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Author: Aleyda Solis Making technical SEO recommendations for your C-suite and getting them implemented can be two distinct endeavors. For the latter, identifying areas to improve isn’t enough—the real challenge is in obtaining buy-in from the teammates responsible for carrying out your recommendations (often the web development and design teams). Having worked with companies across the world over the last 15+ years, I’ve picked up many lessons on how to overcome stumbling blocks and hurdles to ensure that my recommendations translate into real performance and search visibility improvements.  Let’s look at some of those lessons and how you can put them to use to get your recommendations across the finish line. Table of contents: Set the foundations for partnership with devs and product stakeholders Understand the goals and workflows of other stakeholders Create a technical SEO knowledge base Communicate regularly with external teammates Strengthen communication for better implementation and outcomes Explain how each task impacts KPIs Approach collaboration with flexibility Communicate wins—not just issues Prioritize your technical SEO recommendations Avoid fixing every SEO issue flagged by tools Start with the tasks that are most impactful and easiest to implement Avoid using proprietary third-party metrics in your reporting Validate technical SEO execution Define how you’ll measure progress Test before you publish Validate recommendations and agree on an execution timeline Set the foundations for a successful partnership with devs and product stakeholders Getting your technical SEO recommendations implemented often involves working with multidisciplinary teams: developer, product, design, and content stakeholders, and those who manage the website product, infrastructure, and marketing. To be successful here, you will need to: Understand not only your own goals, but also the goals for all involved stakeholders and the business overall Effectively communicate the importance of SEO recommendations to achieve these goals Agree on the technical SEO resources and execution timeline to develop SEO recommendations Maintain robust lines of communication for efficient coordination and successful execution Understand the web development, product, and design teams’ workflows and goals  Aligning SEO with the aims and objectives of your web development, design, and product teams helps keep everyone on the same page. This will enable you to identify the best way to prioritize SEO needs and create a plan of action with your counterparts from other teams that keeps everyone on track and moving in the same direction. For example, if the web development team works in sprints, knowing how long each sprint is can help you coordinate reasonable goals for each one. Create a technical SEO knowledge base for your teammates Develop an “SEO knowledge base” for the company by curating/creating webinars, guides, checklists,  etc.   based on what you found in your site audit. Use this to evangelize to the web development, product, and design teams at the beginning of the process, as well as to create easy-to-reference resources during the ongoing SEO validation workflow. The more they know about what you do and the reasons behind it, the more likely they’ll be willing to help. This is why it’s fundamental to go beyond the identified challenges and opportunities by including the level of criticality these have towards goals.  Communicate regularly with external teammates From the start, set a fluid communication workflow with the teams you will be collaborating with to implement the SEO recommendations.  Agree on recurrent calls and follow-ups for major alignment, clarify complex questions, and ongoing reporting. The frequency of these calls and follow-ups will depend on the speed of the implementation, although this is typically set for once per week or every two weeks.  Establish a collaboration channel or platform (like Monday or Asana) for ongoing project management to facilitate asynchronous communication and resolve non-complex but urgent blockers without waiting for the next weekly meeting. Strengthen communication for better implementation and outcomes One way to enhance communication is to treat other stakeholders like they’re an extension of your own team. This means: Explaining the connection between various tasks and associated key performance indicators (KPIs) Maintaining flexibility when collaborating with other teams Recognizing and communicating wins Explain how each task impacts KPIs Whenever you report about the site’s technical SEO status or evolution over time, remember to explain the importance of each SEO issue with regard to the website’s rankings and, ultimately, revenue. This reiterates for stakeholders and C-suite alike the importance of a given recommendation to the business’s bottom line, which may help you get your recommendations implemented faster. If the technical SEO status isn’t evolving as expected, detail the reason behind this while providing alternative solutions to solve it, along with the resources needed to achieve the associated SEO goal. Approach collaboration with flexibility If you get technical pushback due to a lack of viability or resources to execute your SEO recommendations, communicate with your external teammates to identify alternatives or workarounds to achieve similar results.  There may be other tools or methods that you can use to achieve a similar result. For instance, you may not be able to get access to edit the of the site pages for hreflang implementation, but instead, you can establish the automated generation of an XML sitemap featuring the required hreflang annotation.  This is why it’s important to communicate the expected outcome of each recommendation and ask the development team for input (leveraging their knowledge and experience) to establish alternatives together that are both feasible and easier to support and scale.  Communicate wins—not just issues Don’t just focus on your technical SEO recommendation’s status. Make sure to recognize milestones and achievements, and everyone involved in accomplishing them.  This helps keep teammates motivated and the recognition can be important internally, especially when managers need to know where their teams are investing their time. Prioritize your technical SEO recommendations It’s unrealistic to include every potential optimization on your list of recommendations (and it wouldn’t be very cost-efficient to the business or respectful to the other teammates responsible for implementation). To present an achievable plan, you’ll need to: Identify the SEO issues worth resolving based on SEO goals aligned with other stakeholders and areas of the business. Focus on recommendations that can be traced to actual goals and universal metrics, instead of proprietary third-party metrics. Prioritize your SEO recommendations to start executing the easiest, most impactful actions. Don’t try to fix every SEO issue flagged by tools SEO tools can provide you with an extensive list of website elements to optimize, but those tasks don’t all carry the same weight for your specific site optimization needs. This will depend on your own business context and goals. That’s why it’s fundamental to assess each of the issues and opportunities identified in your SEO audit , analysis, and research. Take the greater context of your website into account and consider whether these issues are actually hurting important queries, page rankings, or, ultimately, your expected goals in a meaningful way. Then prioritize them accordingly  within your existing SEO action plan.  Start with the tasks that are most impactful and easiest to implement When sharing your prioritized SEO recommendations, start with the most impactful and easiest to implement. Explain: The importance and expected impact of each recommendation Why it should also be a priority for the web development, product, or design teams The benefits the recommendation will bring to the website, the teams involved, and/or the business overall  Explaining your recommendations in these terms will help you align teams and efforts according to the greatest potential benefit for your business, which should reflect well on all involved. Avoid using proprietary third-party metrics in your reporting New metrics—particularly proprietary third-party metrics—can confuse your C-suite and non-SEO stakeholders. In addition, the SEO tools  you rely on may change over time—sometimes as a result of new technical needs, other times as a result of internal business needs. Instead, focus on monitoring your SEO status and report  using meaningful metrics that you can easily obtain through multiple sources to showcase your site’s evolution and achievements on an ongoing basis.  Taking this into account, identify the different SEO metrics you’ll monitor (and need to communicate progress of) through multiple data sources. Doing this will also help to validate your recommendation prioritization, ensuring that each task can be traced consistently with meaningful metrics, like:  Crawlability  Indexability Ranked pages Ranked queries Average position Clicks Conversions Revenue from organic search Validate technical SEO execution Verifying that SEO-related dev requests or tickets have been correctly implemented is a crucial step towards the desired outcome during SEO execution. From website security fixes  to validating structured data , you need to be able to confirm the outcome status of SEO-related technical updates.  Define how you’ll measure progress Remember that on one hand, you have those metrics you want to track to monitor your SEO efforts over time. But on the other hand, you also have metrics that will allow you to report on the progress of SEO execution and goals. Each stakeholder will likely want to answer different types
of questions about SEO progress, so the KPIs to track and report on should also be agreed on.  The KPIs tend to be more or less technical, depending on the role, specific interests within the project, and goals. “If it’s meaningful, then it can be measured,” said Jamie Indigo , director of technical SEO at Cox Automotive.  “What is a quantifiable metric? Are there multiple?” Indigo said, recommending that SEOs contextualize and weight these metrics appropriately when gauging performance changes. “In some cases, there’s a direct artifact (like when Google sees the tag!) and a longer term metric (that measures if Google seeing the tag actually matters). For example, Google sees max-preview-image (immediate technical marker) followed by Google returning more of your articles in Discover.” “Not defining what success means or how it will be measured prior to execution is how SEO becomes a dirty word (or shoved to the bottom of the backlog).” — Jamie Indigo, Director of Technical SEO at Cox Automotive Test before you publish Agree on a QA workflow, tools to use, as well as a staging environment with the web development team to test any SEO-related release (or any web release that could affect SEO-related configurations) before they go live.  This environment should be as similar to the live site as possible but blocked to search engine crawlers and require user authentication to access. It’s then also fundamental that you agree on what tools and methods you’ll use to access and validate any execution status to ensure success. Remember that it’s important to not only validate before any release, but also after launch and to agree on what should happen if a critical bug—like one that can harm the site’s SEO goals—is identified. Establish the best course of action depending on the criticality and existing dev workflow. This should be coordinated to reduce disruption to the wider site, explained Crystal Carter , head of SEO communications at Wix. “There are often multiple teams working on a single site at once. If you do not coordinate the time between deployment and validation, it can get difficult to isolate issues. If the team moves on to another deployment, then a rollback could mean that new content or features have to be republished.” — Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications at Wix Validate recommendations and agree on an execution timeline Before any recommendations actually get implemented, make sure that everyone involved understands what they’re responsible for and why.  Then based on the available resources, agree on an SEO execution workflow with the web development, product, and design teams, while ensuring there’s: Enough time for validation before and after any release The agreed timeline actually allows you to see the expected outcome on time If this is not the case, then collaborate with stakeholders to establish alternatives and communicate the tradeoffs with the expected goals to decision makers to align expectations. It’s critical to align understanding about SEO results based on the recommendations’ execution to avoid disappointment. Collaboration is the key to better technical SEO Getting your technical SEO recommendations approved and implemented can be as much about communication and teamwork as it is about faster loading times or crawl budget optimization. While collaboration isn’t what you might immediately go to when thinking about your role, your ability to communicate and collaborate with other stakeholders is likely to influence how successful you are at getting recommendations implemented, which will eventually affect how your business website performs as well as your success as a technical SEO. Aleyda Solis - SEO Consultant and Founder at Orainti Aleyda Solis is an SEO speaker, author, and the founder of Orainti , a boutique SEO consultancy advising top brands worldwide. She shares the latest SEO news and resources in her SEOFOMO newsletter, SEO tips in the Crawling Mondays video series, and a free SEO Learning Roadmap called LearningSEO.io. Twitter  | Linkedin

Updated: October 11, 2024 Author: James Clark If you’ve followed our guide to getting started with Google Analytics 4 , you’ll know how important the concept of an ‘event’ is within this popular analytics tool. Any interaction your users have with your site or app—from a page view to a form submission—can be captured as an event. But, not all these events will be equally valuable to you or your business.  In GA4, you can choose to mark particularly important events as ‘key events.’ Then, you can use this data to further your business by understanding more about your most valuable users and how to grow that cohort. If you’re a longstanding Google Analytics user, you may be more familiar with the term ‘goals’ (as important interactions were called in the old Universal Analytics) or ‘conversions’ (as they were called in GA4 until April 2024). The term ‘goal’ no longer exists in GA4 at all, and ‘conversion’ now has a specific meaning relating to paid advertising only. Yes, Google Analytics is always evolving !  In this article, I’ll keep to Google’s terminology  and use key events to refer to any event that “contributes to the success of your business.” Only key events that are imported into Google Ads become conversions. So in GA4, every conversion is a key event but not every key event is necessarily a conversion. (To make matters more confusing, a ‘conversion’ in GA4 is called a ‘conversion action’ in Google Ads—thanks, Google.) So if you want to understand conversions, you need to understand key events first: the typical key events for different types of site, how to set up key events in GA4, and the benefits of tracking key events. Let’s dive in. Table of contents: Identifying your business and website objectives Toggling events as key events Creating custom events to use as key events Marking custom events as key events Finding and using event parameters Key event limits in GA4 Using key events in reports Choosing an attribution model Advanced uses for key events conversions Explorations Google Ads Audiences Identifying your business and website objectives “Any event that contributes to the success of your business” is quite a broad definition, so it might be worth asking yourself:  What are your business objectives? How does your website support those objectives?   What would a ‘successful’ visit look like to you? If you have an eCommerce site, you will no doubt be trying to get users to make a purchase. If you have a marketing website for your small business, you’re probably using it to generate inquiries—in which case, a user completing an inquiry form or clicking on a ‘click to call’ phone number might be successful outcomes. After all, these actions are also potential revenue generators (if only indirectly). With editorial or publishing sites (where your revenue generally comes mainly from advertising), it can be more difficult to identify ‘success.’ Perhaps you’re trying to build an audience by encouraging email newsletter signups or site registrations—in which case, these would be good candidates as conversions.  In short, there are no hard and fast rules: the events that contribute to the success of your business will be as unique as your business itself. Toggling events as key events Now that you have a good grasp of the events that contribute to the success of your business, you can mark them as key events. You can view your current conversions by going to the Key Events  page in the GA4 interface (in the left-hand navigation, Admin > Data Display > Key Events ). By default, if you’re using a web data stream, your Google Analytics 4 property will have only one event marked as a key event: the purchase event. This event indicates that an eCommerce transaction has occurred, and is always counted as a conversion. To mark an event as a key event, go to the Events  page ( Admin > Data Display > Events ). This lists all the existing events being collected on your site, and shows how many of each have occurred within a given timeframe. If you’ve turned on GA4’s enhanced measurement feature  (and we strongly recommend you do), you may have received some automatically tracked events, including: file_download — When a user clicks a link leading to a file click — When a user clicks a link to an external site view_search_results — When a user conducts a site search on your website scroll — The first time a user reaches the bottom of each page In addition to these events, you may see other events that your platform or CMS is sending. For example, Wix’s ‘live chat’ widget sends events, including ‘Chat - Opened’ and ‘generate_lead’ (when an inquiry is submitted). Third-party plugins and add-ons may also send events. Using a platform that automatically sends events is particularly useful for eCommerce, which can be complicated to set up manually. To mark one of your events as a key event, simply click on the corresponding toggle on the right-hand side (as shown above). Now, when you go back to the Key Event  page, your new conversion will be listed there. This approach only works if the event has been collected at least once in the timeframe you are looking at—otherwise you won’t see it listed. Note: You can also untoggle an event at any time—except the purchase event, that is. Creating custom events to use as key events What happens if you only want specific instances of an event to be counted as a key event?  Let’s say you’re raising money for charity and you’ve built a website to help create awareness. Your site has links to lots of other websites, including one to the fundraising platform where people can make a donation. You’re already automatically tracking clicks on all these links as outbound ‘click’ events through GA4’s enhanced measurement feature. You’ve also thought about the aims of your website, and you’ve identified that clicks on the fundraising link would make an ideal key event. But, if you go ahead and toggle the ‘click’ event as a key event, that will mark all  link click events as key events, which is not what you want. Instead, you will need to create a new, more specific, custom event based on the existing ‘click’ event, then mark this new event as a key event. Here’s how: 01. In Admin > Data Display > Events , click on Create Event . 02. Click Create . 03. Give your event a name. There’s a limit of 40 characters, you can’t use spaces, and event names in GA4 are normally lowercase. Google’s enhanced measurement events tend to follow the pattern action_object , so something like “fundraising_click” would be perfect. 04. Next, add some ‘conditions.’ When all of these conditions are met at the same time, your new event will trigger. The first condition is simply “event_name equals click.” 05. Click Add condition . This second condition is where you’ll indicate that the event should only trigger on clicks specifically to the fundraising platform. For that, we need the parameter “link_url equals” and then the full URL (as shown below). 06. Click Create in the top-right. Finally, close the Create events panel. Next, you’re ready to mark the custom event you just created as a key event. Marking custom events as key events You’re now back on the Events  page, but don’t worry that you can’t see your new event. It might take 24 hours or so for it to appear here after someone has performed the action on your site—which means you won’t be able to toggle it as a conversion yet.  Fortunately, there’s another way to set up the key event, and we can do it straight away: 01. Go to Settings > Data Display > Key Events . 02. Click New key event . 03. Enter the name of the custom event you saved earlier (in our example, “fundraising_click”) in the New event name box and click Save . The reason I don’t recommend this approach for setting up all your key events is that it introduces the risk of getting the event name wrong. It’s easy to misremember your form submission event name as form_submission  instead of form_submit , for example. Generally, it’s safer to use the toggles on the Events page. Finding and using event parameters In our fundraising example, you’ll notice we used an event parameter called “link_url.” An event parameter is just an additional piece of information about that event. So, ‘click’ events have parameters including: link_url — The full URL you are linking to (e.g., https://fundraiser.co.uk/example) link_domain — The domain you are linking to (e.g., fundraiser.co.uk) outbound — Here, a value of ‘true’ indicates that it is a click to an external website. But, how do you find out what parameters are available for you to use when you’re setting up a custom event? You could check Google’s documentation , at least for the enhanced measurement events (such as ‘click’ ). But, the simplest and surest way is to go to Reports > Realtime and look at the Event count by Event name card. This lists all the events that have happened on your site or app in the past 30 minutes: Click on any event to see its parameters, then click on any parameter to see the values belonging to that parameter. So, by going to your website and triggering the event you want to use as a key event, you will be able to check the parameters and values in the Realtime report before setting everything up. A more advanced approach would be to use GA4’s built-in debug mode and DebugView report . This lets you see only the events you are triggering, rather than every event being triggered by every visitor to your site. So, if your site receives a lot of traffic, this approach makes it much easier to find the events and parameters you are looking for. Key event limits in GA4 A standard GA4 property can have up to 30 different key events . This may sound like a lot, but given that you can have as many events as you like in your web data stream, it’s a definite limitation—and something to bear in mind when you start identifying the events that contribute to the success of your business. Enterprise customers paying for Google Analytics 360 have a higher limit of up to 50 conversions. And, here’s a different kind of limitation: Marking an event as a key event doesn't affect data you've already collected, only new data from that point on. So, it’s important to identify your key events as early as you can so as to make full use of the data you gather about your users’ behavior. Using key events in reports Now that you’ve set up key events, you can make use of this data in GA4 reports. The place to start is Reports > Engagement > Pages and Screens . This shows you a list of pages on your site along with the number of views, events, and key events that have taken place on each. The top row gives you a total for all pages. OK, but say you are tracking two key events, a ‘click to call’ event (which is somewhat valuable to your business) and a purchase (which is highly valuable). A total that includes both isn’t necessarily that insightful. Fortunately, there are two ways you can drill down further into the data to understand the exact value being created. First, use the filter on the ‘key events’ column to select a specific key event: Second, you will also see a column called “Total revenue.” If you’re tracking an eCommerce site, your ‘purchase’ events will have a ‘value’ parameter capturing the monetary value of the purchase. This allows your Pages and Screens report, as well as other reports in GA4, to show how much revenue your site is generating. Here it is in the Events report: It’s possible for other conversions to be assigned a value, too. Let’s say you run a plumbing business and you know that a new customer is, on average, worth $500 to you. You also know that one in five of your contact form submissions converts into a paying customer. So, it would be reasonable to give a contact form submission a nominal value of $100 (that is, $500 divided by five). Loves Data has a useful guide to adding a monetary value to key events  (here called “conversions”).  Istarted this article by saying that key events are events that “contribute to the success of your business.” One of the biggest benefits of tracking key events is that you can see how marketing activity is contributing to the success of your business. The place to go for this information in GA4 is the Advertising  section. Don’t be fooled by the name: it gives you insight not just on paid advertising (such as search and display ads), but on all of your traffic sources, including organic search. When you first try to access Advertising, Google Analytics will prompt you to link your GA4 property to a Google Ads account (if you haven’t done so already). You don’t need to actually run any ads to see these reports (i.e., it won’t cost you any money), but you do need a connected Ads account: This section provides information on both key events and conversions (that is, key events you’ve imported into Google Ads). Individual reports and cards will either focus on one or the other, so check the card titles to understand what they are showing you. Let’s look at the Advertising Snapshot  first ( Advertising > Advertising Snapshot ). The card in the middle shows you your traffic ‘channels’ and how many key events each channel has generated: There’s an easy-to-miss dropdown in the top-left of this overview report that lets you select and deselect individual key events. So, you may find that one traffic source is responsible for most of your email newsletter signups, but another traffic source (perhaps email) is responsible for purchases. However, user journeys are becoming more complex and a user may come to your site several times before they convert. The Attribution Paths report ( Advertising > Attribution > Attribution Paths ) illustrates this.  The top of the report shows your most common “early,” “mid,” and “late,” touchpoints to give an overview of your converting users’ behavior: Underneath this are the specific conversion paths that users take. In the screengrab below, you can see that users to this particular site often make two, three, or four visits via organic search before performing a key event: Choosing an attribution model What happens if a user comes to your website via lots of different channels before converting? Perhaps their first visit is via one of your paid search ads. Later, they come back via organic search. They visit again via a link in an email newsletter—and then finally convert. Which touchpoint (or touchpoints) should get the credit for the conversion? This is where attribution models come in: An attribution model is simply a set of rules that decides how credit is allocated. Credit here means both the number of key events and any revenue coming from those events. GA4 makes it very straightforward to see the impact of its two attribution models via the Attribution Models report ( Advertising > Attribution > Attribution Models ). The report shows you key event numbers and revenue for each of your traffic channels—and how those numbers would look under either the ‘data-driven’ or the ‘last-click’ model: ‘Last click’  is the easier one to understand: it attributes all credit to the final touchpoint. This model was the default in the old Universal Analytics, so opt for this if you want to remain consistent with your historic data.  Within last click, you can choose either ‘paid and organic channels’ or ‘Google paid channels.’ The Google paid channels option always gives credit to the final Google Ads touchpoint (if there was one), ignoring any later clicks from organic channels. This model is useful for analyzing the effectiveness of paid campaigns.  If you’re running paid ads for a client, you may be tempted to choose this model just to make your results look better—please try to avoid that temptation as it could lead to difficulty down the line when the client asks why organic or social aren’t driving much revenue. ‘Data-driven’ is GA4’s default model. Instead of following a fixed set of rules, it looks at your historical data and uses machine learning to work out how to assign credit. It’s a powerful feature, but something of a black box in that you can’t see exactly how it works. As Google says , “each Data-driven model is specific to each advertiser and each key event.” All of GA4’s other attribution models (first click, linear, time decay, and position-based) were deprecated in November 2023. Your choice of model is more than just an interesting exercise. If you’re using your conversion data to make business decisions (for example, on where best to spend your marketing budget), then choosing the most appropriate model can help with that. It’s worth considering: do you want to focus on the ‘converting’ channel only, or consider all the channels that might have contributed to that conversion? In the non e-Commerce example below, moving from ‘last click’ to ‘data-driven’ massively increases the number of key events shown as being driven by organic social. This tells us that organic social is important earlier in the user journey—perhaps how users first learn about the brand: Although the Attribution Models  report lets you see the impact of different models, you’ll find the setting to actually change your chosen model in Admin > Data Display > Attribution Settings . Advanced uses for key events and conversions in GA4 Now, you have seen how to set up key events and conversions and make use of this data in GA4’s predefined reports. But, there are many other applications—let’s take a quick look at some of them. Explorations If you prefer to build your own reports (or ‘ Explorations ’ as GA4 calls them), then you can add key event-related metrics and dimensions to any of those reports.  In July 2022, Google added conversion rate metrics: a popular and much-requested feature from Universal Analytics. Originally called ‘user conversion rate’ and ‘session conversion rate,’ these metrics have since been renamed to ‘user key event rate’ and ‘session key event rate’ to make it clear that they don’t just apply to Ads conversions. User key event rate: The percentage of users who have performed a key event. Session key event rate: The percentage of sessions in which a key event was performed. Analytics Mania has a comprehensive guide to finding and using these key event rate metrics . Google Ads We’ve already seen that to enable the Advertising reports in GA4, you need to link your GA4 property to your Google Ads account. You can then import your key events into Google Ads, where they become conversions (in GA4) and conversion actions (in Google Ads). You can use this data to optimize your bids so your campaigns generate more conversions for less ad spend. Importing your GA4 key events isn’t the only way to send conversion data to Google Ads. You could, for example, use a Google Ads conversion tag in Google Tag Manager and bypass GA4 completely. However, linking GA4 with Google Ads and importing key events gives you the benefit of seeing the same data in both locations. To start the process, go to Goals > Summary  in Google Ads and click Create Conversion Action . Then choose the Import option from the following selection: For more on linking Google Ads and GA4, take a look at the Optimize Smart guide . Audiences Another section of GA4 that makes use of conversion data is Audiences   (Admin > Data Display > Audiences ). Here, you can build a segment of users who meet certain conditions that are important to your business (e.g., users who have made a purchase, users who have performed any key event, etc).  GA4 also offers so-called ‘predictive audiences’: one of the presets here is “users who are likely to make a purchase in the next seven days.” However, you will only be eligible to use these if your site meets certain criteria , one of which being a minimum traffic threshold. These audiences have several applications: first, you can add them as a ‘comparison’ to your standard GA4 reports and see what makes them different to your overall users. Perhaps they are more likely to come from a particular country, or visit a certain section of your site. This could be valuable marketing intel. If you’ve linked GA4 with Google Ads, your audiences are also available for use there. This allows you to target your paying customers (or valuable users) with relevant messages as part of so-called ‘remarketing’ campaigns.  The Google Analytics help article on audiences is a good place to start if you are interested in exploring these possibilities. Key event tracking helps you get the most from your site traffic We started this guide by saying that key events are events that contribute to the success of your business. Tracking key events (and conversions) also contributes to the success of your business—by helping you to understand your audience, report on revenue, target your marketing, and make smarter decisions about your website.  Not everyone sees the benefits of setting up key event tracking... but, hopefully, I’ve shown you that it’s the key to unlocking the full value of website analytics for your business. James Clark - Web Analyst James Clark is a web analyst from London, with a background in the publishing sector. When he isn't helping businesses with their analytics, he's usually writing how-to guides over on his website Technically Product . Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Mordy Oberstein Audio content, such as a podcast, is more popular than it has ever been, with some estimates showing a 45% increase in its popularity since 2014 . This means that podcasts may play an increasingly important role in all facets of a business’s growth trajectory, from branding down to acquisition. The importance of strong visibility on podcast platforms, such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify, goes without saying. However, one channel that may fly a bit under the radar when thinking about acquiring visibility and listeners is Google Search. Your podcast appearing prominently on Google’s result pages is powerful for both brand awareness and building a listenership. The problem is, the process to grow your podcast’s organic visibility on Google is somewhat elusive. That’s why, with the help of some of the SEO industry’s foremost experts, we’re going to explore “Podcast SEO” in a way that it hasn’t been explored before. Table of contents: Podcasts on the SERP: An overview How do you get a podcast to rank on Google? Foundational optimization matters more for podcasts Authority, entity recognition, and schema markup The role of links in podcast SEO Thinking beyond the podcast SERP Podcasts on the SERP: An overview Part of the complexity around podcast SEO hinges on the ecosystem Google created for podcast results. Before we take a closer look at that ecosystem, though, let’s first establish that the demand for podcast SEO exists. That is, are people going to the Google search engine results page (SERP) to find podcasts? The short answer is, yes. The demand for podcast SEO According to Semrush, over 71K people search for best podcasts on Google each month: If we break that search volume down (because, unless your podcast is one of the best in the world, this query may not be applicable to you), we start seeing between 2-3K monthly queries for popular categorical podcast searches. For example, best sports podcasts has a monthly search volume of 2.9K: The search volume numbers are still solid (all other considerations being equal) even when you go a bit niche. The keyword best seo podcasts has a monthly search volume of nearly 1K (globally): For the record, I’m trying to be conservative here by using a keyword with a high intent to listen (i.e., best X podcast ). If we broaden the terms, there are even more searches: the search volume more than doubles when we look at the keyword seo podcasts (without the term “best”): I think it’s clear—there are a good amount of people looking to find podcasts on Google. So, if you have a podcast, it likely makes a lot of sense to optimize it for search. How Google shows podcasts on the SERP As I mentioned, the ecosystem for podcasts on the SERP is unique. The bulk of the issue with podcasts has to do with how Google displays them (well, also the type of organic results shown, but I’ll get to that in a bit). Take the keyword seo learning podcast . We get an initial set of nine podcasts with their thumbnails and titles. We also get a secondary carousel of podcasts that generally appears below the initial organic result. This carousel (as opposed to the larger “Podcast series” carousel) is episodic—it presents links to specific episodes, not to the podcast as a whole. It’s because of this that IPullRank’s Garrett Sussman, host of the Rankable Podcast , advises focusing on achieving visibility within the larger, more prominent carousel. “What’s the best way for your audience to discover your podcast on Google?” Sussman said, “You need to appear above the fold for someone who’s searching for podcasts in your industry, category, or topic.” Should you click on a podcast within the top set of thumbnails, the result expands to present a carousel of content from across the web that features or mentions the selected media asset (as shown below). At the bottom of the initial set of listings, you can expand the box to reveal additional podcasts (in our case here, there is only one additional podcast, but generally there can be up to 42 more podcasts shown once the box is expanded). Let’s return to our keyword of seo learning podcasts , which I chose to highlight the episode carousel. Do you notice anything funny about the results in the carousel? All of them contain the keyword learn . As it currently stands, there is a bit of a gap in how Google shows results in the episodic podcast carousel: there is an overemphasis on keywords. Just look at the first three initial results in the episodic carousel for the keyword best seo podcast : Does this mean that you should add “best” to the name of your podcast and beyond? In my opinion, no. Podcasts are one of those assets that speak heavily to brand perception. Adding modifiers such as “best” or “top” may not speak to your audience and may ultimately present your brand as being a tad immature or arrogant. Speak to what resonates with your users first and foremost (but hey, if it does work for your branding, just know it also tends to work on podcast SERPs… for now). For the record, the nuance of keywords doesn’t just apply to the episodic podcast carousel. Simple and small changes to the keyword can have a big impact on what podcasts do and do not appear in the top podcast listings. Even a simple insertion of an “s” to the query (as in podcasts vs. podcast ) can make a difference. In the example below, you’ll notice that two of the podcasts shown in the initial podcast carousel for nfl podcast do not appear for the query nfl podcast s (and vice versa): Lastly, there are the standard organic listings. The organic results on podcast SERPs are a prime example of the intricacy of dealing with SEO for a podcast. This complexity predominantly occurs due to the fact that not many actual podcasts rank among the top organic results. Below are the results for the query history podcasts : There is only a single result that represents an actual podcast, the rest of the traditional results are listicles. Keep in mind I specifically did not search for best history podcasts as that would perhaps overemphasize an intent to get a list of podcasts. Still, nine out of ten of the initial organic results (i.e., the text results) are listicles. This is indeed a hard environment to navigate. Which leads us to our main topic—how do you give your podcast some organic visibility on the SERP? How do you get a podcast to rank on Google? I don’t have any magic answers here. A lot of what I’m about to share comes from my experience working with multiple podcasts, including the SERP’s Up Podcast , The SEO Rant , Edge of the Web , and others. Along the way, I’ve experimented and learned a few lessons (many the hard way) but I don’t have a 100% foolproof guide to ranking your podcast on Google. I think this is one of those emerging areas where no individual person has all the answers, which is why—throughout this post—I’ll be referencing some brilliant SEO minds who were kind enough to share their wisdom about how they approach SEO for their own podcasts. Foundational optimization matters more for podcasts Podcasts, categorically, might not be a niche where Google flexes all of its advanced algorithmic muscle. As mentioned above, Google seems to heavily rely on keyword placement for appearance in the podcast episodes carousel. This seemingly reflects what would be a far more linear approach than we might see Google take in other areas of the web, such as those queries that reflect YMYL ( Your Money or Your Life ) content. This is why what I’ll call “foundational optimization” matters more for podcast visibility than perhaps with other niches. To that end, there is an overwhelming amount of consensus from SEOs who run podcasts about handling these foundational SEO tasks. Optimize podcast title and description for SERP visibility Kate Toon, host of The Recipe For SEO Success Show , urges podcast creators to pay close attention to their show titles: “Just as with getting your podcast ranking on iTunes, I’d argue that the podcast title and description are the most important elements. Choose a podcast name that incorporates your primary keyword and clearly tells listeners what they’re going to get.” This is a sentiment shared by Sarah McDowell, the host of the SEO Mindset Podcast and SEO manager at podcast hosting company Captivate, when thinking about Google’s top-of-the-SERP podcast gallery. “To optimize for the grid at the top, it seems Google is showing podcasts which include keywords and/or synonyms in the podcast title and overall show description,” she said. That’s something I’ve definitely seen from experience. When SERP’s Up initially launched, we opted to leave “SEO Podcast” off the title as we liked the shortened version for branding purposes. At the same time, we kept a close eye on how the podcast performed organically, specifically within the top podcast box. After some time, we weren’t happy with the podcast’s consistency in the search feature and changed the name on the podcast’s RSS feed to the “SERP’s Up SEO Podcast,” upon which we almost immediately began seeing consistent placement in the podcast box (an experience I’ve had when working with previous podcasts as well, meaning this was not a one-off). Note: Platform-specific algorithms such as those employed by Spotify, etc., are not very complex either, and adding on some keywords to the branded title of the show will generally help here as well. When it comes to specific episodes, sometimes the titles can get lengthy. In such cases, you may have to forgo certain elements—one of which, as Kate Toon says, should be the episode number. “For episode titles, forgo adding ‘Episode 17,’ etc., at the start. Instead, front load the episode title with a searchable term, sometimes that may be the [episode guest’s name] if it’s someone famous.” — Kate Toon, host of The Recipe For SEO Success Show podcast This applies equally to both the podcast’s main and episodic descriptions. Here too, due to the nature of how Google seems to function in the space, being strategic about keyword placement comes into focus. As Azeem, host of the Azeem Digital Asks podcast puts it, “One piece of advice that’s helped me rank higher is to use specific keywords in the description that a potential user might search. It’s not a coincidence that the last three words of my own show title end with ‘digital marketing podcast.’” That doesn’t mean you should stuff whatever you would like into a show’s (or episode’s) description. “Similarly, when it comes to episode descriptions, one thing I see lots of other podcasts do is repeat the episode title and write lots of nonsense that listeners won’t read,” Azeem said, adding, “Get to the point quickly and you’ll be rewarded.” Though it may sound basic, don’t shy away from throwing words like “podcast” or “episode” into the description in a natural way. The SEO value of podcast transcriptions “In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion about if, and how, Google indexes the spoken words in audio content,” said Jack Chambers-Ward of Candour Agency and host of the Search With Candour podcast, adding, “In short, having a transcript helps search engines understand the specific content of your podcast episode.” “Don’t get me wrong, just like with on-page SEO, the episode title and description are still key elements for your podcast. However, by using some on-page SEO techniques and accompanying your audio with text [transcripts], you can make your episode pages far more discoverable.” — Jack Chambers-Ward , host of the Search With Candour podcast This uncertainty about if, and how, Google auto-transcribes podcasts definitely brings the value of an accurate podcast transcript into SEO focus. McDowell puts it well, saying, “Whilst Google is indexing podcasts, they are taking information which they can find on the page, to my knowledge (and I did have a conversation with [Google’s] John Mueller at BrightonSEO) they aren’t transcribing audio, so this is where transcriptions come in handy.” (For the record, there is a lot of confusion here as reports around Google auto-transcribing podcasts surfaced back in 2019. However, since then there has been no further official indication nor discussion as to whether Google is transcribing podcast episodes.) Let’s also remember transcripts are very important for accessibility. “I’d also highly recommend publishing a transcript of your episode, not only is it more content for Google to chew through, but it really helps listeners (who don’t have your language as their first language) deal with difficult accents and also is great for those that prefer to read rather than listen,” Toon said. This, to me, is the lynchpin: It’s possible to write an episode summary in order to satisfy both Google and users looking to get the gist of what an episode is about. The truth is, I do this on a very informal podcast I host called the SEO Rant . It’s very much a fun little thing I do on the side and I don’t necessarily have time to edit an entire transcript (my experience has been that doing a proper transcription takes more time and effort than you may think). Instead, I opt for a relatively decent-sized episode summary. In fact, you could argue that going with an episode summary is a better idea than a transcript from an SEO point of view as it allows for more flexibility with content structure and is far more aligned with how written content is generally formatted (without any sort of textual fillers that are inherent to transcripts). However, even if a podcast episode contained a prolific synopsis section, users with auditory impairments, for example, would not be as completely served unless a transcript was also included. That’s why you should still ensure that your transcripts are both accurate and without unnecessary fillers (such as “ums,” or verbal stuttering that your software may transcribe). Further, it is entirely possible to format the transcript with appropriate headers so that it is both more interpretable to users and search engines. Due to the often unstructured nature of certain podcast formats, I recommend you “zoom out” when thinking about a header for a section of your transcript. From experience, I can tell you it’s not always possible to cleanly summarize an entire section of a podcast under a header. Either take the main crux of the section and use that to determine the accompanying header or, as I said, zoom out and find a common thematic thread that unites the section. In any case, understand that a transcript is not simply about automating the conversion of audio to text, but requires real human input and action to make it actually valuable for your audience. The podcast’s web page matters Let’s not forget one thing: we’re talking about Google here and Google deals with webpages. Yes, we’re dealing specifically with podcasts and podcasts are hosted on a platform and then shared via RSS feed. However, everything with Google is semantic and that applies to your podcast. Giving your podcast a website is a must. That’s actually not hyperbole—in 2021, Google began requiring podcasts to have an associated homepage to be eligible to appear as a recommendation within Google Podcasts. In fact, Google explicitly said: “Linking your podcast to a homepage will help the discovery and presentation of your podcast on Google surfaces.” — Google , 2021 Does that mean you can have a homepage for the podcast with essentially no content on it? I think not— what is on that homepage matters . The site you create for the podcast and the content you put on it—particularly on the homepage—matters. It can greatly impact how visible the podcast is on the SERP. For instance, shortly after creating these guidelines, SEOs began to notice that knowledge panels for podcasts were appearing on the SERP. While correlation doesn’t equal causation, the logic does add up: In order to be present in Google’s knowledge graph , Google needs context for the entity and a significant part of that is the entity’s actual website. Add in that the knowledge panels began appearing shortly after Google updated its aforementioned guidelines, along with the fact that the company explicitly stated that the guidelines impact “presentation of your podcast on Google surfaces,” and there’s a solid case to tie podcast knowledge panel appearance to podcast websites. I’ve personally seen the impact of updating the podcast's website long before Google officially updated its guidelines. Since October 2018, when I founded the In Search SEO Podcast with Rank Ranger, I added the podcast homepage to the RSS feed. Two (or so) months after launching the podcast, I finally got around to optimizing the page, which was relatively thin up until that point. After that, the page began to slowly but steadily increase in the rankings for keywords like seo podcast . Concurrently, when the episodic podcast carousel was added to the SERP in 2019, the podcast began to regularly appear in it for similar keywords. The bottom line is that optimizing the podcast’s homepage plays a big role in its SERP visibility. Pragmatically speaking (and in addition to the basic title and description), I recommend including the host(s) as well as when episodes are released, links to various platforms where the podcast can be found, as well as a bit of embellishment as to what the podcast is all about and who it services so as to give Google a bit of context. Contextualizing the podcast also includes the other pages on the site that are related to the podcast. To that end, Olga Zarr of SEOSLY and host of SEO Podcast by #SEOSLY recommends, “Each new podcast episode should also be published as a separate post or page on your website with the embedded player to listen to the episode directly on the site.” To me, this is practical regardless of the organic traffic expectations you have for individual episode pages (which is a complicated matter since most of the listens a podcast receives do not occur on the site itself). Having a site for your podcast that you retain full control over is an important part of the overall branding and marketing of the podcast. As Azeem describes it, “Most importantly, don’t opt for the easy route and use distributors’ own websites—build your own. They are your listeners, not the distributor’s—send listeners to [your own podcast site], use analytics to understand how long they spend with your podcast, and give them more of it.” Authority, entity recognition, and schema markup Broadening what we discussed above (regarding the homepage for the podcast), it’s vital to understand that a podcast is an entity . In fact, it’s an entity that inherently incorporates other entities (in the form of show hosts and guests). How Google is aware of the entities within the podcast is a good question. As mentioned earlier, there have been instances in the past of Google auto-transcribing podcasts (which has been one of the company’s stated goals ). Of course, for relevant web pages and your episode descriptions, there’s also explicitly mentioning the hosts and guests by name as well as linking to their social profiles or sites. However Google is doing it, it is able to (at times) pull out relevant entities from a specific podcast episode. These entities are sometimes shown at the bottom of a podcast episode within Google Podcasts and reflect both people as well as topics. Meaning, it’s vital to discuss topics that are within the confines of the podcast’s stated mission and to have guests relevant to those topics for both your audience and for Google itself. To that end, Jack Chambers-Ward says, “Previous guests, topics, and episodes can often come up naturally during conversation and, with a transcript, these are perfect opportunities to add internal links to create a topical relevance and connections between podcast pages.” Structured data markup and podcasts When trying to make entity connections (which is vital for podcast SEO), structured data markup comes into focus. As Olga Zarr puts it: “Take care of the E-A-T of your podcast by demonstrating your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness as a podcast host. You can use schema to help Google connect the dots.” — Olga Zarr, host of SEO Podcast by SEOSLY There are multiple markups that are applicable from PodcastSeries markup for the podcast’s homepage to PodcastEpisode markup for specific episode pages. And, (because podcasts involve people) Person markup is almost always applicable, as is Organization markup when the podcast is run by a company or group. “This [structured data markup] should not be overlooked,” explains Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications at Wix (and co-host of the SERP’s Up SEO Podcast ). “Google adds well-optimized podcasts to the knowledge graph. This means that each podcast is considered to be a unique entity and can be identified across the web. By investing time in schema properties for people and organizations (like creator, contributor, editor, funder) you are helping to make this entity more accurate across the web.” Structured data has given a boost to the EDGE of the Web podcast, according to host Erin Sparks. “Structured data has been a boon to our show. As we have unfurled podcast episodes and podcast series schema and unpacked the entities we are discussing—we've done that with such a reliable frequency that we are seeing our entity ‘glossary’ start working inside guests' knowledge graphics as the source of trust for that entity,” Sparks said. “That can only happen with a continual building of confidence from the continual layered process of optimization.” The role of links in podcast SEO Personally, I find link building to be my least favorite part of SEO. Aside from its tedious nature, building links makes it quite easy to cross the line and violate Google’s guidelines. However, at the end of the day, links are indeed a part of the ranking equation and link building can be powerful when done properly . Link building factors into getting your podcast visible on the SERP in two unique ways: Surfacing in the initial podcast series box of results Visibility in the traditional organic results (kind of, more on this below). Links for getting podcasts into Google’s podcast series box One of the strongest ways to garner search visibility for your podcast is by appearing in Google’s initial podcast series box. As we mentioned earlier, when a user clicks on a podcast within the box, the listing expands to show more information about the podcast along with a set of “results” that in some way feature the podcast. Due to this functionality, links play a very important role for your podcast’s organic visibility. In this instance, I would feel comfortable saying that links are valued significantly more than they are in general (although, I obviously can’t say that with 100% certainty). There’s a logical reason for this: with the functionality Google employs here, there has to be content that references the podcast, otherwise there’s nothing for Google to show when the result is expanded. Clearly, links play a primary role in all of this. In fact, when we launched the SERP’s Up Podcast in August 2022, the show did not appear within Google’s podcast series box. However, as time went on and the show accumulated links on pages that discussed podcasts, it started to appear within the podcasts that Google lists for relevant keywords. (These appearances were boosted by our modifying the podcast title, as mentioned earlier.) For the record, it’s not merely the link that has the desired effect here (the podcast had a decent amount of links early on). It’s a certain type of link that really matters: the show needs to be contextualized as Google only shows content (such as lists of podcasts or episode pages) within the expanded listing. The importance of links in the context of podcasts is commonly recognized by SEOs who run their own podcasts and, as McDowell says, it’s a good reason to have guests on the show: “Google also seems to like podcasts that have backlinks or mentions from other authoritative and relevant websites. If you’re toying with the idea of having guests on your podcast, this is one great reason to do it.” — Sarah McDowell, host of the SEO Mindset Podcast The emphasis on a podcast appearing within some sort of listicle content has generated a sentiment from SEO podcasters that I very much agree with: “Google currently places too much weight on ranked lists when building out entities around podcast topics,” Sussman said. According to him, “a podcast on three lists will appear higher than a show on two lists” which is a very superficial way to order podcast appearances on the SERP. Links: Leveraging traffic from the SERP’s organic results The second way links factor into the equation has nothing to do with the ranking of a given podcast asset per se. If you’ll remember, the majority of the text/organic results do not reflect actual podcasts and their websites. Rather, the SERP is dominated by lists of various podcasts. This presents an obvious problem in that no matter how “perfectly optimized” a podcast’s own website is, there is a severe limitation in the opportunity to rank. The net result is that a podcast is heavily dependent on appearing within a relevant list of podcasts, as hosted by a third-party site for its “organic visibility” (if you even want to call it that). An additional problem is that a significant portion of these listicles present poor and/or outdated content (depending on the niche). This makes it that much harder to get listed in one. And, of course, if you’re a newer podcast, you would have to wait for new lists to be created (and then rank) or for a third party to decide to update their listicle. To that latter point, Google does (at times) present lists that haven’t been updated in years. It all makes for a complicated, difficult, and perhaps unbalanced organic ecosystem. This leads us to our next point. Thinking beyond the podcast SERP With the SERP for podcasts still not being fully mature and (at a minimum) “difficult,” it makes sense to push the podcast’s presence on other platforms. This means that tactics like repurposing for YouTube come into focus. Aleyda Solis, who heads up Crawling Mondays , doubles down on Youtube, saying, “Whether your podcast is video or audio only, publish it via YouTube too, you'll be surprised (or not) by how many video carousels are shown in Google search results, not only for podcasts names but also for the informational topics covered usually by podcasts, as well as the additional visibility and listeners you can attract via YouTube, too. You want to get in there…” In this way, and specifically when considering YouTube videos, you give your podcast content the opportunity to gain visibility at the episodic level, which can be tricky unless you significantly invest in the text-based content that supports each episode. This can be especially true when the keywords relevant to a podcast episode are highly competitive and where there is a prolific amount of content already available. If you are hosting podcast episodes on YouTube, here’s a pro tip from Wix SEO Advisory Board member Kevin Indig, who hosts the Contrarian Marketing Podcast with Wix SEO Learning Hub contributor Eli Schwartz: “One podcast optimization trick I learned is optimizing timestamps for keywords. Since Google uses timestamps for its ‘Key Moments in video’ feature and key moments can appear for keywords, making sure your timestamps appeal to a user intent or hit the exact match of a keyword can make your podcast rank in the SERPs (if it’s hosted on Youtube). Of course, the overall topic of the podcast needs to fit to the keyword, so it might pay off to do keyword research, then plan your podcast topic, and then optimize timestamps for keywords.” — Kevin Indig, host of the Contrarian Marketing Podcast Parenthetically, when working with timestamps for a podcast episode, Erin Sparks recommends correlating them in the ID3 tags . “Google is processing the ID3 tags as a content roadmap,” according to Sparks. “Doubling down inside of the show page with an exact correlation to those stamps can root the show in a level of trusted content,” he said, recommending that podcasters “segment out with timestamps the key segments/chapters of the show (on the episode page). Utilize the same framework inside the ID3 tags and apply that to your timestamps.” Of course, both repurposing a podcast and distributing it goes well beyond uploading the full version to YouTube. It should also include a sound social strategy with elements such as audiograms for engagement as well as an influencer marketing strategy, which is quite natural if the podcast contains a guest interview. Back to “basics” with podcast SEO I think what makes doing SEO for podcasts so interesting is the nuance that goes into what would normally be considered “basic SEO” tasks. Most practitioners understand there is value in having quality relevant links, but due to the SERP’s ecosystem for podcasts, these links play a deeper role. We all understand the importance of a well-constructed title or “product description” (which is essentially what a podcast description is) but the complexity involved increases as podcasts are consumed within their own unique ecosystems and that same title and description needs to work on multiple levels, from SEO down to clickability within iTunes. I want to end by thanking all of the contributors in this article for sharing their expertise. There’s a lot of murkiness and complexity in trying to bring visibility to a podcast in Google Search. Sometimes it takes a village. Mordy Oberstein - Head of SEO Branding, Wix Mordy is the Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Concurrently he 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. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Ryan Jones Keyword  mapping has driven success for many websites in many niches, and it can do the same to propel your business. In my role at SEOTesting (where I developed the content strategy for the business from scratch), keyword mapping has enabled us to position our content strategically, using the right keywords to take our organic traffic from 2,000 per month to over 8,000 per month (in a little over six months). Along with the traffic growth, keyword mapping has also facilitated better rankings and higher user engagement. As you may already know, the better our businesses do organically, the better the bottom line typically looks. Using SEOTesting as an example, we have taken MRR from $22,500 to $31,000 in the last eight months with content, aided by a great keyword mapping strategy as the foundation. To help you leverage this strategy for your website, this guide will give you all the information you need about keyword mapping, offering you the insights and tools to harness its full potential—whether you’re a seasoned pro or just dipping your toes into the SEO realm. Table of contents: What is keyword mapping? The benefits of keyword mapping for your business and its SEO How to start keyword mapping for your website Beware of keyword cannibalization Tools to help your keyword mapping What is keyword mapping? At its core, keyword mapping is assigning keywords to corresponding pages on your website. In the context of SEO specifically, it’s a strategic approach to ensure that each web page is not only optimized for a specific keyword (or cluster of keywords, which I’ll go into more detail about later ) but also resonates with the user’s search intent  and journey.  This process involves a detailed analysis of keywords to understand their:  Search volume Relevance Competition Potential impact on your content strategy Keyword mapping is about creating a blueprint for your website’s content. It’s where SEO meets user experience, intertwining the “art” of content creation with the “science” of search engine algorithms. By mapping keywords to specific pages, you ensure your site is organized, relevant, and, most importantly, discoverable by your target audience. The benefits of keyword mapping for your business and its SEO Keyword mapping isn’t just an initial step in your overall SEO strategy—it also helps inform tactical, strategic, and business aspects of your website by: Guiding new content creation Helping you identify underperforming content to optimize Revealing performance patterns that could affect your strategy Targeting niche search queries to overcome bigger competitors Guide new content creation When you start creating new content, keyword mapping acts as your guide. It helps you identify gaps in your current content, revealing opportunities for new topics that resonate with your audience’s interests and search queries. You can create content that fills these gaps by analyzing relevant (but not yet targeted) keywords. This ensures that your website addresses a broader range of user search queries, increasing the breadth of your content and enhancing its relevance for users and search engines. Identify underperforming content to optimize Keyword mapping is also an excellent way to troubleshoot and optimize existing content. By mapping current content to its respective keywords, you can identify pages that might be underperforming or not ranking for their intended keywords. This insight allows you to re-optimize these pages by adjusting the keyword focus, updating the content to align with search intent, or improving on-page SEO  elements. Such optimizations ensure that your existing content remains competitive and continues to attract organic traffic. Reveal performance patterns Monitoring entire keyword clusters, rather than individual keywords, will enable you to assess how search engines and users respond to your brand for entire topics, giving you a better overview of how your brand is seen across that topic. For example, you spot a decline in traffic for your website following a Google algorithm update , and you look into this and see that it’s down to your rankings declining for keywords within a [best running shoes] cluster of keywords, it could signal that your brand is lacking authority or relevance on that topic. Another example might be if your rankings for the keyword cluster are stable, but traffic from those keywords declines. This could indicate a new Google search feature  or a decline in interest in that topic overall. Niche-down for more conversions For small businesses, in particular, keyword mapping is a game changer. It levels the playing field, allowing smaller entities to better compete with larger enterprises. Small businesses can target their content more precisely to their audience by focusing on specific, local, or niche keywords. This targeted approach leads to higher-quality traffic, more engaged users, and better conversion rates. If you’re operating on limited resources, keyword mapping helps you ensure that every piece of content created or optimized contributes towards your business’ online visibility and success. How to start keyword mapping for your business’ website Whether you work for a small business or a large organization, the steps to begin keyword mapping for your website are the same. Let’s begin. Plan your keywords Most businesses (especially those with an established online presence) already have many target keywords. These are typically based on your product offerings, services, industry terms, and even competitor analysis . However, expanding beyond this initial list is vital to excel in this planning stage it opens your business to untapped markets and audiences, allowing it to grow even more. Once your business is already established, growing new revenue generally comes from expanding to new audiences. One effective way to expand your list of target keywords is to use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, AlsoAsked, etc. These tools offer insights into keyword search volumes and competition levels, and suggest related keywords that your audience might use.  By analyzing this data and selecting the greatest keyword opportunities (by comparing search volume, the difficulty to rank, and the intent for that keyword, among other elements), businesses can identify high-potential keywords relevant to their niche, but less saturated with search competitors. In addition, sourcing keywords through interactions with your customers  (particularly sales and customer service calls) is an often underrated technique. These conversations are goldmines for discovering the exact queries and questions your audience uses when searching Google. By tuning into these conversations, you can uncover valuable long tail keywords  that are highly specific and often closer to the point of purchase in the customer journey. Incorporating the terms you discover into your content strategy can help improve various SEO metrics and ensures your content resonates more deeply with your audience’s needs and search terms. Organize your keywords into clusters Clustering allows websites to organize their keywords into meaningful groups (clusters) that reflect various topics or themes . This method enhances the relevance and focus of your website’s content to better satisfy user queries and rank higher in search results. Not to mention, keyword clustering can save you a lot of time! If you carefully craft clusters before creating or optimizing content, you reduce the risk of developing underperforming or duplicate content  (i.e., content that does not need to be made). When clustering keywords, the goal is to group terms that are thematically similar or related to a common user intent. For example, keywords like [best running shoes], [running shoe reviews], and [durable running shoes] can be clustered under a broader category, such as [running shoes]. This clustering will help you create more focused content and also aid in structuring your website more logically, ensuring that related topics are interlinked and easy to navigate. There is also another way to think about keyword clustering: in terms of how Google processes the term. Google treats certain specific (but often similar) search terms identically. For example, take [SEO testing] as a keyword. Google treats all of the below keywords as the same keyword: [SEO testing] [What is SEO testing] [SEO testing approach] [Testing SEO tactics] [SEO testing agency] This means that I can create one authoritative guide based on the [SEO testing] keyword, include all of the keywords within this grouping and target all of these queries with one web page. This technique can help your website cover more search terms relevant to your industry, especially when you’re creating a lot of content regularly. And, even if you’re not creating much content, you can still make content management easier for yourself using this technique, as you’ll have fewer pages to maintain and update . Keyword Insights can be a valuable tool for this purpose. It assists with keyword clustering process by analyzing the relationship between different keywords (based on search data).  The tool identifies patterns and commonalities among keywords, suggesting clusters that might not be obvious. This can significantly streamline the clustering process, ensuring your keyword groups are data-driven and aligned with actual search behavior.  Create your keyword mapping document Creating a keyword mapping document is the final step that lays the foundation for your entire SEO strategy going forward. This document details how you will use each keyword across your website. To begin, start by listing your keywords and keyword clusters. Then, assign each cluster and keyword to your website’s pages or sections. The goal is to ensure that every page targets a distinct set of keywords aligned with the content and the user’s search intent. Your keyword map should include headings (columns) like: Keyword cluster (if appropriate) This will list the group of related keywords. Target page This column identifies the specific page on your site that will target these keywords. Search intent Typically navigational, informational, commercial, or transactional, this classification helps clarify the purpose behind the user’s search, guiding your content creation to meet these needs. Current ranking This provides a benchmark for existing content and your content when it is first created. Notes This can include, for example, additional insights or strategies for each keyword cluster. Depending on your needs, you might also want to add columns for search volume, keyword difficulty, or a status field to indicate whether optimization is in progress. Once your keyword mapping document is complete, it becomes an excellent content creation and optimization guide:  For new content, it informs the topics and keywords to focus on, ensuring that your efforts are aligned with your SEO goals. For existing content, it helps identify areas to optimize, whether it’s updating keywords, enhancing content, or improving on-page elements. Want to get started? Try this free keyword mapping template in the resource center. Create and optimize content according to your keyword map Now that your keyword map is actionable, it’s time to start creating and optimizing content.  Content creation is its own separate topic, so I will not go into detail here as there are already many great articles online about producing and optimizing fantastic content . Maintain and update your keyword map Understand that your keyword map is never finished (that is, unless you stop working on your website). There will never be a time when your mapping document should not be worked on and improved and updated with new keywords. As your business grows, expands into new areas, and generally gets bigger and better, there will be more topics you need to create content about, more audiences that need to be satisfied, and more keywords that correspond to them. As these new topics and keywords come into play, your keyword mapping document will constantly expand. The map will grow more extensive as time goes on to keep supporting your website’s SEO. Keyword cannibalization: Don’t let it hold your SEO back Over the better part of a decade spent working in digital marketing and SEO, I have seen first-hand how the industry constantly moves forward. However, certain principles remain consistent, one of which is the importance of correct keyword mapping. Done correctly, keyword mapping is a powerful tool for superior website visibility and traffic. Done incorrectly, it can lead to keyword cannibalization , which occurs when multiple pages on your website compete for the same keywords, confusing search engines and diluting your SEO efforts. Keyword cannibalization isn’t just a technical issue. It’s also a strategic misstep that can significantly hamper your website’s ranking ability.  When multiple pages target the same keyword, they inadvertently compete against each other. This internal competition can lead to search ranking fluctuations, with different pages alternating for the same spot, hindering your SEO strategy’s overall effectiveness in addition to your website’s visibility. How to avoid keyword cannibalization Avoiding keyword cannibalization starts with a robust keyword mapping strategy. Hopefully, this article has pointed you in the right direction so far! Keyword mapping ensures that each page on your site is assigned unique primary and secondary keywords to target, reducing the potential for overlap and cannibalization. Regular content audits using tools like Google Analytics  and Google Search Console  are crucial to identify potential cannibalization issues. In cases where pages are too similar, consolidating them  can resolve cannibalization and enhance the overall value of the content. If consolidation isn’t viable, using canonical tags  helps direct search engines to see a specific page as the “primary” destination for a keyword. Additionally, a strategic internal linking  approach, emphasizing links to the most relevant page for each keyword, reinforces which page search engines should view as the primary page. Tools to help your keyword mapping To round off this article, I will talk about some of the SEO tools  you should use to make the keyword mapping process easier for you and your website. Keyword research tools Proper keyword research lies at the heart of keyword mapping. This is where keyword research tools come into play, serving as the “market intelligence” of your mapping toolkit. These tools are crucial for discovering new target keywords, allowing you to create a comprehensive map covering all aspects of your content’s needs! Some tools you can consider include: Ahrefs Semrush Google Search Console Google Keyword Planner These tools provide keyword metrics like search volume, competition, and relevance. You can use them to identify the primary and secondary keywords that are most relevant to your content and audience, forming the basis of your keyword map. AlsoAsked is another excellent keyword research tool, although it differs from the ones listed above in that it offers the People Also Ask  output from Google search results for your given keyword (instead of keyword metrics). Regardless of what tool you choose, bear in mind that the metrics they provide are estimates, based on their own data (unless they’re Google’s own tools). You should accept that these figures can vary depending on source. Spreadsheet software Creating a spreadsheet is a necessary step of the keyword mapping process. Compared to a Word document or third-party software, a spreadsheet’s clarity and organization are unparalleled, especially when dealing with hundreds of keywords and their alignments to your web pages. This format offers a structured and visually clear way to categorize, track, and analyze keywords. A well-maintained spreadsheet enables SEO professionals to update and modify their keyword map easily, accommodating the dynamic nature of search trends and website development. Moreover, the ability to analyze keyword data through various functions like sorting and filtering streamlines any decisions that you may need to make. Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel are popular choices, each with unique strengths and weaknesses. Google Sheets for keyword mapping Microsoft Excel for keyword mapping Highly collaborative Real-time editing and sharing Ideal for teams Advanced analytical capabilities Better for complex data sets (such as a keyword map for a very large website) The choice of spreadsheet software often depends on your company’s existing practices and requirements. But if it’s up to you, the tool you select should align with your team’s needs and the specific demands of your keyword map. Web crawling software Web crawlers, like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, provide a competitive advantage when you need to create an excellent keyword mapping document. These tools crawl through your website , like search engine bots, gathering detailed insights about your site’s structure, content, and keyword usage. This information is invaluable for identifying gaps in your keyword coverage and discovering areas of your site to optimize for better SERP visibility. By providing a comprehensive view of how your content is currently aligned with your target keywords, web crawlers enable you to precisely refine your keyword map, ensuring that each page is well-positioned to rank in search results. The detailed analysis these tools offer can make the difference between a good SEO strategy and a great one, setting your site apart in highly competitive verticals. Keyword tracking software A keyword tracker is vital when mapping because it allows you to monitor and evaluate keyword performance over time . Keyword trackers provide essential data on how well your intentionally targeted keywords (and other keywords) rank, offering a view into the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. This real-time feedback helps you understand the impact of your keyword choices and make necessary adjustments.  By closely monitoring your keyword performance, you can quickly identify trends , capitalize on successful keywords, and adjust or replace those not performing as expected, ensuring your website stays competitive and relevant. When it comes to choosing a keyword tracker, there are many excellent options:  Ahrefs is known for its extensive database and detailed keyword analysis, making it popular amongst SEO professionals.  Semrush offers a comprehensive suite of SEO tools with great keyword-tracking features. SE Ranking  is generally praised for its user-friendly interface and the accuracy of its tracking. Each platform offers unique features and benefits, making them suitable for various business needs and SEO objectives. Using them can significantly contribute to the refinement and success of a keyword mapping campaign. Successful SEO is never just “one and done” Keyword mapping transcends word-to-page alignment. It’s about strategically creating content that resonates with the intent of searchers (i.e., your audience). It’s a dynamic and ongoing process, continually evolving with your business and the ever-changing SERP landscape. Remember that keyword mapping shouldn’t be treated as a one-time deal! You must continually choose to change, re-format, and evolve your keyword map as your business evolves. Every time your business expands into a new area, think of this as a new “branch” of content to be created and add it to your map! Don’t let new business opportunities go to waste because of a static document. Whilst using tools can give you a small edge, especially when it comes to the speed of your work, and, sometimes, accuracy, using tools is not vital! It’s certainly possible to complete a great keyword mapping document completely manually, without any tools’ input! This is especially true if you’re an expert in your field. Ryan Jones - Marketing Manager at SEOTesting Approaching a decade in marketing, Ryan has worked in-house and agency side. From scaling an eCommerce business from £400K to over £1.4M in annual revenue to increasing conversion rates for small, family businesses, Ryan loves making marketing work for the masses. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Chris Green In my first post on the site migrations , I covered the fundamental elements you need to be aware of to run a successful migration. We looked at: What a site migration is The elements of a successful site migration Migrating to Wix from WordPress Whilst it was a relatively comprehensive article, believe it or not, we only covered the basics. Now, it’s onto the advanced techniques to help manage migrations effectively. Table of contents: Content auditing Mapping your site’s keywords and content 301 redirect mapping Tech SEO checks Reporting and benchmarking Content auditing One of the primary reasons migrations go wrong (or outright fail) is because content is lost as part of the process. Sometimes this loss is intended, other times it is by accident or simply not thought of. I strongly advocate migrating as much content as you can if you want to retain organic performance, but there are clear times when this is not ideal or practical (for example, if you have years of content that is out of date, or no longer relevant). Whatever your situation, there is no valid reason for not taking inventory of your content and auditing it to see what you have and what is working. So, what pages are working? To determine the performance of any given page, I like to capture the following data points about each: Organic traffic (Google Analytics) Conversions (Google Analytics) Backlinks (Your tool of choice) Clicks/impressions (Google Search Console) For small(er) sites, this can be done at the page level, but for larger sites, you may need to report on the directory/section level. How to obtain performance data While you can pull this data manually and use something like VLOOKUP to match up the different metrics, this method can be time consuming and error prone over large data sets. One of my favorite methods is to instead use Screaming Frog to pull all this data in one go. The process is as simple as crawling the website (as you would usually), except before you start, you want to set up Google Analytics , Search Console , and either Ahrefs or Majestic APIs. As each URL is crawled, it will also pull the traffic/ranking/impression/backlink data, which enables you to download a complete spreadsheet that you can sort and filter by metric. Very handy. Seer Interactive has a great guide on using APIs in Screaming Frog, and you can find some more tips here . For more on content audits in general (and how you can run them), this blog/video shares some great thoughts. But, what if there is no data? In too many cases, I have come to audit content only to discover that Google Analytics (or similar) is not present and Google Search Console has not been set up. This means two things: 1) the content audit is made more challenging and 2) the business has no idea what is/isn’t performing. In this circumstance, I would opt for running an initial benchmark ranking report. By this, I mean: 01. Crawl the site 02. Extract the titles/ headings 03. Clean and de-duplicate 04. Run this list of key terms/phrases through a rank-tracking tool 05. Re-check performance after the migration This is clearly a less-than-ideal method, but it still provides you with a list of the content that’s performing best. Mapping your site’s keywords and content Mapping your target keywords to your content is a crucial step in the migration process. This is like creating an IA (information architecture) or a sitemap which UX designers and web designers will likely work on. A really important thing to note is that it is not the same as those, however. The differences are crucial, as they can cause some large issues. Design/UX sitemaps usually map out the structure of the key pages, but they often do not include keywords or URL structure. In the above example, the UX sitemap has entries for “Store” and “Blog” but does not itemize these URLs individually. As we’ll be using this mapping to also create the redirects, it really helps if the process is as complete as possible. Mapping your keywords Mapping your keywords to content can be time-consuming—it should be. Cutting corners during this process is not advised and the better your planning is, the better the migration will be. Trust me. To assist with this process, I have detailed the steps and created a template to help you on your way . (Note: You must first make a copy of the template before you can use it.) I start this process by checking that the most important pages are documented, just to ensure they are present. Return to your content audit and ensure you’re retaining as much of the key content as you can. Missing content and content gaps Assigning keywords to relevant pages is an important element of this plan. This accomplishes two things: Ensures you can retain the keywords you currently rank for Clearly highlights where any gaps or opportunities are In my experience, this stage is usually where you need to start managing the expectations of the wider team. In an ideal world, this is where you dictate everything that is best for SEO, but there aren’t many projects where you will get 100% of your recommendations implemented. You will have to make compromises, but you’ll be able to clearly illustrate—as a result of creating a sitemap—which keywords are missing and the respective traffic that may be lost (based on the content audit). If they don’t want to bring the content across then fine, so long as everyone realizes what is lost as part of this. 301 redirect mapping Once we have an account of the key content that needs to be present (and which pages are targeting which keywords), it is time to map the 301 redirects . I covered how to manage redirects in my previous article , but this will go into more depth. 01. Run through your keyword mapping document. For each new page you have created, assign the URL (or URLs) of the old pages that should be 301 redirected to it. 02. Export a list of pages from Google Analytics and Google Search Console for the last year. VLOOKUP these against your initial list and note what is missing. There may be a lot of noise here (e.g., URLs with tracking parameters, mixed casing issues, or similar), but for this stage, you’re best off mapping everything. 03. Run through the list and assign the page that will be the best-case match once the site is live. If you find that the page only “kind of” matches or it doesn’t really, then consider letting these pages 404. This is assuming you’ve already matched your most important ones, though! 04. Format a spreadsheet into two columns (OLD and NEW) and sort OLD in ascending order. Check to see you do not have any duplicates. If you’re working on thousands of redirects (or hundreds of thousands, for that matter), matching each redirect line-by-line is going to be pretty tough. Here’s some advice for getting started: Look for IDs or unique values in the URLs, if you can ensure that these URLs will stay consistent on the new site, you can match URLs using regex. If you have content on a staging site that is staying the same as the live site, crawl both sites and then export to Excel with titles, meta descriptions , H1s, or any values that are unique. With both crawls, you can use a VLOOKUP to match one to the other. In some instances (such as adding redirects via Nginx or .htaccess), you can first set rules to force all URLs to lowercase and add/remove trailing slashes. This will cut down on individual matches for each variation. Likewise, if you don’t need parameters on the new URLs, creating redirect rules to match to URLs (whether the URL has or doesn’t have parameters in place) will save a lot of time. The above list is more to make you aware of what is possible, not necessarily solve each issue—the implementation and technical setup will heavily influence how you do this, and I don’t want to give advice that may cause issues. Just know that you don’t have to match EVERYTHING manually and there are workarounds. Testing redirects Where possible, always test redirects on a staging environment. Always make time for this, fixing redirect issues post-launch (when everyone is busy doing their planned post-launch tasks) is NOT a situation you want to find yourself in. Work with your developers to implement the redirects during staging—as you would with a live site—you can then modify your redirect list to run a test. Get your original 301 redirect mapping and then run a Find & Replace on your OLD column, but replace the OLD domain with whatever your staging domain is. For example: https://www. youroldsite.com /a-web-page becomes https:// stage.new-domain.com /a-web-page Crawl the list of OLD URLs and then check the destinations against your original URL list—redirects that take place as expected on the staging environment should work on the live site. This gives you more confidence in what you have set up, and the ones you identify as not working are ones you can fix before launch. Even though you have tested—and fixed issues—in a staging environment, ensure that one of the first things you do after launch is re-crawl all your original URLs to verify everything works as expected. Tech SEO checks Ensuring that your new site is technically compliant is another key element of the migration process. This (somewhat) lengthy guide isn’t going to get into the nuances of technical audits, but these are the core elements you especially need to focus on. Crawlable front-end framework : If you’re changing to a JavaScript front end, ensure that any content that is important for SEO (i.e., content and navigation) is rendered server-side. JavaScript SEO is one of the most technical areas you can venture into— this guide is probably one of the best out there if you want to learn more. Performance: Your new site needs to be as fast—if not faster—than the old version. Page speed is a ranking factor and a step backward here can be detrimental to SEO and user experience. Internal linking: Significant internal linking changes (particularly reduction) will require some serious investigation. Crawl the site to get an overview of its technical health: You can use third-party SEO software to understand how compliant your new site is from a technical SEO perspective. There are many things to look out for—a more accessible site-audit process built around Screaming Frog can be found here . There’s so much else you need to get right, but (at a minimum) you want the new site to be as good as the current site. Do not accept lower standards than you currently have and strive for as close to perfect as possible, anything less sets a terrible precedent and is often hard to recover from. Comparing your staging and live sites A quick way to ensure your staging site is going in the right direction is to run comparative crawls with the live site. Screaming Frog has a simple way to do this, but most crawlers have this kind of functionality. The key things you need to watch out for are: Changes in titles/metadata Changes in crawl depth Changes in the number of pages Changes in internal linking There are many other elements to check, but again, significant changes to items in the list above can have profound impacts when you complete the migration. It goes without saying, but you may expect there to be significant changes—after all, you’re launching a new site! But, this is where you’re going to use the audit to highlight changes you may not have been expecting—this is your focus. Reporting and benchmarking A key part of site migrations is the story you tell about it. You may not believe this, but one of the most common conversations I have with new clients is how their SEO performance has been slowly getting worse. And, they also changed websites around the same time. But, nobody put those elements together. If you are not tracking and reporting on these things, many businesses do not know it happens. Unless you are trying to cover up a bad migration (please don’t), you always want to report on progress and own your own narrative here. Ranking performance You need to be aware of all the keywords that currently drive clicks/impressions to your site. Without a solid view of ranking performance before the migration, you will find it harder to show the success (or troubleshoot issues) post-launch. The more complete a view you can build of this, the better. I recommend the following tools to access the data you need: Google Search Console — Look at the top traffic-driving queries for the last year (export via API or Looker Studio if you have a lot of data and don’t want to be limited by sampling). Semrush/SISTRIX — You can use these tools to collect all ranking keywords (and their pages). Both platforms require a subscription, but basic-level access will provide the information you need here. Rank tracking software — If you’re already tracking rankings for your most important keywords, this data is invaluable. A rank tracker can let you track your own keywords, which gives more control than found within Semrush’s and Sistrix’s pre-existing databases. Both tools will also enable you to run your own rank tracking campaigns, although there are other options readily available. In my experience, you will need a combination of the above keyword sources to see the full list, but if you do not have all of this available, the bare minimum is the Google Search Console data. If you are changing domains (and want an easy way of comparing the old site to the new site), then this guide provides a great walkthrough of how to achieve this using Looker Studio (formally Google Data Studio). If you are adding content or making other improvements as part of the migration, you will want to start tracking the new keywords before the migration. This is essential for measuring the growth post-launch. Benchmarking other metrics Rankings and visibility are the best metrics to judge the elements SEO has the most control over, but you will also want to understand other metrics. I like to think of metrics as being on a spectrum, from those that have technical value to those that have financial value. To help visualize this, I have created the metric chain (see below), that illustrates the key migration-related metrics and where they fall on the technical/financial spectrum. A technical metric is less closely related to revenue, but you need to understand this to do your job better. Financial metrics don’t give direct implementational information, but they are great to provide to stakeholders to showcase your impact on the bottom line or to lobby to get your recommendations implemented. Create a snapshot of the key metrics (before your migration) where you highlight what’s most important to the wider team. I usually build these in Looker Studio and include: Clicks (Google Search Console) Impressions (Google Search Console) Organic traffic (Google Analytics) Organic revenue (Google Analytics) Organic conversion rate (Google Analytics) Organic average time on site (Google Analytics) Organic pages per session (Google Analytics) CRuX data (from here ) If you are using Looker Studio, you can easily change the date range covered in your snapshot. This is important as you are also going to want to select the date range to compare against. I usually default to six weeks prior to the migration (but you will need to keep an eye on crawl stats for potentially six months also). This is because six weeks is the usual post-launch window to understand the full impact of the migration, and you want to compare like-for-like as best you can. If your traffic is highly seasonal, comparing a six-week period pre/post launch may not give you a true representation of traffic performance. So, I usually compare six weeks pre/post-launch and the six weeks post-launch against the same period the previous year. This gives you multiple ways of understanding performance and what is related to the migration against other factors. Wrapping Up A successful site migration is entirely possible—you do not need to lose traffic just because you have moved websites. You can’t take it for granted, though. To reiterate, you need to focus on: Ensuring that you do not lose any content that currently performs well Ensuring the new content contains the content/keyword focus you agreed is needed for the new site Testing 301s so you know they will work Auditing the site to maintain/implement strong technical SEO standards Benchmarking, tracking, and reporting on success so you can tell the story of the migration to stakeholders The best place to start is at the beginning. Familiarize yourself with the elements discussed above and use it to form a plan. Ensure all key people involved are aware of the plan and get going! Chris Green - Senior SEO Consultant at Torque Partnership Chris Green is an SEO consultant and trainer of over 10 years. A lover of all things digital and uses spreadsheets for more of his life than he really needs to, Chris specializes in migrations, auditing, reporting, training and standing up new processes for teams. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Jeremy Rivera The time when a shop or local business could just open its doors, place a few local ads, have a grand opening event and call it a day are over. Search engines are ubiquitous and now they’re in people’s hands as they head out the door as part of every smartphone. People now instinctually turn to their phones and search engines when looking for a local shop or service provider, like yourself. Search engines connect them to the products and services they’re looking for, and investing in proper search engine optimization (SEO) can mean the difference between appearing near the top of results and not showing up at all, leaving potential customers for your competitors. “81% of retail shoppers conduct online research before buying. The overwhelming majority of retail consumers start their journey with online research.” — GE Capital Retail Bank Even if you know investing in SEO is a smart choice for your business, there can be other considerations preventing you from committing (such as whether you should learn it yourself or partner with an agency, or even what agency to trust, for example). In this article, I’ll discuss what you can expect to invest, what you should know before pursuing SEO, and what you get in return for your investment. Table of contents: What you’re paying for when you invest in SEO Potential reasons not to invest in SEO Investing in SEO: DIY vs. In-house vs. Outsourcing Can you use PPC/CPC to project ROI? Useful ways to predict traffic and ROI from SEO What you’re paying for when investing in SEO Unlike paid advertising (PPC) campaigns or paid social media campaigns, you aren’t paying the platform (in this case, Google) directly for the visitors that arrive at your website. Instead, you’re competing with other small businesses and sites to appear in the top search results. The better your SEO is, the more visible your brand is likely to be when potential customers search for relevant terms (like your industry, products, or services). In turn, that increases the chances that searchers will click on your listing from search results, get directions to you from Google Maps, or that your content will be read aloud as the response from a smart speaker. So, if you’re not paying directly for that traffic from search engines, what are you paying for exactly? Content: Someone needs to write the pages or articles that will appear in search results, familiarize audiences with your business, and ultimately nurture them towards becoming a customer. Links: You need other sites to lend you relevance and authority by linking to you , and that usually means some type of outreach which needs to be managed. Website design: Your site’s layout and visitor flow can contribute or hinder your ability to convert visitors into paying customers. You may need to pay for some help to optimize your site’s conversion rate. Technical SEO: Ensuring Google and other search engines are properly crawling, indexing, and ranking your site, and resolving technical issues or schema code deployment takes time and expertise. Analytics/strategy: It takes experience and skill to effectively review your site’s performance , your competitor’s performance, and establish a reasonable plan of action or relevant keywords to target with pages or posts. These are the elements that come together to help you appear in search results and turn those online visitors into in-person visitors and/or potentially paying customers. Separating SEO myths from facts Unfortunately, as soon as a small business is registered, it starts getting cold calls and pitch emails from every corner of the world, promising seemingly overnight success for a small investment. There are offshore companies that exist just to try and convince small business owners to pay for their services , and a number of them claim to “do SEO” for your business. It is true that there are shady service providers, and one of the best ways to tell whether they are just trying to make a quick buck off of you (and not actual SEO experts) is because they are not using SEO to reach you—they’re cold-calling or emailing you! If they actually did have the skill needed to rank other businesses in search results, then the proof should be in their own search rankings for their website! Do THEY show up for a relevant search? Beyond that litmus test, there are a number of other ways to evaluate whether an SEO agency or freelancer is the real deal: They don’t guarantee rankings for specific keywords. Their website actually ranks for keywords related to the services they provide. They don’t promise instant results. They don’t claim to be “Google Certified” for SEO services (no such certification currently exists). They have testimonials from previous SEO clients. The potential cost of ignoring SEO If you don’t engage in SEO, then your business may not get found in search results, which limits the amount of people that can find and patronize your business. While this disadvantage alone is enough for most businesses to take SEO seriously, there are a number of other, related disadvantages for you to consider. For example, when people are researching “ What is the best [service/product] that [does what you do]? ”, you will miss out on the opportunity to get in front of that audience since you’ll have no relevant content for them to consume. Instead, the search results will show them a list of competitors or content from your competitors. There is an opportunity window when somebody is doing research before they commit (in SEO, this is referred to as “ informational intent ”). This is even more true the more expensive the purchase is. Optimizing your site enables you to attract searchers at this stage of the funnel , familiarize them with your brand, and, over time, instill trust and nudge them towards becoming a customer. For local businesses, you also have the ability to claim your space directly on Google Search results , and show up in maps. If Google interprets the intent of the search to be local, then it may show a local knowledge panel (shown above)—businesses can claim their local knowledge panel, enabling them to showcase their location details, reviews, images, as well as post product, service, or business updates and promotions. There’s even an entire field of SEO for these local results , and extra steps that can increase a small shop’s ability to reach clients who a ready to buy and physically nearby. The list of potential SEO benefits is long, but when you think about passing on those benefits, remember also that you’re making the internet an easier place for your competitors to reach their audiences because you’re limiting your digital presence (that’s one less business that customers have to choose from). For some types of customers, that’s the same as not existing at all. But, there are legitimate reasons not to invest in SEO There are potentially real reasons why it might not make sense to invest in SEO right this minute. If you’re a small business, with no free time, no budget, and no knowledge of SEO to start with—and you have other successful marketing channel options—then perhaps now is not the best time to invest in SEO. It could be that you’re in a small community, have an incredibly small, niche audience, provide hyperlocal services, and have very little budget to work with. In that case, hiring an SEO consultant or paying for an agency could be far more costly than the potential return. As a business owner, you should also know your audience’s preferred channels. For example, if your target demographic is not very tech savvy, they may be more receptive to traditional marketing. Or, if a social media platform, like Instagram, is the go-to channel for your industry, your initial investment should go towards that. And then, there may be reasons specific to your business: If you are looking for SEO to “save” your business, you may be setting yourself up for failure. If you can’t play the long game (and need a quick return on that investment) then other channels will likely benefit you more. Investing in SEO: DIY vs. In-house vs. Outsourcing Can just anyone do SEO? The short answer is that technically, yes, nearly anyone who can write an email can “do SEO.” But, that’s the same as saying anyone who can turn a wrench or use a screwdriver or watch a Youtube video can fix a car—I would call on someone who has experience and knows how to do it effectively before asking grandma to put down her tea and fix my Corolla. There is no Google University . There’s no “SEO certificate” that you get handed. There is no college degree in SEO and, with the pace of evolving search engine algorithms, it’s a good bet to say that there never will be. You’re really paying for experience and expertise —for someone who has already read, learned, implemented, tested, and iterated on the areas that site owners can optimize to appear higher up in the search results for relevant terms. So, your options include: Investing your own time as a small business owner to learn SEO Hiring an in-house employee to handle SEO for your business Hiring a freelance SEO consultant to address your needs Looking for a digital marketing agency to handle link building outreach, content marketing, and on-site optimization (or separate agencies that specialize in these sub-disciplines of SEO). Each option has pros and cons. Learning SEO for yourself will take time that could otherwise be spent running your business. Hiring an in-house SEO needs to compliment or work with your current marketing strategy or team. It takes time to vet a freelancer or agency and determine if they’re the right fit with the right skills your particular business needs to succeed. Naturally, that leaves us asking: “Is it all worth it?” Can you really use PPC/CPC to project ROI? It’s not unusual for digital marketing tools to provide rough estimates of search volume for a particular term or phrase that might be relevant to your business. Several tool providers use a combination of monthly search volume numbers and simply multiply them by the cost-per-click data (typically provided by the Google Ads API) for that particular phrase. They suggest that you can calculate the “value” of your traffic by simply multiplying the ad cost for the term by its search volume. Does this give you a viable number? No. It really falls short in several ways that can give you a false sense of value , which, in turn, leads to poor budget allocation and decision making. First, this is because you will only ever get a portion of that monthly search volume. Even if you’re at the top of the results, you can only realistically expect to attract about 30% of that total search volume or so (depending on the type of query). So, multiplying the entire search volume number by CPC misses the mark there. Second, just because it would cost you that much for a click via paid search, that’s not typically how much money that click would earn for you . No website gets 100% of its visitors to buy something. Usually, it’s between 2.5-7.5% of visitors (depending on the industry) and can vary depending on how familiar people already are with your brand. So, it’s not even an accurate representation of what that traffic is worth to you. Useful ways to predict traffic and ROI from SEO Let’s take a look at two potential methods to calculate your return on investment for SEO: The first is by calculating the potential change in your site’s current organic traffic and comparing that to the potential expense for the SEO campaign. While simplistic, this could be a good place to start if your main question is “Will my SEO investment pay for itself?” The second is looking at your target keywords and coming up with a potential outcome (if you ranked for those terms in search results) and comparing it to your expense. This method enables you to get more granular by identifying the value of certain keywords for your business. Method 1: Predicting ROI via a projected change in traffic Numerically, this is a fairly easy process: Get your last 30 days of revenue generated by organic traffic to your site. Multiply that revenue by the percentage increase in organic traffic that you’re confident you can achieve after the proposed SEO campaign and you have a rough estimate of how valuable that could be for your business. Then, you can compare that against the cost of the campaign. (Note: If seasonality affects your business, you may want to use average monthly for this calculation.) Of course, you need to have your Google Analytics configured properly to capture not just your site’s visitors, but also to identify search engines as the source of traffic that sent the visitors who made a purchase on your site. That’s assuming you can track the actual sale and sale amount. Usually, this is easiest for eCommerce sites, because transactions are typically recorded and designed to get that data into your analytics program. Method 2: Predicting ROI via search volume, CTR, conversion rate, and revenue per sale The second way to calculate your SEO ROI requires access to a tool like Semrush , DataForSEO, or Ahrefs, where you can build a list of relevant keywords for your business (to eventually identify their associated search volumes). Talk to your salesperson, your receptionist, look over support emails, and gather a list of likely terms and phrases people will use to discover businesses like yours. You’re then going to go through a process to predict your potential organic traffic . Here’s a nifty graphic outlining your next few steps: You will need to take your list of relevant keywords and plug it into your SEO tool of choice to get the associated monthly search volumes. Next, add each keyword and its search volume to a Google or Excel Sheet (you may be able to download this data in a spreadsheet directly from some SEO tools). Remember, that value represents the approximate amount of total searches for that phrase in the previous month. In the next column, you’re going to enter a value representing the organic click-through rate of your site. Because there is more than one choice available on the search results, total search volume will be split up between all the URLs that are displayed. The lion’s share will go to the top position. Here’s a typical breakdown of organic CTR from Advanced Web Ranking’s ongoing case study : So, let’s say that we want to estimate our traffic if we were to rank 1 for a commercial search query. Our Organic CTR would be 28.49% (according to the chart above). So, create a simple formula in the next cell of your spreadsheet to multiply your search volume number by that percentage and you’ve got an estimated amount of traffic for that particular search term (if you ranked 1). Repeat the process by applying that formula all the way down your sheet for each of your terms to project your traffic if you were to rank in a given position on the search results. Calculating potential conversions, sales, and revenue You’re likely aware that not every visitor becomes a customer. Actually, on average most sites convert just 2.5-5% of their visitors into paying clients. You can use this number as a stand-in if you haven’t yet configured your analytics system to track your actual conversion rate . However, if you do have it handy, use your own conversion rate and add it to the next column and then add a simple formula multiplying your traffic (from the previous step) by your conversion rate. If you have a sales team involved, taking leads from the site, then you need to know what percentage of leads from the site they turn into customers. I call this the “sale rate”—add that to the next column and multiply your leads by it. If you’re an eCommerce business, then you can likely skip this step. Lastly, you will add a revenue per sale for the given keyword. It can be an average value or even a projection of lifetime value for acquiring this kind of customer—it’s up to you, but make sure to stay consistent with your measure of value. Multiply the number of sales you get from your conversions and you have your potential monthly revenue. Of course, SEO is not magic. You cannot possibly rank number 1 for every target phrase, no matter how much content you have or backlinks you get. So how can we make a reasonable estimate? Get the sum of all of these values for your set of keywords and make a chart based on the following concepts: If I ranked number 1 for 50% of these keywords If I ranked number 1 for 25% of these keywords If I ranked number 1 for 12.5% of these keywords Now, you have a reasonable SEO ROI projection based on relevant data showing your market potential, which should be used to help you decide what to invest in for your business. SEO is almost always worth it, but you should still know your potential ROI before you buy Keeping in mind that SEO isn’t implemented overnight and its ROI comes over time, you now have some rough, but reasonable numbers to determine how much your organization can benefit from your SEO investment. You can take that SEO forecast from above and use it as a starting point for your in-house candidate, or your prospective SEO consultant or agency. Or, if money is tight but you have plenty of time, there are tons of resources available to learn more about SEO and how to implement it for yourself to reap those rewards in additional traffic and revenue. Jeremy Rivera - Founder of SEO Arcade Over 16 years in SEO, Jeremy has worked with literally hundreds of sites, small businesses, and enterprise level companies in dozens of industries. His focus is on ensuring companies get the best return on investment for their SEO campaign . Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Abby Gleason At its core, SEO success relies on your keywords ranking on the first page in search engines, like Google. Competition for those top 10 positions can be stiff—especially if your business is in a saturated market. When you’re building a keyword list, choosing topics you can realistically rank for is essential to driving organic traffic. If you target keywords that are too competitive for your website, search engines might not even show your content to users—resulting in wasted time and effort. Proper keyword difficulty measurement is a crucial part of a successful SEO strategy. Here, I share my own framework (the Keyword Difficulty Assessment Matrix) for how to assess it more accurately, so you can feel confident that the pages you create will drive traffic. Table of contents: What keyword difficulty is and why it’s important for SEO How keyword difficulty is calculated A more comprehensive approach: The Keyword Difficulty Assessment Matrix Tools to help you determine keyword difficulty What is keyword difficulty and why is it important for SEO? Keyword difficulty (or keyword “competition”) is a metric used to convey how challenging it might be to rank for a given keyword in organic search results. Popular keyword research tools, like Ahrefs or Semrush, provide keyword difficulty figures as a number between 0–100, with 100 representing the most competitive keywords. SEOs typically use keyword difficulty scores to quickly determine how “reasonable” a keyword is to target. They may weigh this difficulty score against the authority of their website to evaluate whether they actually have a shot of ranking high enough to attract clicks from the search results. In general, if your website is highly authoritative (like Wikipedia or Healthline, for example), then a higher keyword difficulty score may not necessarily be as challenging for your website as it would be for one of your less authoritative competitors. However, if you’re in the majority and work with a medium-to-low authority domain, accurately measuring keyword difficulty becomes much more important. You don’t want to waste your time creating content only to be buried on the fifth page of search results. No—you want to be front and center on the first page, and choosing the right keywords is how you make this reality. For example, if you’re a medium-sized business that sells furniture, trying to rank for [dining tables] may be a lost cause. You’re up against some of the most authoritative sites out there, and ranking among them will be difficult, if not impossible. However, a more specific keyword, like [ space saving dining tables ], shows a bit more opportunity. Yes, the term has lower search volume than its more generic counterpart, but it’s easier to rank for. Plus, that specificity means the shopper is likely closer to purchase (these types of keywords are often described as “high intent”). As a rule of thumb, long-tail keywords tend to be less competitive than short-tail keywords. Here’s an example of this concept in action: The phrase [pizza] is short tail (i.e., a short phrase that is likely highly competitive). Longer, more specific variations of the short tail term (like [pizza delivery] or [vegan pizza delivery in NY after midnight]) are less competitive. Generally, more specific searches mean fewer competitors. How keyword difficulty is calculated Keyword research tools use a variety of parameters to inform their scores. Semrush, for example, shares its list of inputs and corresponding weighting: Note: Different tools may use different methodologies to calculate keyword difficulty, so it’s always a good idea to research how each produces its scores. Doing so can help you understand how reliable those scores actually are. While these numbers can provide a helpful starting point for your research, they shouldn’t be taken as fact. Keyword research tools’ metrics aren’t foolproof, and there are many factors that may not be included in the data. Take seasonality, for example. It might be easier to rank for [buffalo chicken dip recipes] in July than in February, when the Super Bowl typically dominates pop culture in the US, and search results become saturated with publishers trying to capitalize on that traffic surge. Keyword tools might not capture that. Or consider trending keywords . The term [chatGPT] showed zero search volume in keyword tools for months after its launch—and it took a while for the keyword difficulty score to reflect reality. You should also evaluate how you use keyword difficulty scores from a collaborative perspective—including a difficulty score in your keyword list might confuse your content team. When I used to include scores in my keyword lists, I would get loads of questions: “What do these numbers mean?” “Are keywords that score below 30 good to go after?” “What are the chances of ranking?” These numbers tell your team next to nothing, so you’ll either have to explain these concepts or omit them when they’re just not relevant for those teammates/stakeholders. The long and short of it is: Keyword research tools can only take you so far. Keyword difficulty needs context in order to be worth mentioning. It has to be more than “a number out of 100.” Keyword difficulty scores are clearly an imperfect metric. As an SEO and/or website owner, you can look at a wider range of criteria to ensure that the keywords you’re trying to rank for are realistic. In the next section, I share my method for assessing and communicating keyword difficulty in a more intuitive way. The Keyword Difficulty Assessment Matrix Once you’ve done your keyword research and have a list of topics you want to potentially target, you’ll want to scrutinize those terms for difficulty, so you can prioritize the highest volume, lowest competition topics. Accurately determining keyword difficulty involves reviewing the search engine results pages (SERPs) and explaining with words (not just numbers) how challenging ranking for that keyword will actually be. I've created a keyword difficulty matrix to help explain the different difficulty levels to your team(s). You should adjust this with whatever language makes sense for your business, but I'd recommend keeping it clear and simple. The Keyword Difficulty Assessment Matrix Ranking Difficulty Criteria Low Top 10 search results do not all contain the primary keyword Top 10 search results are mostly old content (2+ years old) Top 10 search results contain different locales (e.g., ".uk" or ".au" sites in US results) Clicking into competitor content shows mostly low-authority sites with poor experiences: intrusive ads, poor formatting, etc. Medium Top 10 search results mostly contain the primary keyword Top 10 search results are a mix of high-authority and mid-to-low authority sites Top 10 search results are a mix of recently published & old content (2+ years old) Clicking into competitor content shows fairly well-optimized pages, with some opportunity for improvement High Top 10 search results all contain the target keyword & engaging titles Top 10 search results are all high-authority websites (e.g., Mayo Clinic for a medical query) Top 10 search results are all up to date (less than 2 years old) Clicking into competitor content shows extremely well optimized pages, with little opportunity to improve Closely examining the search results is a key part of what makes this process more effective and trustworthy. Instead of putting your sole trust in an SEO tool’s data, you’re rolling up your sleeves and seeing the search landscape for yourself. The result is a keyword list that you can target with an incredibly high degree of confidence. I’ve created a handy Google Sheets template with this criteria that you can tweak and use for your own content strategy. I recommend including these guidelines in your keyword list to clarify how you measure keyword difficulty, and to help your team do the same. Tools to help you determine keyword difficulty While I’m a proponent of adding manual research to your workflow, I’m also a huge fan of using tools to speed things along where possible (and without sacrificing data integrity). Thruuu Thruuu ’s free SERP analyzer tool lets you scrape (extract data from) Google’s search results for any keyword. Analyze up to 100 Google results and find on-page data points (like competitors’ content structure) for a quick, accurate analysis. I love that Thruuu is free, and has a clear, easy-to-use interface to quickly assess the search results. Frase Frase is a paid content optimization tool with a helpful SERP analysis feature that shows you key components of competitor pages including page titles , headings , and word count. I especially love that it shows the most popular topics used throughout competing articles—this can be very helpful context when writing your own content. Apify Apify’s free Google search results scraper enables you to extract organic and paid results, ads, queries, People Also Ask , prices, reviews, and more. My favorite thing about this tool is that you can scrape the results for multiple keywords at once, instead of one at a time (which is a limitation on Thruuu and Frase). Ahrefs & Semrush Ahrefs and Semrush both offer a “SERP overview” report that shows the top 10 results for your target keyword, including metrics like backlinks and estimated traffic. As mentioned above, these tools do offer their own assessment of keyword difficulty by providing a score for each keyword. Even though I don’t recommend relying on their keyword difficulty metrics without additional research, those numbers can provide a helpful benchmark to kickstart your process. Build a keyword list you can feel confident in Assessing keyword difficulty may feel tedious at times. The manual portion of this research does indeed take more time than exporting a spreadsheet from a keyword tool. But, I assure you, a more contextualized, meticulous method makes up for the effort with accuracy. You’ll have a high degree of certainty that these keywords are good opportunities for your business—which can go a very long way in ensuring that you (and your teammates) use your time and resources most impactfully. Abby Gleason - SEO Product Manager Abby Gleason is a content-focused SEO with 6+ years experience leading successful organic search strategies for SaaS and eCommerce brands. She loves to share her learnings and has been published on Moz, Semrush, Search Engine Land and more. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Sophie Brannon What good is an SEO report if it doesn’t clearly communicate the state of your site’s search visibility and provide stakeholders with actionable insights that align with their business objectives? Even if the report includes all the appropriate metrics, it’s your job as an in-house or agency SEO to interpret those trends and make recommendations. Communication in a report is more important than the numbers themselves. Merely compiling your impressions, traffic, rankings, and so on isn’t enough if you want to maximize your chances of getting buy-in for your recommendations. You need to present your findings concisely and unambiguously. To help you create more accessible, effective SEO reports , I’ll cover: What to avoid in SEO reports How to create SEO reports for easy data consumption Looker Studio PowerPoint/Google Slides Spreadsheets Tool-generated reports What you should always include in your SEO reports What to avoid in SEO reports The way you report to stakeholders or clients may change depending on their preferences or the tools available to you. It may also change depending on the level of understanding they have about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. So, instead of starting with how to create an easily understandable SEO report , let’s first look at what you should avoid, as that will be applicable regardless of what software you’re using to create the report. Jargon Overcomplicating your write-ups and using uncommon phrases to explain what you’ve been working on isn’t going to resonate with stakeholders. A director of a local plumbing company isn’t going to understand what Core Web Vitals or a log file analysis is. And most likely, they’re not going to care either. Avoid using too much jargon to keep your reports simple. If this is unavoidable, then offer a written explanation that clearly defines the term(s) you have included. Information overload Giving too much information is just as bad as giving too little. While data is important, data fatigue is all too real. Even if the data is important to you, it may not be for the stakeholder. No matter how clearly the data and charts may portray information, without context this could be seen as just a collection of numbers. Pinpoint the most important data based on what is relevant to your stakeholders and who is viewing the report, instead of simply including everything. Meaningless metrics This is one of the most common scenarios in reporting that I’ve seen. Equally, it’s one of the most common complaints from stakeholders and clients that I’ve seen, too. Often, the data that you’re showcasing is meaningless to stakeholders (even if it’s important to you and your team). Refine your SEO report to show the most important metrics that tie back to the core business goals and defined KPIs. This helps to keep your report clear and transparent without confusing the person you’re reporting to. If there is too much to consume, they will switch off and will not understand the value of your efforts, which could eventually lead to less support for your campaigns. Incorrect attribution Have you experienced an organic traffic spike to particular categories, products, or pages this month? Fantastic! But, have you looked into the real cause of this spike or are you simply attributing it to all of the hard work that you’re putting into your campaign? There can be extenuating circumstances or other channels that feed into the success of your SEO campaign—such as a trend in the overall market, an online sale, or even a successful email marketing campaign—which can drive success via your channel (alongside the work you’re doing). Not acknowledging this within your reporting, and having the stakeholder pull this up, can quickly lead to distrust in the reports you’re delivering and the data you’re showing. Be completely transparent and attribute successes correctly. Confusing layouts An SEO report should tell a story. It should answer the questions that your stakeholders have without them having to ask. Piling in too much data, into too many slides, without a proper order can cause confusion. If you’re using automated reporting, ensure that the system is user-friendly and that the action users need to take is clear. Frustrating the reader before they’ve even absorbed the report will lead them to feel negatively about the entire channel, regardless of the work you’ve done and the results you’ve achieved. Focusing on just one metric This could be a result of stakeholder priorities due to lack of “big picture” understanding, or it could be how you’ve always approached SEO reports. Focusing on just one metric (such as rankings, for example) is no longer as simple as it was before. Search results have changed, Google’s algorithm has changed , and technology has changed to provide a more personalized experience for the user. This means that a lot of metrics are less certain than they used to be. All tools, even Google’s own Keyword Planner, can have discrepancies and this needs to be accounted for within your reporting. Otherwise, a myopic focus on a single metric could lead to a worthless report that neither shows your progress or provides a roadmap to better performance. Find the most accurate source for the data that you’re showing, adjust for any ambiguities, and look at a combination of metrics over a period of time to showcase your results. I prefer a year-over-year comparison to mitigate any seasonal trends that may muddle the month-to-month data. During the pandemic period, I would compare against 2019 pre-pandemic figures to get a clear picture of the market (positively or negatively). Focusing on one metric over a short period of time can make your SEO efforts look far less successful than they actually are. Highlighting only positives If you’re showing only positives, you’ll likely raise a few eyebrows. Particularly when the stakeholders are involved with the business and can see the bigger picture. Don’t be afraid to show where things have gone wrong or if things are not quite going to plan. This is all part of the communication behind the report. It’s more important to show what you’re going to do about it if it’s not going as planned. Showing only positives when this isn’t the case can make your data (and, consequently, you as a professional) seem untrustworthy. Business owners and stakeholders know that things aren’t going to be perfect all of the time. Not personalizing reports I see a lack of personalization all too often in SEO reporting. Your SEO reports should be bespoke to the person or people reading them. This means tailoring the data to the expertise of the reader to show them what they care about most. I’ll go into more specific detail about how to effectively personalize your SEO reports in a later section. How to create SEO reports for easy data consumption Technically, there are infinite ways to structure an SEO report, but Looker Studio , PowerPoint/Google Slides, spreadsheets, and automated tool reporting are some of the most common ways to construct a report. This is important as each tool will have different strengths and potential shortcomings for you to consider when it comes to crafting a clear, intelligible story about your SEO efforts. Here, I’m breaking down the do’s and don’ts of these common tools to help you build a report that is easy for the reader to consume and potentially act on. Looker Studio Formerly known as Google Data Studio, Looker Studio offers a dashboard style of reporting, connecting multiple channels via APIs to build an interactive, real-time report. Do’s: Your dashboard should be consumable at a glance. Use Looker Studio dashboards to provide a clear and simple helicopter view of a campaign by adding relevant charts and graphs in an easy-to-read format. Automate your internal reporting, including the technical details and metrics that matter to your team. This level of granularity won’t always be useful for your stakeholders, but it may be imperative for your colleagues, particularly those working alongside you. Create tabs within the dashboard to divide information, enabling stakeholders to get a clear view of how various efforts are going without getting bogged down with information overload. Utilize the various APIs that Looker Studio supports to integrate the most important data in your reports, quickly and easily. This will save you time with your monthly reporting and also provide an interactive dashboard with up-to-date data that can be referenced at any time. Add annotations to your charts and graphs to make sure that everything is clear to the reader with regard to the relevance of the data and why you’re showing it. Don’ts: Do not simply refer clients and stakeholders to the dashboard in place of regular reporting. You still need to accompany your reports with an account of the work you put in and the success you’ve achieved over time—this is the storytelling component and it’s vital if you want SEO to continue to be a priority for your organization or client. Avoid adding unnecessary widgets or sections. These can draw attention away from the details that matter most. Don’t adjust filters without checking if the changes you’ve made have broken any of the widgets. Try your best not to over complicate your dashboard. It’s easy to get carried away with BigQuery and all of the different adjustments you can make with a Looker Studio dashboard. Keep your dashboard clear and concise based on what your stakeholder wants to see within it. PowerPoint/Google Slides PowerPoint, Google Slides, or even a document (such as a PDF) can offer a more detailed reporting option if you want more write-up space. A lot of text can be overwhelming to stakeholders that have little understanding of SEO, so make sure to refine your doc/slides if this is the option you’re choosing. Bulleted and/or numbered lists with key insights and actions can make this more digestible. Do’s: Use bullet points or numbered lists with key insights and actions to make the report more digestible. Use graphs and charts where possible to make data clear. Give context for all of the information that you’re providing. The “why” is sometimes more important than the “what.” Provide an executive summary of the most important stats. This way, a stakeholder who may not have the time to peruse the entire presentation can get the most important information on one slide. Don’ts: Do not use filler content to fill empty white space. Do not use outdated data during your reporting period. This can lead to a lack of trust and authority in your reporting. With a lack of real-time APIs, you can easily fall into a trap of using data that is no longer relevant, so always cross-check this before submitting your reports. Try not to make presentations any longer than they have to be. This is something that I learnt the hard way after delivering deck after deck of over 100 slides to clients who just didn’t have the time to read through that much information. Where you can, keep your decks as short as possible, without underselling your work. Spreadsheets Some SEOs prefer spreadsheets for their SEO reporting. Again, this can quickly become data-heavy, so ensure that you have clear visuals and only the data that matters most to the stakeholder to keep this clear and actionable. This is typically one of my least favorite types of SEO reporting, usually because the examples have been unclear and data-heavy. But, that doesn’t mean that they can’t be used effectively. Do’s Similar to Looker Studio, use the tab functionality to segment data clearly. Use graphs and charts, alongside annotations, to showcase information. Clearly format all data and information to keep the spreadsheet tidy. Highlight headers in tables, centralize numbers, and use consistent formatting throughout. Use VLOOKUP functions to pull data from different sheets (and even different files, if needed) to cleanly collate the information you need to show. Use formulas to automate calculations to keep your reporting output quick. Color code positives and negatives to clearly highlight what the stakeholder/client should pay attention to. Extract data directly from tools such as Google Search Console using APIs, and use Power Pivot to handle large rows of data and complex data sets. Don’ts: Don’t use the report as a data dump or technical audit export without any proper formatting or explanation. Instead, build out a static dashboard. Try not to overload a sheet with numbers. If you’re struggling to read the numbers, then your stakeholders will likely have an even harder time. Avoid including millions of rows of data just because Power Pivot can handle it. Keep your report as streamlined and visual as possible. Tool-generated reports With the wealth of tools with increasingly sophisticated capabilities available to SEOs, many professionals like to generate their reports via the software that they use day to day. Do’s: Use the automated functions of tool-generated reports to speed up your reporting processes. This way, you can spend less time on reporting and more time on the work that makes a difference. Use the graphs and charts that the tool provides, and use these consistently over time for clear comparisons month-over-month and year-over-year. Utilize any API functionality to pull in data from elsewhere (e.g., Google Analytics or Google Search Console ). Take advantage of the ease of reporting by customizing pages or charts automatically in one place. Export the report—don’t leave it just within the platform. If you unsubscribe to the tool at any time or the client needs data, but the tool has changed its features and the “live” version of the report has broken, you may be left in a sticky situation. Exporting your reports and saving them as static PDFs (for backup purposes) can give you some protection for the future. Don’ts: You should not rely solely on data from just one tool. This can sometimes be inaccurate due to the way tools compile their databases or if they’ve made changes to their reporting functions and other features. Compare this data with other information to get the most accurate numbers for your report. Do not interpret the numbers that the tool gives you as 100% fact. Generally, tools will provide an “average case view” of your data. Results in Google are highly customized, so it can be difficult to pinpoint an exact, 100% accurate figure through third-party platforms for all circumstances. It’s not necessary (or even desirable) to pull in every bit of data the tool provides you with. Keep your reader in mind and make sure you’re not going into too much detail. For example, exporting a technical audit as part of your report every single month can result in clients caring more about how many alt tags they have left to resolve than the fact that their MoM/YoY revenue is significantly increasing as a direct result of your work. What you should always include in your SEO reports So far in this article, we’ve covered the don’ts and we’ve covered some of the top tips for the most common reporting tools in the SEO world. In this section, I’m taking a look at what you should always include, no matter what tool you’re using. Personalization Any report, no matter the tool you’re using, should be personalized to the person you are delivering it to. This means the metrics should align with the KPIs they are interested in and the level of detail within the report should be tailored to the expertise of the reader. If you’re handling more than one client or stakeholder at a time, templating your report can be tempting. But, this can be a downfall in terms of gaining trust and buy-in from a stakeholder, because, nine times out of ten, a template won’t show them what they want to see. Here’s some general guidance to help you customize your reports for the specific type of stakeholder: For a business owner , focus on the direct impact of the channel on revenue or conversions as a result of your work. For a marketing manager , you can include more detailed information on impression share or market captured, and how other channels are feeding into SEO and how SEO is feeding into other channels. For a more senior SEO , you can document exactly what you’ve done so far in a campaign and exactly what you’re doing next. Annotations With all reports, accompany your graphs and charts with annotations and write-ups. I recommend including both insights and recommendations in the following format: The data and the charts — This is the “what” The insights annotation — This is the “why” The recommendations — This is what you’re doing about it This can help you clearly explain what your report is showing, how this aligns with what the stakeholder wants to achieve, and how this feeds into your current and future strategy. This also helps explain where things aren’t going to plan and why. It can even promote action if the cause is internal or not related to you directly, but impacts what you are doing. Clean and clear layouts No matter the format, no matter the tool, and no matter the data you’re showing, make sure that it’s always clean and clear. Graphs and charts typically display data in easy-to-read ways. Consider your audience and their understanding of SEO, and structure your reports (and annotations) around this. A report should be easy to consume on first look. If there’s too much going on, then the stakeholder isn’t going to connect with the report and may therefore look sourly upon all the work that you’re doing. Metrics that matter The most important thing about creating reports that are easily consumable is to always clearly include the metrics that matter to the stakeholder. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore other datasets, particularly if they’re important to showcase the value of the work that you’re doing, but they should be a subset of the report (i.e., shown on a different page or on a different tab). Pull in the reader with the metrics that they care about most through an opening page or executive summary on the report. Then, use other data and annotation to clearly supplement the report. The campaign’s story Your report should always be structured in a way that tells a story, no matter the software you’re using to build it. Lead with the most important stats that summarizes the work you’ve done and the results you’ve achieved, which link directly to the KPIs or business objectives that the stakeholder compares your achievements against. Use the data as the “what” and use insights and recommendations in the form of annotation or clear notes (bullet points work well for this) to explain the “why” and what you’re doing about it. Be transparent with your story and don’t try to bury poor results. Explain why they occurred and how you’re going to adjust the strategy to counter this. And, don’t forget to always follow up a report that you’ve sent with a call or a meeting to talk the stakeholder through it. This helps to ensure that there is no confusion with any of the data or recommendations that you’re suggesting. As with anything in SEO, clear communication is key. You’ve already done the work, all that’s left is to report the story Clearly, there are a healthy amount of factors to consider when compiling a successful SEO report, but they’ll become intuitive over time. Remember, it’s worthwhile to spend time and meticulously craft your reports because, otherwise, your efforts may go overlooked. Or worse yet, you could take the blame for factors that are out of your control. The upside of appropriately detailed, personalized reports is equally high—you stand to secure buy-in for future campaigns, which can enable you to drive success for yourself and your company or your client. Sophie Brannon - SEO Specialist Sophie is an SEO specialist with 7 years of agency experience. She's led strategy, implementation, and communication for local campaigns through to multi-language international campaigns. She's also an industry speaker and led the Web Almanac 2022 SEO chapter. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Menachem Ani Not all online conversions are equal. While most sales are relatively straightforward (like in eCommerce), lead generation is just a stop on the way to the final sale of your service or product, such as: Software and other digital products Service-based businesses (e.g., law firms, marketing agencies, home repairs) Specialized services (e.g., personal shoppers and B2B services) On-page optimization  is critical to both paid and organic lead generation efforts on search engines and social media—for boosting the scale of distribution as well as improving the quality of leads that come through. In advertising, it’s one of the biggest levers we have for growth—most accounts typically can’t recreate the lift that comes from optimizing a page simply by operating in the account. This guide will show you some of the philosophy behind the on-page work my agency does for our lead generation clients. I’ll cover: How to plan your lead generation efforts Critical on-page optimizations Web copy optimizations Design optimizations UX optimizations Testing frameworks and ideas When you need a dedicated lead generation page Pre-optimization checklist: Mapping out your buyer’s journey Marketers often debate about which is more important to a web page: copy or design. But before you get started with either, you have to understand your audience and how you fit into their journey—otherwise known as ‘product-market fit.’ Here are the most important questions to ask before you start creating or changing your pages: Who is the ideal customer for this page? Where in the journey will you meet them? What problem are you solving? What are your customers’ priorities? Which channels will users come to your page from? Once customers come to the page, what do you want them to do? If they convert, what should happen next? How will you qualify and nurture leads? Who is the ideal customer for this page? Knowing who you’re speaking to is fundamental to converting those people into high-quality leads. Selling your product or service won’t go well if you don’t know:  Who your ideal customers are What they’re searching for What’s leading them to seek out a solution What they wished their lives looked like To answer these questions and create useful reference personas, use both online tools as well as user-first research methods . Where in the journey will you meet them? Not every customer is ready to buy today—someone searching for [home remodeling ideas] is not as warm a lead as the person searching for [kitchen remodeling contractor].  So while making your product or service the star of your campaign might work for queries further down the funnel, targeting someone in the research or evaluation stage requires a gentler hand and lighter offer. What problem are you solving? Your customers may face tons of challenges, and most businesses really just solve a handful of them. You have to know what those opportunities are for your business and tailor the page’s content accordingly, accounting for nuances and implicit search intent along the way.  “ Implicit search intent  refers to the underlying reason behind a user’s search query that may not be explicitly stated in the search query itself. It involves understanding the user’s search behavior, context, and preferences to infer their true intent. It also involves empathy.” — Veruska Anconitano , International and Multilingual SEO Consultant A person searching for [rodent control], for example, won’t necessarily be interested in roach control services just because they’re both pests. What are your customers’ priorities? Somewhat counterintuitively, searching for a solution doesn’t mean the person wants it today. Even if they do, that might not be a realistic outcome.  A common example is B2B software, like cybersecurity , where the person using a tool might not be the same person who decides whether to buy it. Knowing what’s blocking your customers’ way and addressing those objections up front can speed up the sales process. Which channels will users come to your page from? Not all your content will appear in the same places, so revisit how you expect people to find or encounter your business:  Is this an informational, blog-style page that will attract potential customers through organic search? Will you show it to homepage  visitors using a pop-up? Will it be the destination of a paid media or ad campaign?  Each of these content distribution  channels and formats should influence your copy and design choices. Once customers come to the page, what do you want them to do? eCommerce websites are straightforward in this regard: you have a product and you want website visitors to buy that product. With lead generation, there are usually more layers and steps before a purchase.  The most common trade in lead generation is your offer (e.g., a free consultation, downloadable resource) for their contact info, so be clear about how you want that transaction to happen. Desired user action What you need to know Form submissions One of the most common lead generation conversions is the form submission, where a prospect gives you specific information in exchange for a resource, free trial, signup, callback, etc. These leads need to be nurtured and qualified. Call conversions Call conversions involve the visitor phoning your sales team from a web page, allowing for immediate engagement and data collection. These can be good if you have a trained sales team ready to take over. Chat conversions More businesses are using chat to capture immediate interest, particularly upper-funnel opportunities they would otherwise neglect. Usually, the tools you use to build chatbots allow those interactions to be tracked as a conversion in ads. App downloads You can also send people from mobile devices to a marketplace where they can download your app. These are great if your product or service ecosystem is centered around an app. If they convert, what should happen next? Your page looks and sounds good, traffic is pouring in, and you’re getting conversions . What now? Perhaps users should look for an email follow-up or expect a phone call in the next 24 hours. Whatever it is, communicate it on-page immediately after the conversion. The more specific you are with these expectations, the more receptive many prospects will be when you engage them. How will you qualify and nurture leads? Because there is no exchange of money, lead generation is prone to spam and low-quality conversions. Once you have someone’s information and interest, you must determine if that interest is genuine. Your marketing and sales teams should have a plan to separate real opportunities from dead ends. Critical on-page optimizations for every lead generation campaign Because you can use lead generation pages to sell anything from information to advice to digital products, they can (and do) look very different. These are the elements that every optimized page should have, as well as their purpose and relevance. Headline Page copy Visuals Responsive design Calls-to-action Social proof Confirmation confirmation Remember: If your discovery plan is through organic search, don’t forget to optimize page titles and meta descriptions . Headline An optimized H1 header  should connect with what potential customers are looking for. Be clear and descriptive rather than clever, and quickly explain the solution you offer. Writing headlines can be challenging, so at my agency, we like to use generative AI  tools to kick-start the thought process. Page copy Depending on what you offer and where you’re meeting potential leads, your page might have a couple hundred words of copy or several thousand. There’s really no right answer to how much copy is “enough,” but as a rule of thumb, I like to present the critical information up-front above the fold, with more supportive and exploratory content further down the page. If you structure your page content this way, you can even track scroll depth in Google Analytics 4  or Microsoft Clarity  to gauge your visitors’ level of intent. Visuals While the copy is what ‘sells’ the conversion, an expressive diagram or clear photo can help pique your customers’ interest and encourage them to seek out more information from you.  Set yourself apart by avoiding stock photography. And if you choose to employ generative AI, review all output for issues that might cause people to lose trust in your brand . Responsive design The share of web traffic coming from mobile devices in the US reached an all-time high of 52.5% in 2022. This means your page designs should be responsive across devices, with particular emphasis on mobile: Ensure that elements load quickly and appear where you originally placed them. Everything should render and function correctly, with enough space between clickable elements. Your page or content’s flow should feel natural to a smartphone’s shape and form. Place critical information and a call-to-action above the fold. Simplify navigation. A logo linking to the homepage is okay, but provide no other external links or complicated menus. Calls-to-action I spoke earlier about clearly telling visitors what to do once they land on your page, but the actual call-to-action (CTA)  matters just as much as the conversion type. A button that says “Submit” might be descriptive, but it’s also not compelling. You can be clear while still making the CTA feel personal and actionable: “Schedule Call” vs. “Call Me Back” “Register” vs. “Sign Me Up” “Request Quote” vs. “Send Me a Quote” Social proof No lead generation page is complete without proof that your offer does what it says. These could be quotes from happy customers, feedback from review sites, video testimonials, screenshots of SMS and email feedback, achievements like number of services completed, or anything else that proves that you can get repeat results. Conversion confirmation A lot of teams neglect the confirmation that should follow a lead-based conversion, but it’s a wonderful place to set expectations for the rest of your customer experience and process. What happens immediately after a visitor converts can have a strong influence on critical business metrics like conversion rate, sales cycle, and customer lifetime value. When I speak to prospective customers for my agency, I always follow up with an email that establishes next steps. A lead conversion is not that different from them having a mini-meeting with your brand. So, make sure that your customers’ conversion action is reinforced by a confirmation message—whether that’s a standalone page, a pop-up, email, SMS, or anything else—that tells them what to expect next. Conversion-oriented copy optimizations Once the page is live, you can start experimenting and iterating on those on-page elements. Here are a few advanced tactics to level things up. Use high-performing page titles and ad text Organic and paid campaigns can be quite different, but they still operate on the same platform: search engines. Most users don’t distinguish between organic and paid results; they just click on the message that gets their attention. If you’re running a paid lead generation campaign, consider using high-performing organic page titles or H1s as inspiration for your ad text or page. For an organic effort, borrow copy from high-converting ads and pages to do the same. Apply psychology and cognitive biases Nearly all successful marketers and sales reps are good at using behavioral psychology, even if they don’t recognize it as such. Some of the models that work most often include: Confirmation bias:  It’s far easier to show people that their beliefs are correct than to convince them that they’re wrong. Many SaaS products use this in their messaging by positioning the user as the hero and an external force as the cause of their problems. Survivorship bias:  Seeing that someone has achieved an outlying degree of success is usually paired with ignoring the vastly higher number of people who failed. Apply this model carefully as it tends to be misused by famous ‘course sellers.’ Fear of missing out:  Also known as FOMO, this is when people are worried that they might pass up a valuable opportunity. Examples include limited-time offers and pre-launch discounts. Framing effect :  This model is built on the idea that how you portray something is as important as the information itself. It’s the difference between “98% success rate” and “2% failure rate.” Sunken cost fallacy :  Many people will continue to spend money and resources on something that isn’t working in the hope of recovering some of their investment. This can be useful if your offer is built on fixing something that’s broken or flawed. Remember to act responsibly when using any psychological or bias-based messaging models—if you ever question whether your usage is ethical, it’s best to scale it back and get some outside opinions before releasing it to the masses. Don’t edit social proof People have a way of spotting inauthenticity when a brand makes a claim. Even something that appears ‘wrong’ to professionals (like a typo or grammar mistake) can make a glowing review feel ‘real.’ For email and SMS proof, screenshots also work better than trying to recreate the UI with design tools. Provide as much information as the prospect needs Many lead generation offers can work with strong above-the-fold content, plus a little extra to support it. But sometimes, people want to know more than the basics. A general rule is the bigger the value of the contract or service, the more information people want before making a decision.  This doesn’t mean you need to write a book. But if you’re selling a $10,000 kitchen upgrade, you’ll probably need more than 50 words to persuade someone that your offer is the best one for them. Design optimizations for lead generation Ready to pour some more time, attention, and love into the design of your lead generation pages? Try these approaches: Pair social proof with photos Use multiple calls-to-action on longer pages Preview your product/service Create custom illustrations Showcase video testimonials Pair social proof with photos Social proof is a great example of a page element that is functional with copy, but made truly effective through design. One example is putting a photo next to customer quotes or reviews, which can lend additional credibility for your brand. Use multiple CTAs on longer pages Overly diversifying your CTA messaging confuses potential leads as it increases the cognitive load and burden of decision making. Using repeat instances of the same CTA can actually be beneficial, especially if you have a longer page with plenty of content and multiple sections. Preview your service or product With visuals, the right option is almost always showing people what your product or service looks like—or capturing the sentiment of how it feels once they start to reap its benefits.  This could be a render of software UI, the cover of a white paper or guide, or before-and-after photos of your service. Create custom illustrations If you’re going down the illustrative path—think diagrams or charts—make something from scratch if you have the time and budget. Using publicly available graphics and stock photography might be quicker and easier, but these feel generic and make it tougher to differentiate (or identify) your brand. Showcase video testimonials Video testimonials can be very persuasive and rapidly increase trust when executed well. People will sniff out a fake review, so it’s best to keep things authentic. In the eCommerce space, many brands partner with creators and customers to amplify user-generated content. For lead-gen and B2B, you might consider a similar approach with clients and influencers . UX optimizations for frictionless conversions As great as a lead generation page looks and sounds, it should also feel right and allow people to proceed seamlessly to the next stage of the process. To provide that experience, prioritize: Accessibility Consumer data management Page intent Lead incentives Page experience (Core Web Vitals) Accessibility Your page visitors expect a quick, intuitive experience. This is especially important if you operate in the health and wellness industry or sell specifically to people living with disabilities.  At a basic level you should try to keep text clear, legible, and compatible with screen readers. For more in-depth guidance, refer to this guide on website accessibility and SEO . Consumer data management People are generally happy to give out their information online, but that doesn’t mean the fear of a data breach isn’t always in the back of their minds. Be clear about how you will use and store their details so they can make an informed decision whether to share it. Page intent Your page has one purpose: to generate leads for a single, specific offer. If you allow visitors a free hand to explore beyond it, your conversion rate may stay sub-optimal.  Limit alternate actions and instead focus on one next-step per page. You should also close off exit points to all but the most critical information, such as your privacy and refund policies. Lead incentives We’ve already discussed that confirmation pages are important, but how do you make the most of them?  One example I see frequently is bonus content or freebies—someone requests a callback or quote for a home theater, and you send them a guide on audio gear or soundproofing while they wait, for example. Be careful; giving away too much may diminish their interest between the online conversion and the final sale. Page experience (Core Web Vitals) Core Web Vitals  are the metrics that Google uses to gauge how quickly a page loads, whether the elements are in proper alignment, and the latency between user input and page output.  When optimized, they produce a page experience that decreases the likelihood of page visitors abandoning the process if they have real interest in what you’re offering. Testing frameworks When you’ve run ads for lead gen campaigns across so many types of businesses, you learn the value of testing. More importantly, you learn what to do and what not to do as you test.  These are some of the lessons that have stuck with me: Expand your reach with ads Test changes in aggregate Tailor your offer to real-life conditions Expand your reach with ads One of the biggest advantages of digital ads is they can quickly reach bigger audiences to test messaging and other elements. They can quickly scale growth for a product  or service that has the fundamentals in place.  Shaping your targeting requires knowledge and data, though. So use a limited budget to test and validate messaging via search and social ads before making larger investments in areas like link building . One approach is using page title variations  as ad headlines to see what gets people to click, and page variations to see what gets the conversion. Test changes in aggregate Many digital marketers prefer to test singular changes to accurately attribute any incrementality. But when using ads to test on-page elements, unless you have the traffic and impression share to achieve statistical significance quickly (and the budget to afford it), you should consider testing multiple changes together as variants. This might mean a new offer with a specific headline or changing the types of social proof you show, for example. Address audience concerns proactively A creative way to test on-page elements is crafting an offer or messaging to match what’s happening in the real world or your industry. My agency works primarily with Google Ads, so any messaging that addresses my concerns with the Google Search API leak  earlier this year, for example, is more likely to capture my attention.  For you, this might mean offering payment plans, amending your refund clauses, providing referral bonuses, supporting new audiences , or anything else that reflects people’s real-world concerns. Dedicated page vs. homepage: What’s the best option? A page specifically built for your lead generation campaign is ideal, but it’s not always feasible. Here are situations where you might send people to a homepage (or another existing page) instead of a standalone lead generation page. Budget limitations:  If you don’t have the funds to publish a separate page, you can always modify your homepage periodically to align with testing and demand. Time limitations:  Sometimes you have to get something out the door with little room to negotiate timelines. In these cases, a strong homepage can suffice until you have time to create a more robust page. Simple, singular offers:  If you have one offer with a singular or narrow audience, there’s really not much need (or use) for a dedicated page. Limited targeting by stage of awareness:  Similarly, only selling to people at one stage of the funnel means you don’t need to address different concerns or priorities (e.g., people researching different types of pest control for rats vs. people who want a same-day exterminator). Pair on-page optimization with offline conversion data for even better ad campaigns One of the toughest parts about lead generation—especially if you’re an agency or third-party service provider—is how critical data is for success, yet how difficult it is to get businesses to share enough of it. While on-page optimizations  are important and certainly give you a great place to generate lift, the real magic is in connecting customer data with your ad platforms. By showing Google and Meta which leads became sales, the platforms can drastically improve the quality of future online conversions by finding more like them. Working some magic on-page is a great way to establish the validity of your efforts, gain trust, and persuade clients to share data from CRMs and other customer databases! Menachem Ani - Founder of JXT Group Menachem Ani, founder of JXT Group, is a digital marketing veteran with 20+ years of experience. He's a leading expert in Google Ads and uses a forward-thinking approach to help businesses grow. Twitter  | Linkedin

Homepage SEO Insights Your homepage is the first thing that search engines crawl and is most often linked to—it’s the page that defines you as a brand. Join Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter as they break down best practices to improve your homepage SEO in order to drive high-quality traffic to your site. Check out the webinar deck Read the Transcript In this webinar we cover: * Strategic ways to create an effective homepage * How to create homepage content that is right for your brand * Technical SEO tactics to enhance your entire site Meet your hosts: 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: Your Homepage SEO matters Speakers: Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding, Wix Crystal Carter, Head of SEO communications, Wix 00:00 Mordy: So let’s get going, welcome to Your homepage SEO matters. Your homepage is the most important page on your website. It's literally the core of your website, it gives so much power to your domain, which is why I’m so excited that we’re going to be talking about what works, what doesn’t work when thinking about SEO for your homepage. We’re thinking about mindsets and concepts and practical, hands-on tips to get your homepage up in the rankings. More traffic, more conversions, more revenue—all the great stuff we want out of our homepage. My name is Mordy Oberstein, I’m the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix and I’m joined by homie, Crystal Carter—the head of SEO communications here at Wix. Hey, how’s it going Crystal? 0:44 Crystal: Hi there, I’m, I’m great, I’m great. Are you, are you at home today? I hope everyone’s feeling at home. Me internet casa, su internet casa. I don’t. I don’t know. But yeah um welcome to everyone and we're going to see if we can get that chat fired up, um but yeah thank you all for joining us, super excited to talk about this. This is something that I love implementing as an SEO. Mordy and I are both really passionate about this but in slightly different, in slightly different ways. Um so, Mordy is very passionate about it from one angle and I, there’s, there’s, I’ve got a few other things which I, I obviously support everything Mordy’s saying. Um but yeah, between the two of us, we’ve got a lot of good, good perspectives on making sure your homepage is awesome. 1:32 Mordy: You’ll get like a real 360 degree perspective of your homepage by the time we’re done. Which is amazing. So, it’s really nice that we have different ways of thinking about the homepage. Um before we dive in, I have a little bit of a tease. Crystal and I are soon to be launching Wix’s own SEO podcast—called SERPs Up. Which will be launching in the next week or two. Keep an eye out for it on the Wix SEO learning hub, which is Wix.com/seo/learn. Of course, check out all the other great resources from webinars like this one—to blog posts and guides all about how you can get started doing SEO. As well as some really deep dives into what’s happening in the SEO world. Now there’s a tonne of great content out there so check out, again, the Wix SEO learning hub. Ok, now, quick note about the format. So I’m going to present, I have my take on the homepage and Crystal has her take on the homepage. So after I’m done presenting, Crystal will share her outlook on the homepage SEO. In the meantime, if you have questions, there’s a Q&A feature in your Zoom panel. Definitely throw in questions relevant to the, to your homepage and SEO and we’ll do our best, after we’re done presenting to go through as many questions as we possibly can. Just know that there are moderators as well, who will try to answer some questions along the way, so we will try to get through as many questions as possible. There’s no such thing as a stupid question, so please don’t feel shy about asking questions, we love questions. Throw them into the Q&A feature, inside of your Zoom panel. With that, I think we’re ready to go. 3:08 Crystal: I think so. I’m ready. Born ready 3:11 Mordy: So let’s do it. 3:14: Crystal: Born ready to talk about home pages 3:16: Mordy: Part one: Mindset matters most when it comes to your homepage. So your site is an entity, and as an entity, it needs identity. And this is the underlying concept of what I’m going to be talking about as it pertains to your homepage. And you’re all like “what!?”. I will do my best now to explain this to you, so by the time that you’re done, it will make sense that your site is an entity and you need to give it identity through the homepage. So let’s have at it. There is one ginormous mistake people make when it comes to their homepage. In fact I once did a study, I went through a thousand homepages—the only goal that I had was, do I understand what this site does by looking at their homepage. I found that 70% of these sites, 700 out of these 1,000 sites—I had no clue what they did. Zero. None. To give you a really far-out practical example of this—so I’m a big sports nut, and the Pittsburgh Steelers recently renamed their stadium from Heinz Field to Acrisure Stadium. One of the biggest sports podcasts in the US, the Rich Eisen Show, was talking about the renaming and he’s like “I don’t know what Acrisure is”. And he did exactly what this company wanted him to do, they spent millions upon millions of dollars to get the naming rights for an entire stadium, so a person like this could do this—he went to the homepage. Hey so, what do they do, this Acrisure? and he went to the homepage and he said “I have no idea”. So they spent million and millions and millions of dollars to rename the stadium in their name, and in the end, from this perspective, kinda pointless—I can’t invest, I can’t buy their product, I can’t do anything because I don’t know what they do. So you’re, this is the single most, you know, problematic thing that homepages face. I’ll give you a really practical example of this, so this website has, as their H1 “Looking to scale your technology to power your growth? Ten Mile Square solves the toughest issues in technology and accelerates digital transformation to succeed in a customer-centric world.”—I have no idea what that means. I have absolutely no clue what they do. As opposed to my favorite Wix site, well, not my favorite, but one of my favorites—ahh they’re all my favorites. Renegade Blitz is a Steelers blog and their headline or their H1 is “All the latest news, all the latest commentary, all things Steelers”—I get it, they’re a site that talks about news and analysis about the Pittsburgh Steelers. Really simple, really easy, really well done. If you take what happened here with these two sites, and you zoom out a little bit, conceptually, the problem here is a lack of identity. In this case, I go backwards in my slides by the way, it’s a thing. Um there’s a lack of identity, the problem facing the first website that I showed you was this, I just, there’s, no-one has any idea what they do. Not just users but also bots, just no idea what that means which is obviously problematic from multiple points of view. In other words, identity, having an identity is what it means to be an entity, your site, think of your website as a thing, because that’s how Google is thinking of it. It’s a thing, and is this thing relevant to the searches that people are doing. Well which searches is it relevant for, when is it relevant, when is it not relevant. The way Google understands if your site is relevant or not relevant is through the identity—it’s understanding what your site is all about and therefore it understands this thing, this entity, also known as your website, is or isn’t relevant for certain topics and all sorts of things. This is fundamentally how Google is looking at things—trying to understand, when it comes to your website, if you wanna break it all down, what Google’s trying to do is very much what a user is trying to do. Trying to understand who you are, what you do and what your site is all about. In other words, this entity that is a site, what is this thing all about. So think of your site as an entity, as a living, breathing, distinct thing that needs identity. And that identity is born through the homepage. Your homepage is like the agent of your website. It’s the, it’s the representative of your website, it’s your website’s senator or congressperson—I don’t know how to put it better than that. Everything you do, that identity that you create on your homepage, it’s creating identity for your entire domain. So when you think about creating your homepage, you have one job, and that’s to do what Acrisure didn’t do, that’s to create identity. It’s to create a very distinct and very clear and understandable identity for your entire website, that spills over to your entire website. And to that, when you create that identity, your homepage should be your guiding light for all the other pages on your website. So if your website sells widgets, well you shouldn’t have product pages about sprockets. The identity that you created on your homepage should spill over to your product pages. If you’re, if you create identity on the homepage, you set up who you are, what your site, what this domain is all about, and that’s X—don’t write about Y on your blog. And if you do, make sure to connect it back to X. Make sure you connect it back to the identity you created on your homepage—otherwise you’re going to create a schism between what you’ve established for the domain via the homepage, and all the other things that you’re doing on your pages. So let the homepage be your guiding light. Everything you do on your website should fit into the identity you establish on the homepage. Practically speaking, what does this mean? So I have a 3 step framework, and some, most of the time this works, sometimes it doesn’t work and sometimes there’s give-and-take. Crys is gonna show you some websites later where this many not be entirely applicable but as a general framework for most websites out there, or at least conceptually speaking, the homepage should do three things; you want it to say who you are, what problems you solve, you know, addressing the pain points of the user, and then how you go about solving those problems. Let me give you some examples, so, great website from Wix, they, they talk about “we develop award-winning sound design and licensing across all platforms” I know in a single sentence, which, by the way, you should do this in a single sentence, you should be able to do this in a single sentence. I know from this one sentence, this website creates sound assets and that’s super important for users to know, obviously and it’s important for Google to know and it’s important it’s done really quickly, just like that. Now, what problems do you solve, so Monday.com does an interesting job with this, and they could have done a little bit of a better job, which is why I pointed, why I wanted to use this example. So their, one of their H2s is “stay on track to reach your goals faster”. So where they did a good job was they realized the user has, what’s the pain point of the user? Someone who wants to buy our product, what is their problem? We have so many things to work on, I don’t know how to manage all this, and I’m getting off-task. I’m not being efficient with my work. So they said, on their homepage, here’s the problem we solve. We’re speaking right to your pain points—stay on track to reach your goals, faster. Where they might have done a little bit better in that H2 is the particular goals, at least for Google, you know; stay on track with your business goals, that sort of thing. To sort of refine that identity, but anyway, different conversation for a different time. They also, byt the way, this something you should consider doing for your homepage, they accent the H2, the header, with a couple of lines in the body text. What this does, obviously this speaks to users which is what you primarily should be doing on your homepage, and on your website in general—this contextualizes for Google the identity you’re establishing initially on the homepage as who you are. Okay, who you are. Great you give me one line, two lines about who you are, what you do. But talking about the problems you solve, gives Google more context to exactly what it is that the identity of this website isn’t what you do at the same time, speaks to users, so it’s like having your cake and eating it too. The next thing, how do you solve these problems, ok. It’s one thing to tell me the problems that I’m going to solve, but how do I actually solve them. By the way, and this is what’s great about this framework is it speaks to users, it speaks to Google and it speaks to conversions. Because once you’re saying ok, here’s who I am, here’s the problems I solve and here’s how I solve them—I’m going to click. Which is really what you want, you want them to dive deep into your website. So you should really be thinking about your website from an SEO point of view, from a user point of view and from a conversion point of view—and those all kind of overlap into one thing in my mind. Now so, let’s take an example from Lyft. So by, right by mark number one, that’s the H2—”Set your own hours. Earn on your own terms”. Underneath that, they’re telling you how they solve this problem. So they’re saying to andriver, let’s say who’s working for a taxi cab company, who doesn’t have any flexibility–”Hey, you need flexibility, we understand your problem, come to us.” Ok, well how do you solve this problem? Oh, get paid instantly, cash out your earnings whenever you want, now I understand how you solve this problem. So again, it speaks to users, it helps with conversion, but all of this is giving Google context of who you are and what you do so they understand what your domain is all about and they’re able to rank you for relevant things. So let’s go back to the idea of an entity having identity, because yes, who you are, the problems you solve and how you solve the problem is all great. But, there’s a certain, you have to frame it a certain way. Your identity, who you are, the problems you solve and what you do live sometimes in a larger context and you have to frame that identity a little bit and how you frame that identity, as all things in SEO, it depends. And if you don’t understand exactly what I’m talking about—I’m going to run through an example. Let’s take a health site, so what this health site did is they did step two, they talked about the problems they solved before they talked about who they are, and that’s fine. You can go out of order, you can play around with the framework. So for example here they said “the right care when you need it most. Talk to a doctor, therapist, or medical expert anywhere you are by phone or video”. They talked to the pain point first and then back to better explain who they are, but it’s very clear. I understand exactly who they are and the pain point is very clear—I wake up in the middle of the night, I’ve got a thing on my side, it hurts. I wanna call the doctor, I can’t call doctor weinberg because it’s 12 o’clock at night, I can call these people. So they’re speaking to a pain point and clearly identifying exactly what they do, right away, top of the fold, on the homepage. So now they’re probably going to go right into telling me how their product works and how they solve my problems. Nope, what this website does is they talk about, they show things like testimonials, awards that they’re won, reviews, they go through their doctors and how they’re board certified and in the top 5% of medical specialists in the whole world, and so forth. In other words, they’re trying to build trust because if you’re a medical website—yes you need to tell people who you are, yes you need to tell me the problems that you solve, yes you need to solve those problems, but if I can’t trust you all of that is meaningless. So for a health site, you have to frame that identity. That identity exists within a larger framework, within a larger context—which is trustworthiness. So it’s one thing to create that identity, establish who you are and what you do. But you have to think about the larger context that your site lives in and how to frame that identity in the case of a health website, that’s trustworthiness. Which may not be important for a gossip website, do I really care how trustworthy they are? Or do I care how exciting and novel the information is—trustworthy, not my main concern. What I really care about is how the Kardahians are doing. So how do you know how to frame that identity? I think it’s pretty easy to figure out how to say who you are and what you do and the problems that you solve, but framing that identity and giving it some context—how exactly do I do that for a health site. Or maybe I’m not a health site. If you’re not sure, you should go to the SERP, go to Google. Literally what I did here, I typed in online doctor, I took the first website that ranked and I, gonna go back in my slides like I always do, saw that they talk about their doctors and their awards and all this and I’m like “Oh, they’re framing their identity in terms of trustworthiness”—which is evidently working. It makes logical sense, it’s what Google would want, it’s what users would want, it’s what everybody wants. So to sum it up very quickly, the homepage; it’s where you build identity for the entire domain, for people and for bots (meaning Google). Part of identity is how you frame it, so in the case of a health site for trustworthiness. It’s gonna be the same for anything like that, like a financial website, anything where trust is a major component, frame that identity and trust. But again if you’re not sure for your particular niche, look at what’s going on in the Google search, on the Google SERP, the results page. Type in a query that’s relevant to your niche, look at the top ranking sites, see how they’re framing their identity. Don’t just copy what they’re doing—think how you can do it differently and better. I don’t advocate for copying, I think you should be unique and different in all cases and again, your homepage is what guides the rest of your website. The identity you create on your homepage spills over onto the other pages and it should sort of reign you in, keep you focused on what you should be focused on, keep you on topic, keep that identity aligned across product pages, blog pages, whatever you’re doing. Let the homepage be your guide. And that’s all I got, so I’m gonna hand it over to you—Crystal Carter. 16:54 Crystal: Thank you so much Mordy, and I think that um that, that you know, a lot of the stuff you’re talking about there is, is applicable to, to most, most businesses and I’ve definitely been working with clients where I couldn’t figure out what they did. We’d have somebody come to us and they’re like “oh yeah we’d like help with your SEO?” and I look at them and I’m like “I don’t, I don’t understand. I don’t know what you do”. Um and that, that, the example of Acrisure, is that what you said? 17:21 Mordy: Um Acrisure, Acrisure yeah. 17:23 Crystal: Acrisure, yeah 17:24 Mordy: Yeah, it’s a tongue twister too. I don’t think, yeah 17:26 Crystal: It’s such a big amount of money to spend for people who don’t know, don’t know what you’re doing. Oh, somebody asked: what does SERP mean? Search engine results pages, thanks very much Adrianna. Lovely. Ok, so Mordy has been talking about some of the concepts behind, um, behind helping your homepage to perform. Um I’m gonna talk about some of the hands-on things you can do, on Wix and generally, um, to, to implement some of that stuff. Um so he’s talked about entities, he’s talked about lots of different stuff. I’m just going to share my screen, um. There we go, so people don’t have to see all my tabs, I’ve only got one tab open, I promise. Um, lovely. Ok, so we’re going to get into part two, so in this section I’m gonna talk about um homepage examples and ehm some different types and some different tactics. So um Mordy went through, went through a few, a few. I’m gonna go through a few more. I’ve got five um homepage examples that are sort of standard homepage examples from some big, big brands. Then I’ve got a couple of brands that are from Wix examples um to, to see how and why people make the homepage decisions that they do. Then we’ll go into how we can implement those and I’ll give you some practical examples of the things you can do on Wix and that you can do generally for SEO. Um so, first things first, the first one we’re gonna talk about, these are names that I’ve given them, so the first one is the funneler. And this is, this is, these are my, my names, so the funneler is essentially, this is a website that's, that’s, that’s not really, this is a homepage that’s designed to not really be the destination. This is a, this is a homepage that essentially brings people off to other places. Virgin is a great example of this because Virgin does so much stuff. Um so Virgin.com, their homepage essentially serves as a, as a vessel for sending, and a funneler for sending people to Virgin Galactic and Virgin Phones and Virgin Holidays and Virgin all of the various different things that they do. This one, so this one, this one is very interesting um so I’ve looked at a few different ones. What was really interesting about Virgin in-particular was this one had the highest percentage of backlinks, this one had the highest percentage of backlinks to the webpage, or going to the webpage overall. Which I thought was very interesting and the reason why, and I think is because when you take this approach of a funneler approach, which actually fits with their brand. To what, more to Mordy’s point, um is, is because Virgin is sort of an evergreen brand that applies itself to lots of things, people expect them to be doing lots of things. So when people go to Virgin.com, they’ll find whatever other Virgin thing that they’re doing. So it works well for them to have all of their backlinks go to that. Um and when we think about smaller businesses, this is a bit, this is an example from a Wix site, which I say it’s a smaller business, to be fair it’s ranking for 2,000 keywords. Um and they are, they are, they are funneling, not to the different businesses within their business but they’re funneling people to their biggest products. So they know that they have a few, they have a few sort of rockstar products and they don’t want people to have to go through the website to find all of those things. They want people who have heard about their brand to be funneled directly to that, to that rock star product. So there’s a few different tactics that you can use for this. So for instance you can use, so, so you can do pointing people to high-value content using buttons, UX segmentation using big pictures or, or um different, different color schemes or that sort of thing. You can also think about content priority, so particularly in mobile you sort of, you tend to have one column and so you put the things that are most important on the top, then that, then that can help as well. Um and the other, when you’re thinking about optimizing, when you’re funneling, when you’re creating these funnels, these are really good places to add keywords and the links for these things are always really good places to add keywords. And you can see that this is also playing out into, into the search. So Google is understanding that this is a very important page for this site and they’re adding it as an indexed page on the, on the search engine results page. The SERP. Additionally, you’re gonna want to take those funnels and add them into the, you know, your core funnels and add them into your page title and your meta description—so that when people are seeing on the server and they see your, and they see this bit um, this is your page title, you can see that they know that “planners” are really important for them so “planners” is here, “letters” is also here and then they’ve got the “planner” here. So you can funnel people before they get to the page and also when they’re on the page. Another one, is the converter, again these are my terms, um. So a converter is essentially a do-thingsey-site, this is a site where you’re, you’re trying to make sure that people can do something. Um so that might be that they want to sign in to something, register or buy, or buy so a lot of ecommerce sites are focused on making sure people can buy whatever they need. Sometimes there are sites where they have like a percentage difference calculator that I use a lot. And that page, that homepage is like “we have a calculator” you don’t have to look for it, it’s right there. I’m just looking at sites—this one was interesting because this had the highest percentage of traffic going to the homepage. So this site had 21% of it’s traffic going to the homepage, and the reason why that works for them is so they can get their business goals achieved with this particular business. And it also aligns with their business cause they’re business is, it’s an app so people do things on the app. So if they can get to the homepage and they can do things and that also works for them. For other small, for other businesses, this works for lots of businesses. This is a Wix site that’s ranking, um, that’s ranking locally for 600 keywords and it is, it is a limousine service and as soon as you go to the homepage, you can book the limousine. You don’t have to find where the booking page is, the top of the page has the booking, the place where you can book the limousine and you can get your limousine booked in and straight and ready to go. So again, things like forms, things like a chatbot or a chat can also help with this if you have a site that’s, if you want to make more dynamic. That you want people to be able to be, have more function, to be able to do more things on the site, then maybe adding a chat might be a thing that might, might be an easy way to just, to do that. Um and also purchase points. Um so, you’re gonna want to think about, with regards to optimizations the forms are great but if you don’t put a header for the form, then sometimes it won’t perform this well for SEO. So if you have, if you have um, this one for instance is going like “rental car” like “premium car rental in Hanoi” so that’s the header for that form um which is below. And also you’ve got like a little summary of what that form is about and also has some keywords in there. Um and so you’re gonna want to support all of these sort of elements with keywords like buy, shop, book—that sort of thing. And you’re gonna want to add that into your copy and your meta descriptions and that sort of thing. And then I also got a point in the sentence there where it says “use the conversion points to link to deeper content” and what I mean by that is that in the summary, if somebody isn’t quite ready to convert, add a little link that houses, that lets them know more. Um as well, this could be a good line link and this can also help to sort of give, give people like people who are still on the fence, a little more detail before they jump. Next is the informer which is not the 90s song, but is the London Stock Exchange. Um so London Stock Exchange uh, the informer. Again, so this is one that, that serves to get people information lots. Lots of information very quickly. So um London Stock Exchange is a great example because they literally have a stock ticker that tells people exactly what’s going on. And this is something that I’ve seen on news websites uh for you know, for the latest stories this is something that you also see for a local news website. Or local websites where they may have the weather report or um ski resorts where they have the ski report or that, that sort of thing where people are known for their knowledge. They’re known, known for giving, giving up-to-date knowledge and they’re putting out a lot of content. Of the sites that I surveyed, this one was really interesting because this one had the most internal links. This site has 378 internal links on the homepage, that’s a lot of links. Um and this helps with a lot, this, this helps with um indexing, which I’ll get into, which I’ll get into later. But with regards to, to um smaller sites who don’t have big budgets like, like the London Stock Exchange. If you’re looking to, to surface more content which is essentially what all of these links are doing, then you can add in a few different elements. So this is a site, um site called “All the food”, which is based in Dublin and it’s a food website which ranks for 2,700 keywords. Including “salad Dublin” which I think is quite impressive. Um so, they post about 4 new posts a day, on average and they, they’re helping to surface all of this new content using a few different methods. So for instance, they’re, they’re using blog feeds, um they’re adding strategic, strategic internal links to some of their best content on the homepage, and also content that lead, that leads to other content. Um they’re also, they’re also um using headers for their, for their information so you know “this week’s top stories”. That’s a header that helps tell Google that this is new content, this is the feed underneath it. And if you have a content, if you have a website that’s got lots of content, for instance, that, job websites are a good one for this. Or um new people who have lots of new products all the time, if you’re posting loads of blogs um and that sort of thing. Then you’re gonna want to think about making sure that you’re absolutely submitted with Google Search Console and also with bing. I’m a big fan of Bing—it only takes one click, if you’re already in Google Search Console it only takes one click so it’s really worth doing. Make sure you make use of your RSS and also thinking about your link, link hierarchy and, and priority. Priority is like, where it is on the page and when we talk about link hierarchy, think, make sure that you’re linking to pages that have good links within them. So that you’re linking to that page that has more links within it when you’re thinking about hierarchy. So the next one is the billboard, I’m always fascinated, I’ve always been fascinated by Zara’s um Zara’s SEO. Um the, this looks like it’s just a website with a big picture on it but actually when I looked at this, this has 96 internal links on it. Um the other thing that’s interesting is, when I was looking through it, we, in our last webinar, last month, we talked with Marcus Tober all about keyword intent. And there’s lots of different types of keyword intent. Most of the websites I’ve looked at today, their intent for most of the people going to the website was informational—they wanted visitors to learn more about the brand. This website was navigational, that is because Zara is all around the world. They have lots and lots of different types of websites and they’re using their homepage to navigate, to help people navigate to Zara in French and you know in, in Trinidad and Tobago for instance. And so they’re, they’re essentially helping people to, to, to go to a certain place. This is something that I would, I would say is not, if this is your own, the only thing you have in homepage, do use this very carefully—unless you are a giant brand like Zara. You can do sort of a little bit of a mix and match for instance. But I would say this is the sort of domain of somebody who, who can, can afford to not have any words on their homepage. You can do a little bit of a mix on this, so for instance this is the potter trail, which is a Wix site. They do Harry Potter, um tours in Edinburgh and I’d really love to go. Um and, and they do the billboard at the top of the page. So what they are doing is they’re using this to focus, so they have the “Book Here” button, they’re using it to focus there. Um they’ve got their, their menu is sort of blended in there but they’re looking for people to focus on the, on the “Book Here”. Now if you are using the billboard, um, the billboard method, that you’ve got those images marked up. It’s also really important that you’ve got clean composition um and that you got, you know, any dropdown that you’re maybe making use of dropdown menus, so that you still have a menu. Maybe if you’re going for a minimalist design but, but that it’s still that the menu, the menu is dropped down. Um so again, think about structured data for your images, think about image uh attributes and think, you can think about well linked dropdown menus. So the next one I want to think about is the feeder. Again, these are my names so um. This is fandom. Fandom is very interesting because fandom was actually the website with the least traffic leading to it, but that’s because fandom isn’t quite a homepage. They’ve been, for fandom, people create their own Wikis of different, of different things. So somebody‘s really into “Game of Thrones” and they’ll create a sort of “Game of Thrones” subpage, um within, within fandom. But essentially their homepage acts as a directory so they’re directing people to lots of different, lots of other wikis within this sort of fandom um, website um, hierarchy. And they’re and, and they’re surfacing lots of different content under lots of different, lots of different ways. We’ve got a big search, search bar there and that’s what they’re doing. Um “YouTube” is a really good example of this um “Apartment Therapy” is another good one um newspapers do a lot of this. And they’re making sure, they’re making sure that this, they’re sending people to lots of different um parts of the site using lots of different methods including feeds, including category stats and that sort of thing. Um, for this sort of thing this is a brand called Evolve. They’re using, they’re using a mega menu to do, to do a very similar, similar thing. Again this is another Wix site. If you’re looking to, if you have a lot of content on your, on your website then thinking about how you can surface lots of that via the homepage is important. A mega menu actually can do a lot for you um, uh to this, to this point um, as long as it makes sense um. So make sure that you’re thinking about surfacing content as it’s created, um and that you’re thinking, um very consciously about your internal linking. Um speaking of our webinars, we have another webinar next month about, all about internal linking. So do tune in for that and make sure you’ve got good headers and keyword copy for um, for your feeds, your collections and all of that sort of stuff. So to summarize, we think about the five, the five things. Mordy is smiling at my names. So we’ve got the funneler, the converter, the informer, the billboard and the feeder and they all kind of, they all kind of do different things. You can use a sort of combination of a few things um, eh eh, at a time, um but generally, these are the, this is the sort of top five of type, of the types of um homepage, homepages that I tend to, tend to be interested in. Um so, I’m gonna go through, if I can just pause, I know there’s a lot of information and we’re gonna go through when we should use, when we should use some of these elements. So I built a little site all about women in space because I love women in space. Um I’m a big fan but I have this, this sits next to my desk, all the time. It’s Sally Ride and Mae Jemison. Anyway, um, you might notice it on the website later on. So this website is using a few, a combination of a few of those elements we were talking about. So, for instance the “women in space and astronomy learn and shop”. That’s sort of a billboard sort of style there. Um but I’ve also used, used a few other elements. So, for instance I’ve got a little bit of the feeder thing in and I’ve got lots and lots of different links to, to lots of it and I’ve got a few different dropdowns from the menu. This, this site that I built only has about 36 pages but there are 38 links on this page. Um so we’re basically making sure that everything is linked across the homepage. Um and then across the middle I’ve got a sort of a little bit of a funneler sort of, sort of activity. So for instance for my keyword research I know that a lot of people are searching for, searching for terms like “women in space”, “female astronomers in NASA” that sort of thing. So I’ve got content that’s dedicated to that and it’s filtered for that so if people arrive on my website and they want to know about those, those few things, they don’t need to look for it, it’s right there and it’s really simple. Um and to what Mordy was talking about you know, with, with making sure that people know what they’re looking at when they get to your site. I’ve tried to make sure that that’s very clear as well. So you know, it’s women in space, you can learn things, you can buy stuff. You know, we’re really into women in space here. Um thanks. So, think about your internal links, think about your menu, when you’re thinking, when you’re putting together your content. Um and for the backend of this, we talked about how your site is an entity. So Mordy talked a lot about your website being an entity and there’s a few different ways that you can help that, help people to understand that. So, within Wix we have lots of different tools and this, this deck will be shared. All of these things link to information about different things on Wix and how you can find these things on Wix. So um just hang in there with me. So this is your social share, so this allows you to, you can, that I replicated the what, the um banner looked like, the homepage and I added that into, to the, the OG from the OG, from the open graph. Um for the, for the home page you can also see that I’ve, I’ve got those funnel information, so learn and shop in the page title and I also got, you know, check out our biographies, learn more et cetera—in the meta description. And then, when and then when we have the page title then um we also have the site name, which I’ll get into that in a moment, that also helps to, to Google to understand what, what all of these things are and all of these things feed into, to the homepage. Further down the homepage we get into like a little, a few other elements so this is more like this sort of informer element like making sure we got a feed there. So this particular part here, this biographies area this is a, this is a blog feed. So this is everytime I make a new content, everytime I make a new blog, it automatically goes on the homepage which means that it gets crawled very quickly. So as soon as I make it, not only is it on this blog page but it’s also on the homepage and we said that Google’s visiting the homepage once people are visiting the homepage and it helps that content to get indexed, it helps it to get ranked. And if you have set it up as a feed using you know, based on the different categories which are within Wix then that helps you to that helps you to, to make sure that that’s automated—you don’t even have to remember it. Um and then I’ve got an image here and the images you can also use images image tags, I talked about the big banner and needing to have structured data and needing to have information about it. You can add image attributes to also add some of those keywords and, and make sort of those things that people don’t know—who um Mae Jemison was, the first black woman in space um and she was on the space shuttle Endeavor. So I’m adding those, those, that information in there and Google will be able to understand that, that is on the homepage for my page about women in space and they can connect all of those, all of that information. And then moving down to the sort of converter elements, um further down the page now because my, my shop there, my thing that I made—our shop isn’t the main thing that we do, it’s a little add-on, so I put that further down the page. If my, if the main thing that I was doing was having a shop, I’d have this much higher up the page. Um but because it’s, it’s not, it’s like, it’s a nice to have, not a, not a, not any sort of deal breaker if I put it further down the page. And then we’ve added in some of those elements where we have um “visitor shop” which is a CTA. “Buy books” that’s another active word, telling people that this is the section of the website where you can do things. Um so, so I’ve added those in and there’s other ways that you can add this in as well, you can add in uh, uh a gallery, you, and again you can do a similar thing with the feed—so for instance, if you have a lot of content or a lot of products that are changing over, you can make sure that those things are, that the new products are coming through first. Or seasonal products are coming through first and that sort of thing can help with, with you as well. And then getting down further, we can also see that we have, and then I’ve done the filter thing again, um to some of the other content that I think is, its important but maybe isn’t necessarily the like sort of the big, big picture stuff. Um so I’ve got a, a review section, I’ve got the “find”, “find activities”. I also have this, this area “Name, Address, Phone Number”, um and the mega menu. Now the “Name, Address, Phone Number” is super important for, particularly for local businesses, because it allows you to get schema markup, for instance in our business info area within Wix, there’s a link to this. Once you fill this in, this gives you the opportunity to have a local business schema markup and Mordy was talking about being an entity, this is how you, this is one of the ways that you define yourself as an entity—schema markup helps Google to understand you as an entity and as a part of the knowledge graph and so, it’s not just a conceptual thing there is also a tangible way that you can, that you can add, add this to your site. And then when you add your “Name, Address, Phone Number” on the footer of your website, this also helps as well. Now this all seems like a lot, don’t worry, because a lot of this stuff is covered in your Wix SEO checklist, um SEO Setup Checklist. And if you go through all of this, all of this um, there’s things that you’ll notice—the first section is all about the homepage. And one of the reasons why the first section is all about your homepage is because, when it says “connect to Google Search Console”—so Google and Wix have an integration and Wix will index your homepage on Google as soon as you connect to, to um, as soon as you connect um via the setup checklist. And I’ve done this, and I, I was like “this isn’t gonna”, “this isn’t gonna be that great”. But on my, on my personal site, I did, I did this and I set up my site and I, I, before I connected it, on the second, second of March, I was not, it was not, it was not on Google. Then within two days it was absolutely on Google. I’m sorry, this is blurry because this is my screenshot that I took in March and wasn’t expecting to use it for a website, or for a, for a, um presentation. But yeah, um because I did, because I did the internal linking all the way through, even though it was just indexing my web, my homepage, it also pulled through a few more, a few more of my pages as well and I mean four might not seem much but I only had twelve pages on the site overall so that’s pulling through, you know, a good chunk of the website um, going, going through. So I think that’s essentially my, my roundup. I’ve gone a little bit over, I’m sorry Mordy, um but if you want to know more about this, I’ve got a sort of, this deck will be shared after so Mordy’s end. Um, as will the transcript and all the resources and the deck includes a few more resources for things like header tags, which we talked about, meta descriptions, search console, also a link to the SEO guide and yeah. That’s, that’s my, my, that’s me on homepages. 39:34 Mordy: So much there and there’s so many different types of homepages that you really can like, really have fun with it. I mean, stay, stay in the boundaries of what you’re trying to do and don’t loose focus. But you can really get creative with the homepage. Like don’t be, like if you listen to the first part of the presentation, please, I’m not saying you shouldn’t get creative with the homepage—get creative with it. 100% there’s some really cool stuff you can do there. 39:54 Crystal: Yeah, I think absolutely and I think, like, I think, really think about it fro your users perspective. I think that’s so important and think about, think about what are the questions that people always ask you and if somebody comes to your website and they go “I don’t understand what you do” listen to them. Listen to them. If they come to, if they come to your homepage and they, and they say “yeah” and they can’t, and they and they still don’t understand or they’re still asking you certain questions. You know, add an FAQ, um you know, if you, if you’re, if people, if people can’t find you know, a certain part of the website, but they always ask—add that to the website as well. That can help your customer service team, that can help, you know reduce calls, lots of, lots of different things so. So um, and I think was was interesting is I, I remember I saw your deck, um and when I was going through, through um, I was going through my page because I built this, I was like “oh yeah, I’m gonna make a little homepage, um for this, for this project” and then I saw your deck and I was like “ok, I can probably do better with that”. 40:50 Mordy: Um so, speaking of questions let’s, there’s a, an abundance of questions, uh really good questions. We’re gonna try to get to as many as we can in the next nineteen minutes. By the way, I apologize, I remiss, I should have mentioned this earlier—we are recording this. You will get the recording automatically through email so do not worry. You get the slides, you get the recording, you get the links for all the ancillary information that we spoke about, it’s coming right at you, directly through email. I apologize for not mentioning that at the beginning of the webinar. Um ok, allright, are we ready Crystal? 41:23 Crystal: Yeah. 41:25 Mordy: Allright. Is there any ruler just a good SEO practice to add, and there’s a few questions around this, add menu items on the footer too—meaning add links to the footer of your homepage. 41:34: Crystal: Yeah absolutely you should add menu links to your footer. I absolutely think you should add menu links to the footer, um you should certainly have a T&Cs bar, that’s really good for users it’s also really good for Google. So I had a client before where they didn’t have like their shipping and returns and like, privacy and all that sort of stuff and didn’t have it on the footer and we added it to the footer and we saw a boost straight away um, it’s a trust signal. 41:57: Mordy: So when you added internal links, and there have been a bunch of questions around internal links. What we mean by internal links, by the way, is your linking to another page on your website. So you’re linking say on your homepage to your about page or your linking to a product page or a blog post, whatever it may be. So when you for example link in a blog post to your homepage, that link to the homepage, that you add, is called an internal link and they’re very important for SEO. One is, they help Google understand what’s on your website, also when Google crawls and comes to your website, they come to your homepage and you set it up through the SEO setup checklist in the, in the, in the Wix dashboard. And Google instantly indexes your homepage. Once they’re there, and they see the other links on your page, they go “Oh, there’s a bunch of other links on your page” and they find pages from links on a page. So most definitely, it’s just bouncing along. Definitely, I do it on all my sites. Include the links in the footer, absolutely do that. It also helps give the user a general sense of “Oh, here’s everything that’s on the website”—so it’s good for users and good for bots, is the philosophy of all things SEO. Good for users, good for bots. 43:03 Crystal: Yeah, absolutely. And I think um, it’s the footer, the footers are a really good place to put like un-sexy links. Like um links that are, that, that are, that everybodys going to, but like maybe they’re not like, maybe they’re not, they don’t fit in like in a lovely, lovely place in the menu. Um so that’s, but yeah 43:21 Mordy: Exactly yeah those, those you know, the on-demand out kind of thing—good for the footer. Um Nicole Holst asks: I am a copywriter and usually write 600/800 words for a homepage, for clients for SEO—which is what I have learned is recommend, which I often think is too long. How do you balance keyword optimization vs length—which is a great question. 43:41 Crystal: So, so, you’re more of the content bot but in my general experience, the length of the, the length of the, the, the copy on the homepage doesn’t necessarily matter Um the quality of the copy on the homepage does matter and I would also say that headers on the homepage are really, really important. So, you know H1s, H2s, H3s, H4s, you know, get in there and make sure you, make sure that you, that you’re breaking things down um, so that, so that Google can sort of skim-read what, what you do and so that you’re, you’re adding that value to it. Not just from a, a you know, a word count point of view but from a sort of information point of view. 44:27 Mordy: I couldn’t agree with you, possibly any more, a million percent. You know, my, my SEO advice, of all SEO advice is don’t worry about SEO. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but worry about your users. So, if you’re from a content perspective that we’re talking about. If you’re writing for SEO and there’s a bunch of questions about keywords like how many keywords, do I know where to put—don’t, don’t worry about it. Write naturally for the user, think about the user where their pain points are, really empathize with the user. Understand what they need, their life context and build a page for them. So if you’re thinking about your homepage, what information do, does your user need, how much of it do they need—to have on the homepage for them to be satisfied to understand. And keep in mind the purpose of the homepage is to understand who you are and what you do, how much do they need, and do that. I’ll give you an exam, a way of thinking about Google, outside of the homepage but in general. My cousin used to be the head of SEO at Surveymonkey and he used to live in Palo Alto, and the, Google used to test, I wonder if they still do, their self driving cars. And he said, the car was able to detect, whether or not a person ran out or a squirrel. If, if Google can understand whether this thing that ran out in-front of their self-driving car is a person or a squirrel, they can understand what you’re writing on your page, assuming you’re writing in a comprehensive, natural way. In other words, don’t worry about keywords. Worry about writing naturally to your users, because what words are you going to use other than the words that really describe what you’re going to say. 45:54 Crystal: Absolutely. And I think, somebody asked what are H1s, H2s, H3s, H4s. So an H2 is a header tag, there’s a link in my deck about what header tags are. Um it’s on our Wix SEO hub so there’s a whole link all about it. Um, H1, H1 is like a headline so, so, so, so, like if you were to go “Food”, “fruit”, “oranges”, “clementines”, like “orange wedges”, like that sort of thing—sort of as you get further down, it sort of um, sort of narrowing into, to the, to the sort of subsections of what it, what is is. Um and, and if you have, let’s say you have a website that is selling fruit, um, so you’re gonna want to break those down. So you might say like “we have food”, “we have fruit”. “We have apples”, “we have oranges”, “we have bananas”, like and you wanna bring, and, and you know “we have it for delivery” and that sort of thing. So think about it that way, how you parse the information because that’s how Google is thinking of it. And somebody else asked about how to use it on Wix. And the thing, there’s a thing that says paragraph, you click on that and then there you see the dropdown for the thing. 46:58 Mordy: Yeah and the editor is right there, in the blog there’s a dropdown menu for headers. And the way I think about it, I think about it, a book report, I’m an old teacher, think about a book report you wrote when you were around eighth grade, ninth grade. Probably not, um. You have the, the title, you know, my summary of, you know, of Mice and Men by Mordy Oberstein right there, that’s your H1. Then you have, you know, plot, that’s your H2 and then you have character, that’s another H2, then you have a little header for each character you know, like the mouse, Lenny, right. That would be a H3, that exists within the larger paragraph of characters. I don’t know if that makes it any clearer or not. 47:36 Crystal: No it’s good, let’s keep on with more questions. 47:38 Mordy: Um ok. Eh David Hook asked—”How do I display my resume experience on my homepage or focus on what the customer wants to buy?”. So, and there have been a few questions about this, how do I, how do I include information about who I am, or doesn’t it sound like I’m at, I should be putting my about page on my homepage. So we can ask the question, what's the difference between a homepage and an about page. Those sort of questions, let’s answer it. 48:04 Crystal: Yeah, so I would say, so as I said in the thing, you can have a headline that’s like, you know “Mordy Oberstein, book reviewer”. Um and you can sort of have, you know, like “Mordy Oberstein”, like you know, like your elevator pitch. Like what would go on your business card for instance. Like “I reviewed all the books, I know so many books, books are great”. Um, you know and, and everybody, you know, “everybody thinks I know lots and lots of things about books” link. Like, so, so, so you have your headline for what that is, then you have your link to an about page, that goes into all of the details with all of the stuff about who you are. Unless you have a one-pager, in which case fine, just go for it. But if you have, if you have a wider site, then absolutely have a little summary, like a little taster, get people interested so they wanna know more, and then have a link out to the big stuff. Also have the so you know, it’s basically a TLDR homepage. Um it’s really good to have yourself on your homepage though, because with this dealer markup stuff, you can add this to your homepage, and get a markup about your homepage, on your homepage. 49:04 Mordy: So Laya asks, I love this question—how do you manage 83 different internal stakeholders, who all want their part of the business to be mentioned on the homepage ranked for their own terms. Such a great question. 49:19 Crystal: Yeah. Do you want to start with that one there Mordy? 49:22 Mordy: Ok, so, um, look obviously you’re dealing with a larger team and everybody has their own, I guess has their own claim on the website for a lack of a better word. So for you kinda wanna, from my general experience, you kinda wanna show how your agenda makes their agenda better. So for example, look, if you wanna have your part of the business on the homepage, or your part, obviously it’s too much. The homepage won’t rank, if the homepage won’t rank, pretty much nothing else on the homepage, is probably going to rank either so no one will see all of the things that you’re doing. So everything you are trying to do, which is get more visibility to show how awesome you are, which is by the way, let’s be team players, believe in every site. You’re not gonna get that visibility, because if you do, what you wanna do, what you’re advocating for on the homepage, we won’t rank and no one will see anything. What you should do is bring in someone who knows a little about CRO, conversion rate optimization—”oh your little aspect of the business, how can we work in a CTA or a link in the footer and get clicks to there, so once we get the homepage ranking, we’ll funnel them into your little section of the business, so you’ll get that visibility and everybody will love you”. 50:29 Crystal: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s a great answer. It’s great. 50:34 Mordy: I feel I have to bring up this question—Saskia Jones asks “how do I solve low text to HTML ratio on homepage?”. 50:47 So I’ve seen a few people in the chat saying that they’re do, doing a lot of photography and stuff. And I think that, I think that with this, Schema Markup is your friend. Absolutely. Um, so, for instance, and, and you, all those, all those image attributes for your images and you know they’re, they’re your friends. If you can afford, oh and also a dropdown menu. So, so if you have a dropdown menu, you like make sure that you got, your dropdown menu has all of the sort of important links through it and that your homepage isn’t just uh the thing. So essentially when you’re saying a little text, to you’ll probably have, like you know, the billboard style menu that we were saying. And if you look at the, the Zara example, which seemed quite extreme, they, they had tons of links on there. They had tons and tons of links on that page but it was one big ol’ picture. Um so, so, I think, think about your menu and use all the image attributes that you, that you have. And with schema markup, you can do a lot for your homepage, so you can do, you can get into the, who the publisher is. So for instance, lets say your photographer Mordy Oberstein is both a book reviewer and a photographer, so, so he’s an amazing wedding photographer, very busy. And um, so let’s say you know, this is a website that was made by Mordy, um and he is the photographer and he studied here and he’s an alumni of this and he did this and he is this and he is that, blah, blah, blah. And you know, same as this social feed and that social feed you can add all of that schema markup into there, um and that’s totally fine on your homepage, and that will help Google to understand who you are. Um as well. The other thing that I would say is, particularly if you’re going for a billboard type site, where you don’t have a lot of, where you have a lot of image, but not a lot of text, is to make sure you’re supporting that site with links. So make sure that you’re supporting that with, with, and I don’t necessarily mean like “oh please can I have a backlink” kind of links. I mean like making sure that you’re supporting it with like, that you’ve, that you’ve got yourself onto like photography directories and um, and that you have um you know, you’ve claimed all of your social profiles and that you have those all going to your homepage. So that people can have lots of signals of lots of information that say that, that you know, what your homepage is about and, and what you do. 52:58 Mordy: So I’ll give you a little bit of, well, I have a question for you because I saw just pop up, just now—what is schema markup? 53:03 Crystal: Schema markup is my favorite thing, essentially it turns your website into a grid. Or like into a spreadsheet. It’s like the equivalent of like um, and when, when they do that Google can mix and match all the different parts of your website and serve it on the SERP. The search engine results page, however they want. So they do this a lot with recipe websites. So it’s essentially like if I said, like, um this is, this is a drink and it’s a long island iced tea, right and like let's say my website is the long island iced tea—um what schema markup does is that instead of saying that your website is a long island iced tea, your website is a little bit of bourbon, a little bit of vodka, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that, so you can take the coca-cola and the vodka and make one thing, and you can take this and take that and make another thing, and it’s all still part of the same thing, but it breaks it up into little parts so that Google can, so that Google can configure it on the SERP, the way that they want. The way that works for their users. 53:59 Mordy: Yeah and so it’s basically giving Google some code, which, by the way is, if you’re using Wix, which you are. Um in the SEO panel, in the settings for a page, you’ll see a field for advanced SEO or a tab for advanced SEO, in there is a field where you can paste in structured data markup code, you’ll see a link to a generator where you just type in what you want and it’ll create the code for you, you just paste it in on many of your pages, we’re doing it for you automatically, your product pages, event pages, those sort of things are doing it for you there. Although you can edit and customize there as well. Basically you’re giving Google some code that makes it really, really easy for them to understand exactly what are the elements that are on this page, then Google can manipulate this information to do some pretty cool things with your website, with your page, on their results page. So I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Google and you’ve seen the little stars that show up, on, inside our in an organic result, how are those little you know, yellow stars get there, that was through structured data markup. But to go back to the low text to code question, I’ll give you a little bit of an inside scoop here. So it’s one of the errors that many, many SEO tools will show up when you run a site audit, so they’ll say “oh, it’s bad that you have a lot of code but not a lot of text” I used to work for one such tool, and I will tell you, I’ve had many conversations with Google about this, where they ask “can you please stop showing that?”. Because it’s not a real thing. So, Google does that, that error, that warning that you see inside of your SEO tools sometimes saying “low code to text, HTML to text ratio”, I’m botching the name, um, because it’s so painful for me. Is, is not a real thing, please stop showing it. And you get, these conversations didn’t take place in private, they’re on Twitter, you can see them. And I advocated to said company “please, Google, they’re right, it’s not a real thing please, you can ignore that”. 55:51 Crystal: What I would say, those things are useful for cause I think like, screening does a, does a word count for you as well. Again, word count isn’t necessarily important. Thank you Mordy. I would say that they’re useful if you’re trying to do a big audit and you’re trying to figure out like, if you have some like empty pages, I’ve done some like audits on like eCommerce sites, where like, they just had like not like “green shoes” or something and you’re like “that’s not enough copy” like that sort of, those sorts of things can be useful for that sort of, sort of stuff. 56:20 Mordy: Yeah, but for us, fine we’ll leave it at that. It’s a sore subject. And then Honikaut asks us a great question—”so should the statement of who we are and what we do be at the top, mine’s at the bottom of my homepage”. So let’s generalize this question, what should be at the very top of the fold on your homepage, should that matter? The answer is Yes. It, think about it in terms of a user, if you have something above the fold way up on top, wouldn’t that tell you that hey, to the user, that’s really important, it sends a clear message. It does the same for bots, what you show at the top of the page, as a rule, kind of tells Google, this is the really most important thing that’s out there. So, who you are, what the site does, should go at the top of the page. 57:02 Crystal: Yeah, I also think also there’s a couple of things around, around like so Google doesn’t always use your meta description, sometimes they change it. And sometimes they will just use the first part of the, part of the website, for instance. Um also a lot of times, people, if you look at a heatmap, with tools like Hotjar, um for instance, or lucky orange for instance, that will let you see how users are, are seeing your website and a lot of times users won’t scroll to the bottom of your website, they’re only seeing what’s in the viewport for websites, for mobiles is what they call it. Which is the first thing you can see on your mobile screen, not necessarily in a page. So um the, the viewport, what’s on, above the fold which is the first thing that you see on desktop before you start scrolling, so a lot of times people don’t make it to the bottom. So if you, if you don’t mind being the serious, like maybe it’s not a commercially sensitive website, but if it is a commercially sensitive website and you are expecting to see lots of new users, then yeah, you should definitely say who you are further up the page. With Wix you can actually test it so um you can do a split site, so you can test your um, you can test, you can test it at the top, you can test it at the bottom and you can see how, how it works um, and um which one works better for you. Um and, and with all these things I think testing is great, but generally speaking, yeah, I think, I think, I um, you know, if I was just asked like yes or no, I would say yes at the top. 58:26 Mordy: Let’s see if we can get one more in here—Dee asks “I represent a skincare clinic in Ireland with lots of treatments and we showcase a lot of the treatments on the homepage as well as testimonials, just wondering what you think of that?” So again, when you have a lot of products maybe on the homepage and reviews, Crystal, what do you think of that? 58:42 Crystal: So I think, I think its good to showcase, to showcase your um, what you do. I think that sounds like good practice, I think as long as you’re able to make sure that it’s organized and that, and I think that its worth thinking about, thinking strategically about what’s on your homepage. So for instance, like if you have, say you’ve got facials, like lets say you have a hot stone lava facial and then lets say you have like a seaweed facial. Well let’s say like, let’s say that most people go for the hot stone lava, and you sell like two of the seaweed facials a year but like somebody really likes getting them so you still have them on your website or whatever. So you probably don’t need to have the seaweed one on there, on your homepage, you probably can just get away with the lava one, and have a link to your other facials from the lava one, for instance. So I would say think of like, get into your Google analytics or if you’re on a Wix site, you can see within your wix analytics, which pages are your top pages and see which services people are most interested in. Make sure that those are definitely on your homepage. Um and if they’re and if you, and if you have some that almost no one ever visits the page, um then, then get those off of those. Just so you can declutter and you can link to them from the other pages. 59:53 Mordy: Perfect. And with that, we’re out of time. Thank you so much for joining us. Don’t forget to tune in to our next webinar coming at the end of August, with Sara Shepard. We talk about internal linking with myself and George Winner, Head of SEO Editorial. Don’t forget to checkout our SERPs Up SEO podcast thats coming on the Wix SEO learning hub, that’s Wix.com/SEO/learn. Tonnes of great resources if you want more information about headers, that is on the actual SEO hub, check that out, um and. 1:00:22 Crystal: There’s also um, Mordy has a super, super long, super exhaustive SEO guide. Mordy loves super long things. Um he also has a super long, super exhaustive SERP guide. We talked about lots of SERP features, and he has a really great sort of, feature guide there as well. So if you want to know about SERPs, you wanna know about SEO guides, you wanna know about lots of SEO stuff—yeah SEO learn. 1:00:43 Mordy: Check it out, it’s a really great resource and again we will be sending the recording to you, through emails. And so thank you so much for joining us, until next time—keep optimizing those sites.

Tuesday, October 29, 2024 Join our panel of SEO content experts for an eComm specific, live-auditing session. Submit your site upon sign-up for the chance to receive invaluable feedback. Through live auditing real sites, this webinar will cover: How your eComm site can stand out in a crowded marketplace How to create a high-impact online shopping experience Easy wins to improve your site’s sales and conversions Meet your hosts: Loren Baker Founder, Search Engine Journal Loren Baker is the Founder of Search Engine Journal, an Advisor at Alpha Brand Media and runs Foundation Digital, a digital marketing strategy & development agency. 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 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. Twitter  | LinkedIn

Author: Christine Zirnheld Whether you’re an established brand with years of business-critical content to manage or an agency performing a site migration for a new client, you need to ensure that only those with the right expertise and authority can make changes to the website. It isn’t just a matter of security—it’s also a matter of collaboration and scalability. For example, managing your website user permissions enables you to hire an SEO agency  to improve your search visibility without also giving them access to your sensitive billing details or user data. In this article, I’ll show you how to use website permissions to give more teammates (both internal and external) managed access to your website so that you can delegate tasks, implement more efficiently, and minimize risk. Table of contents: What are website permissions? The benefits: Website permissions for scalability and safety Website roles for every team member How to edit permissions on Wix and Wix Studio Custom roles within Wix Studio What are website permissions? Website permissions are settings that allow you to control who can make changes to your site, what changes they can make, and which pages they can edit.  For medium or large websites, different team members fulfill duties based on their expertise (e.g., SEOs, copywriters, graphic designers), but very few of those people need full access to the entire website. Website permissions allow you to tailor user access according to each individual teammate’s role (either within your organization or as an external contributor, like a digital marketing agency).  The benefits: Website permissions for scalability and safety Website permissions become more important as the number of people working on your website increases. When permissions are allocated correctly, they allow you to: Scale via collaboration  — When more people can access the site, all aspects of site management (e.g., SEO, design, UX) can become less burdensome because site owners can delegate tasks. This speeds up processes, enabling you to seize more opportunities (like running a last-minute campaign, getting the first-mover advantage on a trending search term , or even just keeping your structured data markup  updated). Many publishers will want to leverage expert freelancers or third-party contributors to write content for their sites. Editorial teams may find managing content from numerous freelancers very time-consuming, but giving freelancers full site access is risky. Blog permissions can streamline the editorial process while ensuring that only those with the authority to do so can hit the ‘publish’ button. Prevent accidental website changes  — For most businesses, website management requires effort from many individuals inside and outside of the organization. Whether due to unintended error or malicious intent, these users could make harmful changes if granted full site access. Instead, assigning various levels of website permissions mitigates risk for site owners and the brand, preventing users from making unauthorized changes to parts of the site they don’t have access to. For agencies, this can mean safeguarding work from accidental changes made by clients. Agencies invest significant time and resources into projects, so it’s vital to have guardrails that prevent clients from inadvertently altering critical elements. When agencies are building out a new site or new area of a site, they could turn off client access for these sections until they are approved to publish. Maintain security and data privacy  — Whether it’s payment details or site user information, you must protect sensitive data stored on your website. Website permissions allow you to enlist the help of team members and third parties while limiting access to this information. Website roles for every team member You’ll need to ensure that the right people have access to the right parts of your site. Let’s walk through the most common website roles and their associated permissions so you can better understand how to delegate access based on responsibilities. Common website roles  include: Site owner Admin Website manager Back office manager Content writer Role Description Permissions Site owner The highest permission level, granting complete control over the full site and dashboard.  Most website platforms only have one site owner, so it’s important to make sure you select the right person in your organization. I recommend giving site ownership to someone who you think will stay with the company long term.  Full website access Can invite website users and assign them roles Typically, this role cannot be duplicated or edited, but can be transferred Admin One step below site owners, admins have full access to the site and dashboard, including sensitive contact information and billing details. Full access (except admins cannot delete the site, transfer the site, or connect a domain) Can invite website users and assign them roles Website manager If you’re at an SEO agency working on a client site, you’re typically assigned the role of website manager, which gives you the permissions necessary to optimize the site. Can manage, publish, and edit content Cannot view billing information, or delete, duplicate, or transfer the site Back office manager This role is suitable for teammates that need to access the site dashboard (e.g., for reporting purposes) but do not need to make edits to the site. Can access the site dashboard, manage site settings and apps Cannot edit the site Blog roles This is a subcategory of roles that can include (but isn’t limited to): Blog editor Blog writer Guest writer Blog editors have full access to manage the blog (but not other areas of the site) Blog writers can only write and publish posts (they cannot create or manage categories) The guest writer role is excellent for guest posts, enabling users to write (but not publish) content. How to edit permissions on Wix and Wix Studio Wix and Wix Studio website owners have a variety of roles and permissions they can assign  to delegate website management (including, but not limited to, the roles mentioned above). To access these settings: On Wix On Wix Studio Choose your desired site. In the dashboard, go to Settings > Roles & Permissions . Go to Sites in your Wix Studio workspace. Hover over the Collaborators icon on the desired site. Click Manage Collaborators . Wix Studio gives digital agencies complete control over permissions and role management in the Permissions Per Page  section. In addition, there are Wix Studio Editor-specific permissions that help you build out and manage your website more effectively, including: View site: Can view all pages and preview the site before publishing Add comments: Can add comments on elements and pages and tag other people Edit site structure: Can add new pages, global sections, elements, and dynamic content Edit layout & design: Can use layout tools, edit breakpoints, and design assets Edit content: Can edit text, links, and media sources (e.g., images, videos) Edit code: Can write code and manage collections Manage page SEO: Can edit SEO and social share settings per page, and add alt text to media Edit site advanced: Can delete global sections and restore an older site version Custom roles within Wix Studio Because every organization is different, Wix Studio allows site owners and managers to create custom roles . These settings take security and collaboration to the next level, allowing you to fully customize what each user can access and change, down to the individual page.  For example, you could decide whether or not a partner agency can publish or edit blog posts, access billing information, manage the client kit, create social posts from the site, or implement custom code .  Permission to collaborate and grow your website Proper permission management is crucial for digital marketing teams aiming to balance collaboration, security, and scalability. By tailoring access levels based on each team member’s role, businesses—from large enterprises to digital agencies—can ensure that their websites are growing and bringing in revenue while minimizing risk. These permissions facilitate smoother teamwork among designers, content writers, managers, and other stakeholders by granting necessary access without compromising sensitive data or the website’s integrity. Wix Studio’s customizable permissions enhance both security and workflow efficiency, leading to more innovative, agile, and well-managed websites. Christine Zirnheld - Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Cypress North Christine Zirnheld is a senior digital marketing manager at Cypress North, specializing in PPC. As a host of the Marketing O'Clock podcast, she covers breaking PPC & SEO news stories with lots of sass. Twitter  | Linkedin