able to launch on time, I did a voice search for “how much do stamps cost” to determine how expensive it would be to send apology notes to all of our hopeful attendees.
This was the voice answer:
“According to stamps.com the cost of a one ounce first class mail stamp is $0.55 at the Post Office, or $.047 if you buy and print stamps online using stamps.com.”
Pretty clever, right? I believe there are plenty of savvy ways like this to get your brand and offers into featured snippets.
10. When did the "People Also Ask" feature first appear? What changes to PAAs do you anticipate in the future?
People Also Ask boxes first appeared in July 2015 as a small-scale test. Their presence in the SERPs grew over 1700% between July 2015 and March 2017, so they certainly exploded in popularity just a few years ago. Funny enough, I was one of the first SEOs to come across Google’s PAA testing — you can read about that stat and more in my original article on the subject: Infinite "People Also Ask" Boxes: Research and SEO Opportunities
When it comes to predicting the future of PAAs, well, we don't have a crystal ball yet, but featured snippets continue to look more and more like PAA boxes with their new-ish accordion format. Is it possible Google will merge them into a single feature someday? It's hard to say, but as SEOs, our best bet is to maintain flexibility and prepare to roll with the punches the search engines send our way.
11. Can you explain what you meant by "15% of image URLs are not in organic"?
Sure thing! The majority of images that show up in featured snippet boxes (or to be more accurate, the webpage those images live on) do not rank organically within the first ten pages of organic search results for the featured snippet query.
12. How should content creators consider featured snippets when crafting written content? Are there any tools that can help?
First and foremost, you'll want to consider the searcher.
What is their intent?
What desired information or content are they after?
Are you providing the desired information in the medium in which they desire it most (video, images, copy, etc)?
Look to the current SERPs to determine how you should be providing content to your users. Read all of the results on page one:
13. "Write quality content for people, not search engines" seems like great advice. But should I also be using any APIs or tools to audit my content?
The only really helpful tool that comes to mind is the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, but even that can be a bit disruptive to the creative process. The very best tool you might have for reviewing your content might be a real person. I would ensure that your content can be easily understood when read out loud to your targeted audience. It may help to consider whether your content, as a featured snippet, would make for an effective, helpful voice search result.
14. What's the best way to stay on top of trends when it comes to Google's featured snippets?
Find publications and tools that resonate, and keep an eye on them. Some of my favorites include:
Industry news publications like Search Engine Journal and, of course, the Moz Blog ;-)
Subscribing to SEO newsletters like the Moz Top 10
One of the very best things you can do, though, is performing your own investigative featured snippet research within your space. Publishing the trends you observe helps our entire community grow and learn.
Thank you so much to every attendee who submitted their questions. Digging into these follow-up thoughts and ideas is one of the best parts of putting on a presentation. If you've got any lingering questions after the webinar, I would love to hear them — leave me a note in the comments and I'll be on point to answer you. And if you missed the webinar sign-up, you can still access it on-demand whenever you want.
We also promised you some bonus content, yeah? Here it is — I compiled all of my best tips and tricks for winning featured snippets into a downloadable cheat sheet that I hope is a helpful reference for you:
Free download: The Featured Snippets Cheat Sheet
There's no reason you shouldn't be able to win your own snippets when you're armed with data, drive, and a good, solid plan! Hopefully this is a great resource for you to have on hand, either to share around with colleagues or to print out and keep at your desk:
Again, thank you so much for submitting your questions, and we'll see you in the comments for more.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Under the banner STOP FOSSIL FUELS. BUILD 100% RENEWABLES, the group 350.org last month announced “a new fossil free milestone: $11 trillion has been committed to divest from fossil fuels.”
“These numbers are strong indicators that people power is winning,” the Bill McKibben-cofounded group boasted. “We would not have smashed our divestment targets without the thousands of local groups who have pressured their representatives to pull out of fossil fuels.”
But the mainstream media hardly reported it—for cause. The $11 trillion is the total assets of the funds announcing divestment, not the actual amount of fossil-fuel assets physically sold with a promise not to reinvest.
Previous milestones of $2.6 billion (2015) and $5.2 billion (2016) were exposed as gross exaggerations (even by Mother Jones) with the word “representing” hiding the trick.
What is the actual, verifiable, executed amount of oil, gas, and coal investments divested? The divestment reports prepared by Arabella Advisors for 350.org do not provide that figure. But one recent announcement contrasts the two figures. Last month, the University of California’s $13.4 billion endowment announced $150 million in sales in order to become “fossil free.” In this case, “representing” (per 350.org) would overstate divestment by a factor of 90.
And what if such decisions are soft? After all, what is “clean” and “green” and “sustainable” is subjective, not objective. Could a fund divest from a coal stock and then later invest, say, in a midstream natural gas stock? In fact, coal divestment accounts for much of the total.
Seller Meets Buyer
Assume whatever actual divestment figure you would like—say $500 billion. A humorous rejoinder (calling the Onion or Babylon Bee) would be:
The American Gas Association, American Petroleum Institute, and National Coal Association reported full placement of divested fossil-fuel stocks, with $500 billion repositioned from politically motivated funds to the wider market.
“Sure enough, for every seller there was a buyer,” the joint press release stated: “With fossil fuels representing a market share of 80 percent for the US and 85 percent globally, expect immediate placement of sold oil-, gas-, coal-related stocks for the foreseeable future.”
Two simple facts govern the energy investment market. Demand will meet supply. And that demand is valuing investments based on financial fundamentals and diversification metrics.
“The [stock] market price stays the same; the company loses no money and notices no difference,” stated William MacAskill, the president of the Centre for Effective Altruism. “Divestment, to date, probably has reduced about zero tonnes of emissions,” added Bill Gates. “It’s not like you’ve capital-starved [the] people making steel and gasoline,” he said. “I don’t know the mechanism of action where divestment [keeps] emissions [from] going up every year. I’m just too damn numeric.”
And according to IEA analyst Michael Waldron, “For oil and gas, we see less evidence of divestment actually having a material effect on what the industry is doing. We haven’t seen any huge increase in funding costs for oil and gas companies.” said.
The Wide Fossil-Fuel Market
Private equity firms are quietly financing profitable projects in the natural/mineral industries at a record pace. Non-public companies and state-owned energy sectors, too, are beyond the reach of the divestment movement.
Of the world’s top ten oil producers, the biggest are state-owned. The world’s largest oil and gas entities are Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco), Russia’s Rosneft, and National Iranian Oil Company. Other giants are China National Petroleum Corporation, Sinopec Group (China), Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), and Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, according to Investopedia. Add Mexico’s Pemex and Malaysia’s Petronas, among others, to the list too.
The divestment movement has targeted banks and insurance companies to curtail business with oil, gas, and coal projects (“33 major global banks poured $1.9 trillion to fossil fuel companies since the Paris [Climate] Agreement was adopted,” complained one study.) But China alone is funding a coal boom at home and abroad, while giving lip service to the Paris accord.
Even targeting the outside funders of fossil fuel companies leaves retained earnings and equity issuance. Platt’s reported:
In terms of capital structure, [IEA analyst Michael] Waldron notes oil majors are much less dependent on debt to finance spending so “it’s not a case of divestment drying up bank funding which is hurting these companies.” The world’s top 25 listed oil companies by production relied on equity to finance 75% of their spending last year, with 25% coming from bonds and other debts, the IEA estimates.
Political Investing is Risky
Fossil-fuel divestment is being joined by a “reinvestment” movement to buy into “industries that will build a just and sustainable future for all.” The pitch by 350.org reads as follows:
Investors should commit at least 5% of their portfolios to climate solutions that help rapidly scale to 100% renewable energy and universal energy access. For those investors who persist in engaging with the fossil fuel industry despite mounting evidence of its failure to achieve anything, we ask them to change track and divest now – as both science and justice demand in this moment.
Science? What about non-alarmist science? Justice? Enter the Green New Deal’s nebulous aims going far beyond the climate crusade. The great majority of investors are not interested in subjective, contradictory, controversial notions of virtue.
Buyer beware applies to socially responsible investing. Remember Enron, considered a “green” and “socially responsible” energy company until its demise in 2001. “Beyond Petroleum” BP was another favorite, pre-Deepwater Horizon. Solyndra and Evergreen Solar are other cautionary tales.
And how about now-bankrupt PG&E, serving northern California? “PG&E shows that we are no longer talking about tree-hugging climate warriors that just want to do good,” stated Wolfgang Kuhn of ShareAction, an activist pension fund. “This is about money.”
Greenwashing has and will fool “socially responsible” investors. Worse, politically correct businesses dependent on special government privilege add risk to risk. Think wind power, on-grid solar power, and electric vehicles in particular.
Fighting Back
Publically traded asset funds are a big target for the anti-fossil-fuel movement. The world’s largest, BlackRock, managing $6.3 trillion globally, is not going along. CEO Larry Fink has wisely kept all his options on the table, drawing ire from divestment advocates.
“BlackRock is perhaps the biggest name you’ve never heard of that is driving the climate crisis,” said Gaurav Madan, a campaigner with Friends of the Earth US. Its sin? Investing in Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and other integrated majors that offer strong dividends.
Leading up to the legislative hearing, the Suffolk County Association of Municipal Employees released an analysis that divestment from fossil fuel stocks to green energy companies would “substantially underperform fossil fuels and result in state pension shortfalls” requiring a $33.4 billion cash infusion over 30 years. The Subway Surface Supervisors Association, the New York State Supreme Court Officers Association and the New York State Troopers Police Benevolent Association oppose divestment.
This echoes earlier objections over divestment from leading educational institutions.
“I [Drew Gilpin, president] also find a troubling inconsistency in the notion that, as an investor, we should boycott a whole class of companies at the same time that, as individuals and as a community, we are extensively relying on those companies’ products and services for so much of what we do every day.” (Harvard University)
“It seems unlikely to us that divestment from fossil fuel would ‘revoke a social license’ when we continue to use fossil fuels day after day in every aspect of our lives.” (Columbia University)
“In our judgment, the deliberate public act of divestment would entangle MIT in a movement whose core tactic is large-scale public shaming.” (MIT)
“Taking an institutional stand on political issues of many kinds threatens the primary educational mission of the university, which is to be avowedly open to arguments of every kind and to avoid giving priority to partisan or other political viewpoints.” (Princeton)
“… the symbolic statement of divestiture would not elucidate the complex scientific and policy issues surrounding coal and climate change and, for this reason, it would run counter to Brown’s mission of communicating knowledge.” (Brown)
“Fossil fuels enable us to operate the university, to conduct research and to provide patient care.… We made a commitment to our donors to use income generated from the endowment to support our mission for today and for future generations –academic and research programs, student support, and life-saving patient care.” (University of Michigan)
Is divestment materially affecting the equity price of oil majors? Of several hundred analyst reports of ExxonMobil, none changed a rating (up or down) based on divestment or climate issues.
Government Divestment and Reform: A Free-Market Program
Rather than focusing on the voluntary investment market, and companies that consumers freely make profitable, the divestment movement should target government ownership and influence that concentrate wealth and privilege with political elites.
First, state energy companies, many listed above, should be privatized. A partial privatization of Saudi Aramco, announced in 2016, remains in limbo, but even an IPO for a small fraction of the company sets a precedent for more private ownership with this company and others to come.
Second, special subsidies to oil, gas, and coal should be terminated, as should preferences to competing energy technologies. In the US, this amounts to approximately $500 million for fossil fuels, and $7 billion for renewables and nuclear power. Globally, fossil-fuel consumption subsidies of $260 billion (2016) for petroleum (40 percent), natural gas (19 percent), and electricity (41 percent) should also be removed.
Conclusion
The divestment movement must contend with growing demand for oil, gas, and coal from 7.7 billion people—and investor appetite for returns and diversification. Global energy demand rose 2.3 percent last year with fossil fuels providing more than two-thirds of the increase. The outlook is almost 50 percent energy growth by 2050, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, with fossil fuels accounting for 70 percent.
It’s still a consumer-first, profit-driven fossil-fuel world. The upstream, midstream, and downstream industries, at home and abroad, offer a wide range of viable investments. Americans and the world should continue to invest, not divest, in dense mineral energies.
Machine learning is only growing in importance for anyone working in the digital world, but it can often feel like an inaccessible subject. It doesn't have to be — and you don't have to miss out on the competitive edge it can give you when it comes to SEO task automation. Put on your technical SEO cap and get ready to take notes, because Britney Muller is walking us through Machine Learning 101 in this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today I'm talking about all things machine learning, something, as many of you know, I'm super passionate about and love to talk about. So hopefully, this sparks a seed in some of you to explore it a bit further, because it is truly one of the most powerful things to happen in our space in a very long time.
What is machine learning?
So a brief overview, in a nutshell, machine learning is actually a subset of AI, and some would argue we still haven't really reached artificial intelligence. But it's just one facet of the overall AI.
Traditional programming
The best way to think about it is in comparison to traditional programming. So traditional programming, you input data and a program into a computer and out comes the output, whether that be a web page or calculator you built online, whatever that might be.
Machine learning
With machine learning, what you do is you put in the data and the desired output and put this into a computer, and you get a program, otherwise known as a machine learning model. So it's a bit flipped, and it works extremely well. There are two primary types of machine learning:
You have supervised, which is where you're basically feeding a model labeled training data,
And then unsupervised, which is where you're feeding a program data and letting it create clusters or associations between data points.
The supervised is a bit more common. You'll see things like classification, linear regression, and image recognition. Things like that are all very common. If you think about machine learning in terms of, okay, there's all of this data that you're putting into the model, data is the biggest part of machine learning. A lot of people would argue that if machine learning was a vehicle, data would be the fuel.
It's a really important part to understand, because unless you have the right types of data to feed a model, you're not going to get the desired outcome that you would like.
A machine learning model example
So let's look at an example. If you wanted to build a machine learning model that predicts housing prices, you might have all of this information.
You might have the current price, square foot of these homes, land, the number of bathrooms, the number of bedrooms, you name it. It goes on and on. These are also known as features. So what a model is going to try to do, when you put in all of this data, it's going to try to understand associations between this information and come up with a model that best predicts home prices in the future.
The most basic of these machine learning models is linear regression. So if you think about inputting the data where maybe you just put in the price and the square foot, and you can kind of see the data like this.
You see that as the square foot goes up, so does the price. A model over time, in looking at this data, is going to start to find the smoothest line through the data to have the most accurate predictions in the future.
What you don't want it to do is to fit every single data point and have a line that looks like that — that's also known as overfitting — because it doesn't play nice for new data points. You don't want a model to get so calculated to your dataset that it doesn't predict accurately in the future.
A way to look at that is by the loss function. That's maybe getting a bit deeper in this, but that's how you would measure how the line is being fit. Let's see.
What are the machine learning possibilities in SEO?
So what are some of the possibilities in SEO? How can we leverage machine learning in the SEO space?
Automate meta descriptions
So there are couple ways that people are already doing this. You can automate meta descriptions by looking at the page content and using a machine model to summarize the text. So this literally summarizes the content for you and pares it down to a meta description length. Pretty incredible.
Automate titles
You could similarly do this for titles, although I don't suggest you do this for primary pages. This isn't going to be perfect. But if you have a huge, huge website, with hundreds of thousands of pages, it gets you halfway there. It's really interesting to start playing around in that space with these large websites.
Automate image alt text
You can also automate alt text for images. We see these models getting really good at understanding what's in an image.
Automate 301 redirects
301 redirects, Paul Shapiro has an incredible write-up and basically process for that already.
Automate content creation
Content creation, and if that scares some of you or if you doubt that these models can currently create content that is decent, I challenge you to go check out Talk to Transformer.
It is a pared-back version of OpenAI, which was founded by Elon Musk. It's pretty incredible and a little scary as to how good the content is just from that pared back model. So that is for sure possible in the future and even today.
Automate product/page suggestions
In addition to product and page suggestions.
So this is just going to get better. Imagine us providing content and UX specifically for the unique users that come to our site, highly personalized content, highly personalized experiences. Really exciting stuff moving forward.
Resources
I've got some resources I highly suggest you check out.
Google Codelabs is one of my favorites, just because it walks you through the steps. So if you go to Google Codelabs, filter by TensorFlow or machine learning, you can see the possible examples there. Colab notebooks or Jupyter notebooks are where you'll likely be doing any of the machine learning that you want to do on your own.
Kaggle.com is the number one resource for data science competitions. So you get to really see what are the examples, how are people using machine learning today. You'll see things like TSA has put up over $1 million for a data science team to come up with a model that predicts potential threats from security footage.
This stuff gets really interesting really fast. It's also so important to have diversity and inclusion in this space to avoid really dangerous models in the future. So it's something to definitely think about.
TensorFlow is a great resource. It's what Google put out, and it's what a lot of their machine learning models is built off of. They've got a really great JavaScript platform that you can play around with.
Then Algorithmia is sort of a one-stop shop for models. So if you don't care to dip your toes into machine learning and you just want say a summarizer model or a particular type of model, you could potentially find one there and do a plug-and-play of sorts.
So that's pretty interesting and fun to explore. The last thing is a machine learning model is only as good as the data. I can't express that enough. So a lot of machine learning and data scientists, it's all data cleaning and parsing, and that's the bulk of the work in this field.
It's important to be aware of that. So that's it for Machine Learning 101. Thank you so much for joining me, and I hope to see you all again soon. Thanks.
If you enjoyed this episode of Whiteboard Friday, you'll be delighted by all the cutting-edge SEO knowledge you'll get from our newly released MozCon 2019 video bundle. Catch more useful technical tips in Britney's talk, plus 26 additional future-focused topics from our top-notch speakers:
We suggest scheduling a good old-fashioned knowledge share with your colleagues to educate the whole team — after all, who didn't love movie day in school? ;-)
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
