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Join our webinar as Marcus Tober, Head of Enterprise at Semrush, gives insights on how to create effective content for different keyword intents—so you can drive organic traffic, attract the right audience and address their needs at every stage of the customer journey. You’ll learn the types of keyword intent and how to use them to find the right opportunities for your site. Check out the webinar deck Read the Transcript In this webinar, we'll cover: Keyword intent and its role in your content strategy Using keyword intent to leverage the customer journey Competitive analysis of keyword intent to improve visibility Meet your hosts: Marcus Tober Head of Enterprise, Semrush Marcus Tober is a leading global SEO specialist and speaker, named a top 8 Online Influencer in Digital Marketing and EU Search Personality of the Year 2016. He previously founded and led Searchmetrics, a global search experience platform, and joined Semrush as Head of Enterprise in 2022. Twitter | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. He also hosts the SEO Rant Podcast and Edge of the Web’s news podcast. Twitter | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO & Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush, and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Transcript: The power of keyword intent for organic success webinar Speakers Marcus Tober, Head of Enterprise, Semrush Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications, Wix Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding, Wix 00:03 Mordy: Hi there. Welcome to harnessing the power of intent for your SEO. My name is Mordy Oberstein and I’m the head of SEO branding at Wix. And we have a wonderful little webinar for you. Before we go around the horn and I introduce our crew to you for today's webinar, I just want to go through the quick format. We're going to start off. Well, we're going to start with a little bit of a sneak peak and surprise for you. We'll get to that in a moment. We're going to start off with Marcus Tober from Semrush, presenting all about user intent. We'll then have a short little panel discussion where we dive into what Mark has talked about, and then we'll be taking questions from you. So if you notice there's a Q and A section in the Zoom setup, throw all of your questions into there at the end, we'll get to as many as we possibly can. 00:49 Mordy: And also have some moderators trying to help you out throughout the webinar. There is no such thing as a silly question. So please, whatever questions you have, we’d be happy to get as many as you possibly can. So do not censor yourself in terms of the content that you ask around keyword intent and how to leverage that. Now let's go around the horn. Today, we have with us, the Head of SEO Communications at Wix, Crystal Carter, and Marcus Tober, who is an absolute legend. He's working at Semrush on their enterprise product. I will just say this, Marcus is one of the founding fathers of SEO in my mind because he started to create enterprise SEO tools. One of the first people to do that. Crystal, Marcus, thank you for joining us. 1:36 Crystal: Thank you for having me. 1:37 Marcus: Yeah. Thanks for having me too. 1:39 Pleasure, Crystal, what do you do here at Wix? 1:44 I am the head of SEO communication. So I communicate about SEO. 1:50 Mordy: What you’re literally doing here right now. 1:52 Crystal: Oh my gosh. Look it, we're doing it right now. And one of the great things about the role is that I get a really good opportunity to talk to fantastic people like Marcus and, to talk about fantastic tools like Semrush to folks at Wix. And, I'm really excited to hear more about that today. 2:10 Mordy: Definitely getting into that and Marcus, I know you're over at Semrush. You want to share with us what you do there. 2:16 Marcus: Yeah, I'm heading the Enterprise Solutions department. So I just joined Semrush in January, but actually the goal is to build great solutions on top of Semrush, which already is like the perfect foundation, especially towards larger enterprise companies. Yeah. It's super exciting. 2:33 Mordy: It is and Semrush is an absolutely fabulous tool, which is why before we get into the actual deep-diving into the keyword intent around SEO, [we] have a little bit of a surprise for our Wix folks here. [I’m going] to share my screen really quickly. Cause I'm happy to say that coming soon, in the near future, in the dev world, when you were developing a tool, the near future is well relative. There is going to be a Semrush integration, right in Wix for your Wix sites, you'll have a new way to access keywords and deeper metrics around keywords in your initial SEO setup. So when you’re setting up your Wix site and you go through your SEO setup checklist, one of the steps in there is choosing keywords to focus on for your website. In the near future, you will have an implant form connection to Semrush, which you can see in the screenshot here that will give you access to keyword suggestions from Semrush directly. 3:35 Mordy: Now what's amazing is that Semrush has a fantastic algorithm, which they recently updated around this to offer you the best solutions or the best keywords that align with what you want to do for your website. So what you would do is you would type in the topic that your website deals with. In the example here, we have hip hop. You can choose a region. For example, here, we're showing the southern part of France, and you get all sorts of keywords relevant to that topic and to that region and you get all sorts of metrics like the search volume, how many people on average or in general are searching for that particular term each and every month in that region? What is the trend? Is that, are people searching for that keyword or that topic more often? Is that a hard keyword to rank for? And what we're going to get into today— what is the intent behind the keyword? Is it an informational keyword, a commercial keyword? And if you're confused about what that might mean, well, that's why Marcus is here. So I'm going to throw it over to Marcus. Look for this soon inside of the Wix platform, very excited to have Semrush inside of Wix and the keyword intent part of the equation that our users will be able to have access to. So Marcus, how does keyword intent work for search? 4:50 Marcus: Yes. I'm super excited to talk about keyword intent because that's the topic I really like to talk about because so many people talk about keywords and rankings and is my landing page optimized and all these kinds of things. But often they do not understand that the searcher has different intents, especially throughout the whole customer journey. And keyword intent is really one of the most important, like segments that you should use to create a good content strategy, to look at your success, to even analyze the competition because not every competitor based on the customer journey is a competitor in that sense. Alright. Yeah. I mean, Mordy like announced me, but I'm Marcus Tober heading Semrush Enterprise Solutions unit and I'm an SEO with some 22 years [experience]. Yeah. What is keyword intent? Why is it important? So keyword intent is the notion of when, what people expect to find when they use search engines. 5:51 Marcus: And it's a concept that Google kind of like made more popular in 2016 already, like many years ago when they said like, “Hey, we have a concept we call micro-moments. And because we, as a search engine, we want to deliver the best results based on, hey, I have things like, I want to know moments or I want to go moments, I want to do, I want to buy.” And this is a concept that Google kind of like made like public. And based on this, Semrush has built the keyword intent, which is very important because it is a good reflection of where people are and what people look for in the whole customer journey. But let me explain a couple of more details about the keyword intent in general. So the first one is informational. So this is the very broad one. When, when people look for a specific question or general information, it could be like, typically a question such as like, “how to tie a tie?” “What are capers?” Or,”who is singing at the Superbowl?” 6:51 Marcus: This is something you can really multiply because whenever people have some sort of problem, they open Google and they do a search. And this is typically informational searches. But informational searches can be also a little bit more specific. People may search for, “what is keyword intent” or “the definition of SEO” or “how to build a website”. And this is something you should keep in mind because informational searches are really like important, you know, how to start getting more insights from your customers and how actually to start being more visible in the whole customer journey. Then there are navigational keywords. When you look at navigational keywords, you often think of just brand searches. But this is not true when the searcher has a certain intent to find a specific website or physical location or certain thing like a login page. This is often when searchers are maybe not in the know, or maybe too lazy to kind of go to the website and just, you know, go to this specific page. 7:46 Marcus: So for example, “eBay login” has a very high search volume or “Facebook login.” So these are typical informational searches, but it could also be like, like Obama's Twitter account and so on. This is something we also define within our keyword terms. Then we have commercial intent when people search for a specific brand or a specific service, but also like for typical comparisons or best of searches, typical listicle pages. So like “iPad air” versus “iPad mini” or “armless office chairs” and all that stuff. So this is important because there's one last segment, which is transactional because this is even closer to the transaction. When people already have decided like, “hey, I know now I want to buy an iPad air and not the iPad mini.” I'm going to search for like, “iPad air.” So I put “for cheap”, or I put “2020” because I don't want to buy the newest one. 8:42 Marcus: I want to buy like an older one or where to buy a kayak. But transactional searches are not just for like purchasing products. They’re also like there for completing actions. So if you do not like sell products, but offer services or offer something else, it could also be like a download or new construction homes. So please keep this in mind. And if you look at all the whole, like segmentation of keyword intent, we could also take a look at like how keyword intent places an important role from the customer journey perspective. Because if you look at it from a funnel perspective, like awareness and interest, they have like the highest search volume. So it means like in this area, people are very unsure what they actually really want. If it's like a certain product, if it's like something else or if it's just general information. 9:33 Marcus: And this is something where we see now in the segmentation, like informational searches have the highest search volume. Then you have commercial searches more like the interest and consideration phase. And then we have to transactional searchers who are much closer to the transaction. And often companies, they mistake the segmentation by okay, transaction searches they deliver the highest conversion rates. We are trying to focus from the content perspective, primarily on transactional searches, but they will miss out the majority of searches the consumer or potential consumer does. 10:11 Marcus: Because in that moment, when you are in awareness/interest phase, this is where you have more search volume. And this is where if you do not get the customer, it's more like, it's more unlikely that you get the sale in the end. So let me give you one example. So think about the user and the intent, right? So, you know, we are here in a Wix webinar. So people search for, “how to build a website.” So many people search it every month because they want to know, and if Wix want to be relevant for, “how to build a website”, they can't just have their landing page with a purchase button like here, see the prices and, you know, let's go and create your website. It's like people have different kinds of searches. And in this list, it's going, what you are going to get in a new CMS in Wix very soon, like different types of searches with different intents and “how to build a website” is a typical informational query. 11:04 Marcus: And if you want to be relevant for informational queries, there are certain things you should understand that people are looking for structured content. They look often for lists. People have gotten very lazy. They don't want to read long texts. They want to have like structured content, like step one, two, three, or they want to have like, like frequently asked questions, like structured content in that kind of sense, because they want to learn very quickly how to build a website. And then like, I dunno, like how to learn or these kinds of things. And this is what Wix actually did. And if you look at all these different types of queries, for the commercial query, “website builder”, you have a much higher search volume, then all the informational queries like “how to build a website.” And then you have your navigation queries, like “Wix website” with a decent search volume as well. 11:55 Marcus: And this is interesting because if you look at, and it's not just to please Crystal and Mordy here, it's because what Wix really actually did here is gave credit, what's called a holistic content landing page. So it means based on the different types of searchers’ intents, that people want to learn how to build a website, people want to understand how all these steps work. People really want to kind of like understand what Wix is offering in terms of product. They created one like holistic connected experience. And the interesting thing is, again, so the intent of keywords is really dominating like what Google is showing, because Google is very much like—I mean, Google's mission is to discover the best content, right? So Google really wants to make sure that websites are [not] ranking that just have keywords on their page, or like use the keyword and title text. 13:00 Marcus: So it's, it's really important that the searcher, in the end really finds as fast as possible, what it was intended to look for. So if you look at the commercial intent website builder, and the informational intent, “how to build a website”, you even see that the results look very different. Whereas on the commercial intent side, you mostly have like really product pages because, because Google understands, this is like a searcher that wants to build a website. And I mean, there are lots of like free, but also lots of really good commercial services. So Wix ranks you on number one. And if you look for the informational intent, ‘how to build a website”, you see the first one is, is a feature snippet. You have point one, two, three, four, five, six on how to create a website. That's often like, like a good intriguing piece for the user to see, okay, this is maybe even answering a question or I want to know. 13:51 Marcus: And also Wix is ranking on number one here, but we have like two different intents. If you look at the rest of the results, this is really interesting is if you just purely look at the rankings, Wix is the only website that is able to rank for both, for the commercial and for the informational query. Everyone else is different. On the left side here for the website builder, the commercial intent we primarily have product offerings like GoDaddy, Wix, Squarespace, et cetera. And on the right side, for the more informational intent query, we have mostly content pages like long form content pages. So you see here now, it's not just the case that you can only rank for one intent. If you create a holistic experience, you can cover the customer journey on a much broader scale. So the customer who comes to your website can learn. 14:46 But at the same time, once he has learned enough, he can even convert on your website, which is actually super cool and not very common. To get a little bit more background in terms of the distribution of keywords by intent, based on our study that we made just recently informational queries, the majority of queries people do. If you look at them, commercial and transactional queries, commercial queries are 10% transactional, like almost 20% and navigation elected minority of just 10% here. So keep this in mind, because if you create content, you should always make sure that you cover enough of like informational intent as well, because this is where we can capture a lot of search volume, which brings me to search volume by intent. So search volume by intent means—we at Semrush measure like how many people search on an average basis, on an annual basis, per average, certain keywords. And if you look at informational intent, it's still in the majority with 53% of all searches on our last keyword database. Then you have here like commercial, which is now in the minority with 8.5% in terms of search volume, because it's often like long-tail queries. It's like, “best iPad air online” or “best iPad deals for cheap” or something like this. So super close to the transactions or lower search volume, then you have transactional queries—16% and navigational queries here with 21% compared to the 10% we had before. And the reason is very simple because if you have like, lots of brands, like if people just search for brands like Wix or Nike or Facebook or whatever, this is typically trading the high search volume, which makes up this 21% here. So yeah, that brings me to a good point because informational searches, they represent a majority of searches and yeah, I mean, there's something that's actually really cool what Google is doing. 16:47 Marcus: There's a website Think with Google. It's like a blog that Google on a regular basis is publishing studies and really like pretty good insights. There was one study about the purest consumer where Google gave some pretty interesting insights about growth in certain areas for mobile searches and for this webinar, I think that's really cool because these numbers are from like 2017. So they're not from today, but important is about the growth. So the growth between like within the two year timeframe, and if you look at this, even small decisions are research like “best umbrellas” within two years had a 140% growth or “best travel accessories” had 110% growth or “best toothbrush” over a 100% growth, which is interesting. So people become more aware of how I can use our search engines to like help me in making my decision. I don't need to go into like a physical location that was before the pandemic. 17:51 Marcus: So I can just use a Google search and look at like certain websites that do give me some good options for like best and then product. And if you then look at mobile searches that have like underscore ideas that they also have grown within a two-year timeframe of over 55%, that's really like everything like “bathroom remodel ideas”, “gender reveal ideas”, “graduation party ideas.” And this is interesting because it's growing fast. And if you look at these different types of queries, look at this, and this is something you're going to get very soon in your preferred CMS. So if you look at this, so you get the search volume and you get the intent, and this is interesting because you see like best and then product, it's typically a commercial query. So like I said, much closer to the transaction, but often with like decent search volume, but informational queries, all the ideas stuff this has, as you can see here, very high search volume. 18:53 Marcus: And if you are, for example, a bathroom store that sells bathroom accessories, you know, sinks and bathtubs and whatever you really need to think about, what does the user search like much, much more before he's even considering a certain product and bathroom remodel ideas would be a perfect idea if you are like a shop to create as content. To kind of like get interested potential consumers on your website, and like really try to help the user to find good information, like how to remodel the bathroom. And you, of course you can like advertise your products and try to make like a good upsell here. So this is really like how you should think about the customer journey. So knowing this, this is not just the only thing that you get as [a] benefit. If you think about keyword intent and kind of like how you can like create targeted content. Often, if you create content for the different types in the customer journey, you also have like much more improved conversion rates on your transactional pages. 20:02 Marcus: So look at Wix’s homepage that is able to rank for informational, commercial or navigational queries. So by creating more holistic content, you can improve the conversion rates and you can kind of like reduce the bounce rates as another pretty good benefit here. Sure you also create more page views because like, if you have like, not just one piece of content for the whole customer journey, you maybe even produce more pieces of content because you know what is searched more in the informational stage and searched more in the transactional stage. If you're like a shop, you can create more content, you can even create more page views. Then your answer boxes, which [are] pretty interesting. So think about the example that I was showing like with Google search results, featured snippets or like these answer boxes that are often below organic. 20:53 Marcus: This is something you can trigger. If you, for example, have FAQs on your page and you use the schema.org integration for the FAQ markup. So it can even trigger these answer boxes, which increases your screen equity within Google search. Sure the next benefit is to reach a wider audience. Why? Because if you are like purely focused on like selling your products or services, that moment when you also create like informational content doesn't mean like everyone coming to your page is becoming a customer, but you can increase your brand awareness. You can increase the customer happiness. And maybe at some point, the person that like visited your page for like bathroom remodel ideas is going to remember your brand coming to your website at a later stage. And sure of course, much more traffic. So how can you do this? 21:47 Marcus: Like in our Keyword Magic tool in Semrush, it's quite simple. The magic tool works in a way that it's like a pivot table. You have an idea. So this one is for “coffee roaster”, and then you see all the results and next to the results, you see the intent, which is actually quite cool because you can filter very quickly, like certain things. Like if you want to create a piece of content, you should focus on informational queries. If you are a shop and you want to understand what kind of keywords do users need—users search to be like more ready for the purchase. You should filter by transactional or by commercial intent, which is cool. So—which you can do here. The next one, which I really love is you can filter by questions. Why? If you really want to understand what keeps your potential consumer up at night, what are they searching? 22:41 Marcus: What are the questions that you can very easily filter by questions only? And for each question, you have the volume and intent, which is cool because here—I had “coffee roaster” as a very broad term before and now people, I mean, I can see people search for “how to roast coffee beans” or “what is a blonde roast coffee.” So this is really cool because if you are a coffee roasting company, like maybe a physical location, like somewhere, or maybe you sell roasted coffee online. If you now create content that incorporates all these like questions, you can not only trigger these answer boxes or featured snippets. You can also get customers to your website because they're interested in something way before they even make a purchase. As you see here for example, “is dark coffee stronger?”. Hey, just great content, answer the question. 23:35 Marcus: And maybe you have a happy customer for life. And like I said, you can also filter by other intents. So this is informational, this is commercial intent. Do you see here? These queries are a little bit different and there's one also one cool thing in Semrush. We do also have like, intents that tend to [be] like informational and/or commercial. So we do not have a binary thing, like only informational, only commercial. Often keyword queries are even like tending towards like informational or commercial. That's something we even offer in that kind of sense, which is actually really cool. And if you are very serious about the business and you want to, you know, sell your products or services researching what people search, researching what people kind of search throughout the customer journey is actually one of the most important things you should do to create content. 24:30 Marcus: Yeah. And then, I mean, there's one other cool thing. Like I said, you should really think about the customer and what keeps them up at night, doing the whole, like journey, how to research product. So here is this example for guitar. And I know many friends that wanted to play a guitar that had in mind to play guitar or played the guitar in their youth. And they might search for things like “how to tune a guitar”. So if you are a guitar shop and you're selling like, good entry level, but also like super expensive electronic guitars, I don't know. The thing is you shouldn't only focus on like, like guitars in that moment, or if you are like a physical location, Google knows, for example, also where the searcher is when people search for where to buy a guitar, this is transactional intent, but this is really close to the transaction you see 1000 people searching versus “how to tune a guitar”, 18000 people searching. So it would be a much better thing if you are an expert anyway, and you have a guitar shop or guitar website, and you know how to tune a guitar and many other things around this topic, you should create the content. If you're an expert who will appreciate your content anyway, because Google is looking for like expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, the EAT concept. And that would be even a pretty good idea to have that content on the website. 26:11 Marcus: Yeah, let's continue here. Like I said, you can even search for different intents in this moment here, it's like informational and transactional, but there's one other thing I wanted to cover at the end is the keyword difficulty, which you're also going to get in Wix's backend very soon. And it's cool. Why? Because if you know that there's like high search volume on many different keywords, but the difficulty [is] potentially very high to kind of like compete for high search volume topics. You can even use the keyword difficulty at that moment. Easy to start with some more easier to kind of like entry level keywords. Yeah. So we're almost at the end on my presentation, at least. So it's important that you get the foundations right. So the keyword intent mapping is very important for you, that new content strategy that you know, that based on the customer journey, you provide the relevant content. 27:17 Marcus: Please do not try to have holistic content for every kind of topic. You should not try to kind of like create “how to tune a guitar” and have the products on the same page. You can have the products on a page, but you should not create a shop page with only like a large amount of content and hope that you can cover everything at the same time. So please be very diligent on what is necessary for informational and for commercial, transactional content. So get your foundations right. So for informational searches, again, these are typically queries where people search for a specific question or general information. This is something you should really leverage to grow your brand awareness by for example, providing proposed or other sorts of informational, educational content, I should definitely include FAQs on your page. Please do not forget to use schema FAQ mark-ups. 28:12 Marcus: And this will really help you to kind of like attract the top of the funnel traffic. Then for navigational queries even if you think like, okay, when people search for my brand or when people search for, I dunno something along my brand, like, I dunno like the login page or some other page, please be aware of that. It's very easy to optimize branded queries, but often at the same time, these large brands or brands in general have an issue to understand like, okay, there's some sort of queries people have around my brand, but you have to, your page is not optimized, maybe an affiliate or some someone else is going to outrank you even for these more navigational queries. So please also consider navigational queries in your keyword and content strategy. And it's again, easy to rank for them if you are the brand anyway. Then we have, again, commercial queries. 29:09 Marcus: This is what people typically use if they want to investigate a certain brand or service or products. This is something you should use in your content strategy when you, for example, create product comparisons or typically listicle pages. Listicle pages are not just for products. It could be also around like [the] “top 10 destinations in Germany” or “the best electric family vans” or something. So it's, it's really like more longer form content where people expect somewhat in-depth information, but really closer to the product. Then we have transactional queries. This is typically where searches already know what they want. They know maybe even where they want it. And this is even something that's highly like recommended to also run PPC ads at the same time, because this is really what Google typically says as one plus one equals three, because if it's very close to the transaction, you should have a good content strategy to have like good organic rankings. 30:14 Marcus: But at the same time, you can even capture like good traffic close to the transaction through PPC. This is my last slide. So why? I mean, I'm a data guy, so I can talk about that kind of stuff like for hours, but Google just recently made a core date. So on May 25th, they started, and I think two weeks later, Danny Sullivan announced they finished with the core date, but the core date has different influences. And I thought like, let's take a look at what kind of keyword intent had the highest influence, the highest volatility doing the Google core update. So I took a pretty long timeframe between May 25th and June 21st. And interesting is really that informational queries here, they had the highest volatility. So from my perspective, I can only imagine that, especially on the informational side, it's higher search volume. 31:15 Marcus: It's often that there's a much larger variety of different offerings that Google really try to readjust what are the best sources. I definitely have seen that for many keywords, but typically brands have good rankings who will now start to rank like more informational sources. I definitely have seen on many high search volume, like really shorter terms and Wikipedia, again, like gain rankings and YouTube at the same time, which is very interesting for transactional and commercial queries. We also had a pretty high volatility and maybe to explain volatility super quick. So volatility means that in my case, more than 50% of the rankings shifted during the timeframe of May 25th and June 21st, more than 50%. This is what I consider right here, volatility. And then the last one—navigational, they even also have a pretty high volatility of 40%. Even if you think like when people search for brand or for certain actions that they want to complete, and they know what actually the result they're looking for, even there at a 40% volatility, why is it important? 32:25 Marcus: So first it's important for you to know that there's constant change at Google. So even if you create content, you see that your competitors, they’re outranking you, and you're maybe not even found on the first page of Google because of the volatility. And if you make a good job and if you kind of like have experts or even expert content, if you maintain the content, like create the assets, maybe create like videos even create what people really want—based on like the high volatility is always good chance that on a regular basis, even with like a big update Google is going to consider you a much more important source and you will start ranking on the first page or even like in the first couple of rankings. Yeah. Thank you very much for the time and the attention. I know that sometimes the topic, I'm going too fast through all the slides, but that's why we have the Q and A now, and I'm really looking forward to all the questions. Thank you. 33:29 Crystal: That was really great. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed all of it. And I love seeing the whiz round with all of the Semrush stuff. Cause Semrush is such a great tool. There are so many parts of it. I have a question Mordy. Do you mind if I jump straight in? Okay. So you talked a lot about search intent and you shared the example from Wix using— obviously you talked a little about search intent, but you shared the example from Wix talking about ranking for a few different kinds of intent on the same page. One of the things that I thought was great about that example was that the formats, was that for the different kinds of intents, there were different, the content was formatted differently. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to that and maybe you could talk a little bit about how Semrush also segments for that within the tool. 34:28 Marcus: Yes. 100%. I mean, the thing is that Google is pretty aware of what the user wants. And nowadays people are very, like, they don't have like a high attention span, so they want to get to the results super fast. So Google even like sends the user very often to the paragraph they're looking for, if you have a long page. And what I found really good, what Wix did is, so you've seen, like there were different types of assets. So often they had like images to explain certain things. You had like lists, especially when people look for structured content and they want to have a list like a step-by-step guide or some sort of like bullet point list. This is something you should provide. And you can use information in Semrush in a way that you look at different SERP features that Google is triggering. 35:17 Marcus: So for example, when you look at the keyword, we also show you in Semrush, there are like image results, video results, there are related questions. So there are direct answer boxes. So there's a lot of like rich information in Semrush that gives you—just looking at the keyword a good of what kind of results are triggered. You know, of course, if you want to create content, you can't just like, like start to produce the content. You really have to understand what does the user want? And often it's maybe something different you have in mind. Right? So with, in living in the Tik TOK, like era, now I would say people need short form content. They need it super fast. And if you only provide long form content then just purely text, that's maybe even something where you're missing out your potential future consumer. 36:15 Marcus: So you have to really think about what kind of format you are using. I mean, we all know that Google is very good at machine learning. They announced this MUM concept, I think [it was] last year, right? Where Google is able to kind of like create the connections between different sorts of asset classes, between like videos and images and texts that Google understands, like the relationship between all of them. So that means like, if you're missing out, because you only provide, I dunno, only images or only texts, only video, and the user has some different, like expectations. You're maybe not being considered anymore as like the best ranking. 37:00 Mordy: Yeah, really. What's really interesting about what you're talking about. What you're saying right now is, and it goes back to this stat that you share, that most of the searches being done, and the volume of searches being done is around informational keywords. So how to do something, the best ways to do something. And you have Google getting really smarter as you mentioned. And that means that how Google understands what someone's looking for, even within the intent of informational, let's say, for example, it's around car insurance. So you have things like, I had to buy car insurance—”which policy should I buy”, “comparing different car insurance policies”, all sorts of informational content. And I think that as Google gets smarter at what it's able to do and how it's able to break down a topic, let's say the topic of car insurance and all the different information—types of informational content that is possible for a person to be looking for that Google's going to be getting better at showing those different pieces of content. So it's not just enough to know, yeah, I need to create informational content, but what kind of informational content should I be creating? Should I be creating a how to guide or a comparison or whatnot. I’m wondering what you thought about that. 38:06 Marcus: I mean, this is really, like a good point, you know, often I have tunnel vision. I'm an eCommerce website. I know, like I have good products, I have good prices, but I have tunnel vision on what the user actually wants, and this is where keyword research looking at the intents like brings a little bit outside to this, like bubble, because people often have any different touch points until they make a purchase right? So Google made lots of studies and they definitely found a high correlation that the more expensive a product is, the more it kind of like, really is valuable and at the same time, expensive the more searches you make. And they had one really cool study for a family that booked a family vacation [at] Disney World a couple of years ago. There was a study and they found out that they made more than 100 searches around the whole topic, like booking this family vacation at Disney World—to in the end, like make the purchase, which is really interesting because they looked up like, “what kind of point of interests are there are?”, “what kind of hotels are there?” 39:15 Marcus: They looked at things they can do in the area. So it wasn't just like one search and they made a purchase. They made over a hundred searches, which is something people often forget that when they create content. Often, I mean, this is really interesting. I was in a board meeting, not that long ago where [it] was asked, like, okay, I mean, we have all these like pages here, but the conversion rate is so low. It was about listicle pages with low conversion rate. But so what do we do with these pages? You know, so because often the decision-makers, they just look purely at certain KPIs, I don't know, conversion rate or deals or whatever. They don't look at like how the customer journey works. And if you start to get the customer very early in the customer journey, you can do something with these people. You can create more brand awareness about your products and people may come back, but to a different page. So then it's more like a problem of attribution. And you know, and that's something that's why I put in this, this guitar example here, because if you just purely sell like guitars in your online shop, but you don't write about how to kind of like tune a guitar or how to, I dunno, select the best one or you're missing out like a big audience. 40:26 Crystal: Yeah. And I think you mentioned expertise, authority, and trust, and that kind of content builds trust. If they know that you know how to tune a guitar, then you probably know about other stuff. So it's worth building that in. 40:40 Mordy: Well, yeah, I'm just going to say it's a good point. Just forget search engines for a minute, but you're your own users, when they come to your site, they find you, whatever keyword they show up at your website and they see that you've covered the bases all around, whatever is around guitar, buying a guitar, playing, that creates one is the funnel is messy, which is really Marcus. What you're saying, people just don't go, okay, well, I have the informational content. Now I'll go and buy it. It's really the research. And you think about yourself, your research, you go in and you go out, you come back, you think about it for a week. You percolate about it and you come back, you, maybe you buy. No I'm going to research more. That's what you know. So the funnel is messy. And at the same time, if you're able to show the user that at each point during their journey, you have the answer to their question—they're far more likely to buy from you. 41:30 Marcus: We do have a lot of questions. 41:33 Mordy: I was just going to say, I want to take some questions before we get into the questions actually about the particular insights that Marcus shared. There were, I noticed there were a lot of questions about the integration. So I'm just going to share my screen really quickly again, and quickly answer some questions or try to answer some questions that I saw about the integration with Semrush that is upcoming. Don't know why that's not loading. Okay. So for starters, the Semrush integration that you're going to have inside of Wix is free. You do not have to pay for it. There's a certain amount of searches you'll have per day. I don't remember the exact quota off the top of my head, but it should certainly be enough to help you get set up. So I'll just run through a quick example. Let's say on your homepage, you want to talk about— 42:15 Mordy: You know, I don't know, microphones for podcasting. That's what your website does. You might want to search for “microphones podcasting” and see what kind of keyword options that Semrush gives you, how often people are searching for those terms related to podcasts, microphones, how difficult it is to rank, and obviously the intent, or you might want to compare that to well, “USB microphones”. Maybe people don't search for “podcast microphone”. They don't call it that, they just search for “USB microphone”. So you can run another keyword search inside of Wix using Semrush data and see, okay, well only 10 people are searching every month for “podcast microphone”, but a million people, just making this number up, are searching for “USB microphone” and it's, you know, a medium difficulty to rank. So that's oops, apologies. That's the kind of data that you'll have inside of there. Now Semrush offers a freemium model. 43:09 Mordy: So you can go from here and you'll have access to do this from the Wix dashboard or go into Semrush proper. So Semrush is an independent SEO data platform, they have a free trial and recommend you check it out. After the free trial expires, by the way, there is a freemium model where you can keep exploring keyword and all other types of data [and] information through their freemium model. So yes, you'll have the access, the initial access to the foundational information inside of Wix, you will be able to use Semrush's freemium model that they offer in general, inside of the actual Semrush platform, which you'll have access to via the Wix platform where you can explore the keyword data and the possibilities a little bit more. So I just really wanted to share that before we get into the actual questions related to the webinar that Marcus just presented to us. Let me have one quick, second, I’ll pull up my questions. I apologize. I don't remember them all by heart. So let's start with the first question maybe let's start with is, what's a good example of how a small business can target users with keyword intent? That’s a really great question. 44:20 Marcus: I mean, the first question, is that, is it a, like a physical business, like with the physical location? So that's important because people that not only search for near me, like, I don't know, “best guitar store near me”, or “best hair stylist near me”. Also Google without the usage of near me, Google knows the location, especially on your mobile phones. So just people searching for “guitar store”, the near me information is important. So if you are a small business and you have a physical location, you should be sure that you use address information on your page. You should use schema.org, like to make sure that Google understands you’re, like in a certain location. And that's actually super easy. So then if you, if you also offer like services outside just a certain area, you should create content, like really based on what we have presented before. You should think about the customer journey from the beginning. 45:21 Marcus: If you sell flowers, you should think about, I mean, if you're not like sending your flowers to all states in the US or like internationally, you should think about like what people search for more broadly in your area. But let's say you ship on a broader scale internationally, even you should really start at the top, like, what are people searching? What are their pain points in the customer journey? And this is how you sort of start like a keyword strategy. You should not start writing just content right away for the search first keywords, because for Google, it's all about a connected topic. So this is semantically related. So that means if you even make proper keyword research and you start writing lots of different types of pages, it's often a case of these things belong together. 46:09 Marcus: That's what I, that's what I call it, holistic content that you put things together maybe as, an extreme, like, you know, like how in a certain order. And then of course, if you sell products or services or whatever, you should really try to understand, like how can you come to the point that like leading the user towards a certain product or service makes it make sense. Two things, I mean, I've seen companies being incredibly successful, creating a good blog, becoming an authority in a certain space without even like super promoting all their products, that it was just natural content they created because all of the expertise and they really created like a good brand around all [this] like informational [and] educational content without the necessity of like hyper promoting the product, that's maybe even the better thing to do. So this is something. 47:01 Marcus: And then there's one thing I really have to talk about because of maybe lack of expertise or lack of time, like really thinking about SEO. Often people try to create good content, even like good people, they try to like underestimate the complexity and the time they need to spend on things like researching instructional content. And they often believe like, okay, if I have like just a few hundred or maybe a few thousand words, that will be good enough, but content is something you really have to care about. You have to maintain, you have to update the content on a regular basis producing one thing once and pushing it online. And it's not enough. So if you really want to be relevant in a certain space, you have to make sure that you maintain and update the content on a regular basis. That you add information,that you add kind of like refresh the content when something is outdated. So this is really important. That's something people often underestimate. So content is really an investment. So that’s—I mean it, and if you do it right then, I mean, look at Wix’s homepage ranking for many different terms, high search volume terms, this is something that you will earn over time when, when you do right. 48:14 Crystal: And I think you mentioned pain points there a few times. And I think for small businesses, that's a really good one to think about. So for a small business, you're very close to your customers for a very, a lot of the time. And it can mean that they ask you the same question a lot. And so, you know, their pain points, they tell you, 48:32 Marcus: This is really a good point. I, seriously, I mean, all the small businesses, especially ones that have like, maybe like a direct connection to the customers because they go to your shop or because you do customer service, like yourself, you should write everything down. This is like the best source is your customer, you know. It’s not just Google keyword tool, or like Semrush magic keyword tool. It's not, it's like your customer's the best source. And that means that like, I mean, I've seen it in the medical space, to the best content is written by doctors, right? Not by someone writing about some sort of like sickness, it's like doctors, they can write about this stuff. And it's the same in every other industry. 49:15 Crystal: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you can use that information as your seed for your wider keywords to make sure that, so the information that you get from your customers, you can use as the seed, where for your keyword research to get like really extra top-notch content. 49:32 Mordy: I'm sorry, let's go to a question. Sorry. From Lizzie Jane, if we go with speaking keywords, by the way, if we go with the common keywords, does that mean we are basically joining millions of people offering that keyword. So how do we stand out from competitors using common keywords? It's a very good question. Crystal, I'm going to throw it to you first. 49:54 Crystal: So what I would say, as a small business, if you're a small business, I think the easiest thing to do is to go to Google and enter in that keyword. So for instance, we've been talking a lot about guitars. So let's say it was a guitar shop. You would enter “guitar shop”. There are millions and millions of guitar shops all over the world. And if you go to Google, they will actually filter you. And they will start to ask you more questions about that. Same thing happens within the Semrush tools. So you enter “guitar shop” and there will be smaller terms within that. And what you want, ideally with keyword research, you want to be a big fish in a small pond. So you need to find the best pond for yourself and also the most relevant pond where all of the fish are your friends now. 50:35 Crystal: So you want to make sure that you've got keywords that work. So you want to filter it down a little bit more so that you're not just saying “guitar shop”, let's say “guitar shop in your town”, or like “vintage guitar shop” or like you know, “great value guitar shop.” Let's say you sell really reasonably priced guitars, but just know what is the special thing about your business and try to tailor your keyword to go with that and make that your sort of core term. That's what I would say. 51:03 Mordy: You can't get around your own identity and what you do and what you offer that is the foundational core of everything. Should I, I'm sorry, Marcus, go ahead. 51:15 Marcus: I just wanted to make a reference. I mean, when people are interested in running, they also do not start to run the marathon the next day, right? So they start slow. I mean, they do training and they maybe start like with like a three-mile run a week later. So this is really how you should see content as well. You should not start with high search hyper-competitive keywords, you should start small and see like the progress then kind of like become better over time. 51:41 Mordy: There's always this question out there in the SEO world, there's a zero search volume keyword, right? Meaning no one's searching for this, there's no such thing as that really. Should I bother writing about it or targeting that topic? In my opinion, you could tell me if you disagree is yes, you need to, it's a search engine with your audience as well. You need to build trust. They need to understand this is who you are. This is what you do. This is the content that we can rely on you for. And if you start off writing for those longer tail longer kind of more specific kind of topics and keywords, you slowly build up that trust. You build up that authority. You build up that expertise in the eyes of your users and search engines, and then you can write and rank for a more competitive keyword. So I most definitely would disagree with zero search volume, don't write about it. No start, maybe start there, that's a good place to get going and build up your, your authority and your EAT as we like to call it. So a quick question, should I be creating content to target every intent Google shows on the SERP for all of my keywords? Very ambitious. Crystal, you’re shaking your head. 52:54 Crystal: I would say not, not everything all at once. And Marcus used Wix as an example, and Wix is actually really good at this. So topic clusters are something that people talk about. So think about your topic. What if you look up, if you look up like blogging or blogs or things like that, Wix has like some blogs on blogging and blogs on 120 different ways to make a blog, different blog topics. So you're covering lots of different parts of the intent. I would say one of the things that's great about SEO is that like, and Marcus talked about this before. It's not a one-shot deal. You can write your blog now, and then you can go back and you can add stuff in later. So like maybe it's “best guitars” [or] “best electric guitars” and maybe the Fender Stratocaster is the best one right now. 53:40 Crystal: Then maybe like this other one makes this great new upgrade. And actually it's not the best anymore. And you can go back and you can update that and make the new guitar, the best guitar, or, you know, different laws will change or other things will change and you need to update it. And that's great. Google loves that because they already know your page. They already know that it was good content. And then you can say that you've updated. And then they know not only was this good before, but oh my gosh, they're keeping on top of it. And it looks great. And it's, you know, it's still good. So this is, this is something that people are looking after. So I think—don't do it all at once. Like Marcus said, like it's, you know, it's a marathon, not a sprint, like get in there, do a bit now, do some more and just keep going. 54:23 Marcus: Yeah. I mean, I think this is really like how we should do it, right? I mean, you should, if you start with like keywords with the lowest search volume and less competition, it's also like super exciting to see your content showing up. It's also something that's like pretty motivational. And what you said, like updating content is one of the things that I've seen most companies struggling with, because it's like, if you don't see it anymore, it's like out of your mind. And if you see content creation as a business, you only think about new content and I've seen companies be most successful when they do maintain and care about content that wasn't even created like a couple of years ago. But like you said, with the Fender Stratocaster, they updated and then maybe they can kind of like be the most relevant source, you know? 55:13 Crystal: And I think we talked about formats as well. Another good way to look at, to change the intent or to add intent to a webpage is like—let's say you had a webpage that was all about how to tune a guitar. And it was a written bit of content. And you talked about the SERP volatility there with different intents. So one of the things that changed in the last algorithm was there was a lot more video that was present. So let's say you had this blog that was written about how to tune a guitar. You could go back to that blog and add a video about how to tune a guitar, and then you would be adding more intent and you'd be able to show it more features. And it would still be the same blog and would still have that ranking stuff, but you'd be able to satisfy customers and it, and it in a different way, which is what it's all about really. 55:55 Morfy: And that's, by the way, a great way—if you want to understand how Google is looking at intents, if you Google something for like “how to play guitar” and you see those images and videos and all sorts of different kinds of media formats, and you know, that Google looks at this, and say, “hey, the intent here is for the person—if you're creating content, well, they want video content, or if they're searching ‘how to make meatloaf’, they want an image there.” So look at what Google is doing. That'll help you clue you into what the wider intent is. So Barbara Danielson asks, “how can I, this is right up Marcus’s alley, right? How can I find out what people who find my site are searching for?” 56:32 Marcus: I mean, just this really where you can like fully use like the full spectrum of Semrush. So if you put in your landing page, Semrush will tell you for what kind of keyword queries any [of your] pages [have] already [been] found, for what kind of search volume and what your ranking is. So this is really a pretty good starting point. And from there, you can start to look at your competition and do the same. So what I often do is—so if I think about one keyword, so for example, “how to tune a guitar”. I take the first ranking and I click on the rankings on the keywords that this page also ranks for. And it's often like hundreds, or maybe sometimes thousands of keywords. So out of one seed keyword, looking at [the] landing page that ranks the best I see what are the keywords this page is also ranking for. 57:19 Marcus: Then I can look at intent again. I see, okay. Top of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. So this type of research is very important because otherwise people get stuck with just the word, a keyword, but in the end, it's like [a] topic, which is much broader and more holistic. So and if you don't know what your page is already known for, you can also go, I'm not having access to Semrush. You can also go to Google Search Console and take a look there because Search Console also gives a lot of pretty good information for free. 57:51 Mordy: So I want to get to one more question, we’re going to squeeze this one in. I think it's a really good question from Anna about keyword ideas and searches. Isn't this just a reflection of us being in the pandemic for two years, and now the trend around whatever keyword will massively change as people go back to normality. 58:11 Marcus: I mean, I totally see where this question is coming from, especially during the pandemic. I mean, all these like websites like Pinterest, or like, or other DIY pages, they really kind of like had a huge growth and especially in searches and popularity, but I do believe like, like the laziness and the knowing that Google is going to provide me [with] any answer I want really. I mean, seriously, people are not going to go away from like idea searches or, best of searches because they know that Google or maybe another search engine as well does a pretty good job in organizing information for me. So that's why I don't think it's going back to normality and you can always use like Google Trends to kind of like challenge, like, “hey, is this really going away?” You can use Google Trends to see if there's like a decline in searches. And I doubt that idea searches in general are going to decline in the future. 59:11 Crystal: And I think also people, you know, Google is a, you know, it's a, it's a two way thing. So, so Google will serve results. And they'll say, “we have this result for you.” And people will say, “I don't like that.” Or people or people will say, “well, I really, really like all those Pinterest searches or I really like having lots and lots of videos for that.” And Google sees people like this, we’ll give them more of that. And I think like within the last year, for instance, Google got much better at understanding video. So they're able to auto add chapters at different sections since you do different parts. And so that will change where things show on the SERP. And that will cause volatility further down because like previously they were only able to index certain text in a certain way, and now they can read videos in a different way as well. So as the technology changes that also can affect different rankings and things, which is another reason why it's good to have a mix of content in your content. 1:00:06 Mordy: Yeah. And content is constantly changing and it's people the way people look for content and what they're looking for very slowly sometimes, but it's constantly changing. I think back and I’ll end on this point, you know, 20 years ago, people were searching for music. They were searching for CDs, right? How many people are searching about CDs or cassettes anymore at this point? Right? 1:00:24 Crystal: Only to sell them. 1:00:26 Mordy: What do we do with them? I found a whole bunch of CDs here. I don’t know what to do with them. But the way people look for things, what they're looking for, it's going to change over time. And that's just the way content is. On that happy note, thank you so much for joining us. And Marcus, by the way. Thank you. That was amazing and wonderful. I really appreciate your time. Crystal as well for us. We're back again next month with another webinar for you. We’re talking about your homepage and SEO for your homepage. That’ll be Crystal and myself. You can look for more SEO content on wix.com/seo/learn. That's wix.com/seo/learn. Learn more and more about keywords and intent and all sorts of great SEO information and check out our next upcoming webinar. You'll also get an email with this webinar recording as well. So not to worry. Thank you everybody. 1:01:21 Mordy: Thank you so much. And thank you, Marcus. 1:01:23 Crystal: Thank you Marcus. Bye bye.

August 23, 2022 Updated: December 6, 2022 With the right internal linking strategies, you can get as much as five times more traffic per page. In this webinar, SEO consultant Cyrus Shepard delves into insights like this one from his case study on 23 million internal links and discusses effective strategies and best practices so you can improve crawlability and increase traffic to your pages. Table of contents Internal links: What and why What are internal links? Why internal links are so important Prioritize diverse anchor text over internal link quantity More internal links don’t necessarily mean more clicks Why more internal links isn’t always better 5 tactical tips to improve your internal linking Webinar transcript Meet the webinar hosts Download the webinar deck Internal links: What and why Creating a robust network of internal links can take time and discipline. To help you decide whether it’s a worthwhile tactic (and it almost always is), you must first understand what internal links are, how they’re different from external links, and why they’re important for both SEO and user experience. What are internal links? An internal link is a link from a page on your site to another page on your site. Shepard mentioned three elements of an internal link: 01. Href element , which identifies the link for browsers. 02. URL , which tells the browser where you’re linking to. 03. Anchor text , or the clickable part of the link. Internal links are different from external links in that they point to another page on the same domain (as where external links point to a different domain). While this may be obvious to some, this distinction is important when discussing links for SEO. Images can also be used to add links (internal or external). While images don’t provide you with the opportunity to add anchor text, the alt text (which is first and foremost used for accessibility reasons), can be used to describe the image so that search engines can get an idea of what the image depicts. Why are internal links so important? Links are an official Google ranking factor and one of the most important parts of the search engine’s algorithm (or any search engine’s algorithm, for that matter). As a ranking factor, internal links can influence rankings in Google search results. However, remember that there are potentially hundreds of ranking factors, and a fixation on any single factor is unlikely to significantly improve your rankings. Internal links also pass PageRank throughout your site. In a nutshell, Google uses PageRank to understand the importance of a page by measuring the number of links (external and internal) pointing to it. When Page A has a link to Page B, some of Page A’s importance gets transferred to Page B. In addition, the anchor text applied to a link gives users an idea of where the link will take them and signals relevance for search engines. Another important benefit is that internal links can help Google (and other search engines) crawl your website. If you create links to your important pages, Google can use that link to discover the page, which can help get it into search results more quickly. Internal links also signal to Google which pages on your site are the most important. Beyond the search-related benefits, internal links also give visitors a path to follow to browse more of your content, products, etc. This helps keep visitors on your site, giving you more opportunities to familiarize them with your brand or market. Prioritize diverse anchor text over internal link quantity Implementing an internal link is easy compared to earning backlinks from external sites . Even so, there are considerations to keep in mind, including anchor text and frequency. More internal links don’t necessarily mean more clicks from search “As you added internal links to a page . . . . traffic tended to rise, but only up until a certain point,” Shepard said, referring to the results of a study conducted by his company Zyppy . “After about 40 or 45 internal links to those pages, traffic actually started to decline after that.” “Then we looked at the anchor text,” he said. Zyppy’s study found that as the anchor text variety increased, the traffic also increased. “This seemed to be the driving factor with traffic,” he said. "And if there’s one key I want you to walk away with from this webinar, it’s that we should be increasing not necessarily the number of internal links, but increasing our anchor text variations." —Cyrus Shepard Based on this observed correlation, site owners and SEOs should prioritize anchor text variations instead of simply ensuring that the links are on the page. Anchor text variations for a recipe blog. Why aren’t more internal links always better? “We found when you have anything more than 40-50 internal links, those tended to be sitewide navigation links,” Shepard explained. “Because it’s in your navigation, everybody can see it. But, how many anchor text variations do you have? Well, you have one, because every page has the same link [and anchor text].” —Cyrus Shepard For larger, established sites, this may be less of an issue because they may have a robust external backlink profile for search engines to factor in. Small- to medium-sized businesses that haven’t established authority in their niches “tended to do better if they didn't link their important pages in their navigation and linked throughout the text [instead],” Shepard said. “My best advice is do what's best for the user and use navigation links for navigation when you want people to find your page. But, don't do it for SEO reasons because the data isn't so clear that those navigation links are going to help your SEO—but, if they help the user, go ahead,” he clarified. 5 tactical tips to improve your internal linking In addition to the guidance above, Cyrus also shared the following tactics to help you get more value from the internal links you’re adding anyway. 01. Audit your anchor text Use a variety of anchor text for your internal links, as pages with more variations tend to rank better and drive more traffic, according to Shepard’s findings. Look for a tool that allows you to export your anchor text (such as Screaming Frog) for easier analysis and organization. “Make sure you know, for every page of your site that’s important, your internal anchor text variations going to that page,” Shepard recommended. 02. Remember your alt text “People forget to fill in their alt text on the image link, but you have to because that counts as the anchor text when you use that image to link,” Shepard said. Alt text also serves as crucial information for screen readers, enabling you to optimize for both search and visually impaired audiences. 03. Use Internal links to help both pages rank better Internal links can help increase traffic for both the page being linked to and the one being linked from, according to a study by SearchPilot. Related content sections offer one way to easily add internal links, Shepard highlighted. Since this does not affect the main content of the page, this tactic may be particularly useful if you’re just looking to add links (and not update the entire page while you’re at it). 04. Link high and tight “If you’re giving people something to click on and you’re telling them something important, put it front and center so that they know where to click,” Shepard said. To that end, add your most important links higher up on the page and avoid burying them in your footer. After all, there’s no guarantee that a user will make it to the bottom of the page before they leave your site. 05. Leverage automation Automation (Shepard recommends tools like inLinks, Twylu, or SiteSeer) can help you find relevant pages to link from at scale, which may be tough to do using manual methods. Automation can be a real timesaver in this regard because it can help you identify internal linking opportunities on older content, which (if not updated) won’t have links to anything that was published after it. Transcript: Internal linking strategies for SEO success Speakers: Cyrus Shepard, Co-Founder, Zyppy Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding, Wix George Nguyen, Director of SEO Editorial, Wix 00:00 Mordy: Okay, hello everybody! Welcome. My name is Mordy Oberstein, I'm Head of SEO Branding here at Wix and we have an amazing guest for you today, an amazing webinar about internal linking and the success around internal linking for your SEO success and your strategy. Before we get started, let me just say we are recording the session, so please, if you missed something or if you feel you want to go back and listen to something again–you will get a recording via email in the coming days after the webinar, it is being recorded. With that we have an absolute legend with us today, he's an OG from the SEO community. I'm a little disappointed he's not wearing a fedora hat today, but that's okay... he's Cyrus Shepard! Hey, Cyrus! How are you? 0:42 Cyrus: Good morning or good afternoon, wherever you are in the world! Happy to be here. 0:49 Mordy: And joining us, with Cyrus, is our own Head of SEO Editorial, George Nguyen. Hey George, thanks for joining us. 0:55 George: Hey everyone! This is my webinar debut, right? 1:00 Mordy: It is your Wix webinar debut, but it's certainly not your webinar [debut] 1:02 George: Oh, that's true, that's true. It's just an honor to be here with, uh, hundreds of attendees, first and foremost. And of course with Cyrus, I'm really looking forward to learning all I can about internal linking, especially because we have our own publication all about SEO. I want to take all your wisdom and apply it as soon as possible. 1:13 Mordy: George, we're going to quiz you afterwards to make sure that all the practices that Cyrus laid out in the webinar that we're following on the hub 1:19 George: Make it public! Let's make this humiliation, you know, so there's no screenshots, let's just get it out of the way now. 1:25 Mordy: Sounds great, okay, so before we jump into all the internal linking goodness and data and strategy that Cyrus is going to share, let me just quickly explain the format. So as mentioned, Cyrus Shepard the founder of Zippy SEO and absolute SEO legend is going to share some insights, some data, some strategy around internal linking. Which is really one of, I consider, the low-hanging fruits of SEO. It's really a very easy thing you can do in order to give Google some greater understanding about your web pages, about your website, and to boost your rankings. 2:00 Mordy: After Cyrus is done sharing his insights and his data, we'll have a little bit of a discussion between the panel, after which we will have a Q&A session so if you have questions about SEO and internal linking, please feel free to share it. Not in the chat feature but in the Q&A feature inside of the zoom platform. So again, please there will be a Q&A session after the presentation, after a short panel discussion, please feel free to share, we encourage you to share and ask questions. There also will be moderators who may be answering your questions along the way so that we can answer as many questions as possible. Cyrus with that, I'm ready if you're ready. I'm definitely ready. I think we're all ready to learn more about internal linking. 2:42 Cyrus: Alright, thanks Mordy. While I figure out how to share my screen over here, let me just say I'm already a little intimidated. I do a lot of webinars and the Wix team, you and everybody else, has been one of the most professional organizations I've ever worked with–so this should hopefully be pretty good. 3:02 Cyrus: Alright, alright, did that work? Everybody see everything? 3:07 George: Oh, we look good. 3:09 Cyrus: Alright, alright. So today we are talking about internal linking superpowers and this isn't just any presentation on internal linking. This is the internal linking Top Gun Maverick special edition. Now, why did I include Tom Cruise and Top Gun Maverick? Am I just trying to take advantage of one of the top movies of the summer that was reasonably entertaining, but you know not very realistic and kind of cheesy? No, that's not why this is the Top Gun Maverick special edition–it's because of this guy, Joseph Kaczynski, the director, he's like six foot eight, he towers over Tom Cruise. Joseph is actually from my hometown, that is Marshalltown, Iowa. There's not a lot to do in Marshalltown, Iowa. There's a Maid-Rite, a pizza joint, I live on the west coast of the United States, Astoria, Oregon, uh, it's about 1800 miles from Astoria to Marshalltown. That's two hours if you fly an F-18 Tomcat like they did in the movie. So this really has nothing to do with internal links, but if i want to if I want you to walk away with a couple of things from today's presentation, it's that, uh, cool things from Marshalltown, you know eventually, uh, come out of, come out of, that city and also internal links are incredibly important to your internal linking strategy so with that awkward introduction, uh, let's dive in to internal links. Let's go get those internal links. So there are some things in this presentation that are slightly technical, uh, if you have a lot of experience with SEO you're going to be very comfortable, for those that don't do a lot of SEO or aren't very technical, some things may feel a little intimidating, but we're going to try to go slow and we're going to start try to start on the same page and hopefully, uh, you can ask some questions if you're confused afterwards but hopefully you'll come away with some insights. So you probably have heard of internal links, you've probably heard that they move the needle if you do a Google search of internal links SEO or case studies, you see, you see all these screenshots of people showing their SEO success. Charts that go up and to the right, uh, we hear this over and over and over again. We know, as we know, internal links work for helping you improve your traffic and we're going to dive into a little bit why. So what are we talking about, I want to make sure everybody's on the same page. What are we talking about when we talk about the internal link? Uh, an internal link is a link from your site to your site. It links your pages together as opposed to lurking to an external site, somebody else's site or an external site linking to you. There's three elements to an internal link, uh, and this gets this is a little bit technical but we have an a href element this this tells, uh, this tells browsers that this is a link, uh, it has a link to your website, not somebody else's website, and it has anchor text the third element. The anchor text, uh, is the clickable part of the link–the part of the link that you see that you click on, and this is very important for Google, for reasons that we'll get to in just a few moments. So we also have internal image links if you link an image to another page on your website that also counts as an internal link and here we have, you know, a couple of important distinctions. We have the source of the image but also the alt text. The alt text is, uh, put in for accessibility reasons. It describes the image, in case of the image link you don't have the text that you can click on, but the alt text counts, uh, for search engines in a way that again we'll talk about a little further on in the presentation. But just remember that the alt text is important for the internal image link. So why are internal links so important? Well first of all we know that links are an official Google ranking factor. It's rare that Google talks about what their ranking factors actually are. They like to hide them from us, so we have, so SEOs don't manipulate them, so they have some integrity. But links are included in the original Google PageRank patent. Google has been talking about them, uh, since you know, the early 2000s. Uh, it's one of the most important parts of Google's algorithm. So we know that the links are important from a Google point of view. Uh now, Google uses links in two different ways and this sort of, this sort of, gets into the weeds a little bit but there is popularity and relevance when Google sees a lot of links coming to your website or a particular page on your website that indicates a signal of popularity. Google says, "oh, there's a lot of links coming in. This must be a popular page. It's probably trusted. It's probably an authoritative source. We're going to rank that page." That's known as page rank. Uh, the other signal that Google looks at with internal links is relevance. And that's where the anchor text comes in. The clickable part of the link, Google will look at those words and see what the link is about and that's the hint as to what your page is about. So if you run a page about Goose from Top Gun and people are linking to you with the words "goose", that's the anchor text signal. And Google might say, "oh, this is relevant to this particular topic. So those are the two signals that we want to focus on; popularity, page rank, and relevance anchor text. So internal links aren't just about popularity and relevance. They also help Google crawl your website when you have a bunch of links on your homepage oftentimes the first links that Google are going to crawl are the pages that you link to from your site. So if you provide Google with pages throughout your website linking to other important pages on your site that help Google find, crawl, and discover your pages, it also tells Google what pages on your site are most important. So that's another important way that, that's why we want to pay attention to internal links for any other reason.It also improves engagement signals. Now, I can do an entire webinar on Google engagement signals. But consider this, consider this piece of text here, with no links on it, and your user finds this link. What are they going to do when they land on this page, they see this page. Well, they're not going to do anything they might read it, hopefully, they read it. But there's nothing to click on. There's nothing for the user to engage with on this page–to click on other pages of your website, consider another page. And these are, these are, from my own website where I have a bunch of links; internal links, external links. What's a user going to do when they land on this page? Well, hopefully, they'll read it again, but now we've given them an option to click on other pages, explore pages on our website, and engage further. What's this going to do, this is going to increase the amount of time that users spend on my site, it's going to increase the number of pages that they visit on my site, it's going to lower my bounce rate–not a Google ranking signal, but an important signal nonetheless. And the more users engage with my site, you'll, we'll see over time, and we've done studies on this, it's usually correlated with higher Google rankings and more traffic so even if it isn't, you're still giving your users more satisfaction because they're viewing more pages, they're reading your top content, and you're giving, you're giving them things to do and engage on. People love clicking on links but you have to give them to them in order to make that happen. First, here's my favorite thing about links. Now, I work in the SEO world and it's often our job to build links because it's an official Google ranking signal. But building links is one of the hardest jobs in SEO and I've sent out emails. I'm sure you've gotten emails, "hey you, want to look at my content"–it's a, it's a terrible, hard, agonizing approach to building links. Uh, and when you ask for links from another website you usually get a terrible response rate. "Will you link to me?" No, we've all had that experience. So why, why is nobody linking to my content? Now, internal links probably don't carry the same weight as external links but the cool thing is you get a hundred percent of the links that you ask for. Yes, when Tom Cruise asks Tom Cruise for a link he gets that link and so do you. You have the same internal link building powers as Tom Cruise because you get 100 percent of the links that you ask for. They're easy, they're sitting there, waiting in the basket just for you to pick up and grab and take and most, most webmasters aren't taking advantage of those internal links that they can give to themselves. So that's why internal links are important. So I know what you're saying, at this point you've done SEO, you're a marketer, you're saying, "Cyrus, my links are optimized. Whenever I write new content, I make sure to link from four or five pages on my site. Uh, we have a process for our writers to do this, I do it myself". I'm here to tell you no, your internal links are not optimized. I know because we've looked at the data and we have the receipts. So, here's a uh, here's a study done by in-links. It's a great uh, internal linking optimization tool that I've used in the past. They did their own study using their own methodology and what they did was they looked for uh, related pages on individual websites. Now if pages are related they should be linking to each other, uh, to help you know, those contextual, relevant signals that we're talking about with anchor text. And in their own methodology, they found that people were missing 82 percent of the important link opportunities. Now, that's a lot. That means four out of five links are internal links are being missed. Now you could argue with their methodology uh, and, and some is perfectly valid. So we ran our own study uh, at my company, Zippy, we looked at 1800 websites and 23 million internal links. Now a caveat, 23 million links sounds like a lot uh, but in the scope of the internet with billions and trillions of links, it's just a tiny bit. But this gave us some clues as to how people were actually internally linking and this, these, this was a cross section of sites across the globe. uh, we looked at everything, and we wanted to find out how often people were linking to their own content internally. And what we found was shocking, depressing, but not too surprising. Most pages had one internal link on the far, far left side of the column and this does not even include pages that were orphaned pages that had zero internal links. Uh, in fact 53 of all the pages we looked at only had three or fewer internal links. Uh, and that's not very many. Three or fewer, that might help your crawling but we're going to get into the number that you should have. In just a minute, uh, in fact only 24 had more than 10 internal links so this verifies that In-link study that we looked at that 82 percent of internal link opportunities were probably being missed even among people who think they're doing a good job of internal linking. So if you're smart, or maybe not so smart like me, you might be asking, "well, l how many internal links do I need, Cyrus? If three isn't enough, uh, what's a good number? Are you saying 10? Are you saying seven? How many internal links should I have?". There's no one definitive answer to that. But we do have some clues. So that study I just told you about was kind of neat because not only did we look at 1800 websites, 20 some odd million links, we were also able to look at the traffic for each of those pages. and to my knowledge this was the first study of its kind where we could actually correlate actual Google traffic to internal link signals. Uh, most studies, you know, use third party data whatever–we actually had first party Google search console data so we could look at the actual traffic and try to dissect some signals, and this is what we found. We pulled everything together uh, now the bottom, the bottom number is the number of internal links to the url, uh, we went up to 100 for this chart, and the left is Google search clicks, uh, 0 to 10. Those don't sound like very high numbers but just keep in mind that most pages on the internet get very little traffic so these are averages. Uh, some pages get hundreds of thousands of clicks so what we found was this interesting trend that actually the more clicks, the more links that you had, actually kind of trended down. But- but- the chart was kind of weird, uh, as you added internal links to a page, you know, "click here, click here, click here", and you're adding links–traffic tended to rise, but only up into a certain point after about 40 or 45 links. Internal links to those pages' traffic actually started to decline after that and that was kind of weird. Why did, why does traffic start to increase but then we see that, dramatically in fact, but then we see traffic start to decrease. So this was a mystery, this was a mystery to us. What- what's happening here? Why do, why does adding more internal links seem to work to a point, but then the effect kind of wears off after that? Then we looked at the anchor text because remember there are two signals with a link that are two big signals. There's popularity, the number of links, uh, you could think of it, but there's also relevance which is the anchor text. And so we looked at the number of different types of anchor text to each link because links can have different anchor text, you can link using different anchor text each time or you can use the same anchor text. So what we did, I'm getting in the weeds a little bit, but we looked at the number of different anchor texts going to URLs. Holy cow. And this is what we found as the anchor text variety increased, the traffic increased dramatically. And we ran this data three different times. We cleaned it, we threw out outliers, no matter what we did, there was a dramatic increase in traffic with anchor text variations–not just the number of links. But the number of different anchor texts, the number of different phrases, and the way you said things, this seemed to be the driving factor with traffic and, sorry, got ahead of myself there. As we get in, as we get increased, uh, the traffic kept going up is a little bit less reliable data. So this is what we want to focus on. And if there's one key I want you to walk away from in this webinar, it's that we should be increasing, not necessarily, the number of internal links, but increasing our anchor text variations. And we're going to go into a few techniques on how to do that. How do I increase my anchor text variety? We want to pass this test. So what are we talking about when we talk about anchor text variety? We're talking about all those different words that we can link to this page. So let's say this is our, this is our page, uh, on recipes–Pinch of Yum, pretty cool little recipe website and we want to link to our recipe page. Well, there are different ways that we could do that. We could, we could simply say, "recipes", every time we write a link to this page. Or we can mix it up a little bit on this page. We say recipes from, from another page, we link to it saying, "tasty dishes, top rated recipes, click here", not very helpful but certainly that's an option. We might use the URL, this is called a naked URL, "pinchofyum.com.recipes", where we don't actually use any words i.e. "our favorite is", etc...etc...etc. So what I'm suggesting is mixing it up like this is a much better tactic than simply linking to it the same way every single time. In fact, we've sort of always known this in SEO but our data shows that the effect is dramatic. That you really want to mix it up every time, and that the number of these variations is what you really want to be looking at instead of the raw number of links, which is the traditional SEO way to do it. So one way to think about this is think about your links in your navigation, uh, and how that impacts anchor text variety. So, traditionally you put, you have an important page–you put it in your navigation, but think about how that works when you put a link in your navigation. You have lots of links throughout your site. Every page on your site links to the same page. Because it's in your navigation, everybody can see it. But how many anchor text variations do you have? Then, well, you have one–because every page has the same link. In this example, it's "How it Works". Every page links to the "How it Works" page with one anchor text. So you have lots of links, lots of popularity, but not, not a lot of relevant signals, not a lot of variation. Now, let's contrast this with a link we put in the body, the body of the text in cold outreach strategy. This is in the blog post, this is a link that Amanda, our friend Amanda Sparturo put in cold outreach strategy. Fewer links you have to manually place them, put them in your blog, but you have an infinite anchor text variety because every page can link differently. You can increase your anchor text variation that way, but this is a complex strategy. Should you link in the navigation? Should you link in the body? What we found in the data, uh, going back to the study. Remember when the chart went down? Uh, with more internal links, we found when you have anything more than 40-50 internal links those tended to be site-wide navigation links. And they didn't perform as well as when the links were in the body. Getting lots of text navigation, uh, lots of anchor text variation so these, these URLs at the top of chart that we saw less traffic, these tended to be pages that were linked to in the top navigation. And there are certainly, there are certainly variations, uh, the data had spikes in it for popular sites and what we tend to see uh, was sites that had lots of authority like Home Depot, lots of popularity. They could get away with big navigation, uh, because lots of other sites are linking to them from all over the internet–for, and so it varies. So you're asking yourself, "should I put a link in the navigation or a link in my body?". If you're a big site like Home Depot, our data suggested–go ahead and put it in. Go ahead and put it in your navigation because it doesn't really matter because they have so much authority but smaller sites in our data so, uh, smaller businesses, mom and pops, medium-sized businesses that aren't Home Depot, they tended to do better if they didn't link their important pages in their navigation and linked throughout, throughout the text. Our friend Backlinko, popular SEO, Brian Dean, um, hugely successful site. This was his, this is his navigation, uh. There's just four links in the whole thing, uh, as a user I sometimes found it frustrating to navigate Backlinko's site because I could never find anything in the navigation. But as SEO was extremely well by limiting his navigation in the top. Uh, he was able to do infinite anchor text variations in the body adding those links himself and there may have been other reasons that he did this but this is something to consider when you're formulating your internal linking strategy. Navigation links or in body links? My best advice is do what's best for the user and use navigation links for navigation when you want people to find your page. But don't do it for SEO reasons because the data isn't so clear that those navigation links are going to help you SEO, but if they help the user go ahead. So here's a question for you, and this kind of gets into some SEO geekery. Excuse me, what happens when you link twice on the same page to, to one of your pages. For example you have a link in your navigation that goes somewhere but you also link to it down in your body. Here's an example, uh, from one of the posts I wrote for Moz back when I used to work for them. We have this popular page, Free SEO Tools. Well I wanted to write a post on Free SEO Tools so I linked to it in the body of the post. Here's a question that SEOs have been asking themselves for 20 years, "which link does Google use? Do they use both links equally? The link in the navigation and the link in the body?" Well traditionally, uh, early in the days of SEO we had this thing called first link priority–that means that Google is going to treat those links differently. The and, here's how, here's how first link priority works with Google. Google will count the first link more than the second link. Specifically, the first link, they'll get both signals page rank and anchor text, popularity and relevance. But if they find a second link to the same page, on the page they don't count the anchor text, they only count the page rank, the popularity. So I'm going fast here, but let's keep this in mind, what we care about is the anchor text and what we're saying with first link priority is, traditionally, Google only counts the anchor text for the first link on the page. So this was 15 years ago, we want to find out with this new data, is this still true in 2022. Is Google only counting those first links for anchor text–which is what we care about? So I ran an experiment, I ran an experiment updated for 2022 where I added a bunch of different links all going to the same page from different pages. And then, I wanted to see how Google measures those links. Uh, set up. The setup was kind of complicated. But the important thing to know is, uh, a bunch of different links were all on the same page going to the same page. I want to see the anchor text that Google counted because anchor text and those variations are what we care about. And I was able to do this, using Google Search Console. Uh, if you don't use Google Search Console–it's a wonderful tool with lots of data and it's free. They have a report in there called links and you can see your top linking text. I was able to set up a sample site so I could isolate the data. For, for the most part, Google Search Console isn't very good for the link report. But in this case, it did help me. Uh, we'll go over some tools here in just a bit. So a page looked like this. It was just an example page and I did various scenarios. So here's the first test. Here's the first test. I have a page and I have an image link linking to a page. And below it, I have a text link linking to the same page. Remember, an image link–we're going to use the alt text for the anchor text. And the second link, it's the clickable part. So, I ran the test. I waited a few weeks and then I saw which anchor text Google recorded. Uh, what do you guess happened when we ran this test? Which links do you think Google counted? Both of them. Both of them. So, this is good to know. This matches with traditional signals. Uh, if, if you have an image link and a text link, Google seems to count both the anchor texts. Okay, good. This is great for when you, when you're selling products and you, have an image of the product and a text link below it that you can vary up your anchor text. This gives you a chance–instead of using the same anchor text both times, you can use different anchor text. Alright, so that was that test. Next test is a little more complicated. I have a text link going to the page. I have a second text link with different anchor text going to the page. And I have a third image link with different alt text going to the page. What do you think happened in this instance? Oh! Google didn't index the second anchor text. This also goes with what, uh, the traditional signals, but very surprising, Google did pick up the image. So it seems if you have at least one image, uh, Google will generally pick that up no matter where it is on the page. But, they'll still only pick up the first text anchor text. Um, and suppo-, and presumably, if we had another image link, they would only take the first one. So we're only getting two anchor text varieties on this page even though we have three anchor texts going to the same page. So let's make the test more complicated: text link, text link, image link, text link. So four potential anchor text on this page, all linking to the same page. What's Google going to index? Well, here's what we would predict. Here's what we would predict, uh, based on our previous test we would predict that Google counts the first anchor text, ignores the second, counts the third because it's an image link and ignores the fourth because it's a text link. This is what we predict. Now, I am withholding some information from you which may influence how you would predict this. I cheated. I cheated on this test because I wanted to see if I could get around Google's, uh, restrictions because anchor text is what we're going for and Google isn't counting some of those anchor text variations. And here's how I cheated. Instead of linking to the page, I use what's called a hash link. Where I just, example.com, I use the same URL. I just added a hash to the end of the link and it could be anything. Any random word. Anything. These are sometimes known as "anchor links". If there's an anchor on the page but you don't need it, you can just add a hash link. Because, I heard a rumor that you know 10-15 years ago, Google was counting these anchor texts if you use a hash link because they see it somewhat as a different page but they consolidate the anchor text signals. So I did this to every link on the page. That's how I cheated, because I want more anchor text. Because that's important for ranking and this is the result. By cheating, by using those hash links, I was able to get Google to index every anchor text on that page, and this is important, if you have a lot of things in your navigation that you're linking to but you want to increase your anchor text variety, beneath it you can simply use a hash link to get Google to count more of those links. So that got a little technical, a little in the weeds. Thank you for keeping up with me on that and I can answer some questions on that if you want, but the SEO geek in me was really excited by this. Alright, so you listen to me get into the geekery. I want to give you six quick tactical tips to improve your internal linking. Uh, make this a little bit more actionable. And please don't share these tips outside this webinar except with your team or your clients. Alright, first of all, you want to audit your anchor text. There's a lot of, there's a lot of tools out there that let you audit your links, but what you really want to be doing is auditing your anchor text because every anchor text counts as a link. That's what you use. There's a lot of good tools out there, but whatever, I'm not going to recommend a very specific tool just be sure that whatever tool you're using lets you look at your anchor text. Uh, I use Screaming Frog in this example because it's a popular SEO, uh, software that a lot of people use. It's free for the first 500 URLs of your site so if you have a smaller site, uh, it's, it's a pretty good solution. They have an- a, you just run a report they have an anchor text export that's very useful. You can turn it into pivot tables–things like that. But make sure you know for every page of your site that it's important your internal anchor text variations going to that page. Keep in mind that even unoptimized anchor text can help, uh, Google. We talked about those naked URls, URLs that when you, when you link to something and it doesn't have any keywords it just says, "Hey, click here at example.com". Google says don't use anchor text like that, but in our data, we found that pages that use those naked URLs actually ranked a little bit better than pages that didn't. And the reason is they generally had more anchor text variations they had more different types of anchor text. Uh, so even unoptimized anchor text can help but keywords in your anchor text help a lot more. Uh, in another part of our data we looked at pages. When you- pages who linked to another page using the exact keywords you were trying to rank for. Those pages had five times more traffic than pages that didn't have optimized anchor text. Again, you don't want to overdo it. You don't want to make every link to internal have exact match anchor text because you want the variety. Uh, but including those keywords, those exact keyword phrases you're trying to rank for–that's a pretty good strategy. Okay, second actual tip: don't miss your alt text anchors. You have images, you have to include those alt text when you're linking internally. Uh, in our data set, five percent of our links had no anchor text at all and the vast majority of those were image links. People forget to fill in their alt text on the image link but you have to because that counts as the anchor text when you're- when you use that image to link. Don't sleep. It's an easy, no-brainer, low hanging fruit thing that everybody can do. Alright, so we often think when we link to a page, that helps that page rank. That the source page you're linking to a target page. But weirdly, and a lot of SEO studies have validated this, the internal link can help both pages to rank. And we have a few examples of this and you'll understand a little bit better as I talk about it. So here's a study that SearchPilot did, uh, great SEO split testing platform. They added a bunch of internal links, uh, on their category pages; this- the left side is the before, the right side is the after–where they added popular categories. The theory was that these popular categories, that they're linking to, would rise in traffic and the result was a 20 percent increase in traffic. Okay, that's great. That's wonderful. They increased traffic 20 percent by adding these internal links but here is the surprising part: it wasn't just the category pages that rose in traffic. The pages being linked from also rose in traffic. Uh, both pages rose in traffic by adding the internal links and in my career this is something we've seen over, and over, and over again... it's just not the page you're linking to, it's the page you're linking from that is rising in, in traffic. Overall, doesn't happen every time. Uh, and we see- and I think the reason for this is those engagement signals that we talked about and the relevant signals. Uh, so this is a this is- this is a post, uh, October 27, 2010, on canonical tags written by our friend Lindsay Wassell, this was a post on Moz that was pretty old but relevant, but we saw its engagement metrics were really in the toilet. Possibly because it's so old–people saw the- the date. All we did to this page was add links in the top of the page; internal links to other sections that give people something to click on. You often see related links at the bottom of the page, we put the related links at the top of the page and what we saw was this increase engagement; people were clicking on the links, we had a better time on site. And so not only did those pages do well but this page, 12 years old, also improved in ranking simply by adding those internal links and this was a strategy we used over and over again, uh, to help this page and the page we're linking to. So that brings me to my fourth point. When you're adding internal links, you'll want to link high and tight. You don't want to bury those links in your footer at the bottom of the page. You want to make them prominent. If you're giving people something to click and you're telling them important–put it front and center so that they know where to click. We- we always did this on the, on the Mo- Moz posts, your most important internal links should go at the top of your post because you're looking for, you want people to click them, you want Google to see that these are important links and you want to increase your engagement. So this is a typical Moz post; we put our most important links at the top, we're an SEO company, our, our important links to Moz. At the bottom we'll link to our competitors Ahrefs, Semrush and neilpatel, if necessary. That's kind of an inside SEO joke, uh, but that's okay. Alright, five tip, number, tip number five. Avoid the first link priority. Uh, this is what we talked about with our experiments. If you have links in your navigation and your body, uh, you might wanna, and you wanna get both anchor texts to count from Google–you might want to use, uh, hash links, index. I wrote this entire post just for this link at the top of the post but I wanted it to count so I used the hash link and if you go, you can inspect it. Uh, is it is indeed a hash link. Does it work? That's when I wrote the blog post and this is the page I linked to. The target page I- I can't say there's a definite correlation between adding that link, and this traffic, uh, to our free SEO tools page. But I think maybe there was. I think maybe there was, and I wrote that entire post for that one internal link. I spent two weeks for one internal link. Uh, but this was the result. I like to think, I like to think that was a million dollar post but that's the power of internal links, um, when- when- when done effectively. Uh, sixth tip in SEO. I like to think that most things can be done by a human. Most things can be done with spreadsheets and free simple tools. Internal linking is one of those rare things where I actually do encourage automation because automation can help you find relevant pages to link from at scale that are really hard to find using traditional methods. Uh, three of my favorite tools are in-Links uh, twylu, I don't actually know how to pronounce it, I've used them several times, I need to reach out. And siteseer, which is my formal- former company, used to be Zippy. Uh, all have great automated internal link uh, recommendations. Some of these have free tiers that you can use. Crawl your sites and they look for topically relevant pages that you can add internal links from, not just the number of links, which a lot of tools do. But they're looking at your anchor text, your topicality, all that good stuff. Um, alright, so to summarize. Maverick six rules of internal linking, Maverick is so good at everything he can fly F-18 Tomcats. He is also a master of internal linking because of course, Tom Cruise, audit your anchor text. Keep in mind your anchor text variations are your number one things that you're going for when internal linking. Don't sleep on your image alts. Uh, make sure all your image alts are tucked away; tight link for both pages, the source page. If you want to improve the ranking on this page add internal links from that page to other relevant pages because it might improve your engagement. You might see your- your- your Google traffic go up. Link high and tight. Keep those important links high on your page. Avoid link first priority if you're linking from your navigation and your body, and leverage automation. Alright, some helpful resources, this will be available in the deck afterwards and hey, thank you for internal linking. I hope you enjoyed this webinar. We're, uh, we're going to take some questions now. Whoo!" 36:55 George: What a ride, Cyrus. Thank you. 37:00 Cyrus: Thank you. 37:01 George: Mordy you're on mute, buddy. 37:03 Mordy: I'm on mute. I was gonna say–thank you, Cyrus. You have that smooth radio voice. I don't have any voice so my mic was off! Um, one of the things, you know, I'm glad, George, you're here as well. Cyrus dribbling on the SEO side, George the content editorial side, one of the things that strikes me is how do you balance that, you know, your- your internal linking there's definitely the SEO benefit to it how- how hard do you push the issue?" 37:26 Cyrus: I push it pretty hard. Uh, one thing I don't like, I think people push it hard in the wrong direction. Uh, they use internal linking solutions, uh, that go through and they just find- you're reading a blog- maybe Forbes is a good example. I don't want to pick on Forbes, and they just overlink everywhere with exact match anchor text for things that aren't quite relevant. Uh, the thing you want to do is when you're adding an internal link make sure the user knows why it's important. Why this is related to the topic of the page. This is a learn more about this. Don't just link to your tire page because you use the word tire on this page that's not very helpful. But, uh, so I think, I think people should be pushing it a lot harder but also with more care and a little, a little less automatic exact match anchor text. But think, keep the user in mind and add those links. Because people are, this is like Google's related questions. When- when somebody searches something they don't have one question they have six questions and if you're not giving them all those other resources on your website, you're doing a disservice to your reader. So add those internal links. Find those, don't make them do a Google search for it. Give them to them up in front. 38:44 George: I can just hop in here. Internal linking is something like there's- there's so many approaches here and one of the approaches that has been presented to me is the exact match method–that I'm sure you're familiar with. I know right, um? 38:56 Cyrus: [Wretches] This is why it's bad. There's so many, I read so many blog posts that do exact match and it's great once. It's the other five, the other 10 links you want variation. And that's why I don't think it's a very good solution. The data doesn't support it. 39:08 George: Yeah like, contextually I've always challenged the um, the efficacy of that because like, yeah, you're sending those signals and it's good for SEO but the user has to, like, it has to make sense for the user. And so, I've not implemented any of those recommendations and my- my approach to this is just kind of been, well, contextually what is most relevant? If I'm talking about a GDP part article, we're talking local SEO here. Do I really need to link to something about redirects here just because it's an exact match? I don't find, like, you have to really contextualize that for your user. I think, I mean this is early days for the Wix SEO learning hub. We're only about four months into publishing, so we'll see how it goes. But everything's promising so far and I think, like, really going with a user first approach will help simplify things uh, in addition to a lot of the, uh, the little things. There was one thing, Mordy, before we move on here, there's a question about the, um, hashtag URLs–you're referring to jump links, right?" 40:06 Cyrus: Right. They can be jump links if you have the a-anchors on the page. If you don't have the a-anchors on the page, they just go to your top level page and the user doesn't notice any difference. Uh, but if you, you can use them as jump links to jump to very specific parts on the page and you, you see that with a table of content links and things like that. My- my own testing so far is that, uh, Google doesn't do a great job of indexing table of content links. Um although they may still be important, we haven't really tested that, but yeah, they- so they long complicated answer to a simple question: they can be jump links but you don't need to use them that way. 40:49 George: Yeah, so in the chat for those of you who sort of had a reaction there, you don't really know how to get those jump links on Wix. Um, just add a link like you normally would and in the interface you can instead of, instead of going to a different site outside you click to link to a section and then you'll get a link to a section as I put in the, um, the chat for you to see. And then you can reverse engineer what that URL is and put it into your internal links. 41:06 Cyrus: Great. Great tip. Great technical tip. 41:15 Mordy: Nice, George. Thank you so much. Okay, so one last thing I wanted to bring up and I was kind of curious how you would approach this. So you- you have the link of the navigation. So again, if you're not familiar, the term that you have the menu of your site, the top menu, that's the navigation of your website and there are links to other pages. And for mentioning from an internal linking perspective, we're going to have the same link in the navigation and the same link in the actual body of the page, go with the body of the page. And again from a user point of view, you mentioned that, yeah, you know, you need to be careful with that–because you do need the user to be able to navigate the website. From an SEO point of view then, you know, the internal linking is more beneficial in the actual body itself. Yeah, I'm just kind of curious what your method is like, when do you know, like, when do you go too far with, I've gone too far by stripping the navigation down. When have I not? 42:03 So I- I shared the, I shared the uh, Home Depot example. A site that I think everybody can learn from that does a great job with this and thank you for that question, Mordy, is Ikea. Go to Ikea. They do not have a monster navigation, they have five or six links in their navigation and it simplifies the user choices. The studies have shown that humans can only handle about seven choices on a page, uh, so you- when you look- when you're doing linking and your navigation, you provide users with 100 links–they're not going to read all those. They're looking for one of seven things. Seven. So, go to Ikea. They hop- they'll have very few, uh, navigation links. Then you click on that page and then you have seven more choices, then you have seven more choices, and they lead you into the funnel until you can finally find that bedroom dresser that you're looking for. So that's a great example don't overwhelm the user. Uh, limit your, I suggest limiting your navigation links to your most important and then expand on the, on the next page and bring them into the funnel. And it's good for the user. It's good for search engines–works really well. 43:03 Mordy: Makes a lot of sense. Again, if you're thinking about, like, "How do I do that?" You think, your- most importantly your- yeah, it's an ecommerce site. You sell, I don't know, clothes. Your most important election pages, you know, those might be something you have the navigation. Particular product pages, you really don't need to have them in there, the user will find them. Okay, I'll go through the boys collection or the adult collection and I'll- I'll go through there and find you know shirts or pants or whatever. It doesn't need to have that in the actual navigation itself. So... okay! Okay, you have a lot of questions. I'm not sure where to start. There's been a bunch of questions around buttons. Do buttons count as internal links?" 43:32 Cyrus: Yes, they do! And uh, a couple things you want to be careful. I- I'm not that familiar with how Wix works with buttons and what the options are but generally, the text of the button, uh, not is- is, counts as the anchor text if it's, if it's actual live text. If you're using an image for a button, you have to make sure there's some text behind it in the html or otherwise. But yeah, the text of the button counts as a link and if you're using "click here", "buy now"–not the best anchor text. Uh, so you might want to be more- more descriptive. But yes, buttons count as links. 44:15 Mordy: That's exactly how it works inside of Wix. Um, to that why- there have been questions around context and anchor text. Why don't things like a naked link or you know a "click here" / "buy now", why are those not as good as a more contextual anchor text. 44:28 Cyrus: Yeah, so I want to be- I want to be clear, they're not bad per se and in fact our data, as I alluded to, shows that even bad anchor text helps. Uh, such as the naked URLs and the "click here". But you're missing, you're missing keyword opportunities with "click here". Uh, again those relevant signals. Your page isn't, you're not trying to rank for the words "click here" or "buy now". Yet, that's never going to happen. You want, what are you- you're trying to rank for a certain brand of men's t-shirts or a particular type of art. Uh, Google actually has a patent, uh, one of their original PageRank patents that if they find a generic anchor text; like "click here", or you know, "buy now", that they might just ignore the- they might ignore the link or they might assign it a lower weight. Uh, there's not a lot of evidence that they do that but they're probably not going to count those links as much as if you use something descriptive and exciting and entices people to click–that describes where they're going to go. Great question." 45:30 George: I wonder if contextually there's a case here in terms of accessibility. Sometimes, I mean every site, every button, all your links are going to be different but you also have to factor in your user experience. And I just want to say that if you're using nebulous terminology, like "click here" "buy now", for people who rely on screen readers–is that meaning coming across? Or are you missing that conversion potentially because of your ambiguous anchor text. So think about that as well. 45:54 Cyrus: Interesting, yeah. 45:59 Mordy: You're just, you wanna- you're the entire, well not the entire. About one of the points of internal linking–so you're giving Google context like, you know, if you write about a topic over and over again, you're an authority on this topic. You're showing Google that connection that, yeah, you know, whatever topic I speak about–I am an authority on that topic. And by having the anchor text being descriptive you're giving them a stronger signal of the contextual content they're going to find there–it's, you're creating a stronger cluster of content around that particular topic. Thereby increasing your relevancy and authority around that topic so give them that signal, why not." 46:28 Cyrus: Yep. The relevance and popularity. Yep. 46:34 Mordy: Um... second. How far down the page does Google read? Will they see the internal links they have all the way at the bottom of the page? 46:40 Cyrus: Yeah, they will. This is kind of this, again, gets into the technical, uh, weeds. Google will index very large pages and all the links on the page. But uh, there's- there's so many different consi- a very large page maybe slow. It may be, Google may not be able to render the whole thing. Uh, there's also the original Google patent called something- called Reasonable Surfer. Google assigns value to links based on how likely people are to click them and with Chrome–used by, you know, a billion people in the world, they actually know what links people are clicking. So links that are higher up on the page generally get more clicks. And there, I heard Matt Cutts say, Matt Cutts was an old Google representative. Not old–he was a Google representative of years gone by. Uh, he no longer directly works with the algorithm or the company, great guy. But years ago, I heard him say, "pay attention to that first link on the page. Pay very close attention to that first link on the page". Uh, and so yeah, the Google will index links further down on the page but just keep in mind they will have less weight than links higher up 47:56 Mordy: Which behaves almost like content. Like the content that's higher up on the page is usually more relevant more contextual to what the page is about and that, you know, the very last paragraph you're running in your blog post is generally not the most contextual, most important part of the page. Just the way the reader would, it's kind of what Google's doing in a way. 48:08 Cyrus: Yeah, and I'm not opposed to putting, I'm not opposed to putting links at the bottom of the page especially to cover your bases. Like, hey, we- these are the important things up here, but, hey, just for the few people who have made it all the way to the bottom–here are some additional resources for you to read. And that- that covers your bases too because at least you got the link on the page. 48:30 Mordy: Yeah, and I've definitely seen a case where that footer link–it definitely helps Google somewhat and I'll say definitely, but it can help Google crawl your site more efficiently because that link is still there even though for the reader. But for Google they see the link at the further page okay next page, we understand the link structure here, it's good to have. Um, okay on this how do you know the links that Google has indexed? 48:49 Cyrus: That is, that's a really good question. I was able to set that, set it up on that test using a very controlled environment. Um, it's to be honest when you're looking at internal links it's really hard because Google's reporting on this is not very good. Um, generally yeah, there's no, the- the short answer is there's for most websites, there's no good way to know which links and anchor text Google have has indexed because their anchor text reporting is honestly not that robust. You can tell the pages that Google indexed, uh, and there are various ways of doing this. You know, Google Search Console or just Google the page, you can Google an article on how to do it, but short answer is there's no good way to know what anchor text and links Google has indexed." 49:41 Mordy: Yep, I like this question. Um, can you link internally to a page too often? 49:47 Cyrus: So there is this idea of over optimization. Uh, that is somewhat controversial in the SEO world. Can you uh, but I believe it's true. We've seen lots of evidence of it. I don't think you can link to an internal page too often at all. I think it's fine to have a gazillion links to the same page and you can't overdo it. What you can overdo is anchor text and that's using your exact match keyword. You have a page on men's jeans and then you just say, "men's jeans", "men's jeans", "men's jeans" over and over again. Google's gonna think well, this guy's trying to manipulate the algorithm he doesn't–maybe the site doesn't have a lot of authority. Uh, we're not going to let it rank for men's jeans. Instead larger sites can get away with it because they have all this authority. They have all this variety. So, I think you want to be careful about varying your anchor text a lot and if you're doing a–if you're linking over and over and over again, don't be scared of naked URLs. Don't be scared of the generic ones that we said. Don't- don't worry about because they increase your variety and they make you less likely to get hit by an over optimization filter." 50:58 George: I'm gonna- I'm gonna hop in on this here and, uh, just bring this to something pretty topical. Uh, for those of you who are really into SEO. The helpful content update is rolling out–some any minute now, right? I think that's any minute now, right? 51:11 Cyrus: Everybody who's not on this webinar is paying attention to the helpful content update. 51:16 George: Right, and part of that is making sure that your content isn't spun up using automated tools and things like that. And you have to think about what Google has said in terms of using automated tools and automatically generated content, GPT 3 type stuff. If you're approaching it with, um, an exact match mindset–in which you're just programming what to replace with what for internal linking. That's kind of a shortcut and it sort of goes against the editorial recommendations that everything has to be reviewed by a human. Now, I'm not saying that this is how Google approaches it at all, but these lines of thinking align. If you're using your brain to just keep going and- and link for the user, add value, your anchor text is going to have permutations. It's going to look different, right, but if you're doing it just with excel and replacing that kind of might be a little bit more sketchy. Something for you to think about, for you to decide on your own. 52:08 Cyrus: Great points, yeah. 52:14 Mordy: Okay, George, I'm going to ask you this one. I never know when adding a link to have the link open in a new window or not. As someone who adds many links to many pages, George, what's your general practice? 52:27 George: Okay, so in terms of how we have things set up on the Wix SEO learning hub for internal things, um, and this is not like- my understanding here is not a hundred percent. But I have links that open internally, for all my internal links, I have them just set to open in the same window. That's my rule of thumb and that's how I've worked at it in a lot of publications. And perhaps, Cyrus, you can shed a little bit more context here on why we do this. But for external links they always open in a different window and that, for me, has to do with the metrics that we're recording. Um, what about you, Cyrus? 52:57 Cyrus: Yeah, so this is- I'm always a little conflicted. I've read a lot of accessibility studies that say you shouldn't open links in a new window and I don't recall all the reasons why. But for people using screen readers and such, apparently it's not as great an experience. But yeah, I generally, I used to religiously open everything in a new window. Uh, but for internal links, especially, I do open them in the same window. Uh, it- i don't think there's one right answer to that. Uh, I think whatever you choose is going to be fine. Um, yeah. 53:34 George: Best practice has not been- there's no consensus on best practice here. 53:40 Cyrus: Yeah, that's an excellent way to put it. No consensus. 53:45 Mordy: You know, just keep in mind, if it is an external link–you are taking the user to a different website. Are they going to come back to your site? To the page? Your web page? I generally find if your content is compelling they will come back. But again, this is something to keep- keep that in mind. Speaking of external links, I know we're talking about internal links, but is there a benefit to linking out externally on your page?" 54:10 Yes! Yes, there is. Uh, this is something we covered extensively, uh, during my years at Moz. That every study we looked at, we talked about internal links today, but every study we looked at where you add external links to relevant pages it seems to help your own SEO. And again, this could be because of engagement signals or relevance, uh, signals that we don't quite understand what Google is doing here. But it seems to work really well. And think of it this way, if someone's going to- if you can't provide the answer, you don't want people going back to Google to do a search because Google's- Google's looking at your website and how users are interacting with it. You would rather have someone land on your site and visit an external page than have to go back to Google the thing. You don't want to do in SEO is have people hit the back button. You want your site to be the place for resources–even if it includes external links, because Google can learn, "hey, people are going to this site and they're not leaving. This is a good site". Even if you're sending people away to external sites, The New York Times, uh, Marshall Simmons uh, who led the SEO there, did- was one of the first to experiment this, where they started linking- followed links to other sites and they saw their pages rise in New York Times. This was years ago and nothing has changed. Don't be scared to link to other sites. Keep in mind you might want to link to yourself first if you have that resource. 55:30 George: And another thing here, very easy to understand–reason to link. Cite your sources. That makes you more authoritative. Like just bottom line, if I, and for everybody, all 669 of you here. Google says that engagement like bounce rate and stuff; those back- those aren't search ranking factors. Google has said that a lot of people write that in their content but they don't substantiate it. A lot of people will say that and then they'll say, "but Google has said otherwise", and then they'll put the citation there. Cite your sources it automatically makes you more authoritative which is always good for visibility. 56:02 Cyrus: Yes, yeah. If you want to practice you can cite zippy.com, uh, just an example site I'm throwing out there. But for your first blog post. 56:11 George: You had to go for it. 56:17 Cyrus: But if I made it funny I thought I could get away with it. 56:20 Mordy: No, that's good. Make sure it's a no follow everybody! 56:24 Cyrus: Oh, no no no no no. 56:30 Mordy: I'll tell you later! As an old teacher, the way I think about linking is almost like, as a way of supporting your content. It's a way of building up or scaffolding understanding. If i don't have that resource internally on my own site, if i want to make sure the user understands exactly the point I'm trying to make, then I'll link to an external resource to make sure that that knowledge is built in a scaffolded way that makes a, a lot of sense for the user. So again, think of it as almost like pedagogically when you link out. Okay, I think we have time for one last question–it involves naked URLs. You're not using any anchor text whatsoever, does it ever make sense to do that." 56:58 Cyrus: Yeah, it- it does uh, uh, it does. But I can't think of any great use cases. I, what I'm saying is, uh, you can use them especially if you're looking. If you just need more anchor text variety they're not the most helpful in the world. Uh, but sometimes you know, I- I've received, I've received emails and sometimes people just need to copy and paste a link. There are rare situations where the naked URL is important. Uh, like an activation link for cable or something like that, you know. I need to type in this URL. I need to share this URL. Things like that, so it does make sense in some instances. I- I wouldn't be scared of naked URLs. I would use something better, but the data says–if you got to use them don't be scared of them. 57:45 Mordy: I gotta go in, okay fine. If you put like- if you want to show the difference between the http and https and the URL that you have a whole- whole post about the difference in the URL structure. Like the difference, the added "s", right, so you want to show the URL structure. You're going to show the naked link there. I found a case! 58:05 Cyrus: Yeah, I- I wouldn't go seeking them out. But don't be scared. I think that's it. 58:12 Mordy: Cyrus, thank you so much! Yeah, thank you, that was amazing and wonderful. And we're honored to have you here and we appreciate the knowledge that you shared. 58:17 Cyrus: Hey, thanks to the Wix team! This has been a great webinar and I've enjoyed working with you. Props to Wix. 58:26 Mordy: Awesome. Um, don't forget. This has been recorded and you will receive the recording. You can find more SEO resources and expand your SEO learning on Wix dot com slash SEO slash learn. That's for SEO learning. We're back next month with a fantastic webinar; myself, Crystal Carter, SEO legends Lily Ray and Glenn Gabe will be here as we talk about what it means to write good content for Google. Thank you so much everybody, of course thank you, George, as well for joining. Bye bye! Meet your webinar hosts Cyrus Shepard, Co-Founder, Zyppy Cyrus’ SEO research and insights have made him one of the most trusted voices in search today. Having started in SEO in 2009, he formerly led SEO and Audience Development at Moz and currently serves as Co-Founder of the US-based SEO consultancy Zyppy. Twitter | Linkedin Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. He also hosts the SEO Rant Podcast and Edge of the Web’s news podcast. Twitter | Linkedin George Nguyen, Director of SEO Editorial, Wix As Director of SEO Editorial at Wix, George creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. Formerly a search news journalist, he has spoken at industry events and endeavors to improve the general public’s knowledge of search engines. Twitter | Linkedin

September 13, 2022 Keeping up with Google’s algorithm updates doesn’t have to be a source of anxiety once you’re able to recognize quality indicators for content creation. Join industry experts, Lily Ray and Glenn Gabe, along with our hosts, Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter, as we dissect real examples of impacted sites and dive into the data about Google updates. Check out the webinar's decks: Check out Glenn's webinar deck Check out Lily's webinar deck Check out Mordy's webinar deck Read the Transcript In this webinar we'll cover: What good content looks like to Google How to strategically approach content Recognize the right content for your business vertical Meet your hosts: Lily Ray , Sr. Director of SEO & Head of Organic Research, Amsive Digital Lily has been making waves in the SEO industry since 2010. Shifting from start-up to agency–she has helped develop and establish an award-winning SEO department at Amsive Digital, delivering high impact work for a long-list of notable clients, including several Fortune 500 companies. Twitter | Linkedin Glenn Gabe , SEO Consultant, G-Squared Interactive Glenn Gabe is a digital marketing veteran with over 25 years of experience. As an SEO writer, frequent conference speaker, and a go-to resource for SEO consulting–Glenn has made an impact in a wide range of industries, ranging from e-comm, military, all the way to finance and education. Twitter | Linkedin Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. He also hosts the SEO Rant Podcast and Edge of the Web’s news podcast. Twitter | Linkedin Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO & Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush and more. Twitter | Linkedin Transcript: What Google wants from your content Speakers: Lily Ray, Sr. Director of SEO & Head of Organic Research, Amsive Digital Glenn Gabe, SEO Consultant, G-Squared Interactive Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding, Wix Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications, Wix 00:00 Crystal Carter: I'm joined here today by Glenn Gabe, who is joining us from the East Coast of the United States and he is from G-Squared Interactive. He is an absolute legend, absolute phenom in the SEO space and we're very pleased to have him here. And he's got 25 years experience as an SEO writer, SEO analyst, SEO Sensei, as it were. And we're very pleased to have him here. Thanks for joining us today, Gabe. 00:30 Glenn Gabe: Yeah, thanks. It's great to be here. I'm really excited especially given the timing that we had the broad core update rolling out and we just had the Helpful Content Update and probably a Product Reviews Update– so this is very fitting. 00:44 Crystal Carter: It's super exciting. And we're joined by another absolute SEO hero, Lily Ray, who is the Senior Director of SEO and the head of organic research over at Amsive Digital. She is going to talk to us about some of her research she's done across SEO algorithms and also about E-A-T, I’m sure. And about all the ways that you can bring quality to your content on a sort of holistic scale. She's also an amazing DJ, and is dialing in to us from Berlin this week. So thank you so much for joining us, Lily. 01:21 Lily Ray: Of course. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here with you guys. 01:25 Crystal Carter: Absolutely fantastic. And finally, last but not least, we are also joined by our own Wix’s own algorithm smith who loves to do deep dives on algorithms and how they all work and he's worked with SEMrush he's worked with other tools. He is here at Wix and helps drive so much of our SEO innovation. It's Mordy Oberstein. 01:47 Mordy Oberstein: Hello! 01:53 Crystal Carter: So I'm super, super excited to have everyone here. We've got two Yankees fans. Lily I'm not sure which team you support. 02:02 Lily Ray: Yankees, I guess. Sorry, sorry! 02:05 Glenn Gabe: You are from Queens though so it might be the Mets. 02:08 Lily Ray: Right, yeah. 02:10 Crystal Carter: Yeah. Okay. So we're gonna hope to hit ourselves an algorithmic homerun today with some of this content. So I'm just gonna let Glenn Gabe get set up so that he can share some of his insights. We have almost 1000 people joining us already, which is brilliant to see. I love how punctual everyone is. I had a look at this deck earlier. It's fantastic. So you're in for a real treat. I'm going to mute myself and let Glenn take it away. 02:39 Glenn Gabe: All right, excellent. So again, it's great to be here. We have major updates rolling out. The September broad core update is actually rolling out, it started yesterday. So within the next few days, I'm sure we're going to see a lot of movement. And obviously your content is super important from that standpoint. So let's hop in. So first, a few key concepts, right. First, machine learning and major algorithm updates. This is extremely important to understand. First, let's talk about Google's Alan Kent, who's been kind of leading the effort a little bit from a product review standpoint. He confirmed that machine learning–a machine learning system is being used for Product Reviews Update. That is not shocking. You can see that tweet on the right side there– here he kind of alluded to that. He also explained a lot more about machine learning in general and how it can be used on a recent podcast with Marie Haynes. So I definitely recommend checking that out and we truly believe broad core updates are using machine learning as well or multiple machine learning systems. And this is where Google could be sending many signals to a machine learning system, which determines weighting of factors and ultimately rankings. So as Bing put it, Fabrice Canel, an engineer can't really go in and understand, you know, the weighting of certain factors and machine learning systems figuring it out. So the idea that you can tweak a handful of things and surge back is not what this is about. You should think holistically about your content, address Google's best practices, and don't just match the competition but try and 10X their content. And you know, it's great that Bing is very open about their use of machine learning and Google little by little explaining more about it. For example, the Helpful Content Updates uses a machine learning system as well. Okay, another important concept, site level quality algorithms. Yes, site level. Not everything is at the URL level, which unfortunately has kind of spread throughout the industry a little bit over the past few years. So Google has site level quality algorithms that can have a very big impact. During major algorithm updates, especially like broad core updates. Google hass explained its evaluating sites overall and over an extended period of time via machine learning system, right? And now the Helpful Content Update’s doing that as well, as well as the Product Reviews Update. So don't miss the forest through the trees, focus on quality overall, don't just look at a specific URL rankings. Across the site could be impacted by site level quality algorithms. So, definitely important to understand that. Another important concept is quality indexing, which I've been writing about for years, probably dating back to medieval Panda days. So for those people that think quality is just about the content. It's not. And anyone that's really focused on broad core updates has seen this, right. You have a terrible user experience, heavy ads, deceptive ads, all sorts of stuff going on on the page. confusing for users, sites like that could be impacted by broad core updates as well. So, Google's John Mueller has explained that in search central hangout quality is not just about the text on the page, it's about the site overall, the UX, the layout, how things are presented, ads and more. So, definitely important to look beyond the content. You may have great content but what if the user experience is absolutely terrible, you’ve better watch out. And this I find myself saying to clients all the time, especially newer clients, the SEO mantra, meet or exceed user expectations based on quarter, right. So it's really, really important. This is what Google wants to do, right? They don't want to dish out rankings for sites that don't meet or exceed user expectations. It can happen, everybody sees it. Sometimes, you know, a site squeaks through and its ranking but over the long term, it probably will not. So it's important to objectively review your content through the lens of user expectations. Then boost content that doesn't pass, right. Or even nuke it if needed. I help usually larger scale sites. It's not uncommon during an audit over a number of months for a site to nuke 10, 20, 30 thousand URLs. Right if they're just cruft, old crop, lower quality content, etc. And also user studies come in very handy for evaluating content and I'm going to cover more about that soon. And yes, short content could still meet or exceed user expectations. Google just covered this on a help hangout that they uploaded to YouTube, I believe it was last week. And they've been explaining this for the long term. If a query yields shorter content and it can meet or exceed user expectations, it's totally fine. Don't just see something with one paragraph and think that it should be nuked. Another important concept. Staying in your lane. I have a case study where I talk heavily about this coming up. So focus on your core competency, show Google what you should rank for, earn links and mentions from other sites based on those pieces of content. All of this can really help especially from an E-A-T standpoint, which I'm sure Lily will cover. It's okay to veer out of your lane occasionally. So some sites are like, could we write about this or that, even though it's not a core competency?” Sure if it's every now and then, totally fine. But in my opinion, based on what I've seen, I would maintain a very strong focus on your core competency. If you veer heavily out of your lane and heavily is a little different than what I explained before. You can pay a heavy price. So what's wrong with my content? So I kind of overloaded this next slide. It's usually three slides. I just wanted to quickly explain the difference between relevancy adjustments, intent shifts and overall site quality problems. Because any site impacted by a broad core update or major update is going to run into this situation. Okay. Again, a lot of information on the slide. Sorry, relevancy adjustments might be totally correct. That's where your content might not be as relevant anymore for the query. A great example of that is when I help entertainment sites, news publishers that maybe have a three year old post that was ranking on page one for a celebrity or politician. Now it's not as relevant anymore. It's still good. It's not low quality. It's just not as relevant anymore. So if that's happening, that's not something where it's overall site quality it’s a relevancy adjustment. Intent shifts are where Google decides to show a completely different type of site for the query. We've seen this and I know Willie has brought this up too, with the Product Reviews Update where an ecommerce retailer might start ranking for reviews or vice versa, and that intent shift can switch as well. So there's not a lot you can do. You can't just suddenly become an ecommerce retailer, if you’re a review site and vice versa. Now, if it's not one of those, it could be overall site quality problems. If it is the good news is you can address those over time and usually recover eventually. But it takes significant work over the long term. It can take six months or longer or even a year or more to see recovery. I've written a lot of case studies about recoveries from broad core updates. Some took a year, year and a half to actually recover if the situation is bad enough. So if quality is a problem, then what is there a way to understand how users actually perceive your site? Yes, there is. And I mentioned this to almost every client and I will tell you a small percentage actually executed for whatever reason. It's super, super powerful to go through that. So anyway, the power of running user studies. You run them through the lens of broad core updates to Helpful Content Update, Product Reviews Update, or whatever you're actually looking at, right? For a lot of clients I’m helping it's usually one of those two; usually Product Reviews Update or broad core update. So Google literally gave you the questions right. There's tons of questions now from the Panda questions from medieval Panda, to broad core updates, to product reviews update, and now Helpful Content Update. Lots of questions, craft scenarios for objective users, not your spouse, not your kids, not your clients, not your co-workers, really from a panel of people that are objective, and have them go through watch videos, listen to them, ask specific questions, have them trying to traverse the site and accomplish something. I'm telling you it's super powerful to see this and hear it. Clients that I've helped go through this it's usually a lightbulb moment. So what can you test? You can test everything from expertise, content quality, deception, ad aggressiveness, barriers, triggers for people which can happen. You may not even know that what you're producing on your site is a trigger for some people. I've seen that happen. Credibility and trust and user experience and from a content standpoint, obviously, focus on content, quality, expertise, credibility, trust and user experience, right. So these are things where you can test like how do real people feel about the content? This isn't just looking at bounce rate or adjusted bounce rate or anything like that. It's literally hearing from objective people. So it's a really good way to go. Okay, let's hop into some case studies. I’ve provided three. First, was a news publisher in a very tough niche, very strong E-A-T but some glaring issues, right. So they tanked during two consecutive core updates, right, as you can see on the right hand side there. So they basically got hammered between the two of them. Contacted mem and what was crazy is, I've been on the site, all the time. So I love the site. I was really eager to help them. So overall, the content, the articles were great, right, outstanding. But there were some really interesting, glaring issues. For example, users could end up in an endless loop trying to find answers they could never find on the site. I found myself doing this based on checking the site via a query, and then I checked the behavior flow report. And I wrote a case study about this, by the way, too. So there’s a blog post backing this, but they also I'll get to that in a second. So the user can end up in an endless loop. There was also a lot of cruft from over the years, they've been around forever. So that was also an issue. So let's talk about behavior flow. So I started from organic search at a certain landing page and watched people go downstream. And watched people go back upstream. And watched people go back downstream. And this was going on over and over. It was unbelievable. So I know a lot of people hammer this report in the old Google Analytics, but boy, it was so easy to explain to the client what was going on, they got it immediately and took action. So what they do is significantly improve the site quality site overall, including nuking or improving pockets of content that were ranking but couldn't meet or exceed user expectations. That's exactly what I was just talking about. They nuked cruft that had built up over the years. They also improved the user experience, technical SEO issues causing quality problems and more. Did a lot of work over several months, and they surged back with the December 2020 broad core update. By the way, they were never in Google News based on their niche and they jumped into Google News. They also jumped back into discover, and this is what it looked like. I mean, you want to talk about spike. I mean, look at that top graph. That's web search. And again, they were really never a Google News for the most part, and they popped in right after the update. So we're down the line. So it was really cool to see that. So what's great about their content? Tons of expertise in the niche, tons. They stay in their lane, you never go on their site, and suddenly, you know, they're writing about entertainment or something, you know, like they're focused on a very specific niche. They provide supporting links and content, which is really important. I can't explain what they cover but it's really important for them to do this. They have visuals, charts and graphs to support the content. And also the story yields shorter content. That's totally fine. I explained this to them. They're totally cool with that. And sometimes it is shorter. It might only be four or five paragraphs. And it still ranks really well because it meets or exceeds user expectations. And they are trusted and well known. Okay, again, I knew them when they contacted me. Okay case study two. Veering way out of its lane. So this was a reference site. Keep that in mind, reference site. Long history, very strong E-A-T, veered way out of its lane at one point. They, unfortunately, there was a content strategy that you know, they figured that they could potentially rank for a lot of stuff outside of their core competency and they did initially and then they got hammered by a broad core update. As you can see in the charts, right. That's Sistrix visibility at the bottom, GSC up top, that's clicks dropping off a cliff. So what do they do? They removed all that fringe content and focused on its core competency. Again, two broad core updates later, they suged back so again. It can take a while, right? Google's algorithms need to evaluate over time and see, “oh wait, there's not health and entertainment and politics and sports. They're focusing on a reference site again.” So it was really cool to see. So these are the surges in visibility. Again, surged back pretty heavily. So what's great about their content, a ton of facts and information about each topic, very strong visuals, which is very important for their site, and in different formats. Which from a user experience–amazing. They have well organized pages with a table of contents and jump links to each section, which is a great way to go if you have a lot of content organized well. They provide links to relevant information across the site. So very strong internal linking, not for the sake of just linking, but really to help users and Google. And it's also a very trusted site. So it was very cool to see that. And the last case, steady as it goes. This site, it's always amazing. Every time a major update rolls through. I go to see what's going on. And they just keep going. It's not like they're surging, they're doing well already. They seem always just, you know, not impacted by these major updates. So it's really fascinating. I've been helping the site by the way since 2014. So they were hit by Panda and Penguin in the past, right? So this was 2012. So they worked hard to improve the site overall and did a lot of stuff over the years. They contain a ton of user generated content in UGC, they moderate now, the UGC heavily and continually review their article content to review or boot the content. Again, extremely steady trending through broad core updates over time, as you can see on the right hand side. So what's great about their content, their articles and blog posts are very strong and based on firsthand expertise, the UGC is provided by real users who have first hand expertise with the programs. Strong moderation, heavily moderated and vetting system in place–so no spam gets on the site, or even really rudimentary comments don't even get up there. They have a voting system to help users understand the most helpful UGC, and they have great visual support in the content. They're a leader in their niche, well known and trusted now by users. And as you can see below, this is over time. Again, they just, I’m sure with this latest update, my guess is they'll probably just keep going. They're doing all the right things. Okay, so let's switch gears a little bit. Let's talk about the Product Reviews Update and content quality. So the wire cutter approach and testing labs. So not surprisingly, through the several Product Reviews Updates for sites that were heavily impacted, they lacked strong content, right? Not shocking. They often had an affiliate focus versus people focus. Very low effort content–trying to monetize, right? so he lacked first hand expertise, experience didn't provide pros and cons, lacked visual supporting review, including photos, videos, and gifs. Don't underestimate gifs, they can be great. They often link to a single seller, mostly Amazon and they just felt like quick and dirty reviews content. I've had so many review sites impacted by these updates reach out to me and when I checked a lot of them, unfortunately, you know, you could check off almost every box here. So it's tough because they have a lot of work to do. So Wirecutter. So in my post about the PRU I often reference the Wirecutter approach to review content, they produce some of the best reviews on the web, super thorough, heavily tested in the lab. Reviews provide everything you need to know for the most part when looking to purchase a product. They've done this for years. They're owned by the New York Times now. But they ranked really well even before that. They have an incredible reputation and it is a trusted site and trust has come up several times in this presentation. So testing labs, there are others doing similar things from a testing situation. Good Housekeeping Institute also has a very, very in depth lab. Right you can check out all this stuff after the presentation. Very well testing lab, same deal. And now other smaller players are creating their own testing labs, which is really interesting, right? For example, a client of mine who surged, let's see, they surged there in the first, dropped there in the second, saw weird movement. Anyway, they basically are like, “okay, we're gonna just really try and figure this stuff out.” So they created their own testing lab. and I'll tell you, those reviews are really, really good. So I expect testing labs to keep growing. Everybody can create one. Is it hard? Yep. Does it take a lot of time? Yep. But if you're focused on review, providing reviews, you should really consider creating your own testing lab. So the anatomy of a strong review, I'll just go down these bullets. So based on Wirecutter, right? Clear affiliate disclosure, make sure people know that you can make money off them clicking your links. A table of contents with jump links, very helpful headings for each section, logically broken down categories, demonstrating firsthand use, techniques and valuable insights, providing pros and cons, very strong visuals, unique visuals as well original photos, videos and gifs, graphs and charts where needed, author details with a link to a bio, references and citations when needed. So, really important when you go down, if you go to Wirecutter, you go down the reviews you’re gonna see a lot of this. So if you're producing product reviews, I would definitely take a look. 20:54 Glenn Gabe: Okay, so now before we move on to Lily, let's cover some key points based on the presentation. So remember that Google is using machine learning for some major algorithm updates. Don't miss the forest for the trees–focus on the site overall. There are site level quality algorithms at play. Again, those site level quality algorithms can have a big impact on broad core updates and other major algorithm updates. Focus on quality indexing, right? So Google's evaluating all content indexed when it's evaluating quality, not just specific URL. Always look to meet or exceed user expectations based on query. Stay in your lane, content wise. If you veer out of your lane heavily you can pay a price. Run user studies–don't think it's great not to do it, just do it. And I'm telling you, you'll have that light bulb moment, probably. Use a Wirecutter approach to building review content, check out their site, you won't be disappointed. Create a testing lab if reviews are important to you. It's very important moving forward to build trust with your users and become a well known source for the topics you cover. So hopefully that was helpful, and I look forward to your questions in the Q&A. 22:00 Crystal Carter: Fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing Glenn. It's always, it's always a pleasure to hear you speak. It's always a pleasure to hear those insights. I've got loads of questions myself. So I'm sure that they'll, we'll have lots from the content as well. Just a quick shout out to the audience. Yes, this is being recorded. Yes, we're going to be sharing resources after the event. And so just in case these are new concepts to you, you can sort of take a deep dive later, later on. But yeah, some fantastic insights. I think the point about user testing is very interesting and I think, not relying on your mom, or your best friend. 22:42 Glenn Gabe: Yeah. That's exactly right. And just one thing on that Google actually provided information in their post about broad core updates about user testing, so they think it's really important too, just keep that in mind. 22:56 Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think there's a few different ways to get to do that. So maybe we can talk about that later in the discussion. And so thank you so much for that and we're gonna move on to Lily's fantastic presentation now. And again, we're going to be sharing the resources from all the speakers after the event. So yes, I'm just going to let Lily get all set up with her beautiful deck. Yeah, yes, Louise Louisa, you'll receive a recording. It'll be on our YouTube channel. It'll also be on the same place where you registered for the event. 23:32 Lily Ray: Awesome. Okay, I finally remembered how to share my slideshow. Okay. Everything looked okay? 23:37 Crystal Carter: Looks beautiful. 23:38 Lily Ray: Awesome. Well, thank you all so much for having me. Thank you, Glenn. That was so much excellent information. And I'm really excited to share some insights as well. I think there’s definitely a lot of overlap between some of the concepts that we're going to be talking about today. So I'm Lily Ray, and I'm going to be talking about how to incorporate real expertise into your SEO strategy. So again, my name is Lily Ray. I'm the Senior Director of SEO and head of organic research at an agency called Amsive Digital. We're based in New York City. and super excited to be here with the Wix crew today. So today, I'll be talking a lot about expertise. I know a few people in the chat asked what E-A-T means. I'll talk about that in a little bit. But it stands for Expertise, Authority and Trust. Expertise is the E in E-A-T. And this is definitely an acronym and a word that we see appearing throughout a lot of different Google documents and Google communications over the past few years. And the way that they're framing it, is honestly one of the most important factors for producing high quality content. And I know that Glenn discusses that in some of his case studies. You know, some of those clients that are doing really well in the SEO space are conveying a lot of expertise throughout their content. So again, for anybody who's unfamiliar with E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. This is an acronym that Google started using in its documentation in about 2014. And it's something that Google uses to train human search quality evaluators who they conduct tests with thousands of times throughout the year all around the world. And Google tells its quality evaluators to think about the E-A-T of the websites, of the people that are producing the content, the brand itself, anybody that's contributing to the website. And so these quality evaluators basically rate how much E-A-T a website or a content contributor might be displaying in the content. And this is something that Google uses to inform future algorithm updates. So it's an important concept to understand for SEO. And beyond that, if you've read a lot of different Google docs, and you know, communications and, you know, product updates and algorithm updates and the language that they're using, you can see that they talk a lot about expertise specifically throughout these documents. So Google actually has this really fantastic guide called the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. It's a really great free resource for SEO. And they specifically say if you want to learn SEO, you should learn how to cultivate a reputation for expertise and trustworthiness in a specific area. They also say that expertise and authoritativeness of a site can increase its quality. This is Danny Sullivan from Google. He does a lot of communications related to what Google is up to. And in an article that he wrote called, what site owners should know about Google's core updates. He asks, “Is this content written by an expert or an enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic very, very well?” So basically, like, is there evidence that the person that's creating this content is a true expert in their field? There's another article that Danny and Google put out about ranking well in Google News and Google Discover, and they explicitly say, “if you want to appear in Google Discover, Google News, you need to make sure that you're producing content that conveys a lot of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.” I know that Glenn mentioned Alan Kent, this is Alan Kent from Google. He's been kind of overseeing the Product Review Updates, which there's been about to be five in the past two years. They keep rolling out new versions of the Product Review Updates. And Alan says that you should always express expert knowledge about the products where appropriate. So we'll talk about that a little bit later as well. And most recently, we have the Helpful Content Update. And this is Danny again, basically saying that with this brand new update that Google launched a couple of weeks ago called the Helpful Content Update. You need to make sure that your content clearly demonstrates first hand expertise and a depth of knowledge, for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service or visiting a place. So we call this this common language that Google's using throughout a lot of these communications. The last thing Danny says about the Helpful Content Update is that you should avoid basically entering some niche topic area without sufficient expertise to be able to write about that content. But basically, if you're putting out a site because you see maybe you bought a domain, you want to pretend like you're an expert in a field you thought you'd get a lot of SEO traffic and potentially, you know, like affiliate revenue or ad revenue, but you don't actually have real expertise to write about that content. That could potentially set you up to be negatively impacted by the Helpful Content Update. So my theory, and I know that like Mordy, we talked about his, Mordy from Wix, we kind of think that there's like this big change that's happening with Google over the past couple of years, where I believe that they're algorithmically being able to differentiate between a real expert and somebody who might be faking expertise or basically just rehashing what a lot of other people have said online. So there's a really interesting Google patent that was analyzed by the late great Bill Slawski a couple of years ago, called contextual estimation of Link Information Gain. This is a Google patent that they filed in 2020. And it has this really important concept called an Information Gain Score. What this means is that Google is capable of understanding when they're looking at two different documents, and let's say the documents have effectively the same information, if something has net new information that they haven't seen before. That's going to increase the information gain score of that content. So basically, that means if this content has a certain expert opinion, or certain pieces of information or fact that Google hasn't seen in other content, that's going to increase the information gained score, and therefore that could potentially increase the rankings because Google is looking to produce or provide more original content in the search results, different perspectives and the search results and as you can see by a lot of these communications, they're really focused on conveying expertise as well. So I wanted to share with you a little SEO storytime because whenever I think about the role of expertise in SEO, I always think back to this one little anecdote that I've experienced in my time doing SEO for clients. So I wanted to show you guys one example of a small tattoo shop website that continues to outrank Cosmopolitan, Byrdie, Good Housekeeping and Men's Health for a variety of different tattoo keywords. What's amazing about this example is this site has been sitting here in the Featured Snippets on and off for six years. And these are really big brands that have a much bigger presence, you know, bigger domain authority and all these other SEO metrics that we think about–this is just a small tattoo shop business from New York. So how does this site continue to rank in the Featured Snippets? And how does it continue to maintain such great page one positions for all these different keywords? So you can see here, there's a variety of different, you know, really relevant keywords that this small website, probably only a 10 or 15 page website, continues to rank on page one and in many cases in the Featured Snippets. Well, what if I also told you that nobody has touched this content since 2016? This website has essentially not changed at all. The content that's ranking in the Featured Snippets has not changed at all. It hasn't even been updated at all. So I worked with this client, and I'll tell you all about our SEO process. It's pretty simple. Obviously, this person is a tattoo artist. He's been tattooing for 20 years, and what I did was, we came up with a couple of different pieces of content that we thought would be really relevant for his customers to know. Such as, “what lotion to use on a healing tattoo?” I asked him some questions. He gave me all the answers based only on his own experience. I transcribed all the content lightly optimized for SEO. So it wasn't that you know, it wasn't like I was giving him a bunch of things that he needed to answer based on my own keyword research. He was giving me a bunch of content based on his own experience, but then we tweaked it for SEO and included relevant headlines, and honestly haven't touched it since. It's been six years. And my theory is that Google is capable of understanding number one, this is an expert in their field. This is a website that's focused on tattooing. This is a person that's an expert in tattooing that we recognize online, that person, and this website has a lot of E-A-T in the tattoo space. But beyond that the content that he's creating demonstrates that he's a true expert in his field. And the content offers that unique expert perspective that we're not just seeing from a bunch of other publisher sites who are honestly probably doing a lot of research from all the same resources. This person didn't look at any of these other resources. He's just providing his true expertise. So I believe that there's a lot of sites that are doing a really great job of this and they're using an expert focused content strategy that's getting them big gains in the SEO space. So these are a variety of different sites that are seeing big increases in SEO this year. So this was calculated using the Sistrix visibility index. That's a tool that basically evaluates how much visibility a given domain has on Google over time. Think of it like the stock market for SEO. And you can see that all these sites have seen pretty substantial increases in Sistrix visibility this year. This was calculated between January and September of this year. Now, I want to be clear, there's obviously many different factors that go into an SEO strategy. There could be all kinds of reasons why they're seeing increases, you know, these sites are doing a lot of things, right? It's not just about the expertise. They have, in many cases, great technical SEO, they have great PR, great backlinks, you know, great brand recognition. All these things are of course contributing. But there's a lot of different ways that you can look through the content of these sites and see how they're leveraging real in house expertise, or in some cases reaching out to experts in their field to inform the content that they're creating. So lifewire is a really interesting one. They have a lot of different product reviews. And what you can see is that they actually have a dedicated page on their site that describes Lifewire’s experts and they specifically say to Glen's point, you know, we were careful to work with real experts in their fields. We take seriously the credentials and the expertise behind the people who write and edit the content that you're reading on this website. So not only does this site focus on expertise they actually have an entire page describing how important expertise is to their business. This is another site that is really interesting to keep an eye on. This is a gentleman named Bob Vila. He does home construction projects and he maintains a lot of position one or page one rankings for a lot of different keywords. And what I love about this is that Bob Vila is, you know, a professional home contractor. But there's so much great content that's either written with Bob, you know, in conjunction with Bob or maybe Bob oversees the content or provides an expert review of the content. And in this example, this is a page that he's ranking position one for the keyword, “basement waterproofing”. And then this article is written by Bob and another writer. There's honest recommendations for how to work with a contractor, there's FAQs and the content. He explains the what, why and how you should, you know, implement basement waterproofing in your home. He isn't necessarily linked to a lot of other sites, because again, he's the one that's providing the expert information. He provides clarity around the expected costs of doing basement waterproofing with real numbers, you know, not just like a vague range but an actual cost of this process. And then again, you know, there's a lot of sites that do use other external writers or maybe they hire writers in house but what I love about this site is that Bob is often involved in that content creation process. And you can see that this article was co-written with an author named Glenda as well as Bob. This is a site called gadget review that ranks number one for best ceiling mounted projector. And this is, you know, Glenn talked about some product review sites. This site actually has in its footer, like the methodology behind why the site exists. They talked about the fact that too many product review sites are just trying to capitalize on affiliate revenue and that's kind of informing the content that they're writing. Whereas with gadget review, they're very focused on real expertise. They're focused on objectivity, and they make sure that they've actually tested the products themselves. So these are some screenshots that convey how users and most likely search engines are able to read this content. And say, “there's a lot of evidence on this page that the author's actually spent time with the products. There's pros and cons. There's examples of why they like it.” And if you're Google, you can tell like, maybe a bunch of other people have written about these ceiling projectors. But Gadget Review has net new information because they're experts and they've tried the products, and Google hasn't found that information on any other page before. This is REI. I'm sure you all are familiar with them. They do a lot of things right from an SEO standpoint. And you know, a lot of the growth that they're seeing is not just because of the content, they obviously have a huge ecommerce business as well. But what I love about REI’s content strategy is that they leverage real employees from REI who have specific expertise in different areas. So in this case, this is the number one ranking page for backpacking for women. And it's written by a woman named Liz who's an REI Outdoor School instructor. So it's like from woman to woman. Here's what you need to know about backpacking for women. And it's written in the first person. It's written based on her own experience. And I believe this is what Google's looking for in terms of providing expert advice. This is another site that I love to look at. It's called Smith's Pest Management and it's an exterminator business that based in California, they ranked number one for all these different “how to get rid of” pest queries, and they're growing a lot over time. You can see the SEO visibility of the site is increasing a lot over the past couple of years. This is a gentleman named Zachary Smith. He runs the business. He is an exterminator. He does pest control. And he's involved in the content creation process. You can see his author bio in the content on every page. He uses firsthand experience. They use actual photos that they've taken on the job. They're very empathetic with the reader. You know, it's basically just real evidence that the company that's doing the work is the same company that's providing expert information. So maybe you don't have experts on staff. That's a really common situation for companies to be in. Redfin and Business News Daily are two sites that do a really good job of saying, you know, we wanted to figure out the answer to this question. So what we did is we reached out to a communication and etiquette expert, or we asked human resource experts and professionals to chime in. So you know, just because you don't have an expert working at your company doesn't mean that you can't do that outreach, reach out to them and ask for an expert contribution. So really quick, I want to shift gears and talk a little bit about Google’s Helpful Content Update because I do believe that this new update by Google is very aligned with, you know, this notion of E-A-T and the focus on expertise. So what Google said about this update is that you're going to see more results with unique, authentic information, and you're more likely to read something that you haven't read before. So what have we seen from this update so far? I think a lot of us read Google's communications and kind of saw this coming as like really a potentially big change to search, right? We expected this really monumental change the same way that we see with a lot of these broad core updates, but what's actually happening in reality is it's been a pretty slow update to begin to roll out. But what I think we're going to see is that there's this new notion of classifier, which I'll talk about in a later slide. But Google's beginning to classify sites that are unhelpful, and it's a machine learning system which Glenn talked about. So over time, the classifier can get smarter and smarter and better and better at identifying unhelpful content. So I think we're seeing just the beginning of this update. And Google started with low hanging fruit. So with this update, we're starting to see some kind of fringy sites that aren't really following SEO best practices and content quality best practices, starting to see negative impacts from these updates. So we have things like lyric sites, some adult sites, sites that offer different grammar, recommendations, mp3 downloads, low quality affiliate sites, product manuals, and sites that have copied code on them. So just some really quick examples. We have some lyric sites, there's a lot of lyric sites on the Internet. Obviously. But Glenn pointed out a really good point that in some cases, lyric sites don't actually have the license to be legally displaying this lyric information online. So it's entirely possible that Google is starting to catch on to some of that and you know, really reward like licensed lyric sites. Whereas other sites that are just replicating what everybody else says, without actually adding real value could potentially be impacted by this update. So this is a screenshot of one of the sites that was affected, and I'm in Germany. So that's why these ads are in German. But you can see the extent to which the ads are overtaking the page content, right. It's very hard to use. So it's possible Google's just saying like this, this lyric site is really not helpful compared to other sites that are offering much better content. There's also some product manual sites that started to get hit. So these are sites that offer actual PDFs of different product documentation, but they don't add a lot of original value or anything that hasn't already been found online before. So these sites are being impacted. Grammar sites, which also you know, there's thousands of these types of sites online. Some of them are seeing declines from this update. It's possible Google's just saying, “you know what, we already have so many different answers to this question. These sites are not doing a great job differentiating their content.” And I'm just a little bit like, well, we'll see what happens with this update. But this makes me a little skeptical. Like, I don't know if this is helpful or not. So apparently, Google has deemed a lot of these sites is not not being unhelpful, but personally, I'm like, I don't know this could be seen as helpful. So it'll be really interesting to see how this Helpful Content Update classifier changes over time. And as I mentioned before, this classifier that Google's using is still learning, it's a machine learning process, it's going to get better and smarter over time. The frustrating part is we don't exactly know the extent to which that classifier is working in the algorithms. It's a little bit of a mystery for us. And really quick, the product review updates. I know Glenn talked about this a lot. But if you read the documentation related to what it takes to write good product reviews, they do talk about showing expert knowledge whenever possible, and also providing evidence of your own experience with the products. So they want you to actually show videos and pictures of yourself using the products whenever possible. These are two sites doing that really well. This is Clever Hiker as well as Switchback Travel, you can see that these are pictures of the actual women that are using the products that they're recommending in the article. So this is a really good example: don't just use stock photography, take actual photos of yourself whenever possible. Product Review Updates have been really, really intense for a lot of different product review sites. This is an example of a product review site that was basically wiped off the map with one of these Product Review Update. There was supposed to be a new one maybe this week or next week, but Google just announced a core update yesterday, so we don't really know when that's going to be rolling out but there is a new one coming. And Glenn talked about this as well. But basically there's like a bad and an okay and then a much better way to convey product reviews. This is bad. When you're just pulling in data from Amazon. You're not providing any unique insights. You're just putting affiliate links on the page. Not great. Google does not like that. What you're saying, you know, we have an algorithm that we're using to take all the different information online and create our own scoring system. That's a little bit better, right? You're doing some work, but you haven't exactly tested the products. Better is to say we've tested the products, you know, we have a product testing lab, like when mentioned. And here's what we've actually found through our own product tests. So do this whenever possible. 43:02 So quick tips for incorporating real expertise into your SEO strategy. Number one, as much as you can incorporate real experts into your content strategy. You should do that. So you can provide questionnaires to experts that help inform your content. You can transcribe expert audio and video interviews that they've already done. Or even just asking experts to review the content and then using their names. Number two–make personal branding for experts part of your SEO strategy. So this is a site that's in Spanish but what I love about this site is that they have an expert that contributes content to the site, that same expert, she's a doctor, she has a profile on the site. And then if you Google her name, you'll see that her profile on that site ranks really well for her name. So this site does this for all the different doctors that it has on the site, their content contributors, their experts, and you can tell them, we get to have a page on the internet that ranks number one or number two for your name, which the experts always love. And you can reach out for experts for content contributions when you don't have any experts at your company. So you know, research credible experts in their field, make sure that they're the best person for the job, offer them maybe a link to their site or other publicity, and it turns out that experts really enjoy sharing their contributions. So I ran a quick Twitter survey this week, asking for anybody that considers themselves an expert in the field. How would you respond if somebody reached out to you and said, Hey, would you mind contributing to my article? Turns out 44% of people would happily contribute with no incentive, 22% would contribute with some type of incentive. So the vast majority of experts, basically 66% of experts, are happy to contribute. So always use that as part of your content strategy. 44:46 Crystal Carter: Great insights, we're getting some great feedback from the audience on this. I think Lily might need to rejoin just quickly. But yeah, we're getting some great insights. A few people asked a couple of questions in the chat. If I may, around some of the Wix things we have built in around this. I can jump into that straightaway. Or we can jump back into your deck, Lily? 45:13 Lily Ray: Ah sorry, my internet went out. Can you repeat the question? 45:14 Crystal Carter: Oh, no, I was just gonna give a shout out to a few Wix things because some things some people were saying like, “what do you do if you have a small budget?” And I think that you know, your example of the tattoo parlor was a really good example because I think one of the great things about E-A-T is that you don't need a massive budget to make some of these changes. And you can do them on Wix or on any platform. 45:14 Lily Ray: Yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, in both the example of the tattoo artist, as well as the pest control guy like that doesn't need to have a big budget, you just need some time with the expert. So sit down with them. Think about what are the most important resources to have on your site. It only really needs to be like five, you know, five of the most relevant questions people ask and just work with them to create the content that stands the test of time. 45:59 Crystal Carter: Absolutely. And I think one of the things that a lot of times if you don't have a big budget what you what you might have is time so if you have the time to to put in then it then it can absolutely make a difference. 46:11 Crystal Carter: Do we have more slides from you there, Lily? Was that your last slide? That was that? Okay, it was beautiful. We had some fantastic feedback on it and Mordy I don't know if you want to jump in. We're running out of time rapidly. 46:22 Mordy Oberstein: Sure, so I'm gonna jump in really quickly. And I know we're sensitive to time so I will do this quickly. Hi, I'm Mordy Oberstein. I'm the head of SEO branding at Wix and do a bunch of other stuff. We're going to skip it but we do actually Crystal and I host a podcast called the SERP's Up podcast you can find it on the Wix SEO Learning Hub and last week we actually talked about Google algorithm updates. So if you're looking to learn more, check out the podcast episode. Okay, I'm done plugging. Let's get learning. I'll cut this a little bit short. But one of the things I want to talk about is, Lily and Glenn talked about is the approach is more important than anything your mindset of how you think about content, and how you're analyzing the content after a core algorithm update is really important. So what I tend to do is look at–hey, you know, this page went up in the rankings or stayed the same and still ranking really well versus pages that lost ranking and automatically analyze what's missing in the content, what these pages could have done better. So really performing a thorough and holistic content analysis. And we can talk about this for a long time but I want to be sensitive to the Q&A. So I want to run through three very quick lessons that I have seen over the years from Google's larger broad core algorithm updates, meaning fundamental changes to the algorithm. Lesson number one is to be exact. Whenever and wherever you can, be exact. So core updates or Google algorithm updates are kind of like playing Operation and I don’t know if you ever played Operation as a kid but one small little touch and you set off the red buzzer. Algorithm updates are kind of like that one small little problem can really set Google off, which is why it's really important to be specific. And I'm gonna give you an example. So the key word here is “mild bipolar disorder”. So a really important, very sensitive keyword. And the top three lines, the green line, the pink line, and the light pink line, I guess. These are all URLs or websites/web pages that stayed the same throughout the algorithm update. The purple line lost ranking and what I want to understand is what happened with that purple line. Meaning what happened with that web page that lost rankings? What was the problem with it? And I want to show you really quickly. So the Cleveland Clinic is one of the websites that stayed ranking among the top three results throughout the algorithm update and when they talk about cyclothymia, and they say cyclothymia is often, keyword often, considered a milder form, a milder and chronic form of bipolar disorder. The Mayo Clinic again, one of the top ranking consistent websites, says that it's a, cyclothymia, there are several types of bipolar and related disorders. WebMD says what causes cyclothymic disorder? Many experts, not all, but many experts say that cyclothymic disorder is a very mild form of bipolar disorder. Here's the page that loss rate cyclothymia, sometimes called cyclothymic disorder is “known”, not “often known”, “can be known”, “many think”, “is known”, is known as a mild form of bipolar disorder and they use it in the subheading of the page. An Overview of cyclothymia, I'll get it right. The condition commonly called bipolar three, that's a really big problem because imagine you're somebody who's looking at this webpage and wondering, well, what should I do next? In terms of mental health, and you're reading this paper saying that if you have the symptoms of cyclothymia, then you have bipolar disorder, when that's not necessarily the case. Being exact and being specific, especially as it applies to people's lives and their financial well being is very, very important. So if you can be as exact as possible in your content, it's a way of creating really good, really quality content and Google's kind of in the know about it. Moving on, watch your tone, which I tell my children all the time. So I'm gonna go back to the September 2019 core update. I'll say very quickly, we're looking at the keyword, “business term loan”. What you're looking at here is a web page that lost ranking because of this update. And it did because, well, they're selling a loan that could really mess up your financial life and they're saying, well, a business term loan never goes out of style. We all love a classic, like he’s trying to sell me a used car. Even talks about using a business term loan to finance my brother in law's wacky startup is not really the content you want when taking up millions of dollars of loans. Going to skip the slide for the sake of time. What happened was they sort of updated the content. They wrote the classic small business loan This is the page as it is now still not the best but they got rid of all the weird content about funding your brother in law's wacky startup and they put really helpful really useful informational content about what a term loan means? Types of term loans, so instead of trying to sell, I'm just gonna skip that, skip that, instead of trying to sell or oversell content or via their content. They were being reasonable. They are being reasonable. Now, Google knows you need to make money. Google is fine with you making money on your website, but you should do that appropriately. And don't over don't try to market a very problematic product. If you don't get it right, such as a term loan. As you're trying to market a used car. Market things appropriately. Be reasonable how you go about your marketing language. Lesson number three, teach, don't preach. And we're going to the product review update that Lily and Glenn spoke about, and we're looking at two different web pages, one web page gained rank, one page lost rank at the hand of the Product Review Update. And the question is why? By the way, this is still a problem for these websites. Well, in the case of the site, that won rankings they're still winning rankings and the site that lost rankings. Guess what? They still are in the gutter. Well, they're on page two, which is the equivalent, I guess. And the page that lost ranking. It's not like it's a bad page. It's got stuff on the page. It has a nice chart that goes through each of the products that we're reviewing, in this case the reviewing camping air mattresses. It tells you the price it tells you the warranty grid information even goes through a nice little write up around each product. They even give you a rubric of what they were looking for when they were evaluating the product, but they don't do this. And I'll explain to you what this is in a second. And this is from the page that one rankings. The page that lost rankings when they went through their rubric of how we were evaluating these products, they wrote things like, “oh yes, we looked at comfort”, but it kind of went on and didn't really define what does comfort mean? And how do I define what is comfort if I'm looking for a mattress myself. The page that gained rankings did that. I'll read it to you. For example, they write for comfort some air mattresses have a soft top surface which eliminates the need for a sheet or a sleeping bag others don't. So you'll need to save some type of installation to stay warm. They're telling you when they looked at comfort, these were the specific things that they were looking for, which is really usable because now if I want to go to Walmart, I don't want to look at any of the products on the actual page anymore. I want to go to the store and buy one of these mattresses. I know what to look for. You actually taught me something that I can take and apply somewhere else. In teacher language by the way, that's me teaching children, which is a scary thought. But in teacher language, we call it scaffolding. In other words, if i’m just telling you that we looked at comfort, you may have a rubric around that you use to understand what comfort means. But you haven't brought me along. There's still gaps. I don't really understand that. But if you tell me yes, we looked at comfort and here's how we define comfort. You're filling in all those gaps by the end of the piece of content. I'm walking away fully understanding something that I can apply somewhere else. So if you're thinking how do I create content that Google is going to like? I always think about it as creating scaffolded content that really walks the user through the concepts that you're trying to teach them without leaving any gaps and I don't want to leave any gap by forgetting about the Q&A. So I'm going to end here. Thank you. 54:03 Crystal Carter: Thank you so much for it. Always, always a pleasure. And yeah, some great, great, great insights about making good content and about comparing the SERP and comparing the different results that you see and comparing content to figure out what to do next. So yes, thank you. Thank you all. We've had lots of questions. The audience has been really, really engaged. So thanks, everyone for sticking around and forever asking some questions. Let's jump right into it. Just a quick question for Gabe. You talked a lot about user studies. Can you give us an example of a way that somebody can get started with user studies if they've never done it before? Or maybe that someone might be able to get started with it if they don't have a big budget or that sort of thing? 54:45 Glenn Gabe: Yeah, absolutely. So I wrote an entire post about this. So if you Google, “Glenn Gabe user studies”. So just go there. It has a whole case study of how I helped a health client through a user study through the lens of broad core updates. I list on there various services you can use and everything like that. So it's probably best just to go through that post because it's pretty in depth. Definitely do it. A lot of people again, look at it and are like, “oh, that sounds cool”, and they never do it. But definitely go through that and then just try it out. 55:17 Crystal Carter: Yeah, and I think that's really important because Google is trying to make sure that the content is good for users. So you know, they can see a lot of indicators to show that through all their algorithms. And if you've got real users giving you that insight, it's really valuable. So yeah, cool. And so you mentioned broad core updates, somebody asked what that is, and if I could just summarize quickly. Glenn's like, “that's a big question”. A broad core update is essentially when Google decides to adjust their algorithms across the web, overall. We've mentioned people talking about Product Review Updates, we've talked about other things, and sometimes they'll focus on one particular part of the web and then sometimes they'll focus on the web overall. Those are called broad core updates. Generally speaking, in a very, very top level 56:06 Glenn Gabe: They’re usually three to four times a year. They make the earth shake. It's when Google is basically updating its core ranking algorithm. So it's global across all languages, etc. 56:16 Crystal Carter: Fantastic. And then, we also talked about lots of things for Lily, one of the things that someone was saying was how does Google know whether or not someone was an expert? They were saying, you know, Google's you know, they're just taking these people's word for it. Is that what's going on? Or how do they know that someone is an expert on their website or using external information? 56:41 Lily Ray: So Google doesn't always know, right? Like Google can't possibly know everybody in the world, but they're trying to. They have something called the Knowledge Graph, which is 500 million facts about… 500 billion facts about 5 million entities… or something like that. I should definitely memorize that statistic. But basically, they're trying to understand most of the recognizable people in the world. So when you get to a certain point of credibility, Google actually has an entity for you in the Knowledge Graph. If you Google a person's name, you can see on the right sidebar at the top of the page, they know who that person is, they know that they're an expert in their field and they can make connections between who's writing this content. For example, when Glenn writes content, sometimes they might highlight his name as an author in something like Google discover. So there's a lot of different examples of how Google's using real authorship and trying to get to know who all the real experts are. And I just want to mention something because a lot of people are chatting here, when I mentioned websites that have been dinged because they have copied code, I did not mean CMS platforms like Wix, Wix is fine. I mean, sites that are literally copy pasting code, like Stack Exchange, where they're just like basically plagiarizing other sites–so you're fine if you're using Wix, you're all good. 57:47 Crystal Carter: Okay. And Mordy you talked a lot about different quality of content. Is there sort of a litmus test that you use when you're trying to evaluate whether a piece of content is decent or not? 58:07 Mordy Oberstein: Yeah, it's very similar to what Glenn and Lily talked about. I call it the brand sniff test. So think like a brand marketer for a second. So if you're a brand marketer, what you tend to do is you'll look at something you'll think of all the latest signals that it's sending. Is it the right tone? Is it sending up the right quality signals, like your brain is basically AI on steroids. So when you look at something you're making a million snap judgments like point three seconds. Kind of think of your content like that. If you're a fresh user coming to the page, what latent signals is the page sending? Does this format look right? Is it structured well? Is the tone right? Is it graphically appeasing? And if you take a look at those latent, more subtle signals, and you walk away saying, “this looks like a great page”, then it is probably going to be a great page for Google as well. Obviously, you need to dive a little bit deeper, but that’s my general litmus test. 58:54 Crystal Carter: I think so. And it's interesting that you bring up some of the visual things because Lily and Glenn both alluded to some of those. So that useful one that you showed that had all of those ads everywhere that you couldn't see anything and Glenn, you mentioned you know that when we talk about quality content, we're also talking about content that's messy. So, yeah. 59:13 Glenn Gabe: Right. Yeah, I was just gonna say I mean, I've written for years about the negative UX experience, aggressive ads, deceptive ads. It's been in the quality rater guidelines. So you Google me and ad aggressiveness and all sorts of stuff like that. You'll find some posts about it, but definitely do not overload the page with ads. 59:34 Crystal Carter: And I don't know if we want to take just a minute saying what we think, maybe, about the Helpful Content Update? Or if we think we just keep that can of worms closed. I don’t know if I'm opening a can of worms. I think, do you think, can we possibly make some predictions, maybe? I think it'd be interesting to see how it all plays out. There's a lot of different tools that Google is using for the Helpful Content Update. So. 1:00:02 Glenn Gabe I mean, the biggest thing and I actually pinged Danny Sullivan on Twitter about this, but since it's continually running, if they juice it up, change it, enhance it, whatever. You'll never know that you're impacted by that. That's a huge problem. So I asked Danny, I said if you do that, can you let us know? And he said, if it's significantly updated, then they'll try and let us know. So if not four months from now, a site could tank, it could be the Helpful Content Update. You would have no idea. We had no idea. So I mean, that's the only thing–I just hope that they actually communicate that. 1:00:37 Mordy Oberstein: That part of what makes it hard. They're running another algorithm update right now right after the Helpful Content Update and implying that it's very possible that the Helpful Content Update is going to boosted by the release of the Core Update. So which is responsible for the ranking shift? 1:00:52 Glenn Gabe: Yeah, actually, Danny replied to my tweet about that. That's actually not the case. Based on his response last week, it sounded like broad core would take that signal and actually use it as another signal for broad core update. That's not the case. They're separate. What he was saying is the combo of the two could impact you and be more extreme. Yeah, I know I was with you. And that's what I thought. But that's not the case. Unfortunately. 1:01:18 Crystal Carter: Well interesting to see how it all plays out. In the end. Yeah. And how it affects sites and how we can make sure that we keep the content, the one that you showed Glenn, where it's just always doing well. I've seen clients like that and it was just interesting that Lily you were saying about experts. It was a lawyer site and they just wrote the content. I never did anything like you know, I did like you were saying light SEO make sure they've got headings, bullets and blah, blah, blah. But I didn't go over it too deeply and they and they just said about the structure. And they always do well, because they always just write the content based on you know, what their clients ask them and, and that's that sort of thing. So it's really interesting to see that. Yeah. Cool. I think I don't know if we should start wrapping up because we're sort of hitting our time. We got loads more questions. 1:02:07 Crystal Carter: So we'd love to have you back another time. Thank you very much to everyone for joining, for joining the session. We will be back next month for another Wix SEO session. And it will be all on local SEO. We'll be joined by Amanda Jordan. So please do join us for that. Thank you so much, Lily. Thank you so much, Glenn. Thank you so much, Mordy, thank you all for joining us. 1:02:33 Lily Ray: Thanks for having us. 1:02:35 Glenn Gabe: Okay, great. Thank you!

November 15, 2022 With over 2.5 million blog posts published every day, your content needs to cut through the noise to reach the right audience. Join Ross Simmonds, Founder & CEO at Foundation to learn how you can build a professional content distribution strategy—increasing the reach, visibility and performance of your content by getting it in front of the right audience at the right time. Check out the webinar's decks: Check out Ross's webinar deck Check out Crystal's webinar deck Free template: Download our content distribution toolkit to learn how to automate your posts with RSS, share on social with a single click, create email campaigns, and more. In this webinar, we covered: Getting more value from your existing content Identifying opportunities to increase your reach Useful tools to increase your blog’s visibility Meet your hosts: Ross Simmonds Founder & CEO at Foundation Ross is the founder of Foundation, a marketing agency combining data and creativity to develop ambitious B2B brands. Foundation specializes in planning, creating and distributing content across the world's most competitive social channels—generating millions in revenue for their clients. Twitter | Linkedin Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO & Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush and more. Twitter | Linkedin George Nguyen Director of SEO Editorial, Wix George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works and how to use Wix SEO tools . He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Twitter | Linkedin Transcript: Blog distribution strategies for growth George Nguyen 0:00 I'd like to introduce you first to the person I see on my screen: Crystal Carter, my amazing coworker, the head of SEO communications here at Wix. She'll be speaking to you, kind of chiming in here and there, but a lot at the end there. And if you're watching now, and I will say this again, you will have questions about the Wix interface. How do you do this within Wix? Where do you go to? Those will be answered at the end with examples on screen, so you won't be left—we're not going to tell you how to do something, and then not show you in our own interface, how to do it. So if you have those questions, please hold on to them 'till the end. We'll get to them. George Nguyen 0:36 Now, moving on to Ross Simmons. I asked him just earlier, how do you want me to introduce you? He said, it doesn't really matter, people don't really come here for the speaker, they don't want to know about me. But I'm very excited because he's the founder and CEO of Foundation Marketing. And he is a man that I tried to chase down when I was a conference programmer for SMX, unsuccessfully. I didn't get him to speak at our conference. But he's here now, in an even more intimate setting. And the best thing about this is that it's free. So say hello, Ross. I can't see you on screen. So just go ahead and say hello. Ross Simmonds 1:12 What's going on, folks? Super excited to be here. I did do a nice wave, but super pumped to be in the house and chatting with you folks today. Thanks for the intro, George. Crystal Carter 1:21 We're so pleased to have you. George, thank you for the great intro. Thank you so much, Ross, for joining us. I've been a big follower of Ross's for a long time. And when we were at MozCon I told him so, over and over again! So yes, I think Ross has some great, great insights on how to make the most of your content. And I highly recommend that you take notes, although we'll share the slides later. But take notes, pay attention because they're great insights, very actionable and won't steer you wrong. George Nguyen 1:54 Just to continue embarrassing people—We met Ross at MozCon. I met him there for the first time. But as soon as we saw Ross, Crystal was like, "Here's my phone, take photos." We have so many photos of them at the booth. True stuff. George Nguyen 2:12 I am George Nguyen, the director of SEO editorial, and I help manage the Wix SEO Hub, and I'm here in a moderating capacity. We're gonna go through some of the logistics with you. All right, cool. So yes, we are being recorded. So you're gonna get later on in your email a link to the YouTube video, so you can check anything that you might have missed out on. Please feel free to ask questions in the Q&A panel. And as somebody who has done the Q&A stuff in the background, I would say that your best chances of getting your question answered is if they are—first of all, seems obvious, but—relevant to what we're saying. So if you simply asked, like, how do you rank number one for something, or you ask us how an algorithm works—that is highly unlikely to get answered. And if so, it'll only be tangentially. So please stick to the topic, and you should be golden. But there are a lot of questions, we'll do our best. And you can check out future webinars at wix.com/seo/learn/webinars . Next month, we are talking about Wix SEO product updates. So if you're a Wix user, come join us there. You'll learn how to make use of everything that you're already getting, that you're already paying for with your Premium subscription. And hopefully you'll get more visibility out of it. George Nguyen 3:29 So we've done the introductions. We're gonna get to everything that Ross has to show us right now. And then after that, we're gonna come back to examples from Crystal, and then we're going to do your Q&A. And so I think that's all you're going to be hearing from me for the next, maybe 30 or so minutes. Ross, feel like taking it away here? Ross Simmonds 3:47 I would love to. I do want to make sure—I saw some comments. Someone said that they didn't see the slides. Everyone else—Are you able to see the slides? Could you just drop a quick "yes" in the chat if you are able, awesome. I'm seeing lots of "yes's". That's what I like to see. Let's keep it rolling. I'm going to ask another question, to make sure you can see mine. There we go. Can you see my slides? Ross Simmonds 4:21 Yes, okay. We are in action. Love it. Super excited to be here. Super excited to be giving this presentation. As you would have heard earlier, I gave a big applause and thumbs up when I saw some folks from Halifax, Nova Scotia—that is where I am located. Super excited to be here. Super excited to chat with all of you today. Now, before we jump into it, I do have a question that I want to throw out there, also for the chat. On average, how much time per week do you spend creating content? Just drop a number—number of hours, number of minutes—how much time are you spending on a weekly basis creating content? Some answers here: 40, 3, 2, it's my job, 20, 20, 20, 15, 8, 10. Wow, lots. Okay, same question. Gonna ask a different way. How much time are you spending distributing, promoting and amplifying that same content? How much time do you spend a week promoting it? Answers: 0, not enough, 0, 1, 2, 5 minutes, 3 minutes, 15. Love it. Cool. Somebody put 54—There's no way that you are doing 54 hours distributing. Lots of "not enough". Awesome. I love it. This is exactly what I wanted to hear. And the reason why this is exactly what I wanted to hear is because this is a situation that a lot of people are in, no matter if you are a small up-and-coming business, whether you run a restaurant, whether you run a cafe, a website that's dedicated to generating affiliate links, traffic, etc., a software company. This is the conundrum that a lot of people live in. It's a conundrum that is very real. And it's the simple, simple reality of over-investing in creation and under investing in distribution. Now my last question, then I'm gonna throw to you and then we're going to get into the fun stuff is this: What industry? What background? What business? What's your space? What type of world do you live in? What industry are you in? I'd love to get a glimpse. Answers: Medical, cool. Marketing, fitness, law, women's clinic, fitness, eSports, broker, art, interior design, cool, very cool. Let's jump in. Alright, I wanted to do that so I can set the stage for how I deliver this and some of the things that we talked about today. So I appreciate that context. Ross Simmonds 6:37 Before we get in, now, I'm going to do something that's very real. I'm going to give you a personal confession, just like Usher would. I have a confession to make. You see, this is something that I've carried with me for a very long time. It's something that influenced for decades the way in which I operate and show up at events. That is why I love things like this because I don't have to tap into one of my biggest challenges. So when George reached out to me many moons ago, asked me to go to an event and I couldn't go, it was because of this confession that I'm about to make to you today. The confession is this: I am without question, a wanderer. You see, as much as I love going to events, as much as I love meeting people in the flesh, shaking hands, kissing babies, all of that good stuff, can't really do any of that too close now. But anyways, when I think about my experience at events, I am truly a wanderer. And some of you might be thinking, wonder? What do you mean? Like I'm not talking about that time I went to the local fair with my parents, and I got lost for like 25 minutes. That's not what I'm talking about. When I say I'm a wanderer, I'm a wanderer as it relates to information. Yes, I love going to conferences and hearing people speak. I love sitting there and absorbing and getting new insights, new information that I can apply in my work, and in my job, and in my career. I love all of that stuff. But what I do have a challenge with is when somebody is having a conversation with me, they can be inches from my face, and my mind will start to wander. Ross Simmonds 8:02 I can remember a few years back now, I went to an event, it was in Stockholm–shout out to anyone who's from Sweden here—and I'm at this event chatting with this gentleman. And we're having a dialogue, we're talking about marketing, we're talking about video and how back in the day, if somebody uploaded a vertical video, you'd yell at them and tell them to flip their phone the other way, because you wanted to consume it horizontally. But now everybody loves vertical video. I can geek out about this stuff any day of the week. I love it, right? But I'm a wanderer. So my brain, while he's standing inches from my face, we're having this conversation, and it was just like Charlie Brown. All I could hear was wa wa wa wa wa, right? Like there was nothing actually coming out of his face. Because I was enthralled by a conversation happening completely outside of my area, about butter. There were two people having a debate about whether or not you should keep the butter in the fridge or on the counter. And my mind just wandered completely to this conversation. Marketing is cool. But hearing a dialogue around the debate between butter being on your counter or in the fridge was amazing to me, because I have firm beliefs on where butter should live. And I'm not going to disclose it in here because that'll be controversial, and everybody will get all upset. We'll have a full argument about it. But this conversation just completely enthralled my attention. It captured me, it hooked me and I was fully bought into this debate. And you folks, I want you to drop a comment in the chat. Where would you keep your butter—on the counter or in the fridge? But either way, this convo just completely caught my attention. So I'm listening to these dialogues. I'm just here. This man is standing in front of me. My wife who joined me at the event, she comes back and she's like, hey, honey, how are you doing? I'm like, oh, let me introduce you to this gentleman I just met. And I said, here's my *butter* half. It was that bad folks. I kid you not, I called her my butter half! It was hilarious. I would have been blushing if I could turn different colors, but I couldn't. So I was just like there, looking like I usually do but I was very embarrassed. I was so surprised that this happened. But this happens all the time. It happens all the time, because my brain has the ability to wander. It completely does this all the time. Ross Simmonds 10:09 But it turns out, folks, this is where I want you to hear me out for a second—This is something that all of us can do. It's actually a superpower. Because after I embarrassed myself, I went home and I went to Google, the site that we all use to find out answers to questions, and I decided that I was going to learn what in the world is going on with my brain. And the scientists call this thing, the cocktail party effect. Amidst a bunch of chaos, amidst a bunch of noise, we have the ability as humans to isolate sound at a lower decibel no matter if it's relevant to us or not. But if we care about it, we're able to extract that sound and increase the decibels in our own hearing, mute other sounds to focus on sounds that we care about. It's amazing. When you go to a kitchen party, you go to a restaurant, we all have the ability to do this. When you're at a wedding and you're having conversation with someone, and you're supposed to be listening to the groom give a speech, but the speech isn't that good, and you're just focused on your conversation, you have the ability to tap into the cocktail party effect. That is a human superpower. The ability to focus on a particular aspect of sound in a sea of noise is a superpower that we all have as humans. Ross Simmonds 11:19 But here's the thing. The internet is the loudest cocktail party ever. It's so loud. There's so many tweets, there's so many posts, there's so many shares, and so many blog posts, there's so many TikToks, and looms and videos and YouTube shorts. There's so much content, that it can very easily feel overwhelming. And I've got to say, I got one more deep, personal confession to make. It's all our fault. People like me, marketers who have preached at the top of their lungs for the last few years to create more content, write more content, build more content, and the world will be yours. We have created this mess. We've been preaching that "content is king", and the world has listened. Businesses have listened, you have listened. I looked at the numbers, you folks are creating content with 20, 40, 30 hours a week producing content. You've listened. And for good reason, right? Everyone has said "content is king", you have to create more content. And as a result, we're met with a field of new blog posts, LinkedIn stories, we've got a ton of content and podcasts, ebooks, resources, there's so so much, and I blame marketers. I blame marketers just like me, because all of us have fallen into a trap that I believe is hurting our approach to marketing. We've fallen into a trap that I call "CREAM", which is we believed that "Content Must Rule Everything Around Me". Right? Shout out to Wu-Tang, some of you will get that reference. But this is the essence and this is the problem that we all face every single day. We believe that if we create more content, the world is ours. Ross Simmonds 12:57 But this is a mistake. The evidence, look at Google today, right? Like go online and do a search. Google is making our life harder, even though we're trying to create more content, and we believe that this is going to serve us. Google's going to our blogs, they're scraping the content, and then they're showing it directly in Google. You can write a blog post about a book. I remember one of my first blog posts, it was books on marketing. Google can now take that content directly from my site, and show it directly in the search engine results page. So when you get here and you're looking for marketing books, you're looking for keto books, you don't need to click on a blog post. You're reading it right here. You're consuming it directly here. I know now that I need to buy Contagious, I know now that I need to buy Simply Keto. So I go and buy it. I don't need to click on your blog post that you wrote to learn about it. I can just get it from this. This is the stuff that exists today. Right? Whether it's your skin—you go to Google and you're like, foods that can improve my skin health, right? Google's now using natural language processing to say, eat a tomato, eat salmon, drink water, have egg. They're still working on the robotic thing, like they don't really know how humans speak that well yet, but they're trying, right, and they're trying to essentially replace your blog as a way of saying, you don't need to click on these URLs. Just read it here, right? Google is becoming a destination. You can now go on Google and you can learn about quartz versus granite and they're going to tell you everything you need to know. You want to learn about an emergency fund? They'll break it all down for you. All of this information is there. The blog post that you wrote will no longer cut it alone. You can't just press publish and expect that the world is yours. Google is a destination and you have to respond accordingly. It's becoming more and more challenging to win at the game of digital marketing. And here's the thing: it's going to continue to become more and more difficult, unless you start to shift your thinking. Ross Simmonds 14:47 When you look at social media channels. Over the last few years, there's consistently been more posts being shared by businesses and brands on Facebook, and guess what, the interactions are continuously going down, lower and lower. Why? Because it's a great bait and switch. They convinced us that we should pay for likes, and now they make us pay to reach the people that like us. This is an entire way that these businesses are able to generate revenue. So you can't fall into the trap of thinking that content is king. You need to start embracing distribution. You need to recognize that distribution is more important and we need to embrace the "DREAM", which is "Distribution Rules Everything Around Me". If you can embrace this philosophy and this idea, my hope, and my promise is that after this session, you will leave here empowered and with deep understanding of how you can spread your stories. That every blog post you create doesn't collect dust the day it goes live, but instead, it's something that you can create once but distribute forever. Ross Simmonds 15:45 And that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about how you can use distribution to grow your blog. If you're running your site on Wix, Wix has an amazing feature within it that you can run your blog directly in the product. If you don't have it set up, I strongly encourage you to spend some time thinking about a blog, because a blog can ultimately differentiate you from your competition. It gives you the ability to answer questions, solve problems, show up in Google, so many more different things. But you might think what in the world am I supposed to write about? We're going to talk about that as well. You need to embrace this model folks: create once, distribute forever. Ross Simmonds 16:18 Distribution has changed every industry across the world. When you think about music, and the way that it is now consumed by us as humans, and the way that he used to work, it has been fully disrupted. We now get access to music through aggregators, instead of record deals and distributors. If you're an artist, you can go directly to the consumer. When you think about distribution, it has also changed the media industry. Before, the newspapers used to have people who would drop off newspapers at your doorstep. And now, while that still exists, the typical way of consuming news is through our phone, right? This has been a shift. The distribution behind these businesses have changed. And we must change as well. Create once, distribute forever. Ross Simmonds 17:02 Now before we get into this, I want to talk through a philosophy that I believe needs to be injected in every single blog post you write, as well as the way in which you tell a story about the blog posts that you create. And that is the four E's. The four E's are fundamental. And if there's one area that you should be taking notes, it's this one. The four E's are the key to creating pieces of content if you want that content to work. Ross Simmonds 17:24 If you want that contact to have an impact on your audience, it needs to: Educate people, Engage them, Entertain them, or Empower them. What does that mean? Educational content provides people with new information. It's a how-to post. It's showing me how to do something. When I go to YouTube and I learn how to tie a tie for the first time—that's educational content. That's content that provides me with value. This brand has created this piece, and maybe they happen to be a tie company with a link talking about how I could buy that tie. You want to educate people. Engage: you want to tell personal stories, you want to have questions, have thought-starters. You could put up a post on all or any of your platforms today that just ask people a question, and they'll start to have a dialogue with you. And as that dialogue starts to happen, you have a community and the community happens to be associated with your brand, so goodwill is built between you and your audience. Then there's Entertain. If you can put a smile on someone's face, there's no better connection, right? If you can make people laugh, if you can make people feel good, feel inspired, etc., those are great feelings to invoke in people. But also, if you can entertain people by making them upset, calling out something that you don't agree with, to stir up something, whether it's throwing shade to something that's broken in your industry—all of these things are entertaining in nature, and they connect with audiences. And then finally, Empowering content. Content that celebrates your customers, celebrates others, celebrates and showcases people within your space, your niche, etc. All of these things generate tons of success on content as it relates to content that you can produce. And if you create a piece of content that doesn't fall into one of these four categories, I'm sorry to tell you but nobody probably wants to read that piece of content. You have to create pieces that educate, engage, entertain, or empower. And if you do that, you will be well on your way to creating pieces of content that are going to get shares on social, that are going to engage with your audience and ultimately give you a reason to take that next step of not allowing your content to collect dust. Ross Simmonds 19:22 So create once, distribute forever. How do you do it? How do you actually distribute your content and get in front of the right people? You're pressing publish on these blog posts, they're educational, they're engaging, some of them are entertaining, and some of them are even empowering. You wrote a blog post that highlights the five best places in Maine that you should go if you are under 25 for a coffee, whatever it might be. You wrote that blog post. Now how do you get people to share it? Well, you should probably reach out to the people who you highlighted in it, the people who you're empowering and if they're those cafes, you should talk to them. Get them to share that piece on social. You should probably tag them on social, maybe share it on LinkedIn, share it on Reddit, share it on Facebook, all of these different channels. Ross Simmonds 20:03 How do you do it? The first thing you need to do is understand your audience folks, who is it that you're actually trying to connect with? I love Facebook Audience Insights, it's a great tool that you can access directly in Facebook, where it will give you the insights around the demographics of a certain group that you're trying to connect with. I strongly encourage you to do this. If you have analytics setup, you want to use your own analytics as well, dive into that. Use this data to better inform you on who your audience is. You can dive into this stuff so deeply to better understand. If you're looking at dads on Facebook, in the US, they like the NFL, they like UFC, they like Kevin Hart, they like Buffalo Wild Wings, they like Bud Light. So clearly, dads don't like good beer. This is all very interesting to you, right? Like you can use this. I don't want anyone saying anything about Bud Light now and tell me that that's a good beer. But either way, what I'm saying is, this is the type of stuff that you can dive into to understand the way that your audience thinks, right? But it doesn't end there. You can do this for folks in Toronto and look at adults and be like, great, okay, I see that this audience is interested in BestBuy, they're interested in Fido, they're interested in Sephora. What else are they interested in? How can I use these insights to guide my approach to content? Right? It turns out ,when you look at a fashionable mother, so mothers who happen to like things like Gucci, etc.,they also follow this page called MEAWW. I don't know about you, but I never heard of MEAWW before in my life. But through this research, I was able to see that they have 12 million likes. So can I get MEAWW to share my blog posts on their site? Can I communicate and run ads towards people who like MEAWW, or to connect with this audience? These are the things that you want to think about. Ross Simmonds 21:41 But it doesn't end there. On Facebook, you also have the ability to just go up to the search bar, and look at local groups. How many people in the course of your life have gone on Facebook and you've seen like a marketplace where somebody is selling their latest stroller because they just had a second child, or maybe they're selling a camera or they're selling something on Marketplace. These are things that you can see all the time, right? But Facebook groups have a billion people using them every single day. And there's a major opportunity here, right? Like there's a major opportunity here, because if I'm a brand that is trying to connect with Shopify entrepreneurs, I can go into this group with 113,000 members, and start to share in that group content that I've written for that. So I go into that group and I can say, hey, Shopify entrepreneurs, I just wrote a piece that's breaking down the top 10 tools that every Shopify entrepreneur needs to know. Or, if I'm selling a product that targets working-from-home moms and dads, I go into this group, and I'm like, hey, do you spend a lot of time sitting in your chair? I'm now selling an add-on that you can put on your chair, and it fixes your posture, whatever it may be. You go into these groups and you add value, you ensure that the content that you're sharing within them is educational, engaging, entertaining, and empowering. And these people will ultimately become fans and believers in your product. If some of you right now sell products to a local market, if you go to Facebook search, and you type in dads, moms, and your region, your city, etc., I can guarantee you, you will very likely find groups where you should be promoting your product—talking about yourself talking about your story, and distributing the blog post that you're creating. Create once, distribute forever. Ross Simmonds 23:30 You also have the opportunity—because Facebook has been around for so long now—to find pages that have literally become graveyard pages. What do I mean by that? Well, let's say I'm trying to connect with engineers. This page, I Love Engineering, was created back in 2016. It's very old, but they hadn't put up a post since January 11. So what does that mean to me? It means to me maybe this account—I don't know about you but my life is a lot different now than it was in 2016—maybe this page is being managed by someone who just doesn't have the time to manage it anymore. They don't care about engineering. Maybe they graduated and they became an engineer and they're busy. Maybe you can reach out to them because no one else is following a page called I Love Engineering besides probably engineers, so you reach out to them. And you can say, hey, I noticed this page hasn't been active since 2015. Would you be able to sell it? Yes! For five grand. Okay, that's interesting. Right? Now, this is where it gets very interesting. You start to negotiate, ask for a lower price. Maybe they say 3K. That's like 10 cents a like. So for $3,000, you now have access to 92,000 people who have opted in to a page about engineering. What other spaces exist just like that? Ross Simmonds 24:35 Now some of you probably had your cocktail party effect going for the last little bit and you're like, oh Ross is talking about Facebook. I don't like Facebook, I don't like Meta blah blah blah, my audience isn't on Facebook. Well look at this step. Look at this for a second. If you're in B2B—and that's my space. My lane is B2B. That's where I spend the vast majority of my time—and you're like, ah, professionals don't use Facebook. They do. The stats show that they do, because humans aren't always in our suit and tie. We are just humans. We're a ball of chemicals. And we have emotions and all of those things just like everybody else. So yes, while Monday nine to five, I might be wearing my suit. And I might go golfing and I might be on LinkedIn being all professional, probably looking at my grandkids on Facebook to see what they're up to as well. And that is why you have to think differently, and why you actually need to understand your audience, because your audience is probably using these channels, and you're overlooking it. So don't make the mistake of assuming that your audience isn't there, just because they're not doing business directly on those channels. That is why you need to embrace this idea of understanding your audience, and then creating once in distributing forever. Ross Simmonds 25:41 It doesn't end there, folks. There's so many types of content that you can create. Today, I want to dive deep into tactical ideas that you can use in your business that go above and beyond just blog posts as well. Let's say you aren't someone who likes to write content. You have a voice for radio. You realize that radio doesn't get too many listeners anymore, so you're going to roll out a podcast. You decide that that's what you're going to do. You roll out a podcast. Take that podcast, and you're going to turn it into video content. Set up a camera while you record the podcast and share that on LinkedIn. Promote that content. Video is taking off. Maybe you write a blog post, and you describe what that blog post was into a microphone and you record it. And then you share that on social, right? That is an opportunity that exists. And you can take other pieces of content—things that are just status updates that are text—and turn them into long form pieces with graphics associated too. Turn them into a slide presentation. This one alone [shows screenshot] had over 100 and some likes on this piece. But essentially, it started as just this update. And then it turned into this and it was able to generate more engagement. If you are in the B2B world and you have data, research, visuals—share those on social in the blog post that you've written. If you've added imagery into that blog post, share the image, and then link to the blog posts later on in the piece, just like the folks at Gong are doing here. They're sharing this visual, there's no link to the blog until you click the See More button. And then you will start to see that there's a link inside of all of that content. Ross Simmonds 27:14 And don't be afraid to take your old blog posts and turn them into something else. Turn your blog posts into LinkedIn articles. LinkedIn has the functionality directly in their site, where you can write your blog and publish it on Wix. And then fast forward three days—you're not going to do it on the same day because you want Google to index your Wix stuff and all that good stuff—but you're going to first publish it on your Wix Blog. Then you're going to take it over to LinkedIn, you're going to copy and paste the entire piece, you're going to slightly change the headline, and you're going to press publish on a new article. Because LinkedIn is more likely to serve up content that is living on its platform than another platform. So they're more likely to give you more reach with your content. So turn those blog posts into LinkedIn articles. And then this is where it gets really interesting, right? Because you're able to take a blog post, turn it into a LinkedIn article, and then turn it into a YouTube video. And then time and time again, you're able to distribute and amplify all of these different pieces of content to give you more reach. And then if you create a video on a piece of content that is really valuable for a long period of time—you notice how this says 2020?—you can just keep updating that date to 2021, 2023, 2025, and so on and so forth, and it continues to show up in Google, right? I know. This is the way that you can approach it. You can take that same blog post, that same YouTube video that you created, and you can then embed it into a blog post, embed it into an article that you've created on LinkedIn, or directly into your blog that you post on Wix. That is the opportunity. Ross Simmonds 28:46 You want to plan though your distribution in advance, folks. You want to think about the blog post that you're going to write. You then want to think, ah, am I going to write a Twitter thread? Am I going to share this on LinkedIn or video, send it in an email. You want to think about all of these things in advance, and then you realize and recognize that okay, I got a sense of where I want to go, I'm going to distribute this forever. Now, some of you might be thinking, Okay, I got it. I do have a few bit more. Ross Simmonds 29:10 There's also communities. And I think communities is also where you should be distributing your content. Whether it's Reddit or Quora, these are places that you should also consider. There are local communities on Reddit that are dedicated to local areas and regions. You can go in there, share your content, have conversations, have a dialogue, upload your links. People love that. In Quora, are people asking questions that are relevant to you? It turns out that Google loves Quora. So Google actually is showing people a ton of core results directly in the search engine. So if you can answer these questions and link to your blog posts, it's going to give you even an additional reach. This is something that Jason Lemkin does really, really well. Somebody asked this question: What are some easy ways to increase sales? And as you can see throughout, he's answering the question, but he's also dropping links to his blog. Now I want you to look very closely. And if you're like me, you might have bad eyes so it's hard to see. But they have 63,000 views on this piece, right? That's a lot. That's a lot of traffic on this piece, just from him embracing the idea of creating this blog post once but distributing it forever and linking to it on this question, right? You can find local newsletters, reach out to the people who run a local newsletter, reach out to the people who run a Substack, and either ask them to sponsor it, where they will feature your content, the blog posts that you just wrote within it, and then share it. Or you can reach out and just ask them to share for free. And maybe they'll say yes, because they like what you created. Or maybe you could just use good ol' fashion Google and find forums or find newsletters and start to seed your content there as well. There are so many opportunities out there, folks. There's so many opportunities if you embrace this mindset of creating once and distributing forever. Ross Simmonds 30:54 Now, when I talk about Reddit, typically people start to break out into hives and get freaked out a little bit because Reddit will tell you where to go and how to get there very quickly. A lot of marketers are terrified by Reddit, and I get it. I've been banned three times from Reddit, I know. I've been there, I get it, it is not an easy place to crack. But what I encourage you to do is understand the audience and understand that, yes, Redditors do like links. We did a study at Foundation back in 2018. So we're going to do a new one, where we analyze 150 subreddits. And we found that the vast majority of the posts that we're generating upvotes are those in which they were sharing links, right? So these are the types of things that you want to do. And what you can also do is you can sort content by top posts and get insights into the type of content that individual communities want, and then give it to them. Create once, distribute forever. Ross Simmonds 31:44 Now, this is another one that typically throws people off a bit. You can also find ways to distribute your content in Slack communities. Some of you are like, Slack communities? What in the world does that mean? I use Slack to communicate with my team. This isn't a place to distribute content. Correct. It was originally built for internal communication. But there's Slack communities today that are filled with people who are interested in things like music, interested in things like design, interested in things like SEO and growth. And you can go into these different Slack communities, where people are actively spending time, actively having conversations just like in a Facebook group, and share your content with them as well. Ross Simmonds 32:21 There's also an opportunity that exists on medium.com. A lot of people have the wrong mindset around Medium. And I encourage you to check out toppub.xyz, it shows the top publications on Medium. And all of these are essentially sites that live on Medium.com. Some of them actually take contributions where you can submit contributions to their site. Why does that matter? Because to me, Medium doesn't replace your blog. Medium never replaces Wix, it doesn't replace the way in which you publish your content on your site. No, it's about reach. You view Medium as a guest blogging strategy, where you take the blog post that you've created, and then you upload elements of it to Medium, press Publish, and then have a call to action midway through it telling people to click on a link to read the rest, and it's on your website. View Medium as a guest blogging-style approach, not a replacement for your blog. Create once, distribute forever. Ross Simmonds 33:17 Some of you are probably looking like this right now. You're like, Ross, you just said Medium, Quora, Reddit, Slack, Facebook groups, Substack—What in the world am I supposed to do? I hear you, I hear you. This is what you need to do. You need to start by understanding your audience, right? Because the endless opportunities are there, right? There are a ton of opportunities that exist when it comes to distribution. If you want a list that will overwhelm you even more, but might make life easier because it will help you identify the things that are right for you, check out this free distribution checklist. I've outlined over 100 different ways that you can distribute your content on channels that I didn't have time to cover today. But this will help you a lot in terms of figuring out where's your audience and how can you distribute content in the ways that are going to resonate with them. Check that out. Ross Simmonds 34:05 Because recognize, right now, there is a ton of competition. You are competing with all of the new companies, all the new startups, all the new businesses trying to get your audience's attention. This is just martech alone. How many 1000s of companies are in there? In your space, there are a ton of competitors as well. Right? So this is what I encourage you to do. You feel overwhelmed, you're looking at this, some of you are gonna say I need to go distribute, distribute, distribute. I don't want you to. I don't want you to leave this and just start promoting things like wildfire because you're just gonna burn out. You're gonna get excited, you're gonna share, you're gonna share and then you're going to get a few crickets, might get one like from your mom, one like from your dad and say, oh, that's nothing. I've been there. Right? Ross Simmonds 34:45 What you want to do is you want to start planning. You want to start thinking about the content you should produce, you should start thinking about what you need to have in place to be successful. And then you need to start educating yourself. Start teaching yourself. Keep showing up to webinars just like this. Keep showing up to more training and development, read the SEO blog that Wix is producing and all of that content. Consume this content, because it's going to help you. It's going to prepare you for tomorrow. And if you do that, if you stay committed to that process, you're going to look back at the next few months of learning and development and growth and training for yourself, or maybe even your team and ask yourself, was all of that work worth it? And you're gonna say one thing: you *butter* believe it. Ross Simmonds 35:25 Thank you all so much. I hope you found this valuable. I'd be happy to stick around, answer some of your questions. I know that the team at Wix also wants to share with you folks some tactical insights around how you can use Wix to unlock some of this opportunity. So I'm going to pass the mic over to them. But thank you so much for the time. Be sure to check out the distribution checklist as well. George Nguyen 35:45 See I told you. Didn't I tell you all that it was going to be so good, and that Ross was just downplaying his background? But I mean, it gave us more time to jump into it. This is one of the most lively chats that we've had, that I've seen, so very excited about. Thank you so much, Ross. We're gonna move on to Crystal. George Nguyen 36:03 I just want to tell you all one quick thing. I want to put a little button on what Ross said. Yes, distribution strategies can seem really overwhelming at times. And there's a lot that you can do. But just like whatever your business is, you didn't start out by doing it all. I highly recommend maybe if it seems overwhelming, choosing one tactic, trying it once a week, and just setting that reminder to build up that momentum. Everything will seem more approachable. When you get familiar with the platforms that you're leveraging for your distribution. Once you know how that works, you'll know how to be successful or you'll know that this isn't the right channel and to move on. That's all I wanted to say. Crystal Carter 36:38 Yeah, we got so many insights. Alright. Okay, I'm gonna jump in to sharing just a few. I'm gonna go quickly because we want to get to your questions. Can you see my screen everyone? Cool.So I'm just gonna go through a few things that you can do in Wix. Crystal Carter 36:57 So these are five content distro features that are within your Wix blog. So number one: Every Wix blog is built in with an RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a little bit of tech from the 90s. But it's kind of having a bit of a resurgence. It can be used to help you to automate posts that allow you to connect with users very quickly. And this one is one that I've used. This was using a tool called Deliver it. And it can sometimes help you to get a little bit of the scale with regards to posting to Facebook or to LinkedIn or things like that, if you don't have lots of time. So this is something that you can use. And if you have a blog, then you can find your RSS at whatever your blog name is—this is mine. And then you put in this bit of information at the end. So blog-feed.xml, that's where your Wix RSS is, and every Wix blog has one. So they're really useful. You can also use it internally, if you want to tell everyone else inside your internal team, what new content that you've posted. Crystal Carter 38:02 Simple social share: Every time you post a Wix blog, you will get a little pop up that reminds you that you should share your posts. And it allows you to share on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn. We're going to share this deck afterwards, but there is a link to the support documents from Wix, which will tell you exactly how to do this so you can get the pop up there. And then also, if you have already shared it and you want to go back, then what you do is you go into your Wix Blog Post section, and then you can click the little three dots and you can share the post and you get the same little pop up again, and you can do it again. So that's that one. Crystal Carter 38:38 The other one that we have built into the Wix CMS is email campaigns. So easy email campaigns that you can do within Wix. Again, this document has a link here to some of the information for how to do that. Monthly plans allow you to publish and send emails from your CMS. So for instance, on my blog, if I was to use that one, then I would essentially click this little button where it says Create Email Campaign. And then I'd be taken to something like this. And this will take the blog that I've just posted, and it will format it already. And then I can use lots of different elements to customize it however I want to do, I can add different recipients, I can publish and send, I can also manage my mailing list from within the Wix CMS. And this is a great place to get started if you want to increase your distribution. And even if you're not not planning to do loads of it, like every single week, every single time, it's a great place to do big announcements. For instance, if you've got your big Christmas sale happening or your big holiday sale, then get in there and make sure that you're doing that. If you just launched a new blog, that's a great place to do it as well. Crystal Carter 39:40 Social graphics: So you might have heard of something called Canva for instance. We have something very very similar built into Wix that allows you to make your own social graphics. So Ross talked about how he took a post from from social media and he remixed it and he made it into a post with some graphics. He also talked about some other graphics, using those in your social posts. You can do that in your Wix CMS. So you can create graphics from the content on your site. All of the images that you've uploaded to your site can be used within this particular framework. You can use enhance themes, templates and assets, you can download it or share it to your connected social media accounts as well. So this is one that I used. And then we have a few different templates that you can pick and then you can edit it, and you can increase lots of information there. Crystal Carter 40:29 We also have an easy video maker. So Ross talks a lot about using videos and different channels. So with the easy Video Maker, you can again use information, some of the content from around your site to create videos in your Wix CMS. We have templates, we have lots of assets for audio, things like that to help you there. And you can connect it to your social media account. And these are some of the templates. We do square and vertical depending on which type of social media you're planning to use. And you can use either of those. And here is one that I made myself for my website [womeninthestars.com]. Oh you can hear the music, fantastic. So you, too, can make something that celebrates all of our famous astronauts! And then you can brand it at the end with your website when you share it to all those different places. So that's all I wanted to share with you just now. I hope that it's giving you lots of great ideas for how you can use Wix for your content distribution. And we'll now go to your questions! George Nguyen 41:44 Alright, sorry, I was on mute. And I just found out that I've been trying to type in the chat, but I don't have access to type to everybody. So I've just been typing in myself. I've been on chat in mute. So my apologies, we're gonna jump right into this. I'm gonna take this opportunity to answer one very quick question I saw: Why can't you share on Instagram? There are no links in Instagram posts. Crystal Carter 42:04 [Laughs] So with Instagram, you can share your graphics. And you can also share out via LinkedIn, LinkedIn bio, and things. There's a few different ways that you can do that. George Nguyen 42:17 And I'm also going to show you all—I'm hoping that you'll all return to our webinars because we'd like to see people return and then you can build on the knowledge somewhat. And I'm gonna give you a piece of advice here. When you ask questions to be as specific as possible. So the first question I have here is one I want to use as an example. It just asks: How do you improve conversions from blogs? You can make this a little bit more specific for our experts by telling them well, what is your goal? What is a conversion to you? Are you trying to get a lead form? Are you trying to get them to book a call with you? What's your vertical? That piece of information is really important, because all that kind of changes. That's why we say "It depends" so much in SEO. But it's a very general question. And I'm sure many of you could use some help here. How do you generally improve conversions from blogs? Crystal, Ross, you're going into this without knowing this person's website, their business. So a general advice for everybody. Crystal Carter 43:10 I'd love to let Ross start if that's all right. Ross Simmonds 43:12 Sure, yeah. I would say you want to start by understanding the goal, which George spoke to nicely. And then from that, once you understand the goal, ensure that the blog post is subtly but not over-the-top selling, right? Like, you want to use the blog in a way that you would approach your audience, the same way that you would want to be approached at one of those networking events. If I went up to you and I was like, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, you would look at me like I had 20 heads. But if I went up to you, and I just introduced myself and told you a story about how I was listening to a couple debate about the conversation about butter being on the counter or being in the fridge, you would probably be engaged and we would have a conversation. Then if I suddenly referenced in that dialogue, that I also have a butter company, you would be like, oh, cool, and you would learn about the butter. And then maybe you'd say here's my business card, I actually run a restaurant, I'd be interested in buying that from you. So you want to make your blog posts flow in a way that adds value. And then subtly reference another value add to the reader that you have connected with. That would be my recommendation on how to increase the conversion of your blog posts as it relates to a commerce-driven conversion, CRO. Crystal Carter 44:23 Absolutely. I think also thinking about the customer journey. So Ross has talked to you about a few different channels. So depending on which channel you're distributing your content on, also think about what that people will expect to see. So for instance, I've seen people where they've done lots of stuff on a Facebook ad for instance. And then people come to the website and then the content sphere—and the ad was like, we're selling things and it's on sale and there's a big sale!—and then they get to the website and it's like, hey, yeah, it's cool, everything's really nice. And it's like no! Where's the sale? People want to see the sale, right? So make sure that you're mindful of people's time and that you stay consistent with the messaging. If you have a post somewhere that's talking about selling, then make sure that the content they arrive to talks about selling. If it talks about conversation, talk about conversation. Ross Simmonds 45:06 Definitely. George Nguyen 45:07 I love when you tee things up for me, because now it gives me time to think about my answer to that. I want to contribute. I'm not really part of this, I'm the moderator. But, as a user from the other perspective, what's gonna stop me from converting? You might be in a very competitive niche where people are very suspicious. Some fields, some verticals, like I don't know, discount Bluetooth headphones, right? People are gonna be very cautious about buying things like that from manufacturers they don't know. Are you that manufacturer they don't know? Anything on your page that causes suspicion—from a typo in the first sentence to a lack of product images, or to no clear information about your return policy—all of those will get in the way of your conversions. Feels kind of ecommerce centric. But I feel like that's a good one to move on to the next one. George Nguyen 45:54 Okay. So this is a Wix Blog-specific question, and it's about the way the Wix platform works. Is it better to create a blog post on Wix using the blog post product? Or should I just create a new page, just a straight up page like an about page, and then put the same information on it? Why should I do a blog versus just a static page or vice versa? Crystal Carter 46:18 So one of the things that Ross talked about was that blogs are incredibly effective for driving traffic and creating channels for new content. What you get with a Wix blog, one of the benefits of a Wix blog is that you have an RSS for instance, which is a way for Google to read your content and to know that it's new, and to understand that it's part of the same sort of flow of all the other blogs in your content or on your website. I would say that sometimes there's a time and a place and a season for everything. So it might be that the content should be maybe summarized on an about page. But if you're going to go into more detail—for instance, if you had an about page that was like about this webinar, for instance—you might have the about page with a summary of who all of the three presenters are, then you might have a blog that goes into a bit more depth about, you know, like, where I grew up, and my favorite food, and that time Ross heard someone talking about butter. But I know, Ross, you've spoken a few times about different parts of the website that content best sits on. Ross Simmonds 47:20 Yeah, no, I think having it in the blog section makes the most sense. Because the same way that we consume news as media, you should be thinking about your audience consuming your blog content. And when they come to your website, if they happen to click on a blog, they're going to expect to see a series of different types of information that is typically sorted by chronological order. And that is like a natural flow for humans now. We've kind of been trained by the Internet to consume content that way. So give people something they're familiar with. George Nguyen 47:48 Also, you're gonna notice that you're in the blog—if you have a blog—you're in it quite often. Your static pages, they don't change that often. And the way you manage on the Wix back end, is also kind of different. We have the ability to manage things at scale. So you can manage all your pages in one place, all your blog posts in one place, all your main pages in one place. And not having something cohesive—like you can use one or the other, it's really up to you. But if you mix and match, and you want to go and make those adjustments, you're either going to have to find it manually, or you're going to be moving across the interface trying to remember how you created this page. Okay. George Nguyen 48:22 So this is a very general question again: How do I target the right audience for my blog in Wix? So, everybody just take a step back. When we say target, I feel like people in marketing are like, oh, targeting, there's a way to do this very specifically, very precise. Yeah, you might have some, you know, customer relationship management software that helps you get more scientific. But generally think about if you're running a brick and mortar store, how do they get people through the door? It's not exactly a fine science. It's not a science, it's kind of more of an art. But how would you go about targeting the right audience with your blog? How would you go about that decision-making process? I think that's a more useful approach. Ross, want to kick us off? Ross Simmonds 49:03 Yeah, so it's a tough one. Because when you think of targeting people, essentially, you just need to understand what your audience wants. And then you create that content. So if I know that my audience has a certain type of problem, I'm going to try to create that content for them on a regular basis. So if my audience says, yeah, I am interested in learning what the best mattress is for me and they're interested in sleep, then I'm going to write a blog post about five great things to consider when you are shopping for a mattress. Now, the way that you get a little bit more targeted, is that you go geo-specific. So if you are able to say in your piece, the best mattresses to buy in Boston, in New York, blah, blah, blah, that might increase your ability to show up in local search for those specific keywords, which can be more targeted with your blog content. Crystal Carter 49:53 And I would also say to follow that up, within Wix we have a whole suite of analytics that can give you information about how your audience are responding to the content that you have. We also allow you to connect with Google Business Profile. So for instance, if you find that those local users are really connecting with you, then you can build on Google Business Profile, you can see which geographies you're getting a lot of traffic from, for instance, and so then you can then you can modify accordingly. And also you can see which channels you're getting a lot of audiences from. So for instance, if you shared on LinkedIn and you got a lot of traffic from LinkedIn, that's a great way to say okay, I need to do more of that. And things like that. So you can sort of build, as you said, like Ross was talking about brick [and mortar]—brick by brick by brick. George Nguyen 50:41 Targeting is part of your distribution strategy, too. A lot of people like interior design. Pinterest is what we think of, right? So if you're in that vertical, that might be part of your targeting. You know, maybe if you're an—are we elder millennials, Crystal? Am I an elder millennial? Crystal Carter 50:56 [Laughs] I'm not making any confessions right here. Ross has made some confessions, I will not be. George Nguyen 51:02 A millennial, an elder millennial—I am on Facebook, although I don't use it. You know, that might be where you want to go to reach people in my audience. So think about where you're going to. George Nguyen 51:10 I'm going to answer this question really quick, because I think I can get it out of the way: Is there a limit on how long your blog posts should be? And my answer, let's see if we get a consensus with Crystal and Ross, is that you should write to the length that the subject matter deserves. That's the rule of thumb that I use for the Wix SEO Learning Hub as the editor there. And honestly, the question too—When you ask your Google device or whatever, what's the temperature outside, you only want to hear two digits. Maybe three. More than one. You don't want to hear the whole sentence. That's what I'm thinking. Ross, Crystal, are we on the same page here Ross Simmonds 51:45 Same page. Crystal Carter 51:46 Absolutely. George Nguyen 51:52 Okay. This is probably gonna be our last one. And we only have a few minutes left: Is distribution improved with original images versus stock images? Ross Simmonds 52:00 Good question. I don't know. And that's not usually an answer that you would get from a marketer. They would probably come to a conclusion that would not be rooted in truth and just try to sound really smart. But I don't know. Because I think at the end of the day, you can find some good stock images that will alert people and capture their attention and be click worthy. But I would say the best practices would be that you get inspired by typical thumbnails that are filled with emotion, like you would see in a YouTube video, and try to capture that in your social sharing imagery. What you want to do is disrupt people's feed. So when I'm scrolling through Facebook, and I'm looking at pictures, and I'm trying to see all of my friends' puppy pictures and baby pictures, all this good stuff, I want to see something on my feed that just disrupts it. And if you can create a visual, or find a stock photo, that is shocking in nature, but is still very valuable, that might generate a click, and that might get you some traffic to your content that is of high value. So that's the way that I would think about balancing the act. If you have the time, if you have the budget to customize your graphics, get photography, get an illustrator, get a designer, etc., then of course, yeah, go that route. But if not, just try to find some very creative and interesting stock photos. Crystal Carter 53:26 I would say that one of the things that's great—so just to do one more shout out to the Wix CMS—in your Wix CMS, [you can connect to] your Google Drive, which you can do with one click. You can say connect to Google Drive, and then you can see all of your Google Photos within Wix CMS, and you can just click and bring them in. And we also compress the images for you. So if you're out, for instance, and you've got your business, let's say you have a cupcake business, and you're taking pictures of your cupcakes, you don't even have to upload them onto your site. They're already on your site. So it makes the original stock images conversation easier. We also have Unsplash built into the back of your Wix website. So if you type in, you can just see all of the different stuff from Unsplash. So let's say you want a picture of a puppy, you can type in “puppy”, and then you can get it. But you can also edit those within there as well. So you can do some of what Ross was saying about, making it stand out a bit more. A lot of publishers will show a picture of a computer, and then put the word "Google" across the top of it. And that's how they've customized it to make it a little bit more disruptive, to make it a little bit more unique. So there's a few different methods that you can use to sort of do a combination of the two. George Nguyen 54:38 Alright, we're gonna end this right here. I want to say about this final question though, this is the hierarchy if you really need to simplify it: The worst case scenario is having no image at all. Generally speaking, know your audience, right? But like, no image at all is the worst case scenario. Using a stock image is infinitely better than that. Using a stock image that you've edited yourself to maybe show your branding or make it different than other images is better than that. And nothing will ever be that unique image that you had commissioned that you wanted, you knew in your head would be the cover image. That's what you want. And then you go down that list depending on what your resources are, what your capabilities are. George Nguyen 55:14 Okay, sigh of relief, we have got here, everyone. Thank you so much for your time. Ross Simmonds 55:22 Thank you. Thanks for having me. I know you're about to do your sign off. But I'll say thank you Wix for having me. I hope everybody got a lot of value out of this. I'm easy to find on the internet, folks. So if you do, at any point, want to connect, I'm easy to find on LinkedIn. Just say that you were at the Wix webinar, and I'll be sure to connect with you. I'm on Twitter @TheCoolestCool. George, Crystal, thank you so much for having me and the entire Wix team. It's been a pleasure. I hope everyone got a lot of value out of this. This was great. I had a blast. Crystal Carter 55:48 Thank you so much, Ross. George Nguyen 55:50 Crystal, you want to sign off? Crystal Carter 55:51 I just, thank you. Thank you so much to Ross. It's always a pleasure to hear you speak. And thank you so much to George for moderating, and jumping in at short notice. We appreciate you so much. And thanks so much everybody who's been answering some questions in the background. I hope everyone has a good day. George Nguyen 56:07 We have people leaving. Very quickly: Next month, Wix SEO Product Update Webinar. If you liked what Crystal showed you with the video creator, please mark that on your calendar. We're gonna be announcing it very soon. Other than that, everyone have a great rest of your week and thank you.

Get started by: Creating a website → September 24, 2024 Join us for an interactive workshop where we'll deep dive into optimizing Google AdSense on Wix websites with AdSense experts. Learn how to create ad layouts that are user-friendly and high-performing, track key metrics, and use data to improve results. Plus, we’ll cover the new plugin and answer any questions. In this webinar, we'll cover: Create optimized AdSense ad layouts on Wix Use the Wix Monetize with AdSense app Track and monitor ads Meet your hosts: Alla Avgustinov Product Manager, Wix Alla is a passionate product manager with over 5 years of experience at Wix. She’s collaborated with various teams and contributed to the development of multiple products and features. Responsible for leading Wix’s integration with Google AdSense, Alla is dedicated to helping users maximize their business and online presence. LinkedIn   Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. Twitter  | LinkedIn Rushabh Mutha Global Product Go-to-Market Lead, Google Mutha is an experienced Go-to-Market professional, managing AdSense Formats and Automation. LinkedIn Chen Yanko Yusim Global Product Go-to-Market Lead, Google Chen is an experienced Go-to-Market professional, managing AdSense for Platforms and working closely with the Wix team on the AdSense app. LinkedIn

Author: Crystal Carter You’ve done your keyword research, you’ve got a good understanding of what long-tail keywords are , but how do you actually use them? The basic idea here is to create content that answers the niche questions your audience is asking. There are multiple ways you can do this, from on-page tactics to creating various page types to strategic content refreshes.  Let’s learn how you can apply long-tail keywords to improve your SEO and provide users with a path to conversion. Table of contents: Where should you use long-tail keywords on your website? On-page SEO and meta tags Targeted blog posts FAQ pages & product guides Dedicated landing pages Multimedia content Optimized product & category pages Content refreshes Why you should use long-tail keywords Lower competition Better conversion rates Better click-through rates Personalized search experience alignment Semantic variety Generative search alignment Considerations for your long-tail keyword strategy Where should you use long-tail keywords on your website? Long-tail keywords can show up in any part of the marketing funnel , making them suitable targets for many different types of webpages.  At the top of the funnel, these terms support highly engaging informational blogs. At the bottom of the funnel, programmatic SEO techniques make it easy to create product pages for specific queries. Top uses for long-tail keywords include: On-page SEO  and meta tags Targeted blog posts FAQ pages & product guides Dedicated landing pages Multimedia content Optimized product & category pages Content refreshes On-page SEO and meta tags First things first: Cover the basics by integrating your long-tail keywords into your on-page SEO. Whether you use programmatic methods , settings with bulk SEO tools, or carry this out manually, do not overlook these optimizations.  It’s important to place your keywords in a few strategic places, including: Title tag:  Tempt users to click through from the search results by addressing their niche intent in your title tag . This also helps Google better understand your long-tail content. Meta description:  Ensure that people know exactly what your page is about by including your long-tail keyword in your meta description . URL:  The essence of long-tail keywords should appear in your  URL . Make sure to remove unnecessary prepositions. In the main content:  Your long-tail keyword should appear in the first paragraph of your main content, and variations thereof should appear at least two or three times in your content. Link anchor text:  The anchor text for your internal links  provides important information to search engines. Use long-tail keywords in anchor text pointing to the long-tail content you’ve created. Headings : Whether the long-tail keywords are the main topic of the page or a subsection of the page, include your long-tail term in H1s and/or H2s  for your page. You can use Wix’s bulk SEO settings to optimize multiple pages at once. Now that we’ve gone over the basic on-page usages, let’s look at the types of content you can create with these long-tail keywords that will add value for your website and its users. Targeted blog posts A blog is the most natural way to use long-tail keywords and it will become the home of the majority of those detailed terms and phrases.  Let’s say you own a beauty parlor. Your blog can include an array of relevant topics, ranging from the best products to use, to hairstyle tutorials, and more.  Start by jotting down all the broad topics your audience is likely to care about. Next, identify subtopics  (based on your broader topics), either using search tools or your own knowledge of your audience. Long-tail keywords for these blog posts could include “summer wedding hair trends” or “spring waxing,” for example. Source: Square One Salon and Spa. FAQ pages & product guides Not everyone will know exactly how to use your product or service. And perhaps, they’re looking for this crucial information online.  Let’s say you run a pilates studio and offer special classes for pregnant women or the elderly. Potential customers might ask, “Can I do pilates after the age of 65?” or “Is pilates safe if you’re pregnant?” All of these questions can be translated into a neat FAQ page that deals with these topics. Or, perhaps you sell a certain product that comes with a detailed installation process. You can create a dedicated product guide that provides users with the exact information, which can help you convince customers to buy while improving your website’s SEO. An example of an FAQ section. Google Search Console  can help you find all the questions searchers are asking related to your offerings. If your website doesn’t cover all the topics searchers are coming to you for, consider creating that long-tail content for them. Dedicated landing pages Create dedicated landing pages for long-tail keywords to add some extra flexibility to your digital marketing approach. If you are incorporating PPC or other paid media into your marketing mix, then you can create dedicated landing pages for long-tail keywords to improve the quality of your ad campaigns, reduce ad spend, and improve your conversion rates. This is because you can focus your ad spend on highly targeted queries rather than broader terms (which may bring in irrelevant traffic).  Similarly, local SEO  teams can create long-tail keyword content with location modifiers to connect with users that have needs that are specific to their area.  For instance, you may have discovered that a lot of people are getting to your website by searching for [vegan pizza delivery in Brooklyn after midnight]. You can take this query, create a landing page and perhaps even create a special offer for these searchers. This page could be shared on highly targeted social media channels, as a GBP post , or even as targeted ads for users that match the affinity, intent, location and time frame for that query. Multimedia content Content like podcasts , videos, webinars, and infographics create lots of opportunities to explore long-tail topics. This kind of content opens up new distribution  channels to connect with audiences in additional ways. And, using multimedia also means that you can easily embed this content into related content.  For instance, if you had a blog post about chocolate ice cream, you could create an infographic about organic sugar-free chocolate ice cream that would enhance the main article but also address the long-tail keyword. If you had an article for the long-tail topic, you could use the infographic on that page as well. Optimized product & category pages Product pages are highly targeted, making them a great place to include long-tail keywords. It's not uncommon on Amazon and other top-ranked eCommerce websites to see a product description or title that is extremely specific and includes lots of different attributes for the product. These product descriptions tap into long-tail keywords and help ensure that users that are looking for something highly specific are able to discover these unique products. Long-tail content for eCommerce is often done via programmatic SEO methods, which allow pages to be created at scale. Not only does this make for more precise product landing pages, but it also means that programmatic SEOs can respond quickly to emerging product trends and client needs. Content refreshes When you discover long-tail keyword opportunities via user-first research , site search, or other methods, you don’t always need to create a brand new page to satisfy the user’s needs.  Incorporating long-tail keywords into your content refresh  plans can help you keep your content relevant and connect with new users.  Long-tail keywords often focus on specific aspects of a topic or product, so they can inform product description sections, new header tags on blog posts, or even your about page. Update your content with long-tail keywords to add new relevance to existing content, which not only refreshes the page, but can help signal new relevance to Google, too. Why should you use long-tail keywords? You should include long-tail keywords in your SEO content strategy because they help you target more specific topics and high-intent users. This has a number of benefits for your business and its SEO. Lower competition Most people researching keywords for their pages try to catch the big fish (i.e., big search volume ). Generally speaking, this is the best way to get more impressions from search results.  If you’re an established brand with a seasoned domain name, this can be an option for you. But as a small business owner with a fresh new site, it may be harder to take on that challenge. However, the game changes when there are fewer players involved.  Because long-tail keywords have a lower amount of monthly searches (sometimes this can even be zero, according to SEO tools ), they can be much easier to rank for. This strategy, blended with trending keyword topics , can yield significant gains. Better conversion rates You know that every conversion counts. And to a certain extent, the more “niched down” the query is, the more qualified the user is as a potential customer (meaning that web traffic to long-tail content may be lower than for head terms, but these searchers are more likely to know what they want).  For example: Scenario 1 — Let’s say that your website attracts 100 people per day from search results for broad keywords. Out of those 100, about three people purchase a product or send an inquiry email. Your conversation rate would then be 3%. Scenario 2 — Twenty people find your page by searching for long-tail keywords that you rank for. Out of those 20, three people convert into paying customers. Just like that, your conversion rate becomes 15%. In this situation, every 100 people that arrive on the site would generate 5x more conversions than for the more broad term.  This improved efficiency can help you reach your business goals without having to necessarily create and maintain large amounts of content. Better click-through rates Ranking is only one part of the equation—you also need to convince searchers to click through on your listing from the search results. By addressing very specific topics (using precise long-tail keywords in your content, page titles, and meta descriptions), you can filter out searchers with less relevant keyword intent , therefore increasing your click-through rate. Whether Google looks at CTR as a signal of whether your site matches a given query (which is contentious), it’s better to focus on click-through rate as a measure of proper intent matching than it is to prioritize it in order to increase rankings. Personalized search experience alignment Recently, more people are treating search engines like personal advisors, seeking answers that are specifically tailored to their needs. So instead of someone searching for information anonymously, people are using words like “me” and “I,” with mobile searches including the qualifier “for me” growing over 60% between 2016–2018, according to Google . Along with more personalization comes a notable increase in keyword length. Searchers want answers as fast as possible, without putting too much effort into getting them. Therefore, by simply lengthening their query, they know they’ll find the best and most relevant answer, which is all the more reason for you to focus on those longer, more specific keywords. Semantic variety Another valuable characteristic of long-tail keywords is that there can be many variations of a search term: [how to find long-tail keywords] [how do I find long-tail keywords] [can I find long-tail keywords]  Etc.  Semantic advances  in machine learning help Google understand topical relevance, so by targeting just one of those long-tail queries, you are automatically targeting plenty of other, similar queries. The sum of those small volumes combined can actually amount to a large volume for your topic.  Additionally, the specificity of the term can make it much easier for search engines to recognize the entities within the keyword and send more relevant traffic to you for related terms. Generative search alignment Generative search (e.g., Bing’s CoPilot, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity, and even Google’s SGE ) thrives on long-tail terms. This means that these tools encourage longer queries. In the case of Bing CoPilot’s, the search bar allows for up to 4,000 characters per query.  Users adapt to the technologies available to them, so it makes sense that they will change the way they query information around the web to get the most out of these tools. As a result, websites that are able to better address long-tail queries are more likely to thrive. Considerations for your long-tail keyword strategy Long-tail keywords can be an incredibly effective part of your overall SEO strategy; however, there are some challenges that you should take into consideration when adopting this approach. For those who want to achieve high velocity of traffic (i.e., gain a significant amount of traffic in a short amount of time), long-tail content can be challenging because: You may need a large volume of content to get traffic that is relevant enough to push you into the SERP  in a meaningful way. Publishing a few blogs on long-tail topics per month may not yield results immediately. However, this approach can be an essential part of a long-term SEO content strategy. Creating long-tail content may require a lot of time and resources. Even with the aid of automation techniques  and generative AI tools like ChatGPT , you will need to ensure each piece of long-tail content plays a strategic part in your user journey  in order to manage your resources efficiently. Pairing long-tail content with additional SEO and marketing strategies (like topic clustering  from large volume head terms, search ads, and/or content repurposing) can help you get impact more quickly. Essentially, the nature of long-tail keywords is that they are not a sprint but a marathon, so it’s worth setting the proper expectations for clients and stakeholders. The future is long tail Google has repeatedly stated that 15% of all queries are brand new  (never been searched before), with long-tail keywords making up the vast majority. That means that these niche queries represent fresh opportunities for your brand to sidestep big competition, increase conversion rate, and achieve better SEO without necessarily having to create volumes and volumes of content. Crystal Carter - Head of SEO Communications, Wix   Crystal is an SEO & digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush, and more. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Crystal Carter Get started by: Creating a website → We all just want a little attention. And that is essentially what bounce rate tells you—how much attention your site is getting from its visitors. It helps you understand if visitors are interacting with your site or leaving after just a few seconds. But, bounce rate has evolved over the years—both in definition and in value as an SEO reporting metric . In this blog post, I’ll show you how that evolution impacts your SEO  strategy. Table of contents :  How Google defines bounce rate Ways to check your bounce rate In GA4 In Wix Analytics Whether bounce rate still matters How to reduce bounce rates and improve engagement Bounce rate alternatives What is bounce rate? In 2024, Google’s bounce rate metric measures the percentage of users who did not “engage” with your website during a session. This means that their session lasted less than 10 seconds and/or did not have multiple screen or page views (as measured in Google Analytics 4 ).  Bounce rate is the inverse of a site’s engagement rate, so the engagement rate combined with the bounce rate will always amount to 100%. This definition is an evolution of the concept of bounce rate  from earlier versions of Google Analytics (i.e., Universal Analytics).  In Universal Analytics (UA; deprecated  in July 2023) Google  defined bounce rate as “the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page.” In other words, if a user came to your site, but didn’t click on any other button or view any pages (aside from the one they first landed on), that was considered a bounce. All of those users divided by the total number of visits to your site gave you the bounce rate.  In 2021, Google retired the term “bounce rate” and added the “engaged sessions” metric. Under this definition, the user’s visit needed to last longer than 10 seconds, include a conversion, or have multiple screen or page views to be considered an engaged session. Then in July 2022, Google re-introduced the bounce rate metric, explaining that it is the inverse of the engagement rate  (engaged sessions divided by total sessions). So in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), bounce rate measures the percentage of sessions that were not engaged. What is bounce rate in Wix Analytics? Within Wix Analytics, for Wix and Wix Studio websites, bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who left your site after viewing only one page. This aligns more closely with the historic definition of bounce rate in UA. How to check bounce rate Many analytics tools can help you assess bounce rate. Here’s how to find bounce rate in: Google Analytics 4 Wix Analytics View bounce rate in Google Analytics 4 There are a few ways to see bounce rate in GA4. Depending on your account level access and requirements, you can add bounce rate to custom reports and explorations. Insights If you query “bounce rate” in the search bar, you can see an Insights drop-down and site panel that shows you the sitewide bounce rate.  Custom reports If you are an account admin, then you can add bounce rate as a metric in a report. For instance, in the Pages and Screens report below, I added bounce rate and engagement rate as metrics. Explorations In Explorations, you can add bounce rate as a metric, then add it to your settings so that you can see it in your visualization or table. View bounce rate in Wix Analytics When you create your website with Wix or Wix Studio, you can utilize  Wix Analytics  tools to better understand visitor behavior and bounce rate. You can view sitewide bounce rate data in the Behavior Overview section . Or, you can use the Page Visits report to get more granular data on bounce rate (along with dozens of other metrics, including URL, date, device type, user type, city, and UTM campaigns). Does bounce rate matter? Bounce rate is a measure of the proportion of users that have not engaged with your site, so it can be a useful starting point for assessing the quality of your site and the strength of your marketing funnel. A high bounce rate may indicate that more visitors are coming to your site and turning away before interacting with your content. A low bounce rate means that visitors who reach your site are more engaged and tend to click on something else before leaving.  A high bounce rate can tell you that visitors are not interested or not able to access your content or complete transactions. So, some SEOs see bounce rate as a potential signal of a need for conversion rate optimization (CRO). Taking note of bounce rate in conjunction with conversion rates may help you to determine if your site is performing well. If both are poor, then it is important to evaluate what might be causing this downturn. Bounce rate can also tell you something about your targeting and advertising. Visitors might leave your site quickly if they came for something different than what you’re actually giving them. This could happen if you are misrepresenting your product, targeting a mismatched audience, or not researching keywords properly . Is bounce rate a Google ranking factor? SEO experts will tell you that the question of whether bounce rate is a Google “ranking factor” or not comes up frequently from clients (or others) who are learning SEO. To be clear, bounce rate is not a Google Search ranking factor. During a session of Webmaster Central office hours  in 2022, John Mueller, senior search analyst at Google, addressed the misconception saying, “I think there’s a bit of misconception here that we’re looking at things like the analytics bounce rate when it comes to ranking websites, and that’s definitely not the case.”  So with regard to SEO, you can use bounce rate to assess how engaged users are with your content or page layout, but you should not expect bounce rate optimizations to have an immediate impact on page rankings. What is a good bounce rate? Understanding whether your current bounce rate is good or bad (in comparison to industry benchmarks) can be tricky because “bounce rate” measures two different user behaviors in GA4 and in its predecessor UA. Bounce rate in Google Analytics 4 The percentage of users who did not engage with your website during a session (i.e., their session lasted less than 10 seconds and/or did not have multiple screen or page views). Bounce rate in Universal Analytics (deprecated) The percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page. If you’re looking to compare historic bounce rate benchmarks from UA, referencing a tool like Wix Analytics (which uses the same bounce rate assessment as Google’s Universal Analytics) can help you compare data more consistently. Depending on your industry and the type of site that you have, you should expect different bounce rates. For example, a page that sells products or services should not have the same bounce rate as a blog. Since the goals of the two sites are different, the expectations of how many people click to navigate to another point on your site should also differ. It’s also important to consider the devices people use to access your site. Depending on your content/offerings, it is possible that users reaching your site from a mobile device might not take any additional actions. Instead, they might wait to browse your site from a desktop. You could therefore see a large difference in bounce rate between mobile device users and desktop users. According to data  from Custom Media Labs, desktop users bounce 42% of the time across industries and website types (on average). They also found the average bounce rate for mobile devices to be about 16% higher across industries.  This indicates that many users bounce, and that you can have a perfectly healthy website that sees almost half of its visitors bouncing. However, it is always important to strive to increase engagement and decrease your bounce rate as this can help your business grow and thrive. How to reduce bounce rates and improve engagement To truly understand bounce rate, you also need to understand what can cause it to fluctuate (and thereby how you can improve it).  Bounces can occur for a number of reasons—for example, a user might: Fail to engage with a page because it did not load Arrive at a page and quickly return to search because they need to refine their query Arrive from Google via a jump-to-text link which immediately answers the question An example of a jump-to-text link in Google Search. And then there are other cases in which a page might intentionally send users away from the website or into a different channel. For instance, a page or screen with a phone number might have higher bounce rates on desktop than mobile because users are picking up the phone. All of this to say that a high bounce rate might not mean that there is anything wrong with the page.  However, if you want to explore changes in engagement rates, it’s worth taking time to: Check for technical issues Test your content Review PPC campaigns Check for technical causes that lead to low engagement and high bounce rates Slow loading times can impact engagement rates. A website that takes a while to load may cause users to turn away without even seeing your site.  You can use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights  or the Wix Site Speed Dashboard  to check your website’s loading time. You can reduce your site’s loading time by ensuring that you haven’t overloaded it with excessively large photos or videos, and that you’re limiting the number of fonts. Simple changes can have a huge impact on how many visitors reach your website. Test your content priority and UX Examine the navigability of your site and its user experience (UX) design.  Good website navigation and UX help visitors understand how to use your site and reach the pages they’re looking for. Poor design can mean that a visitor can’t find a button that they are looking for or, alternatively, that clicking on a button will result in an unexpected and unwanted outcome.  You can mend such design blunders by changing the text or visibility of the buttons on your site. Optimizing small details, like the color of your site’s buttons in contrast to the background can affect how users experience your site. Review your PPC campaign targeting Conveying your product accurately on all advertising platforms is another potentially potent factor for reducing your bounce rate.  It is easy to imagine a scenario where you sell a product that provides a free trial. Therefore, it might feel appropriate to advertise your product as “free,” as it helps bring in more users and can ultimately lead to more conversions than you might have otherwise had. However, it’s possible that once users reach your product and understand the true costs that come along with it, they will turn away.  This lack of congruence between ad and reality can lead to a high bounce rate. Review your campaign landing pages and make sure they align with the keyword intent  for the ads. Alternatives to bounce rate Tools that measure user interactions via heatmaps, scroll tracking, and other methods can give you much more actionable information on user behavior.  Bounce rate can provide you with some top-level information, but it is rarely useful as a standalone metric because there are so many reasons why someone might bounce and because some engagement metrics can give false positives. An example of a heatmap in Microsoft Clarity. Source: Microsoft. For instance, a session where a user came to your website, clicked a broken button four times, and then left, would be seen as an “engaged” session—with no bounce. But, UX auditing tools can identify that as “rage clicking,” which would tell you to update the broken link. While bounce rate can provide some view into how users are interacting with your pages, those who are looking to monitor user engagement more closely should consider CRO and UX tools, like Microsoft Clarity  (shown above).  Engagement is more complicated than just bounce rate There are so many contributing factors to what makes a page earn a high engagement rate (and thus a low bounce rate). The fact that this metric has evolved over the last few years is a testament to that.  If you’re just getting started with bounce rate as an SEO reporting metric, remember to adjust your expectations for your business model and the way users are intended to interact with your pages. Remember, it’s more important that users are engaging with your brand and giving you their business than it is to target an arbitrary bounce rate. Crystal Carter - Head of SEO Communications, Wix   Crystal is an SEO & digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush, and more. Twitter  | Linkedin

Join experts from Wix and Deepcrawl for this session to understand how to keep your website healthy for search engines. Learn how to improve your organic performance with best practices that address common technical SEO issues. Read the Transcript In this Webinar We Covered: * The fundamentals of technical SEO * Recognizing, prioritizing and resolving common issues * Tools and tips for maintaining a healthy website About our Speakers Nati Elimelech , SEO Technical Lead, Wix With over 15 years experience in SEO, Nati teaches about advanced SEO solutions, large-scale SEO, and handling SEO infrastructure challenges for veteran SEOs and agencies. When he’s not working on making millions of websites SEO-friendly, Nati spends his time with his lovely wife, baby girl, cat, and dog. Twitter | Linkedin Chris Spann, Senior Technical SEO, Deepcrawl Chris works with some of Deepcrawl’s largest clients. He holds a consistent track record of providing key recommendations and deliverables, paving the way for the identification of significant opportunities. Chris has seen many SEO issues and their solutions. Twitter | Linkedin About our partner: Deepcrawl Deepcrawl is a pioneering SaaS platform that empowers the world’s leading brands to harness their revenue potential through technical SEO. Its cloud-based enterprise technologies help brands diagnose and fix performance issues on their websites. Deepcrawl has partnered with Wix to launch a custom-built app that helps users to identify opportunities for SEO. It’s now available on the Wix App Market. Transcript: Breaking Down Technical SEO Webinar Speakers Edu Giansante, Head of Community, Wix Nati Elimelech, SEO Technical Lead, Wix Chris Spann, Senior Technical SEO, Deepcrawl 00:03 Edu: Alright. We're going live here. Let's see people are coming in, I can see a lot of new numbers and faces popping up here. This is insane. It's a lot of people. Wow. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to our amazing, amazing webinar we have today on SEO. We're gonna go technically on SEO. And we have two amazing people here with me. I'll give it like 30 seconds before we start, so maybe we can do like an icebreaker here. I was asking the guys actually, what should I ask—if it's something related to music or to, I don't know, drinks? And they're like, well, we all have young kids here, so we’re not into this. So my icebreaker question for you guys. And in the meanwhile, I want to hear where you guys are joining us from. Let me know here in the chat. By the way, when you chat, you can select the option so everyone can see. Okay. Oh my God, this is going insane. This is crazy. Okay, Nati, Chris question for you guys, because you have young kids. What would be your dream, like, you know, ability that you want your kid to learn in the next five years? That would be like, wow, I love my kids so much more. 01:11 Chris: For me, I think the big thing, so my daughter is just just starting to learn to sing. And I'm really looking forward to it because I'm quite musical. But I'm really looking forward to her learning. So although it's almost cuter at the moment, because she kind of can't sing. So in a way, I wish that would stay as it was but yeah, I'm looking forward to actually being able to play my guitar and sing a song with her. I think that's gonna be great. 01:36 Edu: Oh, man, it's amazing. I would love that. Actually, you know that statistically, your daughter has more chances of becoming a famous singer than she has of becoming a famous YouTuber. There are more YouTubers than musicians out there. So better chances for her to be the next Lady Gaga. Who knows? 01:52 Chris: Well, you know what, this chat is making me feel like a Twitch streamer. So. 01:56 Edu: Oh, yes. How about you, Nati? 02:02 Nati: So Rose, my daughter, is 18 months old now. My wish is a bit more practical. I want her to be able to walk the dog, to walk the Husky. It gets so cold during the night, man, she needs to step up. You know, take a part of the load on and I'm just waiting for her to catch up with that. 02:24 Chris: Yeah, we have two dogs that do not get walked as much as they used to. 02:31 Edu: I'm in the dog stage still. So I’m still walking my dog myself. Amazing. Oh my God. I'm seeing so many people coming from a lot of places. It's incredible. Like, I mean, all over the world. We have India, we have Canada, we have the US. We have a lot of countries in Europe. I’m in Europe as well, myself. We have Israel. Wow, insane guys insane. And we beat the 1K, this is amazing. Oh my God, we have 1.1K people here. This is next level amazing. So I will respect your time and get started, cause I know guys are here to see and hear about technical SEO, not about you know what we're going to do with our kids and our dogs. So let me share my screen here very quickly, and we're going to get started. So I want to introduce you to these two amazing guys here, Nati and Chris. These guys are like the next level of tech SEO and we're gonna bring this conversation and you know, make it very informal, because we want to make sure that you guys feel comfortable about asking questions. Because we have this crazy chat with a lot of questions coming in, if you guys have any questions, anything you want to ask, please use the Q&A icon there. There's a Q&A box. You can click on that. Throw your questions there. We have a ton of people behind the scenes here in the backstage making sure that the questions get answered. And I'll throw some of the questions live to the guys as well. Without further ado, I want to hand the mic to you both Chris and Nati Welcome, please, the floor is yours. 04:04 Chris: Cool, thanks very much. I guess if we can jump into the first slide then Edu. Okay, yep. So basically this session today is kind of designed to help especially owners of Wix sites, understand a little bit about technical SEO. We're going to cover off some of the basics and the fundamentals of technical SEO and what technical SEO is, a lot of common issues that we see. So my job at Deepcrawl is that I’m a member of the professional services team. So I spend a lot of my time auditing and looking at big enterprise level sites and some smaller sites as well. So we're going to discuss common issues that we see across sites like this. And then also tips and best practices and things like that for maintaining a healthy website. Obviously, Nati is here as the Wix expert. And I'm here, hopefully to talk about, to bring a little bit of experience from how we see things at Deepcrawl as well. So I guess if we can skip on? Edu: Yeah. Chris: Nati, would you like to say this? 05:26 Nati: Yeah, sure. So let's talk about what the definition of technical SEO is really about, without getting into too much detail. And I do want to stress that SEO, technical SEO is an entire discipline. Don't, you know, feel out of place, if you don't understand everything right away. It's about a way of thinking, a way of looking at things, rather than remembering everything by heart and remembering code by heart. But the biggest aspect, the gist of technical SEO is about playing nice with search engines. You know, search engines, and the bots, crawlers. These are all, basically, that’s software. And technical SEO is mainly about making a website bot-friendly. Taking care of all the special needs, that software, that [a] bot, that [a] crawler has, so our website can actually rank in Google. In other words and in most cases, technical SEO is about getting out of the way. It’s about getting out of the way, and helping your content rank if it's good enough. If it satisfies your search intent, it's about not holding your progress and halting it because of certain issues. That's the way I see it. 06:53 Chris: Yeah. The way I always think about it, technical SEO is making the information retrieval bit, right, of Google's life more easy. So Google, half of Google is information retrieval—is getting information out of websites. The other half is understanding what that information is, and then deciding who does it best. This is very much focusing on just making sure that Google—and by extension users—can get the information that they want out of your website. So I guess if we just briefly touch on how Google crawls websites. So effectively, obviously, by crawl we mean when Google visits your website, goes through it and finds as many links as it can on that website to understand as much as it can about that website, as much of what is on your website. And it does it, nowadays, it does it pretty much like a user does. It uses a specialized version of Chrome, called Chromium, which is designed to be more easily automated. So back in the old days, Nati, as you remember, Google used to just kind of request content, and then whatever code came back, it would try and pass that code and understand what the page was based on from that. Nowadays, it still does do that. But it will also now actually take a visible representation of your page. And it will try and use that to actually understand what a page is about as well. So kind of gone are the days of the little tricks you used to be able to do to hide things from Google or to make Google think things were there that weren't. And nowadays, yeah, as I say, you now have to treat Google a little bit like a real person. 08:36 Nati: Definitely, so I love that you mentioned that. Search engines and their bots [are] about information retrieval. So let's go over what information is. Okay, what do these bots care about, right? So to make it simple, Google, or the bot, knows about a certain URL on the web, it doesn't matter which website, and then it goes and fetches it, right? It makes a request to that page, to that URL. The server returns what we call a response. And that response contains the headers and the HTML Google cares about. Now, basically, Google extracts, it doesn't use everything, but it extracts what they care about. So one, of course, is the status code. We were talking about 200s, 301s, 404s, 500 codes. Whenever we mentioned that, you should know that that's the first thing. Any client, any software that fetches even your browser that fetches the URL, that's the first thing they see. Is this page okay to crawl? Oh, can I continue? So whenever the bot fetches that URL, they get the response, and they also get the HTML. The HTML, if everything is okay. The response is the interesting bit because Google takes two things away from that. One is the content, or the main content. Now when we're talking about content, it's not necessarily a long-form post, blog post or an article—images are content, videos are content, almost everything that a user sees is content. Almost, right? If we take away the UI and different functionality of a website so Google takes that. And the other thing Google does, is extract all the links on a page. Why? Because that's how Google and other bots know about the other pages on a website, right? Because whenever I fetch a page, I get all the HTML. The HTML contains the links, and those links will be added to my crawling queue. Now I know about them, and then I can fetch them. So the most important part, I think that the biggest foundation of technical SEO and about being crawl-friendly, is making sure Google can discover all the web pages, all the URLs, on a website—right? And then, what's the next layer, Chris? If I made sure, for example, Google does discover all the URLs on my website. First of all, what do you think I would need to pay attention to that may harm that cause, that may harm that goal, that may detract from Google's ability to figure out what's going on on the website? 11:28 Chris: So I guess the main thing, I guess, actually, if we jump into the next slide, potentially, we can start looking at some of the some of the main issues. The very, very first thing we'd start to look at, and I think the big thing for a lot of sites—sometimes with enterprise sites, you can get really into weird details and really strange issues. But the biggest thing is always making sure that content is available, effectively, to crawlers. But also that content is, wherever possible, as unique as possible. So one of the first issues that we see, with some websites, and this happens a lot with shop fronts, and things like that, quite often, is what we call content duplication. Now, a key thing you need to get your head around with technical SEO is that Google sees the URL, and what comes back from when it requests a URL are very separate things, or things that aren't necessarily related. So if Google asks for four different URLs, and gets the exact same content, or almost the same content back each time, it's going to struggle to understand which URL it should put in the search results, I guess, if that makes sense. So if you have two or three pages that focus on the same product, or the same destination, say, you begin to create issues where Google doesn't understand necessarily, which one is the real one—which is where canonical tags come into play. And a canonical tag is essentially, I believe, Nati—it's just a setting in Wix, which is, effectively a way of saying to Google and to other search engines: the URL that lives in this tag here is the canonical version, the original, the progenitor. And these work across sites as well. So if you were to push out content to be syndicated, for instance, if you're a great blog, those blogs can specify your site within the canonical tag, which means that you will then get the credit back from Google. Nati, I know in our dry run, we had a great example of duplicate content that you brought up, and I'm trying to remember what it is now. 13:52 Nati: Anything that has to do with any parameters to the URL, basically even UTM tracking parameters or sorting parameters. Everything that changes characters, adds characters, changes the URL, but serves the same content, is basically a duplication. But I do have a question. Other than Google not being sure what to show in search results, why is that such an issue? Is it a big issue? Does it become more of an issue for certain websites? What do you think about that? 14:29 Chris: I think for a lot of sites, duplicate content is a—it can be a smaller issue. And nowadays, it's certainly less of an issue than it used to be. Nowadays, Google is quite good. What we used to see back in the old days and where canonical tags came from, is people used to just straight up steal content, right? They would take content from well-ranking websites because the thinking was, oh, if such and such a website ranks really well for this keyword, then it must be their content. So they would steal their content, put it on the page. These canonical tags help issues like that. As I say, I think nowadays unless you have millions of pages Nati, or I guess a good example is like Nati was saying—if you have faceted navigation on your site, and you have, let's say, a red dresses page, and a red dress is under £50 (pounds) page, but all your red dresses are also under £50 (pounds), you now serve that exact same piece of content across two different URLs. Which, again, says to Google—Google starts to go, I don't necessarily know what to file this under, I guess. Whereas a canonical tag just helps you to say, hey, guess what, it's going here. So back at you then Nati, detecting duplicate content. I mean, it's kind of easy for me, we have a duplicate content function in Deepcrawl which helps me find this stuff. But I guess, is there an easy way of pulling this information out, if you're not using some—like a big enterprise crawler? 16:08 Nati: So, there are plenty of solutions out there. First of all, any type—most crawlers will get the job done, do exactly what we specified, fetch the HTML, extract all the links, crawl all the links, and then you will be able to see if you have duplication issues. Another great tool is Google Search Console, which will alert you [in] some instances. But another great, great tool is just using your keyboard, copying a piece of text, and searching it inside of quotes. And then you can find out if your content is duplicated on other websites, or if it's duplicated, but there are other URLs omitted from the search results. So you can use Google search for that. You can use external tools or the app. And you can use Google Search Console, which you should always, always, always be using. It's a tech SEO's best friend, I think. But I did notice that canonical isn't really directly visits, right? When I say, hey, this is the canonical version—I'm basically giving Google another hint, right? I'm not—I can't decide that for Google, because Google looks at other signals, other pages pointing to a URL, if it's been linked to, and all other stuff like that. So what would you recommend when deciding on the canonical URL or the original URL? Is there anything you think needs to be done by tech SEOs on a site level? Like I didn't know, editing internal links? 17:54 Chris: I was about to say the biggest thing is internal links, right? If you have a holidays to Spain—if you have two holidays to Spain pages, and one is linked to in your main nav, and in 10 blog posts. But you set the other one is the canonical tag, Google's probably going to go well, hey, I don't think this is the original version of this content. This page that's pointed to all over the website, this feels like the actual canonical version. And this is where you can get into some interesting issues sometimes, where people have produced great content, but they've canonicalized the wrong URL. And then Google ends up using the URL that is poorly linked to and then goes, oh, well, this isn't a great page, and then ranks it poorly. I've just spotted somebody in the chat asking how you set up a canonical tag and Nati I'm gonna throw it to you, I believe they're just on by default in Wix. 18:54 Nati: That's very CMS-dependent of course. In Wix, all URLs are canonicalized by default, so you don't have the duplication going on. But, had you decided to edit it yourself for any reason, you could use the SEO panel to edit the canonical tag or default and override it. But out-of-the-box, you shouldn't have any duplication issues. Unless you do it yourself, if you copy an article over more than once. Or even if you, for example, have a blog, and you have a couple of posts. And you use all the categories you have and you tag them in all the posts. Basically what you will be creating—and that's your fault, not ours, is a lot of different tag pages or category pages, but with the same content, right? Same posts. So it's down to user error at this point, and you can override our settings, but I think most CMSs out there at this point—the ones that do care about SEO—not only canonicalize their URLs, I hope, but they also give the ability to edit it. And if they don't, they should. 20:12 Chris: Cool. Let's move on then to our next slide, which is 404 errors and broken links. So Nati, I guess, first off, why would you see a 404 error? Where would you see broken links? How and why is this an issue? 20:33 Nati: Okay, so there are, again, a few ways to detect 404 errors. One is using the app, Deepcrawl for, you know, a full offering of tools or other crawlers to detect this. They just go over the links they find. And if something is broken, they're alerted to it. The other one is, of course, Google Search Console. And I'll surprise you by also adding Google Analytics if you actually have it configured, because then you can filter pages by the 404 title. You can see all the URLs that have triggered the 404. And that applies to most CMSs, that's a cool trick. You can use Google Analytics if you have it to detect 404s. So 404s are caused by two types of root causes. One is user error, of course. I've created a page, I've linked to another page on my website. And I didn't link very well, or I've linked to another page on my website, but I have, later down the road, changed the URL for that website. Alright, external causes are that someone linked, I have a backlink to my website. But that backlink is broken, because they didn't parse it well, or because I, again, have changed the URL structure or the slug and didn't do anything about it. So there are internal and external causes to that. I do want to stress—not every 404 error is a big issue you should be taking care of right away. Because as you know, Chris, the larger websites, especially eComm websites, right? They tend to accumulate 404s over time. Sometimes not by their own doing. So imagine I'm a website, right? I have Google Search Console, and I have done a crawl with an external tool, with a third party tool. And I see a lot of 404s. I don't have all the time in the world, SEO is about doing 200 different things at once, right? So how would you go about prioritizing 404s? And when are they something an SEO should be able to live with? 22:56 Chris: So I would say the biggest, the biggest time to worry about 404 errors, or a page returning a 404, or a link being broken effectively—is if you're in a situation where effectively one of your big pages, one of your big traffic drivers or one of your big conversion pages potentially breaks somehow. Now this could be, you know, again, down to somebody deciding a URL needs to be changed for whatever reason, or links to that URL suddenly breaking [it]. Obviously, I would always say that internal links within your site should always return a 200 status eventually, whether they go through a redirect or not. I think we'll get onto redirects in a little bit. But yeah, effectively all your—obviously again, as a user, if I'm clicking around a navigation on a website, or something similar, and I suddenly find that a page is broken when I click on a link, it's a nightmare. It's an awful user experience, I don't get anywhere. And crucially, more importantly, I then as a website, I don't get to rank for whatever is on that page, right? So quite often, what we will see is, we prioritize, essentially, 404s that we find a lot of effectively. Again, 404s are very, very easy. Obviously, if you have a header nav across 200 pages on your website, and you make a single typo in your header now, you suddenly break 200 links. So we will always flag things like. And obviously, quite often, I'm working on sites with millions of URLs and these can create millions of 404s which can be changed in a, you know, opening up the CMS, pressing Delete and adding the S on the end—or whatever the change is. So I would always recommend starting there and say, ensuring that your header navigation and things like that all work perfectly, then your big content pieces and go from there. How to deal with these issues? As I say, quite often, you've got a couple of options there. The best issue and the best way to fix it, and the easiest way to fix it—is to fix the link, right? If it's an internal link. But the big problem sometimes is that you might find that you have a link from— and this happens all the time from a great—you might have a great backlink, right? So you might have got some national press or some international press. But you will find that—but you might find that, despite you sending them the link that you want them to use, they've just got it wrong. Now they're not responding to your emails, etc, etc, etc. So what can you do? So obviously, the perfect thing to do is to go into your CMS, go into Wix or whatever, and change the link. So it's now the right link that points to the right URL. But the other options are redirects, Nati, right? And I'm going to hand it over to you for this, just because obviously, I know you can talk about how to actually fix it within—or how to set up a redirect within Wix. 26:23 Nati: Yep. So we said first of all, you fix the link that you want to redirect, right? And you want to redirect things, URLs that have had past signals. What I mean by past signals is that there was actual content behind them. That there was something tangible and real behind them, not just just a systematic 404, so make sure you do prioritize that. Going about it in Wix, first of all, in many places, and we're extending that over time, whenever you change a URL slug, for example, or sometimes the URL structure that we're working on. We will automatically add a 301 redirect for you. We want to fix the links for you. But in many cases, we'll edit automatically and you can disable it yourself. If you want to add your own manual redirections—301 redirections—you can go to the Redirect Manager under SEO Settings , and you have many options there. You can do it one-by-one, you can do it by groups, you can upload the CSV. And that way you make Google understand—you make Google pass the signals, pass everything basically Google knew about regarding your URL, to the new one. There is, of course, one major caveat here—that you can’t just redirect anywhere you want. You should always, always, always, always redirect to the same or matching content. Meaning that just redirecting 404s to your homepage isn't going to help much. Just redirecting it to another URL, another page that's important for you, isn't going to help for long. You want to always, always redirect to the best and closest match possible. Content-wise, of course, right? Not URL structure-wise. It doesn't matter what the URL is, it's about the content behind it. So always make sure you redirect to the right URL. And also always make sure that URL you're redirecting to is the canonical version. And that it returns 200—okay, the one we've mentioned earlier. Chris: Yeah. 28:47 Edu: So I have a question, maybe a dummy question here. But I'm getting like a lot of insights here, which is really, really good. But I have two questions. One is, how do I actually edit the URL? And the second question related to that is—because you mentioned like a human error where they forgot an “s” and then crashed the whole thing. But is there an easy way for us to troubleshoot and find the source of the 404 issue? 29:12 Chris: So I can take the second bit in terms of finding the source. So again, any web crawler that you might use, will always highlight a 404 error. Search Console also contains a list of 404s that Google has found, which is obviously a great resource. But also I mean, again, a little bit of manual UX I guess, and testing of your site, will help you find anything. Again you know, before you push a new navigation live, make sure all the links in it work, effectively. They will always be my choices—whenever you push content live, make sure those links work, go and check yourself. But also you've got, as I say, Search Console, you've got any web crawler you choose to use. And they will be my first two options. Nati, I'm going to pass fixing the link or actually editing the link over to you because again, it feels like a Wix question. 30:24 Nati: So in Wix, there are a couple of places where you can do that. You can do it in the SEO panel, where you can edit the slug for the type of page you're working on, in most cases. And you can do it to a greater extent in our SEO Patterns . You can actually change the entire structure for your blog posts or your product pages. And we're extending that as well to other page types. So you can do it as a whole—for example, all of your blog posts, if you wanted to start with “banana”, you could end with “someone take my Husky out for a walk please”, you could. And if you just wanted to edit the specific slug for a specific page, blog post, product, whatever—you can do that as well. 31:14 Chris: Yeah. So next, let's jump into something a little bit more, I guess. What am I going to say? Relatable, I suppose to a standard user. So as we mentioned before, Google is a robot that does go off and just pull back the code that builds out your website. But nowadays, as well, Google does what we call “render” a page. So it will actually generate an image somewhere and it will analyze the image of the “above the fold”, as we call it. So “above the fold” refers to whatever is visible when your website first loads. So effectively, that is on your desktop. Obviously, that is the widescreen rectangle of what you're looking at. The “fold” is an old journalism term. That's right. It's [where] the newspaper used to physically fold—the important information was above it, right? And for whatever reason, we've taken that, and we've just carried that through into SEO. So Google just looks at the initial viewport—the top content of the page. And nowadays, it's fascinating, Google will do things like check out the size of text on a page. So you have your headings, so your H tags, H1,2,3, etc. But Google will look at text that is bolded on a page, text that is large on a page, text that takes up the majority of the initial viewport, and will say hey, this content is important to this page, right? Again, in the old days—I talk about the old days a lot—people would do things like make their headings really small and hide them in content. This is I mean, as well as being awful for accessibility, like really bad for accessibility. It wasn't great for bots. I've just spotted somebody asking if the text needs to be live text, will it read an image? Always make text live. Google can read images. But if you want that content to be reliably seen by Google, I would always say to make that actual text, right? But yeah, so back in the old days, Google would be able to—or people [would] be able to hide stuff effectively by making H2s small and things like that. We can't get away with that nowadays. And so what we need to do—as well as the page needs to be human, readable and accessible. It also needs to be accessible for bots, right? Nati, like nowadays, we should just try and treat Google like most of the humans that use a website. 34:05 Nati: So definitely, I think we need to lay some grounds for—some basics for—how Google works again, and how we will behave before we delve into that. So for everyone not aware, we have discussed that Google fetches HTML, right? And Chris did mention that Google runs JavaScript and renders the page. Rendering a page is about basically taking all these building blocks. The building blocks are the HTML and the CSS and the JavaScript. And using the pieces like Legos and instruction, and basically building the page. Okay. Now, in the past, we all cared about this word HTML Google sees. Now, tech SEOs should care about what Google actually sees—it's not just HTML. It's how it's constructed, how it's put together. And what Google is trying to do is figure out, okay, what's the most important piece of content on a page? And when we understand that when Google looks at a web page—by the way, something you should know about how bots behave, and then I’ll continue about how Google views a web page. A few things you should be aware of. First of all, Google is mobile-first, right? What does being mobile-first mean? Being mobile-first means that the primary version Google theoretically should crawl is the mobile one. Why? Because most searches, most of our interactions on the web, are done on mobile. So whenever we look at a page, we should all—most of the time, we should look at it and design it according to mobile-first best practices. How would it look when viewed on mobile? And that's where the folds most come into play. Because think about it, it's prime real estate. And you don't have much space on mobile devices, right? You have the fold. I'm not—we're not saying Google only sees the fold, right? Because when Google fetches a web page and renders it, it actually opens a very, very large or tall viewport, right? Because Google doesn't scroll, Google doesn't click anything. Googlebot doesn't interact with anything. All it does is open a large viewport, and whatever is in that space, in the fold, is considered—or maybe gets extra value out of being there. So whenever you're looking as a tech SEO, at a website, bring it up on mobile. It's best if you actually do it using one of Google's tools, like the website Mobile-Friendly Test , or the Rich Results Test , or fetching it using Inspect URL in Google Search Console, and inspect whatever's in the fold. If you have something pushing down the main content—and when I'm talking about the main content, I'm talking at least about the main heading of a page—then you should look into that. Because what you're signaling to Google and to your users is, look, this pretty image is what I care about. But whenever someone hits a page and goes to a page—the user and the bot—the first thing they should know is, this is what I'm going to be reading about. This is the product I'm going to be viewing. This is the content being served to me. So whenever you're thinking layout, think about how it would be displayed on mobile. I think that's the best advice I can give when it comes to that. 38:00 Chris: And just to lead on from that Nati, a thing that we see a lot and a thing that people don't do enough of. We all have a real habit, right? We do our work on our laptops, usually plugged into, you know, plugged into WiFi, plugged into a router or on our home WiFi. Which is great. And we build our websites, we go yep, that looks amazing. But then what we don't do is—we don't go outside and pick up our phone and actually see what happens, right? Like—my phone is a very middle range Android phone, it's like a £200 (pound) phone. If your website struggles to work on my phone, while I'm waiting at the bus stop, then I'm not going to use that site. You know what I mean? Especially again, if you run a bus timetable website, and your website doesn't work on my mobile phone at the bus stop, I'm not going to use your site, you know? So a big thing is to know who your users are. And again, we talked about Google Analytics earlier on. Look at what browser they're using and what devices they're using. And ensure your site works for those users and those browsers. Should we move on then to something a little bit more content based, Nati, and discuss schema markup? Basically, schema markup powers everything that's on a Google search result that's not an old fashioned bluelink, right? So again, my favorite is always recipes when it comes to schema markup. If anyone else is like me—when I'm looking for a recipe to make, I do most of my searching with my eyes. But also, again, like I said, I have a two-year-old, or nearly two-year-old. I'm also really interested in things that I can cook in ten minutes. So review schema is a great way of taking your really good recipe and saying, this is what it looks like, it looks amazing. 300 people have said that it's great, 300 people have rated it five stars. And also, it takes 15 minutes and here are the ingredients. And that's all based on schema markup. So schema markup is a way of organizing the content, basically. So while Google does its best to understand the content that's on a page, schema markup is basically a way of using—it's almost like you're filling in a form, right? For a website. Google says, what are the ingredients? So then it gives you a box to write in the ingredients. And Google goes, thanks very much. What does it look like? And then you give it a picture. And Google goes, thanks very much. We've got the picture, I understand that. What are the ratings, you can say? Well, this person said it was four out of five, this person said it was four and a half out of five. And Google goes, great. Now we know all that information, we can build out what we call Rich Snippets, which are these nice looking snippets, which can, in [the] best situations, they can entice people in. So again, looking at the recipe ones there, straight away, now, if I'm looking at that, I'm going to go for the one on the right, because they're the best chewy chocolate chip cookies, and they look like it. So I'm going to click on that one. What other examples? I guess, Nati? I mean, I was gonna say, what's your favorite schema markup? I know not everyone's as weird as me. 41:37 Nati: I don’t think I have a favorite one. But I think people first need to understand that schema markup is just another layer, right? Of your content. Schema markup is about structuring your content in a way that would be best suited for machines. Okay. Why do we do it? Why do we want to do it? First of all, we do it because it offers enhanced, aka rich results. But it also helps search engines and software understand what's on a page better, because it's structured. We say, hey, look, this is the price, this is the image, you see the SKU for the product. And all the data is neatly structured for a non human. So first of all, I think every structured data that helps other machines understand what's on my website is beautiful. However, I think a lot of people get drawn—sucked into the structured data game, the markup game, and try to markup everything on the website, right? And that's a bit odd. That's like going to your kitchen and putting a label on everything like this is a fork, this is a spoon, this is a knife. Like Google would know that's a knife and that’s a spoon. So what I'm saying is, structured data markup is great. But I would advise everyone to stick to whatever produces rich results on Google. And you don't have to remember by heart, what does and what doesn't—you could go on Google and search for “ Google search gallery ”. Whenever you do that, the URL will be brought up. And you can see, like, a catalog of all the different rich results that Google offers. So products are of course a must. And for events, you get neat rich results. Recipes, definitely. I have my own recipe website. And rich results have been like amazing, because they offer increased, you know metrics, better performance on search results, they make you stand out. And they make you more helpful to the user. So I would focus on anything that can bring a rich result. However, in Wix, I wouldn't go overboard because most of these are already generated by default. So I wouldn't advise Wix users to go overboard. You can do that, you know in our SEO panel—and in SEO Patterns , you can set for an entire page type. I just want to stress—structured data, those rich results, are only applicable when you rank high on Google. Meaning that if you're on the second, third page on Google, don't bother. Don't waste your time. Which brings me to my next point about taking a similar approach in tech SEO and your website health. You're going—when using software, when using Google Search Console, when detecting issues, you should always prioritize, right? 45:08 Chris: Yeah, that's right. So if we jump onto the next slide. We—oh, sorry, I've had the wrong slide there open. So we're getting onto prioritization in a second, Nati. But I guess what you're talking about leads on to auditing websites, which we discussed earlier. 45:31 Chris: So effectively, yep. We have. So we talked about all these different issues. 45:38 Chris: But how do you actually go about finding them? How do you go about fixing them? So obviously, we've mentioned Google Search Console a few times. Google Search Console is, again, whether your site is a tiny, one person operation, or whether you are some of the biggest websites on Earth, Google Search Console is a great source of information for all sorts of problems. I use it for all of our clients, pretty much every single day. Search Console is a great tool. Third party auditing tools as well, I mean, obviously, I'm a big fan of Deepcrawl. I was before I worked here. But there are other tools out there, we've mentioned Screaming Frog a couple of times. Screaming Frog is a great, great tool to help you find problems. So Screaming Frog operates as closely as possible to Googlebot effectively. And will go through your sites and find as many pages as it can, and then give you a lot of great reporting on the issues, or any issues that you might find, they might be able to find on the site. Once you've done that—and we were talking about prioritization earlier—you need to begin prioritizing those issues, which we'll get onto in a second. A very important thing to do, is to schedule and have a regularity to these audits. Now, regular doesn't necessarily mean often. It doesn't necessarily mean you know, daily, or you know, three times a week or whatever like that. If your site is, you know, for a lot of sites, weekly, or maybe monthly, is the kind of cadence you might be looking for. Again, what we do for a lot of big clients is they will have one big check of the site monthly or bimonthly. And then smaller—sort of what we would call tactical crawls and audits—more weekly. And then also, the last point is, and this is kind of what Nati was talking about before, is not to waste time on SEO myths. Or not to waste time on rabbit holes that don't necessarily lead anywhere, right? It's very easy to get caught up on weird issues or small issues that don't necessarily provide much impact, and ignore a page over here that's not being indexed anymore, or a load of broken links, or something like that. So it's always worth focusing on that stuff. And again, always try and avoid hearsay, on Twitter, or whatever, about what the new, definite big ranking factor is. Because again, I'm sure Nati and I have both seen a lot of them over the years that have turned out to be not an awful lot, or haven't been a lot. But someone's done a study, right? A really flawed study and said that if your page is green, it ranks better. It's very easy to get lost down these rabbit holes. Is there anything else on that? I see I'm just looking at time. Or do you want to jump straight into how to prioritize? 49:02 Nati: I think we could jump to how to prioritize. I know that people have been, you know, saying we don't know the tools too well, to actually make the connection. What are you talking about? So people all over the chat, please understand we don't have time to show the tools. We do have a previous webinar that explains a lot of the tools with our basic data. We will, however, when we can, share links to articles explaining how to use the relevant Wix tools and when—so don't worry about that. I'll make sure that happens. Right now, you need to take away a way of thinking, a way of looking at a website through the eyes of a non human—a software bot. And that's what we're trying to impart here. So—after you will get down the line all the links explaining how to do all of these things and additional explanations. And that's that. I think we can go to prioritization. But before prioritizing—it doesn't matter if that's the Deepcrawl app or anything else. You mentioned a website audit. A website audit is about, it's just an inspection, right? Like an auto inspection. You bring your car in, and they tell you everything that's wrong, right? So technical SEO is about finding what’s gone wrong and what you expect to be there, but isn't there. So before prioritizing—how would you go about scheduling these audits? I've decided on the software I'd like to use, okay, I've connected Google Search Console. I've decided to use Deepcrawl or Screaming Frog or whatever other tool I've heard of. Should I do it every day? Should I do it every week? How much time are users or people here supposed to invest in technical SEO? 51:18 Chris: Quite often, I would say that it can vary enormously on the size of the site and how much content you're putting out. I think for the vast majority of sites, a monthly audit and health check is more than enough. Again, most tools—Deepcrawl has automated crawling of the site and Deepcrawl will, the Deepcrawl app within Wix will crawl your site weekly. But also, most tools, again, Screaming Frog, you can set schedules within Screaming Frog as well. Although do remember that means that your computer with Screaming Frog on does need to be turned on at the time. I'd maybe recommend making sure that's on a Monday morning while your computer is on or leave your computer on for a couple of hours on a Friday evening, something like that, in order to get the data. But yeah, I would say for the majority of sites monthly but weekly is a great way to absolutely make sure that you find anything, basically as soon as it happens, right? 52:28 Nati: Hopefully. Eventually, everything breaks, right? 52:31 Chris: Right. Exactly. Yeah. And sometimes it breaks and you don't know why. So. 52:38 Nati: Okay, so let's discuss a bit of [about] prioritization but because I feel this is the most important aspect of doing SEO work, not just technical SEO. So lay it on me, what's the first thing? There are plenty of issues—I go to Search Console, I see a lot of errors and statuses, and notices Google is throwing at me, and Deepcrawl is throwing stuff at me. And it’s overwhelming. I don't understand half of it. What should I target first? [What] should I invest my limited time in resolving? 53:16 Chris: Yep. Biggest thing is always content. Any issues that make content non-indexable, right? So any situation where you have a page on the site that Google is not going to be able to see. That's issue number one. I would always rather Google see a page with issues than not see a perfect page or a page that's perfect otherwise, you know. So internal linking is always going to be a thing that we're going to look at straight away. If you've got links to big pages that are broken, you're going to want to focus on those. After that— 53:54 Nati: Sorry for stopping you. Okay, what does that mean? That the page is or isn't indexable? 54:00 Chris: No problem. So a page that's not indexable is a page that basically cannot be put into the index by Google. There are tags within a page that you can use to set this. What I would say is the vast majority of, again, eComm and things like that—eComm websites, you will want the majority of pages indexed. And kind of your indexing or not indexing strategy is a bigger topic, I would say for a lot of this. But on the whole, yeah—so a page that is not findable or able to be put into the index by Google is a page that we would consider to be not indexable. Whereas a page can be indexed and no longer findable by Google, should links be removed or things like that. 54:48 Nati: So there are a lot of—again, it depends, like in everything in SEO. And that's the biggest lesson here, people. Everything depends in SEO. If I don't know anything about indexing but I did want to go about finding issues. What are things that usually make Google not want to index something, meaning that I haven't instructed Google to not index anything. If we think about the index as a big library. And each website is a book. And each page on that website gets a page in a book. And I haven't taught Google, look, ignore this chapter, don't index it. But still, Google hasn’t, right? I can see some of my posts aren't being indexed. Google Search Console told me that this is not a part of my offering in my libraries, Google. What should I look out for—even if I'm not a technical person? 55:54 Chris: I would say again, like you mentioned before, use your keyboard. Google your own website, Google the things that you're trying to rank for, and see if you are there—is always the biggest indicator. Also, again, I think there are—if you're not a technical person, you don't want to be looking for tags, I believe there's toggles and things like that within Wix to actually no index pages. Well, yeah, that would be the first place I'd start. If obviously, you're looking at a website that you own, and a website where you have control of the CMS. I'm just looking at the time Nati, you have a couple of minutes left. So we have a next slide here on how to keep a site healthy. Yeah. So obviously, we've talked about automated and scheduled crawls before. Obviously, we have apps and crawlers out there. A big thing for me is to always consider SEO, with every single change that you make, and also to educate people who use your site. So whether that's your colleagues, or if you have a situation where you're a consultant, things like that. Try and teach everyone in the business about SEO, because, again, from working in quite big companies. And obviously, the bigger your company gets, the more points of failure there are. In all aspects of SEO, the people are normally the biggest point of failure, right? Someone might decide one day, hey, I don't know why the URL for this page is this, I'm going to change it. And then not fix the links—or a number of different issues. I don't like the H1 tag, I'm going to change the header of this page—unbeknown [to] the fact that you've spent the last six months building links to that page, and you've worked really hard to make sure that page is super-optimized, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I would say to always try and teach as many people as you possibly can within your business, what SEO is, why it's important, just to think about it with every change you make. And also, like we mentioned right back at the start, the great thing about technical SEO is, you have documentation. It's the one bit of SEO that Google will actually lay it out and say, here's how you do it correctly. And even better, here's a tool that you can just test it with. Use those tools. Use that documentation to build things out to the letter, because it's the one part—it's why I stayed in technical SEO and moved away from traditional SEO. I like to be able to do a thing, and then press a button, and have a little pat on the head from somebody that says yep, you've done it right, well done. So I would always focus on that stuff. What about yourself, Nati? What are your tips for keeping a site healthy and in good shape? 58:46 Nati: Prioritization, of course, I think for most websites, a monthly crawl is great. But I think it's important not just to audit a website, meaning to run a program or an SaaS service, or some sort of software. It's also about tracking the number and types of errors over time. You want to see that your website health is trending up, right? You don't want to see an increase in errors, you want to see a decrease in errors. So one of the things I would constantly monitor is like last month, I had this and this and this issues, have some of them increased? Gotten worse? Or have they improved. If I noticed a trend, for example, I have an increase in 404s. Maybe there is a wider issue that I haven't solved at the core yet. So always look at the trends and compare what the services [and] the tools serve to you. So I know the Deepcrawl app does that. You can compare—there are trend lines there that you can see. I know that Google Search Console in many reports also offers trend lines for various things. I would say that the most important tool—and I beg Deepcrawl’s forgiveness—the most important tool in a tech SEO’s arsenal is Google Search Console. You can do that, by the way, in a couple of clicks using our Connect to Google feature in the Wiz [ SEO Tools , under Marketing & SEO ]. Always go there. Always see what's stopping your website from reaching its full potential. Now, no one is going to teach you to be a tech SEO in an hour. You know what, they're not going to even teach you to be a tech SEO in a month. Experience, time, and a lot of research goes into that. The important thing is to check, to encounter issues, to do a Google search, or, you know, ask for advice in supporting communities, on Twitter or in Facebook groups, and then resolve it. What we try to do on our end, is try for you to not have to take care of that at all. But it's always, always, always important to check it once in a while. Just like you have your car tested and licensed every year so it doesn't break down while you drive. That's the same thing here. You don't want something silly on your website, impacting your business or your clients’ business. And that's what tech SEO is all about. It's what could I or someone else screw up? And how do I fix that? And it's not something you'll get right into right away. You have to keep at it. But the first step is connecting to Google Search Console, diving into the data—wait a couple of days for the data to populate. Dive into the data. Understand what Google is pushing back at you, meaning if Google is surfacing it, I guess it's important. And one last tip. A lot of people have been noticing around the web—I manage a lot of large SEO communities and a lot of people will be noticing—there's an increase in “crawled” but not “indexed” in Google Search Console. I’m sure you've encountered it on many websites, forums, discussions. So, that's a great example of how sometimes it's not your fault. Remember, Google is a third party—they have bugs, they have preferences, they have limited resources, even if it's Google. It's not always your fault. But when it is, you better take care of that. 1:02:44 Edu: Awesome Nati, Chris, I want to thank you both for your time. You know, this one hour was insane. A lot of really good insights, we had over 250 questions asked in the Q&A. Plus, I can easily say 200,000 chat comments here. So it was really, really good to see all this movement and everyone [is] really, really excited to hear from you both. As you said, it's not going to be something you learn overnight, it's not going to be something that's easy to just stop and do it and okay, now I know tech SEO. It takes time, it takes you know, energy to go through things. And again, Deepcrawl, having Wix SEO with all the features we released recently helps a lot, helps a ton. So guys, if you have additional questions, I know we couldn't go through this because 250 questions—we would be here for like five days and not be able to answer all of them. So feel free to ask us questions. If you are part of any of the communities we own like [the] Editor X community, or Wix Partners community or All Things Wix. Join it, keep asking the questions there. If you want to go on Twitter, make sure you tag us using the hashtags TechSEO, WixSEO, SEOWix, Deepcrawl. Go for it, go crazy, ask questions there. I'll try and convince the guys to maybe spend some time there to get the questions answered on Twitter as well. But above all, I want to be respectful of your time and we dedicated one hour here. So again, thank you so much, guys. Kermit says hi, as well. Yeah, thank you, everyone. Chris, Nati, thanks for all the time and everyone in the backend here who is like not showing their faces but it's a lot of people behind the scenes to make this happen. So thank you everyone, guys. Thanks for everything. Have a great day. 1:04:19 Nati: SEO rocks. 1:04:20 Chris: Thanks.

Tuesday, December 3, 2024 | 1PM ET Join E inat Hobbian-Seybold and Paz Dekel for a roundup of 2024s standout SEO releases , from the latest AI solutions to enhanced accessibility features —and get an exclusive sneak peek at what’s to come in 2025.  In this webinar, we’ll cover:  The highlights of 2024's SEO releases How to get the most out of the latest solutions  Upcoming product releases for 2025 Meet your hosts: Einat Hoobian-Seybold Head of Product, SEO & A11y, Wix Einat began her SEO career by developing organic strategies for top global brands and later discovered her love for product development. As the Head of Product for Wix SEO, Einat builds impactful products that make SEO accessible and approachable to more than 200M users around the world. X | LinkedIn Paz Dekel SEO Product Manager, Wix After working in marketing at a fintech, Shira joined Wix to build products that help users promote their business. As a Product Manager for SEO, Shira’s focus is twofold; she develops products that streamline workflows for professional SEOs while also making SEO more accessible to DIY users. LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. X | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. X | LinkedIn

Author: Petra Kis-Herczegh How do you set a five-year plan when you don’t know what the industry will look like in six months? Even at the conference level of the SEO industry, expert speakers regularly have to update their presentations to account for the latest updates. Job descriptions are constantly shifting, requiring SEOs to cover more within their skillset, from creative copywriting to engineering machine learning algorithms and prompting AI tools. So, how do you keep up to date with it all?  The answer is simple—become really good at learning—but the execution requires attention to detail. Whether that’s learning to adapt, learning from others, learning from your own mistakes, or learning how you learn best, this process should be the first thing on your mind when you think of career development. In this article, I’m going to cover some key elements you can start focusing on to kickstart your career progression. In each category, experts from the industry have weighed in to share their experience. Table of contents: Lead with your transferable skills Optimize learning through self-efficacy Build an authentic personal brand Use your interpersonal skills to invest in relationships Don’t try to fix people problems with technology Reflect on your progress and reinforce what works Lead with your transferable skills “You don’t have to know what you want to do in two years’ time. Actually, that kind of rigidity can make you miss opportunities in front of you. Like life, careers are fluid. You might start in SEO but find you build skills that move you into analytics, performance marketing, product, development, or more. You'll learn more by diversifying and leaning into your strongest skills instead of chasing a constant linear progression.” — Samantha Verge, Marketing Manager at PitPat   Embracing lifelong learning is the most beneficial thing you can do to continuously progress your career. Generally speaking, the most effective approach for this is to start with your existing, transferable skills. If you ask experienced SEOs whether they ‘wanted’ to learn Google Analytics 4  (GA4), most would tell you that they didn’t, but oftentimes we just don’t have a choice. In times like this, a strong understanding of your transferable skills is extremely useful.  Let’s say you’re tasked to recreate SEO reports from Universal Analytics (UA) in GA4 .  If you have strong analytical skills,  you might want to start your learning by exploring the new metrics, how they are collected, and how they are grouped. If you’re familiar with learning and exploring new databases, you might find that this approach makes it much easier to create new reports (compared to creating exact replicas of UA reports). Or, if you’re more user- and solution-minded,  you could start by noting the purpose of each report and the problem(s) they solve, and then start your learning by exploring how GA4 can answer those very same questions. However, it’s hard to tell what’s hype and what’s here to stay when it comes to digital marketing skills, and skills can become requirements almost overnight. When that happens, you have two options:  Accept, adapt, and learn the skills required to continue on your path. Shift your career towards the things you enjoy learning about.  Either way, learning is required, which is why it helps to understand a little bit more about how we, as people, learn. Imagine your brain as an air traffic network. The airlines represent your expertise in different areas and the routes are the skills required. Routes in high demand will become more efficient, while routes that are no longer required might get abandoned. Imagine what has to happen when there’s suddenly a demand for new skills. That’s learning. When picking up a new skill, it’s best to initially lean on your existing, transferable skills—in our air traffic example (above), that means relying on existing routes. Perhaps going directly from A to B requires a lot more investment than to use existing routes to go from A to C and then C to B.  There’s certainly more than one way to learn new job skills, but no matter how you choose to approach it, weigh out your motivation, the investment you’re willing to make, and the transferable skills that can help you get there. Optimize your learning through self-efficacy “It was humbling to begin my SEO career in my thirties at such a junior level, and imposter syndrome was a big factor. Initially, I constantly reminded myself that I had been successful in both of my previous careers (as a teacher and journalist) and that both required continuous learning—something I had done many times before and knew I would have to do countless times again in my life. So, I leaned in and eventually minor successes gave me the confidence to take on bigger responsibilities, and now I’ve managed my own SEO publication for over two years.” — George Nguyen , Editor-in-Chief, Wix SEO Learning Hub To better understand your motivations, the investment required and your transferable skills, you need to understand self-efficacy (i.e., your belief in your capacity to execute the behaviors necessary to reach a specific level of performance, according to the APA ) .  Self-efficacy is basically your confidence in what you know and what you can learn. They go hand-in-hand: learning improves self-efficacy and self-efficacy improves learning.  The connection between these concepts can play out in two distinct ways: Self-limiting beliefs  — This refers to when your low self-efficacy prevents you from learning something new. Let’s say you want to apply for a job but, after reading the job description, you feel unqualified, and so you don’t apply. Obviously, that means you won’t go through the interview process and you definitely won’t get the job, which means you lost out on a learning experience as well as potential a job offer. Buck this pattern by shifting your mindset to focus on the process. There are also a number of factors that could help you conquer self-limiting beliefs, such as peer support and external demands. You might have someone refer you for a role you otherwise wouldn’t have applied for. Whether you get the job or not, the process should yield some useful feedback that you can learn from. Self-fulfilling beliefs  — Eventually, as you undergo more learning experiences, your self-efficacy improves, and the process becomes smoother and less intimidating. If required digital marketing skills keep changing every year, then the only way to keep up is to ensure your self-efficacy serves you well. It’s similar to how you need to understand the business you’re working for in order to come up with an effective SEO strategy . The better you understand how things work (and how you  work), the environment you are operating in, and the people you work with, the more effective you will become despite Google updates  and market shifts. It takes self awareness, self discovery, and a good amount of reflection to accurately judge what skills are relevant for your career. Page experience, NFTs, generative AI—there’s always hype around what’s new in digital marketing, but don’t get distracted—make sure to consider your own unique personality and confidence as a key factor for prioritization, because that’s what self-efficacy is. Build an authentic personal brand People often think building a personal brand is all about ‘raising your profile’ and becoming known in your industry, which can be a part of it, but is this really why you should do it?  Azeem Ahmad on stage at MozCon 2024. Just like branding for businesses, your personal brand needs consistency, so it’s important to define why you’re building your personal brand.  If you think of personal branding within the role of career progression, the goal is to form meaningful connections because these will help open up relevant opportunities. Whether that’s an opportunity to learn something new, support someone else’s progression, find your next role, or even to start a business with someone. The keyword here is relevance —which, as an SEO, you should already be very familiar with.  Personal branding is not about the spotlight—it’s about genuine connection with others. “In the beginning, I didn't understand the true importance of crafting a distinct personal brand. It has allo wed me to build relationships and improve my speaking and networking skills in public, whilst in private I focus on sharpening my tactical skills. This has really helped push my career forward. So, my words of advice for anyone reading this, and thinking about it is to put effort into building that personal brand. Share your expertise, connect with your audience across various platforms, and don't be afraid to admit when you get things wrong and be prepared to learn from others. This has really helped push my career forward.” — Azeem Ahmad, Digital Marketing Consultant & Podcast Host, Azeem Digital Asks Try things that help you connect with others in the industry. These could (but doesn’t necessarily have to) include: Speaking at industry events Hosting a podcast Participating in industry conversations on social platforms,  Contributing to blogs (or starting your own) to share expertise Engage in company initiatives that resonate with you or suggest initiatives that don’t exist today but might be a good way to connect with likeminded people in the industry. Join communities and participate in them, or even create your own. Share, empower, support, and ask for support.  This could also be something on a smaller scale, but much more relevant to your direct environment, such as creating a workshop within your company to share a useful skill or presenting the result of your work to the wider team or department. There are so many different ways to build your personal brand, but no matter how you approach it, make sure that it resonates and works for you (because, again, personal branding is about being genuine to who you are). “ At the start of my career, I thought that being knowledgeable about and skilled in all areas of SEO and beyond, (e.g., coding), would be absolutely necessary for progression, however with time I realized that an understanding is of course needed but it is better to find your strengths and focus on that. Whether that leads you to specializing in tech SEO, following a leadership route, or one of the newer paths (maybe becoming an SEO product manager). Whatever you choose, one thing is clear: purely having hard skills will not be enough. You need to work on your soft skills too.” — Vanda Pokecz, SEO Lead, Global Savings Group Use your interpersonal skills to invest in relationships  Finding it hard to learn something new? A supportive community (or just a friend) cheering you on can make a huge difference. Trying to get recommendations implemented for a technical project ? You’ll need the trust and support of your stakeholders and decision-makers. Want to get promoted? Start by assessing the impact you currently make on the people around you. At the end of the day (or quarter), when it comes to your promotion it’s still going to be people making those decisions—not algorithms. “ Human connections matter just as much as technical skills. Initially, I prioritized expertise, thinking it was the key. However, I've come to see that people want to work with those they genuinely enjoy being around—not just someone competent. The skills get you in the door for the interview; how you relate to others determines if you will thrive or not. SEO is a highly collaborative discipline requiring close coordination across teams. No matter how bright someone is, if coworkers find them difficult or demotivating, it influences how the project is going to go.” — Myriam Jessier, Co-founder of Neurospicy Agency Interpersonal skills, often also referred to as ‘soft skills,’ are an essential part of any role.  Soft skills include empathy, listening, communication, storytelling, leadership, critical thinking, and other skills that help you interact effectively with others. The main goal of soft skills is to improve your connections. So it’s no surprise that it’s one of the crucial things to focus on when thinking about career progression. Are you considering becoming a team lead in the future? Make sure to start emphasizing the people element of the role, because being a successful leader means you’re able to empower your team and help them grow. “Initially, I did not place enough value on my soft skills. I was focused on developing my technical skills, I even contemplated learning to code (massive lol). In the end, it was my soft skills that really highlighted my value as a manager. My ability to coach and mentor others, instilling confidence and fostering growth, proved invaluable. Additionally, skills such as driving commercial outcomes, educating stakeholders on the value of SEO, and upselling were also key to career progression.” — Miracle Inameti-Archibong, Head of Organic Search, John Lewis Finance Soft skills also come in handy when securing buy-in. While data might convince your stakeholders about your project, I’m going to bet that you won’t get the buy-in you need if you haven’t built respect and credibility through connections. When I asked Travis Tallent, VP of SEO at Brainlabs about his biggest surprise learning in SEO, he said: “Getting buy-in from colleagues. My first agency experience was quite competitive (in a friendly way), and it built a ‘me vs. them’ mentality. This led to me avoiding folks who I didn't enjoy working with. In my subsequent career moves, I realized that winning influence ultimately means building close relationships—even with folks who aren't natural fits for you—and understanding what motivates them. I've found that when I can align their goals with my goals, it's a win-win for everyone. Beyond, being kind is always the nicest thing to do in any situation and that’s an easy way to eventually win people over.” — Travis Tallent, VP of SEO, Brainlabs Connections impact you, your projects, and your career progression. We all know professional achievements are great for career progression, but it’s often overlooked that in order to do the work that gets you to an achievement, your colleagues need to at least respect you enough to want you to succeed. Don’t try to fix people problems with technology “As a tech SEO, working directly with engineering means more work may be implemented, resulting in more trust, more wins, more revenue. But also: working with amazing engineers likely means you are learning to work through their process. Having a functional framework for logical problem solving, testing, iterating… that can be transformative in terms of what work you do and how impactful it is!” — Tory Gray, CEO of Gray Dot Your greatest ideas are worth nothing if they cannot (or simply just won’t) get implemented. Execution through smooth and successful implementation is crucial to success and you want to approach this as a process rather than something you have to ad-hoc fight for every time you need to get something across the finish line. You have to understand that no matter how much data you have to back something up, if there’s a people-problem in the process, issues won’t go away with technical solutions. They can only get fixed through human connections.   Do you have site changes going live without sign-off, negatively impacting your SEO? Are devs not following the process you advocated for? No matter how much more money you throw at fancy tools or creating decks on how things are supposed to work, unless you go and talk to the development team and work on those relationships, initiatives will continue to fail. Avoid siloing and make sure to develop relationships with your stakeholders. Listen and learn with the purpose of understanding others’ perspectives, goals and motivations. Reflect on your progress and reinforce what works  We are at the end of an extensive list of advice you should consider testing and implementing in your day-to-day. And while testing implies that you should be taking feedback, I couldn’t leave you without emphasizing how important it is to reflect on your progress and use the feedback as an opportunity to reinforce what works (and reevaluate what doesn’t). This step can be so easy to overlook, especially when you are in high-stress or fast-paced environments. As SEOs, we often try new things and move on to the next without taking the necessary time to reflect. But if you remember that learning is a process that you optimize through self-efficacy, you can also learn to take a critical eye to your progress. This will help you build that authentic personal brand that’s so helpful in forging meaningful connections and cultivating a mindset that is always ready to adapt to whatever the industry throws at you. Petra Kis-Herczegh - SEO Consultant   Petra is an SEO consultant  with a background of working in-house for B2C & B2B brands, TUI, Jack Wills, as well as enterprise software brands, Yext, and Botify. She is also an international conference speaker. Twitter  | Linkedin

Updated: March 23, 2023 Author: Crystal Carter The new Wix Edit by Page feature allows site owners to review, monitor, and edit their pages’ meta tags , URL slug, indexability, and more, all from one place in the Wix Dashboard. Currently available for main pages and product pages (with more pages to come), this update is a game-changer for Wix users, allowing them to make adjustments to important aspects of their SEO on Wix efficiently and effectively. In this article, we’ll discuss: Getting started with the Wix SEO Settings Edit by Page feature How to make edits using the Edit by Page feature Examples of ways to use the Edit by Page feature to improve SEO on your Wix site Edit by Page release notes Getting started with the Wix Edit by Page feature The Wix SEO Settings Edit by Page feature shows an overview of your default settings and configurations for multiple pages, all within a single dashboard (shown below). To navigate to this feature, go to the Wix Dashboard and select Marketing & SEO > SEO Tools > SEO Settings , then choose either Main pages , Products , or Events and select the Edit by Page tab. From here, you can monitor and update various aspects of your SEO setup with speed and ease, while viewing at-a-glance details that can help you make more informed SEO decisions. Understanding the Edit by Page table The Edit by Page feature displays information about your pages ( title tag , meta description , URL slug, and indexability) in a searchable and sortable table. For main pages , you will also see a column for the Page name (as shown below). In these same settings, you will instead see a column for Product name and Event name for their respective page types. The table offers you insights into your overall SEO approach and can be toggled (by clicking on the column label) to sort columns alphabetically, reverse alphabetically, or by indexability. Below are some definitions that will help you navigate the Edit by Page table: Column Details Product name This column lists the name of each of the products that are showing in your online store . If a product is not listed here, it may be hidden. Page name This column lists all of the names of pages (as defined in the Wix Editor ) that have been created on your site. Event name ​This column lists all of the names of all published event pages on your site (both previous and current). Draft and deleted events are not visible here. Page URL Click ⓘ (in the column header) to review your default URL format for your pages. Title tag ​This column lists the title tags associated with your main pages. Click ⓘ (in the column header) to review your default title tag settings. From this popup, you can also click the Customize default link to edit your default title tag elements. Meta description This column shows a preview of the meta description associated with each main page. Mousing over the preview will show you the full meta description. Click ⓘ on your meta description column, then click Customize default to review your meta description defaults or update them. Indexable ​This column shows pages that can be indexed and displayed in search results. If there is a minus sign, then indexing has been turned off for this page and/or the product has been marked as hidden in your store. If the page shows a checkmark, then it can be crawled by search engines. Click the column header to sort your pages by indexable or not indexable. Each row of the table represents a main page or product page, and shows additional information for the associated page (details for both published and saved pages are shown). Click on elements of the table for additional information or to take steps to edit your page. The example images in the table below reference the screenshot above. Column Capabilities Example Page name Review the live page name (as defined in the Wix Editor ) for this page. This might not be the same as the page title. Page URL ​See the current URL slug for your page or click the link to visit the published page. Title tag ​View a preview of your title tag. Hover over the text to see the complete title tag as a popup (as shown in the image to the right). Meta description View a preview of your meta description. Hover over the text to see the complete meta description as a popup (as shown in the image to the right). Indexability ​For each page you will see a minus sign or a checkmark. If your page has a checkmark, then it can be crawled by search engines. If your page has a minus sign, then it cannot be crawled. Hover over the minus sign to access a popup with instructions on how to change your indexability (pictured right). You can also use the search bar (shown below) to query the content of any column and find relevant phrases or terms. How to make edits via Edit by Page To take action from the Edit by Page screen, hover over the row for the page you would like to edit and click the three dots on the far right (as shown below). From here, you have the option to Edit, Go to page info , or View live page : Edit — This opens the SEO Settings panel for the selected page. Go to page info — This opens Wix Editor for the selected page so that you can update designs, copy, and more. View live page — This opens the page, as users see it, in your browser. Pages that are not indexable are viewable from this link, but will not be crawled by search engines. Using the SEO Settings panel When you select Edit on a given page, the SEO Settings panel for that page will appear on the right-hand side of the dashboard (as shown below). This panel includes editable fields for your SEO settings, with tabs for SEO basics , Social share and Advanced settings . Previously, this panel was only accessible from the Wix Editor, but now you can make and save edits without having to open the Editor. Edits made and saved here will show on the Edit by page (or Edit by product , if you’re working on your product pages) table immediately and will also be updated on the site. After you’ve made your desired edits, click the Publish button to save and implement them. Then, click the X in the top-right of the panel to return to the table, where you can select another page to optimize. Working this way, you can implement changes to improve the SEO on your Wix website more quickly (as opposed to manually opening the settings for each page, one by one). Examples: Using the Edit by page feature to improve SEO on your Wix website Seeing crucial details about your main pages’ optimizations on a single table allows you to make more coherent decisions to improve your SEO. As an example, here are a few SEO tactics that you can implement effectively on your Wix website with the Edit by page feature. 01. Add keywords to your SEO meta tags Holistically considering your keyword profile can greatly benefit SEO sitewide. Because you can search all the content within the Edit by page table, you can easily check how prevalent certain keywords are across your SEO meta tags. For instance, if you were looking to optimize for a specific keyword or topic cluster , then you would be able to see how often this keyword shows on your site’s URLs, title tags, and meta descriptions with a single query. This information can allow you to prioritize which keywords you might need to improve or which keywords you might need to consider. In terms of ranking in search results, pages that are optimized for the same keywords may be more difficult for Google to interpret as distinct content. So, you may wish to add more variety to the terms across your site so that each page has a unique keyword topic or intent focus . In the case of a website about space travel, for instance, some pages may need to be optimized for the topic/keyword astronauts , but we might also consider optimizing pages for related terms, like space explorer and space traveler , and even drill down into long tail keywords that include space organizations (like NASA) or specific relevant events (like the Space Shuttle launches). 02. Write relevant title tags for your website When you review your title tags via the Edit by page table, you can see check to see if they: Use a clear pattern that makes it easy for users and Google to understand your content Accurately reflect the content of each page and your site overall Each include a relevant, unique keyword for the page Have the optimal length of approximately 60 characters By viewing all of your title tags in a single table, you can check for errors, issues, or inconsistencies that are repeated across the site. If this is the case, then you can take steps to optimize the title tags on your site. 03. Create unique meta descriptions to support search Sort your meta descriptions alphabetically (by clicking on the associated column header) to identify duplicates that could make it more difficult for Google to understand that your pages are distinct. Doing so can help users better understand your content in search engine results pages. Meta descriptions often show in Google, so taking time to make them unique can improve click-through rate and may potentially contribute to improved performance in search. 04. Ensure your most important pages are indexed Indexing is one of the most important steps in making sure that your content performs well on search engines. Pages that are still in draft and products that are not listed on your site should not be indexable. Conversely, it’s important to ensure that your most important pages are indexed and can be seen by search engines. The Edit by page feature gives you a quick and easy look at which pages you have set for indexing or have blocked from crawling. This table is a great place to start understanding which pages you have made available to Google (or other search engines) and pairs well with Wix’s Site Inspection tool to help manage your crawl. 05. Fine-tune your automated and default SEO settings In the Edit by page table, you can see your default settings for automated meta descriptions and titles, as well as the page-by-page implementation (shown in each row). This means that you can quickly assess if your automations work well or should be adjusted. For instance, you might want to consider creating unique meta descriptions or customizing your SEO defaults if you see multiple pages where the meta descriptions: Do not follow natural language patterns or don't make sense Generate meta descriptions that exceed the 500-character field limit Improve your SEO with Wix’s built-in tools The Edit by Page feature compiles crucial SEO details for your pages in one table, giving you the information you need to take quick action as well as the ability to do so without having to open up the Wix Editor and select individual pages. But, SEO is an ongoing process and there’s even more you can do to further your SEO gains. Explore the SEO Hub to learn more about how to optimize your site pages and make use of the full suite of Wix SEO Tools . Edit by Page release notes May 2023: Edit by Page feature opens to English-language users for Wix Blog pages. February 2023: Edit by Page feature opens on Wix to global users for Main Pages, Wix Events, and Wix Stores Product Pages. January 2023: Edit by Page feature opens on Wix to English-language users for Wix Events pages. November 2022: Edit by Page feature opens on Wix to English-language users for Main Pages and Product Pages. Crystal Carter - Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO & digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush, and more. Twitter | Linkedin

Last updated: 23 February 2024 Author: Matthew L. Kaminsky Once you know who and what your site is for , you can start thinking about how its SEO, structure, and content can be used to benefit your audience and achieve your business goals. All websites aim to drive conversions. Whether you want people to sign up as a client, buy a product, or visit a physical location is up to you. Your website should be built to suit the needs of your particular business. What are SMART SEO goals? The SMART framework is a goal setting method designed to create more actionable aims and objectives by ensuring that each goal is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound. Examples of SMART Goals for SEO When working on projects, laying out your targets, KPIs and SEO reporting , SEO lends itself really well to the SMART framework because each plan of activity should be carried out in response to a business need that is demonstrable with data. You can use SMART objectives on your website growth strategy by ensuring that each SEO recommendation shows: Specific area of the site, conversion metric, or behavior that you wish to impact Means of measuring the effect of your marketing Confirmation that you have the tools and resources to achieve your desired outcome Clear relevance of the SEO goals with the business goals Estimated time to complete and see an improvement from the work Taking this approach can help you turn a general SEO goal into a SMART SEO Goal. Here are some examples of how you can convert a general goal into a SMART goal in SEO: General Goal SMART Goal Improve mobile performance During Q3, we will increase traffic and revenue from mobile users by improving the number of product pages which are optimized for rich results. Increase traffic from local audiences Next month, we will increase user visits to location landing page, from GBP by optimizing the GBP profile. Improve indexing Over the next 3 months we will optimize the product feed to increase the percentage of live product pages which are indexed by Google. Setting up your site to drive your goals Your website is a key component in your digital marketing activity  and understanding how it can be used to drive your overall business goals is important. You need to consider site structure, content, and also how people use search engines to find your web pages . The way your site is configured will help you understand which goals are achievable and relevant to your business. Structure your site with the sales funnel in mind The sales funnel is a basic marketing concept. It is all about a buyer’s journey from their first interaction with your brand right through to the point where they take action. The top of the sales funnel is all about introducing a broad audience to your brand. Further down the funnel, you’ll lose some users but others will move through to conversion—that’s why the funnel slims toward the bottom. How many people eventually convert will depend on how effective your website’s content and structure are, among other factors. When choosing your site structure, you need to create intuitive navigation so users can find what they’re looking for. In addition to an easy-to-use menu bar, every page on your website should feature a call-to-action(CTA) , which moves people along your sales funnel toward conversion. Keep in mind that your website visitors won’t necessarily land on your homepage and go from there. Google will lead them to whatever page is most relevant to their search terms. So, think of every page as a landing page , or potential entry point into your sales funnel. Plan & measure content for different stages of the sales funnel When choosing content for your website, keep in mind that certain types of web pages relate to different parts of the buyer’s journey. If someone lands on a “How to” blog post, you shouldn’t go straight for a hard sales pitch. That visitor is probably still in the awareness phase and not ready to buy. So, this is the time to be helpful, supportive, and make a lasting impression. To nurture your new lead, you could include a CTA that encourages further reading or a newsletter signup. This way, you’ll be the first brand they think of when they are looking for products or services in your industry. On the other hand, someone reading a product page is probably further down the sales funnel. Whether they’ve browsed your site to get here or arrived directly from search results, they may be ready to make a purchase. So, this is where some impressive, sales-focused information will be useful for both your users and your business. People visit certain pages for certain reasons. When considering your SMART objectives for SEO, paying attention to what is measurable at each stage of the funnel will help you to benchmark and attribute your goals to something tangible. Equally, data on the length of the sales cycle will help you to gauge what is achievable across a few weeks or a few months. If you’re in tune with your users and cater to their needs, it will be easier to create content that leads to conversion and fulfills your goals. Account for search intent As it turns out, a buyer’s journey through the sales funnel largely corresponds with a user’s search intent . So, if you cater your content to suit the needs of your users at various stages of the journey, you’ll optimize both your sales funnel and your search rankings. Different pages on your website should correspond to different search and keyword intents , and this intent will depend on where the customer is in the buyer journey. For example, if someone types “How to make pancakes” into Google, the intent behind their search is likely to be informational. So, they probably don’t want a product page or a sales pitch disguised as a recipe—these types of content are more appropriate for searches with a commercial research or transactional intent. Considering the needs and requirements of your audience can help you set targets that are specific and highly targeted for the user. How do you know if a website is successful? Tracking certain metrics will empower you to gauge the performance of your website over time and help you identify what’s working and what needs improvement. These metrics are known as key performance indicators (KPIs) and, in addition to linking your website and your business goals, they convey how successful your marketing activities are. What are examples of KPIs based on SMART SEO Goals? The website and SEO goals and KPIs you choose will depend on your specific goals, but they should always be: Specific to your website’s configuration Measurable with your SEO and marketing tools Achievable with resources you currently have or can attain Relevant to the success of your company Deliverable in a timely manner Associating KPIs with each stage of the sales funnel will help you identify which parts of your website are contributing toward your company’s success, as well as which areas need work. Example SEO KPIs for the top of the sales funnel (ToFu) SEO is a great way to reach people who are unaware of your business and start them on the buyer’s journey. If your ToFu goals includes using SEO content to drive traffic to the website with awareness raising content like targeted blogs, videos and guides, then the following KPIs can indicate growing awareness of your business: Search rankings: Tracking how search engines rank your content over time can help you identify whether your brand is trending towards more or less visibility. Generally speaking, the higher the ranking, the more impressions you’ll receive, which usually translates to greater brand awareness. Organic traffic: This is the number of visitors that come to your website from Google’s search results. Number of new visitors: If this number is high and growing, it’s a sign that your strategy for building awareness is working. Example SEO KPIs to track the middle of the sales funnel (MoFu) Once people are aware of your business, you want to engage their interest. During this stage you may be investing time in your SEO content strategy to improve you E-E-A-T with trust building content on your home page, about page, and profile pages for experts in your team. Since your goals will be to build engagement, your KPIs show signals that visitors are moving toward conversion: Number of returning visitors: This will tell you how effective your website is at building and retaining an audience online. Pages per session: The average number of pages someone looks at during their visit provides an important gauge of how engaging your website’s content is. If this is low, you may need to look at improving your website’s structure, navigation, and CTAs. Email signups: Trackable in Google Analytics, this KPI can be an indicator of how engaging and helpful your blog content is. If this is a CTA anywhere on your website, this is an important KPI to track. Branded search volume: The number of times your company name is searched each month indicates how many people know about and are interested in your business. If this is increasing, you’re doing a good job. This metric is available in most keyword tools. Alternatively, you can use Google Trends to keep track. Example SEO KPIs to track the bottom of the sales funnel (BoFu) At the bottom of the sales funnel, your leads are ready to convert. This is usually the part that directly advances your business goals. Depending on your website, users may make a purchase, contact your sales team, get a quote or book an appointment. So, these are the KPIs to track: Leads and Form submissions: The number of incoming submissions tells you about how successful your website is in building trust and guiding users toward conversion. Average Order Value:  As a site-wide metric this can indicate if your customers are engaged with your campaigns, see you as a trustworthy brand, and help you to determine the expected return on additional marketing channels like PPC. Conversion rates:  Track the percentage of users who purchase, subscribe, or enroll via organic search channels. A higher conversion rate indicates that your marketing funnel is working well. Purchases: High sales volumes can signal great content and navigation. Shopping cart abandonment:  This shows how many people leave your website in the middle of filling out a form or making a purchase. If this is too high, it may indicate that the process is too complicated. When measuring the value of your ecommerce website , monitoring abandoned carts can help you to create actionable campaigns to achieve your overall business goals. You don’t have to track all of these KPIs, but it's a good idea to regularly monitor some from each stage of the sales funnel. This will provide a succinct and simple overview of your website’s progress, without weighing you down with hefty reports.  Adopting a SMART approach to SEO goal setting When setting out to achieve your SEO goals building a solid SMART approach can help you to get great results for clients and to empower your team. Whether you are working with an SEO agency, or carrying out SEO work in-house having clear, data backed objectives from the start will help you throughout the lifetime of the project. Matthew Kaminsky - Wix SEO expert and online instructor Matthew is responsible for SEO education initiatives at Wix, helping people increase their sites’ visibility on search engines with SEO. Twitter | LinkedIn