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but there are clear times when this is not ideal or practical (for example, if you have years of content that is out of date, or no longer relevant).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

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

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

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

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

Homepage SEO Insights Your homepage is the first thing that search engines crawl and is most often linked to—it’s the page that defines you as a brand. Join Wix’s Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter as they break down best practices to improve your homepage SEO in order to drive high-quality traffic to your site. Check out the webinar deck Read the Transcript In this webinar we cover: * Strategic ways to create an effective homepage * How to create homepage content that is right for your brand * Technical SEO tactics to enhance your entire site Meet your hosts: Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. He also hosts the SEO Rant Podcast and Edge of the Web’s news podcast. Twitter | Linkedin Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO & Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush and more. Twitter | Linkedin Transcript: Your Homepage SEO matters Speakers: Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding, Wix Crystal Carter, Head of SEO communications, Wix 00:00 Mordy: So let’s get going, welcome to Your homepage SEO matters. Your homepage is the most important page on your website. It's literally the core of your website, it gives so much power to your domain, which is why I’m so excited that we’re going to be talking about what works, what doesn’t work when thinking about SEO for your homepage. We’re thinking about mindsets and concepts and practical, hands-on tips to get your homepage up in the rankings. More traffic, more conversions, more revenue—all the great stuff we want out of our homepage. My name is Mordy Oberstein, I’m the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix and I’m joined by homie, Crystal Carter—the head of SEO communications here at Wix. Hey, how’s it going Crystal? 0:44 Crystal: Hi there, I’m, I’m great, I’m great. Are you, are you at home today? I hope everyone’s feeling at home. Me internet casa, su internet casa. I don’t. I don’t know. But yeah um welcome to everyone and we're going to see if we can get that chat fired up, um but yeah thank you all for joining us, super excited to talk about this. This is something that I love implementing as an SEO. Mordy and I are both really passionate about this but in slightly different, in slightly different ways. Um so, Mordy is very passionate about it from one angle and I, there’s, there’s, I’ve got a few other things which I, I obviously support everything Mordy’s saying. Um but yeah, between the two of us, we’ve got a lot of good, good perspectives on making sure your homepage is awesome. 1:32 Mordy: You’ll get like a real 360 degree perspective of your homepage by the time we’re done. Which is amazing. So, it’s really nice that we have different ways of thinking about the homepage. Um before we dive in, I have a little bit of a tease. Crystal and I are soon to be launching Wix’s own SEO podcast—called SERPs Up. Which will be launching in the next week or two. Keep an eye out for it on the Wix SEO learning hub, which is Wix.com/seo/learn. Of course, check out all the other great resources from webinars like this one—to blog posts and guides all about how you can get started doing SEO. As well as some really deep dives into what’s happening in the SEO world. Now there’s a tonne of great content out there so check out, again, the Wix SEO learning hub. Ok, now, quick note about the format. So I’m going to present, I have my take on the homepage and Crystal has her take on the homepage. So after I’m done presenting, Crystal will share her outlook on the homepage SEO. In the meantime, if you have questions, there’s a Q&A feature in your Zoom panel. Definitely throw in questions relevant to the, to your homepage and SEO and we’ll do our best, after we’re done presenting to go through as many questions as we possibly can. Just know that there are moderators as well, who will try to answer some questions along the way, so we will try to get through as many questions as possible. There’s no such thing as a stupid question, so please don’t feel shy about asking questions, we love questions. Throw them into the Q&A feature, inside of your Zoom panel. With that, I think we’re ready to go. 3:08 Crystal: I think so. I’m ready. Born ready 3:11 Mordy: So let’s do it. 3:14: Crystal: Born ready to talk about home pages 3:16: Mordy: Part one: Mindset matters most when it comes to your homepage. So your site is an entity, and as an entity, it needs identity. And this is the underlying concept of what I’m going to be talking about as it pertains to your homepage. And you’re all like “what!?”. I will do my best now to explain this to you, so by the time that you’re done, it will make sense that your site is an entity and you need to give it identity through the homepage. So let’s have at it. There is one ginormous mistake people make when it comes to their homepage. In fact I once did a study, I went through a thousand homepages—the only goal that I had was, do I understand what this site does by looking at their homepage. I found that 70% of these sites, 700 out of these 1,000 sites—I had no clue what they did. Zero. None. To give you a really far-out practical example of this—so I’m a big sports nut, and the Pittsburgh Steelers recently renamed their stadium from Heinz Field to Acrisure Stadium. One of the biggest sports podcasts in the US, the Rich Eisen Show, was talking about the renaming and he’s like “I don’t know what Acrisure is”. And he did exactly what this company wanted him to do, they spent millions upon millions of dollars to get the naming rights for an entire stadium, so a person like this could do this—he went to the homepage. Hey so, what do they do, this Acrisure? and he went to the homepage and he said “I have no idea”. So they spent million and millions and millions of dollars to rename the stadium in their name, and in the end, from this perspective, kinda pointless—I can’t invest, I can’t buy their product, I can’t do anything because I don’t know what they do. So you’re, this is the single most, you know, problematic thing that homepages face. I’ll give you a really practical example of this, so this website has, as their H1 “Looking to scale your technology to power your growth? Ten Mile Square solves the toughest issues in technology and accelerates digital transformation to succeed in a customer-centric world.”—I have no idea what that means. I have absolutely no clue what they do. As opposed to my favorite Wix site, well, not my favorite, but one of my favorites—ahh they’re all my favorites. Renegade Blitz is a Steelers blog and their headline or their H1 is “All the latest news, all the latest commentary, all things Steelers”—I get it, they’re a site that talks about news and analysis about the Pittsburgh Steelers. Really simple, really easy, really well done. If you take what happened here with these two sites, and you zoom out a little bit, conceptually, the problem here is a lack of identity. In this case, I go backwards in my slides by the way, it’s a thing. Um there’s a lack of identity, the problem facing the first website that I showed you was this, I just, there’s, no-one has any idea what they do. Not just users but also bots, just no idea what that means which is obviously problematic from multiple points of view. In other words, identity, having an identity is what it means to be an entity, your site, think of your website as a thing, because that’s how Google is thinking of it. It’s a thing, and is this thing relevant to the searches that people are doing. Well which searches is it relevant for, when is it relevant, when is it not relevant. The way Google understands if your site is relevant or not relevant is through the identity—it’s understanding what your site is all about and therefore it understands this thing, this entity, also known as your website, is or isn’t relevant for certain topics and all sorts of things. This is fundamentally how Google is looking at things—trying to understand, when it comes to your website, if you wanna break it all down, what Google’s trying to do is very much what a user is trying to do. Trying to understand who you are, what you do and what your site is all about. In other words, this entity that is a site, what is this thing all about. So think of your site as an entity, as a living, breathing, distinct thing that needs identity. And that identity is born through the homepage. Your homepage is like the agent of your website. It’s the, it’s the representative of your website, it’s your website’s senator or congressperson—I don’t know how to put it better than that. Everything you do, that identity that you create on your homepage, it’s creating identity for your entire domain. So when you think about creating your homepage, you have one job, and that’s to do what Acrisure didn’t do, that’s to create identity. It’s to create a very distinct and very clear and understandable identity for your entire website, that spills over to your entire website. And to that, when you create that identity, your homepage should be your guiding light for all the other pages on your website. So if your website sells widgets, well you shouldn’t have product pages about sprockets. The identity that you created on your homepage should spill over to your product pages. If you’re, if you create identity on the homepage, you set up who you are, what your site, what this domain is all about, and that’s X—don’t write about Y on your blog. And if you do, make sure to connect it back to X. Make sure you connect it back to the identity you created on your homepage—otherwise you’re going to create a schism between what you’ve established for the domain via the homepage, and all the other things that you’re doing on your pages. So let the homepage be your guiding light. Everything you do on your website should fit into the identity you establish on the homepage. Practically speaking, what does this mean? So I have a 3 step framework, and some, most of the time this works, sometimes it doesn’t work and sometimes there’s give-and-take. Crys is gonna show you some websites later where this many not be entirely applicable but as a general framework for most websites out there, or at least conceptually speaking, the homepage should do three things; you want it to say who you are, what problems you solve, you know, addressing the pain points of the user, and then how you go about solving those problems. Let me give you some examples, so, great website from Wix, they, they talk about “we develop award-winning sound design and licensing across all platforms” I know in a single sentence, which, by the way, you should do this in a single sentence, you should be able to do this in a single sentence. I know from this one sentence, this website creates sound assets and that’s super important for users to know, obviously and it’s important for Google to know and it’s important it’s done really quickly, just like that. Now, what problems do you solve, so Monday.com does an interesting job with this, and they could have done a little bit of a better job, which is why I pointed, why I wanted to use this example. So their, one of their H2s is “stay on track to reach your goals faster”. So where they did a good job was they realized the user has, what’s the pain point of the user? Someone who wants to buy our product, what is their problem? We have so many things to work on, I don’t know how to manage all this, and I’m getting off-task. I’m not being efficient with my work. So they said, on their homepage, here’s the problem we solve. We’re speaking right to your pain points—stay on track to reach your goals, faster. Where they might have done a little bit better in that H2 is the particular goals, at least for Google, you know; stay on track with your business goals, that sort of thing. To sort of refine that identity, but anyway, different conversation for a different time. They also, byt the way, this something you should consider doing for your homepage, they accent the H2, the header, with a couple of lines in the body text. What this does, obviously this speaks to users which is what you primarily should be doing on your homepage, and on your website in general—this contextualizes for Google the identity you’re establishing initially on the homepage as who you are. Okay, who you are. Great you give me one line, two lines about who you are, what you do. But talking about the problems you solve, gives Google more context to exactly what it is that the identity of this website isn’t what you do at the same time, speaks to users, so it’s like having your cake and eating it too. The next thing, how do you solve these problems, ok. It’s one thing to tell me the problems that I’m going to solve, but how do I actually solve them. By the way, and this is what’s great about this framework is it speaks to users, it speaks to Google and it speaks to conversions. Because once you’re saying ok, here’s who I am, here’s the problems I solve and here’s how I solve them—I’m going to click. Which is really what you want, you want them to dive deep into your website. So you should really be thinking about your website from an SEO point of view, from a user point of view and from a conversion point of view—and those all kind of overlap into one thing in my mind. Now so, let’s take an example from Lyft. So by, right by mark number one, that’s the H2—”Set your own hours. Earn on your own terms”. Underneath that, they’re telling you how they solve this problem. So they’re saying to andriver, let’s say who’s working for a taxi cab company, who doesn’t have any flexibility–”Hey, you need flexibility, we understand your problem, come to us.” Ok, well how do you solve this problem? Oh, get paid instantly, cash out your earnings whenever you want, now I understand how you solve this problem. So again, it speaks to users, it helps with conversion, but all of this is giving Google context of who you are and what you do so they understand what your domain is all about and they’re able to rank you for relevant things. So let’s go back to the idea of an entity having identity, because yes, who you are, the problems you solve and how you solve the problem is all great. But, there’s a certain, you have to frame it a certain way. Your identity, who you are, the problems you solve and what you do live sometimes in a larger context and you have to frame that identity a little bit and how you frame that identity, as all things in SEO, it depends. And if you don’t understand exactly what I’m talking about—I’m going to run through an example. Let’s take a health site, so what this health site did is they did step two, they talked about the problems they solved before they talked about who they are, and that’s fine. You can go out of order, you can play around with the framework. So for example here they said “the right care when you need it most. Talk to a doctor, therapist, or medical expert anywhere you are by phone or video”. They talked to the pain point first and then back to better explain who they are, but it’s very clear. I understand exactly who they are and the pain point is very clear—I wake up in the middle of the night, I’ve got a thing on my side, it hurts. I wanna call the doctor, I can’t call doctor weinberg because it’s 12 o’clock at night, I can call these people. So they’re speaking to a pain point and clearly identifying exactly what they do, right away, top of the fold, on the homepage. So now they’re probably going to go right into telling me how their product works and how they solve my problems. Nope, what this website does is they talk about, they show things like testimonials, awards that they’re won, reviews, they go through their doctors and how they’re board certified and in the top 5% of medical specialists in the whole world, and so forth. In other words, they’re trying to build trust because if you’re a medical website—yes you need to tell people who you are, yes you need to tell me the problems that you solve, yes you need to solve those problems, but if I can’t trust you all of that is meaningless. So for a health site, you have to frame that identity. That identity exists within a larger framework, within a larger context—which is trustworthiness. So it’s one thing to create that identity, establish who you are and what you do. But you have to think about the larger context that your site lives in and how to frame that identity in the case of a health website, that’s trustworthiness. Which may not be important for a gossip website, do I really care how trustworthy they are? Or do I care how exciting and novel the information is—trustworthy, not my main concern. What I really care about is how the Kardahians are doing. So how do you know how to frame that identity? I think it’s pretty easy to figure out how to say who you are and what you do and the problems that you solve, but framing that identity and giving it some context—how exactly do I do that for a health site. Or maybe I’m not a health site. If you’re not sure, you should go to the SERP, go to Google. Literally what I did here, I typed in online doctor, I took the first website that ranked and I, gonna go back in my slides like I always do, saw that they talk about their doctors and their awards and all this and I’m like “Oh, they’re framing their identity in terms of trustworthiness”—which is evidently working. It makes logical sense, it’s what Google would want, it’s what users would want, it’s what everybody wants. So to sum it up very quickly, the homepage; it’s where you build identity for the entire domain, for people and for bots (meaning Google). Part of identity is how you frame it, so in the case of a health site for trustworthiness. It’s gonna be the same for anything like that, like a financial website, anything where trust is a major component, frame that identity and trust. But again if you’re not sure for your particular niche, look at what’s going on in the Google search, on the Google SERP, the results page. Type in a query that’s relevant to your niche, look at the top ranking sites, see how they’re framing their identity. Don’t just copy what they’re doing—think how you can do it differently and better. I don’t advocate for copying, I think you should be unique and different in all cases and again, your homepage is what guides the rest of your website. The identity you create on your homepage spills over onto the other pages and it should sort of reign you in, keep you focused on what you should be focused on, keep you on topic, keep that identity aligned across product pages, blog pages, whatever you’re doing. Let the homepage be your guide. And that’s all I got, so I’m gonna hand it over to you—Crystal Carter. 16:54 Crystal: Thank you so much Mordy, and I think that um that, that you know, a lot of the stuff you’re talking about there is, is applicable to, to most, most businesses and I’ve definitely been working with clients where I couldn’t figure out what they did. We’d have somebody come to us and they’re like “oh yeah we’d like help with your SEO?” and I look at them and I’m like “I don’t, I don’t understand. I don’t know what you do”. Um and that, that, the example of Acrisure, is that what you said? 17:21 Mordy: Um Acrisure, Acrisure yeah. 17:23 Crystal: Acrisure, yeah 17:24 Mordy: Yeah, it’s a tongue twister too. I don’t think, yeah 17:26 Crystal: It’s such a big amount of money to spend for people who don’t know, don’t know what you’re doing. Oh, somebody asked: what does SERP mean? Search engine results pages, thanks very much Adrianna. Lovely. Ok, so Mordy has been talking about some of the concepts behind, um, behind helping your homepage to perform. Um I’m gonna talk about some of the hands-on things you can do, on Wix and generally, um, to, to implement some of that stuff. Um so he’s talked about entities, he’s talked about lots of different stuff. I’m just going to share my screen, um. There we go, so people don’t have to see all my tabs, I’ve only got one tab open, I promise. Um, lovely. Ok, so we’re going to get into part two, so in this section I’m gonna talk about um homepage examples and ehm some different types and some different tactics. So um Mordy went through, went through a few, a few. I’m gonna go through a few more. I’ve got five um homepage examples that are sort of standard homepage examples from some big, big brands. Then I’ve got a couple of brands that are from Wix examples um to, to see how and why people make the homepage decisions that they do. Then we’ll go into how we can implement those and I’ll give you some practical examples of the things you can do on Wix and that you can do generally for SEO. Um so, first things first, the first one we’re gonna talk about, these are names that I’ve given them, so the first one is the funneler. And this is, this is, these are my, my names, so the funneler is essentially, this is a website that's, that’s, that’s not really, this is a homepage that’s designed to not really be the destination. This is a, this is a homepage that essentially brings people off to other places. Virgin is a great example of this because Virgin does so much stuff. Um so Virgin.com, their homepage essentially serves as a, as a vessel for sending, and a funneler for sending people to Virgin Galactic and Virgin Phones and Virgin Holidays and Virgin all of the various different things that they do. This one, so this one, this one is very interesting um so I’ve looked at a few different ones. What was really interesting about Virgin in-particular was this one had the highest percentage of backlinks, this one had the highest percentage of backlinks to the webpage, or going to the webpage overall. Which I thought was very interesting and the reason why, and I think is because when you take this approach of a funneler approach, which actually fits with their brand. To what, more to Mordy’s point, um is, is because Virgin is sort of an evergreen brand that applies itself to lots of things, people expect them to be doing lots of things. So when people go to Virgin.com, they’ll find whatever other Virgin thing that they’re doing. So it works well for them to have all of their backlinks go to that. Um and when we think about smaller businesses, this is a bit, this is an example from a Wix site, which I say it’s a smaller business, to be fair it’s ranking for 2,000 keywords. Um and they are, they are, they are funneling, not to the different businesses within their business but they’re funneling people to their biggest products. So they know that they have a few, they have a few sort of rockstar products and they don’t want people to have to go through the website to find all of those things. They want people who have heard about their brand to be funneled directly to that, to that rock star product. So there’s a few different tactics that you can use for this. So for instance you can use, so, so you can do pointing people to high-value content using buttons, UX segmentation using big pictures or, or um different, different color schemes or that sort of thing. You can also think about content priority, so particularly in mobile you sort of, you tend to have one column and so you put the things that are most important on the top, then that, then that can help as well. Um and the other, when you’re thinking about optimizing, when you’re funneling, when you’re creating these funnels, these are really good places to add keywords and the links for these things are always really good places to add keywords. And you can see that this is also playing out into, into the search. So Google is understanding that this is a very important page for this site and they’re adding it as an indexed page on the, on the search engine results page. The SERP. Additionally, you’re gonna want to take those funnels and add them into the, you know, your core funnels and add them into your page title and your meta description—so that when people are seeing on the server and they see your, and they see this bit um, this is your page title, you can see that they know that “planners” are really important for them so “planners” is here, “letters” is also here and then they’ve got the “planner” here. So you can funnel people before they get to the page and also when they’re on the page. Another one, is the converter, again these are my terms, um. So a converter is essentially a do-thingsey-site, this is a site where you’re, you’re trying to make sure that people can do something. Um so that might be that they want to sign in to something, register or buy, or buy so a lot of ecommerce sites are focused on making sure people can buy whatever they need. Sometimes there are sites where they have like a percentage difference calculator that I use a lot. And that page, that homepage is like “we have a calculator” you don’t have to look for it, it’s right there. I’m just looking at sites—this one was interesting because this had the highest percentage of traffic going to the homepage. So this site had 21% of it’s traffic going to the homepage, and the reason why that works for them is so they can get their business goals achieved with this particular business. And it also aligns with their business cause they’re business is, it’s an app so people do things on the app. So if they can get to the homepage and they can do things and that also works for them. For other small, for other businesses, this works for lots of businesses. This is a Wix site that’s ranking, um, that’s ranking locally for 600 keywords and it is, it is a limousine service and as soon as you go to the homepage, you can book the limousine. You don’t have to find where the booking page is, the top of the page has the booking, the place where you can book the limousine and you can get your limousine booked in and straight and ready to go. So again, things like forms, things like a chatbot or a chat can also help with this if you have a site that’s, if you want to make more dynamic. That you want people to be able to be, have more function, to be able to do more things on the site, then maybe adding a chat might be a thing that might, might be an easy way to just, to do that. Um and also purchase points. Um so, you’re gonna want to think about, with regards to optimizations the forms are great but if you don’t put a header for the form, then sometimes it won’t perform this well for SEO. So if you have, if you have um, this one for instance is going like “rental car” like “premium car rental in Hanoi” so that’s the header for that form um which is below. And also you’ve got like a little summary of what that form is about and also has some keywords in there. Um and so you’re gonna want to support all of these sort of elements with keywords like buy, shop, book—that sort of thing. And you’re gonna want to add that into your copy and your meta descriptions and that sort of thing. And then I also got a point in the sentence there where it says “use the conversion points to link to deeper content” and what I mean by that is that in the summary, if somebody isn’t quite ready to convert, add a little link that houses, that lets them know more. Um as well, this could be a good line link and this can also help to sort of give, give people like people who are still on the fence, a little more detail before they jump. Next is the informer which is not the 90s song, but is the London Stock Exchange. Um so London Stock Exchange uh, the informer. Again, so this is one that, that serves to get people information lots. Lots of information very quickly. So um London Stock Exchange is a great example because they literally have a stock ticker that tells people exactly what’s going on. And this is something that I’ve seen on news websites uh for you know, for the latest stories this is something that you also see for a local news website. Or local websites where they may have the weather report or um ski resorts where they have the ski report or that, that sort of thing where people are known for their knowledge. They’re known, known for giving, giving up-to-date knowledge and they’re putting out a lot of content. Of the sites that I surveyed, this one was really interesting because this one had the most internal links. This site has 378 internal links on the homepage, that’s a lot of links. Um and this helps with a lot, this, this helps with um indexing, which I’ll get into, which I’ll get into later. But with regards to, to um smaller sites who don’t have big budgets like, like the London Stock Exchange. If you’re looking to, to surface more content which is essentially what all of these links are doing, then you can add in a few different elements. So this is a site, um site called “All the food”, which is based in Dublin and it’s a food website which ranks for 2,700 keywords. Including “salad Dublin” which I think is quite impressive. Um so, they post about 4 new posts a day, on average and they, they’re helping to surface all of this new content using a few different methods. So for instance, they’re, they’re using blog feeds, um they’re adding strategic, strategic internal links to some of their best content on the homepage, and also content that lead, that leads to other content. Um they’re also, they’re also um using headers for their, for their information so you know “this week’s top stories”. That’s a header that helps tell Google that this is new content, this is the feed underneath it. And if you have a content, if you have a website that’s got lots of content, for instance, that, job websites are a good one for this. Or um new people who have lots of new products all the time, if you’re posting loads of blogs um and that sort of thing. Then you’re gonna want to think about making sure that you’re absolutely submitted with Google Search Console and also with bing. I’m a big fan of Bing—it only takes one click, if you’re already in Google Search Console it only takes one click so it’s really worth doing. Make sure you make use of your RSS and also thinking about your link, link hierarchy and, and priority. Priority is like, where it is on the page and when we talk about link hierarchy, think, make sure that you’re linking to pages that have good links within them. So that you’re linking to that page that has more links within it when you’re thinking about hierarchy. So the next one is the billboard, I’m always fascinated, I’ve always been fascinated by Zara’s um Zara’s SEO. Um the, this looks like it’s just a website with a big picture on it but actually when I looked at this, this has 96 internal links on it. Um the other thing that’s interesting is, when I was looking through it, we, in our last webinar, last month, we talked with Marcus Tober all about keyword intent. And there’s lots of different types of keyword intent. Most of the websites I’ve looked at today, their intent for most of the people going to the website was informational—they wanted visitors to learn more about the brand. This website was navigational, that is because Zara is all around the world. They have lots and lots of different types of websites and they’re using their homepage to navigate, to help people navigate to Zara in French and you know in, in Trinidad and Tobago for instance. And so they’re, they’re essentially helping people to, to, to go to a certain place. This is something that I would, I would say is not, if this is your own, the only thing you have in homepage, do use this very carefully—unless you are a giant brand like Zara. You can do sort of a little bit of a mix and match for instance. But I would say this is the sort of domain of somebody who, who can, can afford to not have any words on their homepage. You can do a little bit of a mix on this, so for instance this is the potter trail, which is a Wix site. They do Harry Potter, um tours in Edinburgh and I’d really love to go. Um and, and they do the billboard at the top of the page. So what they are doing is they’re using this to focus, so they have the “Book Here” button, they’re using it to focus there. Um they’ve got their, their menu is sort of blended in there but they’re looking for people to focus on the, on the “Book Here”. Now if you are using the billboard, um, the billboard method, that you’ve got those images marked up. It’s also really important that you’ve got clean composition um and that you got, you know, any dropdown that you’re maybe making use of dropdown menus, so that you still have a menu. Maybe if you’re going for a minimalist design but, but that it’s still that the menu, the menu is dropped down. Um so again, think about structured data for your images, think about image uh attributes and think, you can think about well linked dropdown menus. So the next one I want to think about is the feeder. Again, these are my names so um. This is fandom. Fandom is very interesting because fandom was actually the website with the least traffic leading to it, but that’s because fandom isn’t quite a homepage. They’ve been, for fandom, people create their own Wikis of different, of different things. So somebody‘s really into “Game of Thrones” and they’ll create a sort of “Game of Thrones” subpage, um within, within fandom. But essentially their homepage acts as a directory so they’re directing people to lots of different, lots of other wikis within this sort of fandom um, website um, hierarchy. And they’re and, and they’re surfacing lots of different content under lots of different, lots of different ways. We’ve got a big search, search bar there and that’s what they’re doing. Um “YouTube” is a really good example of this um “Apartment Therapy” is another good one um newspapers do a lot of this. And they’re making sure, they’re making sure that this, they’re sending people to lots of different um parts of the site using lots of different methods including feeds, including category stats and that sort of thing. Um, for this sort of thing this is a brand called Evolve. They’re using, they’re using a mega menu to do, to do a very similar, similar thing. Again this is another Wix site. If you’re looking to, if you have a lot of content on your, on your website then thinking about how you can surface lots of that via the homepage is important. A mega menu actually can do a lot for you um, uh to this, to this point um, as long as it makes sense um. So make sure that you’re thinking about surfacing content as it’s created, um and that you’re thinking, um very consciously about your internal linking. Um speaking of our webinars, we have another webinar next month about, all about internal linking. So do tune in for that and make sure you’ve got good headers and keyword copy for um, for your feeds, your collections and all of that sort of stuff. So to summarize, we think about the five, the five things. Mordy is smiling at my names. So we’ve got the funneler, the converter, the informer, the billboard and the feeder and they all kind of, they all kind of do different things. You can use a sort of combination of a few things um, eh eh, at a time, um but generally, these are the, this is the sort of top five of type, of the types of um homepage, homepages that I tend to, tend to be interested in. Um so, I’m gonna go through, if I can just pause, I know there’s a lot of information and we’re gonna go through when we should use, when we should use some of these elements. So I built a little site all about women in space because I love women in space. Um I’m a big fan but I have this, this sits next to my desk, all the time. It’s Sally Ride and Mae Jemison. Anyway, um, you might notice it on the website later on. So this website is using a few, a combination of a few of those elements we were talking about. So, for instance the “women in space and astronomy learn and shop”. That’s sort of a billboard sort of style there. Um but I’ve also used, used a few other elements. So, for instance I’ve got a little bit of the feeder thing in and I’ve got lots and lots of different links to, to lots of it and I’ve got a few different dropdowns from the menu. This, this site that I built only has about 36 pages but there are 38 links on this page. Um so we’re basically making sure that everything is linked across the homepage. Um and then across the middle I’ve got a sort of a little bit of a funneler sort of, sort of activity. So for instance for my keyword research I know that a lot of people are searching for, searching for terms like “women in space”, “female astronomers in NASA” that sort of thing. So I’ve got content that’s dedicated to that and it’s filtered for that so if people arrive on my website and they want to know about those, those few things, they don’t need to look for it, it’s right there and it’s really simple. Um and to what Mordy was talking about you know, with, with making sure that people know what they’re looking at when they get to your site. I’ve tried to make sure that that’s very clear as well. So you know, it’s women in space, you can learn things, you can buy stuff. You know, we’re really into women in space here. Um thanks. So, think about your internal links, think about your menu, when you’re thinking, when you’re putting together your content. Um and for the backend of this, we talked about how your site is an entity. So Mordy talked a lot about your website being an entity and there’s a few different ways that you can help that, help people to understand that. So, within Wix we have lots of different tools and this, this deck will be shared. All of these things link to information about different things on Wix and how you can find these things on Wix. So um just hang in there with me. So this is your social share, so this allows you to, you can, that I replicated the what, the um banner looked like, the homepage and I added that into, to the, the OG from the OG, from the open graph. Um for the, for the home page you can also see that I’ve, I’ve got those funnel information, so learn and shop in the page title and I also got, you know, check out our biographies, learn more et cetera—in the meta description. And then, when and then when we have the page title then um we also have the site name, which I’ll get into that in a moment, that also helps to, to Google to understand what, what all of these things are and all of these things feed into, to the homepage. Further down the homepage we get into like a little, a few other elements so this is more like this sort of informer element like making sure we got a feed there. So this particular part here, this biographies area this is a, this is a blog feed. So this is everytime I make a new content, everytime I make a new blog, it automatically goes on the homepage which means that it gets crawled very quickly. So as soon as I make it, not only is it on this blog page but it’s also on the homepage and we said that Google’s visiting the homepage once people are visiting the homepage and it helps that content to get indexed, it helps it to get ranked. And if you have set it up as a feed using you know, based on the different categories which are within Wix then that helps you to that helps you to, to make sure that that’s automated—you don’t even have to remember it. Um and then I’ve got an image here and the images you can also use images image tags, I talked about the big banner and needing to have structured data and needing to have information about it. You can add image attributes to also add some of those keywords and, and make sort of those things that people don’t know—who um Mae Jemison was, the first black woman in space um and she was on the space shuttle Endeavor. So I’m adding those, those, that information in there and Google will be able to understand that, that is on the homepage for my page about women in space and they can connect all of those, all of that information. And then moving down to the sort of converter elements, um further down the page now because my, my shop there, my thing that I made—our shop isn’t the main thing that we do, it’s a little add-on, so I put that further down the page. If my, if the main thing that I was doing was having a shop, I’d have this much higher up the page. Um but because it’s, it’s not, it’s like, it’s a nice to have, not a, not a, not any sort of deal breaker if I put it further down the page. And then we’ve added in some of those elements where we have um “visitor shop” which is a CTA. “Buy books” that’s another active word, telling people that this is the section of the website where you can do things. Um so, so I’ve added those in and there’s other ways that you can add this in as well, you can add in uh, uh a gallery, you, and again you can do a similar thing with the feed—so for instance, if you have a lot of content or a lot of products that are changing over, you can make sure that those things are, that the new products are coming through first. Or seasonal products are coming through first and that sort of thing can help with, with you as well. And then getting down further, we can also see that we have, and then I’ve done the filter thing again, um to some of the other content that I think is, its important but maybe isn’t necessarily the like sort of the big, big picture stuff. Um so I’ve got a, a review section, I’ve got the “find”, “find activities”. I also have this, this area “Name, Address, Phone Number”, um and the mega menu. Now the “Name, Address, Phone Number” is super important for, particularly for local businesses, because it allows you to get schema markup, for instance in our business info area within Wix, there’s a link to this. Once you fill this in, this gives you the opportunity to have a local business schema markup and Mordy was talking about being an entity, this is how you, this is one of the ways that you define yourself as an entity—schema markup helps Google to understand you as an entity and as a part of the knowledge graph and so, it’s not just a conceptual thing there is also a tangible way that you can, that you can add, add this to your site. And then when you add your “Name, Address, Phone Number” on the footer of your website, this also helps as well. Now this all seems like a lot, don’t worry, because a lot of this stuff is covered in your Wix SEO checklist, um SEO Setup Checklist. And if you go through all of this, all of this um, there’s things that you’ll notice—the first section is all about the homepage. And one of the reasons why the first section is all about your homepage is because, when it says “connect to Google Search Console”—so Google and Wix have an integration and Wix will index your homepage on Google as soon as you connect to, to um, as soon as you connect um via the setup checklist. And I’ve done this, and I, I was like “this isn’t gonna”, “this isn’t gonna be that great”. But on my, on my personal site, I did, I did this and I set up my site and I, I, before I connected it, on the second, second of March, I was not, it was not, it was not on Google. Then within two days it was absolutely on Google. I’m sorry, this is blurry because this is my screenshot that I took in March and wasn’t expecting to use it for a website, or for a, for a, um presentation. But yeah, um because I did, because I did the internal linking all the way through, even though it was just indexing my web, my homepage, it also pulled through a few more, a few more of my pages as well and I mean four might not seem much but I only had twelve pages on the site overall so that’s pulling through, you know, a good chunk of the website um, going, going through. So I think that’s essentially my, my roundup. I’ve gone a little bit over, I’m sorry Mordy, um but if you want to know more about this, I’ve got a sort of, this deck will be shared after so Mordy’s end. Um, as will the transcript and all the resources and the deck includes a few more resources for things like header tags, which we talked about, meta descriptions, search console, also a link to the SEO guide and yeah. That’s, that’s my, my, that’s me on homepages. 39:34 Mordy: So much there and there’s so many different types of homepages that you really can like, really have fun with it. I mean, stay, stay in the boundaries of what you’re trying to do and don’t loose focus. But you can really get creative with the homepage. Like don’t be, like if you listen to the first part of the presentation, please, I’m not saying you shouldn’t get creative with the homepage—get creative with it. 100% there’s some really cool stuff you can do there. 39:54 Crystal: Yeah, I think absolutely and I think, like, I think, really think about it fro your users perspective. I think that’s so important and think about, think about what are the questions that people always ask you and if somebody comes to your website and they go “I don’t understand what you do” listen to them. Listen to them. If they come to, if they come to your homepage and they, and they say “yeah” and they can’t, and they and they still don’t understand or they’re still asking you certain questions. You know, add an FAQ, um you know, if you, if you’re, if people, if people can’t find you know, a certain part of the website, but they always ask—add that to the website as well. That can help your customer service team, that can help, you know reduce calls, lots of, lots of different things so. So um, and I think was was interesting is I, I remember I saw your deck, um and when I was going through, through um, I was going through my page because I built this, I was like “oh yeah, I’m gonna make a little homepage, um for this, for this project” and then I saw your deck and I was like “ok, I can probably do better with that”. 40:50 Mordy: Um so, speaking of questions let’s, there’s a, an abundance of questions, uh really good questions. We’re gonna try to get to as many as we can in the next nineteen minutes. By the way, I apologize, I remiss, I should have mentioned this earlier—we are recording this. You will get the recording automatically through email so do not worry. You get the slides, you get the recording, you get the links for all the ancillary information that we spoke about, it’s coming right at you, directly through email. I apologize for not mentioning that at the beginning of the webinar. Um ok, allright, are we ready Crystal? 41:23 Crystal: Yeah. 41:25 Mordy: Allright. Is there any ruler just a good SEO practice to add, and there’s a few questions around this, add menu items on the footer too—meaning add links to the footer of your homepage. 41:34: Crystal: Yeah absolutely you should add menu links to your footer. I absolutely think you should add menu links to the footer, um you should certainly have a T&Cs bar, that’s really good for users it’s also really good for Google. So I had a client before where they didn’t have like their shipping and returns and like, privacy and all that sort of stuff and didn’t have it on the footer and we added it to the footer and we saw a boost straight away um, it’s a trust signal. 41:57: Mordy: So when you added internal links, and there have been a bunch of questions around internal links. What we mean by internal links, by the way, is your linking to another page on your website. So you’re linking say on your homepage to your about page or your linking to a product page or a blog post, whatever it may be. So when you for example link in a blog post to your homepage, that link to the homepage, that you add, is called an internal link and they’re very important for SEO. One is, they help Google understand what’s on your website, also when Google crawls and comes to your website, they come to your homepage and you set it up through the SEO setup checklist in the, in the, in the Wix dashboard. And Google instantly indexes your homepage. Once they’re there, and they see the other links on your page, they go “Oh, there’s a bunch of other links on your page” and they find pages from links on a page. So most definitely, it’s just bouncing along. Definitely, I do it on all my sites. Include the links in the footer, absolutely do that. It also helps give the user a general sense of “Oh, here’s everything that’s on the website”—so it’s good for users and good for bots, is the philosophy of all things SEO. Good for users, good for bots. 43:03 Crystal: Yeah, absolutely. And I think um, it’s the footer, the footers are a really good place to put like un-sexy links. Like um links that are, that, that are, that everybodys going to, but like maybe they’re not like, maybe they’re not, they don’t fit in like in a lovely, lovely place in the menu. Um so that’s, but yeah 43:21 Mordy: Exactly yeah those, those you know, the on-demand out kind of thing—good for the footer. Um Nicole Holst asks: I am a copywriter and usually write 600/800 words for a homepage, for clients for SEO—which is what I have learned is recommend, which I often think is too long. How do you balance keyword optimization vs length—which is a great question. 43:41 Crystal: So, so, you’re more of the content bot but in my general experience, the length of the, the length of the, the, the copy on the homepage doesn’t necessarily matter Um the quality of the copy on the homepage does matter and I would also say that headers on the homepage are really, really important. So, you know H1s, H2s, H3s, H4s, you know, get in there and make sure you, make sure that you, that you’re breaking things down um, so that, so that Google can sort of skim-read what, what you do and so that you’re, you’re adding that value to it. Not just from a, a you know, a word count point of view but from a sort of information point of view. 44:27 Mordy: I couldn’t agree with you, possibly any more, a million percent. You know, my, my SEO advice, of all SEO advice is don’t worry about SEO. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but worry about your users. So, if you’re from a content perspective that we’re talking about. If you’re writing for SEO and there’s a bunch of questions about keywords like how many keywords, do I know where to put—don’t, don’t worry about it. Write naturally for the user, think about the user where their pain points are, really empathize with the user. Understand what they need, their life context and build a page for them. So if you’re thinking about your homepage, what information do, does your user need, how much of it do they need—to have on the homepage for them to be satisfied to understand. And keep in mind the purpose of the homepage is to understand who you are and what you do, how much do they need, and do that. I’ll give you an exam, a way of thinking about Google, outside of the homepage but in general. My cousin used to be the head of SEO at Surveymonkey and he used to live in Palo Alto, and the, Google used to test, I wonder if they still do, their self driving cars. And he said, the car was able to detect, whether or not a person ran out or a squirrel. If, if Google can understand whether this thing that ran out in-front of their self-driving car is a person or a squirrel, they can understand what you’re writing on your page, assuming you’re writing in a comprehensive, natural way. In other words, don’t worry about keywords. Worry about writing naturally to your users, because what words are you going to use other than the words that really describe what you’re going to say. 45:54 Crystal: Absolutely. And I think, somebody asked what are H1s, H2s, H3s, H4s. So an H2 is a header tag, there’s a link in my deck about what header tags are. Um it’s on our Wix SEO hub so there’s a whole link all about it. Um, H1, H1 is like a headline so, so, so, so, like if you were to go “Food”, “fruit”, “oranges”, “clementines”, like “orange wedges”, like that sort of thing—sort of as you get further down, it sort of um, sort of narrowing into, to the, to the sort of subsections of what it, what is is. Um and, and if you have, let’s say you have a website that is selling fruit, um, so you’re gonna want to break those down. So you might say like “we have food”, “we have fruit”. “We have apples”, “we have oranges”, “we have bananas”, like and you wanna bring, and, and you know “we have it for delivery” and that sort of thing. So think about it that way, how you parse the information because that’s how Google is thinking of it. And somebody else asked about how to use it on Wix. And the thing, there’s a thing that says paragraph, you click on that and then there you see the dropdown for the thing. 46:58 Mordy: Yeah and the editor is right there, in the blog there’s a dropdown menu for headers. And the way I think about it, I think about it, a book report, I’m an old teacher, think about a book report you wrote when you were around eighth grade, ninth grade. Probably not, um. You have the, the title, you know, my summary of, you know, of Mice and Men by Mordy Oberstein right there, that’s your H1. Then you have, you know, plot, that’s your H2 and then you have character, that’s another H2, then you have a little header for each character you know, like the mouse, Lenny, right. That would be a H3, that exists within the larger paragraph of characters. I don’t know if that makes it any clearer or not. 47:36 Crystal: No it’s good, let’s keep on with more questions. 47:38 Mordy: Um ok. Eh David Hook asked—”How do I display my resume experience on my homepage or focus on what the customer wants to buy?”. So, and there have been a few questions about this, how do I, how do I include information about who I am, or doesn’t it sound like I’m at, I should be putting my about page on my homepage. So we can ask the question, what's the difference between a homepage and an about page. Those sort of questions, let’s answer it. 48:04 Crystal: Yeah, so I would say, so as I said in the thing, you can have a headline that’s like, you know “Mordy Oberstein, book reviewer”. Um and you can sort of have, you know, like “Mordy Oberstein”, like you know, like your elevator pitch. Like what would go on your business card for instance. Like “I reviewed all the books, I know so many books, books are great”. Um, you know and, and everybody, you know, “everybody thinks I know lots and lots of things about books” link. Like, so, so, so you have your headline for what that is, then you have your link to an about page, that goes into all of the details with all of the stuff about who you are. Unless you have a one-pager, in which case fine, just go for it. But if you have, if you have a wider site, then absolutely have a little summary, like a little taster, get people interested so they wanna know more, and then have a link out to the big stuff. Also have the so you know, it’s basically a TLDR homepage. Um it’s really good to have yourself on your homepage though, because with this dealer markup stuff, you can add this to your homepage, and get a markup about your homepage, on your homepage. 49:04 Mordy: So Laya asks, I love this question—how do you manage 83 different internal stakeholders, who all want their part of the business to be mentioned on the homepage ranked for their own terms. Such a great question. 49:19 Crystal: Yeah. Do you want to start with that one there Mordy? 49:22 Mordy: Ok, so, um, look obviously you’re dealing with a larger team and everybody has their own, I guess has their own claim on the website for a lack of a better word. So for you kinda wanna, from my general experience, you kinda wanna show how your agenda makes their agenda better. So for example, look, if you wanna have your part of the business on the homepage, or your part, obviously it’s too much. The homepage won’t rank, if the homepage won’t rank, pretty much nothing else on the homepage, is probably going to rank either so no one will see all of the things that you’re doing. So everything you are trying to do, which is get more visibility to show how awesome you are, which is by the way, let’s be team players, believe in every site. You’re not gonna get that visibility, because if you do, what you wanna do, what you’re advocating for on the homepage, we won’t rank and no one will see anything. What you should do is bring in someone who knows a little about CRO, conversion rate optimization—”oh your little aspect of the business, how can we work in a CTA or a link in the footer and get clicks to there, so once we get the homepage ranking, we’ll funnel them into your little section of the business, so you’ll get that visibility and everybody will love you”. 50:29 Crystal: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s a great answer. It’s great. 50:34 Mordy: I feel I have to bring up this question—Saskia Jones asks “how do I solve low text to HTML ratio on homepage?”. 50:47 So I’ve seen a few people in the chat saying that they’re do, doing a lot of photography and stuff. And I think that, I think that with this, Schema Markup is your friend. Absolutely. Um, so, for instance, and, and you, all those, all those image attributes for your images and you know they’re, they’re your friends. If you can afford, oh and also a dropdown menu. So, so if you have a dropdown menu, you like make sure that you got, your dropdown menu has all of the sort of important links through it and that your homepage isn’t just uh the thing. So essentially when you’re saying a little text, to you’ll probably have, like you know, the billboard style menu that we were saying. And if you look at the, the Zara example, which seemed quite extreme, they, they had tons of links on there. They had tons and tons of links on that page but it was one big ol’ picture. Um so, so, I think, think about your menu and use all the image attributes that you, that you have. And with schema markup, you can do a lot for your homepage, so you can do, you can get into the, who the publisher is. So for instance, lets say your photographer Mordy Oberstein is both a book reviewer and a photographer, so, so he’s an amazing wedding photographer, very busy. And um, so let’s say you know, this is a website that was made by Mordy, um and he is the photographer and he studied here and he’s an alumni of this and he did this and he is this and he is that, blah, blah, blah. And you know, same as this social feed and that social feed you can add all of that schema markup into there, um and that’s totally fine on your homepage, and that will help Google to understand who you are. Um as well. The other thing that I would say is, particularly if you’re going for a billboard type site, where you don’t have a lot of, where you have a lot of image, but not a lot of text, is to make sure you’re supporting that site with links. So make sure that you’re supporting that with, with, and I don’t necessarily mean like “oh please can I have a backlink” kind of links. I mean like making sure that you’re supporting it with like, that you’ve, that you’ve got yourself onto like photography directories and um, and that you have um you know, you’ve claimed all of your social profiles and that you have those all going to your homepage. So that people can have lots of signals of lots of information that say that, that you know, what your homepage is about and, and what you do. 52:58 Mordy: So I’ll give you a little bit of, well, I have a question for you because I saw just pop up, just now—what is schema markup? 53:03 Crystal: Schema markup is my favorite thing, essentially it turns your website into a grid. Or like into a spreadsheet. It’s like the equivalent of like um, and when, when they do that Google can mix and match all the different parts of your website and serve it on the SERP. The search engine results page, however they want. So they do this a lot with recipe websites. So it’s essentially like if I said, like, um this is, this is a drink and it’s a long island iced tea, right and like let's say my website is the long island iced tea—um what schema markup does is that instead of saying that your website is a long island iced tea, your website is a little bit of bourbon, a little bit of vodka, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that, so you can take the coca-cola and the vodka and make one thing, and you can take this and take that and make another thing, and it’s all still part of the same thing, but it breaks it up into little parts so that Google can, so that Google can configure it on the SERP, the way that they want. The way that works for their users. 53:59 Mordy: Yeah and so it’s basically giving Google some code, which, by the way is, if you’re using Wix, which you are. Um in the SEO panel, in the settings for a page, you’ll see a field for advanced SEO or a tab for advanced SEO, in there is a field where you can paste in structured data markup code, you’ll see a link to a generator where you just type in what you want and it’ll create the code for you, you just paste it in on many of your pages, we’re doing it for you automatically, your product pages, event pages, those sort of things are doing it for you there. Although you can edit and customize there as well. Basically you’re giving Google some code that makes it really, really easy for them to understand exactly what are the elements that are on this page, then Google can manipulate this information to do some pretty cool things with your website, with your page, on their results page. So I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Google and you’ve seen the little stars that show up, on, inside our in an organic result, how are those little you know, yellow stars get there, that was through structured data markup. But to go back to the low text to code question, I’ll give you a little bit of an inside scoop here. So it’s one of the errors that many, many SEO tools will show up when you run a site audit, so they’ll say “oh, it’s bad that you have a lot of code but not a lot of text” I used to work for one such tool, and I will tell you, I’ve had many conversations with Google about this, where they ask “can you please stop showing that?”. Because it’s not a real thing. So, Google does that, that error, that warning that you see inside of your SEO tools sometimes saying “low code to text, HTML to text ratio”, I’m botching the name, um, because it’s so painful for me. Is, is not a real thing, please stop showing it. And you get, these conversations didn’t take place in private, they’re on Twitter, you can see them. And I advocated to said company “please, Google, they’re right, it’s not a real thing please, you can ignore that”. 55:51 Crystal: What I would say, those things are useful for cause I think like, screening does a, does a word count for you as well. Again, word count isn’t necessarily important. Thank you Mordy. I would say that they’re useful if you’re trying to do a big audit and you’re trying to figure out like, if you have some like empty pages, I’ve done some like audits on like eCommerce sites, where like, they just had like not like “green shoes” or something and you’re like “that’s not enough copy” like that sort of, those sorts of things can be useful for that sort of, sort of stuff. 56:20 Mordy: Yeah, but for us, fine we’ll leave it at that. It’s a sore subject. And then Honikaut asks us a great question—”so should the statement of who we are and what we do be at the top, mine’s at the bottom of my homepage”. So let’s generalize this question, what should be at the very top of the fold on your homepage, should that matter? The answer is Yes. It, think about it in terms of a user, if you have something above the fold way up on top, wouldn’t that tell you that hey, to the user, that’s really important, it sends a clear message. It does the same for bots, what you show at the top of the page, as a rule, kind of tells Google, this is the really most important thing that’s out there. So, who you are, what the site does, should go at the top of the page. 57:02 Crystal: Yeah, I also think also there’s a couple of things around, around like so Google doesn’t always use your meta description, sometimes they change it. And sometimes they will just use the first part of the, part of the website, for instance. Um also a lot of times, people, if you look at a heatmap, with tools like Hotjar, um for instance, or lucky orange for instance, that will let you see how users are, are seeing your website and a lot of times users won’t scroll to the bottom of your website, they’re only seeing what’s in the viewport for websites, for mobiles is what they call it. Which is the first thing you can see on your mobile screen, not necessarily in a page. So um the, the viewport, what’s on, above the fold which is the first thing that you see on desktop before you start scrolling, so a lot of times people don’t make it to the bottom. So if you, if you don’t mind being the serious, like maybe it’s not a commercially sensitive website, but if it is a commercially sensitive website and you are expecting to see lots of new users, then yeah, you should definitely say who you are further up the page. With Wix you can actually test it so um you can do a split site, so you can test your um, you can test, you can test it at the top, you can test it at the bottom and you can see how, how it works um, and um which one works better for you. Um and, and with all these things I think testing is great, but generally speaking, yeah, I think, I think, I um, you know, if I was just asked like yes or no, I would say yes at the top. 58:26 Mordy: Let’s see if we can get one more in here—Dee asks “I represent a skincare clinic in Ireland with lots of treatments and we showcase a lot of the treatments on the homepage as well as testimonials, just wondering what you think of that?” So again, when you have a lot of products maybe on the homepage and reviews, Crystal, what do you think of that? 58:42 Crystal: So I think, I think its good to showcase, to showcase your um, what you do. I think that sounds like good practice, I think as long as you’re able to make sure that it’s organized and that, and I think that its worth thinking about, thinking strategically about what’s on your homepage. So for instance, like if you have, say you’ve got facials, like lets say you have a hot stone lava facial and then lets say you have like a seaweed facial. Well let’s say like, let’s say that most people go for the hot stone lava, and you sell like two of the seaweed facials a year but like somebody really likes getting them so you still have them on your website or whatever. So you probably don’t need to have the seaweed one on there, on your homepage, you probably can just get away with the lava one, and have a link to your other facials from the lava one, for instance. So I would say think of like, get into your Google analytics or if you’re on a Wix site, you can see within your wix analytics, which pages are your top pages and see which services people are most interested in. Make sure that those are definitely on your homepage. Um and if they’re and if you, and if you have some that almost no one ever visits the page, um then, then get those off of those. Just so you can declutter and you can link to them from the other pages. 59:53 Mordy: Perfect. And with that, we’re out of time. Thank you so much for joining us. Don’t forget to tune in to our next webinar coming at the end of August, with Sara Shepard. We talk about internal linking with myself and George Winner, Head of SEO Editorial. Don’t forget to checkout our SERPs Up SEO podcast thats coming on the Wix SEO learning hub, that’s Wix.com/SEO/learn. Tonnes of great resources if you want more information about headers, that is on the actual SEO hub, check that out, um and. 1:00:22 Crystal: There’s also um, Mordy has a super, super long, super exhaustive SEO guide. Mordy loves super long things. Um he also has a super long, super exhaustive SERP guide. We talked about lots of SERP features, and he has a really great sort of, feature guide there as well. So if you want to know about SERPs, you wanna know about SEO guides, you wanna know about lots of SEO stuff—yeah SEO learn. 1:00:43 Mordy: Check it out, it’s a really great resource and again we will be sending the recording to you, through emails. And so thank you so much for joining us, until next time—keep optimizing those sites.

Tuesday, October 29, 2024 Join our panel of SEO content experts for an eComm specific, live-auditing session. Submit your site upon sign-up for the chance to receive invaluable feedback. Through live auditing real sites, this webinar will cover: How your eComm site can stand out in a crowded marketplace How to create a high-impact online shopping experience Easy wins to improve your site’s sales and conversions Meet your hosts: Loren Baker Founder, Search Engine Journal Loren Baker is the Founder of Search Engine Journal, an Advisor at Alpha Brand Media and runs Foundation Digital, a digital marketing strategy & development agency. Twitter  | LinkedIn   George Nguyen Director of SEO Editorial, Wix George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works and how to use Wix SEO tools . He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Twitter  | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter  | LinkedIn

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

Author: Maddy Osman A robots.txt file is a tool you can use to tell search engines exactly which pages you want (or don't want) crawled. Editing your robots.txt file is an advanced skill. Before you make any changes, you need to understand what the file is and how to use it. Keep reading to learn how a robots.txt file works and how you can use it to take greater control over your SEO efforts. What is the robots.txt file? A robots.txt file is a document that specifies which of your site pages and files can and can’t be requested by web crawlers. A web crawler (also sometimes referred to as a spider or bot) is a computer program that identifies web pages online. Crawlers work by scanning the text and following all the links on a web page. After a crawler finds a new web page, it sorts and stores the information it discovers. In the case of a search engine crawler, this information forms part of the search index . Each search engine uses its own crawlers to discover and catalog pages on the internet. Web crawlers for search engines like Google and Bing are some of the most frequently discussed bots, but other services like backlink checking tools and social media platforms also use crawlers to understand content around the web and may visit your site regularly. You can see how often and how many bots are visiting your site in your bot log reports . When a crawler visits your site, the first thing it does is download the robots.txt file, if there is one. Crawlers use the instructions in the robots.txt file to determine whether or not they can continue crawling certain pages and how they should crawl the site overall. You can use your robots.txt file to optimize your crawl or (if you are an experienced site manager) even block specific bots from crawling your site at all. Your robots.txt file also tells search engine crawlers which page links and files it can request on your website. The file contains instructions that “allow” or “disallow” particular requests. The “allow” command tells crawlers that they can follow the links on your pages, while the “disallow” command tells crawlers they cannot follow those links. You can use the “disallow” command to prevent search engines from crawling (following the links on) certain sections of your website. To make your sitemap available to Google , include your sitemap in your robots.txt file. A sitemap declaration is included within the Wix robots.txt for indexable sites, but self-built websites should ensure that a correct sitemap is available. Including a sitemap here can support consistent crawling and indexing. Without a robots.txt file, crawlers will proceed to crawl all the pages on your website. For small websites (under 500 URLs), this is unlikely to change how or how often your site is crawled and indexed. But, as you add more content and functionality to your site, your robots.txt file takes on more importance. How a robots.txt file can be used for SEO For your website to appear in search results, search engines need to crawl your pages. The job of the robots.txt file is to help search engine crawlers focus on pages that you would like to be visible in search results. In some cases, using a robots.txt file can benefit your SEO by telling search engine crawlers how to crawl your website. Here are some of the ways you can use a robots.txt file to improve your SEO: 01. Exclude private pages from search Sometimes, you’ll have pages that don’t need to appear in search results. These pages could include test versions of your website (also known as staging sites) or login pages. Telling crawlers to skip these private pages helps maximize your crawl budget (the number of pages a search engine will crawl and index in a given time period) and makes sure that search engines only crawl the pages you want to appear in search results. Note: Search engines don't crawl content blocked by a robots.txt file, but they may still discover and index disallowed URLs if they're linked to from other places on the internet, including your other pages. This means that the URL could potentially appear in search results. For ways to prevent your content from appearing in search results, see the alternatives to robots.txt section below. 02. Prevent resource file indexation Creating a website can require uploading resource files such as images, videos, and PDFs. Since you may not want these pages to be crawled and indexed, you can use a robots.txt file to limit crawl traffic to your resource files. Additionally, your robots.txt file can stop these files from appearing in Google searches. This helps ensure that both search engines and your site users are directed to only your most relevant content. 03. Manage website traffic You can use a robots.txt file to do more than keep website pages and files private. It can also be used to set rules for crawlers that prevent your website from being overloaded with requests. Specifically, you can specify a crawl delay in your robots.txt file. A crawl delay tells search engines how long to wait before restarting the crawl process. For example, you can set a crawl delay of 60 seconds: Instead of crawlers overloading your website with a flood of requests, the requests come in at one-minute intervals. This helps to prevent possible errors when loading your website. 04. Declare your sitemap As specified within Google’s documentation , you should include a line on your robots.txt that specifies the location of your sitemap. This helps Googlebot (and other bots) find your sitemap quickly and efficiently. If this is not present, then the sitemap may not be crawled regularly, which can cause delays and inconsistencies in how your site is indexed, thus making it harder to rank. Alternatives to robots.txt crawl directives If you want to prevent Google from indexing individual pages or files, other methods, like robots meta tags and the X-Robots-Tag, may be a better option than doing so via your robots.txt file. Robots meta tags Adding or modifying robots meta tags can send specific directives to bots for certain pages. For example, to prevent search engine crawlers from indexing a single page, you can add a "noindex" meta tag into the of that page. Depending on your site’s configuration there are a few ways to update your site’s robots meta tags. Use robots meta tag tool presets to make bulk updates If you have SEO tools on your site or in your CMS, you may be able to apply robots meta tags to single pages, sections of your site, or the site overall by adjusting your settings. For instance, if you are a Wix user, you can edit your SEO Settings to customize the robots meta tags for page types in bulk. Wix offers eight robots meta tags presets that are recognized by multiple search engines, but additional tags may also be relevant for your website. For example, if you would like to manage crawlability with regards to Bing or Yandex , you may wish to manually include tags specific to their bots. Or, to noindex the entire site (remove it from search results), you can update the Set site preferences panel. Other SEO tools may have similar presets, so it is worth checking the documentation to confirm what is available. Use robots meta tag tools to make updates to single pages To change the settings for a single page, you can add a robots meta tag into the head of the relevant page. If you have a Wix website, you can add or update custom meta tags in the Advanced SEO tab as you edit a single page. X-Robots-Tag on single pages Alternatively, robots meta tags can be inserted as an HTML snippet in the section of your page. You can specify a noindex directive , which tells crawlers not to include the page in search results, or add other tags as required. You might want to use a robots meta tag on pages such as: “Thank you” pages Internal search results pages PPC landing pages The X-Robots-Tag prevents search engines from indexing your resource files. Unlike a robots.txt file, the robots meta tag and X-Robots-Tag work better for single pages. If you want to manage crawl traffic for entire website sections, it’s better to use a robots.txt file. Wix site owners can toggle indexing settings by page by navigating from the Wix Editor to Pages (in the left-hand navigation). On any page where you’d like to make changes, click Show More and SEO Basics . Turn the Let search engines index this page toggle on or off depending on your preferred indexing status. The robots.txt file on Wix Your Wix website includes a robots.txt file that you can view and customize . Take care— a mistake in the file could remove your entire website from search results . If you’re not comfortable working with advanced website features, it’s best to get help from an SEO professional . You can view your website’s robots.txt file by going to the robots.txt editor in the SEO Tools page. You can click the Reset to Default button within the Robots.txt Editor to restore the original file (if needed). If you simply want to view your robots.txt file, you can do so by navigating to mydomain.com/robots.txt (where “mydomain.com” is your site’s domain). Understanding your robots.txt file on Wix If you’re going to make changes to your robots.txt file, you should first familiarize yourself with how Google handles the file . In addition, you need to be familiar with some basic terminology in order to create instructions for crawlers. Crawler : A computer program that identifies web pages online, usually for the purpose of indexing. User-agent : A way to specify certain crawlers. For example, you can differentiate between crawlers for Google Search and Google Images. Directives : The guidelines you can give the crawler (or specified user-agent) in a robots.txt file. Directives include “allow” and “disallow.” Robots.txt syntax Syntax is the set of rules used for reading and writing a computer program or file. Robots.txt uses code that begins by specifying the user-agent, followed by a set of directives. Take a look at the following code: User-agent: Googlebot-News Disallow: /admin Disallow: /login In the above example, the specified user-agent is “Googlebot-News” and there are two “disallow” directives. The code tells the Google News crawler that it can’t crawl the website’s admin or login pages. As mentioned above, user-agents can refer to more than just different Googlebots. They can be used to set rules for different search engines. Here’s a list of user-agents for popular search engines . If you want your rules to apply to all search engine crawlers, you can use the code User-agent: * followed by your directives. Besides “allow” and “disallow,” there’s another common directive to understand: crawl-delay. Crawl-delay specifies how many seconds a crawler should wait before crawling each link. For example, User-agent: msnbot Crawl-delay: 10 states that crawlers for MSN search must wait 10 seconds before crawling each new link. This code group only specifies a crawl delay—it doesn’t block MSN from any website sections. Note: You can include multiple directives in one code grouping. Making changes to your robots.txt file on Wix Before you make any changes to your robots.txt file, read Google’s guidelines for robots.txt files . To edit your robots.txt file, go to SEO Tools under Marketing & SEO in your site's dashboard. Then, follow these steps to edit your robots.txt file: Click Robots.txt Editor Click View File Use the This is your current file text box to add directives to your robots.txt file Click Save Changes Click Save and Reset Verifying changes to your robots.txt file You can use Google’s URL Inspection Tool to verify your changes. Type in a webpage address that you have disallowed to check if it’s being crawled and indexed by Google. For example, if you disallow the “/admin” section of your website, you can type “mywebsite.com/admin” into the URL Inspection Tool to see if Google is crawling it. If your robots.txt file was submitted correctly, you should receive a message that your URL is not on Google. Remember, you have to verify your domain with Google Search Console before using the URL Inspection Tool. You can use Wix SEO Setup Checklist to connect your website to Google and verify your domain . Then, any time you submit changes to your robots.txt file, re-submit your sitemap as well. When it comes to SEO, measure twice, cut once There are several ways you can use your robots.txt file to strengthen your SEO. There are also a multitude of reasons why you might want to make some of your pages inaccessible to crawlers. Now that you’re familiar with a variety of use cases, ensure that you’re selecting the right option for your purposes—in some instances, using robots meta tags may be more appropriate than disallowing via your robots.txt file. Ask yourself, are you simply looking to noindex a page? Or, are you trying to prevent resource file indexation, for example? Carefully consider what you’re trying to achieve before implementing any changes and record your changes so that you can reference them later. Maddy Osman - Founder, the blogsmith Maddy Osman is the bestselling author of Writing for Humans and Robots: The New Rules of Content Style , and one of Semrush and BuzzSumo's Top 100 Content Marketers. She's also a digital native with a decade-long devotion to creating engaging content and the founder of The Blogsmith content agency. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Lorcan Fearon Since the integration of AI into the search results, I have spent a lot of time optimizing my clients JSON-LD structured data. In particular, I’m focusing a lot on future-proofing product category pages for eCommerce websites and adapting them to the new era of search we are operating in.  There are a number of reasons to do this, most of which I’ll cover in more detail in the later sections of this post, but here are the three main reasons to explore this tactic: Structured data helps search engines to not just understand your product category pages, but understand them deeply .   A deeper understanding of your pages makes it easier for search engines to trust and rank that page for more relevant  searches. Higher rankings help you compete on valuable SERPs and return value  on your pages. I started to test this out when I was working with a client that sold underwear and loungewear. Underwear was their main product, but loungewear really drove up the AOV of their orders, so I created a custom CollectionPage schema markup for their existing pajamas category, which was sitting just off the first page of Google’s results for some great non-branded search terms. As no on-page changes were needed, the client was happy for us to try this out and we saw a great uplift in clicks and impressions, which had a knock-on effect on orders. Let’s get into the workflow so you can adapt this for your (or your clients’) category pages. In this guide, you will learn about: Why you should use CollectionPage schema Entity SEO & structured data in the future of organic search Where to craft and validate your structured data Why your JSON-LD code should be structured in a graph  How to create your own CollectionPage schemas (with templates)  How to implement this for your websites Why should you use structured data on your collection pages?  I call upon JSON-LD when I am working on a website that is already doing all the right things on-page. The product category pages have all the right ingredients—they’re just edged out of those all-important top rankings by competitors.  I sometimes describe this as an ‘extra-mile’ optimization (i.e., doing the thing that most people haven’t thought or bothered to do). Maybe it’s because they perform well via huge brand value and recognition or they only have the bandwidth/knowledge to prioritize SEO basics . In any case, this is a tactic that I don’t often see websites implement. Product schema is often there, as well as ‘out-of-the-box’ schema markup from plugins, but considering search engines’ preference for product category pages for so many of the non-branded search terms we value in SEO, it surprises me how little this schema type gets used. This tactic is something you can apply without changing anything on the page (in most cases), and it can help you close the gap on your competitors. If the product you sell  could be confused with another or it has multiple names (e.g., flip-flops, sandals, thongs), then this is a way to ensure you are being as clear as possible for search engines, which is crucial if you want your category page to show up for those searches.  However, this structured data implementation method is probably not  a good idea if your category pages have a terrible user experience, they’re unusable on mobile, or loads slower than paint dries.  There are often a number of more pressing issues product category pages can suffer from that you should consider addressing first. This really is going that extra mile for your online store. I describe this as leaving no stone unturned in the pursuit of the top ranking positions.  Entity SEO and its importance for the future of search Also referred to as ‘ semantic SEO ,’ entity SEO is the practice of helping search engines to find deeper meaning in the keywords we use so that they better understand the concepts that these words refer to.  If this is the first time you’re encountering entity or semantic SEO, here are some great resources that will not only help you better understand the theory behind my structured data approach, but also aid you in keyword research and content creation as well: What is semantic SEO? 10 ways to improve semantic SEO with disambiguation Why entities matter for SEO (Podcast) To demonstrate how a search engine understands entities, let’s take the first sentence of one of my childhood heroes’ Wikipedia entry: We can see (via Google’s Natural Language API ) that search engines can identify concepts and entities quite well here. This is important for the future of search because, as experienced SEOs know, Google doesn’t seem too interested in carrying on with the traditional ‘blue links’ search listings. Google doesn’t want to be a search engine as much as it wants to be an ‘ answer machine .’ In order for Google Search to reach its final form, as it were, it needs to be able to infer, understand, and relate concepts, entities, and things  as easily and successfully as a human can.  Whether you like it or not, this is the direction Google Search, and almost all search engines, are pursuing. This is why I have been drawn to this tactic. I see this as not only a good SEO tactic for today, but an even better one for tomorrow. By focusing on entities and their relationships now, you’re preparing your eCommerce store for an impending future where search engines don't just read your content, but truly comprehend it. Where to craft and validate your structured data  Before we continue, I am going to assume from this point onwards that you can craft your own structured data, or at least know how to edit it, as I will provide my own template below.  And if you don’t know how, don’t worry! Again, you couldn’t be in a better place. Crystal Carter created this comprehensive guide to structured data  that will get you up to speed. A great website I use to play around with structured data is the JSON-LD Playground , mainly because it validates your code  as you edit, whereas other validators require you to ‘submit’ your URL/snippet with a few seconds waiting.  It may not sound like much, but when you are trying to find out where just one “]” should go, it does get quite tedious so real-time feedback can end up saving you a lot of time if you’re working at scale.  Why your JSON-LD structured data needs to be a graph There’s just one more important stop to make before we get into the example: This is on the idea that your schema markup should be a ‘graph.’  This concept is best explained in this article from Joost de Valk , which changed the way I approach crafting JSON-LD structured data. The article covers this in greater detail than I’m able to here, but to try and summarize it neatly: A common schema markup practice in SEO is to create different snippets (e.g., a HowTo, a Product schema, WebPage and so on) but to have these as separate blocks .  For example, you may have a snippet of schema markup that looks like this: { "@context": "https://schema.org/", "@type": "Product", "name": "Example Product", "image": [ "https://example.com/photos/1x1/photo.jpg" ], "description": "A description of the product.", "sku": "0446310786", "mpn": "925872", "brand": { "@type": "Brand", "name": "Studio Hawks" }, "review": { "@type": "Review", "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": "4", "bestRating": "5" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Stu D. Hawk" } }, "aggregateRating": { "@type": "AggregateRating", "ratingValue": "4.4", "reviewCount": "89" }, "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "url": "https://example.com/product", "priceCurrency": "GBP", "price": "119.99", "priceValidUntil": "2023-11-05", "itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock", "seller": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Example.com" } } } And an Organization schema markup snippet that looks like this: { "@context": "https://schema.org/", "@type": "Organization", "name": "Example Corporation", "url": "https://www.example.com", "logo": "https://www.example.com/logo.png", "contactPoint": { "@type": "ContactPoint", "telephone": "(+44) 20 38877388", "contactType": "customer service", "areaServed": "UK", "availableLanguage": ["English", "Spanish"] }, "sameAs": [ "https://www.facebook.com/example", "https://www.twitter.com/example", "https://www.instagram.com/example" ] } What Joost de Valk is describing in the article is that schema markup should “always be one inter-connected graph.” This means that all your different schema properties should relate to one another and this relation should be indicated within the code it is housed in.  { "@context": "https://schema.org/", "@graph": [ { "@type": "WebSite", "name": "Example Store", "url": "https://www.example.com", "publisher": { "@id": "https://www.example.com#organization" } }, { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Example Corporation", "url": "https://www.example.com", "logo": "https://www.example.com/logo.png", "contactPoint": { "@type": "ContactPoint", "telephone": "(+44) 20 38877388", "contactType": "customer service", "areaServed": "UK", "availableLanguage": ["English", "Spanish"] }, "sameAs": [ "https://www.facebook.com/example", "https://www.twitter.com/example", "https://www.instagram.com/example" ], "@id": "https://www.example.com#organization" }, { "@type": "WebPage", "url": "https://www.example.com/product", "name": "Product Page for Example Product", "description": "This is a detailed product page for Example Product available at Example Corporation.", "publisher": { "@id": "https://www.example.com#organization" }, "mainEntity": { "@id": "https://www.example.com/product#product" } }, { "@type": "Product", "name": "Example Product", "image": [ "https://example.com/photos/1x1/photo.jpg" ], "description": "A description of the product.", "sku": "0446310786", "mpn": "925872", "brand": { "@type": "Brand", "name": "Studio Hawks" }, "review": { "@type": "Review", "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": "4", "bestRating": "5" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Stu D. Hawk" } }, "aggregateRating": { "@type": "AggregateRating", "ratingValue": "4.4", "reviewCount": "89" }, "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "url": "https://example.com/product", "priceCurrency": "GBP", "price": "119.99", "priceValidUntil": "2023-11-05", "itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock", "seller": { "@id": "https://www.example.com#organization" } }, "@id": "https://www.example.com/product#product" } ] } For our purposes (and the purposes of this article), our CollectionPage is the mainEntityOf our WebPage, which belongs on our WebSite that is owned by our Organization. This is demonstrated in the next section. Connecting all of these entities together and organizing them neatly within your JSON-LD schema markup means you are going that extra mile to ensure that  your category pages have the highest chances of being completely understood by search engines.  It does add a layer of complexity to your structured data, but hey, if you are going that extra mile, you might as well really  go that extra mile, right? CollectionPage schema snippet example Below is an example template of the code snippet I currently use. I have tried out some different approaches, and there may be different quirks or considerations depending on which platform your website is built on. Some CMSes may require you to download a plugin to upload custom structured data, which could upload it in the wrong place, or multiple times. It may not always be immediately obvious how to upload your own custom structured data on a CMS .  Feel free to take this CollectionPage schema and adapt it for your online store: If you were to use this on a real page, below is how it could look. Let’s see how this snippet would shape up if we applied it to the Rolex men’s watches collection page: The Wikidata URLs referenced in this example point to the entries for Rolex (the brand), and to watches (the thing).  Of course, for this particular page we could have a lot of confidence that search engines are well aware of Rolex and what their main product is. But, when you don’t have the brand value of a retailer like Rolex, directly connecting your product category to the Wikidata entries that are associated with it is an effective way to remove any doubts about what the page is for. I operate on a deep mistrust of search engines’ abilities and on a daily mantra of ‘make the search engines’ job easy’ when optimizing websites. By directly linking to entries from one of the databases search engines use to understand the world (i.e., Wikidata), you have gone that extra mile to ensure there is no room for doubt when search engines interpret your page. How to implement your custom CollectionPage schema markup  Now that you’ve crafted your custom CollectionPage snippets and are ready to test them, you need to upload them to the page.  For Wix website owners, I will walk you through the workflow step-by-step, but bear in mind that this process is roughly similar for other website platforms as well.  There are two ways you can add structured data to your Wix web pages —from the SEO settings panel within the Wix Editor for the individual page or from the Edit by Page  settings  for the page type (Blog, Product, etc). To add structured data to an individual page using the Wix Editor:  Go to your editor . Click Pages & Menu  on the left-hand side of the editor. Click the More Actions  icon (three dots) next to the relevant page. Click SEO basics . Click the Advanced SEO  tab. Click Structured Data Markup .  Click +Add New Markup . Add your new markup under Write your markup in JSON-LD format . Click Apply . You can also add or manage your structured data for all pages of a certain type by accessing the Edit by Page settings and selecting the desired page type: Go to the Wix Dashboard for your desired website. On the left-hand menu, go to Site & Mobile App > Website & SEO > SEO . Click on SEO Settings   in the Tools and settings  section towards the bottom of the page. Select the desired page type. From there, head over to the Customize defaults  tab to customize the default structured data for that page type. If you are struggling to find a way to upload your own custom schema code to your website, you can also use Google Tag Manager to implement this . It’s a slightly more cumbersome process, but for stores selling high-competition product categories, every advantage matters. Structured data for eCommerce category pages: When every advantage matters Personally, as someone who has never been a whiz with code, I love playing around with JSON-LD schema markup and think there is so much we can be doing with it as SEOs for our websites. While these optimizations may feel optional right now, the state of the web continues to advance and, one day, it’ll be a best practice that you may not be able to forego. To that end, let’s recap what you’ve learned so that you can walk away with a clearer picture of how structured data helps you go that extra mile for your online store: Custom structured data for collection pages is a tactic that aims to prepare your eCommerce website for the future of organic search.  Organic search and search engines are moving towards not just knowing the terms we search for, but understanding thoroughly as well as their relationships to other entities and concepts.  Structured data is one of the elements that powers this understanding. This tactic is a supplemental optimization, meaning that this is for closing the gap on competitors for a page that already does all the right things  (e.g., good UX, relevant content, a good product, E-E-A-T ).  This is not a ‘hack’ or a silver bullet for your website. Consider Joost de Valk’s proposition that all schema markup should “always be one inter-connected graph.” You can use my template, and hopefully make it a lot better(!), to get started on testing these snippets yourself.  Lorcan Fearon - Senior SEO Specialist & Operations Lead, StudioHawk UK From London via Nottingham & Kent, Lorcan Fearon is a senior search marketing specialist and operations manager for the UK team of Australia's largest SEO agency. Linkedin

Author: Mordy Oberstein Get started by: Creating a website → Competitor analysis is one of the most foundational SEO tasks I can think of. After all, your competition influences how hard you’ll need to work to show up at the top of search results. That is why when SE Ranking approached us to build an app for the Wix App Market, we were all-in on the idea of creating a tool that would help you understand the competitive landscape on Google—without having to leave Wix. Your competitors on the Google search engine results page (SERP) might not be who you think they are. As a matter of fact, your organic search competitors are often different from your competitors in real life (or on platforms like social media or YouTube). With that, let’s explore how the SE Ranking app helps you survey the competition on Google’s search results so that you can make better SEO and content decisions. Table of contents: How to get started with the SE Ranking app in Wix SE Ranking tool overview Competitor overview data International SEO competitor insights Exploring competitor keyword performance Discovering additional SERP competitors Paid performance competitor insights Performing keyword research with the SE Ranking tool How to get started with the SE Ranking app in Wix You can access the SE Ranking app within the Wix App Market , found in your Wix dashboard. The app is categorized under Marketing > SEO . Alternatively, you can search for it by name via the app market’s search field (and if you’re reading this post, you can access the SE Ranking app directly from here ). Once you install the app (installation is done on a per-site basis, not at the account level) you’ll see an entry point to it in the site’s dashboard. The SE Ranking app in Wix uses a “freemium” model. For each site you connect, the app grants you 10 lifetime data requests for each of the two tools within the app (i.e., competitive research and keyword research ). SE Ranking SEO competitor analysis tool overview As mentioned above, the SE Ranking app within Wix contains both a competitive research tool and a keyword research tool. Let’s start by first looking at the competitive analysis tool. To get started, enter a URL into the tool’s search field. Here, you have the option to analyze the entire domain, an individual URL, etc. You can also select regions to analyze the URL according to. Running an analysis presents you with a wealth of data, trends, and insights. I suggest you explore the tool firsthand, as there are too many data points and filtering options to include here. Competitor overview data Analyzing a website with the SE Ranking app presents you with an overview that includes: The estimated organic traffic to the site The number of ranking keywords the site has The estimated amount of paid traffic to the site The number of backlinks the site has Note: Before we go any further, I want to note that the data any third-party SEO tool presents is an estimation. Remember, the figures you see are not an exact reflection of the site’s performance, but rather a best estimate. Personally, I look at third-party data for the trends or to get an idea of the general orientation of the data landscape. The data in this section helps you understand the general state of the site’s performance. Beneath the initial overview, you can reference trends data in order to qualify the aggregated data shown. This way, you can understand whether your competitor’s traffic, keyword rankings, etc. are on an upward or downward trend. International SEO competitor insights Scrolling past the overview section, you can dive into a competitor’s organic performance according to regions or specific markets. This data gives you insight into the site’s per-market organic search performance, according to the site’s estimated: Organic traffic market share Amount of organic traffic Total number of ranking keywords You can also toggle to see the same data for the site’s paid efforts on the Google SERP. In a nutshell, you’ll have a bit of data to better understand where your competitor is both focusing and succeeding across the globe. To that end, click on the “Compare” button at the bottom of the “Traffic distribution by country” table to select the specific markets you want to analyze more deeply. To illustrate the table of data shown above, the SE Ranking app gives you an organic traffic trends chart. This can provide you with an immediate understanding of which markets your competitors are gaining or losing momentum in. Seeing a competitor slowly losing organic traffic in a specific market might be worth exploring, as it could mean there is potential for you to break into that market. The app also shows you a similar trends chart that highlights the number of ranking keywords your competitor has in a specific market over time. There is also a chart for the organic traffic cost over time per market. This means you’ll have a sense of how much you would have to spend in paid ads to receive the same amount of traffic your competitor pulls in organically. Exploring competitor keyword performance The SE Ranking app within Wix can help you understand what specific keywords drive your competitor’s organic traffic. The initial table gives you insight into which of your competitor’s keywords are improving (or declining) as well as what new keywords they have captured (and which ones they’ve lost). This data is contextualized with metrics such as: Monthly search volumes Ranking position Keyword competition score Click the “View detailed report” button to dive into your competitor’s ranking keywords. You can access more keywords and focus your competitor research by using any of the available filtering options. Pro tip: One thing you may want to do is set a filter to remove any keywords that contain the brand’s name. This way you’ll have a better sense of how the competitor is ranking for non-branded keywords. Another way to filter these keywords is by SERP feature . The app tells you the total number of keywords that your competitor ranks for that brings up a given SERP feature on the Google result page. You can use these to see top-level trends around keyword intent . For example, if there is an unusually large number of keywords that bring up a local pack, you know your competition is most likely targeting local markets. Select a particular SERP feature to bring up keywords for which the SERP contains that feature. For example, when selecting “Video” (for Google’s video box) I was served with the following keywords: In such a case, you might try to overtake your competitors by creating content that ranks for those keyword(s) and by creating videos that could be shown in the video box on the SERP. Discovering additional SERP competitors One of the most significant things the app enables you to do is discover additional organic competitors. If this is your goal, you can enter your own domain into the tool’s initial search field and pull data for your own site. You would then see who your organic competitors are in the “Organic competitors” section. The initial competitor research (as shown in the example below) focuses on keyword competition via: The total number of keywords each competitor ranks for within the top 100 positions on the Google results page The number of keywords unique to the domain being analyzed, unique to the competitor being viewed, and the number of keywords both domains rank for (see the hover-over in the image below) The data on the number of “common” keywords (i.e., the number of keywords where the domain being analyzed and the competitor being viewed both rank) is another reason why you might want to analyze your own domain. If you analyze your own domain, you can discover who your competitors are and see which competitors are ranking for the very keywords you also rank for. Strong keyword overlap might mean that the competitor in question is potentially attracting visitors away from your site. Click on “View retailed report” within the organic competitors report section to get a more detailed look at your competitors’ performance. Here, you can reference a trends chart to help you identify which of your competitors are falling off the SERP and which are gaining momentum and acquiring more traffic from Google over time. You can toggle between metrics and see trends for: Total traffic Number of ranking keywords Traffic cost Backlinks The table that follows the trends graph shows you your top 10 competitors on the SERP, as well as: The number of keywords both you and your competitors rank for The number of keywords your competitors rank for, but your domain doesn’t Total number of keywords (along with traffic and traffic cost) You can use filters here, as well, to refine your result and to discover additional opportunities. Selecting a keyword data point for a specific competitor will show you data similar to the “Organic competitor” comparison section of the app. Here, you’ll see visuals that help you compare your keyword and traffic performance to that of your competitors (you can analyze two competitors simultaneously in this report). The table that accompanies the visuals indicates the specific keywords that are unique to your competitor, that both your domain and the competition rankings for, etc. The table includes metrics such as ranking position, keyword difficulty, and search volume, so that you can decide which keywords you want to focus on. For example, if you see a competitor is ranking above you for a keyword that is relatively easy to rank for and has a high search volume, you may want to prioritize it. While there are a plethora of other report sections to explore in the SE Ranking app, the last bit of organic data I’d like to highlight is the “Top pages in organic search”table. Here, you can see which of your competitors’ pages matter most to them (or which of your pages is the most important to your organic efforts). The data shows which pages receive the most traffic (both in raw numbers and as a percentage of overall traffic). Click the “View detailed report” button to dive deeper into the performance of your competitor’s pages—or your own pages, for that matter. Say, for example, you know that both you and your competitors are targeting local event keywords. You could filter the results to show your competitors’ pages that contain the word “event” in the URL. That would be a quick way to see which of your competitor’s event pages are the most valuable to their success. Paid performance competitor insights The SE Ranking app within Wix also helps take a pulse on how your competitors are behaving on the paid SERP—specifically, how they are leveraging Google Ads to supplement their organic success and compete with you. For example, the “Paid keywords”table gives you information on which keywords your competitor is targeting with Google Ads. Moreover, you’ll be able to see which of these keywords have seen a performance improvement (or decline) as well as what new keywords they are buying. To better contextualize this data, the SE Ranking app also tells you where your competitor’s ads are appearing. Are they showing at the top of the SERP (potentially posing a bigger challenge to your rankings) or at the bottom (where they will be seen by fewer users)? Like with the organic research shown earlier, you can use the SE Ranking app to discover who you are competing against when buying Google Ads. Here, too, you’ll see information related to which competitors you overlap with. You can also use this table to dive into more detail about paid keyword overlap with your competitors. In addition, the app shows you which pages are connected to your competitor’s ads and how much of the paid traffic share they receive. This can be very helpful when you’re creating landing pages for your own ad campaigns, as you can look to see what works for your competitors. Lastly, the SE Ranking app can tell you which keywords are triggering your competitor’s ads on the SERP, with metrics on how many ads they are running for the keyword, CPC, and beyond. Performing keyword research with the SE Ranking tool in Wix You can also use the SE Ranking keyword research tool built into the app to qualify and explore a focus keyword discovered when analyzing your competitors. The overview section of the report gives you a top-level summary of the keyword’s organic opportunity for a given country, and includes information on the keyword’s: Ranking difficulty Search volume and search volume trends Regional volume CPC User intent The following section helps you expand on the seed keyword initially searched for by showing you similar keywords, related keywords, and questions that utilize the seed keyword. You can dive deeper into the initial results and see an expanded list for each keyword type. Here, you can filter your results and see expanded metrics, such as the SERP features that appear on the page for a given keyword. Pro tip: What’s interesting here is that if you click on a given keyword, you can see the search volume trends over time. This is a great way to spot any potential seasonality related to the keyword. You can also click on “Organic results”to see the top-ranking URLs for the keyword, along with which URLs have seen a ranking increase or decrease. Lastly, you can see which domains are running a Google Ads campaign that targets a similar keyword. Don’t jump to conclusions about who your competitors are Who are your competitors? It depends. Your brick-and-mortar competitors may not be who you’re competing against on the Google SERP. So, it’s best not to jump to conclusions about who they are (or aren’t). Instead, dive into the data and see who is actually giving you a run for your money in the search results. It’s easy to chase after every potential competitor and ranking opportunity, but no one has unlimited resources and being strategic in what you prioritize can make all the difference. The data within the SE Ranking app helps you understand who to focus on, what to focus on, and when to focus on it. 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: Yossi Fest In March 2024, Google officially replaced First Input Delay (FID) with Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as one of the three Core Web Vitals (CWV) metrics. This change wasn’t just a tweak—it was a fundamental shift in how Google evaluates user experience. The question you’re probably asking is why did Google make this change?  Comprehensive evaluation: A web page might respond quickly to the first click, but then lag on subsequent interactions. INP considers all interactions, providing a more accurate representation of the user experience. Challenges and opportunities: Whilst INP is harder to optimize for than FID, it offers an opportunity (or for SEOs, a challenge) to significantly improve the overall responsiveness of your site. Sites that pass INP evaluations are likely to offer a superior user experience, which can lead to better engagement and general SEO performance. However, because of its complex nature, coupled with Google not explicitly providing information on the specific problematic interactions (unlike LCP and CLS, the other two CWV metrics), you as an SEO professional or site owner are left to do the work of identifying the INP issues, analyzing performance traces, and addressing the issues accordingly. In this guide, I’ll cover the nitty gritty of what goes into a web interaction, how to spot INP issues, and strategies to decrease your INP timings, ensuring you’re fully equipped to tackle this element of user experience and SEO. Table of contents: What is INP? Understanding interactions: The foundation of INP How to view your website’s interactions 3 steps to identify problematic interactions 01. Start with the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console 02. Crawl your site with Screaming Frog & the PageSpeed Insights API 03. Identify poor interactions using the Performance tab in Chrome Dev Tools 6 methods to optimize your INP 01. Audit your third-party scripts 02. Conduct a visual change audit 03. Audit your first-party scripts 04. Prioritize HTML hyperlinks over JS buttons 05. Optimize debounce time 06. Yield to the main thread How to measure the success of your INP optimizations What is INP? Interaction to Next Paint  is the metric that Google uses  to measure a web page’s responsiveness to user interactions.  Google defines ‘interactions’ as: Clicking Mousedown Tapping (on devices with touchscreens) Key strokes INP does not include scrolling, as this is not an interaction with the page itself. INP is measured in milliseconds, and Google categorizes performance as follows: Good  — INP is equal to (or less than) 200ms Needs Improvement  — INP greater than 200ms and less than (or equal to) 500ms Poor  — INP greater than 500ms Understanding interactions: The foundation of INP To optimize INP effectively, it’s essential to first understand what an interaction is and what factors influence its timing. An interaction is comprised of the following three components: Input delay  — This is the initial delay between a user’s interaction and the browser registering the interaction (and subsequently being able to respond to it). While several factors can affect input delay, it’s usually JavaScript (JS) running in the background and the browser not being ready to attend to the interaction that adds unnecessary delay. Processing duration  — After the input is recognized, the browser must process the action. This could involve complex calculations, DOM manipulation, or data fetching. Presentation delay  — This is the time it takes for the browser to update the display after processing the interaction. Processing delay is usually influenced by rendering performance and how efficiently the browser can paint new frames. As you proceed with your optimizations, remember that it’s not just about knowing what INP is, but rather about understanding how each interaction on your website impacts performance. Equipped with this knowledge, you can approach performance optimization more strategically, identifying where the delays are, and what’s causing them. How to view your website’s interactions Now that I’ve caught you up on interactions and INP, it’s time to view and analyze your website’s interactions in detail.  While there are several tools and techniques available to help you do this, I’m going to focus on using Chrome Dev Tools because you can get all the data you need from it, and it doesn’t require third-party tools or a setup process: Right click on the desired web page and click Inspect . This opens Chrome DevTools. Navigate to the “Performance” tab and hit the record button icon either in the top left, or click the “record” button on the right side panel, or “record and reload” to have the page loaded fresh. Interact with the page like your users would. Click on buttons and enter text into fields. Click on the record button again to stop the recording. The trace will then automatically load into the tab. Look for the row named “Interactions.” In this row, you will see the interactions you performed on the page as well as detailed information about everything that went into the interaction. You’l also notice the row called “Main” (underneath the “Interactions” row). This is the main thread of the browser where you can see all processing activity.  Essentially, performance traces are detailed logs of everything that happens during the loading and interaction phases of a web page. By analyzing these traces, you can identify which interactions cause the highest INP scores and why. 3 steps to identify problematic interactions Finding the exact interactions that contribute to your page’s poor INP score can be time consuming, but with the right approach and tools, you can effectively isolate and address the issues.  Following the three steps below to find problematic INPs on your pages: Start with the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console Crawl your site with Screaming Frog and the PageSpeed Insights API Identify poor interactions using the Performance tab in Chrome Dev Tools 01. Start with the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console The Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console  (GSC) is a great place to begin because it provides insights into which pages on your site are experiencing INP issues, and whether these problems are more prevalent on desktop or mobile.  I use the INP section of the Core Web Vitals report for: URL group analysis — Drill down into the URL groups that Google identifies as problematic. This can help you focus your optimization efforts on the pages that need it the most. Trend analysis — Use the daily bar graph (showing the number of URLs; as shown in the example above) to see how your INP issues are trending over the last three months. Is the INP issue on the rise? Is it decreasing? Have there been any site updates that correlate to changes in trends? 02. Crawl your site with Screaming Frog & the PageSpeed Insights API Instead of manually entering all your URLs into PageSpeed Insights  to see each page’s INP score, crawl your site with Screaming Frog using the PageSpeed Insights API. When used in tandem, these tools allow you to pull INP data along with other Core Web Vitals. This gives you a comprehensive view of how your entire site is performing. Enable the PageSpeed Insights API , then select only the following CrUX Metrics: CrUX Interaction to Next Paint (ms) CrUX Interaction to Next Paint Category Next, run a crawl of your site. You will then end up with a list of pages, their respective INP scores, and the CWV performance category that they fall into (as shown below). Once you have your list, prioritize the URLs to fix by the traffic they receive and/or importance (by other business metrics you can define, like revenue, for example). By crawling your site with Screaming Frog, you can also identify patterns and common issues that might affect your INP scores, which can be particularly useful for large sites with many pages and page types. 03. Identify poor interactions in the Performance Tab in Chrome Dev Tools Once you have prioritized the URLs you want to improve, you need to identify the problematic interactions on those pages. Up until October 2024, you’d have needed to use the Web Vitals Chrome extension , which provides real-time feedback on your site’s Core Web Vitals, including INP.  However, the latest version of Chrome now includes detailed LCP, CLS, and INP data directly inside the Performance tab. Here’s how to use it effectively: Accessing the Performance tab — Open an incognito window in Chrome, then open Chrome Dev Tools by right-clicking and choosing “Inspect.” Then navigate to the Performance tab. Simulating network conditions — To match the conditions of poor internet connections that some of your users may access your site with, especially on mobile devices, I recommend throttling down CPU processing power to 20X. This can be done at the top of the Performance tab under “CPU” settings, or under the recording settings in the right pane of the tab. This also greatly helps with viewing the interaction in DevTools. Once you’ve throttled down, refresh the page. Perform interactions — Click around your site as a typical user would. Focus on the elements that you know users interact with the most, and work your way through all buttons, links, text input fields, etc. You’l notice that after each interaction, the interaction type, interaction target, and latency is logged in real-time. Identify problematic elements — Hover over the interaction target to highlight it on the page, or click on it to see it in the Elements tab. You’l notice that the INP time in the INP tile is the longest interaction from your interactions—exactly how Google calculates your page’s INP time. 6 methods to optimize your INP After you’ve identified the problematic interactions, it’s time to move onto the optimization phase, which can be the most difficult. Here are six methods I recommend for optimizing your interaction timings: Audit your third-party scripts Conduct a visual change audit Audit your first-party scripts Prioritize HTML hyperlinks over JS buttons Optimize debounce time Yield to the main thread 01. Audit your third-party scripts Third-party scripts are external pieces of code that your web page executes (typically for functionalities like analytics, social integrations, and/or tracking). While these scripts are super useful, they can also increase loading and page interactivity times. The more JS scripts your page needs to load, the longer your interactions will take until they finish fully loading. In addition, many third party scripts (e.g., TikTok , Facebook, Google Analytics ) may fire when they don’t need to.  Start by identifying redundant scripts.  Obtain a list of all third-party scripts on your site and determine if any of these scripts are redundant or unnecessary. You can obtain this list directly from the Network tab in Chrome DevTools, in a Lighthouse audit under the “Reduce the impact of third-party code” section of the Diagnostics section, or from most good web performance tools that provide content and script breakdowns. Defer non-critical scripts.  For scripts that are essential but not critical for initial page load, use the async or defer attributes  so that they only load after the main content loads. This ensures that your non-critical scripts don’t block critical main thread time during early interactions. Identify any scripts (or tags in Google Tag Manager) that fire on each click (or multiple times on a page when they don’t need to).  Tags should only fire where they’re essential or when a user performs a specific action.  Many websites manage their scripts through Google Tag Manager. This can make managing scripts much easier as there are native options to select exactly how you want your scripts to fire and what triggers them to do so. 02. Conduct a visual change audit Visual changes (like animations and effects that occur after a user interaction) can significantly impact INP. Animations and effects, such as blurring, sliding, fading, etc. often trigger extra rendering steps. Consider minimizing visual changes after an interaction that does not enhance your users’ experience to help improve INP timings. For example, let’s say a user clicks on the main menu on a page, and that makes the page fade slightly (or puts a blur effect on the rest of the page). This action requires additional rendering processing, which may be taking up valuable space on the main thread. By reducing (or simplifying) these visual changes, you can help reduce INP timings and promote a more responsive user experience, as the browser can focus more efficiently on processing the core interaction (rather than handling visual changes that may be unnecessary), and spend less time on: Repainting Layout recalculation Copositing layers 03. Audit your first-party scripts Unlike third-party scripts (where your business has no control over the contents of the scripts), first-party scripts are JS files that you own. You can perform the following actions to optimize script content and delivery: Bundling and minifying  — Ensure that your JS files are bundled and minified. Bundling reduces the number of HTTP requests needed to fetch scripts, and minifying removes unnecessary characters (and spacing), reducing file size. Both of these practices can improve load times and responsiveness to interactions, directly impacting INP. Lazy loading first-party scripts  — Just like the more common practice of lazy loading images, lazy loading JS files ensures that scripts only load as the user gets to them (i.e., scrolls down to an area that contains elements that require the JS). As an example, chat widgets and social media plugins usually aren’t required until the user has been on the page for a while first. This practice ensures that, once again, the main thread can remain free to handle interactions that may come its way. 04. Prioritize HTML hyperlinks over JS buttons JavaScript buttons can introduce significant delays in processing time because they require the browser to execute scripts to handle interactions. Compare this to regular HTML tag links that are natively processed by the browser and are generally much faster. Audit all internal links  (including hidden links behind tabs, menu links, etc.) to see if they are coded as HTML hyperlinks with the standard tag, or whether they are implemented as JS buttons. If you find JS buttons, you should convert these to HTML hyperlinks where possible. This is especially important for navigation menus and prominent internal links where speed is crucial.  05. Optimize debounce time Debouncing is a technique used to limit the rate at which a function executes, which is particularly useful with search bars or any other text input fields where results may auto-populate. Without proper debouncing, each keystroke could trigger a server request, which in turn may overwhelm the main thread and increase input delay and processing times. Search bars usually have a debounce time of 300–400ms. I recommend increasing this to 1000ms in order to decrease the amount of server requests. The higher the debounce time, the fewer server requests there may be.  It’s important to consider that users may experience a small amount of sluggishness due to slower responsiveness. It’s an important balancing act here—if you feel that the detriment caused by slowing down your auto-populated results may impact UX, then test out a lower debounce time. 06. Yield to the main thread Yielding to the main thread is a performance optimization that can help reduce the main thread’s blocking time during JS execution. It involves breaking down long JS tasks into smaller, more manageable ones, allowing the browser to ‘yield’ control back to the main thread to handle interactions from the user.  Here are two ways to employ this tactic: Use ‘requestidlecallback’ to allow non-urgent execution to happen during idle periods (as the name suggests), so that critical tasks can be handled in the main thread first. Apply ‘settimeout’ for JS that cannot afford to wait for an idle main thread. This is used as a mechanism to manually split long-running JavaScript tasks into smaller chunks. The basic idea is to break a large task into smaller pieces and use setTimeout with a short delay (usually 0 milliseconds) to schedule the execution of the next piece of work after the current task completes. This allows the browser to handle other tasks (like user interactions or rendering updates) between the chunks, which helps keep the UI responsive. How to measure the success of your INP optimizations Now that you’ve hopefully implemented some of the techniques above, it’s crucial to perform an impact analysis to evaluate what worked, what didn’t, and to see if your INP times are moving in the right direction. Just like how we used various tools and techniques to assess what pages needed INP optimization, you need to do the same post-optimization. To measure the success of your INP optimizations: Immediately compare pre- and post-optimization performance Monitor INP trends over time Collect and review real user monitoring (RUM) data Immediately compare pre- and post-optimization performance Similar to how you identified poor interactions on a page, you can once again use the trusty Web Vitals extension to obtain interaction timings.  Use the extension’s simulated throttle environment and compare timings from before and after optimizations. Monitor INP trends over time Use GSC’s Core Web Vitals report to monitor how your INP metric changes over time. Since this report is based on CrUX  data, it provides a reliable measure of real-world user experience. It’s critical to remember that Google’s CWV scores are based on CrUX data collected and aggregated over the previous 28-day period, meaning that you cannot check your page’s ‘new’ INP immediately after optimization.  Collect and review real user monitoring (RUM) data Real user monitoring  (RUM) provides insights based on actual user interactions with your site, giving you an accurate, on-demand (as opposed to waiting the 28 days) overview of performance compared to lab tools. RUM involves collecting performance data directly from users as they interact with your site. The data collected provides timings for a wide range of metrics, such as TBT  and, of course, all CWV metrics. Many solutions also provide detailed insight into how your site performs across different geos, devices, and browsers. Consider using Google’s free CrUX Vis  tool, based on the Chrome User Experience Report dataset.  Other common solution providers include  Rumvision and Debugbear. Interaction to Next Paint: Maximize your responsiveness for better user engagement and search performance Whilst INP may not be the easiest to optimize for, it’s also an opportunity to perform a more holistic user experience audit. After all, INP is just a CWV metric that Google uses to assess general page experience—which is key for your users.  Not only will you optimize for the Page Experience algorithm, you are also working toward ensuring that your site visitors have a smooth, responsive interaction that keeps them engaged and satisfied, maximizing the chances of driving meaningful business results.  Remember that optimizing for INP is an ongoing, iterative process that requires continuous (or at least periodic) monitoring. By staying vigilant and keeping an eye on your CWV reports in Search Console, you can rest assured that you remain competitive in an increasingly user-centric web landscape. Keep testing, keep optimizing, and you’ll see the results of increased user engagement and search performance. Yossi Fest - Technical SEO Specialist at Wix Yossi Fest  is a technical SEO specialist at Wix, where he's passionate about championing technical optimizations for better search visibility. Before joining Wix, he worked as an SEO lead at digital marketing agencies, driving organic growth for enterprise clients. Linkedin