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Author: Lazarina Stoy Visitors generally come to your site looking to learn something or perform an action. The more intuitively they’re able to get what they came for, the more likely your business will also benefit. However, locating a resource or a piece of information on a site can be frustrating if the right signposts aren’t in place. CTAs present one way to guide those visitors, turn them into leads, followers, or even nudge them towards the final step of buying your product or service. It can also help them become brand ambassadors post-purchase. In this guide, we’ll discuss what you need to know to begin creating compelling CTAs that benefit both the business and its strategic growth objectives, as well as the visitors of your site, including: What a CTA is How CTAs help your business and your audience CTA types CTA types based on business goals CTA types based on desired user action CTA types based on medium How to choose the right CTA Other elements to factor into your CRO strategy Key takeaways Frequently asked questions about CTAs What is a call-to-action (CTA)? The CTA acronym stands for call-to-action, which is a signal or prompt to a user to perform a desired action. The action the user is encouraged to take typically aligns with the business or strategic goals of the brand or website and often is considered the next logical step of the user journey. Some might say that CTAs should always encourage an immediate sale or other type of conversion (e.g., sign-up). This is a misunderstanding, as most sophisticated conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies use various combinations of different CTAs according to the stage of the funnel that the user is in . This enables a smoother approach to nurturing leads —one that is mindful of the different needs of users with different intents and fosters a trust-based relationship between the user and the business. What are the benefits of a good CTA? Having a good call-to-action can benefit every online space (not just websites) as it helps alleviate decision fatigue for users by broadcasting the next step in the journey (for those interested in taking it). At the same time, well-crafted CTAs also encourage users to take actions that are beneficial to the business, such as signing up for a newsletter or buying a product, for example. Here are some of the benefits of creating good calls-to-action for your users: Better understanding of potential avenues to take as a visitor Quicker access to important content Improved user experience and quicker navigation Less stress and frustration from decision-making and self-navigation, in turn promoting better website and content usability Creating strong CTAs is also beneficial for your business as well. They can help you: Increase engagement, which can help you improve website metrics such as bounce rate , time on page, session duration, and pages per session. If you’re working with videos as a medium, they can help bolster metrics such as watch time and click-through rate , all of which are associated with improved organic performance. Improve your understanding of users’ online behavior Improve performance of targeted goal completions CTAs can be applied to almost any content or online space, including in different places within a website, throughout social media pages, or even in videos, such as on YouTube or TikTok. So, at this stage, you might be wondering what a good call-to-action looks like. Let’s go through some examples from different domains and for different use cases, but first, let’s break down all the different CTA types. What are the different CTA types? One way we can break down CTA types is based on the business goal. In other words, what is the call to action trying to achieve and how does it help the business strategy? Here, we have summarized a number of different CTA types, but will go into further detail in the sections that follow. CTA type Aim Suitable for User acquisition Turn a visitor into a user Any business that allows users to sign up to a service using the website or allows users to purchase a product through the website Lead generation Turn a visitor into a lead Any business that can save customer service costs by allowing users to become better informed about a product or service through the website, submit a purchase order form through the site, or get their main questions answered through the site Lead nurturing Turn a lead into a qualified lead Any business that has a multi-step funnel (purchase process) and/or can offer something to the user (such as a downloadable resource or discount, for example) Promotion Generate awareness about something, such as a product launch, services, your brand, or its unique competitive advantages Any business, regardless of size or structure CTA types based on business goals User acquisition A user acquisition CTA aims to attract users directly by turning a visitor into a paying customer. This can be achieved via a complex CTA setup (which may be more appropriate for mature brands with greater resources), but can also be achieved via a simple button, a compelling, consistent business proposition, and a good user experience. What user acquisition CTAs can achieve User acquisition CTAs aim to attract users or paying customers. For an eCommerce website, that would be someone purchasing a product via the website. For a service website, that might mean someone booking a consultation and purchasing via the site. And, for SaaS companies, this could be someone subscribing to a service (with or without a trial period). What businesses user acquisition CTAs are best suited for This CTA type is suited for businesses and organizations that have a self-service product, service, and/or payment process (for example, a SaaS company with a self-sign-up product, like Asana or Monday.com, or an eCommerce organization like Amazon or PrettyLittleThing.) Examples of user acquisition CTAs Retail giant Amazon’s instant purchase tactics are one of the most recognizable examples of this type of CTA. The site’s buy now and one-click checkout buttons make it as easy as possible for visitors to become users. In other niches, user acquisition CTAs would typically include “sign up”, “get started,” or “create an account” buttons, but can also be CTAs based on the proposition of a free trial. Where to place user acquisition CTAs User acquisition CTAs are the money makers, so they should always be placed in prominent locations throughout the website. One common placement is in the top navigation menu, but these CTAs can appear in multiple different ways throughout a blog or resource section, as well as in service (or equivalent) pages. Lead generation A lead generation CTA is a broad CTA group encompassing elements that enable visitors to fill in their contact information, whether it’s through a form, signing up for a newsletter or something similar, effectively turning a visitor into a lead. What lead generation CTAs can achieve Lead generation CTAs can help you achieve just that—generating leads. This sounds simple enough, however, a crucial component of any worthwhile CRO strategy will ensure that lead generation has a purpose and the data that users provide will be utilized by the business in some form of value exchange—not for the purposes of irrelevant communications, solicitations, or for selling to third-parties. What businesses lead generation CTAs are best suited for Lead generation CTAs are used by small and large businesses alike, as each business (regardless of size and function) can benefit from having a self-service lead generation model via their website or other channel that enables user data collection. Examples of lead generation CTAs One of the most popular examples present on almost every website is a subscription pop-up or nudge. These can include direct email entry boxes, as shown below. Alternatively, they can also be a lot more creative, yet achieve the same purpose. Where to place lead generation CTAs These types of CTAs are most often placed within the content of a page. You can also choose to make this CTA type ever-present by adding it to a side menu or the footer menu, however, bear in mind this may hinder its effectiveness, as some visitors might not make it to the footer of the page. Nevertheless, that can be a good place to get user information via a simple email subscription form, or your last chance to make a good value proposition in return for lead information. One way to calculate the potential effectiveness of the email sign-up form (or any other CTA placed in the footer) is to reference historical page-scroll data across your website and make an evaluation based on the percentage of visitors that make it down to the end of your pages. To summarize, lead generation CTAs can be placed throughout the website, in the content body, in a side menu, or in the footer. Some brands have also experimented with placing their lead gen CTA in their expandable menus (as shown in the example below). Lead nurturing Lead nurturing is the process of lead cultivation for audiences that are not ready to commit to a purchase straight away. To put it otherwise, lead nurturing targets top-of-funnel users or users with an informational intent , and anticipates that not every visitor of the website or platform will be immediately ready to buy. A winning lead nurturing strategy accounts for needs of the visitor based on who they are (using profile characteristics, such as title, role, industry, search patterns, interests, and so on) and where they are in their buying journey, adapting the strategy as needed. What lead nurturing CTAs can achieve Through lead nurturing, a business can ensure that it steadily grows its lead portfolio, despite being aware that a percentage of this portfolio might not make a purchase immediately (or even ever). What this strategy achieves is, in part, investment in the future potential of the collected leads as well as building brand awareness and positive brand associations with target consumers. What businesses lead nurturing CTAs are best suited for Lead nurturing CTAs are typically used by organizations that require a degree of education about their product or service or would benefit from getting potential customers more familiar with their brand to make those prospects more likely to commit to a demo or purchase later on. Examples of lead nurturing CTAs Here is an example of lead generation using a downloadable resource, which targets a niche audience. Where to place lead nurturing CTAs Similar to lead generation CTAs, there is no limitation to where you can place these, but each placement will likely have a different impact on the CTA’s effectiveness. What matters more than the placement is the copy and incentive used to entice the lead. Ideally, this should be something relevant to the visitor’s interest, search patterns, and persona. This information can typically be gathered via a combination of your first-party data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console . For larger organizations, collecting data about which landing page your leads were first introduced to and what enticed them to make a purchase can also inform this decision. Promotional А promotional CTA is a call to action that does not aim to collect any type of information from the user or nurture them down the funnel. Instead, this type of CTA acts as a signpost to promote something else on the website or channel. To give you an example, an info card within a YouTube video pointing to another YouTube video is a type of promotional CTA, and so is internal linking in the SEO world. Both essentially amount to you promoting something else that you believe would be useful to the user, based on their search intent and profile, without expecting anything else but the click in return. Promotional CTAs can be both buttons and links , but they can also be static visuals (e.g., an image or banner), or an auditory message delivered through a video or podcast. What promotional CTAs can achieve Promotional CTA can facilitate cross-pollination of resources across your channel or website. They often help promote smaller website goals that are not directly tied to revenue, such as increasing page views or subscriber count. What businesses promotional CTAs are best suited for Whilst helpful and necessary, promotional CTAs alone do not form a cohesive conversion strategy. Yet, without them, a cohesive strategy could not exist. Both small and large businesses alike rely on them, though they are not generally enough for hitting revenue-related goals, such as product or service purchases. Examples of promotional CTAs “Read more” buttons are one common example of promotional CTAs, despite there being a lot of research that suggests these buttons are ineffective from both a CRO and SEO standpoint . Specifically, such generic promotional buttons are not great for accessibility, nor do they clearly and cohesively communicate the link destination (thus, being misaligned with SEO best practices ). And, they don’t typically provide a clear call to action. Despite this, they are still prominent, as you can see below. Another, better example are buttons that are organized based on a clear aim the user might have, or a value proposition, such as “find a solution” or “start for free.” Promotional CTAs are also very common in eCommerce. Below is a great example of such a CTA in action. Where to place promotional CTAs Promotional CTAs can be placed anywhere on your site, including in menus and content. However, considering the prominence of the top-level navigation or main menu, it might be better to reserve the spot for lead generation or other conversion-related CTAs. CTA types based on desired user action Now that we have learned the main types of CTAs, let’s take a look at CTA tactics that can be used for completing common objectives and how they relate to the business goals we discussed in the previous section. ​ CTA tactic ​ Description Business goal Example Form completion Form completion CTAs require the user to provide you with their contact details (among other relevant details you can ask for). This can be used for things such as a newsletter subscription, to request contact, or solicit feedback/reviews, depending on the nature of the data collected. Lead generation Free trial/demo Free trial or demo CTAs are typically offered in the SaaS and cloud industries, wherever there is a self-service or sales-assisted model. Lead generation, user acquisition Free download ​Free downloads prompt the user to download a resource either in exchange for contact information or to promote user satisfaction and positive brand awareness. Lead generation, lead nurturing Sign-up/ create an account The sign-up CTA is intended to encourage people to sign up for a service or to an online community like a social media site, for example. This is only suitable for websites that have an in-site experience, such as an eCommerce, social media, SaaS, or other service sites. User acquisition Social share Social share CTAs encourage sharing on different social platforms. This CTA type is suitable for content that is highly shareable, and some websites even enable users to directly highlight snippets of the content. Promotion Social follow ​Social follow widgets are typically displayed in the footer menu, can be added as prompts, or appear as side-menu pop-ups. These social follow prompts can urge people to follow or subscribe, but the aim is establishing a connection between the brand’s business profile and the potential customer. These CTAs can be visual, but they can also be verbal as well in podcasts or videos on the site. Promotion Message/ live chat ​The message or live chat CTA is a nudge. It can be considered an extension of the contact form and a replacement of (or addition to) calling the business directly. This CTA is great for lead nurturing but can also be used for lead generation, depending on the degree of support that is required. Lead generation, lead nurturing Leave a review This type of CTA urges people to leave a review, testimonial, rating, or any other feedback about their experience. This helps businesses build trust via social proof, which also helps to build authority . Such signals can also be utilized by search engines for understanding whether a brand is a real or fraudulent subject matter expert, and whether it should be recommended to new users. Promotion This list above is not exhaustive but covers all the basic tactics that can support a business’s strategic action-based goals. One thing to note is that, while we have covered examples of CTAs with different structures, calls to action can be delivered through a variety of mediums, including audio, video, text, image, or a combination. Let’s now take a deeper look at CTAs by medium. CTA types based on medium Image CTAs Image CTAs are not uncommon in conversion rate optimization strategies. Oftentimes, the image, button, and surrounding text work collectively to achieve the goal. There are also cases where businesses use an image that looks like a combination of CTA elements, such as text, other images, and a button, yet is structured as one clickable creative that takes the user to the destination page to complete the desired action. While this can sometimes enable an easier user experience, it might limit SEO value as the text CTA is contained in an image, thus not parsed by crawlers, and the internal link is processed as a no-anchor (also referred to as a “naked”) link . These CTAs might look like a banner ad and contain an image of the offer alongside copy explaining the value. Image CTAs could also be an image of the offer itself, which makes sense if promoting a template or a tool. HubSpot has shared its approach to generating more conversions on its blog via image CTAs by incorporating two of them per article, which are hyperlinked to the landing page with the relevant offer. Text CTAs Text-based CTAs, while often overlooked, can be very efficient for SEO purposes, but can also be pivotal to the success of a CRO strategy. For instance, HubSpot’s frequently referenced case study explains that the company uses anchor text with different styling as part of its blog to help captivate readers’ attention (as shown below). Below is another example from Alaya. The same tactic is used as part of a sentence in the text, highlighting the value proposition via the link and the relevance to the user via bold text. Video CTAs Video CTAs can be longer, compelling the user to take an action through the art of storytelling, or they can be shorter and more to the point. A video, created with the purpose of attracting users (user acquisition), would often have other CTAs within it. For instance, a video about the story, vision, and aims of a brand might contain a product demo, which is lead nurturing, as well as call for a social follow on the platform where the video is hosted. Video CTAs are extremely rich in potential and, when constructed with thought and care, they can garner great results, not only by generating revenue for the organization but also by decreasing the need for sales assistance. GIF or short videos are also possible CTA types, depending on how they are aligned with surrounding elements. Short clips (like the one below), whilst meaningless out of context, can be positive for conversion rate optimization when positioned around a strong, compelling message and quick access sign-up links. Hybrid CTAs Within the hybrid category, there are a few notable mentions which essentially cover different combinations of CTAs across different mediums. One great example is the in-post banner by Alaya, which combines image, text, and a button to deliver a compelling message. How to choose the best CTA for your website and your visitors? There are different factors to consider when choosing a CTA type. First, it’s important to use a variety of CTAs to keep things interesting for your users. Depending on your business goals, and the specific locations (sections, pages, or resources) on your site or channel that you might want to promote, you can shortlist different CTA tactics to test across different mediums. When thinking about CTAs and actions that the user should complete, it’s important to take into account the user’s search intent and the particular stage of the customer journey that they’re in. Looking at first-party data can be a great way to start building behavioral models for your current and ideal personas. This can help reduce tension between the business and the consumer and ensure that the latter does not create a negative association with the brand. Considering search intent when designing your CRO strategy can also ensure that the website is organized with a cohesive intent-driven architecture , and each action is aligned with the interest of the user. Ultimately, it will be the visitors of your site that determine the effectiveness of your CRO strategy, so it’s important to monitor and measure the performance of your CTAs and adapt them as needed. What other factors should you keep in mind when designing your CRO strategy? In addition to your CTAs, there are three important components that you should keep in mind when designing your conversion rate optimization strategy: the copy used, performance tracking, and whether you will implement testing. When writing copy for your CTAs, you should keep in mind the principles of good copywriting , as well as ad copy best practices . When thinking about performance measurement and testing, consider whether you have the capability to A/B test your CTAs. If your traffic performance does not yet allow A/B tests to be implemented and show statistical significance, rest assured that you can still work on CRO initiatives. You can still implement custom tracking via platforms like Google Tag Manager , and self-report on the performance of different events (e.g., button clicks, banner clicks, image clicks, etc.) via Google Data Studio through its integration with Google Analytics. The aim of such a report would be to monitor the differences that result from the changes you make to the site, such as swapping button text, whilst you work on improving traffic. Key takeaways There are many different avenues that your conversion rate optimization strategy could go in, even just based on the types of CTAs you choose for your site. This article mentioned a number of different CTAs, split into three groups: CTAs based on business goals CTAs based on desired user action CTAs based on medium To choose the right CTAs, you should consider what would benefit the business, how this can be communicated to the user, how the user can also benefit from the interaction, and how and where the nudges will appear to best encourage action. When implementing CTAs it’s also important to consider aspects like copywriting, A/B testing, and performance measurement. Calls to action FAQ What does CTA stand for? The CTA acronym in marketing stands for a call-to-action, which is a directive that is used to provide a signal or prompt to a user to perform a desired action. The desired action the user is encouraged to take is often one that aligns with the business or strategic goals of the organization, and often is considered the next logical step of the user journey. What does call to action mean? A call to action refers to an explicitly communicated nudge by a business or organization to the consumer of their content to perform an action that would benefit either the user or the organization, or both. Common examples of calls to action include “buy now,” “sign up,” or “read more,” for example. How do you write a call to action? To write an effective call to action, you must have a good understanding of: Your audience’s needs and how they can be best addressed What your business offers to address those needs Any overlap between your business goals and your audience’s needs When you are ready to write your call to action with regard to these considerations, it’s best to also keep ad copywriting best practices top of mind. What are the main CTA types based on business goals? There are four main types of CTAs based on business goals: user acquisition CTAs, lead generation CTAs, lead nurturing CTAs, and promotional CTAs. What are the main mediums for CTAs? CTAs are delivered via four main mediums: text, image, video, and audio CTAs. Oftentimes organizations will combine different formats, generating hybrid CTAs to improve their conversion performance. Lazarina Stoy - SEO & Data Science Consultant   Lazarina  is an organic marketing consultant specializing in SEO, CRO, and data science. She's worked with countless teams in B2B, SaaS, and big tech to improve their organic positioning. As an advocate of SEO automation, Lazarina speaks on webinars and at conferences and creates helpful resources for fellow SEOs to kick off their data science journey. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Lazarina Stoy For small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), on-page SEO is absolutely essential because it’s the lever that site and business owners have direct control over to enhance their organic visibility. While other strategies do exist (and are largely complementary, like PPC or link building ), they may not have the long-term ROI of on-page optimizations. In addition, SMBs often have another distinct advantage over larger businesses: proximity to their target audience. Combining insights and feedback from customer relationships with on-page SEO best practices is something that all brands should do to maximize their online presence and serve potential customers in ways that competitors just aren’t. In this guide, I’ll discuss three broad, effective strategies for implementing on-page SEO, what the strategies aim to achieve, and the specific tactics you can use to implement them for your SMB. Table of contents: Create content that addresses and fulfills user intent Tactics that can help you align with search intent Create content that is easy to comprehend for both users and search engines Tactics that can facilitate easier content comprehension Link to authoritative sources and other topically relevant content on your website Best practices for effective links SEO tools to help with your on-page optimizations How to measure the value of your on-page enhancements Key takeaways Create content that addresses and fulfills user intent Search intent refers to the intention a user has when they visit a search engine to perform a search (i.e., what they’re looking to achieve when they search a given keyword or phrase). Most search intents can be classified into one of four categories: Informational queries Transactional queries Commercial evaluation queries Navigational queries So, why do you need to address search intent? There are multiple reasons: Topical relevance Search engines like Google use query matching (among many other factors) to determine which results to show. Previously, this meant that it was important to mention certain keywords on the site. Today, this notion has evolved into topic relevance and entity-relationship matching . The words you use still matter, but it’s more important to write about a topic in both a coherent and competitive (to other content that exists out there) manner. To do this, focus on explaining the relationship between other related entities, while also aligning the language you use to the language your potential audience might be using. In other words, this means creating content that’s relevant to your audience and answers the potential questions/pain points they may have, and meeting them where they’re at using language and perspectives that they’re already familiar with. Search engine results page diversity Search engines want to surface different types of content on the first page of search results (both in terms of content type and domains) so that users can always find what they are searching for quickly, even if their query is ambiguous or might be answered with multiple different search results. This means that there is more competition for the top positions, and certain spots are “reserved.” For instance, definitions are often served by Oxford Languages or Wikipedia, reviews might be sourced from G2 or another review platform, and image or video packs might be a mainstay on search engine results pages (SERPs) for certain queries (e.g., informational searches). A robust focus on search intent (in each page and piece of content) means that Google is more likely to prefer your site to address searches that match your content. User experience Addressing search intent also means offering a good user experience. If someone is searching for something and they find it on your website, this may signal to Google that your website offers a good experience that satisfies visitors. Conversely, look out for short, non-descriptive pages and/or doorway pages , as these often lead users to jump quickly onto another page or go back to search—both of which signal poor user experience. Tactics that can help you align with search intent Now that you know why it’s important for your content to match the appropriate search intent, let’s talk about the tactics you can follow to ensure that they do. Perform intent-driven keyword and topic research Aligning search intent starts with keyword and topic research so that you know the intent search engines attribute to the keywords you’re targeting—after all, you’d be wasting your time if you wanted to rank an article about fixing iPhones for the query buy new iPhone , for example. To get the most insight from your keyword research, you must have a complete understanding of your business’s/product’s unique selling points, but also how your audience searches for products (and whether there are any differences in how users might search for what you offer based on their language, location, or culture ). Instead of simply collecting keywords and targeting them based purely on search volume (for example), identify patterns in the way users might find your product and business at different stages of the user journey . For instance, when buying an iPhone, people might first research product specifications, using informational search queries that contain the words “what” or “how” (e.g., how many MP iphone 13 pro max ), while at a later stage, they might inquire about product comparisons and the commercial landscape (e.g., differences between iphone 13 and 14 , best phone 2023 ), before finally searching for terms related to pricing, places to buy, or discounts. Informational search examples Commercial search examples Transactional search examples Once you identify your keywords and group them based on possible user intent, you will be better equipped to create content that is aligned with the desired user experience—and have a clearer understanding of which intent buckets are more prominent for your products and service. When doing intent-driven keyword research, avoid dismissing keywords entirely based on search volume alone (or other metrics that third-party tools might provide). Instead, focus on the user, their experience, and the user journey. As an SMB owner, you might find greater success targeting longer, niche keywords instead of competing for short, ambiguous queries with search volumes in the hundreds of thousands. Address all entities and concepts that might help the digital user journey In addition to researching for keywords and topics to center your content around, strive to explain the entities that make up the subject matter and the relationships between them. These are important as they often are used by audiences to make purchase decisions. For instance, a person would not purchase a car without an understanding of the major concepts that form the basis of this decision, such as the different types of cars available, the different types of fuel that power cars, concepts such as manual or automatic controls, and even different finance options. A prospect might have information about all of these things before starting the purchasing journey, however, their knowledge might be limited or they might not know enough to make a decision. Here is where the website, its pages, content, and organization, should act as a digital salesperson to help with the educational component and enhance the decision-making process. Similarly, if you sell a service or product, ensure the content you create addresses all potential questions users might have about it . Organize your site to facilitate visitors’ search intent This could mean a few different things, but mainly it pertains to leading users to their next intended step (which is ideally closer to converting). Here are some examples: Inviting them to learn more about a topic by suggesting a related post Prompting them to learn more about your services after inquiring about your brand Showing related products after they’ve expressed interest in purchasing something from your site This can also be approached from the opposite direction: Are there any potential blockers that might cause prospective customers to abandon their journey? Anything from subpar site security to questionable grammar to a lack of diverse product images could hold back your business—it’s up to you to identify and remedy those issues. Continuously collect and analyze first-party data for insights Utilize your first-party data sources (e.g., feedback forms, customer service conversations, user research, etc.) to create content, pages, and experiences that align with the needs of your users. Below are some other examples of data sources you can use to satisfy your existing or target customers: YouTube and/or TikTok comments can help you discover new blog post ideas. Forums and discussions in online community groups can help you understand how users speak about products like yours. Amazon (or other platforms’) reviews of your product (or products like it) can help you understand your audience’s main pain points, which you can address when discussing your product on your site (following the necessary improvements, of course). Create content that is easy to comprehend for both users and search engines Creating content that positively impacts your business isn’t just about what you know and what the audience is searching for—it’s also about how you present it. Let’s now discuss some basic considerations to help out both search engines and potential customers. The fundamentals of site discovery In order to show up in search results, your site must first be crawlable and indexable (i.e., visible to search engines). This will indicate to search engines that the site can be crawled and included in their index. Note: By default, Wix sites allow search engines to crawl and index them . After ensuring crawlability and indexability , the next step is to create page structures that enable search engines to easily comprehend the content and match it to user queries. How to structure content for easy consumption At a bare minimum, this means ensuring that each page has a consistent and easily digestible heading structure, including: A title that cohesively explains what the content is about An H1 heading that expands on or contextualizes the title to help indicate the page’s purpose H2-H6 headings that indicate the hierarchy of the different page sections and the content within them, enabling skim-ability for high-intent users At a more advanced level, this includes ensuring that content is written in the language that audiences use to discover your business. This involves both writing and adapting content to the way your target customers express themselves, but also researching and validating your brand voice with both these groups. At an expert level, this involves adding structured data , which search engines use to contextualize your pages. Adding different types of structured data (depending on your page or content type) can make it easier for Google to understand what your pages, products, and your website are about. It will also help your site appear in rich results in Google Search , which can help improve the click-through rate by making the result more enticing to click on. Tactics that can facilitate easier content comprehension Here it is important to understand that your aim as an SMB is to maximize the opportunity for user engagement on the site, whilst also providing the ability for users to consume only what they need. The strategies below will help you do just that. Set your content to be visible for search engines Ensure that all public-facing content (more on this below) is published and set to enable search engines to crawl and index it. Check that your sitemap is active and reflects all the pages on your website (or otherwise, does not contain broken pages, redirected pages, or other status pages besides live pages), and is accessible via the URL: domain name + “/sitemap.xml” (e.g., https://www.mywixwebsite.com/sitemap.xml) You should also verify that your robots.txt file is accessible via the URL: domain name + “/robots.txt” (e.g., www.mywixwebsite.com/robots.txt). You can use your robots.txt file to block pages that you don’t want to show up in the search results (like a “thank you” page or your entire site if it’s under construction, for example), but you’ll also need to ensure there are no live links on the site to sections that have not been published to avoid errors or a bad user experience. Improve user engagement from the SERPs Use a keyword-rich, descriptive, and enticing title to encourage clicks to your site. Your meta descriptions should communicate value and promote action from the search results. To get more potential visibility from the content you’re already creating, add structured data to your pages (where suitable) to enable your content to appear as a rich result on relevant SERPs. Whenever appropriate, add images to your pages, as these can also be displayed in search (e.g., in author pages or blog posts). Whenever you add images (not simply decorative graphics or icons), ensure that they are compressed before uploading them, and add alt text and descriptive captions to reflect the contents of the image. Organize content coherently Your titles should be based on the primary purpose of the content/page. If a page you’re publishing is primarily a tutorial, but it has a conceptual introduction, try to write a task-based title instead (for instance, “How to select the right SUV” is probably more aligned with your target audience than the more ambiguous “Selecting the right SUV”). Likewise, section headings are also written based on the type of content in that section. As a basic hygiene check to avoid duplication, make sure that there is no repetition between the title and headings. And, when writing titles and/or headings, avoid using the -ing verb forms as the first word where possible (words like “billing” or “pricing” are exceptions to this). In terms of formatting, Google has surfaced a number of best practices : Write headings and titles in sentence case. Delete numbers in headings that indicate a sequence of sections. Use punctuation in headings sparingly. When using an abbreviation in a heading or title, spell out the abbreviation in the first paragraph that follows the heading or title. Finally, make sure there are no empty headings or headings with no associated content beneath them. Remember, heading tags are used to structure content hierarchically. To change the visual formatting of a heading, it’s better to use CSS than a heading level that doesn’t fit the hierarchy. Don’t make up your own formatting for headings. There are also no skipped levels of the heading hierarchy. For example, H3 heading tags should only go under an H2 heading tag (or follow other H3 tags if it’s a list). H2 through H6 tags should similarly be used to structure the rest of the content and correspond to the semantic structure of the page (as this formatting is used for more than visual purposes). Additionally, including links within headings is not a good practice, as this can easily be confused as a style applied to a heading instead of a link, so avoid placing links in the heading text. To assist users with specific intentions, consider adding a table of contents (where appropriate) to aid quicker content discovery and a better user experience. And to maximize conversions, ensure that all call-to-actions are clear and strong , prompting the user to take the desired action—whether that’s signing up to a newsletter, downloading a resource, buying a product, or signing up for a service. Link to authoritative sources and other topically relevant content on your website Links don’t just take you from one page to another—with the right execution, they can guide your users, add authority to your content, and help search engines discover your pages. Let’s take a closer look at how links can support all these goals. User experience improvements Linking to authoritative sources within your own content allows you to cite the claims you are making within your copy. This is important as it highlights that your content is informed by trustworthy, credible, and authoritative sources . Despite popular belief that Google uses outbound link quality as a metric to determine rankings or that there’s a magic number of authoritative outbound links required to gain more traffic, these claims are not substantiated by Google . Instead, Google spokespeople emphasize that such links, when appropriately used throughout the content, can improve the user experience by informing the audience of other resources that may be relevant to their search intent. In its guidance on creating helpful content , Google also advises creating content that “presents information in a trustworthy way, with clear sourcing, evidence of expertise, and background information about the author or the publishing site.” Discovery improvements for relevant pages and queries on your site Linking to other relevant content on your site means that you are enabling visitors to discover more of your pages that are relevant to their interests, which could lead to engaging with new blog posts, products, and/or services. Internal linking also helps Google (and other search engines) discover new pages and new ways that these pages can be served to users via the text you use to link to the content (referred to as anchor text). These links also help indicate the relative importance of pages on your site by distributing link equity. Besides the anchor text, the surrounding text can also be used for hints on what potential queries the linked page can be matched against. Best practices for effective links First of all, avoid generic anchor text. Everything in the realm of “read more,” “learn more,” and “click here,” will not serve your search engine visibility goals. Ensure all linking text is descriptive of the link destination and provides enough context for the user. This is true for both internal and outbound links, as both should strive for wording that describes the destination page. In terms of link settings, below are some quick best practices to follow : Ensure there are no links pointing to redirected or 404 pages. Set all internal links using the “follow” link setting . When linking internally, set links to open in the same window. When linking externally, set links to open in a new window. This enables improved user engagement tracking for internal link interactions, while also providing a better user experience for those that click on external links as they can always quickly come back to your site by returning to the original tab in their browser. SEO tools to help with your on-page optimizations Here is a selected collection of tools I use to do on-page optimizations, keyword research, and other enhancements, suitable for people with little or no prior experience in SEO and for SMB owners. For intent-driven keyword and opportunity research, you can use any SEO platform like Semrush , Ahrefs, etc. They come at a heavier monthly cost, but can help with a wide array of SEO research and opportunity identification tasks. There are also free alternatives for identifying relevant keywords, such as: Google Keyword Planner to identify broad match keywords (which contain the term you enter to start the search) and semantically related keywords (which contain other similar terms) Autocomplete Keyword Tool by PEMAVOR to bulk-export terms that Google suggests based on a given keyword SEO Minion browser extension to bulk-export PAA (people also ask) question and answer pairs from the SERP, quickly identify organic competitors, and analyze headings, titles, and other on-page SEO elements. To identify the structured data that your competitors are using, try the Ryte Structured data helper browser extension . To speed up the process of creating the structured data for your website, use a structured data generator (e.g., by ClassySchema or Merkle ). For creating content briefs, there are multiple tools to choose from, depending on your budget. Paid options include tools like Keyword Insights , but to get started for free, test Contenteum ’s content generator (which is based on the URLs and titles ranking within the SERP) or Dashword ’s AI-powered content generator. If you just want to conduct a quick spot check of existing content, you can use a tool like the SEO Pro Extension for Chrome to get an overview of the title tag, meta description, canonical tag, word count, headers, links, and so on. If you're a Wix site owner, you can use the built-in SEO Assistant to ensure that you've already optimized aspects of on-page SEO (like headers, alt text, structured data, meta description, and more) before you publish your blog post. How to measure the value of your on-page enhancements How can you determine whether your strategies are having an impact ? Here аre metrics you might want to monitor to ensure that the tactics you’ve implemented are serving search engines, your visitors, and your business. Organic keywords and traffic Review the keywords your site is ranking for and ensure that they are aligned with your target keywords, topics, and entities. Consider whether these are also aligned with your business proposition and whether they help further your company’s goals. User engagement Review metrics like: Average time on page Bounce rate Exit rate Average number of pages per session Average session duration Etc. Improvements in all of these (with a decrease in bounce rate) are a good indicator of intent alignment and effective site architecture. Site engagement events Review metrics such as: Page scroll Button clicks On-page events (shopping, browsing, social follows, etc.) Improvements here indicate that the experience on the page is enticing for users and content is organized in a way that promotes engagement. Search performance If you’ve added structured data to some of your pages, you can also monitor for improvements in clicks and click-through rate, as well as overall search visibility (namely in the Rich Results and Enhancement reports in Google Search Console ). Key takeaways Greater search visibility often correlates to greater revenue for your business. Although there are many tactics that can help you get more visibility in the SERPs, on-page SEO elements are the ones that are under your direct control. While I’ve discussed many considerations in this article, it’s important to see the forest for the trees. In short: Create content that addresses and fulfills your audience’s search intent Make that content easy to comprehend for both users and search engines Link to relevant content internally and authoritative content externally By focusing on these three areas, you’ll make your site more user-friendly for potential customers and more easily understood for search engines. Lazarina Stoy - SEO & Data Science Consultant   Lazarina  is an organic marketing consultant specializing in SEO, CRO, and data science. She's worked with countless teams in B2B, SaaS, and big tech to improve their organic positioning. As an advocate of SEO automation, Lazarina speaks on webinars and at conferences and creates helpful resources for fellow SEOs to kick off their data science journey. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Lazarina Stoy I n a landscape where online presence is paramount, taking proactive steps to optimize your website  by eliminating duplicate content can significantly improve your brand’s success at multiple stages of the customer journey. For instance, at the start of their journey, users browse search results for the most relevant, high-quality websites, but duplicate content can reduce your brand’s search visibility and competitiveness.  And, as users proceed down the marketing funnel, duplicate content threatens the conversion once again due to a fractured/frustrating user experience, making it difficult to locate all the information about a given product, service, or topic on a single page. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the nuances of content duplication, show you how to identify duplication on your website (and other properties on the web), and share some fixes you can implement to resolve any content overlap. This article primarily focuses on the type of duplicate content you have control over—on your own domain—however, external duplicate content can also diminish your search performance, so I'll also address that as well. Table of contents: What is duplicate content? Types of duplicate content When is duplicate content a problem? Duplicate content metrics How to identify duplicate content How to check for internal metadata duplication How to check for internal duplicate content How to check for external duplicate content How to fix duplicate content issues Fix internal metadata duplication Fix internal duplicate content Fix external duplicate content Takeaways What is duplicate content?  Duplicate content refers to content that’s very similar (or identical) to other content on the web, either on another website (i.e., external duplicate content) or another page of the same website (i.e., internal duplicate content).  You can flag a page as duplicative if you see that it has one (or more) of the following characteristics:  Significant content overlap  — The content portions of a web page are either exact copies or very similar versions of the original content. Structural and semantic similarities  — There are substantial similarities in the overall structure of the page, including the on-page metadata (e.g., URLs, headings , subheadings, paragraph structure, etc.), as well as semantic similarities  (e.g., entities mentioned, arguments made, etc). Content in which minor subtleties are the only differentiator can signal that the pages are trying to appear different, but actually serve the same purpose. Lack of thought originality  — The content is informed by the same sources and presents similar perspectives.  Similarities in ranking queries  — Both pages are ranking for an identical set of keywords (signaling a lack of unique content) and target the same intent and audience. Types of duplicate content In addition to the internal and external duplicate content classifications I mentioned above, you can also examine duplicate content through the lens of similarity (i.e., exact duplicate or near duplicate). Duplicate content type Exact duplicate Near duplicate Internal duplicate content Duplicate on-page meta data Parameter URLs that are indexable and non-canonicalized, leading to the same page Feed content pages (e.g., blog archive, tag pages, category pages) Paraphrasing copy/pasted content Content cannibalization Boilerplate content, like on-page banners and CTAs, product descriptions, or info boxes, that are very similar or identical across many pages Using a similar page and heading structure across multiple pages Overlapping phrasing, sentence, and paragraph structure over multiple pages External duplicate content Syndicated content published on multiple sites Unauthorized republishing, scraped, or “cloned” content (copied without permission or proper attribution) Cross-domain duplication Partial copying (e.g., when affiliate websites use similar or identical product descriptions, borrowing from the original website’s product description) Paraphrased content, content structures, and website architecture (e.g., websites, created to manipulate search engine results and not add value for user) Fully AI-generated content  is also inherently unoriginal, especially when paired with site structure copied from another website It’s useful to assess whether a page is an exact duplicate or a near duplicate for the sake of prioritization, but also to understand how Google will perceive and rank the page.  To elaborate, exact duplicates (when left unmanaged) almost certainly will result in lower rankings, worse user experience, and harm your website’s search performance overall. On the contrary, near duplicates are considered with nuance, depending on the context and the degree of similarity. When is duplicate content a problem?  Duplicate content isn’t always a cause for concern. In some instances, content duplication can be harmless and even intentional, like in the case of news syndication.  In general, problems occur when content duplication is malicious, misleading, hinders the user experience, and/or does not serve a specific purpose. When duplication is responsible and strategic, it can help you promote your content to a wider audience or serve other business functions. Here’s a breakdown of when content duplication is (and isn’t) problematic. Content duplication can be harmless when: Syndication and repurposing are enabled —   This allows you to share content across platforms (like social media or news aggregators) with permission and proper attribution. This can expand your content’s reach and enhance your overall brand. Fair use is implemented —   Duplicating content under fair use or licensing agreements is acceptable (e.g., quoting source material, educational materials, etc). Canonicalization and URL management govern distribution —   Use canonical tags  and proper URL management to specify the original version for search engines. This applies to both re-publishing content on a platform like Medium and managing URLs with parameters internally. Content duplication is problematic when: Copy/pasted (or exact duplicate) content accounts for the majority of the content on a page —   Word-for-word repetition across multiple pages or websites hinders search engine indexation  and confuses users. Purposefully copying content from other websites without attribution is also punishable by law. Paraphrased (or near duplicative) content accounts for the majority of the content on a page —   Similar content with overlapping phrases, similar structure, or semantically-related arguments can frustrate users and worsen the search landscape. Republishing is unauthorized or attribution is missing  —   Copying content without attribution or permission violates copyright laws and Google has said it “reserves” the right  to penalize such websites. “Duplicate content does happen. Now, that said, it’s certainly the case that if you do nothing but duplicate content, and you’re doing it in an abusive, deceptive, or malicious, or manipulative way, we do reserve the right to take action on spam.” — Matt Cutts, Google Duplicate content metrics There are several metrics that can show you whether your website’s content is duplicated internally or externally. Here’s what to look out for.  In Google Search Console : Metric Why Pages indexed Indexable pages that Google chooses not to serve can indicate poor content quality (i.e., duplicate content). Look out for high numbers of the following status issues :  “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user” “Crawled - currently not indexed" Erratic or declining traffic performance Traffic fluctuations or sudden drops can indicate duplicate content, cannibalization , or external content surpassing your own website’s content. Monitor for drastic changes in positions and clicks from search to help identify pages that are potentially affected. Ranking query overlap for internal pages Significant overlaps in ranking queries for internal pages can indicate lack of unique content and perspectives, causing diminished search traffic for one or both pages. In Google Analytics 4 : Metric Why Bounce rate on pages with similar terms or structure High bounce rate on these pages could suggest that users are struggling to differentiate between the pages, causing a poor user experience. Session duration declines for pages with similar terms or structure Noticeable drops in session duration for pages in the same topic cluster  could signal duplicate content problems. Time on page Track the average amount of time users spend on each page of your website. A longer average time on page suggests that users are engaged with the content and find it valuable. How to identify duplicate content To identify duplicate content internally, you’ll need to evaluate your website’s pages against one another. To check for external duplicate content, you’ll compare your pages against other pages on the web. In the following sections, I’ll take you through the process of doing exactly that. How to check for internal metadata duplication If you are concerned about duplicate pages on your website, the quickest way to validate the issues is to run a duplication analysis on your metadata. Check for similarities in elements like page titles , page headings and subheadings, meta descriptions , and URLs.  This is a simple, straightforward duplication analysis and can be performed with freemium crawlers like Screaming Frog, which extracts data for all the aforementioned elements on all your site’s pages.  To scan for duplicate metadata on your website, download and install Screaming Frog  and start a crawl. Once the crawl is complete, export all internal data to a Google Sheet and paste it into the first sheet of this template  (you’ll need to make a copy of the template first).  Next, click on Extensions > AppScript in the top-level menu, then select findanddisplayduplicateswithURLs.gs  from the list, and click on RUN, which will automatically sort the pages to show duplicate titles, headings, and URLs, as well as a summary, in the sheet titled “Summary of on-page duplication.”  You can also take your analysis a step further by analyzing your metadata for semantic similarities. This is useful for identifying patterns that might qualify as near duplicates, like abusing title or heading patterns, which can become tedious for users. While Screaming Frog doesn’t currently offer this semantic analysis for on-page data, there are workarounds you can use in Google Sheets. Once you have entered your data in the Google Sheets template I provided above, the template will automatically run a fuzzy matching (string similarity)  formula to weed out titles or headings that are similar but not exact. You can review these semantically-related on-page elements in the “Near Duplicates” tab, alongside the number of potential matches and most similar alternatives. This can help you pinpoint whether you’re abusing any particular title or heading formats or structures, e.g., “# Ways to connect {tool} with Looker Studio” or “Ultimate guide to X,” like below. This type of duplication analysis is suitable for sites of any size/age. Ideally, you should conduct this analysis as part of regularly scheduled reporting processes, especially in organizations where: There is more than one person (or team) creating content There is no tracking in place for new content/web pages  The website/publication is more than a year old These scenarios can lead to duplicate content (as a result of human error or lack of coordination and tracking), so you’ll need to be more vigilant if your website (or your clients’) falls under one of these scenarios. How to check for internal duplicate content If you have concerns about duplicate content on your own website, go a step beyond metadata analysis (mentioned above) and evaluate the written content on your website for self-plagiarism and duplication.  Here are my favorite, beginner-friendly, and readily available methods to quickly identify duplicate content on the same domain (according to website size and budget):  Method 1: Similarity assessment based on ranking queries Using the Search Analytics for Sheets Google Sheets extension  (free, with paid option for larger exports), pull out a report for organic ranking queries, grouped by Query and Page. Ideally, set the report to be extracted into the same Google Sheet template , in the Sheet tab titled “Query-based duplication,” as shown in the image above.  Ensure that the OverlapSummary sheet is empty, and navigate to Extensions  (top-level menu) > AppScript  > CalculateQueryOverlap.gs . Run the script. The template will automatically apply a formula that sorts the data to show only the duplicated queries, the number of pages ranking for each of these, and the corresponding URLs. In the sheet titled “OverlapSummary,” data will populate (via a custom AppScript formula) with a summary of the pages that overlap on ranking queries. Review pages that rank for more than 80-90% of the same queries, as you can either consolidate the content on these pages  or further optimize them, because, as is, they are not ranking for unique queries.  Method 2: Run your website’s content through a plagiarism checker Use a paid tool (like Siteliner , for example) to get a self-plagiarism report on your entire website. Siteliner provides a summary based on the page’s importance (how many internal links it has) and the degree of copied content on it. Siteliner also shows you the exact content that is duplicated on each page and the URLs of other pages containing the same content. You can even scale this approach for larger websites via Siteliner’s API. Method 3: Duplicate content analysis via crawling tools You can also check for duplicate (and near duplicate) content with Screaming Frog . By default, the crawler identifies exact duplicate pages. For smaller websites (under 500 URLs) duplicate content detection is free and automatic for every crawl.  Before starting a crawl, you can instruct the tool to also detect near-duplicate pages, based on a threshold of your choice (i.e., a percentage number, such as above 90% similarity). This feature requires a paid license and will return a custom duplication report.  Other crawler tools, like Sitebulb , offer similar duplicate content detection features. Here’s a summary of the methods you can use for internal duplicate content detection, with regard to their respective costs and advantages: Method Tool Cost Advantages Query-based analysis Google Search Console Free Quick and easy way to identify non-direct duplication Offers a view of your site as Google sees it Plagiarism checker Siteliner Paid (free for sites under 250 URLs) Great for getting a snapshot of issues on medium or large-sized websites Detailed analysis Hands-on interface Good for ad-hoc analysis Crawling tool Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or any other crawling tool  Can depend on the tool, but generally free for smaller sites and exact duplicates Great for getting a snapshot of issues on medium- or large-sized or large websites Detailed analysis Great for enhancing ongoing reporting  Additional metrics enable a more holistic analysis Historical comparison How to check for external duplicate content In addition to auditing for duplicate content on your own website, you should also actively search for instances where your content has been used (or copied entirely) elsewhere without your permission.  While external content duplication can sometimes be unintentional and harmless to your organic search performance (e.g., someone directly quoting a snippet from your blog), it can also be malicious in cases where the creator of the duplicate does not add any new information, is monetizing the copied work, or has not credited your original work.  One tool that I like to use for external content duplication analysis is Copyscape , which offers a straightforward and low-cost way to discover if your web content appears on other sites. There are several ways to use the service, like submitting a URL or sitemap, pasting a batch of URLs for analysis, or even via an API.  The tool then scans the web for any pages that contain similar or identical content, identifying the number of matches for each page, the degree of risk for the given page, top-matching sites, and even flagging any errors it encounters with the URLs provided. It not only identifies full copies (i.e., exact duplicates) of your content but also finds instances where parts of your text have been used. You can also set up automatic monitoring, which alerts you when the tool finds new copies of your content. By proactively monitoring for duplicate content, you protect not only your intellectual property but also your site’s rankings on search engines, as duplicated content can chip away at your organic search performance. How to fix duplicate content issues  Once you’ve identified duplicate content (using any of the methods listed above), you can take the following steps to reduce similarities in your website’s metadata or content.  Fix internal metadata duplication Use unique heading tags:  Headings help organize the content of a page and provide context for search engines. Similar to title tags, heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) should also be unique for each page.  Canonicalize product URLs:  For eCommerce websites, product URLs with parameter variations (like color, size, etc.) should be canonicalized to the main product URL. This tells search engines that the main product page is the authoritative source for product information. Fix internal duplicate content Aim for mostly unique content:  Ensure the content on each page is at least 70% unique. While some repurposing is expected in a website, there shouldn’t be patterns of content abuse with the aim of gaming the search algorithm. Consolidate and redirect, don’t delete:  When merging content, implement a 301 redirect  instead of deleting the obsolete page to avoid loss of link equity and 404 page status errors . Diversify your content portfolio:  Avoid writing in the same style, the same structure, or format for all your website content. Diversify the types of content you create by experimenting with listicles, case studies, tutorials, and so on. Fix external duplicate content Signal originality to Google:  Implement canonical tags on your website and make sure all content has a publishing date, revision dates (if any), and E-E-A-T -establishing information. Improve your content further:  Consider further enhancing your content by adding new perspectives and insights as a way to set it apart from the duplicated instances. Get in touch with the other website’s owner:  Some website owners would prefer to simply remove your content when requested, instead of risking escalation (more on that below). Report infringing content to Google:  In a video on content duplication , Google stated that, in certain circumstances, you can file for a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown. This only applies if copying your content is illegal (such as in the case of music, for example). Take legal action:  In case you have evidence of intellectual theft, take legal action under the DMCA or European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) (depending on your location). The goal for all of these content deduplication initiatives is improving your website’s organic search performance (by improving your content quality and improving user experience). As you progress towards that goal, you should also see improvements in the metrics I discussed earlier . How to audit your website for duplicate content: The takeaways Content duplication, while not always problematic, can be difficult to identify or manage, especially on larger and more established websites. It can manifest in several cases: internally or externally, by exact or partial duplication, or sometimes even unintentionally. In all cases, duplicate content issues should be monitored and, where possible, addressed to ensure optimal search performance and user experience.  To identify duplicate content issues, review your traffic patterns, search performance, and indexation in GSC data, as well as your page experience, engagement rates, and time on site in GA4.  Regularly audit your website  for duplicate on-page metadata like titles and headings, but also utilize tools like Siteliner for internal duplicate content analysis and Copyscape to identify copies of your content on the web.  If you identify duplicate content internally, implement the necessary actions to make pages and their respective content unique. In the case of malicious copies of your content elsewhere, try to get in touch with the website owner before reporting it to Google or the relevant authorities in your area.  By implementing systems to monitor and audit your content for duplication, and taking corrective action when needed by producing unique and helpful content, you are ensuring that your website and business are operating sustainably now and into the future. Lazarina Stoy - SEO & Data Science Consultant   Lazarina  is an organic marketing consultant specializing in SEO, CRO, and data science. She's worked with countless teams in B2B, SaaS, and big tech to improve their organic positioning. As an advocate of SEO automation, Lazarina speaks on webinars and at conferences and creates helpful resources for fellow SEOs to kick off their data science journey. Twitter  | Linkedin

Updated: February 27, 2024 Author: Abby Gleason When’s the last time you switched up your keyword research process ? For the first couple years of my SEO career, I accepted that there was an established, “go-to” method for keyword research, and I relied primarily on keyword data from popular tools to be my guide. This process might sound familiar: Go to an SEO keyword research tool and plug in a topic Filter the highest volume keywords that seem realistic to rank for Create content based off that list And you know what? This method can work just fine. If done correctly, you might be able to drive some significant traffic to your website this way. However, over time I realized there are a few key problems with this method: It prioritizes search volume over everything . This data is merely an estimate, and these tools usually do not provide context for search trends or seasonality. High search volume usually = high competition. This often means only the highest authority websites can rank. If you’re using a keyword research tool others can access, then your competitors can see all the same keywords you do. There’s no chance for first-mover advantage. Yes, paid keyword research tools can prove very helpful in informing your topic selection. But relying solely on these tools leaves a gap in finding highly relevant topics for your website—a gap that only additional research can fill. Harnessing trending keywords for SEO is an excellent way to fill that gap while also signaling topical relevance to search engines and potential customers. Table of contents: What are trending keywords in SEO? The benefits of emerging keywords Ways to integrate trends into your topic research Monitor current events and pop culture Scale your social listening Identify your customers’ expectations Find breakout terms in your user data Tools for discovering trending SEO topics Defining trending keywords in SEO In SEO, trending keywords are search terms and phrases that have emerged recently and do not have historic search volume. Tools may show these keywords as having low (or zero) search volume , but they could actually be driving thousands of searches every month. Benefits of using emerging keywords The most successful SEOs and content marketers recognize that finding trending keywords is one of the best uses of their time. This “trend-driven” research process can result in some pretty compelling advantages: Your content “skips the line” (i.e., first-mover advantage). The competition may ignore or completely miss keywords that don’t show up in keyword research tools, which provides you an opportunity to be an early contributor to the conversation. The first-mover advantage can mean that your content ranks better on Google (and other search engines) than it would for more competitive terms. Addressing trends can help you build positive brand perception amongst your customers and prospects—it’s a positive signal for your brand to cover highly relevant topics and provide a unique, authoritative perspective. Disclaimer : This article is not suggesting your business should write about every trending topic. I’m not promoting a bandwagon approach where every business needs to take a stance on, say, trending political topics. The point is to consider trends in your product area or in topics that your audience is interested in, and create product-relevant content that you have authority on. Ways to integrate trends into your topic research So where does one find these coveted, trending keywords? And how can you build it into your existing keyword research process? Let’s dive in. 01. Keep an eye on current events/pop culture Culture drives demand and new searches. If a singer releases a new album, for example, it can increase searches on Google for a particular style of makeup, clothes, or even furniture featured in the music video. Take Taylor Swift’s Midnights , released in late October 2022. The new album catapulted searches for every aspect of the singer’s life, from makeup to clothes to even her pets. Major cultural events create an opportunity to predict what searchers will be interested in. Go beyond the scope of what’s just happened and consider all interests related to the trend. You can think of this as a PEST analysis for potential content. Some common aspects of pop culture that play out in trending searches include: What’s being released/trending on popular streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc. Movies that are generating buzz as Oscar contenders What’s popular in music, sports, fashion, video games, etc. For B2B companies, the same idea applies. What’s happening in the world, and how does it impact your industry? This could include reviewing: Upcoming regulations Legislation that impacts your industry Politics The economy There is an element of relevance and brand safety that you must also prioritize, so make sure the connection between the topic and what your brand does/sells is apparent. Tip: If you’re not sure what your audience’s interests are, try an audience research tool like Sparktoro . It can show you behavioral info like what websites your audience visits, social accounts they follow, hashtags they use, and more. Qualitative audience research is best, but this can be a good place to start. When it comes to trending searches, the goal isn’t just to write about what’s currently happening, but to anticipate questions that people will search around that topic. Let’s use ChatGPT , the AI tool that took the world by storm in 2022, as an example. For months into its meteoric rise, ChatGPT was a zero volume keyword in popular tools. Yes, really–and there’s examples to prove it, like this case study from Sara Taher. But with 100 million users within the first two months, it’s safe to say there’s interest in all things ChatGPT. With this swarm of interest, opportunities arose to anticipate other questions that might pop up around this tool. Some low competition content ideas around ChatGPT include: How to use ChatGPT ChatGPT alternatives ChatGPT detector ChatGPT prompts for [industry] This is just one dramatic example of a rapidly trending topic that drives (and sustains) millions of searches, yet there was very little authoritative content in search results for it. How to stay up-to-date with current events: Set Google Alerts for when new results for a topic show up in Google Search. Consume news, especially news that is relevant to your industry/audience. Subscribe to industry newsletters to stay up-to-date on what’s happening. Maintain general awareness of what’s trending in pop culture (specifically as it relates to your audience). Twitter’s explore section and Reddit are two places to look, but your best bet is to follow the same publications/sites that your audience follows. 02. Scale your social listening Social media is a powerful search engine. Want to know what’s trending? Scroll through social media and you’ll be bombarded with whatever’s most popular at the moment. While you don’t need to spend hours a day on each platform, it’s worthwhile to follow hashtags in your space and regularly review threads related to your topic/niche. My sneaky favorite social media platform to get topic ideas from is Reddit. You can sort comments by “Best,” “Top,” “New,” “Controversial,” and more. Tip : Reddit’s search function leaves a lot to be desired. I like to Google my topic and append “reddit” to the search to get the most relevant threads. Social listening is simple and can be incorporated into your research routine without much effort. Follow your hashtags and topics across different platforms your audience engages on, and check in to see what’s getting buzz. Follow relevant influencers on these platforms and monitor what they (and their audience) share. And no need to become obsessed—schedule it during your work day like you would any other research. 03. Identify your customers’ expectations How better to learn what your audience is interested in than to hear it from the source ? If you have the opportunity to speak directly with customers or customer-facing teams, absolutely make that part of your research process. For example, I once worked with a women’s fashion client who connected us with two of their salespeople. We spoke for an hour about common customer pain points, what types of clothes they were most interested in, and the questions the salespeople most frequently received. After a one hour call, we had 100 new content topics for their website. Yes, 100. Many of which we never would have gotten from traditional keyword research. The simplest version of this could be putting out a poll on your owned channels (like email or social) and asking your audience what questions they have or what types of content they’re most interested in. Regardless of how you do it, speaking with customers or customer-facing teams at least a couple times per year can be extremely fruitful for your content efforts. 04. Find break-out terms in your user data Your data tells a story. It shows you what’s working, what’s not, and can even show you what people are trying to find but can’t (which indicates an opportunity). Here are a few ways you can use your own data to inform your topic selection: Internal search data : Examine the search terms users are searching for on your website. Are there terms that are increasing in popularity? What content do they find when they search for this? Consider creating educational content or product pages specifically for these searches to move them further along the customer journey. Top performing content : What content is driving the most engagement recently? Look for patterns. Are there certain topics or content formats that perform the best? Can you double down on your efforts here? Google Search Console queries : Review your top performing content from the past few months. See what queries you’re being found for that you don’t expressly mention or target in your content. Optimize for those, or create a separate article targeting them. Here’s a quick case study of this in action: Here’s the chart from the tweet above: Tools for discovering trending topics for SEO As the cliché goes, the best things in life are free. This can also apply to your keyword research process. Free (or very low-cost) tools are available to help you catch trending search terms quickly and reliably. Google autocomplete suggestions Google autocomplete suggests popular long tail search terms related to a given keyword/topic. It’s essentially a free idea generator, as the predictions reflect popular searches and search patterns across the web. Google notes that while autocomplete looks for common queries, it also considers trending interest in a query. This allows autocomplete to show the most helpful predictions unique to a particular location or time, such as for breaking news events. Here’s an example: As you can see, a few days after Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show, searches related to her performance (and her surprise pregnancy announcement) appeared at the top of Google’s autocomplete suggestions for her name. You get instant access to trending searches for your topic. Tip : Tools like Answer the Public can streamline this for you, although I like to do manual searches using my browser’s incognito mode as well to validate the tool’s suggestions and gather additional ideas. Google’s People Also Ask feature In Google’s results, the People Also Ask feature surfaces popular questions related to your search. Similar to autocomplete, this section shows common (and trending) questions people are searching for on this topic. Using Rihanna as our example search again, you see a mix of trending and common questions. As a side note, there are indications that Google will make it easier to identify trending terms in PAA boxes by adding a handy “Trending” label to questions. Google appears to be testing this as of February 2023 , but I have not seen one of these tests myself yet. Tip : Tools like AlsoAsked can streamline this for you as well, but again, I also recommend manually searching in incognito mode to see results in real-time. Keywords Everywhere I’m a big fan of this tool , which is a paid (but very inexpensive—my subscription breaks down to less than $1 USD/month) keyword research extension you can add to your browser. When I conduct a search, it shows me estimated search volume, competition level, and related keywords right in the SERPs. One of my favorite features is the Trend Data chart. Despite being a basically free tool, I find Keywords Everywhere to more accurately capture trending topics than traditional keyword research software. Remember the example above, citing ChatGPT as a zero volume keyword in popular (paid) SEO tools? Keywords Everywhere is one of the tools that showed otherwise. Trend analysis tools Free keyword trend tools are also available to help you quickly identify search trends across a variety of topics. These include: Google Trends Exploding Topics YouTube Trends TikTok Trends Pinterest Trends I find the trending “Related queries” section in Google Trends particularly useful, like in the example below for “plant care.” So many ideas! In general, I’ve found that these related topics don’t often have much competition in the SERPs, so there’s a lot of opportunity to rank. Glimpse If you like Google Trends but want more out of it, Glimpse  is your new best friend. Their freemium Chrome extension, Google Trends Supercharged, adds trendlines, volume data, and more keyword insights right into Google Trends. You can see a great example of how Glimpse works with their COVID-19 Consumer Impact tracker , which tracked some surprising search trends at the height of the pandemic. Glimpse offers insights on every topic, so you’re not limited to a few categories. My favorite feature is the weekly email alerts, which send me trending topics in my niche. I’ve sent many ideas to our editorial team based on what Glimpse suggests is trending. Your intuition Finally, one of the best keyword research tools you have at your disposal is yourself—trust your instincts. If you are actively engaged in your industry and are generally aware of what’s going on in the world, you’ll catch wind of trends, no tools necessary. One example we’re all too familiar with is COVID-19. When the pandemic started, many could relate to familiar questions like, “what do I do?” and “how can I help?” These types of questions fit into my former healthcare client’s content strategy, so we created articles to address them. This LinkedIn post summarizes the success of one of these topics. Tools estimated zero volume, but our intuition suggested otherwise. The bet paid off. Breathe life back into keyword research The process I’ve outlined above may seem like extra work compared to relying on paid tools to do it for you. And you’re right, it is more work. But if you add a few of these tools into your regular process, or schedule a quarterly brainstorm where you do a deep dive, you’ll find that it doesn’t add up to that much extra work after all. What matters most is if the impact is worth the extra effort, and I can say from experience that it definitely is. And going beyond performance: maybe, just maybe, this process will even make keyword research fun again. In my opinion, that alone is worth the effort. 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:  Alla Avgustinov Display ads are a popular revenue source for many websites (e.g., blogs, news websites, social platforms), but they can also be a supplementary, low-maintenance revenue generator for just about any website that attracts visitors. Google AdSense enables you to display ads to your website visitors, which helps you get the most value from those visitors while diversifying your site’s revenue stream. Let’s take a look at everything you need to know to get started with Google AdSense on your Wix or Wix Studio website.  Table of contents: What is Google AdSense? How Google AdSense integrates with Wix & Wix Studio Get started with AdSense & Wix in 3 steps Set up the Wix AdSense app on your website Create ad units in the Wix Monetize with AdSense dashboard Place ad units in site widgets Bonus: Place ads in Wix Studio’s global sections Strategies for maximizing AdSense on Wix & Wix Studio Show ads on your website’s high-value page types Create monetizable content for high-value audiences Add AdSense to high-traffic posts in Wix Blogs What is Google AdSense? Google AdSense is a display advertising platform that allows website owners to show ads  on their website(s) that are aligned with their site content and audience.  The ads themselves are provided by Google and all you (as the site owner) have to do is to designate an area on your web pages to place the ads. The more impressions the ads get, the more the revenue these ads will generate for your site.  How Google AdSense integrates with Wix & Wix Studio Wix’s Google AdSense integration was developed through Embedded Connect , which streamlines the connection process and helps you start earning faster by enabling you to sign up for Google AdSense without leaving your Wix Dashboard. You’ll need to connect a custom domain name  before you get started. Once you have, you can connect Google AdSense to your Wix & Wix Studio websites.  To include AdSense in your page templates, you can use the Wix Monetize with AdSense  app from the Wix App Market. Blog owners may also choose to monetize individual blog posts with ads . For this, you can use the native Wix Blog integration to build ad placements as you create your blog posts. Now, let’s dive a bit deeper on how you can get started and best practices to optimize revenue. Get started with AdSense & Wix in 3 steps To generate revenue from AdSense display ads on your Wix or Wix Studio website: Set up the Wix Monetize with AdSense app on your website Create ad units Place ad units within your site widgets Wix Studio users can also place ads within global sections for efficiency and scalability as they build (more on this below). 01. Set up the Wix AdSense app on your website After you’ve connected your domain, add the Wix Monetize with AdSense app to your site by installing it from the Wix App Market .  Next, you’ll need to configure the integration from your site’s dashboard: Click the Wix Monetize with AdSense  page in your dashboard (under the Apps section).  Click Get Started . Click Connect Account .  Sign into the Google account you want to use with AdSense or create a new Google account to use with AdSense.  Complete Google’s steps to either create a new Google AdSense account or connect your existing account. Once you connect your site to your Google AdSense account, Google needs to approve it (the verification process might take up to 4 weeks ).  During the verification stage, you can head to your Google AdSense  account and check up on the process. This is also a great time to organize your content and strategy to maximize potential revenue from AdSense before you actually start displaying ads. 02. Create ad units in the Wix Monetize with AdSense dashboard Ad units display content (from other websites) on your website. The ad is the visual content that is displayed in the ad unit (and what your site visitors see when they visit your site). When creating ad units, you can decide the dimensions of the ad that will be displayed inside the ad unit. To create an ad unit: Go to the Wix Monetize with AdSense  tab in your site’s dashboard. Click New Ad Unit . Enter a name for the unit under Ad unit name .  Choose what type of ad unit you want to create: Responsive ad : The ad unit size adjusts to the width of your screen.  Fixed ad : The ad unit remains the same size on all screen widths. Click the drop-down and choose the size of the ad.  Click Save . 03. Place ad units in site widgets  Once you’ve created an ad unit, open the App Market and add a Wix Monetize with AdSense widget to your site (a widget is already in place if you installed the app from the Wix or Wix Studio Editor). Once this is done, you can connect an ad unit to the app widget and place it in a section on the page. Bonus: Place ads in Wix Studio’s global sections Wix Studio site owners can save time by applying the same ad formatting across multiple pages, which is ideal when you have a lot of pages of a certain type (i.e., blog posts, product pages, etc).  To do this, use Wix Studio’s global sections feature :  In your Wix Studio editor, select the layers panel. Find the section where you added your ads, then click the three dots and scroll down to Set as Global . Select the relevant option (i.e., header, section, footer). Now, when you edit another page, you can select your pre-designed ad section to adjust and add to the page. Once the above steps are complete, your ads are live on your site! Strategies for maximizing AdSense on Wix & Wix Studio Getting started with AdSense is already straightforward, but you can put in just a bit more effort to ensure that your display ads scale with your website and generate as many impressions as possible.  Here are some tactics to get the most value out of AdSense for Wix and Wix Studio website owners: Show ads on your website’s high-value page types Create monetizable content for high-value audiences Add AdSense to high-traffic posts in Wix Blogs Show ads on your website’s high-value page types According to Google, some of the best performing site types for Google AdSense include : Blogs Forums Tools pages Content strategy and user intent are important factors for success with AdSense, so each of these page types should be engaging, optimized for keywords, and helpful to users.  These types of sites are easily created and managed on Wix and Wix Studio: Page type Example AdSense placement Wix & Wix Studio Apps Blogs Blog posts and/or post footers Wix Blog Forum Sidebar Wix Forum Tools pages Top of the site and/or sidebar Wix Studio Custom Apps Wix & Wix Studio have tools to support SEO , community, and content distribution , which can help you create engaging content that drives traffic to monetized pages. Create monetizable content for high-value audiences Use the Google AdSense calculator  to understand how much money you could make on AdSense, depending on your website’s industry and region. Average ad revenue can vary depending upon the region and interests of your audience, so if your business model is dependent on display ad revenue, then this research can help inform your overall content strategy (and potentially your business model as well). For example, Google’s AdSense calculator shows that for a site with 50,00 page views, the average potential earnings is around $1,696 per month (or $0.03 per view) for a site with an audience based in the Americas region (as of September 2024). But, these earnings vary greatly depending on category and region. For instance, if you have a website that attracts an audience interested in finance, it could be worth cultivating a following in Asia to improve revenue.  Category Region Potential earnings for 50K page views Finance Europe, Middle East, Africa $2500 Finance Americas $2000 Finance Asia and Pacific Countries $3100 However, if you were creating content within the ‘Home and Garden’ category, there is potential to see earnings of up to $8,000 per month for audiences in the Americas, but around $2,400 in APAC regions. Category Region Potential earnings for 50K page views Home & Garden Europe, Middle East, Africa $3000 Home & Garden Americas $8000 Home & Garden Asia and Pacific Countries $2400 Your earning expectations should align with content topics and market potential. Carry out research to find the best fit for our site. Add AdSense to high-traffic posts in Wix Blogs If you would like to use AdSense directly in the body of your Wix blog posts , you can add your AdSense code to that blog post with the dedicated panel (shown below) as you create your articles. Once you have live ads to display, generate the HTML code snippet for a ‘fixed’-sized ad (within Google AdSense) to use in the blog. Then, in your Wix Blog post editor, click Add + ,   scroll to the bottom of the panel and select Wix Monetize with AdSense . Here, you can add the code for the ad you want to appear in the post. This can also enable you to add additional monetization fields to individual blog posts, which is particularly valuable for high-traffic pages. Get more revenue from your website traffic with Wix & AdSense Whether display ads are your primary or secondary source of revenue, follow the guidance and tactics above to ensure that your Wix or Wix Studio website is helping you get the most value from your traffic. For more information, check out: Wix Monetize with AdSense on the Wix Help Center Google AdSense Help Center Alla Avgustinov - Product Manager, Wix Alla is product manager at Wix. Best known for leading Wix’s integration with Google AdSense, she is dedicated to helping users maximize their business and online presence. Alla also collaborates with various teams and contributes to the development of multiple products and features. Linkedin

Author: Giuseppe Caltabiano Visual content has the power to break through the noise and grab the attention of our audiences in a way that words alone simply can’t. It goes beyond mere aesthetics, too—the human brain processes visual information much faster than text, making visual content a powerful tool for conveying complex ideas quickly and effectively. In content marketing, visual content enhances engagement, improves brand recall, and can significantly influence consumer behavior. And, when your visuals are optimized correctly, they can help new users discover you in Google Search. For all these reasons, visual content is an indispensable tool for marketers looking to capture and retain audience attention in an increasingly crowded content landscape (which has become even more nuanced with the introduction of AI-generated content). In this blog post, I’ll cover every aspect of modern visual content marketing, including: Understanding your audience to create more effective visual content Connecting with your audience’s emotions through visual storytelling Maintaining visual consistency for better brand recognition Choosing the right format for your visuals Embedding accessibility and inclusion into visual content plans Optimizing visuals for your audience’s favorite platforms Attracting audiences on Google with visual content SEO AI and visual content: What you need to know How to measure visual content success Leveraging user-generated content for marketing and product feedback Understand your audience to create more effective visual content Knowing your audience helps you tailor your visual content to meet their needs and interests, ensuring it resonates and engages them effectively. Before diving into visual content creation, you need to gain a deep understanding of your target audience. This step isn’t just important for visual content—understanding your audience should be the first phase of any solid content marketing  strategy.  This involves identifying your audience’s:  Demographics Preferences Interests Pain points Online behavior Etc.  If you don’t have this audience data, new generative AI tools can help. For example, Rock Content’s AI Persona Creator GPT  can help you learn more about your audience simply by providing a website domain.  Or you can go with an ‘old school’ approach and conduct thorough market research and audience analysis  to gain insights into the type of visual content that resonates the most with your audience, enabling you to plan and tailor your content accordingly. Just ask yourself these key questions: Who are you trying to reach?  Consider factors like age, location, occupation, and income level for a B2C audience. For B2B audiences, get a good understanding of the job profiles and responsibilities, sales cycle, and the brand decision-making process (for purchases, in particular). What are your ideal customers’ passions, aspirations, and pain points?  Identifying these allows you to tailor your visuals to address their specific needs and desires. Where do they spend their time online?  What kind of content does your audience consume? Which content influences them? Understanding which social media platforms or publications your target audience frequents lets you optimize visuals for those specific channels. Once you understand your audience, the next step is to create visual content that aligns with their interests and preferences. This means selecting the right narrative, choosing specific themes, design schemes, or types of visuals that appeal to them. Let’s take a deeper look at those considerations in the following sections. Connect with your audience’s emotions through visual storytelling  Posting an image or video online and waiting for the audience to engage is not a strategy. Like with any other content format, you need a compelling rationale for visual storytelling and a clear plan for turning views into meaningful marketing results. Ben Horowitz, a startup founder and VC expert who has invested in the next generation of leading tech companies (including Airbnb, Facebook, and Twitter), was asked in an interview some years ago about companies insisting that products are the only thing that matters. His answer was enlightening: “Companies that don’t have a clearly articulated story don’t have a clear and well-thought-out strategy. The company story is the company strategy ”. — Ben Horowitz via Forbes Humans are wired for stories. Stories evoke emotions, create connections, and leave a lasting impression. Stories help us to connect with our audience and, on a biological level, they make our brains light up, meaning that information is wired in more reliably . Stories help create memory structures , which are the foundation of all brand building activities. Visual content marketing unlocks the power of storytelling, allowing you to craft captivating narratives. Whether through a series of captivating images or a narrated video, storytelling can humanize your brand, foster emotional connections with your audience, and distinguish your content from competitors, de facto making your message more memorable. The key is to ensure that your visuals tell a story that is aligned with your brand message and values. To craft compelling visual stories, focus on creating a clear narrative flow, use consistent visual elements, and incorporate emotions that resonate with your audience. Below are a few examples of effective visual storytelling techniques. Explain complex topics with infographics and motion design:  Visualize complex datasets and statistics through interactive or animated infographics . These enhance knowledge absorption and engagement by using charts, graphs, and illustrations to make information easier to understand and retain. Convey complex topics and concepts that are paramount to your brand narrative with motion design and animation techniques for even greater visual impact.  Highlight customer success stories:  Showcase positive customer experiences using visuals that illustrate testimonials or case studies. Customer stories build trust, demonstrating your brand’s value. Unveil your company culture with humanized content:  Offer a glimpse into your team, work environment, and core values through engaging photos or short videos (like in the example below). This fosters transparency and helps your audience connect with the human element behind your brand (in addition to building your brand as an employer). By weaving storytelling into your visual content, you move beyond mere information dissemination and create an emotional connection with your audience. Maintain visual consistency for better brand recognition Your visual content should reflect your brand’s identity through consistent use of colors, fonts, logos, and imagery. Visual consistency not only reinforces your brand message but also helps establish a cohesive brand image across various marketing channels and touchpoints.  When your audience encounters your visuals across various platforms, they should be able to instantly associate them with your brand. You can achieve this by maintaining a cohesive visual style across all your content. Here are some visual branding elements for you to consider: Color palette:  Establish a specific color palette that reflects your brand personality. Use this color palette consistently across all your visuals, from website design to social media posts. Fonts:  Choose a set of fonts that complements your brand identity and ensures readability across different platforms. Maintain consistent fonts throughout your visuals. Logos:  Your brand logo is a visual representation of your company. Ensure proper and consistent logo usage across all your visuals. Moodboard : When brainstorming branded video content, begin by collecting all visual and sound references as well as media assets you want to use. This visual mind map is called a “moodboard,” and it helps you consolidate your visual concept and align it with your brand guidelines.  By maintaining a consistent visual style, you create a recognizable brand identity that reinforces brand recall and recognition for your audience. Choose the right format for your visuals With a myriad of visual content options available, it’s essential to select visual content that aligns with your content goals and resonates with your audience. Whether it’s eye-catching images, informative videos, or interactive infographics, select visuals that effectively convey your message and evoke the desired response from your audience.  Each visual content format has its particular strengths. Let’s explore some of the most common and powerful types of visual content. Images:  Images are the main pillar of visual content marketing. From captivating photos and product illustrations to informative charts and data visualizations, images offer a versatile way to grab attention, communicate ideas, and enhance content. Videos: Videos come in various styles and formats, including brand stories  (excellent for branding campaigns), explainer videos  (such as the one in the example below), tutorials, product demonstrations, testimonials, and vlogs . Short, highly engaging, and shareable video content is key to expanding your audience on social media and shaping brand awareness. Infographics: Infographics are visual representations of data, information, or knowledge presented in a concise and visually appealing format. They combine text, graphics, and imagery to simplify complex concepts, explain processes, or communicate statistics and trends effectively. Interactive content: Interactivity allows users to actively engage with and participate in the content (rather than passively consuming it). This includes interactive infographics , quizzes, polls, surveys, games, calculators, and interactive videos. This style of content can enhance user experience, increase engagement, and provide valuable insights into audience preferences and behavior. I cover interactive content in more detail in the next section of this post. Branded images:  These are images that incorporate a company’s branding elements, such as logos, colors, or fonts. Branded images help create a consistent visual identity across various platforms and marketing materials. Consider your content goals and your audience’s preferences to narrow down the right visual formats. For example, infographics may be more suitable for educational content, while videos could be better for storytelling. Engage your audience with interactive content You can design visual content to encourage interaction through calls-to-action , polls, quizzes, or clickable links. This not only engages your audience, it can even foster a sense of community and return valuable feedback and user behavior data. Interactive content  is a form of content that enables marketers to create a digital dialogue between a visitor and their marketing automation platform. Integrate interactive elements (e.g., polls, quizzes, clickable links, etc.) into your content to encourage participation and conversation. These elements make your content more dynamic and can provide insights into your audience’s preferences. They let you engage with your potential customers in real-time, respond to comments, and solicit feedback to create a dialogue and build deeper connections that promote repeat business. Creating interactive content is easier when you have a platform that won’t require custom development and coding for every experience. There are a few options on the market, including Rock Content’s Ion , a robust platform that allows companies to create engaging interactive experiences with just a few clicks. Embed accessibility and inclusion into visual content plans Accessibility  is about removing barriers that may prevent people with disabilities from accessing your website or content. Inclusion is about going a step further and ensuring that people with disabilities are included as valuable members in all aspects of society. Consider the following: Today, 15% of the world’s population experiences some type of disability.  Nearly seven out of ten participants (69%) opt out of using websites because of accessibility issues, according to a study conducted by Click-Away Pound .  In addition, 86% mention that they would spend more time in online stores that were more accessible. This makes accessibility crucial for visual content marketing. Fundamental optimizations include using alt text for images, captions for videos, and ensuring color contrast is sufficient for those with visual impairments. When planning your content, make sure to also reflect the following accessibility best practices to ensure that all members of your target audience can understand and appreciate your visuals: Video transcripts:  Include transcripts alongside videos to ensure that individuals with hearing impairments can access the content. Transcripts also benefit users in noisy environments or those who prefer reading over listening—and they are filled with keywords  that can help signal relevance in Google Search. Keyboard navigation:  Make sure your visual content is accessible via keyboard navigation, allowing users who rely on keyboard-only or assistive technology to interact with your content seamlessly. This includes interactive elements, such as buttons and links. Screen readers:  When creating visual content, consider how it will be interpreted by screen reader technology used by individuals with visual impairments. Structure all textual content, including captions, overlays, and alt text in a way that can be accurately conveyed by screen readers. Color contrast:  Employ good color contrast to ensure visuals are discernible for viewers with color vision deficiencies. Audio descriptions:  For videos or animations that contain important visual information, provide audio descriptions that explain the visual elements to blind or visually impaired members of your audience. Audio descriptions should be concise, descriptive, and synchronized with the corresponding visual content. Accessibility testing:  Regularly test your visual content using accessibility tools and guidelines to identify and address any potential accessibility issues. Conduct user testing with individuals with disabilities to gather feedback and ensure that your content is truly inclusive and accessible to all. Optimize visuals for your audience’s favorite platforms Different social media and digital platforms have unique requirements and best practices for visual content. To maximize engagement and reach, adapt your visuals to fit the specifications of each platform. Whether it’s Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter/X, Reddit, or LinkedIn, optimize your visual content’s format, size, and presentation to ensure it resonates with your audience and stands out in their feeds. You should follow platform-specific guidelines for format and size, as well as keep up-to-date with competitor activity and trends to maximize the impact of your visuals. This may involve creating multiple versions of a visual to suit different platforms or adapting them to different formats.  In addition to understanding platform demographics, consider the following optimizations: Aspect ratio:  Each platform has its preferred aspect ratio for images and videos. Ensure your visuals display correctly across all channels. For instance, Instagram Stories utilizes a vertical format (9:16), while YouTube videos typically display in a horizontal format (16:9). Duration : Adapt your content to each platform’s output duration. While Youtube Shorts are up to 60 seconds long, TikTok has been pushing  for more lengthy content and currently allows up to 10 minutes of video.  File size:  Large file sizes can lead to slow loading times, hindering user experience. Utilize formats that deliver reasonable image and video quality with mild compression loss, like JPEG for standard images, PNG for transparent images, and MP4 for videos.  Attract audiences on Google with visual content SEO SEO for visual content focuses on enhancing your brand’s visibility in search engine results pages ( SERPs ). Key aspects include:  Using descriptive file names and alt text Optimizing image size and format for faster loading Sharing on social media and obtaining external backlinks Mobile optimization via responsive design To optimize visual content for SEO, it’s essential to follow a few key guidelines. First, ensure that your content is relevant to your target keywords and complements the surrounding text on the page. Use descriptive filenames and alt text for images to provide context for search engines and improve accessibility for visually impaired users.  It’s crucial to use relevant keywords in file names, alt text, and captions. This practice helps search engines understand the content of the images or videos, making them more likely to appear in search results. Additionally, optimizing file sizes and formats ensures that visual content loads quickly, improving page load times and user experience, which are key factors for search engine rankings as well as conversions. Implementing structured data  for images and videos can also enhance visibility in search results through rich snippets.  Furthermore, creating high-quality, original visual content encourages shares and backlinks, which can increase a site’s authority and ranking.  AI and visual content: What you need to know Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming visual content creation, offering solutions for generating personalized content, enhancing images, and even creating entirely new visuals.  While AI-powered tools can streamline workflows and enhance efficiency, you need to understand their capabilities and limitations. Even though some tools have been able to successfully automate visual content creation processes and techniques, such as removing backgrounds (Canva, Photoshop ), generating subtitles ( Opus Clip , CapCut ), and voicing video narrations ( Eleven Labs ), they still require a human professional’s touch for consistency, content accuracy, as well as art and visual concept direction.  It’s important to note that the technology still cannot generate original and branded content. It can, however, still serve as visual inspiration in the ideation phase. One of our designers tested one such tool, Firefly , trying to duplicate branded images. It’s important to be aware of these limitations and ensure that visual content generated by AI aligns with your brand values and messaging. Use AI responsibly to streamline, rather than replace, human creativity in visual content creation.  How to measure visual content success Track key metrics to accurately evaluate how your visual content is performing and optimize your strategy for better results. Here are some additional metrics to consider alongside engagement, reach, conversion rates, and return on investment: Click-through rate (CTR) : Measure the percentage of users who click on a call-to-action or link within your visual content. A high CTR indicates that your visual content is effectively driving user engagement and prompting action. Time spent on page:  Analyze how much time users spend interacting with your visual content. Longer times suggest that your content is engaging and holding your audience’s attention. Social shares:  Track the number of times users share your visual content across social media platforms. Social shares serve as a measure of content virality and audience engagement, indicating how well your content resonates with your audience. Heatmaps and scroll depth:  Use heatmaps and scroll depth analysis  to visualize how users interact with your content. Heatmaps can highlight areas of high engagement or interaction within your content, while scroll depth analysis can reveal how far users scroll down the page and which sections are most engaging. By incorporating some of these additional metrics alongside traditional KPIs, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your visual content’s performance and identify areas for improvement.  Leverage user-generated content for marketing and product feedback Encourage your audience to share their own images related to your brand/products and showcase that user-generated content (UGC) across your marketing channels to engage new potential customers and provide authentic content that enhances your credibility. In addition, highlighting user-generated content helps build a sense of community and trust. It shows that you value your audience’s contributions and can lead to increased loyalty and engagement. One of UGC’s lesser-known benefits is its ability to improve your brand’s visibility within search results. Not only does it increase the amount of content pertaining to your brand, but UGC is also often keyword-rich content, which may increase the number of keywords your content ranks for. There are many examples of UGC in B2B and B2C. Among them, LEGO is probably the most significant and my favorite case. At the heart of LEGO’s user-generated content is LEGO Ideas —this is where aspiring LEGO designers can submit their own LEGO designs (as shown above).  LEGO’s user-generated content strategy contributes to many of its crucial business priorities and marketing channels: Direct product development X/Twitter marketing YouTube marketing Niche marketing Influencer marketing LEGO has essentially made any of its fans a potential independent LEGO content creator. The fans play the role of both designer and marketer. This puts LEGO at an extreme advantage as it helps the company tap into new niche markets with ready-made influencers eager to help and show off their own creations. See the bigger picture with visual content marketing When used strategically, visual content marketing can significantly enhance your content marketing strategy, offering boundless opportunities for brands to engage, inspire, and connect with their audience on a deeper level.  By implementing the best practices I’ve outlined above, you can unlock the full potential of visual content marketing and propel your brand towards greater engagement, visibility, and success.  Giuseppe Caltabiano - Senior Director of Marketing at AVK   Giuseppe is a global marketing leader with 20+ years' experience. He excels in crafting content and marketing strategies for B2B enterprises. Recognized as 2-time influential European B2B marketer, he has an MBA from SDA Bocconi and is trained in M&A at London Business School. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Gemma Fontané Beyond being a marketplace with its own algorithms and search results, Etsy is also a website that appears in Google search engine results pages ( SERPs ). That means creating a store on Etsy can benefit your online shop in two important ways:  Selling your products on the Etsy platform  Increasing the visibility of your store on Google However, Etsy results in the SERPs can also put you at a disadvantage if you already have your own website. It can be a challenge to compete with a marketplace like Etsy for search rankings. So, how do you determine if Etsy is your ally or competitor? And, as an ally, how do you maximize its potential? Let’s analyze a few different scenarios to evaluate whether creating an Etsy store can be an effective strategy for your business. Table of contents: Etsy: What it is and its impact on eCommerce How Etsy results work Etsy in Google SERPs Determine if Etsy is the right strategy for your online store Identify your business’s most important search terms Conduct your market and SERP analysis Assess Etsy in Google SERPs Implement your strategy to leverage Etsy’s Google SERP visibility for your products Optimize your Etsy store page Optimize your Etsy product listings Automate your Etsy listings with Wix Become an Etsy Star Seller How to become an Etsy Star Seller Advertise on Etsy to boost visibility So, when is it worth creating a store on Etsy? Etsy: What it is and its impact on eCommerce Etsy  is a global marketplace for handmade, handcrafted, niche, or vintage products created by independent sellers that manage their own orders and inventory. As an eCommerce platform, Etsy offers a wide range of product categories, with some types more popular than others. For example, in several marketplaces, shops in the ‘Jewelry’ and ‘Art & Collectibles’ categories were common among the top Etsy sellers  last year. Etsy’s significance and market share varies from country to country, with its most active markets being English-speaking. When it comes to Etsy’s users, the United States accounts for the vast majority  of traffic to the platform, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and Australia (as of June 2024).  These markets don’t just account for the most Etsy users, they’re also where Etsy has more visibility in the SERPs. Contextualizing where and your potential customers use Etsy and how it shows up in search results is crucial for defining and developing your digital strategy.  How Etsy results work Etsy operates differently from Google—in particular, there are specific features that make some products appear in higher positions and with more visibility in its marketplace than others.  While we don’t know all the parameters of Etsy’s algorithm, there are certain factors that we do  know can increase your products’ visibility  within Etsy’s platform. For example, Star Seller  status, among other considerations, can boost your visibility, as we will cover later in this article. Etsy in Google SERPs As a website, Etsy also appears in Google search results—and with high impact in certain product categories and regions. Some of Etsy’s category, subcategory, and product pages achieve very relevant positions in Google SERPs: So, how do you take advantage of Etsy to boost the visibility of your products in Google SERPs? Let’s take a look. Determine if Etsy is the right strategy for your online store In this section, I’ll cover the factors you need to assess first to decide if building a store on Etsy actually helps your visibility on Google, or if the benefits are limited to Etsy’s platform. These factors include: Your product’s search terms The market and SERPs your products will compete in Etsy’s placements in Google SERPs that are relevant for your store Identify your business’s most important search terms First, you need to  identify the search terms you want to rank for online  (these typically relate to your business’s main product). Understanding these keywords helps you assess how you can leverage Google, Etsy, both, or neither. It’s important that you be very concrete and specific during this initial stage. For example, if you sell stone rings, you need to conduct keyword research  on this specific type of product—not generic jewelry. This allows you to identify the most potential search terms for your business, based on factors such as search volume  and keyword difficulty . Etsy does not provide any tools for keyword analysis. Therefore, to gather information about search terms, we will use SEO tools that provide data from Google SERPs. Using the results from these tools, evaluate the volume of users searching on Google SERPs for the products you offer. From this data, conduct a market analysis and a Google SERP analysis . Conduct your market and SERP analysis After you define your main search terms, conduct market research to determine if Etsy has enough search presence in your target region and how that visibility relates to your products. You should analyze how relevant products display in Google SERPs. Analyze the following to evaluate your product’s Etsy market fit: Etsy’s market share in the target region:  Analyze whether Etsy has sufficient market share  in the potential regions where you want to sell your product, as the marketplace may not be commonly used in some regions.  Etsy’s presence in Google SERPs for your products in target regions : As you can see from the examples below, Etsy does not appear in Google SERPs in Spain at all for the term [gold bow earrings], but it’s the first result in the US. For more data on Etsy’s prevalence on Google SERPs for each region, check out Semrush’s web traffic stats for Etsy . The main SERP competitors  for your Etsy products in target regions:  It’s important to know whether search results are led by large retail stores with a wide range of categories/products or by small artisan stores.For example, when selling [multi stone rings], the main competitors in the Google SERPs for Etsy are large retailers with a wide array of categories and products. On the other hand, for [Tió de Nadal] or [Caga Tió] (a traditional Christmas product from Catalonia, Spain), the main competitors are small artisan stores. In the second scenario, if you are a small- or medium-sized business, you might be able to compete in Google SERPs against Etsy with our own website. In the first scenario, however, if you want to sell multi-stone rings and have limited resources to allocate to your website, achieving top rankings will be very difficult. Assess Etsy in Google SERPs  Once you verify that Etsy appears for your potential product in Google SERPs, you must also study how those results display: Product-related Google SERPs — Look at how Etsy products stand out in the SERPs. For example, Google might show a product carousel, a specific product, or even entire product category pages, as Google’s results can vary significantly across markets. Multimedia content — Beyond the traditional search listings, study what type of multimedia content Google prioritizes for your product type (images, videos, etc). This analysis also helps you define your content strategy within Etsy to maximize its potential. Paid or organic listings  — Finally, analyze whether the products that appear in the Google SERPs for your target region show up through organic rankings or through paid advertising via Etsy marketplace (as shown below). These analyses lead to two main scenarios that will help you decide whether Etsy is the best place for your products: When you search your main terms on Google… Why What you should do Etsy results rarely or never appear This may be because Etsy does not include this type of product or does not prioritize it. It could also be that in this region, Etsy does not have enough presence in Google compared to other competitors and is not competitive enough. The best option might be not to create a store on Etsy for your product and to consider other channels, especially if you have limited resources and are a small store. Etsy results frequently appear in the top search results This suggests that there is a significant volume of user interest in Etsy for this product type in this region. This scenario shows that Etsy is competitive for this product and market, so it can be very advantageous to create a store on Etsy to sell products and increase your visibility in Google SERPs. Etsy can complement your online shop’s website, especially if you find it challenging to compete with the websites that appear in the top Google results. However, for your products to appear via Etsy in Google SERPs, it’s not enough to simply create a store on Etsy. You must optimize our products within the marketplace to ensure they surface for the right potential customers. Let’s look at some of the main strategies you can implement to achieve this. Implement your strategy to leverage Etsy’s Google SERP visibility for your products There are different factors to consider when creating your Etsy store to achieve strong visibility. That visibility benefits you by helping your products not only appear on Etsy but also in Google SERPs.  These factors include: Your store page Your product listings Star Seller status Advertising on Etsy Optimize your Etsy store page Each Etsy business has its own store page. The first thing you must do is validate that all necessary store information is filled in to provide users—and Google—with the complete details of who you are. Make sure to provide: A description of the business  — Origin story and foundation, location, manufacturing processes, product development, etc. A description of the seller:  Within the store page, there is a specific section where, in addition to describing the business, you can introduce yourself as the seller. In this section, provide detailed information about who you are, years of experience, awards, and so on. Legal details  —   Information on shipping policies, legal aspects of the product, credentials, etc. Images and videos  — Visual content  to help describe the store in a complementary manner. For example, include a promotional video of the store, videos or images of the workspace, or multimedia content showcasing the product creation process. Links to your profiles on other platforms : Social media, your homepage, and other relevant sites. For the experienced SEOs reading this, filling out a detailed Etsy merchant store page helps show experience, expertise, authority and trust . Optimize your Etsy product listings Create complete and detailed product listings to improve your visibility within the Etsy marketplace as well as help your products appear in Google SERPs. To optimize Etsy product listings: Perform keyword research to appeal to target audiences  —   Although Etsy does not provide a way to analyze search volume and competition data, you can study potential keywords your audience uses by reviewing marketplace results (data from which is shown in the image below) and conducting keyword research on Google (the process I covered above). Identify potentially valuable and relevant terms for each of your products and use them within the product listing . Don't just target generic and competitive keywords—also focus on long tail keywords  that can help you show up in high-intent results. Once you build up some historical data, you can analyze how users find different products in your store. Title — Include a clear and concise title that accurately defines your product. Highlight what makes it unique using terms your potential customers are likely to search. Photos and videos  — Add multiple images and videos showcasing your product, including its user experience and manufacturing process. The cover image is key to attracting clicks from users on the Etsy results page. It’s also important to: Include the product name within product image alt text. Include a short description of the image, describing the color, materials, etc. Complement images with videos whenever possible.  Description  — Describe your product thoroughly, detailing the manufacturing process, functionality, usage, and shipping details.  Include the main search terms for the product within the description. Organize information coherently, using paragraphs so that Google understands your product.  Use bullet points when listing out features or specifications. Product details  — Classify your product within the most appropriate category and include all relevant attributes. This helps achieve visibility for your product within its category. Use tags to highlight search terms and descriptive phrases for your product. E.g., material + name of the product (i.e., natural silver rings). These labels must be accurate and aligned with the product. You can include a maximum of 13 tags for each product and they can be up to 20 characters long. It’s best to add some variety and avoid repeating search terms. Shipping  — Specify the shipping time to provide a good customer experience, especially for international shipments that may take longer. Offering free shipping can help you stand out in Etsy  search results. Discounts  — Discounts and promotions can also boost your visibility in Etsy search results. Automate your Etsy listings with Wix There are ways to optimize and automate these processes to save you time when uploading products to our Etsy store. Wix users can add the following apps to automate their Etsy listings: Etsy integration by Webkul :  This app a llows you to export Wix products to your Etsy account, making it easy to manage inventory across both your website and Etsy.Inventory synchronization adds extra convenience by reflecting accurate stock levels, whether sales happen on your site or Etsy. LitCommerce Multichannel Sell by LitCommerce : This integration not only allows you to list products on Etsy, but also on other platforms (eBay, Amazon, TikTok Shop, etc). With this app, you can centrally manage all your products from one dashboard, ensuring that the latest version of your catalog appears everywhere your customers are likely to convert. Become an Etsy Star Seller An optimized product listing certainly helps for visibility on Etsy, but in order to reach the top positions, your store must aim to become an Etsy Star Seller . Star Sellers are sellers recognized by Etsy for their demonstrated customer service experience. For merchants, becoming a Star Seller means: Increased Visibility:  Higher chances of being featured in Etsy’s top rankings. Search result distinctions:  Etsy provides badges for prompt responses and timely shipping, helping sellers stand out from the crowd. More traffic and sales : The Star Seller recognition demonstrates a seller’s expertise, experience, trustworthiness, and authority, leading to more traffic and sales. How to become an Etsy Star Seller To be eligible to become a Star Seller, your shop must have at least five orders and $300 in sales within a three-month review period. Additionally, your store must have been on Etsy’s platform for at least 90 days since your first sale. Once you’re eligible, you must achieve and maintain the following: Quick message response rate  — Respond to at least 95% of initial messages from users within 24 hours. On-time shipping and tracking  — Ship at least 95% of orders on time with tracking or with a shipping label purchased on Etsy. High average ratings  — Achieve and maintain an average rating of 4.8 or higher on your Etsy store. Advertise on Etsy to boost visibility You can also advertise on Etsy to achieve more visibility for our store’s products. I recommend this in two main situations. New stores : Advertising on Etsy can help you generate initial sales. Early sales are often more challenging to earn, but they are very important for increasing visibility in Etsy’s search engine. Without sales and reviews, it will be very difficult to compete organically in Etsy. Highly competitive products : In highly competitive verticals, paid listings can increase visibility on Etsy but also boost the chances of your products getting selected for ads in Google Search through the Etsy marketplace. So, when is it worth creating a store on Etsy? Etsy can be a powerful tool for your business, depending on your circumstances and goals. On one hand, Etsy’s authority can help you ‘outrank’ bigger brands in Google search results. Optimizing within Etsy’s own ecosystem can be highly beneficial when there is a market opportunity for your products, especially if you lack the resources to compete against big brands for top rankings. Even within Etsy’s own marketplace, there is great potential. If there’s a market for your goods, optimizing your listings and store within Etsy can be profitable. Etsy’s own search algorithms can drive traffic and sales directly from the marketplace to your store. By achieving Star Seller status, utilizing effective keywords, and creating engaging product listings, you can maximize your visibility within Etsy, leading to increased sales and brand recognition. On the other hand, if smaller brands are outranking you for potential search terms, consider focusing on your website in tandem with your Etsy store to target the SERP from all angles.  Each industry, product, and region may have unique characteristics. Experiment to identify where customers are coming from and seize those opportunities, but remember the importance of a multi-channel strategy. While Etsy can significantly boost your visibility and sales, leveraging multiple platforms can enable a more stable and diversified business. Gemma Fontané - Co-founder and Director at Orvit Digital Gemma Fontané is an SEO consultant, co-founder, and director of Orvit Digital , where she leads digital strategies for B2B and eCommerce clients. She is also a teacher, industry speaker and author, as well as a co-founder of two international Christmas eCommerce stores. Twitter  | Linkedin

Recorded December 13, 2022 It’s been a momentous year of product development for Wix’s SEO team and we are excited to recap on the latest additions and updates to our product portfolio. Join Nati Elimelech, Head of SEO, and Einat Hoobian-Seybold, SEO Product Lead, for a demo of our new features and a sneak peek of what’s to come. Check out the webinar's deck This webinar will cover: Our latest SEO tools and features How to use them Upcoming product releases Meet your hosts: Einat Hoobian-Seybold SEO Product Lead, Wix Einat began her SEO career by developing organic strategies for top global brands and later discovered her love for product development. As the Product Lead for Wix SEO–Einat builds impactful products that make SEO accessible and approachable to over 200M users around the world. Twitter | Linkedi n Nati Elimelech Head of SEO, Wix With over 15 years of experience and a focus in large scale website optimization, Nati was the CEO of a prominent SEO agency catering to some of Israel’s biggest brands. As the Head of SEO at Wix, he focuses on helping platforms be search-engine friendly and building SEO products. Twitter | Linkedin Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. He also hosts the SEO Rant Podcast and Edge of the Web’s news podcast. Twitter | Linkedin Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO & Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush and more. Twitter | Linkedin

February 28, 2023 The time has come: Google’s Universal Analytics is sunsetting on July 1 2023, and we’re ready to help you get started with GA4. Join digital analytics maven Krista Seiden on a walkthrough of the key information you need to facilitate a smooth transition and ensure you’re set up for success. In this webinar we will cover: How GA4 differs from Universal Analytics Top tips for using GA4 How to get started Meet your hosts: Krista Seiden Founder, KS Digital An experienced leader in digital analytics, Krista spent 7 years in product management for Google Marketing Platform. She served as VP Product Marketing & Growth at Quantcast before founding KS Digital in 2019, to help businesses make the most of their digital marketing investments. 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 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, brightonSEO, Moz, DeepCrawl (Lumar), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Transcript: What you need to know about GA4 00:00 Crystal Welcome to our webinar. Today we're going to be talking about GA4 with myself, I am the Head of SEO Communications at Wix. And we are joined today by Krista Seiden, who is the queen bee, the person, the go-to person for all things GA4. You will recognize her from the internet, from all of the fantastic things she shares. But also you will recognize her from the Google Analytics training videos on YouTube where she shares her insights there as well. We're very pleased to have her here. And we're also joined by Mordy Oberstein, who is my my partner in crime and my co-host on the Surf's Up SEO podcast and our Head of SEO Branding here at Wix SEO. And we are both so so keen to hear from Krista today all about GA4 because we like everyone else got that email. 00:50 Crystal And thought to ourselves, wow we do need to get this going on. So welcome, Krista. Welcome, Mordy. 00:58 Krista Thank you, so great to be here. Thanks for having me. Mordy I literally ignored that email, said, I can’t handle this. Crystal We'll do fine. We've got this. We've got this. We've got Krista. We've got tools, we have all the things that we need. So as we go through just a little bit of housekeeping, this webinar is being recorded. Yes. And you will get a YouTube for the recording afterwards, where there'll be a link for you to watch this on YouTube at your leisure to pause and stop and think and have a go and try it again. Then we will also encourage you to ask questions in the Q&A panel, please do that. I can see some people have started asking some questions already which is great. And then also if you want to keep up with our future webinars, go to Wix.com, forward slash SEO, forward slash learn. We've got a brand new look for 2023 as well. So please enjoy that while you're there. And check out the Wix SEO webinars there. And then for the agenda, we're doing our introductions as we get some people filing through which is great. And then Krista is going to shed some light on this fantastic topic for us and help us to understand everything a lot better. And then also, we're going to get to, because Krista is going to be talking generally about GA4, about general top tips, general best practice, general really good things that you can do to make GA4 really sing. I'm going to share a few things for our Wix folks in the house. I'm going to share a few things about implementing GA4 on Wix, some top links and some top resources that you can peruse at your leisure. And we'll also share those things afterwards. And then we'll get into the Q&A with questions from you. We'll try to answer the questions in the chat as we go along if we can. And with that, I'm going to stop my share and I'm going to let Krista get in and tell us all the wonderful things about getting into GA4. Whoo. 02:49 Krista All right. Let's go ahead and start my share. 02:54 Krista Perfect, let me know you can see that. 02:58 Krista All good. All right. So today, we are going to talk about what you need to know to maximize your use of Google Analytics 4. I also have some tips at the end on how to get started. So don't worry, if you haven't started yet. We'll get there. But I want to walk you through all of the ways that I think that you can make the most out of GA4. 03:17 Krista So quick agenda for this talk. What is GA4? How does it compare to Universal Analytics, so probably the tool that you know and love currently. This is also being called GA3 these days, so you may hear me say that as well. I've got seven tips for you to help you maximize your use of GA4. And then we'll finish with how to get started. If you see a little star on any of the slides, that means there's a blog post or some additional detail in the link out to that as well. 03:44 Krista All right, first and foremost, let's rip off the band aid. Hopefully everybody here is aware that Google Analytics 3, Universal Analytics is going away on July 1 2023. Google has said we are stopping processing of data from Universal Analytics. So if you've not migrated to GA4 you essentially will not have any analytics data after July 1 2023. You don't want to be in that boat. So let's show you how you can make the most of this. 04:17 Krista Alright, so status check. Maybe in the chat, go ahead and let us know. Are you already using Google Analytics 4. Have you installed it? Are you actually actively using it? Are you still relying on Universal Analytics, kind of? Which boat do you fall into? One—you haven't installed it. You don't care. Two—you've installed it but you're only using Universal Analytics. Three—you've installed it and you're trying really hard to use it. 04:46 Krista All right, actually can't see the chat while we're going through here. But I'm gonna just, there's a lot of great answers in there. 04:54 Krista There's a nice mix. Yeah, we've got some people actually using GA4? Mordy Yep. Krista All right. Love it. 05:00 Krista All right. So just to level set everybody, let's quickly compare GA4 versus its predecessor, Universal Analytics, or GA3. So Universal Analytics, this is also sometimes known by its code name, Analytics JS or G Tag JS. But the more recent code base looks like what you see on the right, it was launched in October of 2012. So this is actually over a decade old, if you can believe it or not. And it was a migration from Classic Analytics, which came out in 2007, which was a migration from Urchin Analytics, which Google bought in 2005. But the code base actually started way back in 1998. So Universal Analytics is actually like, crazy old, like 25 plus years old is some of that code base. Hence why it's time to move on. 05:50 Krista We want something that is a little bit more fresh. It's centered around the concept of sessions. It focuses on metrics and dimensions, such as pageviews, sessions and bounce rate. 06:00 Krista It's highly customizable, but it lacks structure for things like events. So if you're used to using UA, and you're used to events, you'll be used to this format of category, action and label. All events in Universal Analytics are a combination, a unique combination of category, action and label. So if you have a robust event architecture on your website, you can have hundreds or even 1000s of events tagged with some unique combination here. I know I have done implementations for sites like that in the past. If you do it really well, it can be very useful. But if you have people do it over time, with different structures, this gets really unwieldy really, really fast. 06:39 Krista And of course, that deprecation date is looming for Universal Analytics. 06:44 Krista Okay, GA4 looks like what we see on the right, slightly different than that look and feel from UA. 06:51 Krista It was launched in July of 2019, under the name App + Web in public beta, quick check in the chat. Go ahead, let us know. Were you an early App + Web beta adopter? Did you start using it back then? I personally have been using it since sometime early in 2018. But you all wouldn't have had access back then. Just a little background, I used to work at Google, I actually helped to build GA4 for the first couple of years. So I was at in on all of these early days. 07:22 Krista It was renamed to Google Analytics 4 and became the default property type in Google Analytics in October 2020. So Google came out and said, okay, it's time to move in 2020, or in October 2020. We are now saying GA4 is ready for primetime. We're taking it out of beta. Whether or not that's actually true in most people's opinions is up for debate. But Google said, yes, it's ready, start using it. If you create a new property in Google Analytics, it's going to default to a GA4 property. You can still create UA properties at that time, but they're trying to push everyone starting all the way back over two years ago, two and a half years ago at this point, to GA4. So if you haven't been migrating over the last two and a half years, Google's been trying to subtly tell you it was time. 08:08 Krista It focuses on events and parameters. Everything is an event in GA4, even a pageview is considered an event. And it is highly customizable, but it actually offers a lot more structured data than Universal Analytics. Event names and parameter names are reusable, so you don't end up with implementations with hundreds or 1000s of these things. Most implementations, I do even for really, really large Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies have, you know, at most maybe 30 unique event names. There are cases where there may be more than that. But it actually makes it a lot more structured, a lot easier to work with, in my opinion. 08:45 Krista Okay, if you want to know all about how GA3 and GA4 compare side by side, I actually have a PDF that you can download, it's at that link there. I think Crystal is going to drop it in the chat as well so that you have that link. This is just a like six or seven page PDF that goes through feature by feature, what was in Universal Analytics, whether that was the free version or the 360 version, and if that is in Google Analytics 4 with some notes. 09:12 Krista Okay, now let's move on to the meat here. The seven tips I'm going to give you to maximize your use of Google Analytics 4. 09:20 Krista Tip one. And this might be the hardest for many people, is to learn the new reporting. I know that there's hesitation to jump in and start using GA4. It looks and feels very different, you don't really know how to get started. Hopefully some of the things we're going to talk about here will make that a little bit easier. 09:38 Krista So first is the new Real-Time. This looks and feels very different if you were a Firebase Analytics user or Google Analytics for Firebase, as it was renamed. This may look a little bit more familiar because this was kind of the Real-Time look and feel from there. 09:53 Krista What I really like about this, is the ability to dig into certain cards. 10:00 Krista Specifically the Event count by Event name card. So all of the events, remember everything in GA4 is an event, all of the events being collected will come in through here, in this Real-Time view. And you can actually click in and dive deeper into what is being collected. So you can click on an event name. 10:16 Krista For example, if I want to dig into my purchase, if I can click on that event name, it will open up the parameters that are being collected with those events. So for example, Transaction ID or Value, I can click into that parameter name. And I can actually see the real value. This is really, really great for troubleshooting, debugging, checking that you've implemented something correctly, checking that your data is actually collecting the way that you would hope it is, or really, for just watching all those purchases coming in on a nice eCommerce website, like we all know that Real-Time is used for. Okay, or Blog post view, I use that a lot as well. 10:52 Krista Okay, user and traffic acquisition, this is a big change from Universal Analytics, this is really important. In Universal Analytics, we only had one type of acquisition report, it was well, there was multiple reports, but it was all one type of acquisition, it was all session-based acquisition. 11:10 Krista Meaning that Source/Medium report that you're probably really familiar with or the Campaigns report or something like that, that you would find them the All Traffic section, that was all based on session data. In GA4, we actually have two types of acquisition attribution here, one for the user and one for the session, which is called Traffic Acquisition, you can switch between the two. And you can see the differences. User is going to be the very first campaign source medium, etc, that that user had or really that cookie had, that GA4 is looking at. Traffic Acquisition will be based on the session. So if they come back multiple times over the course of a few days, or a week, or a month, as long as that cookie lives on, then that may be different for each time they come, right. So you can see that we have in this little GIF that's playing the differences here, do you actually click on that first user default channel grouping where the mouse is right now. We're on the session one, you can change the primary dimension that's listed there. In GA4, it always starts with this default channel grouping, you may be more used to looking at this by Source/Medium, for example. If you click that drop down, you can actually change it to Source/Medium and get a little bit more of a familiar look. In fact, I can show you that right here. So this is what it would look like, the same Traffic Acquisition report with Source/Medium applied. And I've actually applied a secondary dimension here. I'm in my Traffic Acquisition report. So the session-based one, I’ve applied the secondary dimension of First User Source/Medium. So what that means, is I'm looking at the traffic or the session-based acquisition for Source/ Medium. 12:53 Krista And I'm looking, breaking it down by the first thing that brought them to my site. So you can see here, they first came by the SEO FOMO email that came back from organic search, and so on. I've also filtered this, as you can see, for organic traffic only. So there's a lot you can still do in all of these table reports. I know there's a lot of information being thrown at you real fast. But I want to show you kind of usefulness of this UI. 13:20 Krista Okay, pages and screens. This is most similar to what you're used to in Universal Analytics as the All Pages report. In Universal Analytics, that report is based on the Page Path. So the you know, the URL after the host name. In GA4 it defaults to the Page Title. But as you can see, in this little GIF, you just click that drop down, you can change it to Page Path, so that this looks a bit more familiar for you. I know I prefer Page Path, I’ll actually show you later how you can customize this to make Page Path, the default for you. But this is going to be a very useful report, similar to how you used it in Universal Analytics. 14:03 Krista Technology details, and this is going to be the same actually for Demographic details. In Universal Analytics, you are probably very familiar with having a ton of things down that left-hand nav, right. There are something crazy, like 150 plus different combinations of reports that you can get to through the left-hand nav of Universal Analytics. It's insane when you think about it. In GA4 this is way more streamlined. I think one of the biggest pieces of feedback that Google has heard, is that people log into GA4 and it just looks empty, right. It doesn't look like there's that much in there. Like where did all my reports go? They are almost all still here, believe it or not. They are just not hidden but more streamlined is how I like to think about it. And I'm trying to show you that here in this GIF. So we're under Technology details. A details report is just going to be a table report, an overview report. We didn't look at one yet. But an overview report is essentially like a dashboard with a bunch of little cards on kind of showing the highlights of the section. 15:00 Krista Personally, I almost always use the detail reports, I find them actionable. But it will default to one particular dimension. In this case, it defaults to, I think Browser. 15:14 Krista What we see here, you can click that drop down and change it to, I believe there's 10 dimensions that you can access through this one detailed report: Browser, OS, Screen Resolution, importantly Device Category, that was a default in the left-hand nav on Universal Analytics, probably something that you used a lot. I know I used it a lot. It's still here. It just lives now in this detail report. So rest assured, you still have access to probably 100 plus different reports, you just need to navigate to them. 15:48 Krista Okay, that was reporting. Now let's talk about tip two—take advantage of new metrics and dimensions. So there's some new things in GA4 that you haven't seen before. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's actually probably a good thing, right? It's progress that we have some new stuff to play around with. 16:06 Krista First is the idea of engaged sessions and engagement rate. Now I know there's a lot of confusion around engaged sessions. What does this mean? What it means is this session or this cookie, or this person has been on the site for either at least 10 seconds, or they have had more than one event. So they've done two things. Maybe they scrolled and they clicked, or they had a pageview and they clicked or they had two or more pageviews. 16:35 Krista So essentially this is trying to get at the idea of this is actually somebody on your site doing something rather than kind of a bounced session. And when GA4 first came out, there was no Bounce Rate. This is actually a big debate that we had internally at Google when I was still there. I fought really, really hard to get rid of Bounce Rate, we can talk about it later, if you want. I hate bounce rate, it's a terrible metric, you should not use it or count on it. The only thing that bounce rate is good for in my opinion, is to track over time just to make sure there's no crazy like changes. But in general, bounce rate is a terrible metric. So we won, and we got it removed from GA4. But of course, there's been so much feedback, Google actually brought it back. This is really, really important, though. And I think this is my next slide. Yes, the new Bounce Rate is not the same as Universal Analytics. It is actually literally the opposite of Engagement Rate, which is the rate of engaged sessions. You can see I actually have a table here where I have engaged sessions and then Engagement Rate and Bounce Rate right next to each other. So you can see, it is one minus the Engagement Rate. That's not the same as Universal Analytics, you cannot compare a Bounce Rate between GA4 and Universal Analytics. And it's not even a default metric in the report, you're only going to see it if you specifically add it to reports. So I still think that's a good thing. You can argue with me in the in the chat or in the questions if you want. And tell me all the reasons why you love Bounce Rate, but I think that this is a step forward. 18:08 Krista Default channel groups. Okay. So default channel groups are not a new concept. We have these in Universal Analytics, we also had custom channel groups. In GA4, there's actually a new default channel group, though, they took a look at the I believe it was 10, or 11 channels that we had in UA and said, we can do better with these definitions. We can make this more robust, we can add new channels so that it's a little bit more granular, people can get more information here. There are now 18 default channel groups in GA4. So I think Google's done a much better job here. And you can actually see those Paid Video, Organic Social, Paid Shopping, Organic Video, these are all new default channel groups available in Google Analytics 4. There's a whole Help Center article that breaks down all of these default channel groups. If you just Google GA4 default channel groups, it's the first thing that will come up. And so you can see all of these new channels, for example, all these new organic breakouts that you can look at: Organic Shopping, Organic Social, Organic Video, Organic Search, it's a lot more than just organic, it gives you a lot more granularity there. 19:10 Krista And then I did want to quickly comment, this is kind of under the radar, but custom channel groups, highly-requested feature for GA4 since it doesn't yet exist. 19:22 Krista It's in beta right now or it's in a secret alpha. So it should be coming very, very soon, so we can all rejoice for that, we will have custom channel groups in the near future. But please don't put that on social media. And don't tell Google I said that. Alright. 19:40 Krista Tip number three, um, report customizations. I have a lot of favorite parts of GA4. But I think this may be my actual favorite part of GA4. But I'm probably going to say that at least three more times throughout this presentation, so hold me to it. 19:54 Krista You can build almost any report that you want in GA4, so you're not limited to what is just out of the box in that left-hand nav, you're not even limited to the structure of the left-hand nav, you can change it all. This is something that is completely net new in GA4, you could never do this in Universal Analytics. And I think it's a huge step forward to making analytics really, really useful for your particular business or organization. 20:18 Krista Okay, how does this work? Here's an example. This is my blog, kristaseiden.com. I blog about go figure, analytics. 20:27 Krista And it's a blog, right? There's no revenue collected on this site in particular, but the default report that I get most of the default reports, right, have this Total Revenue column. Now, I know that I'm not collecting any revenue on this site. But if I were to give access to somebody else, and ask them to analyze my site, you know, they could come back and say, like, I think your eCommerce is broken, there's no revenue showing. And we don't need that, right. Like, I know that this is not a thing for my site. So I can actually remove this metric from my reports if I don't need it. And the way that I do that, is through customization. In the upper right-hand corner, there's this little pencil icon, it's the edit icon or customization icon. If I click it, it will open this report in a customization screen. 21:13 Krista I've clicked in on the right-hand side to metrics. And specifically, I'm now looking at this Total Revenue metric. And I can simply just click the X to remove it. When I do, it will refresh the report, you now see this report has no revenue metric column. This is a very, very simplistic example. But as you can see, I can make this report my own, right, I didn't need revenue in my reports, because there's no revenue on the site, I can get rid of it. 21:40 Krista And then I can save this report, either save it to overwrite the default that is already in the left-hand nav, or I can save it as net new. And name it something else if I want to have two versions. The other thing that I really love here is being able to add report filters. This launched, I don't know, maybe six months ago at this point, huge, huge addition to customization. Because now I can filter down my customized reports. 22:09 Krista One of the biggest complaints about GA4, especially early on is that everything's in one property, there's no views, I think report filters, and I'll show you in just a second are a really great option to help you kind of deal with some of that, to be able to create specific collections of reports that are just for certain audiences. What do I mean? Well, if I want to have a Pages report that is only looking at United States data, I know many of you are not from the US, I happen to be. So I'm going to use US in this example. But you can do it for whatever country you're interested in. So I'm building a filter here including the country United States. And then it shows me a summary that that's what is included here. 22:55 Krista And now actually, this is a really quick GIF to show you how simple this is just, I'm searching through here for country, I find it, I add my value of the United States, select OK, hit Apply. And now this report is filtered for only US data. So what does this give me, this gives me the ability to create several reports, not just this Pages report. But any reports I want that are going to be US only. So in the past, I may have had a US view in Universal Analytics from US data. Now I can have a set of reports that is US-only data within the same property. 23:32 Krista And to do that, once I've created all of those customized reports, I need to put them somewhere. I need to put them into what's called a collection. So all of the things that you see on the left-hand side where it says App Developer, Krista’s Faves, Lifecycle User, those are collections. And if you expand them, you would see the reports inside of them. For example, Krista’s Faves—this is just a collection of all my favorite reports or all the reports that I use the most often but I want quick access to, right. So I’ve created a collection of those reports. And I can do this for my US traffic. So I can create a collection of a bunch of reports that I have filtered down for only US traffic, I can have that live in my left-hand nav, and I can tell my US teams, my marketing team, whoever is analyzing data to go to this US section for data that's just already been filtered for them. So they don't have to filter it. They can just look at that data and know it's US-only data. So again, it's not you know, 100% of views replacement. It's not only US traffic in this whole property, but it's only US traffic in all of these reports. And that can get you, you know one step closer to being able to really help different groups of users in your organization. 24:50 Krista Okay, tip four is to go deep on Explore. Explore is an ad hoc analysis tool, kind of like a deep dive tool that lives in GA4 that you can essentially build more in than you can in the reporting UI. It's a little bit more complicated to use, it does take a little bit more practice. But I think there are some really great benefits here. 25:14 Krista The first one is Funnels, this is something that I think only really 360 customers could do in Universal Analytics, it's now available to everybody in GA4 to build funnels, you can build a funnel, that is up to 10 Steps long. 25:30 Krista I rarely see people that have 10-step funnels, I actually had a client the other day who wanted to have like 15 or 20 steps, I was like, I think I can consolidate these. 25:40 Krista It's a really long funnel, and you're limited to 10 steps. But I think for most use cases, that's pretty sufficient. And then you can do things like segment this funnel for different traffic. So here I've applied segments of looking at organic versus direct traffic, to see how those people go through. This is for the KS Digital website, which is my site where I sell consulting services and courses and stuff. So you can see I have my homepage, they've gotten to my academy page, and they've added to cart, that's the steps we're looking at in this funnel. And it looks like organic traffic performs slightly better for me, that's great. Um, other things I can do here in a Funnel report is I can actually create a segment of the abandonment. So if somebody, for example, comes to the site, goes to the academy site, adds something to their cart, but they don't actually end up purchasing, I can create a segment of users who dropped off who didn't end up purchasing but had added to cart, make it an audience and share that audience with Google Ads for retargeting or remarketing, which is really, really powerful, right. I can bring those users back users back to my site, through ads. 26:47 Krista If I know that they were interested or engaged, I can even add a special offer, you know, for $200 off or something like that, to hopefully entice them to buy. 26:59 Krista Pathing is another really cool report here that we get in Explore. 27:05 Krista I was famous for saying when I was internal at Google as a product manager that I absolutely hated all of the flow reports in Universal Analytics. It was especially hilarious because my product manager boss was responsible for building the user behavior flow at some point, like many, many years back, but he agreed, they're terrible. 27:26 Krista You may disagree, go ahead, let me know in the chat, why, but in my opinion, they're the worst. And because I would often say this, he came back to me one day, and he's like, great, you hate this so much, can you please go build something better. So he put it on my shoulders to think about how GA4 can actually do pathing in a meaningful way. So if you like the Pathing report, please let me know. If you don't, tell Google since I don't work there anymore. 27:51 Krista But this is a little bit of my baby. I do love it. But I think it's very useful. Again, 10 steps is what you have here to path out. And essentially, you can keep clicking the dark ends of each step, those are called nodes to expand them out. And you can do that by: Page Title, Page Path was recently added, or Event Name. You can also segment this path, you can break it down. So I can look at just my organic traffic, I can look at what device category users were on as they're going through the site. For example, if I wanted to filter that just for organic, I can apply that segment. I can also do a backwards path, right. So here we're looking at how people go from a starting point. But if I click this Start Over button, this is really hidden. Sorry about this, you have to hit Start Over and then you get this screen where you can choose either a starting point or an ending point. So if you choose that ending point, you can path backwards. So for example, on my site, if my ending point is adding to cart, I would like to know what were the steps that somebody took to actually get to the decision point to add to cart. So I can start pathing backwards, okay, they looked at the course page, they looked at this page, they looked at the about me page, they looked at various things. And I can start to understand what might have been kind of the successful triggers to get somebody to actually add to cart and purchase a course. This is really great for things like add to cart purchase, getting to, you know, how do people get to a certain resource that you might have? Pathing is useful for kind of this exploratory look at things. Once you have a good idea of what paths people may take. That's when you might want to actually build that out into a funnel so that you can track that on a more consistent basis. 29:37 Krista Again, you can segment this, you can break it down so much, you can do with pathing. 29:43 Krista Okay, tip five is to take advantage of integrations, lots of integrations available in GA4. In fact, in Universal Analytics, the only integrations you had as a free user was Google Ads and Search Console. 30:00 Krista And in GA4 free in which all of the integrations are now available to free users as well as 360. So you get not just Google Ads, but you get search ads, 360, you get Search Console, of course, you get a free BigQuery export of your raw data, this is probably the most exciting, it's also the most technical. 30:19 Krista But for people who want to get it, that raw data, or who need to get it out of GA4 and have access to that raw data, this export to BigQuery is amazing. People would literally pay to upgrade to Universal Analytics 360, just to have this feature. And it is now available for free for everybody in GA4. So if you know, you know, this is a really great thing, even if you're not too interested here, but you may have some use for raw data in the future, this is a great thing to look into. Super easy to set up. It's literally a couple of clicks for all of these integrations in the UI. 30:55 Krista Tip six is to use UI based tools to improve your data. So I also really like these, not quite as much as customization, but I think that there's a lot of really great value here. 31:07 Krista The first is enhanced measurements. So this lives in your Admin panel under Data Streams. When you select a data stream, for example, I'm in my web stream details here, you can see Enhance Measurement. This is going to be on by default when you create a GA4 property. And this means that you are going to collect a handful of events out of the box. Essentially, Google is saying, hey, we can recognize the schema for this, we know when an outbound link is being clicked, we know when somebody is scrolling on your site. We know when they're doing site search. If you want us to collect that data for you, we can, you don't have to do anything, except for toggle on the settings. And actually they're toggled on by default. So if you don't want them, you just toggle them off. What I really like about this, is that it I think, democratizes data a lot more for GA4. These things all required in Universal Analytics, additional implementation. You would have had to set this up in Google Tag Manager and the code. Some things like scroll tracking have become easier over time in Universal Analytics, but previously, like required a mountain of code just to be able to do. And now it's as simple as a little toggle. So you don't have to be technical at all, this is going to be collected for you out of the box. So a lot more data is coming for you in GA4 just by implementing the you know, little code snippet for Google Analytics 4. This is great, I love this. 32:32 Krista Cross-domain tracking setup. This is pretty simple. You can do it all in the UI, you don't have to go into Tag Manager or into the code, as long as you're using the same Measurement ID, so the same GA4 Property ID on these different sites. So for example, if I have the same Property ID, Measurement ID on kristaseiden.com, on my blog and on ksdigital.co on the business site, then I could set them up here to be tracked as cross domain. 33:02 Krista This one, this one is great. So I'll give you just a second look at the screen. And you can recount all your greatest horrors of being an analyst and coming across a scenario like this. 33:16 Krista Okay, take a breath, because we're gonna get better here with GA4. 33:20 Krista All right, this and this is not new to me, I have encountered this so many times in my past lives as analysts in various situations, you may have had different developers implementing a button in different ways, at different times. For example, here a Start Now button on the website, one button was implemented as a start underscore now for the event name, the other was implemented with start now with the one word and a capital N. Therefore, it's going to collect as two separate events, two separate rows of data in my analytics account. This is literally the bane of every analyst’s existence, I know, I see head nodding, you can feel the same. 33:59 Krista Google Analytics 4 actually gives you tools in the UI to fix this. Now, that's not to say that you shouldn't fix the underlying source, I would highly recommend fixing the issue on the site or in Tag Manager. But if you either don't have the resources to do that, or the time or you just need a quick fix, this is an amazing quick fix. It will not fix historical data. So you'll still see this for everything in the past that you've collected already. But going forward, it will fix the issue. So how does it work, you're gonna go to the Modify Events feature. 34:32 Krista And when you click Modify Event, it's going to open up this screen for you. And you can see I've just given this name for my modification, I’m consolidating Start Now. And then I have matching conditions. My first condition is that my event name equals start now, one word with capital N. And then I'm going to say when you see that event, modify it with these parameters, my new thing should be event name is start underscore now. This is it, that’s literally all I have to do and then hit Create. 35:00 Krista Now every time GA4 sees start now one word come in, it is going to modify it to start underscore now before it processes into the data before it shows up in the UI. So it's going to fix everything going forward, and consolidate those down to just the one event name based on the rules that I've written here. This is so so cool. I can't stress this enough. I love this. 35:28 Krista All right, my last tip for you is to use the GA4 data model to your advantage. So I talked very briefly at the beginning about the data model, right? It's different between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4. Universal Analytics is based on sessions, pageviews, etc, you have the event model of category, action, label. GA4 is based on events and parameters. So every event is collected with a number of parameters to distinguish it. 35:57 Krista Let's go into detail a little bit more here. 36:00 Krista So this new data model, fully events based, there's four types of events. The first is automatically collected events. These you get out of the box just by installing the snippet for GA4. This is going to be things like: First Visitor, First Open, Page View, Screen View, User Engagement, and so on. 36:18 Krista We talked about enhanced measurement events, these are also essentially out of the box, you just can toggle them on and on or off. That’s: Scroll, Video Engagement, Site Search, Outbound Clicks, Form Interactions and so forth. 36:29 Krista Then, of course, there are additional events, if you don't have everything you need, which you probably won’t. There's probably additional things that you want to collect, and those come in two forms, recommended events. So Google has, if you just Google GA4 recommended events, there's a whole Help Center article that breaks it down by vertical, either eCommerce or retail, travel, games. And it's a whole list of event names and parameters that Google recommends. And essentially, if you use the event names and parameters as Google has recommended, they will have specific reporting available for you. For example, there's eCommerce reporting that's available only if you're using the eCommerce schema, as they've laid out. There is specific reporting for games that is available if you're using the event naming that they have laid out. And then of course, if you have things that you want to collect that don't have recommended event, no problem, you can always collect a custom event, which is anything that you want, in terms of how you would set that up. And it's going to be unique to your site or your app. 37:31 Krista Okay, let's put this into context. I know that's very like high level, let's actually make this real. So this is a screenshot from my blog from kristaseiden.com. It's a very typical blog, right, there's a homepage with a bunch of like snippets of articles, and a continue reading button to take you out to a full article page where you can read the whole thing. 37:53 Krista So when somebody clicks this Continue Reading button, I am collecting an event. And with that event, I have parameters that I'm sending. If you are a standard or free customer of Google Analytics 4, you can send up to 25 events, or sorry, up to 25 parameters per event that you're collecting. If you were a 360, or a paying client of Google Analytics 4, you can send up to 100 parameters for every event that you're collecting. This is a free account. So for this Continue Reading button, I'm going to be able to collect up to 25, I don't actually have 25. So let's break it down. 38:26 Krista There is a recommended event name in Google Analytics 4 called Select Content, which is essentially perfect for this Continue Eeading button. I could call this event continue reading. But then I wouldn't have specific reporting that might be available for this Select Content event. Since Select Content is essentially what I'm doing here, I'm going to use that event name. So that's the event name I've selected. This is the Google Tag Manager interface. By the way, I should have mentioned that I implement my website through Google Tag Manager, pretty easy to set up. But I have my event name of Select Content for when people click on that button and then I'm collecting some parameters with that. I have the button title. So that's going to be Continue Reading. Article Title, whatever the article itself was titled, Article Tag, Article Date, and the Link URL, which I'm collecting is the click URL. So I'm sending all of these pieces of information along with the Select Content event and when I collect all that data, now we're back over in Google Analytics 4, we're actually in the Explore section, looking at a Free-form report, which is essentially a table report on steroids. I can have tons and tons of metrics and dimensions added here. 39:35 Krista And you can see I have my event name Select Content, the Article Date, the Article Tag, the Article Title, and then the count of that event and the users doing it. So it can see a whole lot of informaion about every time somebody is clicking that Continue Reading button. And I can start to analyze which articles are being clicked on the most, which articles are essentially the most popular on my site. 40:00 Krista So this is article analysis using this one simple event that I collected five parameters on. So pretty useful, I think event schema here that you can get a lot of information out of. 40:12 Krista One more example. 40:14 Krista You can use this same architecture events and parameters to do testing on your site. It's not a testing tool, but you can collect information if you are running tests, right. So for example, on my KS Digital website, I have different signup boxes to sign up for my newsletter, to keep informed. And I can test out different copy for those signup boxes. So subscribe for course info and launch updates or get digital analytics resources in your box or in your inbox. 40:42 Krista And with this event, so my event is going to be newsletter signup. 40:48 Krista My parameters are going to be something like a subscription type or the academy page, the homepage, etc. subscription location. 40:59 Krista Experiment name, so this is my subscribe, headline, test, experiment ID, my variant ID, if I'm sending these types of things, I have these types of things. And then I can also send a user property. Is this person a prospect or a known customer? 41:14 Krista And then again, I can do my analysis once I've collected this data. So here we can see my event name. I said on the last slide, it was newsletter signup, I actually use the event name of signup, because that is a recommended event from Google. And then I have my subscription location and my subscription type. So you can see all this information that I'm collecting. And I can see which, you know, subscription buttons are doing the best. And if I'm testing the headline, I can add, you know, the experiment ID, the variant ID here, etc. So tons of information I can collect with the Simple Schema. 41:48 Krista Okay, that was a lot, we got a little technical there at the end, hopefully you were able to keep up. If not, you can watch the recording, you can go to lots of blogs, different articles about this stuff, tons of information out there. But I want to leave you with some tips on how to get started. So first and foremost, it is go time, you need to start now if you have not already started. 42:10 Krista You don't have time to waste is what I'm saying, you gotta get going with GA4. How do you get going? You want to set up a Google Analytics 4 property. And I'm going to say this very strongly. You want to do this manually. Why do I say that? Well, recently, Google has sent a notice. So the email that Crystal mentioned at the beginning that everybody got saying we are soon going to configure analytics, Google Analytics 4 for you. Essentially, they're saying, if you haven't set up a Google Analytics 4 property that we know of, by starting sometime in March, aka as early as this week, we're going to migrate one for you. And then, every time you log into analytics, or refresh, you probably have seen this pop up saying, hey, this is your GA4 property, is this linked to a UA property? If so, which property? 43:03 Krista Okay, all of these things essentially are being used to help Google auto migrate for you. So like I said, starting in March, they're going to create a property, even if you've created your own GA4 property already. If it's not linked via this modal or you didn't link it initially when you set up, Google won't know that you have a GA4 property for that UA property, so they might still migrate you. 43:28 Krista To avoid this, you want to opt out. 43:31 Krista You can opt out in your Universal Analytics property. So you go to Universal Analytics, you go to Admin, under the middle column, the Property column, you go to GA4 Setup Assistant, all the way at the bottom, there is this ability to toggle on this opt out. 43:52 Krista There are some good things about auto migration. There's a long tail of users who are not going to migrate, let's face it. So this is Google's, you know, kind of last-ditch effort to help you migrate. But I think all of you here, are here to learn and get ahead of the game. So I would highly recommend that you do this yourselves. That is because Google, when they are setting up the auto migration, is going to migrate a bunch of features for you based on your settings in Universal Analytics. And some of those settings, you may not want to migrate to UA, and you want to have a say over those, such as the conversions that you're using for bidding in Google Ads and the audiences that you're targeting for bidding in Google Ads or how those audiences or conversions are even set up. Or the users that you allow access to your GA4 property. If you don't migrate that for you and you don't turn off auto migration, Google's just gonna say great, you had 100 users in the UA we're gonna migrate all 100 users to your new GA4 property. You may not want all of those users to have access to your GA4 property. So think about this. I'm actually posting a long Twitter thread about this later today. So if you go to at Krista Seiden on Twitter, you will see a very detailed breakdown of this auto migration and what to avoid. 45:05 Krista And yes, I highly suggest you avoid it. Okay, if you have gotten started or even if you haven't, when you do, I've also created this resource. It is a Data Studio or sorry, a Looker Studio dashboard since that was rebranded. It's available at the link here, Crystal is going to drop that in the chat as well. 45:26 Krista What this is, you can select on the left, your Universal Analytics property, on the right, you select your Google Analytics 4 property. It is going to lay this data over itself side by side. And you can see how this data compares between your Universal Analytics setup, and your GA4 setup. Very, very useful to be able to see kind of how your implementations compare, should they be equal? No, not exactly. In fact, you don't want to aim for parity with your UA account because that's changed a lot over the years, and it's very different to how GA4 works. But this helps you understand what those differences might be in a lot of different categories. 46:04 Krista Also, lots of helpful blog content out there. So my blog, kristseiden.com, Simo Ahava is kind of the go to for everything technical and Google Tag Manager. Julius from Analytics Media writes a lot of great stuff. Essentially, there's so many resources out there, just Google GA4 and whatever your question is, and something will come up. 46:24 Krista And then last but not least, I mentioned this a few times throughout, as we're looking at various examples. On ksdigital.co, I do courses for Google Analytics 4 so I have courses for understanding the reporting and the Explore interface, understanding advanced features and settings, a technical implementation deep dive to help you actually implement Google Analytics 4 and bundles of those options. You can use the code Wix for $250 off any of the full courses or bundles. And that's valid until the end of March. So hopefully some of you may find that useful as well. 46:58 Krista With that, I want to say thank you very much. I think we've got some time for some Q&A. I'm sure I've seen a lot of questions come in. So I think there's a lot of Q&A to go there. 47:10 Crystal Thank you so much, Krista. That was absolutely fantastic. There were a lot of of things that I did not you know you could do, and a lot of things that were that were shared. Mordy, I think I saw you following along on your Google Analytics. 47:24 Krista Good. I'm glad. 47:27 Crystal It's good. That's the way to do it. 47:29 Crystal Yeah, thank you so much. I'm just gonna go through a few quick Wix things before I get into some of the Wix elements. Before we get into the Q&A. I just wanted to say that I know we covered loads, Krista is an incredible fountain of knowledge with regards to GA4. So we covered loads, but the best thing about a webinar is that you can listen and you can watch the playback afterwards. And you can follow along and pause and it's like having Krista coaching you through the whole thing. So I'm just going to share quickly, just a few resources from Wix and for Wix users. So these are a few of the Wix GA4 resources that we have around. So there is a, Wix has a special tool that allows you to learn integration that allows you to connect with with Google. So there is documentation from Google about how to connect your Wix property to GA4 on Wix and also how to connect Google Ads as well. So that's some documentation there. If you want to upgrade to GA4, our help documents have information about how you can do that. And we also have a document specifically dedicated to to tracking Wix Events on GA4. And you also have a bit of documentation about Tag Manager on Wix. So Krista mentioned Tag Manager as a really great tool for working with GA4 and, yeah, we've got some documentation on how to get involved with that. From a more strategic point of view, and we also have the Wix SEO Learning Hub, which has a lot of great resources, including a link for beginners, who might—this might be very, very new to them called Getting Started with GA4. We have information about conversions in GA4 and we also have a general sort of strategic thing about SEO reporting, which talks a little bit about Google Data Studio, Looker Studio, and some more. And with that, and there's links to all of those and we'll share that later but with that, I think we can get into the get into the Q&A. There were lots and lots of active questions in the session. So I think we can get into that, Mordy, have you got some questions for us? 49:43 Mordy A bunch of questions. I just want to say to folks you know GA4, and I'm with you on this. I really liked GA3. Universal Analytics was my friend and I'm having, I am struggling with GA4 myself. 49:55 Mordy It seems overwhelming and it is overwhelming, and just getting your foot into the door and building up intuition, I think building up your intuition around how to use an analytics platform is the way to do it. And it's not like, there's step one, step two, step three, it's really having an understanding and creating an intuition around how to use the platform. So if you saw this, and you're a little overwhelmed by it. It doesn't mean that there wasn't anything worthwhile for you to take away from it. But just starting to see that user experience and what's available in Google Analytics 4 starts to build that intuition. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, I am with you. That's fine. It will be okay. There's plenty of resources out there, Crystal just mentioned, but just seeing what's in there is a really good first step. Now with that. 50:40 Mordy I'm gonna, I was debating where to go with the first question, and I'm gonna go with Simon Cox's question. Simon is a former member of the Wix SEO Advisory Board by the way, just to my point, a former member of the Wix SEO Advisory Board has questions about GA4 because we're all in the same boat. 50:57 Mordy And I feel like Simon is perhaps, is channeling the entire SEO industry with this question. And this is a very Simon question. Simon is a wonderful individual, he also has a strong sense of humor. 51:07 Mordy He wrote, how can the ordinary SEO pivot to GA4? None of the reports every SEO uses matches anything in GA4. 51:19 Krista Great question. I think that, yes, there are going to be a lot of differences between Universal Analytics and GA4. The most similar things will be things like the Traffic Acquisition report, and I showed you how you can change that to look at Source/Medium, you can filter for organic traffic, etc. One thing I didn't show here, but I actually do have a blog post about it, is how to create an SEO Landing Pages report. Essentially, you take the Landing Page report, you customize it to add a filter to only show organic traffic. And now you have a report that's just looking at your SEO landing page data. I think there's a lot of useful features here. You have the Google Search Console integration, etc. So I think, you know, if you're seeing a lot of differences that might be down to your actual implementation of UA versus GA4 and how those things are collecting. There will be inherent differences, because the platforms are different. But you should still find very useful information for your analysis in GA4. 52:23 Mordy Which goes back to my earlier point, that we're all still having a hard time building that intuition around the platform. Crystal Also, I was really grateful when you showed off some of the dropdowns there of some of the new reports. That's really awesome, but sorry. 52:38 Mordy There's a bunch of questions, I will try to summarize it around the historical data. So the UA historical data will be entirely inaccessible after Universal Analytics is sunsetted, or will just cease to collect new data? 52:54 Krista Good question. Um, the answer is yes, and yes, and no, and yes. Um, so Google is going to stop processing data on July 1 2023 for free users of Universal Analytics. They have said that for a period of at least six months after, which takes us to January 1 2024, you will still have access to your Universal Analytics views. Meaning you can view all of the data that was collected and processed prior to July 1, but there's not going to be any new data starting July 1 onwards, only GA4 data will be available after that point. GA4 data will also not be available in your UA properties. UA data will not be available in your GA4 properties. They are a different data model, you actually cannot combine the data in a meaningful way. So no, they will not bring your historical data over for you. So you will lose access to that data sometime January 1 2024 or after. 53:54 Krista So you'll have access for a bit to do that historical data analysis. Highly recommend looking into ways to export that data from Universal Analytics using the API, using different connectors. I've just been chatting with a tool called Analytics Canvas. They actually are coming out with a really cool solution to help you get your data out of Universal Analytics and into like a Google Sheet to visualize with Looker Studio or something like that. I know that's the route that I'll be going for, you know, some of my properties. I think the idea of having the data in BigQuery, or a sheet or something that you can have Looker Studio on top of so you can set that side by side with your GA4 data is going to be the best path forward for most people. 54:36 Crystal Fantastic. I think that's really important. I think also because you were talking about some of the properties and some of the channels and they don't all exactly line up. So if you have a tool that allows you to have it in a sortable, filterable way, historical that can be really helpful. 54:52 Mordy I want to jump back to a foundation because I felt I should have asked this first. A couple people are asking how do you define an event in GA4? 55:00 Krista Yeah, so you have to set it up. Except for automatically collected or enhanced measurement events, those come out of the box. But you have to set it up and so I showed a couple of examples, setting up that Select Content event, or that Continue Reading button or the newsletter sign up event. So I've set mine up in Google Tag Manager, if you're not using a tag management system, you can set it up in the code. But you will have to manually set up these additional events. But that was also the same in Universal Analytics, right, you had to add all of the additional events that you wanted to collect. 55:35 Mordy On the Wix side of Universal Analytics, we did automatically fire and trigger some of the events. But you may be wondering, is that going to happen in GA4 because as Krista mentioned, the events that we were triggering, if I'm, unless I'm incorrect, I believe I'm right. The events we were triggering automatically for you in Universal Analytics, in GA3, they're automatic in GA4. You don't have to set them up. It's done for you by the platform. 55:59 Crystal I think some of the tools that Krista was showing with with Tag Manager allows you to sort of add some potentially, can allow you to add some customizations if you're an advanced user. But if you're still getting started, then you know, there's a lot of tools that are available within within GA4 to help you see what you need to see. 56:18 Mordy So let's jump to this one, because there's been a slew of [questions] of this variation. This question, how do I know what version of Google Analytics I have? 56:27 Krista The best way to know is looking at the left-hand nav, if there's a lot of like clickable things in the left-hand nav that open up and expand, and you see like dozens or hundreds of reports, you're in Universal Analytics. If there's not very much there, you're in GA4. Crystal The first time I opened it up, I was like, what, where is everything? Why I don't see anything? I felt exposed. 56:56 Krista Hopefully now you know where some of those things live. Crystal Yes. Thank you, honestly, brilliant. Mordy And I guess before we go, we have only a minute left. This was not a question but a few people have asked is using Google Analytics or Google Analytics 4 a ranking factor? The answer is no, it does not impact your ranking. If you don't connect Google Analytics to your site, your rankings will not be impacted. It's Google, not Yandex. 57:23 Crystal Thank you. 57:28 Crystal Lovely, thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much, Krista. We're going to be sending out lots of—you've got a lot of a love in the chat Mordy. 57:40 Crystal We're gonna to be sending out this recording and some links. Thank you to Krista so much for sharing those links with us. And you'll get a little bit of a roundup with some of the Wix resources as well from us. Thank you to everyone for joining us on this session. And hope to see you again our next webinar which is going to be next month and we're going to be talking about local SEO. So hope you can join us for that and thank you very much. 58:10 Krista Thanks, everyone. Mordy Bye.

March 21, 2023 Now more than ever, local SEO can make or break a business. By optimizing your website for local search, you can gain a critical advantage over competitors in your area. Join our hosts, along with leading expert Kyrstal Taing, for a breakdown of the steps you can take to figuratively (and literally) put your business on the map. Check out the webinar's decks: Check out Crystal Carter's deck Check out Krystal Taing's deck In this webinar, we'll cover: The key differences between traditional and local SEO How to put local SEO trends to work for your business Tried-and-true tips for increasing your local traffic Meet your hosts: Krystal Taing Global Director of Pre-Sales Solutions at Uberall Krystal is the Global Director of Pre-Sales Solutions at Uberall, as well as being a Google Business Profile Platinum Product Expert and faculty member at LocalU. She helps brands deliver best-in-class hybrid experiences and is a respected authority on local search. 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 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, brightonSEO, Moz, DeepCrawl (Lumar), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Transcript: Introduction to local SEO Mordy Oberstein 0:00 Welcome to intro to local SEO, I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding here at Wix and I'm joined by the always amazing Crystal Carter, who's the Head of Communications here at Wix and by Uberall's own Krystal Taing. So many Crystals, two Crystals for the price of one. Crystal Carter 0:18 And you Mordy. Mordy Oberstein 0:27 Thank you for joining us. To answer the most pressing question, yes, the webinar is going to be recorded. It'll be up in a few days or so, you'll get an email with the link to the YouTube recording. It'll also be hosted on a post, the same URL where you registered on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. So definitely know it will be recorded, you can always go back to the recording, please ask questions. There's a Q&A panel, please ask your questions. We have moderators who have been so fortunate to join us and they will help answer your questions and those that we don't get to during the moderation period. We'll try to answer ourselves after we go through the presentation. So please, please ask questions. There's no such thing as a silly question. The only way we learn is by asking questions. So please ask questions. And again, we do a monthly webinar series. Please look for future webinars on the SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn/webinars. I think next month webinars about AI and content, and how to handle AI and content and SEO. So we're looking forward to that. Okay, so we've done the agenda, or we're doing the introductions, which is part of the agenda. We're going to hear from Krystal Taing, about local SEO, and then we're going to go through some local SEO resources from the great Crystal Carter. And then we'll have our Q&A. Crystal Carter 1:51 So the local SEO resources are going to be things on Wix. So Krystal Taing is gonna be talking a lot about things generally about SEO, and some things about Wix. But the last section I'll be covering at the end is how you can do it on Wix. So if you're wondering about that, just hang in there with us. And we'll get to it. Mordy Oberstein1 2:07 And then of course, the Q&A. By the way, if you're looking at me during the presentation and I'm looking around, it's because I'm looking at the Q&A doc that we're working on to make sure we answer your questions. I am absolutely participating and paying attention. Crystal Carter 2:22 And how could you not live with such fantastic guests that we've got here today? Krystal Taing 2:26 Absolutely. Awesome. Yes, we're excited to be here, I have to say thank you to Mordy and Crystal and the entire Wix team. So I'm excited to be here. So thank you for having me. Hopefully, we can geek out over some local SEO, which, you know, I'm just personally really passionate about, as Mordy mentioned, I am with Uberall. And I'm here today really just to talk about an overview of local SEO, what does it mean for local businesses around the world? What are some tips and best practices that you should follow? And then of course, as they mentioned, happy to take as many questions as we can answer. And then of course, if there's time to follow up afterwards, we can do that as well. So I think with that, I'm happy to go ahead and get started. So in terms of what we'll cover today, I'm going to provide a high level overview of why local SEO is important. I imagine, you know, it's very blatant to a lot of users. But also, I think there's some things to consider from a consumer perspective as well. And I'll touch a little bit on the differences, as well as overlaps between traditional and local SEO, because there's definitely a lot of blending. And I'll highlight a few best practices to improve your local rank ranking in the three packs. And that pack, you know, on Google Maps, some tips and tactics. And then of course, this would not be an SEO webinar in 2023 if we didn't touch on AI, because it's just really changing the game. So I wanted to share just some thoughts and discussion points around that and how we're thinking about it and how businesses can start considering leveraging AI in their day to day management. In terms of local SEO, in general, though, I wanted to share a few kind of initial stats to really set the stage and discuss why we're talking about this. So if I take off my marketer hat, my SEO hat, and I really just think about myself as a customer and a searcher like I am on my phone all the time searching restaurants near me, convenience store near me, pharmacies near me, all of this stuff. And there's actually a really, really insightful review survey and consumer report from BrightLocal that says 78% of consumers use the internet to find info about local businesses more than once a week. Like I said, for me, I know that's dozens of times a week. And then also there's a lot of considerations that they take whenever they are deciding once they find that business, how to choose them. One of those is reviews as you can see in a stat that we shared about a review survey, but there's a lot of other things that we want to dive into as well. So really, just to put it into plain terms, we want to make sure and help educate businesses on why this is important, why we're talking about it. It's really to help serve customers that are looking for a product or service nearby. And it's also essential for businesses with physical locations. So you can be a market, a pharmacy, you know, a salon, and you want people to come into your physical business. But it's also incredibly relevant if you are delivering a service to your end user as well. So you can be, you know, a garage door repair service, of course, people aren't going to likely show up to your office with their garage door saying, can you fix it, you have to go visit them. But you still need to rank and there's quite different tactics to consider when you don't have a physical business that people are searching, but you're delivering that service to the user. So when we think about local SEO versus traditional SEO, as I mentioned, there's actually a lot of blending that goes on. But if we take a step back, typically local SEO just means some type of local intent, this can be explicit. So that means someone that is taking out their cell phone or going online and doing a search. And they say, you know, taco shop San Diego, because I put the term San Diego in there, Google knows or, you know, plenty of other search engines, we can throw Bing in the mix, we can throw Apple in the mix at this point, they know that you are looking for somewhere to visit when you say the word San Diego or when you say near me. However, these companies are also smart enough to know that there's a lot of search terms that are implied local searches. So again, you know, I want to book a massage or something like that. They're also assuming that you do not want a Wikipedia article on how to become a massage therapist that you likely want some local results in there as well. So anytime we talk about local SEO, oftentimes, this means surfacing a business where a customer can visit or you can deliver the service to them. Oftentimes, when we think about traditional SEO, this covers the gamut of everything that can be on the website on the internet. So yes, there can be traditional SEO tactics that are applied to local businesses, of course, but also what traditional SEO can serve that local SEO doesn't, or online only businesses, businesses where maybe you're just trying to deliver information. That's where we'll see some of those kinds of typical standard traditional SEO tactics. So if we were to break it down, and we were to kind of bucket all the topics into traditional and local SEO, we wanted to provide this kind of output. I will mention as well, because a lot of these are blended, while the targets for local and traditional SEO are different. They definitely can be shared across the board. But if you think of traditional SEO, it can be online customers for anywhere. Again, you're thinking of something like, you know, a Wikipedia article, someone wants that to rank, no matter where they're located, you don't have to be in a particular area to find value from finding this article. Whereas local SEO is really targeting that consumer that is nearby, or planning to be nearby. So oftentimes thinking not just your immediate crowd, but maybe people traveling through, or you offer a product or service that people are willing to travel to get. These are things potentially like lawyers, oftentimes someone is going to travel farther to get services or meet with a lawyer, or potentially like a mortgage broker than they are to go buy milk at the grocery store. So sometimes your local consumer can be a little bit broader than the immediate neighborhood or area that you're serving. Oftentimes, the keywords that you're targeting between traditional and local SEO are often different. And so you think traditional SEO, you might have broad terms, whereas in local SEO, not only are you targeting, you know, components like near me and the area, but oftentimes your services and your products are going to be a lot more specific to your market as well. You know, maybe there's, for example, like trends or you know, different types of ways that people refer to your product and services in your area that may be a lot more relevant to those local consumers, then, you know, someone's searching for information across the web. In terms of devices, traditional SEO Of course, you can target both desktop and mobile, local SEO of course, you can target both desktop and mobile, but the amount of searches that are taking place on mobile is continuing continuously increasing year over year when it comes to a local aspect. And again, when you think about yourself as a consumer, oftentimes, I will use my cell phone to just geo locate me and look nearby. And I'll zoom in on the map to find this information. But if it's a product or service that I want to do more research on, I may then just go naturally take that to my desktop to find a little bit more, maybe I need to see if it's in stock, maybe I feel more comfortable completing my order on a desktop than I do on my cell phone. You know, that kind of thing. But in terms of just that first step of showing up, mobile is hugely important for local SEO, in terms of what happens on the SERP or the search engine result page. So this is basically the results that show on Google and traditional SEO, you're really targeting basically everything that shows below the map. Whereas with local SEO, your main target is really going to be your Google Business Profile listing that displays in the map pack. We will show you that and we'll talk about that a little bit more. But making sure your business is present there. And of course, that only qualifies if you have a brick and mortar location, or a service area business. So if you just operate a website, if you're just you know, running a blog or something like that, then, you know, maybe local is not the most relevant. So the Google Business Profile and map locations are really going to target those, you know, physical businesses. Of course, you want to think about things like search intent conversion rates, and how these vary based on what people are looking for. Again, same thing here is taking the difference between what a consumer is looking for near them compared to just general information online. And then of course, the way the results are delivered to users. And when you look at a local result, compared to a result that's not local, you're going to see different elements in the SERP that users are going to engage with. And just to mention, again, the differences and types of businesses, you know, ecommerce, SaaS, basically, any business can do traditional SEO, and only those brick and mortar and service area businesses are really relevant for that local intent. So to really focus a little bit more on the map packs, the three pack, I mean, I feel like you'll hear about it, I think it's even called the snack pack at some point in time. But this is kind of the goldmine for all businesses, this is where you want to show if someone searches, salon near me, massage near me, you want to be one of those three results. The amount of clicks that happen on those first three results is astronomical compared to any others on there. So this is really the target and the goldmine for businesses. And it's also nice, because it's a snapshot, kind of like a digital storefront for your business when you display there. So it's not just getting there, of course, that's the target. But it's also making sure that that small little snapshot is as impactful as possible to the eyes that see it to give you the chances of users clicking on you. But this is really the target, getting your business in the map pack. So if we talk a little bit about some best practices to improve your chances of getting there, there are some basics. So one of the things that should always be considered is just keeping your data and your Google Business Profile accurate. And while customers may not know at the moment, whether or not your name or address, or phone number is accurate, Google does. Google is consistently getting user feedback. They're consistently scraping the web for additional information to validate whether or not this is a good result that they trust to deliver to a user. So as a business owner, you have to kind of influence Google's trust by saying yes, my data is accurate. You can validate it against my website, you can validate it against Bing and Apple and anywhere else that Google is going to check and validate your information. So having that, you know, really good source of truth, making sure it's consistent is going to ensure that Google doesn't distrust your information, and they will qualify you to rank in the top map pack. Of course, once it's correct, you want to make sure you have everything filled out. I think this is oftentimes one of the things that maybe small businesses may not take the most advantage of, because it can be cumbersome, you may not know the right things, you may get some errors, but really taking the opportunity to fill out that entire real estate, add all your images, your content, your text, to a user and allowing it to represent your business is going to be really, really helpful. And again, it sends all the signals to Google about your business. It tells them how and when they should show you by adding images of your location of your employees of your products and services. Google is smart enough to read that and say, oh, there's a lot of pictures from this business for this product, that means I should probably start ranking them when people search this product, they are a relevant result, outside of just completing your data, and we'll go into details in just a few slides about all of the elements. Of course, reviews and ratings on your profile are hugely important. This is really, I think, what allows you to stand out whenever you do rank in that three pack or in the top five? Oftentimes, the first thing I do, especially when I'm thinking of particular industries, is look at the ratings. It's not just are they three, four, or five, it's how many reviews do they have? How many do they have compared to the other two businesses I'm looking at? Oftentimes, your reviews and ratings are really going to be what tipped the scale for a user engaging with you. And then, of course, you know, you don't stop there, of course, you want to start with a really solid profile and local visibility for your location on Google and on all the directories we mentioned. But you have to also implement your on page local SEO, it's not just important for ranking in organic, it really does impact the way you show on Google. And again, sends Google more information about your business, when they should show you, how they should show you and oftentimes even pulling information from your website to justify why they displayed you to users. So getting into the three pack we talked about, you know some of the high level tips. But really optimizing your Google Business Profile, I will say if you have one strategy that you can focus on this week, this month, it is definitely starting. They're not where you should end, but it really makes a huge impact. It's where all of your competitors are. And it's really the most visible to consumers. 90 or more percent of the world's searches happen on Google still, today, they are huge, they have a huge market share. So making sure your business is here and is complete and accurate, is definitely going to move the needle for you. Also improving not just your reviews but the amount you have. The volume of reviews you have. And your responses to those reviews is going to be impactful. And I think when you respond to reviews, oftentimes we see customers come in and possibly change their rating, or they're evaluating the way a business responds in terms of engaging with them. So responding to reviews absolutely has an impact to the conversions that customers are taking on your profile. And then of course, the more people clicking on your profile and doing business with you is going to be a positive signal to improve your ranking on Google. And then also, I just want to highlight this as one of my favorite tactics, again, depending on your industry, is high quality photos. And when I say high quality, I don't mean that you need to go hire a 360 photographer, or buy a fancy camera, like every smartphone has a really, really nice camera. And it could just be focusing once a month, taking a handful of pictures of your office space, your products, you know your services, especially if you're doing home services, like what does your equipment look like or a repair job and adding these to your business. There's just been a tonne of development about how these display to users and also the information Google gets behind the photos, especially due to the strong AI they have in evaluating the information image. And I will mention here, if you are in a restaurant industry, I can't mention enough how impactful this is. If you take your phone out and search a restaurant near me, I oftentimes say the results look a lot more like Pinterest than they do a Google search because images are really, really at the forefront. So I always like to recommend going and doing a search that your customer would do. And look at what that result looks like and kind of set your target for a business you would engage with. So we've been talking a lot about Google Business Profile, so just to make sure everyone's clear, Google business search results looks just like this and your profile is what shows here. So I mentioned it is a snapshot of your business. It is not like your website, your homepage where you have endless space and endless functionality to describe and show your business. You get a very limited view of information that Google determines is relevant for users to fill in. And I cannot mention enough to fill it all in to make sure you are giving customers everything they need to decide in that moment. So you know, you can go into things like just starting with your name and your category. I'll mention we published a really great article on Wix with their SEO Hub earlier this year about selecting your Google category, because I don't think businesses realize how impactful and important that is. So when Crystal shares some of the resources later, that'll be a great one to review, if you just had considerations about that. But you can see here, address information, hours, a handful of attributes. And then again, on every single one of these, you're going to see an image, you're going to see reviews, you're going to see some high level detail. So again, thinking about the information a customer wants, or needs, at the moment, when they're ready to make a decision, make sure that it's published on your profile. When we talk about getting your data to Google, and then where it's going to rank when Google is considering ranking it, I think it's important to be aware of where this is. So we talked about local and traditional SEO a little bit. And there are what we refer to kind of as the blue links, those are organic results. That is where your website link will show up. Where we are targeting with the map pack is right there in the middle. On the map, you'll typically see red dots or map pins or branded pins showing your business on the map. But then you'll have the nice map pack showing your business details. It's usually three results. Sometimes there are paid results in the map. So sometimes you'll see four or five with a very, very discreet word that says ad next to it. That's one of the map pack ads. And then of course, at the top, there's also other areas of Google, where you can do paid organic, there's LSAs, there's a few other different Google SERP features that might show above the map pack as well. But if you see and you do any local searches, Google is really drawing as much attention as they can to those main listings that are ranking on the map pack. And when we think about why we're targeting that, it's just because most people are clicking there. So of course, you want to show up as much as possible on a search result page when a user does their search, they take their query, but really, they're clicking primarily on the map pack. Of course, some of the ads are going to gather and garner a lot of those clicks. So if you are in home services, or a category that offers any local service ads, and you're looking to drive the needle, I would definitely recommend looking into that. But also, if you're not in there, or it's not something that you want to prioritize, really targeting the map pack as your first focus is going to be helpful. Of course, then there's other search features. And then the organic links that display below, you cannot forget the importance that your actual website has not just in helping display on your Google profile, but ranking in addition. So if you can score that top backpack position, or one of those three, and then also get your website to rank for that, you are pretty much golden. So I do want to highlight a little bit of the local pack ranking factors. I am going to caveat this, and I think it's official. But Darren Shaw, who runs the White Spark Ranking Factors actually is publishing the new edition tomorrow. So it'll be the 2023 local ranking factors that comes out tomorrow. So these numbers may change slightly. For anyone that doesn't know it's a survey of dozens, or even at this point, it might be hundreds of local SEO practitioners that basically answer all of these questions about what moves the needle for their clients and their customers that they work with. And I think the report is about 10 years in history. So it's been released every few years, since I think 2012. And so the new one is coming out. But what this gives us is an idea of what is most impactful to customers. What is most impactful to Google when they are ranking and displaying a business. But then also it gives businesses and marketers something to focus on. So again, there's not just you know, I'm not just saying focus on Google first because it's fun or you know, it's easy. It really is because it makes the most impact when you are thinking about showing up first to customers. Then it's followed by reviews. There's a lot of different factors within reviews. This covers the content and reviews, the volume of reviews, the speed at which you get reviews, the recency, so many different things, but that's all taken into account. And that is kind of the number two local search ranking factor followed quickly by on page elements. Very much like reviews. This covers so much, its content, its structure, its title tags, its headers, it's basically just having a really strong on-page strategy and how that influences you ranking in the map pack. Outside of that, there's a lot of backlinking strategies that you can implement. So Google seeing your business mentioned in reputable articles and sites around the web, linking to your website, and the page that's mapped to your Google Business Profile really does send strong signals to Google to say, okay, not only do we trust this business, but all of these other reputable companies and websites, also trust them because they're publishing them. So we are going to influence and increase where we're ranking this business. Outside of that we have behavioral and citations that rank right at the same. So behavioral really just means how users engage with your business, I will say this oftentimes this gets a little bit missed, because behavioral is a huge influence for conversion rate. So ranking just means you show, conversion means who's clicking. And so oftentimes, the more people who click, the more Google is going to say okay, this was a really good result. And you know, we should start showing this more because a lot of users are engaging with the content. So while behavioral isn't an immediate and huge impact to ranking, it is really, really strong when it comes to conversion. Citations, this is what I just like to kind of call like the vegetables of the food pyramid, it's the thing that most businesses just have to do. It's not super exciting, or you know, the prettiest of it. But it's just that thing that tells Google that your data is consistent, it allows you to ensure that there's no breaks in the consumer journey. So yes, you might have someone searching for your business on Bing, on Yellow Pages, on you know, some of these sites around the web. It's important for that to be consistent, because if they don't see the right phone number, there weren't the right hours or the right address. While it might not be the lion's share of traffic, Google is going to see and track that information is not accurate. And you know, that's going to impact your ranking negatively. But then also a consumer who might be engaging with your content, there's also potential to have a bad experience. So making sure your data is published on all the sites your customers are on is definitely a ranking factor. And then what we have kind of trickling down at the end of the list is personalization. This really just happens to be the person that is searching for the business or service, do they have preferences, languages, any settings on their browser app that is influencing the results that Google is giving you, I think this is one of the ones that is becoming less relevant, and we're not seeing as often. But it's still important to be aware that sometimes that impacts the results. To touch a little bit on on-page SEO and how that segues into local SEO. There's a couple of high level things that I actually mentioned, for any Wix users. Crystal is going to dive into some really nice tips about how to manage some of this stuff on Wix if you're leveraging that. I can't talk about local SEO, if we don't talk about content, that's what you hear. Google wants information, not just to rank you locally, but just to understand your business. So really having a strong on-page content strategy, especially that includes local components is going to be helpful, structured data, it's just a really helpful way to teach Google how to navigate your information. Otherwise, you're leaving it up to chance, like if you don't have structured data, they're going to crawl and they're going to think they have the right idea about your business. But structured data is really the map to get them the information that you need. And then of course, local specific pages. So if you're a single business, you know, targeting different areas, especially service areas, it's great to have pages that represent each of the service areas. And then of course, if you're a multi location business, ensuring that you have a page that represents each store location, and has relevant content to that specific area is going to be impactful to Google. And then of course, whatever page you create, making sure that it's on your GBP profile to connect the dots. We talked a little bit about citation building. I just want to highlight here that this is going to vary by industry and by region. And really here just mentioning that you should identify and evaluate where your customers are. So I think restaurants and hotels definitely need to consider Yelp. But if you are, I don't know a grocery store, I don't know that it's important for you to be on Yelp. Same thing with TripAdvisor. That's huge when it comes to travel. That's going to be a really critical site. You need to ensure your business is accurate, you're responding to those reviews, if you are in the travel industry, or rely on travel business, and then of course, you know, industry specific sites like Avvo, there's a tonne of home services sites that you should make sure you're on. In addition to those regional directories, every area has different sites, there are different sites in Canada that a lot of the businesses up there rely on. Same thing when you think about businesses in Europe as well, that there's very specific, niche directories that are relevant. So making sure that your basic information is there, it's accurate, and you have a seamless way to update it. And the last topic, before I highlight, the Wix App is really just touching on AI. And I think this one is actually really interesting, because I just love reading everyone's ideas, and tests of what they're doing and thinking of what AI. But oftentimes, for me, I'm thinking, okay, what could be helpful for a business owner? How can they leverage AI? So I don't know if anyone's used ChatGPT, or tested any of these. I've seen some really, really interesting use cases, things like saying, hey, I have a cafe in this area, can you evaluate other cafes nearby and tell me what their average rating is? Or tell me what their categories are and what my category should be? Oftentimes, there's ways to mine information with AI, to help you and to help inform some of your decisions. So I think it's also like, you know, one of those areas where you have to be cautious because it's a new model, things are changing, and it only knows as much information is put into it. So I think it's helpful to do a lot of research. So whether you are looking to target new customers, and you're trying to get additional information, ideas for content, which you will all see I loved. I actually played around with it recently, there is an AI text editor in the Wix App that helps you build some content based on some topics that's really, really interesting. I love AI for content optimization and providing that. And then also, I just think it's really interesting, something we're doing at Uberall is leveraging AI to connect the dots in the consumer journey. So we have messages, for example, someone sends you a message on Google, they say is this product in stock? If we have that information, our platform, not only will we pull it out and say yes, we have this in stock, would you like to place an order for it to be picked up at your nearest location, here's the address. Those are the types of ways that I think AI really can help move the needle for local business owners, and create efficiencies, but also help drive a little bit more revenue, which I think is what everyone is focused on. So I just love hearing about some of the the tests and developments with AI. And as a local marketer, understanding where this can impact business owners is tremendously exciting. And the other thing I will just mention is our overall app that we have in the Wix Marketplace. So for those of you that have maybe started managing your Google Business Profile, and you're looking to maybe see where do we go to the next level, we have an app that allows you to manage your listings, and then also your listings and reviews. And so this is going to publish that data across a network of a number of directories in your area. It also comes with manual cleansing. So one of the things that is quite annoying is if you go into Google and try to publish your business, and they say your address is incorrect, or your map pin is off, we have a process that as soon as the data comes into our system, it is cleansed by a team of experts to ensure it publishes quickly to all of these sites, because they all have their preferences. There's also a number of metrics and a performance score. So you can track not just how your Google listings are doing, but how your listings and data is performing across the line, of course, the ability to add and publish photos for your business as well. And then if you're interested in reviews, there's a lot of really nice review tools and features that are available within the app, pulling in your reviews, responding to reviews, creating offers and social posts and managing that Q&A. So I think definitely, if you're looking to take your local SEO to the next level, taking a look at the overall app in the Wix Marketplace would be quite interesting. And we have a handy little QR code here that'll take you directly to it. Awesome. And with that, Crystal I think it's back to you to share some of the local SEO resources. Crystal Carter 34:55 Fantastic. Thank you so much Krystal. That was brilliant. Really, really insightful. Well, thank you so, so much. A few people asked a few questions about some acronyms. A few people said, what's the GBP again? That's Google Business Profile. Someone said, what's AI? That is artificial intelligence. And yeah, there's a lot of great tools. And also someone said, will this be shared? Yes, it will be shared, it's being recorded, it will be shared on YouTube. We will also be sharing the decks afterwards. So if you weren't able to scan the QR code, because you're watching on your phone, and you can scan, you can get the QR code after we finish. I'm just going to share my screen now. And we're gonna go quickly through a few resources on Wix. So we have a few things that are useful for you to know. So first things first, and when you create a Wix website, you can add your address into the business info panel on your Wix website, and it will create structured data automatically. Somebody asked what structured data is, unstructured data is essentially a little bit of code that sits behind your website that humans can't see. But bots can see it, and they love it. Because it's essentially like giving them the recipe for your website, rather than just giving them the whole pizza or the whole bowl of soup or whatever. There'll be a link on this deck, so you can see that later as well. And also the other thing you want to think about is adding your name, address, phone number, also known as NYP, in the local SEO circles, to your footer and your about page. So if you're wondering how to do this with a Wix website, there's a section where it says "Add a Section" and we have a whole section that talks about adding your business info, and it includes your business, name, address, and phone number. We also have sections that allow you to incorporate Google Maps onto your About page. So you can add in your business info, you can add in a little bit of information about yourself, and you can add in your address. So Krystal was talking about your pins on your maps. Make sure that you've got the same address and your business info as you've got here. And you can point that there. Krystal also mentioned our AI tool. So let's say you get to your About page and you're not sure what to put for it. And you want to make sure that you've got your local business information information there, you can use the AI text creator, you click create AI text, and then you would click About for this particular one. And then you'd add in some of the things including some of the location information and your service information. And then you would get a few options on this particular one, I thought option three was good. So I clicked to use text, and I've added to page and then you can adjust it, it's very important that you check your AI texts when you're using AI because they it's very much like it's generative, and things like that. So it's important to double check it and make sure that it fits exactly what you need, and that it's accurate for your uses. The other thing we want to think about is setting up your Google Business Profile. I saw a few people in the discussions talking about how do I set this up. If you're on Wix, and you don't have a Google Business Profile, you can do this from within Wix. So you would go to your Marketing and SEO Settings, you click on Google Business Profiles, and you start typing in your business name. And it'll give you a few options. In this particular case, the business that I had wasn't listed because it's not listed. But if it was, then it, for instance, would show on the list. So I would type in the business name, and then I'd start filling in my details. So as Krystal was saying, it's really important to fill in all of your business details. For this particular one, I started writing and I wrote in 79 characters about my business but to be honest, I should add in more details than that. And also, we have the business category as well, that is in a drop down. So there'll be other categories that you can choose from in there, and it's worth trying them out and testing them. The other thing that you can add into it is you can add photos from within Wix, you can also adjust your business hours. And you can add in some of the attributes, Google Business Profile gives you the option to say that it's a women led business or that you have WiFi that's paid or you have curbside delivery or that sort of thing that's really useful. So that's worth checking out as well. And finally, we have some information about your business data. So Krystal was also talking about business data. Within your Wix CMS, you can see the traffic by location report to see visitors by region, city and postcode. So on this particular one, I filtered it by New York. But you can see it's showing a few entries for Brooklyn and a few entries for New York. But you'll notice that they're both different postcodes. So let's say you're targeting a hyperlocal pizza place and you deliver really locally, you can see who is seeing you there. And you can also see it on a map if you want to get a bit more information there. That's not New York, but here we go. The other thing I would say is to check out the Wix SEO Learning Hub, as Krystal was saying there's a lot of overlap between classic SEO and local SEO so you can get a full overview on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. You can also dive into all her local SEO resources including Krystal's fantastic guide to the introduction to local SEO, and her other articles as well. And lots of Google Business Profile webinars and more. And with that I'll say thank you and we can go into a very lively Q&A and get some more fantastic informations from Krystal. Mordy Oberstein 40:15 Thank you Crystal and thank you Krystal. I've been waiting the whole webinar to say that. There's been a lot of questions, we're trying to monitor the Q&A section and I'm going to try to unify a bunch of questions by theme. So we can answer as many questions as we possibly can all in one shot in the limited time that we have. So one question I saw a lot was, I don't have a physical store. I'm a service business. So I don't know if I'm a mobile mechanic or I do home medical testing. How does it work to set up a Google Business Profile? What's the deal? Krystal Taing 40:49 Awesome, that's a great question. So the requirements for having a Google Business Profile is either the customer can visit you, or you deliver your service to the customer in person, like you just have to make in person contact, you can't be a virtual therapist that never meets your customers in person, although I think Google is going to think about that, in the future, how things change. But that's currently the requirements. So a mobile mechanic, as you mentioned, absolutely qualifies. There's a feature within Google where you have to hide your address. And there are parameters around when you can and when you have to. So if you have an office space, and technically someone could come visit you or maybe you want your address published so that you could get deliveries easy or something like that, you can publish it, but then market your business as a hybrid. So you can say also I accept people at my location, but I also deliver goods and services to them. And so Google won't hide your address. But they'll add features that say you serve a very specific area. Now, if you are someone that practices out of your home, and your home has no signage, and then you just go meet your customers or clients where there are, Google guidelines state you have to hide your address, a residential address cannot be published on Google as a business, again, unless there's clear signage, and then that would just be a feature within Google that you do, you hide your address, and then Google publishes kind of this little polygon on the map and you add your service areas that you serve. And that one will will be published that way, but your address won't be displayed. Mordy Oberstein 42:34 Perfect. Now, let me ask you a different question. Let's say I have multiple service areas. So let's say Miami and Jacksonville and Tallahassee, I don't know how far Tallahassee is from Jacksonville. But I know that Jacksonville and Miami are far away. How does that work? Is it one giant service area? Do I have multiple locations? And each one has its own service area? How does that work? Krystal Taing 42:59 So typically, you're gonna still just have a single business profile on Google. And then in the field where it says area served, you list all of the zip codes, counties, cities, however you deliver it, Google's guidelines are just if you put a city in there, you have to accept customers from everywhere in that city. So you have the ability to expand it. Guidelines are quite grey, about qualifying for an additional listing if you're a service area business, but a good rule of thumb is if you're just one business, everything operates the same as a single business profile with additional service areas. Mordy Oberstein 43:37 Is there a radius like, if the area is five hours away? Can I do a service area for New York and all the way to California? Krystal Taing 43:48 So Google guidelines state two hours, I will mention, they are a guideline, that is not a rule. So that's one thing too, because there's examples where a wedding photographer would be willing to travel to a different state, they don't qualify for another listing in the states that they're willing to travel to. So it is one of those things that you know, don't make a judgment call as a business owner, unless you have two separate businesses operating, I would say keep a single profile. Mordy Oberstein 44:22 Okay, the last follow up question. I can answer all the questions around this. I think, by the way, there are a bunch of questions about hiding my address. I don't see you answer those people. Like you know, it's my home. I don't want people to actually show up so you hide the address, so you avoid that problem. But let's say okay, I have set my service area. Great. Google has a two hour guideline. But I set it from New York to Miami. Now someone's searching for mobile mechanic Miami will hurt my rankings if I'm sent from New York all the way down to Miami because Google will think well, maybe I'm not relevant for Miami because most of them are in New York. Krystal Taing 44:55 Yeah. So this is also really important. Setting your service areas in Google, it doesn't matter if they're just a bunch of zip codes in New York, like Crystal is showing, or they're multiple states, that does not impact where Google displays you. Google is going to display you, one, based on your physical address that you have, even if you hid it, they still know where you were verified. But then also, they're going to lean on a lot of these other local SEO signals. So this is where on page content and on page SEO is going to be hugely impactful, because for a service area business, you're going to have limited things in GPP, that will tell Google, hey, I'm relevant in New York, but I'm also relevant in Miami. That's where they're going to need to see, you know, backlink mentions and different publications around the country. They're going to need to see content on your page that serves all of those markets. But that's where I would start with GBP, but you definitely need to leverage on page and other tactics to actually influence Google and rank you in the right areas. Mordy Oberstein 45:59 Right. So I think in that case, if you have an attorney in New York or Miami, have a page on your website, mobile mechanic, New York, mobile mechanic Miami, send a signal that way. Krystal Taing 46:09 Yeah, yeah. But I will say it's not going to be detrimental. You know, it's just not probably going to be as successful if you don't have a strong SEO strategy broadly. Mordy Oberstein 46:20 That was therapeutic, we really dived deep into the service area. Krystal Taing 46:25 It's a fun topic. Mordy Oberstein 46:26 It is. It is also a very confusing topic. Because again, Google's guidelines are a little bit not so clear sometimes about this. Another question I've seen is about optimizing my Google Business Profile, what goes into optimizing my Google Business Profile? What category or categories do I pick? What matters? For example, a question I have seen, and been asked multiple times is, can I schedule and create Google posts out of Wix? And I think you'd be able to do that with the Uberall app. But are Google posts a ranking factor, if I post more often, is that going to rank me higher? What goes into optimizing this mysterious Google Business Profile? Krystal Taing 47:03 Awesome. So I don't want to take the shortcut out of here. But this is a very detailed answer, because there's a lot and we could be here for another hour. What I will say is that the new local search ranking factors report comes out tomorrow. I'm also happening to be on a webinar with Darren Shaw on Thursday to discuss the new changes. And a lot of it's going to be about GBP. But I would definitely recommend just to search local search ranking factors. It's White Spark that does it I know, he's contributed to the Wix SEO hub as well. But that dives into every feature of GBP and ranks the importance of it. So there's things like your name, your category, what are the things that people think you should pay attention to that you really shouldn't. So there's a section on myths that really don't have an impact. So I think that is definitely a good starting point resource, because it is actually quite complicated. In terms of posts and other content that you can add to Google. It's definitely impactful and important. This is where I would say it definitely toggles the line between ranking, which is showing up and conversions. I would say thinking about Google posts to drive action is going to be more impactful than thinking about it for Google to show you higher. But yes, to your point, the Uberall app does allow you to schedule as many posts as you want, not just to Google, but to Facebook, to Twitter, to Instagram, to other places, as much to a year in advance. So if you're like, hey, I've got a couple of hours this month, you can go in and set your calendar for quite a while. Crystal Carter 48:43 I think that the categories point is really useful. In my local SEO workings, I've seen posts make a big difference to sort of getting a little bit of visibility. I'm sure the ranking factors will go into that. But certainly getting involved in posts can make a big deal or make a big difference. I'd be interested to hear you talk a bit about categories. I've worked with a recruitment client, for instance and there was one where you could schedule it as a recruiter and another where you could say the category was employment agency, and we had different search results, depending on which one it was. I think I had another client who was a tennis center and they were a real leisure center. Are we a sports center? Are we that sort of thing? So if you could expand on how you choose the best category? Krystal Taing 49:33 This is why I wrote an entire article on it because it's important. It is a huge driver of how you display and changing your category can almost immediately have an impact on how Google understands you. It's also something you shouldn't change all the time because it could trigger suspensions if you're going back and forth between it so you want to be thoughtful about how you're choosing it. So oftentimes one of the first things to do is to do a couple searches on Google, see what your local and maybe even national competitors have as their categories. And start that as your list, these are the five ones that typically display. And you'll start to get trends. And then I would say, go do a couple of searches that you want to show up for, see the businesses that Google is already ranking for those of those queries, and see what their categories are, and see where they vary and add to your list. I always think that's a really good starting point. And then one of the really important things is your category controls a lot of the other information you have access to inside Google. So your attributes, the way your reviews look like there's so much stuff that is controlled based on your category. So going and validating what's available, like are there particular URLs you want to publish, that maybe a mortgage broker has, but a loan office does not have? So you want to be mindful. Do I want to be a professional or a business? But yeah, that's what I would say is outside of getting your information correct. Doing solid research on your categories is really important. Because basically Google reads your name and then your category. And then they're like, oh, do we show this business or not? And it's quite interesting. So starting with those searches, I think is really helpful. Mordy Oberstein 51:26 By the way, in the chat, I was gonna mention this, but someone just threw it into the chat. I'm looking right now, we have a resource on the SEO learning of how to select your GBP pattern category. So look for the URL in the chat. If you can't find in the chat because there's so many messages ,look on the SEO Learning Hub for that article. By the way someone asked about Google posts, Google posts are basically almost like social media kind of updates about your business. You can showcase products and offers and all sorts of information. From my point of view, when I see someone or a biz has Google posts and makes me feel comfortable, like this business is taking care of their business, they're concerned about their online visibility. When you see a full Google Business Profile it makes me as a consumer feel, okay, this company and this business is on the ball, I trust them as weird as that sounds. It's almost like as a whole, optimizing your Google Business Profiles, is almost a way to convert people, because it makes them feel comfortable with who you are, and the fact that you are on top of things. Krystal Taing 52:29 I always describe it if you were to think, I don't know, back in the 90s, the 2000s, when people frequented malls, what attracted you was that store window, because they were showing their products, they had this display, they had a full name and full font, or the lighting was good, like imagine that as your Google business profile, but just digitally. And I think that you should always take that into account. Someone has a small area to get a snapshot of your business, give them everything they can to really have an understanding. Crystal Carter 53:00 Yeah, I think you mentioned filling out all of the different things. And so for some verticals like restaurants, for instance, you can catalog every single item on your menu, interior, exterior, things like that. For hotels, they have amenities, and they have all these sorts of different things. And it really makes a big difference. Krystal Taing 53:20 Yeah, and I mean, again, that is where I feel like I take my hat off, when I go, I know I'm going to go to a restaurant, one of the first things they do is look at the menu. And it's great. If it's on Google, I don't have to click another link to get to another website. If I can scan and lmake sure they have options for the group of people I'm going with it's incredibly helpful. Mordy Oberstein 53:39 The same with images. When I look at a restaurant or whatever local business, I always look through the images and see, okay, what's the atmosphere? Do we really want to go? What does that food look like? Someone asked it in the chat at one point, what images do I show? Really anything I've seen, I've seen property management companies who don't think their office is the commodity, they have properties out there. So they're showing the property, they're showing the maintenance staff, they're showing them, fixing things, all that. You can really put a 360 degree view of your business (I don't literally mean 360 because you could do that also) a holistic look at what your business is and what it is visually, what to expect when they engage with you. Basically, anything right around that. I want to talk about structured data markup really quickly, because there's a lot of questions about structured data markup which is code that you can add to your site that helps Google better understand explicitly what is on this page and it can alter how you appear on the Google results page. So one question I saw around this was, do I need to put local business structured data markup on all my pages, on my homepage? A question that wasn't asked that I will ask that does matter is let's say I'm a service area business, and my address is not shown, do I add local business structured data markup or is there another markup I should be using? Krystal Taing 55:02 Yes. So a few different questions in there. I will say in general, yes. You should add structured data to as many pages as you want Google to understand. But they don't always have to follow the same thing. It's like there is structured data for you to markup reviews, there is structured data for you to add information about your products and services and prices. And then yes, there's local business structured data, which I'd suggest there's a lot of elements underneath local structured business data, that is likely a lot more detail than what you need, because local business is a little bit broader. But absolutely, if you're a service area business, there are ways to display your address and not display it in structured data. So absolutely structured data for the win, as much as you can. And as much makes sense for your business. Crystal Carter 55:54 And I should just say, if you're a Wix user, if you input your address into the business info, your structured data gets added to the most appropriate pages, and you don't have to worry about which pages they're on. So they go straight into the places that they should be. Mordy Oberstein 56:11 As Simon Cox mentioned in the chat, we automatically add it for your blog and your products. One last quick, quick question we have another minute, I saw people asking you about citations. Where? Everything? Everywhere? Does it matter? You know, just the main ones? How crazy do I have to go with managing my citations? Krystal Taing 56:30 This is where I just love the technology at Uberall because we have packages based on your business and where your location is. And your service area. So our technology basically says if this user that's leveraging the Wix Uberall app has a hidden address, we are only submitting your business to directories and sites that allow hidden addresses. Because if you don't, then they're going to publish your address to those sites. And same thing, if you're a business that's in Canada, we have a tonne of direct integrations with specific Canada directories, you don't have to think about it. It's all based in the backend. So typically a good volume, especially for small businesses that don't have this huge brand recognition to live on. If you're not Walmart, having more citations is better. 20, 30, 40. I think ours comes by default with 50 based on your region. But the idea is that you hopefully can leverage automation, because keeping them up to date, they're not always the most savvy websites to edit your information on. So leveraging the Uberall app is really helpful. Mordy Oberstein 57:41 Yes, absolutely. Do check out the Uberall app and a big shout out, by the way to Jason Brown, for helping to answer some of those questions on citations. And I love the local SEO community, local SEO for the win. With that, just reminder again, the Google app, check that out, check out the SEO tools inside of Wix around local SEO, and there will be a recording sent out to you. So if you came late or if you miss something you want to go back to it, you will be able to rewatch this as many times as you would like. And last but, oh second to last, catch us again next month as we talk about AI writers and how to handle content from a content creation point of view and from an SEO point of view with Ross Hudgens and Mike King. It's an amazing group of people right there. Crystal and Krystal. Thank you both so much. Krystal Taing 58:32 Thank you so much. I will mention find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or anywhere if you have more questions. Thank you so much, Crystal. Thanks so much for having me. Bye. Mordy Oberstein 58:42 Bye, everyone. Bye

April 17, 2023 ChatGPT offers a seemingly neat solution to the pain points that come with SEO content creation. But what does this groundbreaking technology mean for the future of the web? It’s the question on every SEO’s mind—and what our hosts will be getting to the bottom of in this upcoming discussion with Michael King and Ross Hudgens. Check out the webinar's decks: Ross's deck Michael's deck Crystal's deck In this webinar, we'll cover: When to use AI writers (and when not to) What AI-generated content means for SEO The implications for the state of the web overall Meet your hosts: Michael King Founder and CEO, iPullRank An artist and a technologist all rolled into one, Mike is the Founder and CEO of digital marketing agency, iPullRank. Mike consults with companies all over the world, including brands ranging from SAP, American Express, HSBC, SanDisk, General Mills, and FTD, to a laundry list of promising eCommerce, publisher, and financial services organizations. Twitter | LinkedIn Ross Hudgens Founder and CEO, Siege Media Founded and led by Ross, content marketing agency Siege Media has made the Inc. 5000 List for the last five years running. Before this, Ross built websites from launch to #1 rankings for extremely competitive queries. He’s been featured on the likes of Moz, Search Engine Land and Forbes and is also a frequent speaker at conferences such as MozCon and LearnInbound. 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 Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, DeepCrawl (Lumar), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Transcript: ChatGPT and AI writers in SEO content Crystal Carter 0:00 Today we have myself and Mordy Oberstein who are permanent fixtures here on the Wix webinar scene. And then we also are joined today by Mike King, who is the founder and CEO of iPullRank. He is an artist and technologist all rolled into one. He runs a fantastic digital marketing agency, he consults with companies all over the world, and he's been working in AI and LLM models for years. We're so pleased to have you here today, Michael, thank you very much. Mike King 0:32 Yeah, of course. Crystal Carter 0:35 We are also joined today by Ross Hudgens. Ross is the founder and CEO of Siege media andhas made the Inc 5000 list for the last five years running. He's done some fantastic work with Moz and Search Engine Land and forums. He's a frequent speaker at LearnInBound, he is also someone who works in the AI space quite significantly, and has some fantastic 49ers memorabilia, we're so so pleased to have Ross here. Thank you for joining us Ross. Ross Hudgens 1:12 Yeah, thanks for having me excited to be here. Crystal Carter 1:13 So we're gonna get into it in just a moment. We are working on some of those admin things, we'll sort those out shortly. But just to let you know the webinar is being recorded. Absolutely, it's being recorded, it will not only be shared on the page that you signed up for the webinar on, but it will also be shared on YouTube. So find it in all of the places where you've enjoyed regular content. And you'll get a link to the YouTube page on email as well. And you are all very familiar with the Q&A panel, as we're working on sorting out the chat panel. So ask your questions in the Q&A panel, as we go along, and we will curate those and answer them at the end. If you want to know more about our future Wix webinars, then visit Wix.com/SEO/ learn/ webinars and you'll find all of those there. And moving on to our agenda for the day, I'm gonna hand it over to Mordy Oberstein. Mordy Oberstein 2:02 So before we get started, you know, I come from the from the content side of SEO. So AI writers were an interesting avenue, AI generated content is fascinating, and it's novel, and it solves a lot of pain points. For those who are not on the writing side of the world, writing is difficult, and it's time consuming, and AI writers came along, and AI generated content seemingly has solved that problem. Writing is no longer hard, and it's no longer extremely time consuming, it would seem. So we thought it'd be really, really important to have a webinar to really dive into just when do you use AI written content? When is it not appropriate? What are the best ways to use it? How does it impact SEO going forward? Because it does seem like a panacea. But generally, things that are too good to be true or sound too good to be true, are generally too good to be true. And while AI writers are an amazing tool, I think it's worthwhile to have a look at how to use them responsibly because, I try to think about the web as a child, it goes through stages. It could be a child, it could be a toddler, it grows up, it becomes a preteen, it becomes a teenager. I would say the web is somewhere around like a teenager right now, if I had to like put my finger on where's the web, and teenagers are generally, just thinking about my own my own life, not the most responsible. And I think that there's a tremendous amount of opportunity with AI generated content. But I also think there's a tremendous amount of potential problems that come with it. So we thought it'd be really, really, really important to dive into how AI writers will impact the web and SEO. And for that we're gonna turn it over to Ross Hudgens who's going to handle AI for content creation, then dive into the impact of AI on search with Mike. And then of course, we'll have your questions at the end of that, if you see me, by the way, and I'm I'm scrambling around it's because I'm looking through the Q&A, as the webinar goes along, to try to take down the questions that are most pertinent. And with that, let's hand it over to Ross. Crystal Carter 4:18 Fantastic. I'm just gonna stop sharing my screen. Ross Hudgens 4:22 Thank you Mordy. Great. I will screen my share on my side. I'm excited to be here to talk about AI generated content, as Marty was kind of setting up there. I mean, as he nicely described, I think some of the initial reaction a lot of people can have is, you can press a button and create content with AI--why don't I do this with every keyword I'm trying to rank for? And can I go about doing that using these tools, that seems so possible and feasible to do that? So that's going to be essentially what I'm going to get into, with that in mind, maybe that's not really the case, unfortunately. But maybe there's a middle ground where we can still use this very powerful tool to help our businesses be successful through search, and what are some of the ways we can do that. So before I get into it, I've got a good introduction already, but just to kind of restate it, we've been around for 10 years, we're a content marketing agency with SEO specialization, so creating content online to rank on Google is pretty much all we do. So this is our sweet spot. And I founded the company as well. So I've been thinking about strategy on this side for a long, long time, as I was teed up previously, worked with a lot of great ecommerce brands across the web. And that's sort of some of the context for some of the companies we work with in terms of the advice I might give today. So first, essentially I want to start with the idea that the goal of SEO is not simply to publish content. If the goal of SEO was just to publish content, then creating content with AI would be optimal. But unfortunately, that is not the case. Instead, the goal of SEO is not to publish, it's to win is to build the absolute best thing or have the goal of doing so in order to achieve that goal. So really, to achieve the number one ranking, you need to have that argument that it's the best content, not the same content as everyone else, because if you're simply generating the exact same thing everyone else has generated, there's no way you can truly make the argument that you're the best thing for that result. So that is part of the conundrum here with AI content. The issue is that essentially, content is a commodity. If all of us go to ChatGPT or your tool of choice, and you ask it's similar things in terms of creating a blog post, you're gonna get a very similar result, it's at that point, very hard to argue that you're truly making the best thing in that case. So to kind of give some examples and in flavor there, if we're searching for something like, "what is SEO", and we input it into ChatGPT, you end up with very similar feeling content, not that I'm saying these four on the left did that. But you can sense how sort of it ends up repurposing a lot of what exists, and you end up with very similar things. But there is a solution here. What you do want to do with these tools is to not use them as output engines in isolation. Don't just go to these tools and say, give me a blog post meant to rank for what is SEO, without providing anything, if we provide it something, or rather something great, that's when magic is possible. But before we get there, just want to show an example of this in practice, of just how sameness can occur with very simplistic prompts and inputs for the tool. So if we go there and say, hey, I'd love a guide to rank for Wix SEO, please give me some recommended URLs and maybe metadata and maybe some supporting images, I might add to that result as well, we get a rough looking blog post like this, we won't read through the whole thing. But for the most part, it's a relatively simple article that if you go search these things, Wix is ranking, good job Wix, so that makes sense. But the other articles as well feel very similar to this, but I'd say a little bit better on average. And some of the issues beyond just some SEO practices being signed off, at least from our definition, putting the keyword far to the right, or putting the keyword at the end of URL. One of the things that occurs on this suggestion from them, is that really the only Wix specific thing and the entire blog post is this first section of the Wix SEO Wiz. So that's not very Wix SEO specific, it's not additive, necessarily. It's not finding anything novel to add to this, it's essentially repurposing what already is there. And that, for that reason, is going to not allow an article like this to rank, even if it's a decent article, all things considered. So what you need to rank though, is the best content that does exist for that topic. So if we take this further, what do we need to get there? Essentially, the magic is when you can give this tool or these tools unique inputs, you can create content faster and better and get new things that would allow you to get to content that actually can win. So in this left chart, let's say we have a unique data set of 50 or whatever number of populated cities in the United States with unique data points around how many five star restaurants and bars they have, how many popular events are there are to maybe create a study on like the best cities to visit or best cities for things to do per capita, hypothetically, if we had and curated this dataset, brought it together and then put provided it to the tool, we then could ask it to create a blog post, or even a summary on this concept and get something that no one else ever had. Because we are bringing it something that nobody else ever has asked. So in this case, we do that. We ask it ChatGPT, can you please summarize my data, and you can see now it's actually immediately coming up with insights based on the data that's provided in that chart, we don't even need to think about it, it creates copying in a pretty well done way. And this is just a summary. It's definitely capable of taking that same unique data set, and if I go to it and say, hey, I'd like to create a study of the 10 best cities for things to do in the United States, please write in the brand voice of Trulia, 400 500 words that could be pretty solid, you'd probably likely need to improve it. But because you brought it unique insights from the start, rather than just asking for a blog post of things to do, you're more likely to actually create something that's great because you brought it something great up front. Another example of this is if you bring it unique things about your company, and then ask it to describe that so ChatGPT4 can now interpret and view images when you share a URL with the interface. So if I share this shoulder bag, and then ask it to write 150 words of branded sales copy in the brand voice and tone of this brand, it does a very strong job of that. So what we're doing here is we're giving it something unique. This is a unique photo from our unique product line that we spent a tonne of time and effort to curate and get right and also define our own brand. And we're asking it something specific that only we as a business could ask. This is not something competitor Y is going to ask in the same way ever again. So this is going to give us unique, novel, well done content that otherwise if we had not given a unique, well done input, we would have never gotten out as an output. So we can see here where we're getting to, if we give it the right things, which can be data which can be designed, which can be our products, it can then get to a place where it can actually create high quality content that might be able to support ranking in many instances. Another example is simply editing. So it's a very good line editor on average. So if you input copy that has issues or just barely any copy, it's pretty good at editing that at a high level. So if we think about the elements of content, that's essentially the same idea, we are given an input to get an output that's unique, no one else will only give ChatGPT, this exact same set of copy. So it's now going to take what I had and further improve it, rather than simply asking it to create a blog post on post structure for SEO, I'm now saying edit my blog post. So you can see that difference in mindset means I get something that Google's happy with, and users are happy with, and hopefully you can rank because of that. So I have a few little different typos in here, it might be possible to quickly pick up on that. But that's part of the potential value add of a tool like this for sure. So sort of recapping that I think you can use it as an output engine using information you feed it. If you simply ask it to be an output engine without feeding information, that's where we get stuck. We create content that's like everyone else is that has risk for all of our businesses. Another way of saying that is you can use it as an editor summarizer. Rather than simply creating from scratch. If you're using it for that kind of thought process, you're more likely to again, get to things that Google and users like, all things considered equal. Another tool we like for line editing and sheets and the like, and I'm sure Mike will get into a lot of this good stuff, I would guess. But this is good on the content creation side, plugs into Google Docs pretty easily and allows you to input your ChatGP, the AI is really well done. I know Wix has versions of this too, that sort of definitely ties into some of this concept where if you have a well done landing page, it essentially has the AI then create content based on what is already there, you've essentially applied this concept that I previously described in a well done way. So use AI to create content that supports SEO. Also, this is another way of doing it using input: so you could technically create content from scratch for things that aren't trying to rank directly for SEO without many inputs and be relatively okay as long as it's not trying to rank itself. So some examples of that would be things like a privacy policy or return policy, terms and conditions, you probably would still want to customize those for your business, but you could reasonably ask these tools to generate those for you. But these other pages are all good examples of areas where you could feed it inputs, depending on the kind of content, to get pretty good content back. So we saw the example of data for the data studies, what if you gave it 30 different images for your category, and then said create 100, 200 words of copy that describe this category for Stella store, which is another brand that uses Wix, and then create that copy, that's gonna be well done in terms of output that can definitely support SEO. So we talked about product pages as well, it could reasonably create and help you develop a career page. It's not going to rank directly for SEO, but it's going to be a valuable place to build a page like that. Social media copy is another great place and generally, more and more thinking about visual content, a lot of the brands on Wix, you have great visuals, from your products, photography, video, etc. So if you share that URL with the tool, and then have it interpret that design in your brand voice, you can get pretty well done work where really the main weight is being carried by your images rather than the text. And that's where this can have a lot of value. So we see in this left example, for Stella Store's top left image, I fed that into GPT4 and asked for Instagram social media copy. And comparing to the existing Instagram, it's relatively solid, using similar use of emojis, it seems to be relatively on point with the hashtags used as well. And as we hopefully we would generally all agree most of the weight in social media, Instagram type content, is the image itself. So you can get to high quality content a lot faster when you think about what is the most important part of this content and the least important areas, those are very clearly opportunities today to use tools like this to kind of fill out that experience while maintaining your brand advantages. So to kind of restate that there are many places where high quality content needs to be some more supported by text content. But that text content itself is relatively a commodity, or just not adding that much value. That's where AI really has a great place to then round out those non commoditized areas. So we're referencing back to this handbag, or shoulder bag. It's the product here, it's the site design here that carries, I would argue the majority of the weight and importance, they do a great job with copy in the bottom left, they even have a little poem that occurs down there. But if you fed that to AI, I would pretty confidently say it can output a very similar framing or theme around that while maintaining the core most important elements, which of course, are those product photos, which you still need to do by hand, at least for now. And the overall site design and aesthetic that is maintained there. So with that thought process in mind, there's a lot of great things that can occur. So to kind of sum it up, if you stick to this idea that to be productive with AI, give it best in class inputs, that's the goal of SEO is you need to have the best in class things. So if you believe you have the best in class handbags, and you give it the best in class photos of those handbags, and ask it for supportive copy, you realistically can rank with that page. But if you simply ask it to create content from scratch without much guidance, that's not best in class, you can't realistically do that in a way that's going to reliably help you rank consistently in search. So use it as an output engine using your best in class inputs. And that's how you're going to consistently win with SEO using this great new technology. That's it for me. Thank you for the time. Crystal Carter 19:10 Thank you so much, Ross. That was brilliant, some really great insights there. And I saw a lot of people commenting in the chat that was really great to see some practical applications there. So thank you so much for that. I'm sure we'll get to the questions afterwards but I guess we can jump straight in for Mike's section for the wider scope. But thank you so much for that, really good, you've got lots of big thumbs up in the chat. So thank you. Michael, let's get you up next. Mike King 19:46 Confirming that you can see my screen? Good? Cool. All right. So let's talk about what generative AI means for SEO. So real quick. I'm Mike King. And you know, despite popular expectation, I am not the real estate agent for that house back there. But you can follow me on all the things for iPullRank. I'm from an agency called iPullRank. You know, we do all the SEO and content strategy work and so on. And we've actually been using GPT technology since 2020. Here's a quick example, where we drove $300 million in incremental revenue for our client just by, you know, getting more generative copy on to product listing pages. So let's talk about how Google is under a lot of threats right now. One of which is that TikTok supplanted Google as being the site that gets the most traffic on the web. ChatGPT, in general, was a code red for Google, they said, like, hey, we gotta figure this thing out, which is so remarkable because the T in GPT is from a technology that Google invented. We've also got users believing that Google search quality is on a steep decline, you know, people are adding Reddit to the end of queries, because they feel like without it, Google isn't giving you good results. And so all of these are threats that are going to impact your content marketing and SEO. So the TikTok threat means that Google is going to rank more visual content, you're seeing more examples where people are looking up queries, like how to tie a tie, and it's not your blog post that turns it into 30 steps of how you do a Windsor knot, it's three videos that are ranking at the top. And so if you're not, you know, creating content that's going to be there, you're just not going to get the clicks. And so short form video is gonna get a lot more competitive, we're seeing that, you know, more and more people are about to ramp that effort up, because they feel like that's how they reach Gen Z. And so if you're going to be doing short form video, don't forget to put it on your website, most people just put it in the channel, Instagram, YouTube, or whatever, you really want to have it on your website, and there's a great guide on the Wix website, it talks about how to how to do video optimization that I think you should check out. But the other thing is that ad sales are actually down for Google as well as a function of the economy, and also as a function of people going more towards other platforms like TikTok to spend their money. And so what does that mean for organic search, it means that you're going to be in situations like this, where Mesothelioma, one of the most expensive if not the most expensive keyword, at least in the States has, you know, more whitespace around these ads, you're seeing the feature snippet take up more space. And so the user is going to most likely click on those ads. And so what that means is that the real estate is going to get smaller, and you're gonna have to be more effective as early as your metadata in order to be, you know, driving those clicks. But the last time that people were saying that Google search quality wasn't so good, we got two things that changed SEO forever, which were the Panda and Penguin updates. And so really, what this is telling us is that Google is coming at us with this or not us coming at people who are making bad content with this helpful content update, that we are likely to see something like we saw before, where they're just demoting content that's not valuable. So if you leave with one thing today, leave with this idea on here that you have on the screen, right? You should only be creating content that's at the intersection of your audience persona expectations, your buyer persona expectations, and then search engine expectations. So I kind of split the audience persona from the buyer persona, because there are people that will, you know, consume your content and may influence your buyer personas, but will never become buyer personas. I think we all know what buyer personas are. And beyond that, you know, search engines are another persona that you need to account for, because they have a lot of expectations of your content in order to rank for your target queries. And so that's what I want to talk to you about today, pretty much, but through the lens of the threat of generative AI. So if you're a local business, small business, or what have you, you probably shouldn't know about what's going on in the local search space. And what we were finding is that content is still a lot of the top factors when it comes to ranking for a local business. And so this is from the latest local ranking factors from Whitespark. Obviously, this is also true in standard organic search as well. But the whole point here is that a lot more people are going to be making content this year. And this stat right here 54% of businesses, comes from Ross's team. So thanks for putting that together for me, Ross. We're also seeing that 47% of people are going to be increasing their blog, blog content. And of course, SEO is more than just blogs. But typically, when we're thinking about SEO, we're like, Okay, well, how do we write more stuff? Right? Well, here's the other part, marketers have the highest adoption of generative AI and it makes sense because we're the people that have to create the most content right? And so there's this growing list of generative AI tools, there's a tonne of them out there. They're all effectively just using, you know, the API's for ChatGPT or GPT4 or whatever, and then putting their spin on it with their own sorts of prompts. If you're using chat GPT directly, which I would actually recommend over any of those tools, I recommend you check out a tool called AI PRM, which is effectively like a prompt management tool. And it's also a community of prompt engineers. So you can pull from prompts that they've already written, and use that to generate your own content. And so one of the things that I've noticed by playing with this is that some of these prompts are like a paragraph long, and they generate really good copy. Whereas in most cases, people are just like, hey, give me a blog post about x. And they kind of leave it at that. And so if your prompt is one sentence, and you get back garbage, it's what you pretty much should expect. And so I would say just play with that tool, and also look at other people's prompts and see what you can learn from it and creating your content. But the reality of it is that every tool on the planet is integrating ChatGPT in some form or fashion, including Wix. And I actually spent five minutes last night, building a website using Wix AI. And in fact, like, literally, it took five minutes only because I had to figure out which pictures I wanted to use, because the process is so easy. And so here's the example, right, like, I'm setting up my site, I'm generating my About copy, I'm giving the things that I want to include in that. So enterprise experience, full-stack developer, over $4 billion in incremental revenue driven, and then it gives me three different options to choose from, didn't love the first one, second one a lot better, selected it and then I've got my website. And so you know, I think that this is the sort of thing we're going to see a lot more of where people can really get to the point of generating content so that they can create the presence that they want. And in fact, things are already moving well beyond that, in that we have this new technology called AutoGPT, which is still kind of nascent at this point. But it can, you can just say like, Hey, I want you to act as let's say, a marketer, and figure out how to build me a presence that is going to make me money. And what it does is that just continues to make new prompts and do new things, to figure out what you want it to do without you having to prompt that every time. And so that just gives us a glimpse of where the future is going. But a big result of that is we're gonna get a whole lot more crap too. And so there's a gentleman named Doug Kessler, he gave a really compelling talk about this back in 2013. This idea that more and more brands, we're going to get into content marketing, is going to really be like a race to the bottom for constant quality. But another thing you can get is people giving you the answers of how to fix your chat while you're on a webinar. Who knew? Thanks, Steve. But Google actually loosened their stance on generated content as well, a few months ago, actually about a month or two ago. And I think this is one of the things that was holding up this big deluge of content before, because so many people were like, oh, you might get penalized by Google. Well, they're saying like, you know, as long as it's made for humans, it doesn't matter how was created. And if you look at the guidelines and more depth, they're just like, hey, we're actually really good at detecting spam anyway. So make it however you want, you can't really beat us, which I don't know is true. In fact, I don't think Google can reliably detect LLM continent or generative AI content. Because, you know, I've played with all the tools, and they all give a lot of false positives and false negatives. And so it's not really a strong enough signal to rely on by itself. In fact, open AI can't even reliably detect it, their tool only detects correctly 26% of the time. And so what Google has to do is combine any detection like that with the other signals that they have. So you may or may not be familiar with E-A-T, which I refused to say as EAT, I call it E-T instead. But anyway, if they layer those signals with, you know, whether or not they believe something is generated or not, then they can say, okay, well, it's generated. And plus, it's off the baseline for this given author for this given website. And so they're seeing a lot of, or we're seeing a lot of reports in the SEO community where people are saying, like, hey, I've been trying this out, my site got crushed. I guarantee you that those are also sites that just like, you know, spun up the content, didn't edit it, and just straight up published it. If you do that, you deserve what you get. Now to the point that Ross was making, a lot of us are doing copycat content. You know, we're using tools like Surfer and Phrase and it's saying, like, hey, anything on this keyword features these keywords, has these headings and so on. And it's always been weird to me that because marketing is very much about differentiating yourself and standing out, but instead, people just copy each other endlessly. I don't get it as an artist, but you know, it is what it is. So if you want to survive, what you also really need to do is make better content than what's out there. And so, also, I feel like we need to update our understanding of search because it's very much out of date. And yes, this is going to be one of those like, oh, this guy's talking about patents but really, it's all about content and links. So how Google works and all sorts of things actually work is what's called the vector space model. So you take a query, and you plot it in a multi dimensional space, you also take the document or webpages, and you plot those in multi dimensional space, and whichever ones are closer to the query are considered more relevant. So relevance is not like a qualitative idea. It's very much a quantitative idea. And so Google has a whole pipeline when they do they're crawling, they're processing, rendering, indexing, and ultimately ranking. That's not a shock to you, if you've been following SEO. But if you haven't, or even if you have been following SEO, the one key change that Google made, starting in about 2013 that really was like a quantum leap in better performance. And that was their switch from what's called lexical search to semantic search. So lexical search is really about counting words. Are these words on the page? How often are they on the page? How do they relate to other words that should be on the page, whereas semantic search is very much about meaning. And the way that that works is through that idea that I just talked to you about of converting words into multi dimensional coordinates in vector space. So as an example, here, you take the phrase, "how old are you?" It's converted into a series of decimal numbers, and then you can compare against other words in that same way. So here's an example from what's called the words of vector methodology that Google built back in 2013. So in the example, you take the vector for the word King, you subtract the vector for the word man, and then you add the vector for the word woman, and you get the vector for the word queen. So effectively, you can do mathematical operations, to determine the relevance and the relatedness of subjects, topics, keywords, and so on. So relevance is a function of a mathematical operation called cosine similarity. And so when the cosine similarity between these two vectors is close to one, that means that they're very close together or similar. When it's close to zero, that means they're orthogonal or not related. And if it's close to negative one, then it means they're opposites. And so Google came up with something called Bert, which allows them to have better vectors basically, where those relationships and the context was really captured. And what do I mean by that? Well, previously, the way that that was built, the word bank in both of these sentences would be considered the same. But with Bert, the word bank is understanding that river bank means something different than making a deposit in the bank. And so now that they can do that, they have a better understanding of the meaning and your content. And so you get these, what we call higher dimensionality vectors that allows you to really capture the information. And so that's how all of Google search works across YouTube images, everything, they're just looking at these different numbers that represent content, and then determining which is closest to the actual query. And so where Google has improved here, so this idea was called dense retrieval, where they can better understand the different aspects within your copy, not just looking at the copy in aggregate, but also, what does this paragraph mean versus what this other paragraph might mean. And so when you're seeing the feature snippets where they're highlighting, specifically in the paragraph where it is, that's this work, that's this methodology at work. So the whole thing to take away here is these vectors, these embeddings, is how Google really understands content relevance in a way that they never did before. And so your website has a vector, your author, or you as an author has one. And so Google can associate things with your representation in this mathematical way. So another thing to know about this is that they're able to understand the relationships between different pages. So you're gonna want to build any links to your site, from pages that are actually relevant to what you're discussing, that's something that we've said in SEO for forever. But it's really why you're seeing that link building is working differently than it did before. Other things that if you're doing any sort of content marketing, your byline is an asset. So don't just be writing on random topics, because Google is associating your expertise based on this author vector that they're creating about you. So the last thing I want to really talk about here is that relevance is not a qualitative measure. I've built a tool called Orbitwise, you can measure this and compare yourself to other, you know, websites. And so this is a free tool that you can try out. So here's my friend Vanessa. She's actually a brand strategist and a Wix user. I was looking at her website because she hit me up, she saw that I was doing So I was like, oh, let me see if I can bring her site into this. And so she, there's a keyword that she ranks for, which is how to build brand awareness. And I look to see who ranked number one for that. It's a site called Wordstream. And I wanted to see, is her page less relevant than Wordstreams because it doesn't rank as well, or is it just a function of authority. And so you put it in, you put the keyword into the tool, "how to build brand awareness", you put her website in, you put your email address, because you know, lead generation, and then you put in your URL, if it doesn't make it a top 10. And so what it's doing is it's scoring everything in that same idea that I just talked about that vector space model. And each of these dots represents one of those websites that's ranking for that keyword, but you're also getting these relevance scores. What you can see here is that the average score for was ranking in the top 10 is 72.42, or 7.43 and Vanessa's page is actually a 73, whereas Wordstream's pages a 72. And all these other ones are, you know, varying in that range. And so in this case, it isn't a function of her page being less relevant, it's more a function of her needing more authority. And so this is a good thing for you to know. Because you never know, do I need to, you know, optimize my content, or do I need to build more links? Now you can know. And so you can just check out the tool here. Alright, last point is the future of content and links. So we moved here, this is still a question that people are asking, like, how long should my content be for SEO? That actually should have never been the question because we've always been evolved beyond the word count idea. In fact, the guy that used to run search a gentleman I met named Tsingtao. Back in the early 90s, he wrote a paper about why you shouldn't just look at the length of content to determine whether or not it should rank, what they do is what's called document length normalization, so everything is effectively compared, as though it's the same length. And, you know, again, marketers are still copying, we're all doing the Skyscraper Technique, except we're skipping the part where you make better content, because we're just going in and looking at what these tools tell us to do, and then inserting more keywords. And in fact, ChastGPT too can do that, or ChatGPT can do that for you. This is an example where I had written something about generative AI and I said, hey, put the keyword in here more in places where it makes sense and it does it quite well. So there's no reason that you should be toiling over there. Just give it after you've written your content over and then it can do it for you. But the reality is that everyone is going to be creating what we call like perfectly optimized content. That's an example of the integration between Jasper and Surfer. And you can literally drag and drop different headings and say, write me something about this. So really, we need to evolve beyond this complex version of keyword density, because Google has to sort all this out, you know, if everybody's writing the same stuff, who do they rank, right? Obviously, authority comes into play. But nevertheless, if everything else is equal, who do they rank? And so that's where this idea of information gain comes into play. And basically, what that saying is, if I've got 100 pages to choose from, which of these pages is saying something new that the other ones don't, and then based on that, I can give it a booster, so it ranks better. Google has a whole patent around this, they have a whole score for it. And I think as part of the helpful content update, they are kind of giving more weight to the score. So it's definitely something that you need to account for. So really, you want to cover all the bases for whatever expectations people have. But you also want to focus on saying something new. So we've got a guide on AI and content and SEO. So check it out. Just want to wrap it up real quick. Your relevance and authority needs to be your primary focuses so you can survive and always create your content at this intersection of audience personas, buyer personas and search engine expectations. I'm from iPullrank, we got a show called The SEO Weekly, check it out. And I got a book, you should buy it. That's all I got. Crystal Carter 39:04 Thank you so much, Mike. That was fantastic. That was a whirlwind tour for anyone for anyone who was thinking that was that's a lot of information, and it was, this is all being recorded. It will be on YouTube. So you can go to YouTube, you can slow it down because Mike was moving quickly through a lot of a lot of some great concepts there and if you need to look down that fine, and the links will be shared. So we will share the decks with you as well, if you can see the link there. And a lot of people were really interested in Orbitwise. So that's great to see as well. And we've had a lot of questions. So I'm going to hand it over to Mordy to wrangle the questions from our very active audience. We always have a very engaged audience here for webinars. And so I'll hand it over to Mordy and we can have a little bit of a discussion. Mordy Oberstein 39:51 So before I get into the questions plus one for The SEO Weekly with Garrett Sussman. Garrett is amazing, a fan favorite, so definitely check it out as a great way to keep up with what's going on in the wide world of SEO. There are a gazillion questions. I don't know where to start. Let me piggyback on one of the later points that Mike was actually talking about information gain. What about a scenario where and this is a common question around just creating content with AI, where it's already been done before a million times over? Can I use AI for that? And where's the added benefit that I'm going to be able to add? If the topic's already been covered before a 100 times over, I'm only covering it because I need to cover as part of my corpus of content. How does that work? Mike King 40:41 Yeah, I actually kind of disagree with that idea that just because it's been, you know, kind of comprehensively covered that there's nothing new to say, as an example, me and Ross just talked about the same thing. We both had different takes on it, right? Like, I think it really comes down to the level of expertise. But what I generally will say to people, is that you can take a look at the entity graph and figure out what's related there. And then based on that, talk about something new, right? Like, you can use a tool like it's a tree, or even looking at Wiki data, or whatever, and then put in your topic and then see what else is relevant to it, and then figure out how you can work in something related to that, to whatever is related to it. So as an example, let's say I'm talking about vinyl records, right? You know, there are different types of vinyl records. If I was just going to talk about vinyl records in general, you know, you're just saying like, a record player and listening to music and so on. But then you can see, okay, well, the 78s, there's 33s and 45s. Like, there are different elements to that and then when you keep traversing the entity graph, there are more things to talk about that you may not be aware of. That's generally where I tell people to start if they just can't find an expert to talk about the subject. Crystal Carter 41:56 And I think if we have a few beginners who are with us who are unaware of what an entity is, it's essentially, the way I normally describe it is it's pretty much a noun, or something that Google knows exists in real life online, but it's essentially essentially a noun. So something that has a Wikipedia page Disneyland, or wherever, these are things that are considered entities. And when you get knowledge graph that says that this is Disneyland and it's here and it's founde there, blah blah blah. Ross Hudgens 42:31 Yeah, love that. We have a concept we tell our team to use called Vines, it's sort of like how to think outside the box different areas to look to, news experts, social, images, video, did that backwards, but I dropped the link in the chat. That's some different areas to kind of like think through and yeah, potentially find some additional entities as well. Right. Mordy Oberstein 42:50 And that's one of the things a little bit dangerous about one method that people do to analyze the results pages. Let's see, okay, what's ranking for the keyword? And you can only tell what Google's already ranking, but you can't tell what doesn't exist yet that Google would rank should it exist. Let's look at a more general question. How is AI going to improve? And do you think it will ever get to a point where it'll be consistently updated? I think what that question meant was ChatGPT, the data set has ended in 2021. I think it may have updated it. But will it ever be to a point where the data set that the AI is being trained on will be in real time? And if so what does that mean for the future of the web? Mike King 43:34 Yeah, I definitely think it's going to improve. I mean, that's just like the nature of technology, right? Like, and so many people are focused on this, like, every day, there's some new tool that people are building, like, I can't even keep up. But as far as like, you know, will it ever be trained in real time? I don't know how realistic that is, as far as like, you know, in the near future, because the way training works is like, distributed across a tonne of different websites, and obviously, not websites, computers, and then you've got to, like, you know, curate the data to some degree. But at the same time, I don't think it matters as long as the base layer of the language model is good, which it very much is and you're seeing that they're doing what's called retrieval augmented generation where they're pulling in results from search and then using that to inform what the answer is. So you don't necessarily need it to have real time data. You just need it to be able to pull in stuff when it doesn't know if it has something accurate. Ross Hudgens 44:31 I know new plugins are available that you can add crawl ChatGPT that allow you to crawl the web to that direct URL. I believe I don't have access to that yet but. Mike King 44:43 Yeah, AIPRM does that. Crystal Carter 44:45 And then Bing's new thing or whatever they ground ChatGPT in their chatbot with Bing result results. I recently tested it to ask it if Zedaya had gone to the Oscars. And there was a photo that was circulating of Zendaya at the Oscars and she was not, she was in London with her boyfriend. And yeah, Bing backed with ChatGPT said no, she was not in at the Oscars. So that's something that does seem to be working so far. Mordy Oberstein 45:18 Sort of, I've had a lot of experiences where it's if the news is very, very, very current, it's still a little bit stale. So be careful. Check the citations. This brings us to the next question. What will be the future of organic traffic? Should AI become a prominent feature in search engines? Such as it already is in Bing? Yeah, I think that landmine. Mike King 45:44 I mean, we don't really know. Like, I think the reality is that people prefer answers. But at the same time, I think what we saw with the feature snippets is that it displaces the search volume. And what I mean by that is like, let's say you used to just search for, you know, Eiffel Tower, right? And you would go to some random page and read facts about the Eiffel Tower. But now you're getting those facts right there in the SERP. So it's not that you like, close Google, you're feeling like okay, well, what's my next question? And so they get sent somewhere else? And so I think the issue is that there may be situations where the Chatbot doesn't give a good enough answer. And then in that situation, people are going to go back to search. But also I don't know that, you know, this, this mode is going to be what everyone prefers all the time. Because you don't always want to have a conversation. Sometimes you just want an answer. Mordy Oberstein 46:39 Yeah, I always thought that was interesting. Because to me, the novel of the AI experience is the chat itself, not the answer. I can get a featured snippet. I have a direct answer. I do think that it's interesting; I have a controversial take on this, I guess. I think that things like Peters did with direct answers, I guess now the AI chat experience, they incentivize now the secondary layer of knowledge. So the first the first layer of knowledge is basically handled by whether it's a feature snippet, whether it's an AI chat experience, whatever it is, and it's really the secondary layer of content that needs to be handled on an actual website, which means that the incentive to create content should be a little bit more specific. But that's just my personal controversial take on the lack of incentive to write top level content in 2023. Okay, who was the author? If AI writes content? Who is the author? I think that's a good question for Ross. Ross Hudgens 47:39 I mean some of my presentation was actually arguing, don't have it write that much content, you're sort of the base layer, in some ways it might be rounding you out. And if someone's contributing 20% 30%, I wouldn't probably call them an author in that case. I think that's probably the most powerful use. Yeah. Mordy Oberstein 47:59 That was the beauty of your presentation, I think. Like if you if you look at AI as being open, and you just give it a prompt and go and you have no borders around it and you don't give it a controlled environment: disaster. And impersonal. But if you give it constraints, and you give it delineation, you give it a context to work out of then it's an amazing tool. Okay. Do you think there are going to be people who are going to specifically seek out brands who write human content? I think that question was more about do you think that there will be cases where brands will up their level of content to distinguish themselves from other brands that are predominantly using AI? And will people be able to recognise that and seek that out? Mike King 48:47 I think that's definitely going to happen as far as people can. As far as people being able to recognise it, I don't know. Because the way that these things work, is all in like mimicking how we write. And even if even once people start creating other new, interesting, original stuff, then it just gets fed back in and it learns again, and then copies how we write. So I don't know that it's going to be the sort of thing where people can naturally detect it and I think if we think about Cambridge Analytica and how all that went down, and how people couldn't discern the difference between like real social posts and fake ones, it tells you everything you need to know as far as that, but I do think that people are going to start saying things like, yeah, this was generated with no AI as an example on 60 minutes last night, at the end of the segment about AI with Google, they were like, yeah, just so you know, this wasn't made with AI and I think we're gonna see a lot more of that and people are going to embrace that. Crystal Carter 49:45 I think the tricky thing with it is like, where do you draw the line because I use Grammarly, for instance, and they're adding a lot of this stuff into into Google Docs, they're adding it into into Microsoft Word for instance. So it if that helped you, does that mean that you had some AI? Similarly, I very often will dictate, and that is using voice chat or voice recognition to create the text. So I think that can be a bit tricky. I'm not sure if Ross has an opinion. Ross Hudgens 50:16 Yeah, I mean, I generally agree with all that it's sort of up to us to guide it. I think today, you could go to content sites and see very bad SEO content. And you just feel that and it's sort of getting to that best result thing. If that's done with a lot of AI content in there, I don't think people are gonna know the difference. But if you go to someone who's misapplied using the tool, it's a lot of junk it'll just read just like that same kind of bad SEO content today. So as long as they're achieving that goal, I don't think it should matter too much. Mordy Oberstein 50:51 Yeah, let's point out the state of content now isn't great already. Crystal Carter 50:57 I think also what you were saying about the different prompts and how you have people who are prompt engineers, like there is definitely a skill in writing a prompt. If you ever, if you log into MIT journey, you can see like, if I log into MIT journey and say, oh, I want to see a dog riding a skateboard, and the picture comes that awful, terrible, and I see other people who are making you know, Rembrandt, you know, the Sistine Chapel over here. And I'm like, how did you do that? And they've got these really complicated, really complex prompts. So I think you're right that you know, you both talked about the value of the input. There's the traditional adage for AI garbage in, garbage out. And it's very important that you that you finetune that Mordy Oberstein 51:36 Ross, this one's right up your alley, would you repurpose content with ChatGPT? Ross Hudgens 51:44 I think so I mean, that social media example I shared is a relatively reasonable example of that, where you're using a product photo that lives on your website, you're now asking it to create social media copy, I think that's a reasonable way to do that, where essentially, you're still using that base layer of best in class thing, which is the image and then supporting it in some way where I know I haven't tested it. I didn't do with my own presentation, but apparently you could have it take a blog post and make a presentation out of it. I think that'd be a powerful thing to do. Mordy Oberstein 52:13 Someone pointed out in the chat that in your example, the AI even added in the emojis. Yeah, exactly. They got it. Nailed it. What's going to happen with Google, if there's going to be a plethora of mediocre content coming into into the ecosystem? A deluge of it, an enormous amount of, maybe not spam content, but what's basically out there right now, but a lot more of it. How will Google respond? Mike King 52:46 Yeah, I mean, I think it's what I was saying before, you know, that's where the E-A-T thing comes into play. Andyou can spin up all the content you want but if you don't have the authority, it kind of stops it right there. And then you can go into the longtail of course, but you know, less people see that. So they probably don't care as much. But at the same time, there's gonna be a lot more bad content and a lot more good content as well. And so as a result of that, all of those signals that Google already uses is going to make the good content continue to perform better. So I don't think that Google is going to be under attack, because they've getting millions more pages. But I think that they are already mitigating that with E-A-T, the helpful content update, and so on. Mordy Oberstein 53:34 Yeah that makes a lot of sense. If you look at the site, overall, the authority of the website overall, they can help you with the various pages. So again, if you're competing with two pages that are competing against each other that are relatively similar, if one website is far more authoritative, and far more topical, that's another bit of a boost for that particular page, and also, what Google can do. In terms of his language profiling, I personally believe that it's able to profile language in order to understand whether or not you have a first hand experience with the product that you're reviewing. It's not far-fetched to realize that Google can profile language or to say, hey, this is closer to what language would look like if you actually use the product versus if you're just randomly spun it up with AI. I feel like I have to ask this question. And I'm almost dreading it. But I'm gonna ask it anyway. Because someone asked it, and we're just gonna do it. Will AI gain consciousness? I have strong feelings about this. Ross Hudgens 54:37 I'm not the expert for that question. Will it achieve AGI I think is the right word? Probably. Mike's way more technical than me. Mike King 54:47 I definitely think AGI is realistic. You know, probably not as soon as everyone's predicting like, you know, there are tool or libraries out right now called like, Baby AGI like I think we're getting ahead of ourselves. But, you know, I think it's really a function more of computing power, which we have a tonne of, and we're just getting more as we go. So I think that it's possible. But I think that at some point, our regulators are going to step in and slow things down. Like the EU is already trying to ban ChatGPT. So you know, I think it's possible, it's just will we see it anytime soon is a different story. Mordy Oberstein 55:25 Fun Mordy fact is that I'm a little bit of a philosophy nerd. And I think we're talking about human consciousness. I don't personally, and this is just my honest opinion, I don't think that's possible. I think the human human mind that persona is ineffable and you can't qualify it, and therefore you can't pass it on. And generally speaking, that which is the created thing can never surpass the creator of it. So personally, I don't think it's possible. Mike King 55:59 I think there's flaws in your argument Mordy Oberstein 56:02 We should have a conversation about this at another time. I'll pull out my Aristotle and my Kierkegaard and we'll have a long conversation about this. But I saved it for last, so we wouldn't be able to have a philosophical conversation on our webinar. So I think we're out of time. Sorry, Mike. Crystal Carter 56:27 Alright. Well, thank you to everyone. Thank you Mordy for bringing the philosophy to the discussion. Thank you, to Mike for bringing in the algebra. I wasn't expecting to have to remember my vectors. I was like, oh, snap, we're getting mathematical over here. Okay. And thank you to Ross for bringing so many practical examples. It's been a fantastic session. Thank you to everyone for being really involved in the chat and for sharing your information. Again, it's going to be online, it will be on YouTube, it will be on our website. And we'll be sharing it on social media as well. So if you missed anything, please go back. Rewatch slow it down if you need to pause it, rewind all of that stuff. Thank you very much for joining us. Our next webinar will be next month. We'll be talking about Google Search Console with Daniel Waisberg from Google and it will be fantastic. So I hope to see you there. Thank you both. Thank you all and good evening. Good afternoon. Goodnight. Mordy Oberstein 57:25 Oh wait, don't forget to sign up for our newsletters Searchlight over on the Wix SEO hub. Hey, marketers gonna market. Thanks, everyone. Ross Hudgens 57:33 Thanks, everybody.

Reverse-engineer a strong backlinking strategy by taking stock of what’s working for your competitors. Join Ahrefs’ Patrick Stox and Dialpad’s Debbie Chew to learn how to uncover valuable backlink opportunities that can help your sites rank higher. In this webinar, we'll cover: Identifying competitor link strategies with SEO tools How to spot the best backlink opportunities Tips for link outreach and acquisition Meet your hosts: Patrick Stox Product Advisor, Technical SEO, Ahrefs As well as lending his expertise to internal product teams, Patrick shares his technical SEO knowledge further afield as an Ahrefs brand ambassador. Previously a lead author and reviewer for the SEO chapter of the Web Almanac, he also organizes several SEO groups, including the Raleigh SEO Meetup. Twitter | LinkedIn Debbie Chew, Global SEO Manager, Dialpad With almost a decade of digital marketing experience, Debbie leads the global SEO strategy at Dialpad and is deeply passionate about sharing her SEO knowledge with other marketers. She has previously spoken at MozCon and SearchLove, while her work has been featured on BuzzSumo and Ahrefs. 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 Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Transcript: SEO competitor backlink analysis Crystal Carter 0:00 Today we're going to be talking about SEO competitor backlink analysis. And y'all are in for a treat because we have two panelists here who are fantastic at backlinks, at all aspects of backlinks and we're going to cover it from lots of different angles. So you're going to get a really well rounded introduction, or top up of your knowledge around backlinks. So to give a little roll call, we're going to be joined today by Debbie Chew. Debbie is a fantastic backlink and link building expert. My name is Crystal Carter. I'm head of SEO Communications here at Wix, we're joined by Patrick Stox of Ahrefs. And we're also joined by Mordy Oberstein, my partner in crime, my podcast co-host, writer on the Wix SEO Hub, international speaker, Yankees fan, Mordy Oberstein. Mordy Oberstein 0:51 Thank you for the last one, that was the most important one. Thank you for that. Crystal Carter 0:56 Okay, so in this session, it's important to know and please tell anyone who joined late because they always ask. We love you all. But they always ask the same question. Yes, the webinar is being recorded. The YouTube link of the recording will be sent to you via email after the webinar. So I know that we're going to cover a lot of stuff during this webinar, don't worry, you'll get the link, you can go back and watch it on YouTube. And you could stop and start and play along as you go later on. So don't worry if things don't make sense just in the first instance, you can stop and start and go through it, as well as questions in the q&a panel. We have people who are going to be answering those as we go along as best we can. We are also going to be curating some of the themes to ask our panelists at the end. If you liked this webinar, join next month. Actually, we're not doing August. We are doing July. So join us next month for our next webinar. And then join us again in September for webinars after that and you can find those on the Wix SEO Learning Hub afterward. And without further ado, we're going to get into some of our presentations. So we've done our introductions. We're now going to hear some insights from Patrick Stox. Then we're going to hear some insights from lovely Debbie Chew. And then I'm going to tell you a few different things that you can do to support your backlink campaigns and your backlink activity on Wix. And then we're going to do the q&a as led by the wonderful, fantastic Mordy Oberstein. Mordy Oberstein 2:24 Quick point of order, marketers have to market, don't forget to check out our SEO newsletter Searchlight over at the Wix SEO Hub and our podcast SERP's Up. Crystal Carter 2:34 Yes, where you can hear all of this information, and more. So with that, we're gonna head over and over to Patrick. Patrick, if you'd like to share your screen. Patrick Stox 2:46 Can you enable screen sharing? Crystal Carter 2:50 That would be a great, great thing for you. Just a second. Mordy Oberstein 2:55 I think I got it. Yep, got it. Cool. Crystal Carter 3:00 That does it. Patrick Stox 3:03 All right. Hey, everyone. Excited to be here. Thank you for the awesome introduction, Crystal. Mordy always, always a fan. As Crystal already said, I work at Ahrefs. I'm pretty active in the SEO community, I'm really not going to cover any of this. For those that don't know, a link basically, is when you click something that takes you to another page, that's a link. There are different things that make some links better than others, you know, the page that it's on how relevant it is to the pages linking to the anchor text, or like what the link says that kind of thing. Links are like votes, they help you rank better in Google, you're basically saying I trust this site. I like this site, I'm gonna link to it. I think that content is good. So you should rank them higher. And Google uses that. According to Google, one of their folks has said that it's literally one of the top two ranking factors, content and links. We've run tons of studies because we have more link data probably than anyone Ahrefs. We found that generally better links correlate with more traffic. Now, warning, correlation is not causation. Anyone that does any data analysis will tell you. But generally, if you've got a page with good content and good links, you're going to rank better than a page with good content, but no links. I actually proved this a couple years ago, I used what's called the disavow file in Google and I basically said don't count links for a bunch of my posts, and the results kind of speak for themselves. We lost a bunch of traffic, we lost a bunch of rankings. It hurt us, don't do that. It's a bad idea. So bad, that I think I was the first one to actually try this. And we've also run big studies. I think this study was over a billion pages. And we found that 92% of pages have almost no links. Now, two thirds of those actually had zero. But another 26% had one to three referring domains, like one to three different sites that link to them. So there aren't that many pages on the web that really have good links that are viewed as kind of authoritative that people are vouching for, that people think the content is good. It's a surprisingly small subset of pages. And those pages answer a lot of user queries, so they tend to get a lot more traffic. If you're going to start link building, the one thing that I always recommend, especially for like local service companies, which typically I've worked with a lot in the past, start with your competitors, look at the links they have. First off, find your competitors, we've got a way to do this for free. The whole competitor report lists dozens of competitors. Within Ahrefs it's Ahrefs.com/awt, which is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. This will show you in a nice, competitive view chart. But if you don't want to do that, it's fine. You can just search on Google and see who your competitors are. And this is actually just a random page on my own website about purple laser pointers. And my competitors are some niche laser sites and Amazon and eBay, basically. But yeah, just pick a few terms that you know are relevant to you and you can find who your competitors are. With that, you want to see what links they actually have. So again, this is another free tool Ahrefs.com/backlinkchecker, you put it in any domain you want, you'll get, I think it's 100 that it's limited to, it tells you what links are going to your pages. With that, what you want to do is just look at common links, it's basically links to companies to pages that are in the same niche as you are probably the links that you also want, they're probably the ones that are easiest for you to get. So this is kind of your low hanging fruit. I'm going to show you a better example here using accountants. So like some local accountants to me, I'm in Raleigh, North Carolina. So I just picked a few. A link intersect tool, there's several of these out there, but basically, you can enter a bunch of competitors, and get the co-occurrence of their links. So five of these sites have a link from whatever domain, you can do this again for free. And there's a bunch of free backlink checkers too. It's just a lot more trouble to go through one at a time and unlimited data. So these guys have helped speed up the process of it. And this is kind of what that looks like. So goodfirms.co, a website, probably about accounting firms, there's three of these companies here locally that have links from them. So that's probably a link that I want to go after. Same thing like us paa.org, I'm sure that's an accounting organization of some kind, probably already a member, may not have filled in the website information when filling out the form and signing up for that. So more than likely, I might have a profile there, my client does, I can just go in and say like, oh, this is my website, and boom, got a link from there. That's the kind of thing you want to look for. You want to work your way through the individual links, see what they're getting, look at the sites and find patterns for that. Now I have a much more scaled process I use personally, I put a link to this blog article. This hasn't with exporting sites. I did this for I believe whoever is in the top 10 in the top 50 US cities. And also as a way to do it with local markets to find local specific links. So I basically said don't just look at accountants, go look at lawyers, go look at dentists, go look at other service industry folks in the same market and look at what kind of links they're using. I personally even use an API for this. So this takes me like all of 10 minutes to do. If you're exporting, I would say a couple of hours and then another hour or so on the classification. So it's more work upfront. Well, I would still say less work than trying to go through one at a time but in general more work upfront but a faster process when you start to go looking at the links that you want to get. So patterns, certain things you'll find niche specific. So these are basically all the links that I found that I would classify as niche specific for accountant links. I could probably go through the sites and look at how and get these in an afternoon. So it's not that it's gonna take you forever to go through these. It's not that it's a tonne of work, I would say these links are some of the most valuable you can get whatever links are niche specific to your industry. They're probably some of the easiest ones for you to get, but also they're the most relevant links. So they're going to be valuable, they're going to help move the needle and help you rank better. Lots of other ways to look at patterns, you'll see things like directory sites, local citations, coupon websites. That's about all I found, actually, when I was looking at just the accountant links. But when I started to look at the city specific links, I found a world of different opportunities. So again, this is relevant in Raleigh, but we have a bunch of colleges and universities here. I found that their forum, their websites, people are getting links from jobs, from scholarships, from clubs, sponsorships, from discount codes, these are all opportunities for you to get locally relevant links. Tons of city specific magazines, different event type sites that I found stuff on for the surrounding area, the greater state North Carolina, tons of opportunities, these are folks that are generally looking for content. Then it might be that they want to feature a local business, it might be that you're doing good in the community, you donated something, you spend your time volunteering, any number of reasons can show up for why they're getting these links. But in general, if other local companies are getting these, that is an opportunity that you can probably get into. There are also tons of local news magazine sites, food blogs. Some interesting other patterns that I saw were people involved with weddings here. Basically every DJ, every photographer, every event planner, they were all talking about the weddings and the events that they were doing, and they were all linking to each other, which I thought was pretty fascinating. You know, if I was, say, a dentist here, I might even get involved with weddings, do some kind of thing like, oh, get your teeth whitened, bride and groom. Because more than likely, I could probably get some links for some other local companies out of that. Just being involved with the wedding. It was very similar for real estate. So like realtors, apartments, HOA communities, they were all linking to local restaurants, local things to do. So if I'm an event space, if I'm a restaurant, more than likely, I'm going to reach out to some of these folks and be like, hey, I'm here. We're awesome. Do you want to add me to the list you already have? There's just a tonne of patterns. These are again, common ones. I've seen it across like different niches. But any suppliers, affiliations, meetups are popular, especially if you're sponsoring a meetup, buying them some pizza or something or some sodas, you typically will get a link out of that. Local podcasts, charities, sponsorships, different awards, like city awards, who's got the best burger in town? Who does the best landscaping? All kinds of options are opportunities for that. Coupons, different directories for things in the city. Again, these aren't super complicated, or super hard to get. They're things that your competitors are already getting links to, or folks in your city are already getting links from. So more than likely, you can get these, these are kind of low hanging fruit, they should be fairly easy. I would say, again, if you spend a day, two days, three days, you'll probably cover most of the links that you can get within your city and within your niche. So it's not super time consuming. It is time consuming, but it's not as bad as I think a lot of people think. And I've done this many times over the years with different companies. And usually I would say results are shown within a couple months. They tend to go right, right up towards the top if they were, say like middle of page two, middle of page three for some of their main terms. So it does work. And that's all I've got. I'm excited to see what Debbie is sharing and Crystal after that. So thank you all, appreciate your time. Crystal Carter 14:48 Thank you so much, Patrick. That was really, really cool. I think we have a lot of great questions in the chat, a lot of people who are interested in links. So we were talking in that section about how, now you can understand the sort of linking environment, the kinds of links that other people in your space are getting to help their content rank. As Patrick was saying, a link from another website to your website is like a vote. It's like somebody saying this person is good. And I think this person is good. And I think that person is good when they link to you, when they post a URL from their website and to your website. And yeah, you've explained it really well. Debbie is now going to talk to us about a couple of examples and a couple of ways that once you've done that research, once you've had a look at all of the different kinds of links that people are getting in your space, how you can go about getting some of those links to your website in order to help you get some great SEO results. Debbie Chew 15:47 Awesome. So let me share my screen now. Thank you, Patrick. I think we have a good segue into my talk today. So basically, hi, everyone. My name is Debbie. I'm the Global SEO manager at Dialpad. Of course, thank you, Crystal and Mordy, and everyone at Wix for having me to talk about links today. I do want to kind of expand on a few things that I think will be helpful for everyone to help you have a better understanding of what really works for your competitors. But I do want to also remind you to also look beyond your competitors, which Patrick touched on a little bit as well. So earlier, we've kind of talked about that link intersect or a link gap analysis to see, you know, what are domains that are linking to your competitors, but aren't linking to you. If we have a better idea about what works in your industry, I think that's gonna be really, really helpful information that you can use to guide your own link building strategy. So in order to figure that out, the big question that we want to figure out is, what are your competitors best pages by links? Right? So Patrick earlier shared about like, where are the sites you can get links from, but I also want you to look at what are the pages you want to get links to. So when you are able to figure out what is this valuable, link worthy asset that you can create for your website, that's going to be something that can really help increase your chances of getting links, you can use that as a way to maybe pitch journalists, or share it on social media, and it kind of goes viral. And that might be a way for it to increase its visibility and get links that way. So I wanted to go with an example. So let's say we have this dog walking service. And so we use Ahrefs, and then we're looking at who are our competitors. And we identify rover.com as a potential competitor, or Angie's List for pet sitters. So in Ahrefs, we can go to the Site Explorer at the top, and then enter in the URL rover.com. And then on the left, there's the best buy links, we can click on that. And then you'll see the results here. What we're going to do is ignore some of the pages like the homepage or like the signup page, but we're going to focus on some of the remaining pages that you see. So we have dog friendly cities, I'll share the pages in the next slide that's coming up. So there are a few and then there if we keep scrolling down, there's a lot more that we can look at. And what I did was I pulled all those URLs into this table. So I have the title of the page, the URL of the pages, and then also the referring domains. So I can see which ones have gotten a lot of links. And then the most important thing here is to look at each page, and then categorize them by the content or page type. So for example, the first one is on top emerging dog friendly cities. This is a research that rover did with I believe it was Zillow, they looked at which cities in the US are going to be really dog friendly. And so if you're a dog lover, you can potentially consider renting or buying a house in those cities. So that was kind of the purpose of that research. And the insights is kind of something that you might not have ever heard of before. But it's also very interesting. So it's unique, new and interesting, and that gets people's attention, essentially. Aside from that, we have a tool. So they have this tool where, for example, if you see some sort of plant and you're not sure if it's going to be poisonous or not to your pet, you can look it up and there's this really cool tool that Rover has to help you understand that. And so I think this is another content type that can really help people get links, as well as it's just a very informative piece of content that is helpful. And that's why I've gotten links. Another one that I wanted to quickly talk about is the listicle type of page. So they have 100 most popular dog names. So you know, if you're a pet dog owner, and you just got a new puppy, you might be looking for a name for your dog, right. And so having that listicle is just a super helpful resource for you. And if someone else is writing a blog post about, I don't know, some tips for when you first have, or how to take care of a puppy. If you're a first time dog owner, I might link to this 100 most popular dog names because it's relevant to the topic that I'm writing about. So from my experience, topics are pages that are based on research, or like a tool or even a listicle. It can be dog names, it can be even a list of different stats for a specific topic. Those are really great ways to get links, no matter what industry you're in. So definitely look into what exactly your industry is doing. Make sure you don't only look at one competitor. But we're also going to do this process for two or three competitors. And if you know, if you have the time, you know, look at more of the pages that have gone links and really categorize them and Tally those up. The end goal is to really get a pulse on, you know, how is your industry or how's your niche building links. So the more competitors you analyze, you can avoid potential bias. So for example, if you only look at one competitor, and they only rely on creating a lot of guides for their website, and that's what has gotten links in the past, that might not be the best way for you to get links, you also want to look at what other competitors are doing. I wanted to kind of quickly share that I have done something like this for six different industries in the past. And I shared my findings. In a talk that I did back in March at Searchlove. I wanted to share one key finding that I think would be helpful for this audience. With the study that I did, I looked at six different industries that are really competitive in terms of buildings to see for competitive niches, what exactly are people trying to do? What types of pages have people gotten links to? And therefore what pages should your website also have. And so I kind of separated out the DR90 Plus websites and I found out the top three types of pages that have gotten a lot of links are number one, a product or service page, it's like a dog walking page. Number two is a guide. So maybe like how to choose a dog harness for your dog. And then number three is research. So the Zillow and rover piece that I mentioned before. So make sure if you will try this methodology, do it for your industry, and really see what shows up in terms of what is your industry? How are they building links, it's going to be typically different from other industries. And you know, if you do this research, make sure to give me a shout out, let me know, what are some of your findings, happy to talk about that. Another thing I wanted to quickly go over was, that's aside from just looking at your competitors and your specific niche, as Patrick mentioned, you should also look at what are some of the complementary businesses to yours. So two reasons I recommend this, number one, there might be really cool and unique ideas that other companies are doing in terms of link building that you can repurpose for your own niche. And then another thing is also, if you're able to identify the different partners, you can kind of build a network around and you're able to sort of create Win Win relationships with these people, they can help potentially distribute your content. You can also do co-marketing with them to collaborate on link worthy assets. One quick thing to kind of help you ideate who these competitors are, you can just ask ChatGPT so this is what I did. And so they gave me a bunch of potential other businesses for me to reach out to and try to create a relationship with. So last thing I wanted to touch on before you start doing your link building and make sure to also understand Google's guidelines in terms of like, what are things that they want you to avoid what is considered spammy link building. So if you see any of your competitors, or complementary businesses engage in any of these. So like excessive link exchanges, buying or selling links, which is relatively common, or like forums, man, spam, you should avoid doing that. Because they're essentially against Google's guidelines. So a lot of times when it comes to link building, you need to try it out for yourself to see what tactics actually works for your company, what might work for someone else might not actually apply to you. And so you need to just try it out yourself, and see the results and iterate from there. So you know, again, if you see there's a bunch of foreign comments that are linking to your competitor, that doesn't necessarily mean that this is actually links that help their website, it might actually be hurting their website. So you need to really be careful when you do all this analysis and decide, you know, what is next. So that was what I wanted to share today. Feel free to find me on Twitter. And I also write for Wix as well. Yeah, happy to answer any questions during the q&a section. Thank you. Crystal Carter 26:26 Fantastic, thank you so much. And there's some great examples of ways that you can do link building there. We have got some great chat questions. Mordy, are you getting the questions ready for everyone? Mordy Oberstein 26:39 I've got a notebook full of quick questions. Crystal Carter 26:42 Lots of questions. Okay. So what's gonna happen now is I'm gonna go through a few Wix resources for helping you to manage some of your link building activity, I'm gonna go quickly so that we have time to get to your questions. And you're gonna get this deck after the webinar finishes, and there are links to everything that I'm talking about, so that you can explore it in a bit more depth afterwards. So I'm going to talk to you about a few of the backlink management resources that we have on Wix. So one of the things that we were talking about is when you're getting links, it's really important for you to track the links that are coming in and whether or not your link building efforts are going well. So Debbie was talking about, for instance, if you did a report, and if you were getting lots of traffic to your report, and let's say that the news, the local newspaper, picked up on your report on like, how many dog walkers are there are in the city of San Francisco. For instance, let's say you did a big survey of all the dog walkers in San Francisco. And they wanted to see that well, you know that it was on the news, the local newspaper, but it might have been on other websites as well. So when you go into your Marketing Overview Report you can see your referral growth over time. Now sometimes, traffic from external links is referred to as referral traffic. And in Google Analytics, you'll see this and also in Wix Analytics. And here, if you select organic social, which are those link building signals, they're not exactly the same. And you would also select referral, and you can see your growth, for instance, on this one. And you can also see, for instance, the different channels that you're getting across that as you're going through as well. And the other thing that you can see is the value of your links. So for instance, it might be that newspaper, and then all of the people who come from that newspaper buy something. That means that's a really valuable backlink for you for lots of different reasons. So, for instance, if you go to the order conversion by traffic source report, then you can filter by referral, which tells you where the link came from. So this is the external website that has a link to this website. And then you can also see information about the traffic source. And you can also see information about those sales that were related to that over that period of time within that report. The other thing that's useful to think about when you're doing backlinks, some of the comments were saying how can I add a link to my website? Well, the thing about backlinks is that once it's on their site, you're not in charge of it so you don't exactly add it, they add it. Sometimes people add it wrong. Sometimes they might add it without the www or they might misspell something or they might do something to that effect. And if that happens then the links are not as valuable to you as it might be if they've done it properly. Now if that happens, you can use the URL redirect manager to redirect their misspelled link to your properly spelled link. So here I have communities with two ends. And thank you for the link. I wish you'd spelled it properly. Here's a redirect to my actual page that has the community. So in the Wix URL Redirect Manager, you can manage that. And you can find that in your Wix SEO tools. Another thing that's useful is to track your links. Sometimes people use something like a coupon code or, or a promo code if you're doing a campaign or you are working with an influencer or doing something to that effect. It might be that you use a coupon code. We have coupon code generators, and you can generate a coupon and you can give them the code. And then you can see, for instance, if something was working there. We also have something that automates canonical tagging. And for the beginners out there, don't be afraid of that word. It's not a big deal. It sounds more technical than it is. It's basically like stamping, saying that the content is yours and you are the original writer of the content. And what happens on Wix is when you make your blog, or whatever content you had, we automatically canonicalize your page. So if you do something called content syndication, for instance, if you publish your page on a different place, or if somebody else publishes your page, or your content on a different place, we have the canonical that tells Google that you are the original poster of that content, and it helps you to help with your content syndication. Additionally, we also have lots of resources on the Wix SEO Hub. There are a few people asking about backlinks and learning more about backlinks. For the beginner point we have a great article from Ashwin that talks about backlinks 101. Once you get to grips with that, you can have a peruse through Debbies's web articles about link building, about how to get started, she shares some great examples there. She also talks about sort of the link building myths and things there and we also had Debbie join us for a podcast as well. In fact, I'm realizing we need to get you on the podcast Patrick. Don't worry about links. And with that, I'm going to jump into your questions. And again, we're going to send links to all of them. So I'm going to stop sharing, and we're just going to get to your questions. Mordy Oberstein 31:47 We did, by the way, give Patrick a backlink on the episode there. He talked about how to choose the right SEO tool. There's so many questions. Thank you Patrick that was really interesting. Someone asked about the T shirts, why are you both wearing matching T shirts. That is the very famous Ahref shirt that just says t-shirt. It's a classic, classic SEO t-shirt. Thank you for mentioning about traffic Crystal, I think one of these gets lost in the discussion about links is that links are good, because they bring traffic to your website. Not just further, quote unquote, SEO link juice, which helps Google find you and be able to crawl your pages as well. Yeah, another benefit. So one of the other benefits really quick about links is, Google's let's say, you have a link from ESPN.com. And Google is crawling ESPN's website and they stumble across your link to your website, they will theoretically follow that link, see your website and start crawling and indexing and reading your content as well. So it's a great way for pages to be discovered. Link building tags, Debbie touched on it. Link building sometimes can be relationship building, especially the local scene. If you're a local business, and you go, say at the local county fair, you can make relationships with other people at that fair who are related to your business. And you can theoretically evolve to the point where you're like, oh, you do that? And you do that? Great. I'll link to you on my website. Oh, really, it makes sense for me to link to you as well. Don't do an exchange on purpose that way. But if it comes out naturally, that's another issue. That's a great way to get links. It's the teammate technique. And it's where I see that maybe you have done something on your website, you talk about a certain topic, I could help you spruce that up a little bit, and make that even better, and add on some points you might have missed. And I might even have a blog post on my website that talks about that which you would naturally link to, because I helped you with it. It's content. It's about literally what you're talking about, and the natural result is going to be a link. So relationship building and link building really kind of go hand in hand. Crystal Carter 34:11 I agree with that. I mean, I'm sure Patrick and Debbie would agree with that as well. I think it's a really great place for beginners. If you have sponsored the cupcakes at the church picnic, then ask for a shout out on the church website. I'm just saying. Patrick, I don't know if you have any insights on things like that for beginners to get started with some links that are based on their relationships. Patrick Stox 34:34 What Mordy said, especially for local links. You know, you want to be on a podcast, go meet the person and go to a meet up that they're at. Yeah, it's that way really, no matter what it is, you know, I got the link from the podcast apparently because I did the podcasts. I'm active in the community more. He's a great guy. He hooked me up there. So that kind of stuff helps me, I'm sure that's probably how I like it. All of the links to my own website or a lot of the stuff to Ahrefs, people share my content when I write because I've established those relationships. So it really does help. Absolutely. Mordy Oberstein 35:14 Social media, by the way, is a great way to get links. Patrick did a post before that mentioned disavowing links. And that it didn't really make a difference. I saw that. I said, hey, let's cover that in a podcast I do called Edge of the Web, it's an SEO news podcast. And we covered that on the podcast. And we linked to Patrick's article, which I saw from Patrick's social media. So social media is a great avenue to build links. Okay. With that, there are a lot of questions. One of the questions I got is, are all links equal? Crystal Carter 35:52 I think that's great, what do we think, Debbie? Debbie Chew 35:56 I would say no. So there are spammy links that I kind of talked about earlier. Like, for those typically, if you're not familiar with what disavow does, please do not use it. Like that's what John Mueller at Google has said many, many times. So I mean, naturally for, all websites out there, they have some random spammy website that links to them, you can just ignore that because Google is already ignoring that. But in terms of are all links the same? I would say there are the links that can potentially drive traffic, but they may not be from very authoritative sites, perhaps they're from a really relevant site. So with the dog walking example, maybe in another county, another dog walker, there are links to you that's really relevant, and potentially could drive traffic to your website. Whereas if it's ESPN linking to your dog walking website that seems kind of odd, I guess. Yeah. So I think you need to have a look at it from different angles, and also figure out like, what are your goals in terms of SEO? Are you trying to build links to improve the rankings of your pages? Are you trying to build links to actually just drive traffic to your website? Or potentially drive leads? And people who are actually your audience? So those are a few things that I would look at. You can also look at metrics. The traffic of that website that's driving links. There's just a lot of different things to look at. So it's definitely not all the same. Right? Crystal Carter 37:41 And Patrick, in your tool, you class the links in different ways, don't you? Patrick Stox 37:45 Yeah, depending on the size they are, the strength. We have UR which is a page level strength metric. But then there's all the other data. I think, in general, Google counts links more where they're more likely to be clicked. So a link in the header or footer is worth less than a link in the body. So I mentioned the anchor text right to start with. So what that link actually says, it's kind of a pet peeve of mine, when people link with, learn more, click here, read here. So all that is basically saying to Google like, this page is about learn more. If it says the service, that's useful information. Crystal Carter 38:44 So anchor text is when you have a hyperlink, anchor text is the word that's underneath the link. So essentially, I try to think of it as almost like the door or the label or the door. So let's say it's like what's behind the door. And if the door just says, open, you have no idea what's behind the door. If the door says kitchen, then you're like, great, that's the kitchen, I want to go to the kitchen. So you will go through the kitchen. But if you're just labeling with nothing, then that's not really giving them details. And so all of the anchor text gives Google information about your site, which helps them to understand your site as well. And yeah, it's really, really, really...I can't agree with you more about click here. Mordy Oberstein 39:30 Conceptually speaking, I think what you're trying to say is, the websites that are linking to you and the text that they're using to link to you create a semantic relationship between you and the other websites. We're talking about relationships, Google's trying to establish a relationship, saying okay, what's your relationship to this topic that this website is talking about that's linking to you--is your relationship. Is this random? It's trying to better understand and contextualize who you are, what you do and how relevant you are for that topic by your associate. Who are you friends, basically. And if your friends are nothing to do with what you're talking about, then maybe there's something going on here that's a little bit weird. Another question that comes up often, that's come up in the chat is, is there a magic number? Is there a magic number of links that you need? Is there a magic number of websites that you need linking to you? What's the magic number to get the rankings? Debbie Chew 40:26 First, the limit does not exist. Mordy Oberstein 40:29 Does it not exist or are you just not sharing it? Patrick Stox 40:33 I mean, potentially more than your competitors. But there's so many other factors too, content and, you know, Google's other 200 ranking factors. So links are just like one one part of it. Again, they're kind of a major part. But if you're not doing external linking, at least do internal linking, links from one page on your site to another, you control them, those are easy to add, so all this stuff adds up. And I don't think anyone would legitimately give you a number that says you need 578 links. It just doesn't work that way. Crystal Carter 41:11 I think also, Mordy you touched on this about crawling. When we think about links, if somebody writes a piece of content, and it has no links internally and has no links externally linking to it, that's kind of like a tree falling in the woods making no sound is what that is, it's a lonely, lonely page. Rather than a number, think about competitors, have a good look at competitors to give you an idea of the kinds of links you should be getting. If you think about something that's like a news post, good news articles will tend to have lots of links coming off of them. Whereas if you have one piece of content that doesn't have one, that's a news article, and it doesn't have any links to it, that's kind of saying that this piece of content doesn't have any votes, that's good. There aren't that many people linking to it. I don't know if you'd agree, Patrick, that it can vary by industry. For some industries, it's really important to have a good volume of links. And for some industries, it's less important. Patrick Stox 42:19 Oh, yeah. A lot of what I focused on here was local service businesses. And sometimes the folks even ranking in the top five, they have 20 or 30 links. And that's it. Right? You know, someone like Google is gonna have billions. Mordy Oberstein 42:34 And I think that's something to keep in mind. Patrick mentioned before, that links are not the only factor. I think what happens with links is it's so quantitative, I can get 100 of them, I can get 1000. Now I'm going to win. We get hyper focused on getting the links, when really, links are one part of the equation I have. I've literally outranked Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and you know all the other websites with a small little website that has no links, because that made sense for that particular query with those particular pages in that particular instance. And really, me running around trying to get links wouldn't really have been the most beneficial use of my time. So don't think that now that I've listened to this great webinar, I have to go out there and I have to get a million links. That's not how it works. Question, Debbie, which is more important, internal links, meaning one page on your website, linking to another page on your own website, or external links, meaning another website, linking to your website. Debbie Chew 43:45 I think in terms of priority, definitely, the internal links is just such an easy sort of low hanging fruit for you to do, no matter what content that you create on your website, you should always have internal links from other pages, so that you make sure like Google can crawl your website and make sure to find those pages and its relevance. So at the very bare minimum, when you publish a new piece of blog, or a new blog, for example, try to find other places within your website that you can link to there. And then let's say, assuming that you've written the best piece of content on this topic, you've added some internal links within your website, you can kind of let it sit for a little bit, maybe give it a few weeks or a month or so and see how it ranks. So let's say, a month later, you're ranking on the first page, but you're at the bottom of the first page. At that point, you might want to consider maybe trying to build a few links to it so that Google understands like okay, this is a piece of content that people feel is trustworthy and good. And I'm not going to now make it go from 10 to the first page, number one on Google. So that's kind of my recommended approach to it. You don't have to put in 1000s of links to this page. Crystal Carter 45:15 I think in my experience, I found that sometimes depending on how your website's configured, it can depend as well. For some big sites making sure you're very strategic about your internal links can be important for how you show on the SERP. Because if you have lots of content around a similar topic, then it can affect whether or not you showed in results and how you show there and which content gets the priority as well. So yeah, I think that they're absolutely both important. Mordy Oberstein 45:51 If you're looking to learn more about internal linking, we have some posts added. We did a webinar with Cryus Shepherd about it. So check out the Wix SEO Hub for more on internal linking, check out the Ahrefs blog, I'm sure they also have a bunch of resources on internal linking. Hey, Patrick, do social media links count? Patrick Stox 46:09 Generally no. Pretty much every social media platform uses what's called no-follow, which in the past has told Google like, don't pass value through these, I'm not gonna say they don't help because like what Mordy mentioned earlier, he saw one of my posts there, he linked to it from his podcast. So for exposure, you can reach an audience that you wouldn't have ever reached, some writer for a newspaper or Search Engine Land or something might see that and write it up, and then boom, you just got a link because of the social. So I wouldn't discount it. But the links themselves on social, no. Mordy Oberstein 46:57 With that, we touched on it just a second ago about the different types of links, there's a no-follow link. And that relates to a question that someone asked regarding: I sponsored something and I paid to have my logo, let's say appear up on their website, and that image links back to my site. Does that link out? If I paid for it? Patrick Stox 47:26 That's complicated. Technically, it shouldn't. Technically that should be marked, sponsored or no-follow. Google does have some systems to look to try and identify whether that is a paid for link and discounted if it is. But there's always a chance that it actually could be counted as well. Like if their systems don't care, if it's not marked up. Potentially, it could. But hopefully, you're sponsoring something because you want to be sponsoring it and not and not doing that just for the links. Mordy Oberstein 48:04 Can we quickly run through what it means when we say no-follow link or sponsored link versus what we'd call a follow link? Crystal Carter 48:15 I was just gonna say I dropped a link in the chat. I'll drop it again. We have an article on the Wix SEO Hub also about no-follow links. So I'll drop the link there as well. Debbie Chew 48:25 Cool. So basically, by default, all the links on the web are follow. So basically, if I'm linking to this other page, I'm showing Google I vote for this content, I think it's good. Now, there are situations where if that person paid me money to sponsor something that I'm hosting, then I should actually let Google know that this link was through a sponsorship. And I can mark that link as a sponsor. And then there are other situations where, let's say, people are able to comment on my website. And for some reason, they are able to get a link from my website to their website and I don't want that to count. That's a situation where I would add a no-follow. Basically, if you think about user generated content. So a random blogger goes on Debbie's blog and comments. There's no vote of confidence there. I just want to make sure that link is a no-follow. Or for example, I think some higher domain rating websites like Forbes, maybe, or Huffington Post, they might also just no-follow their links because they don't want people manipulating their authority and showing Google mixed signals basically. Crystal Carter 50:02 I think it's kind of like you don't vouch for everyone. The bigger your site gets, the trickier it is to check every single link that comes through the door. Something like the Huffington Post, or like everybody who comments on your blog, you can't check everyone to see if every single link that they share is a good quality link. And you don't want people to think that this link is great. Because it may or may not be and you don't know. So that is kind of what the no-follow is supposed to signal. It's supposed to say,either that Mariah Carey meme like, I don't know her, or, I can neither confirm nor deny whether or not this content is decent. That's kind of what it's supposed to say. Mordy Oberstein 50:51 Yeah, because you know, it's a two way street if you're linking out to other sites. So if I have a baseball blog, and I'm linking to ESPN, Google's looking at who I'm linking to. I'm linking out to a bunch of really shady sites that are trying to steal money from people. I'm betting maybe that's not a great website to rank. So what you link to also says something about who you are. So if you write a blog post, and people put whatever link they want in the comments. Oh, no. Now Google's gonna think I'm not reputable. Because the people in the comments are linking out to all these crazy websites. But there's a label or there's a status, you can attach to the link called user generated. It goes like Okay, we got it. These are random blog comments, and we're not going to hold it against you, kind of thing. Which brings us to another question, let's say a bunch of really non reputable websites, and obviously we spoke about it before, but let's just discuss it. A bunch of non reputable websites are linking to me. The exact question was, how can I remove links people have established that I don't want right? So Joe is a terrible person. He's got a terrible website, and he's linking to your website. Oh, no. What do I do, Joe's linking to me? How do I get rid of that link? Crystal Carter 52:07 What do you think? What do you say, Patrick? You use that disavow thing, I think that's what some people think that's for? Patrick Stox 52:13 I mean, I think that's what it was originally for. But years ago, Google kind of changed the way they worked. Where before you would want to remove any bad links or you might be penalized. Now, Google plays a lot nicer rather than penalizing people, giving the manual penalties. You either have to do outreach and say like, please remove this link and then anything you can't get removed, that was what the disavow file was for. The disavow tool was to remove anything extra, to say like, please don't count these against me, I screwed up. I made this mistake. But their systems changed. I don't even know six, seven years ago, probably, where they just tend to ignore any spammy links now or any bad links. So I would not touch a disavow tool unless I had a manual penalty these days. But I know a lot of people do it as a routine maintenance thing. I personally think they're shooting themselves in the foot, they're probably getting rid of some links that are helping them. So this is not something that I would do. Crystal Carter 53:23 Yeah, I've seen this situation, I think somebody mentioned something like this. Somebody had some malicious traffic coming through. So they had some really spammy links coming into them that were sort of like bad bot traffic or something to that effect. I don't know if you've seen other ways of addressing this, but in the end, they migrated their site. So they changed their domain. And rather than doing a straight 301, they actually had a page that was like, we have a new page at this page. So if it was a human who got there, they would go to the new link. And if it wasn't a human, then they wouldn't, they would just end there. So that was an extreme case. And I doubt that many people are going to be in that sort of situation. But you know, I think it is also a question of thinking about the page that they're linking to. So if they're linking to a specific page, you have control over the page that they're linking to, you have control over the content that they're linking to. So there's potential opportunities that you can take some action on that side if you're getting terrible traffic, but I think it's unlikely that's happening to you. Mordy Oberstein 54:38 So TLDR for the most part, if you know bad actors are linking to you from their websites, Google's pretty good at just ignoring it. So you should too. The last thing that I really want to talk about which people have brought up is, we mentioned Google's guidelines. Can we maybe just run through a couple of scenarios or situations or aspects that violate these guidelines because that line of trying to build links, and violating Google's guidelines is a very thin line. I'll get you started off. Somebody comes on LinkedIn and says, hey, would you like to guest post on my website, and I will guest post on your website, and we'll trade links. Technically that's a violation of Google's guidelines. That's how thin the line is. Debbie Chew 55:36 Yeah. So I think the way that I approach something like that is...my company is Dialpad. We are a SaaS company so we integrate with a lot of different tools. And let's say so, for example, like HubSpot, we integrate with them. If for some reason, HubSpot wants to create this content that's super relevant to Dialpad and our audience. I wouldn't say no. I don't have a reason to say no, because I know the content that they write is really high quality. So in that case, I would accept it. And if I can write something that's super high quality for HubSpot, and it goes through their editing process, and they kind of vet everything that I write, including the links, and they find it acceptable. I don't see why not. Or why Google should discredit that relationship. So there are specific situations. So I usually think of it more like, if I'm genuinely writing good content for this other blog and they're also writing it for us and it's not just for the backlink, we also want to write something that's helpful for each other's audience. I think it's okay in that situation. Crystal Carter 56:53 Do you think it's the question of user value? Debbie Chew 56:56 Yeah, user value, and not doing the guest posts for the link, but more of the user value there. It's all about intent. Mordy Oberstein 57:08 If the intent is to get links or whether it's, I have something good to say, let's share with our mutual audiences. Patrick, I'll give you the last word. Patrick Stox 57:20 So I would say a lot of new folks, they'll just go to like fiverr.com and buy a package of 100,000 links, do not do that. Anything that is at some crazy scale, if it sounds too good to be true, if it's some automated process, if they're like, we're gonna add you to 500 websites or whatever, don't do it. It's not going to help you, at worst it could very well hurt you, you could actually get a manual penalty from that kind of thing. Links take work, they take relationships. Really, if it sounds too easy, just think twice. Mordy Oberstein 58:04 Don't buy links, I think is the bottom line. If someone has to sell you a link, don't buy it. Crystal Carter 58:11 Well, thank you all. Thank you all for coming. Thank you, Mordy, for fielding all those fantastic questions from our fantastic audience. Thank you, everyone. We have lots of backlink content on the Wix SEO Hub. So please go and check that out. We have podcasts. We have this fantastic webinar, we have loads of articles. Do visit Patrick on the Ahrefs blog where he has lots more content on links and a lot of the studies that he referenced as well. And you can see lots of content from Debbie on links and she also has a website with some great work that she's done there. So yes, thank you to Patrick. Thank you to Debbie. Thank you to Mordy, thank you to everyone in the audience. And we'll see you again at our next webinar in July. Mordy Oberstein 58:57 Thank you everyone. Debbie Chew 58:58 Bye everyone.