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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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