Search Results

Author: Gus Pelogia Website owners and SEOs usually optimize websites so that searchers can find them and convert, but the journey sometimes starts before users even reach your website. The search results offer you (or your business) the opportunity to provide much of the information audiences are looking for about your brand, including a link to your domain, a description of what your business does, how to get in touch with your customer support, etc. This information is neatly presented in “knowledge panels”—a highly visible and valuable search result feature designed to provide an overview of a person, place, thing, or concept. A knowledge panel for your brand can help instill trust with potential customers because it shows that search engines, like Google, understand who you are. However, if you want to earn this badge of honor (and search visibility), you’ll need to teach the search engines all about your brand and you’ll need to keep those details consistent and current.  Here’s what you can do to score a knowledge panel for your name/business, while naturally promoting yourself across the web. Table of contents: What are knowledge panels? Who is eligible for a knowledge panel? Entities: The building blocks of knowledge panels Do you need a knowledge panel? The benefits of knowledge panels for your business Getting started with your “home” entity Building E-E-A-T: The key to Google’s trust How to check Google’s confidence in your entity Claim and manage your knowledge panel What are knowledge panels? Knowledge panels are information boxes that search engines (like Google, Bing, etc.) will show when you search for an “entity”—a fancy term for people, places, things, and so on. I’ve put together a more detailed explanation of entities in the next section, but for now, this basic information covers what you need to know. Search engines are more likely to show knowledge panels for well-known entities. Here’s what you can expect to see in a knowledge panel: Individual (personal) knowledge panel Brand/company knowledge panel Basic bio information  Age Profession Nationality Net worth Education Known relatives Place of birth Books/movies/shows Awards Professional/personal associations Social media accounts Website Founders CEO Customer service number Headquarters location Founding date Number of employees Subsidiaries Number of locations Revenue Stock price Social media accounts Introduced by Google back in 2012 (although now adopted almost universally by other search engines as well), knowledge panels do a lot more than display information about a person or brand. They’re a way to connect entities so that search engines can understand how these concepts are related to each other.  Google stores these entities and associations in its “ Knowledge Graph ,” which, in its own words, is a “database of billions of facts about people, places, and things.” This allows Google to make associations, such as who wrote specific books, the tallest building in the world, fastest animals, and so on.  As an example, here’s a knowledge graph I generated based on Spider-Man’s Wikipedia description (below). You can see that, while the U.S. Army isn’t explicitly mentioned in the text, it appears in the knowledge graph because both Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (Spider-Man’s creators) were veterans. This is the power of knowledge graphs in surfacing relevant information, which you can see right on the search results page ( SERP ) in the form of knowledge panels. Who is eligible for a knowledge panel? You might expect that only popular entities deserve such a prestigious SERP feature, but I’m here to tell you otherwise: anyone—including you—can have a knowledge panel.  Take, for example, George Nguyen (above)—he is the editor-in-chief of the SEO Learning Hub  (this website). He is not famous or particularly well known outside of his industry, yet he has a knowledge panel with a bio, an image, a link to an author page, and links to two of his social media accounts. This is because, in order to create a knowledge panel, search engines like Google need to be certain about who or what the entity is (as opposed to how popular it is). After all, Google will only display a knowledge panel if people are searching for you/your brand and it’s in Google’s interest to give the best answer right away. Google used to mostly trust a few sources such as Wikipedia, IMDB, Crunchbase, and the most well-known social media channels to extract information for knowledge graphs, but that has changed a lot in 2023. In the wild, I noticed a lot more websites have become sources, including the Wix SEO Learning Hub! In some cases, Google changes the source of information from time to time and displays another source for a knowledge panel. This can also change based on location. As long as the information displayed is correct in both sources, there’s nothing to worry about. Here’s an example based on location: my own search results in English include videos with me, while the same search done from Brazil highlights books I’ve written in Portuguese within my knowledge panel. What is an entity? “An entity is a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable. For example, an entity may be a person, place, item, idea, abstract concept, concrete element, other suitable thing, or any combination thereof.” — Google Patents, “ Question answering using entity references in unstructured data ” Search engines have evolved beyond simply matching keywords and can understand entities beyond single words or phrases . Anything can be an entity—e.g., a location, name, movie, food, color. In addition, these entities connect to each other regardless of language, as they are tied to concepts and not just keywords. To give another example, here’s a search to find out Jerry Seinfeld’s age (above). Google shows me an answer straight away and connects it to many other entities related to Jerry Seinfeld, such as: Parents Spouse Children Alma mater Movies and shows Official social channels Google has high confidence about all of his personal information and, to top it off, it shows me other people connected to him (personally and professionally) and their ages, as it believes it’s a probable follow-up search someone would do. As we learned recently, Google uses search behavior  to improve results ( so does Bing ), so it may even change some of the results if users have changed their follow-up searches. (Note: User engagement is just one of many potential elements that search engines use to determine rankings.) How does Google have confidence about all this information to display so much beyond my simple “age” question? Because all of these things (age, relatives, movies, colleges, etc.) are entities. So, to get your knowledge panel, you need to become an entity as well. Do you need  a knowledge panel? If you manage a local business,  perhaps a Google Business Page (GBP)  is enough for you. It really depends on what type of business you are in and who your audience is. A GBP (left) is a straightforward profile that any local company can create. It exists only on Google properties, it’s managed directly by the business and can be optimized to appear in Google surfaces like Google Search and Maps. Google Business Profile example Google knowledge panel example On the other hand, a traditional knowledge panel (right) is more complex and requires Google to understand and trust your entity a lot more. Wix users can instantly verify their business and set up their Google Business Profile via their Wix account using their Business Registration Number (a process that might otherwise take up to seven days ). Shortly after verification, your Google Business Profile should start showing for relevant searches (e.g., your business name, your services, etc). For other companies,  you might want to protect or promote a brand. Are there other businesses with the same name as you? Has your company merged with another and Google is still confused? These are some great reasons to pursue a knowledge panel for your brand. How knowledge panels benefit your business Some might be impressed by how cool it is to have your picture, profession, and associations displayed directly on Google, but there are many more advantages revolving around personal branding. Imagine:  An author being able to display all their books on Google’s shelf A band displaying links to all their albums and streaming services An interior designer displaying photos and videos from their YouTube channel and allowing you to see their style even before going to their website. Now let’s look at the benefits for brands: Without even having to leave the search results, you can tell potential customers who you are, where your company is based, your customer service number, social channels, and more.  Beyond that, there’s an element of prestige and trust associated with knowledge panels. This can help establish credibility for your business, as knowledge panels are often seen as a form of endorsement by Google itself.  In addition to powering knowledge panels, Google also uses its knowledge graph as a source of information to create carousel and comparison features right on the SERPs, providing you with another incentive to build out your personal or business entity on Google. Get started by building your “home” entity You don’t need to be famous to have a recognized entity and a knowledge panel, but Google must have confidence you’re a distinguishable entity—not just a simple query from a random search user. As with many things in SEO, there are plenty of ways to build yours. Let’s start with the one that I believe is the easiest: building your home entity—a technique based on Jason Barnard’s method  that I adapted according to my experiences. It’s called a “home” entity because it’s the one page that will aggregate all your base information and it’s fully under your control. Let’s assume Google doesn’t know who you are yet, so you must have a page about you (or your business) to start. This can be a homepage on your personal website or your “About the Company” page. This page will naturally answer things like: Name Age Location(s) Awards won Owner/founder Contact information What you do/sell Social channels  Once you create this page, the next thing you need to do is add structured data markup to it. In short, structured data is a piece of code that “tags” each of these elements (name, age, location, etc.) on your pages into a format that’s readable by search engines. This not only provides search engines with information to populate knowledge panels, it also contextualizes your business for Google, allowing it to establish more entity relationships.  Wix has great resources explaining how to add  and validate structured data . You can deep dive into them, but for now, you can start by using the templates below: Structured data template for persons Structured data template for companies These templates contain the most basic information, but you can include a lot more information by adding other relevant elements, available on Schema.org for either Person  or Company  properties, depending on your needs. While establishing your home entity and implementing structured data is a great place to start, it likely won’t result in a knowledge panel (if it was this easy, all brands could have one). You’ll need to continue demonstrating your authority  and unifying your online presence to build out your entity, which I’ll discuss next. Building E-E-A-T: The key to Google’s trust So far, you have a starting point to explain to Google (and Bing), in search engine language, who you are. That’s just the beginning. Google is looking for external sources (out of your control) to gather more knowledge about entities like you (or your business). Getting your brand mentioned in well-known sources, alongside more information about you, is key to increasing Google’s confidence about who you are/what you do so that it can generate a knowledge panel for your entity. Existing businesses need to continue building their authority Google will look for a lot more evidence that you are a real entity so that it can avoid mistaking one person or company for another, or providing incorrect information to searchers. Validate your business information across existing sources If you already have an online presence, the next step is to validate the information that is out there about your business. Start by Googling your brand name and save every website that talks about you. This includes: Company profiles used in search (Google Business Profile, Yelp, TrustPilot, etc.)  Social media (Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, X, etc.) Other databases (IMDB, Crunchbase, Wikipedia, industry-specific databases, etc.) Other websites with unstructured data (e.g., news articles and blog posts) The next step is to audit what’s written about you and ensure essential information is up to date. Is your business still at the same address? Is the website and phone number listed? Do you categorize the business the same way? In the case of your business profiles, most of them were likely created by you, so it’s easy to update incorrect information. Many others can be claimed in case you didn’t create them directly (as a matter of fact, you can claim your knowledge panel once it’s available—more on that later). News articles and blog posts are harder to get updated, so it makes sense to go after them last. If you’re an expert in your field that writes for different websites, update all the about/bio pages to reflect your most up-to-date information. Maybe you changed jobs, got promoted, or received an industry award since you first began publishing on those sites. The plan here is to get the information available online about yourself or your brand accurate and consistent, so you can even use the same exact bio on all websites (don’t worry if they don’t match word for word, as long as the key information repeats, as shown in the example above). Keep delivering consistent information about your business and offerings Getting your name mentioned in well-known sources, alongside more information about you, is key to increasing Google’s trust. If you know a PR campaign will get industry coverage, aim to provide vast and accurate information about your company within it. This naturally happens in a good campaign—I mean, if you don’t explain what you sell somehow, then you should review your press release before it goes live. However, there’s more that you can provide, such as your:  Offerings (products and services) Logo Location Contact details Founding year Key accomplishments Social media profiles etc. Take, for example, this press release  about Wix’s AI meta tag generator : The very first line of the press release tells you exactly what the entity (Wix) is. The end of the press release features an “About Wix.com Ltd.” section, which reiterates what Wix is, when it was founded, and what it offers. Ultimately, the information you include here depends on your niche, but whatever you add, understand that consistency is the name of the game if you want it to help you earn a knowledge panel. New businesses should be consistent from the start If your business or professional website is new, it likely has little to no footprint online. Start researching places you’d like to be and profiles that make sense to create. For example, a SaaS businesses might start with G2, Product Hunt, and Trustpilot. You’ll have to keep your profiles up to date, so don’t claim profiles you won’t manage properly or that aren’t relevant to your business, as they may be considered spam and might send dubious messages to Google if, let’s say, your address or other info is incorrect. Do you see what we’re doing here? We’re feeding Google information about your entity. Remember to update your SameAs property  within your structured data to link to these profiles, social media platforms, and databases. Also, add regular links to them on your content as well, you should do this for business reasons anyway. For professional (portfolio) website owners, remember to:  Add your website on your Instagram bio Link to X (formerly Twitter) from your LinkedIn Include your job title on Crunchbase Include your social channels in your website footer and structured data  Many of these websites have dedicated spaces for this information, so use it to your advantage. How to check Google’s confidence in your entity The easiest way to see if Google understands an entity is to check Google’s knowledge graph API . There are also tools, such as Kalicube’s Knowledge Graph Explorer  and Carl Hendy’s Knowledge Graph Search , that give you an interface and ping the API, returning a confidence score. This confidence/relevance score (at the very top of the example above) has no cap. The Beatles (band) has a score of 21,027, while their homonymous album’s score is 4,726. It makes sense that the artist comes first and, while it’s easy for a human to know that, search engines have to write code to emulate how the human brain would think.  Only take the confidence/relevance number as a reference in case there’s competition, such as another person or brand with a similar name. I’ve seen entities with a confidence score as low as 10 to achieve a knowledge panel. These tools also return a link to your actual entity page on Google (e.g., https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/m/05f77_x  takes you to Wix’s entity/knowledge panel) where you can see what the entity looks like. Based on experience, I usually see changes getting picked up here first and weeks later appearing on Google for general searchers. In mid-2023, Google made changes and broadened the sources it considers for knowledge panel data, making it possible to get a knowledge panel even when the API doesn’t recognize you. In fact, I’m not identified on the API, but I have a panel. The best way to know, like always, is to Google it! Keep in mind that some knowledge panels change based on location and have different designs on desktop compared to mobile.  Claim and manage your knowledge panel Once you earn a knowledge panel, you can leave it as it is or claim it. Google requires you to prove ownership of the entity, which you can learn more about right here . After you claim your entity, you can request changes to the existing fields. Google requires some justification and sources to approve the changes you requested; if they get approved, the changes usually go live in a few days. From this point forward, you mostly need to keep all these information sources about your brand consistent and up to date to ensure that you maintain your knowledge panel and the search visibility you’ve earned. Use your knowledge panel in tandem with your other digital marketing efforts If creating a knowledge panel is relevant to your business, it’s time to start building out your entity. Here are some things to remember as you do so: Auditing your brand is the first step to ensure consistency and relevancy. Part of the process is to spread the word about your brand by disseminating consistent and relevant information across the web. So, in a way, getting a knowledge panel may just be an added benefit from marketing your brand. Your profile’s appearance might be different based on the searchers location and until it becomes a more robust entity, you might see information change or Google changing the main source of the knowledge panel. In many cases, a knowledge panel is more of a status symbol or a luxury than an absolute necessity, so use this SERP feature as an add-on to your other marketing activities that might be more relevant for your business goals. It’s all about having an integrated marketing strategy as opposed to putting all your eggs in one basket! Gus Pelogia - SEO Product Manager Gus Pelogia is a journalist turned SEO since 2012. He’s currently an SEO product manager at Indeed, the top job site in the world. Every day, he writes tickets for small and large initiatives and works in a cross-functional team with writers, UX, engineers, and product managers. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Ashwin Balakrishnan Ever looked at ruins from an ancient civilization and wondered what might have been if the world had preserved those structures for more than the last few centuries? Content consolidation is the marketing and SEO equivalent of that “what if” scenario. It exposes the flaws in your web content/ content marketing  and tests your ability to restore it to pristine condition. And like architectural preservation, it requires a variety of talents: one part marketing, one part design, one part web development. But I won’t sugar coat it: It’s a tough thing to get right. Planning tasks, deciding their order, getting buy-in, coordinating different teams to deliver without going over schedule and budget… Did I mention that it’s one part project management as well? If you’re planning a consolidation effort in 2024 (or want to know if you should), read on to find out: What content consolidation is and why it’s necessary How to plan a consolidation project What to look for when analyzing content How to measure impact and other post-project considerations Content consolidation: What it is and why it’s necessary Content consolidation is the process of auditing and optimizing a website to reduce content overlap, improve keyword and intent targeting, and deliver a better user experience. Unlike a full website audit  (which seeks to identify all sorts of potential issues), consolidation boils down to one singular outcome: fewer pages competing for traffic with shared intent. The benefits: Why SEOs consolidate content As businesses increase their marketing efforts, their websites typically grow in both traffic and number of pages. Part of this website growth includes publishing content that serves specific purposes but might overlap with pre-existing content. Publishing new content takes considerable time and effort, and is subject to Google crawling, indexing, and ranking  these new pages. Updating existing content (while still an effort) is less tedious and shows changes to search performance much sooner. Consolidation is a periodic method of cleaning the clutter. For users, content consolidation reduces overlapping pages , making it easier for them to find the information they’re looking for in one place. The bottom line:  This allows a single page on your site to rank higher and more often for a given intent or query, rather than having multiple pages with overlapping content that would perform worse both individually and collectively. When and how often to consolidate content If you’re monitoring metrics and KPIs downstream of search traffic, you’ll likely feel the need for content consolidation before you see the signs. A website cluttered with outdated and overlapping content is typically not going to resonate strongly with its target audience. Examples of when you should dig deeper include: Reduced lead qualification and conversion rates Diminished order quantities and sales volumes Website traffic trending down for several consecutive months Losing strong rankings that you’ve held for a long time Decreases in click volume and click-through rate Keep in mind that these trends can be caused by other factors—like search engine core updates  and poor product/market fit—but, whatever the cause is, these factors still warrant investigation. And while there’s no fixed or definitive answer to when a brand or website should consolidate its content, here are some guidelines that have served me well: New websites usually don’t need to consolidate until they reach a critical mass of pages, and certainly not until they’ve built out functional marketing teams. Brands undergoing product or vertical changes should consolidate website content as soon as possible—this may be especially important if you’re entering a new niche. Smaller teams with limited resources should plan an annual audit and consolidation exercise, with sufficient time and budget allocated to the process. Larger teams that produce more content can consolidate more often (such as once a quarter) or hire specifically for roles that do so on an ongoing basis. Rohan Ayyar, Co-founder of 99Stairs , looks for specific signs that consolidation should be on the horizon: “A drop in readership, views, time on page or traffic (depending on the way you look at your analytics and the nature of your content); or a drop in rankings. The latter is significant because empirical evidence suggests that organic search traffic from Google accounts for two-thirds of all traffic to a given site. We now know that Google has been using clicks (directly or indirectly, depending on who you ask) and user interaction in its ranking algorithm. More clicks lead to better rankings, better rankings lead to more clicks. Since Google is chasing user preferences and user satisfaction, if your content isn’t doing well in the search results, it’s a clear indication that it’s time to either update it or combine it with another piece to try and match your audience’s search intent more closely.” — Rohan Ayyar, Co-founder at 99Stairs How to plan for content consolidation  When it becomes clear that consolidation will work in your website’s favor, you need to step back and draw up a plan. Jump right in and you’ll miss opportunities, underestimate time and budget, overlook errors, and ignore the complexity of the exercise. Instead, make sure you outline the task before you begin. Here’s what you need to consider. What to look for Generally, you’ll want to review every URL on your website. If you’ve done a recent messaging overhaul and refreshed your homepage or other key landing pages, you can consider excluding those. For most content consolidation efforts, you should include blog posts and articles, landing pages, and resource pages, among others (the exact types of pages you need to assess will depend on your business model). Examples of what to look for include: Thin content that doesn’t offer much value beyond surface-level insights. E.g., A landing page filled with ads and barely any relevant main content. Outdated content that is behind the times or no longer relevant. E.g., An article about how to connect Google Search Console to Google Universal Analytics (which was deprecated in favor of Google Analytics 4  on July 1, 2023) Duplicate pages (i.e., nearly identical content) on different URLs Low-quality content that brings in irrelevant or no traffic Ray Martinez, VP of SEO at Archer Education , runs a full blog audit to determine whether consolidation is necessary and how to prioritize the pages he needs to consolidate. “Through that audit, we'll look for opportunities to completely redirect a page, combine pages, or refresh pages ,” adding that, “I'll also work through a new sitemap to understand if there are any gaps to plan for new content.” Where to look There are multiple areas of action within consolidation, some of which stretch beyond digital marketing and SEO into other disciplines. So I’ll focus on the core SEO tech stack most teams need to both plan the exercise and see it to completion: Site analytics:  Scour your website data and organic keywords pulled from site analytics (e.g. Search Console , GA4 ) for dips in traffic, which might indicate that Google is recommending you less often for certain queries. Loss of impressions, click volume, and click-through rate can also flag this issue. SEO monitoring:  All-in-one SEO toolkits  (e.g. Ahrefs, Semrush, Mangools, etc.) can help with auditing your site for technical issues and seeing whether key queries with similar intent are being split across multiple pages. Use the audit data and dashboards to plan scope of work and report on progress. Content optimization:  Use tools like Clearscope and AlsoAsked to gather insights into how people search, and to see what content currently ranks best for those terms. These tools also allow you to analyze existing pages on your site for gaps in topic coverage  and depth, making it easier to structure your content updating process. Project management:  Once you know what needs to be done, it’s important to keep everyone on schedule and accountable. Project management tools like Asana and Notion make it easier to divide a large project into manageable sprints, assign work to people, and provide the data and context they need to fulfill their roles effectively. Planning, budget, and resources Project management isn’t glamorous, but it’s critical for success when working on a live website. You need to know who’s involved, how long their tasks will take, what it will cost in terms of finances and opportunities, and what sequence things need to happen in. From my own experience, here are some points to consider so that you have the best shot at success: Content consolidation generally takes longer than you expect, so plan for a longer window than you think is necessary. This is especially true if you haven’t worked on the domain for a significant period of time. Deadlines will almost always get missed, so build in a buffer period. If you need something in 14 days, aim for a working timeline of 10 days. Your budget is very likely lower than it should be. It’s better to ask for more money and not spend it all than to go over budget. Running out of budget halfway through your consolidation effort and not being able to obtain more could mean that you’re just leaving more content to consolidate in the future. Other priorities will surface in the middle of consolidation. Create a method to determine whether those priorities need to come before or after the ongoing consolidation. One thing that has helped me is adding buffer time to the project timeline to deal with SEO surprises. As you work through your list of tasks, you’ll encounter issues with images and layouts, broken links, failed redirects , and a variety of other unavoidable setbacks. You’re already working on fixing these exact issues, so make a note to come back and fix them later. If they’re on important pages or critical to user experience, use the buffer time. Prioritizing consolidation tasks During your project, some tasks will need to happen in a particular order. For example, fixing redirect issues before merging duplicate pages might require a second pass at redirects after the fact. If you have limited resources, you’ll want to prioritize the tasks that make sense for what is available to you. For example, if you’re working with several talented developers but only one content writer , it may be more efficient to put technical health first. Implementation When it comes to turning recommendations into action, many factors affect your ability to get changes implemented. Are the right decision-makers on board with your project?  Without buy-in from the people who can make things happen, your project is likely to amount to little more than a glorified audit. Are you in-house or freelance/at an agency?  The former makes it easier to implement changes but also comes with greater accountability. The latter puts less onus on you but is tougher to see through. If you’re a freelancer or at an agency and you’re not able to get your recommendations implemented, then you’re also probably unlikely to renew the client (because they’re presumably still working on your initial batch of recommendations). Do you have direct access to developers and content creators?  Going through a client representative or any other intermediary can be more stressful than working directly with those who will do the work because “playing telephone” introduces delays and potential miscommunications. Many SEOs also know how to code, navigate technical issues, write content and copy, or have other skills adjacent to SEO. If that’s you, you probably have enough working knowledge to collaborate well with other professionals.  For those who are just getting started in SEO or have limited expertise outside of this discipline, here are some things to keep in mind: Developers may have other responsibilities to the product, especially in SaaS. If you want your technical fixes implemented, be mindful of this and communicate the value of why certain actions should be prioritized. Writers will produce better content if you provide a brief with all the relevant background information. This keeps you in control of content strategy instead of trusting it to someone who likely isn’t a subject matter expert. Here’s a great content outline template  from Jess Joyce. Your content consolidation checklist Now that you have an understanding of what’s involved and what you’ll need, it’s time to begin planning the actual consolidation tasks and activities. Here are some of the things you should aim to improve, spread across three SEO categories: content, backlinks, and technical SEO. Content SEO Arguably the core of this effort is actually rewriting and restructuring the words and images that appear on the pages you want to improve. Here are four pieces of advice to help you give decaying content new life. 01. Bulk up thin content Thin content refers to pages that have much less relevant information (with regard to the search query) than the ones ranking at the top of the search engine results page ( SERP ). You can make your content more robust by: Developing a content refresh brief template that outlines the steps needed to go from thin (current state) to robust (target state). It may be useful to conduct an analysis of your top competitors  as well, so that you can benchmark the state of their content. Using a tool (like Clearscope, for example) that analyzes SERP content to show you what topics are covered in pages that rank for a target query. Matching the content quality your competitors provide before going deeper, broader, or approaching your content from a unique angle. Note:  Low word count is not a flaw in itself, but as a proxy measurement for thoroughness. I prefer to analyze relative word count (i.e., my content’s word count compared to those of pages that rank high for the target query). 02. Merge duplicate content Sometimes, you end up with two (or more) web pages that are closely related or provide the same information. This can be detrimental if search engines think they both satisfy the same intent, or if some of the pages have information that’s missing from others (i.e., splitting up relevant information across pages). If that happens, traffic will also likely split across these pages—usually search engines will choose one version that they consider to be the “best” or default version of the lot. By combining many duplicate pages into one, you can protect against these issues. An example of target queries you should merge into one page An example of target queries to retain as separate pages “how to grow tomatoes at home” “growing tomatoes on balcony” “home garden tomato tips” “how to grow plum tomatoes at home” “how to grow roma tomatoes at home” “how to grow cherry tomatoes at home” 03. Update outdated content Outdated content can be irrelevant and signal that your brand is uninformed. You’ll find this type of content on any site that has been online for more than a year or two. It’s an inevitable part of marketing on the web, but it still needs to be addressed. There are some easy ways to spot outdated content: Something published more than one year ago is a candidate for review. Pages with a year in their title can be updated. Performance (especially click-through rate) is decaying for more than 3-6 months. You (or a subject matter expert) knows that a concept has evolved or changed. Content about concepts, products, and services that no longer exist may need attention. Once you’ve identified pages that need freshening up, a content refresh brief can outline what the new approach should be and how to bridge the gap between those two states. Typically, this involves someone familiar with the topic reviewing it for gaps, inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and outdated information. 04. Prune low-performing content Most of the traffic to a website comes from popular sources, such as branded keywords and a group of evergreen pages. That means the lion’s share of the content you publish will perform modestly or poorly. Generally, it’s fine to leave most of your low-performing pages untouched—not everything you publish is going to become a viral hit (nor should it be). But at times, it can make sense to remove a page from the search index  altogether when it: Is poorly written and optimized or has no focus keyword Serves a business purpose but no SEO purpose (e.g., a “thank you” page) Strays too far from your niche Just remember: deindexing before deletion (meaning that it’s often better to deindex a page instead of delete it). Removing pages altogether should be your last resort, as certain pages underperform when it comes to SEO but nevertheless play a vital role for your business and its customers. Backlinks Whether you’ve merged pages or created new ones, it’s important to ensure the health of all links pointing to your refreshed content from within and beyond your website. Internal links:  Make sure your updated content has links pointing to other relevant pages on your website , as well as ones from related pages pointing to it. External links:  When combining pages, be sure to set up redirects to the newly consolidated URL so that all previous links still work. For new content, refer to the guide on backlinks  I wrote featuring specific advice. Broken links:  Do a final check for links that lead to nonexistent or redirected content both on your site and from other sites. Fix the ones you can, and do outreach to fix/reclaim the external ones . Technical SEO As you merge and update content on your website, you’ll also want to check the technical health of these new URLs. This ensures that the people discovering your content have a positive experience (instead of potentially getting an error or landing on the wrong content). Here are some of the things you should look out for: 3xx errors:  This group of website error codes  relates to redirection (when a particular URL forwards users to another URL). The more common versions of these codes include pages that have been moved permanently ( 301 ) or temporarily (302), which generally aren’t an SEO issue, but you should definitely review and address other 3xx errors. 4xx errors:  These error codes indicate an issue with your website (or your client’s). The most common of these is the 404 error (where a particular page could not be found), such as when a page is removed but no redirect is established for that URL. Others cover pages that are forbidden (403) and permanently removed (410). Canonicals:  When you have a group of duplicate pages—either because the URLs are structured differently or otherwise lead to the same content—the canonical URL  is the one that search engines consider to be the default. This is especially important to monitor when merging duplicate pages. Indexed pages:  To make content less visible, you can delete the page or (more advisably) simply remove it from a search engine’s list  of indexed or recorded pages. This prevents it from being discoverable through search, but any links leading to that page will still work (meaning the page can still serve your business purpose without being discoverable to every Google user). Metadata:  This category includes “data about data,” e.g., title tags , meta descriptions , and structured data (schema). Ensure that all your refreshed pages are populated with this information to maximize discoverability  for the most relevant search queries. Core Web Vitals:  Ever visited a site that was slow to load, rendered out of alignment, or got stuck when you interacted with it? Then you know how frustrating a poor page experience  can be, especially to someone who feels like they just found something interesting. Make sure to assess and optimize both desktop and mobile performance. After consolidation: What happens next You’ve created the plan, got the buy-in and budget you need, and—fast forward a few weeks (or months)—your content consolidation exercise is complete. Or is it? Here are four things you should do once the actual consolidation is over: Review your changes:  So much happens when you’re merging pages, deprecating others, and updating content across a variety of topics. It’s easy to forget a page, gloss over a broken link, or miss that 13 th  redirect error. A quick recap of work done against work planned is a great way to sweep the room. Verify fixes and changes:  Once you’ve made sure the content you wanted to spruce up is done, you’ve got to make sure the machines agree. Your consolidation exercise should culminate with a site audit in the SEO tool of your choice, which should unveil what’s been fixed and what hasn’t. Plan for new issues:  When you do your post-consolidation checks, you will almost always encounter new issues that weren’t there before. Human error and high volumes of work aren’t the best of friends. At this stage, you’ll want to figure out whether these new issues need to be addressed right away or stashed for a later date. Measure impact:  What good is all this work if you can’t prove the outcome of all the time and money you’ve spent on it? Measure your most important metrics  on the day your consolidation exercise ends, so they can serve as benchmarks when you measure them again down the road. Unfortunately, GA4 no longer has annotations so you’ll want to use an alternate system to record these baseline metrics and the date of completion. Content consolidation makes your site better for users and search engines Think of content consolidation as spring cleaning for your website: You’re improving on what’s already there, which is a whole lot easier than starting over from scratch. And, while the first time you do this exercise will be the most difficult—with time and practice—you can create a system that allows you to keep your website relevant, up-to-date, and organized. Ashwin Balakrishnan - Head of Marketing at Optmyzr   Ashwin Balakrishnan  is a B2B SaaS marketer specializing in organic growth, backlinks, and content SEO. He leads the marketing team at Optmyzr, where he hosts the Search Marketing Academy podcast. His personal backlink profile includes gaming, Lego, and electronic music. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Adriana Stein When used for basic business-to-business digital marketing and search engine optimization tasks, like creating content, generating keyword research ideas, defining search intent, and analyzing search engine results pages (SERPs), ChatGPT can be a useful efficiency booster—but it’s far from displacing human marketers and SEOs. The biggest limitation in content outputs from generative artificial intelligence is technical, long-form content. This type of content is typically driven by information from an SME (the true heart of effective B2B digital marketing)—content that AI simply can’t match. Furthermore, due to the greater complexity of many B2B industries (compared to typical retail businesses, for example) there’s a high risk of publishing misinformation when relying solely on AI-generated content. So, if you do happen to use generative AI (especially ChatGPT), you absolutely need to fact check, edit, and adjust—which, from my perspective, is the largest sticking point when evaluating whether an AI-driven process is actually more efficient. To further explore these potential applications, let’s dive into how AI-generated content can be used for SEO and digital marketing strategies for B2B SaaS products and services. Table of contents: How generative AI and ChatGPT are currently used in B2B businesses Will ChatGPT replace B2B content writers? ChatGPT considerations for your B2B SEO strategy Review: 5 uses of ChatGPT in B2B SEO content creation Creating a B2B buyer journey map Conducting B2B SEO keyword research Creating a B2B product listing page Writing a B2B SEO blog post Writing a B2B case study ChatGPT is a tool, not a B2B digital marketing replacement How are generative AI and ChatGPT used in B2B companies? The excitement around ChatGPT is a recent development, but the concept of generative AI is not as new as all of the hype might suggest. In fact, AI is already being used by B2B companies to : Automate chat conversations and personalization with engagement-driven data Predict customer journey behavior to improve the customer experience Provide insights on large-scale and advanced analytics and data science Analyze content marketing data and results Furthermore, there are several tactics for integrating elements of AI marketing for both eCommerce and B2B companies. For example, generative AI can be used as a content idea generator, as part of your content creation process, and for assistance with basic SEO tasks. But, there’s still a major issue that you need to be aware of: AI tools are not yet advanced enough to use as a standalone solution—especially in the complex world of B2B digital marketing and SEO. Human oversight is still 100% essential for generative AI to achieve results for a company. Case in point, here’s a (hyperbolic) take on the state of generative AI for sales from B2B marketing consultant David Kirkdorffer: Will ChatGPT replace B2B content writers? As potential applications for ChatGPT and generative AI continue to increase, B2B digital marketers face an important choice: work with generative AI or with a human content writer/subject matter expert (SME). Here are a few considerations that may impact your decision: 01. Generative AI tools summarize information sources that may not have been fact-checked: You may be familiar with these types of sources (e.g., the list of “X Stats for B2B Digital Marketers in 2023” that you have to dive into a rabbit hole to confirm original sources across 10 backlinks). Unfortunately, generative AI doesn’t account for the quality of information (or lack thereof), so this makes the fact-checking process more important than ever before. 02. Google’s priority is to show quality information on the SERPs: When you combine AI-driven SERP manipulation with misinformation, that can be a direct route to a manual penalty. To avoid this scenario, you need to understand how search engines perceive AI and how AI-generated content is detected. I go over this in detail in another article about using AI for eCommerce content . Overall, B2B buying decisions are heavily influenced by technical SMEs and case study data, so if your content contains wrong or misleading information, that can create a cascading effect that loses clients, revenue, and—most importantly—long-term brand trust. So, to answer the question, no, I don’t believe generative AI will replace B2B content writers or SEO strategists. At this stage, generative AI can only potentially help B2B digital marketers with content production efficiency. But again, there’s another major caveat specific to B2B: I, myself, work primarily with B2B businesses and the amount of editing and fact checking required from generative AI outputs is the same (if not even more) than with a content writer. So, I currently find working with a human writer or expert to be much simpler, more authoritative, and consequently more efficient. ChatGPT and generative AI considerations for your B2B SEO strategy If integrating generative AI into your B2B SEO strategy is a necessity, here are my suggestions for doing so in the most effective manner. Assess strategic guidance with a critical eye: It’s important to always do your own customer research if you want to avoid botched campaigns down the line (I have an example of this in the section below ). B2B buying committees are complex and full of nuances, so the basic information that AI generates is simply not enough to market and sell million-dollar B2B products and services. Focus on using generative AI for content ideation rather than content production: Long-form AI-generated content that tries to explain technical B2B topics is often low quality because it lacks subject matter expertise and credible data. Instead, use it to help with brainstorming and creating new content plans. Supplement your output with technical data from an SME: Mention your case studies, concrete customer data, real customer stories, get quotes from experts. There are so many ways to improve the authority of generically produced AI content. Develop a database of prompts: The more you use generative AI, the more you’ll understand when and how it provides the best outputs for your specific company/situation/needs. Start saving a database of prompts that generated higher-quality outputs (closer to a final product). That’s one potential way generative AI can be used to save time and money in the long run. Base your prompt database on your specific company messaging, target audience, and the marketing channel that the content will be published on. Prioritize quality over quantity: While this can be true for many types of businesses, B2B purchases can easily grow to multi-million dollar deals over the years and involve multi-person decision making and potentially serious consequences. Only use generative AI when it truly helps your content and strategy creation. Don’t use it to spit out random content that brings no ROI. For example, don’t be the digital marketer who creates thousands of blog posts in a day with AI. This is the exact definition of SERP manipulation and you’ll come to regret it later. Fact check everything: Only use high-quality, legitimate sources that come from real industry experts. Generative AI doesn’t necessarily use such high-quality sources (in some implementations, it may even fabricate information), so this adds quite a bit of manual work, which is where I question the efficiency of working with ChatGPT-like tools the most. Lily Ray, Amsive Digital’s senior director, SEO & head of organic research, points out the lack of source citation and credibility as one of AI content’s glaring flaws : Review: 5 uses of ChatGPT in B2B SEO content creation To help you better understand how you can utilize ChatGPT for B2B SaaS and services industries, I’ve provided some examples for different B2B business and content types. These are based on complex B2B companies that my team and I have worked with throughout the years. I’ve also included a few strategy foundation elements, since I find those more useful than full-length AI content generation. Can ChatGPT create a B2B buyer journey map? ChatGPT can be a great tool for creating a buyer journey map. You’ll just need to provide sufficient information about your company and the direction you want to take your buyer map in. For this example, I wanted to create a buyer map for a company that sells IT consulting services for hospitals that don’t have their own IT platform. In the example below, I input the following prompt: Create a buyer journey map for a company that sells IT consulting services for hospitals that don’t have their own IT platform. While this is not the worst output, it omits buyer committee involvement (the group of decision makers involved in a B2B purchase). Since I based this example on a real client, I know that the IT department actually has very little involvement in the purchase decision for such services. That decision is influenced much more by the board of directors and investors. These stakeholders are also often the people who initiate the “awareness” phase above, not the IT department. Similar to my advice in the previous section, don’t just take what the AI spits out at face value. Spend time doing your own customer research to better understand the buyer journey, especially in B2B, as there are often larger buyer committees and many different steps involved. Can ChatGPT conduct B2B SEO keyword research? I also wanted to see how well ChatGPT performs B2B SEO keyword research. For this example, I wanted to create a list of keywords for a company that sells a platform for media publishers and financial services providers to increase customer retention via gamification. I input the following prompt: List keyword ideas for a company that sells a platform for media publishers and financial services to increase customer retention with gamification. Unfortunately, this list is quite terrible and doesn’t match search intent at all. In fact, it talks about a bunch of topics that aren’t even relevant for this company. So, I tried again with a more detailed prompt: List long tail keyword ideas for a company that sells a platform for media publishers and financial services to increase customer retention with gamification. You can see that this prompt resulted in much better search terms. They actually relate to what the company does and how it can educate its audience about the product. However, there are two problems here: 01. When I ask ChatGPT to provide search volume and search difficulty for the keywords, I get the following response: 02. While most of these terms do have a much better search intent match, the majority of them don’t have search volume, potentially making any SEO efforts to target them largely pointless. The conclusion: ChatGPT will never be able to replace SEO tools or a human SEO strategist. True SEO success comes from targeting search intent-match keywords with search volume which—as it says itself (above)—ChatGPT is incapable of doing. Can ChatGPT create a B2B product listing page? Okay, so how about writing an SEO product page? Can ChatGPT do that well? For this example, I tried to create a product listing page for a company that sells software that simulates traffic to help city governments plan infrastructure projects. I entered the following prompt: Write a 500-word product page targeting the keyword “traffic simulation software” for a company that sells a traffic simulation software that helps city governments plan infrastructure projects. This one is honestly awful—probably one of the worst outputs I’ve seen for B2B content. This type of content would need a full outline prompt in order to be even remotely viable. Some other issues with the content include: Lack of headers that target focus keywords Very difficult readability CTA placement is only at the end Lack of conversion landing page or on-page optimization best practices No B2B trust builders (like case studies, data, or cited sources) There is potential to improve the output over time by experimenting with prompts, however from my perspective, this company is likely to be much more successful by sticking with human writers. Just don’t even bother with AI here. Can ChatGPT write a B2B SEO blog post? For this example, I wanted to see if writing a blog post was possible for a business that provides high-quality prototyping, rapid tooling, and low-volume manufacturing services to support other companies’ product development needs. For this, I entered the following prompt: A company provides high-quality prototyping, rapid tooling, and low-volume manufacturing services to support other companies’ product development needs. Write a 1000-word blog post targeting the focus keyword “plastic injection molding” that explains the topic ‘Color Consistency in Plastic Injection Molding’. This output was so bad that only a snippet is worth showing. From what I can tell from the examples above, generative AI is not effective for long-form, technical B2B content. This particular example also needs a full outline prompt to produce any meaningful content in a way that’s both optimized for search engines and contains correct technical information. Its weaknesses are the same as the above product listing page example, which include: Lack of headers that target focus keywords Very difficult readability CTA placement is only at the end Lack of SEO best practices for blog posts No B2B trust builders (e.g., case studies, data, or cited sources) Lack of word variety makes it clear that the content was generated by an AI (it sounds spammy and untrustworthy) You could spend time testing prompts and seeing if the output improves, but in my opinion, this company is also likely to be much more successful sticking with human writers— particularly those that are technical SMEs. Can ChatGPT write a B2B case study? Finally, let’s see how ChatGPT performs when you need to create a B2B SaaS case study. For this example, I used a company that provides a micro learning platform to help HR teams upskill company employees. For the prompt, I entered the following: Write a 500-word case study about Company X, a client of a company that provides a micro learning platform to help HR teams upskill company employees. While adapting to a hybrid work environment, it became clear that Company X employees didn't feel like they had time for longer-form, desktop-oriented learning content. To grow engagement and create a learning culture at all levels of the organization, Company X needed to integrate bite-sized learning that accommodated different learning styles. I think that this response could have been a lot better if I had provided a full outline, but this outline probably shouldn’t be created by AI. A human B2B digital marketing strategist would already need to compile the data, organize the flow, insert client testimonials, etc. Again, I would say that this company would benefit more from human writers, because integrating AI into a process that so heavily depends on true customer stories and real data would just add more time to edit, personalize, and fact check, rendering it simply inefficient. ChatGPT is a tool, not a B2B digital marketing replacement Generative AI is taking B2B marketing by storm and it’s not going anywhere soon, but that doesn’t mean that digital marketers should hang up their coats and walk away. In reality, AI was not created to replace B2B marketing or content creation—but, with some careful oversight, it can increase your efficiency. However, if you start to rely solely on AI without fact checking or generally caring about content quality (by spitting out articles by the thousands, for example) I can guarantee that you’re going to fade into the background fast. Currently, generative AI simply isn’t able to create a strategy that actually generates revenue, nor is it capable of curating usable outputs without meticulous human input. So, if you really want to experiment with this technology, use AI tools as a way to help with brainstorming and initial ideation. Then, enhance value for your target audience and include specifics about your organization and products/services. Make sure to incorporate plenty of examples, testimonials, and case studies as well. We may be able to automate repetitive tasks with AI, but we can never take the human out of effective B2B digital marketing. Adriana Stein - CEO and Founder at AS Marketing Originally from the US and now living in Germany, Adriana Stein is the CEO and founder of the marketing agency AS Marketing . She leads a team of multi-language SEO experts who develop holistic international marketing strategies for global companies. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Adriana Stein While artificial intelligence has the potential to make you a more effective SEO or digital, using it for translation and localization in search engine optimization comes with business considerations that you need to take seriously. Website owners carrying out international SEO campaigns have a responsibility to present linguistically and legally accurate, helpful information, regardless of what country they’re in or what language they speak. And although Google has responded to how it perceives AI-generated content , AI is still limited when it comes to generating correct information. That means that when you use AI for direct translation, it’s absolutely necessary to have a human edit and fact check the output. Otherwise, you could publish content that’s not only wrong, but that gets flagged by a search engine—not to mention it won’t engage and convert customers in your international target regions. So, the question remains: Where and how does AI fit into multilingual SEO localization? As a multilingual SEO and marketing specialist myself (and someone who is currently learning my fourth language), I’ll share my perspective and concrete examples generated by AI. Table of contents: What AI is used for translation? The accuracy of AI translations Can AI translation replace human translation? Considerations for using AI tools in your multilingual SEO strategy Examples of ChatGTP for SEO localization Market-specific buyer personas Keyword localization International SEO blog post Meta description translation B2B homepage hero section translation What AI is used for translation? Nowadays, when people refer to AI for translation, they’re typically referring to generative AI technologies like ChatGPT . “ChatGPT is fine-tuned from GPT-3.5, a language model trained to produce text. ChatGPT was optimized for dialogue by using Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) – a method that uses human demonstrations and preference comparisons to guide the model toward desired behavior.” — OpenAI , the creator of ChatGPT Other generative AI tools are also available, and they work much in the same way (meaning that they are susceptible to the common pitfalls I’ll discuss later). While Google Translate now includes some AI-powered features , it’s nowhere near as flexible as a tool like ChatGPT. Nevertheless, I’ll compare ChatGPT output with Google Translate to show you how far AI has (or hasn’t) come for multilingual SEO. How accurate are AI translations? This is how Mohammad Omar , CEO of AI data management firm LXT, describes AI’s value for translations: While he describes the nuances of languages perfectly, he’s missing a crucial point: Language nuances are where a real person is needed the most because they are so highly specific. In many cases, AI tends to fail miserably because it doesn’t account for subject context and cultural relevance . If brands want to maintain linguistic and legal accuracy (the basics for successfully operating in international markets), the context, environment, tone, and intent simply can’t be copy/pasted from auto-generated text. Language is an area that’s rather “subjective,” because people say things in many different ways. Even within the same language, dialects, regional differences, slang, and other components of speech can be drastically different. As a consultant that’s translated thousands of texts from German to English (and who leads a team of translators that does the same in 30 languages), I can wholeheartedly confirm that true multilingual SEO success is never a copy/paste job. Although AI translation can generate relatively decent outputs to help get you started (more on this below), it still 100% requires human oversight. From an SEO perspective, a successful process requires that someone that is fluent in the target language and someone that understands the business review any content to ensure that the correct intent and information are carried across from language to language. To put it simply: from a multilingual SEO and content perspective, AI tools can give you a head start, but you should never solely rely on them. Can AI translation replace human translation? As more AI platforms roll out, many of us digital marketers are wondering the same thing: Will AI replace human translators in the multilingual SEO process? To bring us closer to an answer, there are a few elements to consider. Translation, localization, and content adaptation processes are context-specific and must adhere to various legal regulations: The way that product names, titles, phrases, and concepts need to be stated for one website is likely entirely different for another. For example, there are vastly different regulations across different countries surrounding medical and healthcare messaging. If you copy/paste AI outputs here, you could end up a quick step away from a lawsuit. The generalization and lack of personality behind basic, AI-generated translations just isn’t good enough right now: Global companies that target specific regions can’t use the same approach everywhere. If you do this, native-language SEO competitors will always beat you, because they will always engage the local audience better. Plus, this could get you in trouble with Google. Using 100% AI-generated content still poses a risk for manual penalties , largely due to the question of quality, accuracy, or potential search engine ranking manipulation. Churning out thousands of AI-generated blog articles daily—regardless of the language—will negatively pique Google’s interest. Google expects content to demonstrate E-E-A-T : In the case of AI translations, it’s extremely important to maintain that first “E” (which stands for “experience”) in E-E-A-T by injecting actual human experience into the output. This consideration takes on another level of complexity when it involves a different language. When it comes to SEO content localization, this is always a must because one region’s audience is vastly different from another. Let’s also consider this from the view of large language models (LLMs), the process used in ChatGTP for translation. Here’s an abstract from “ Dissociating language and thought in large language models: a cognitive perspective ,” an academic paper by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, MIT, and UCLA: “Today’s large language models (LLMs) routinely generate coherent, grammatical and seemingly meaningful paragraphs of text. This achievement has led to speculation that these networks are—or will soon become—‘thinking machines’, capable of performing tasks that require abstract knowledge and reasoning. Here, we review the capabilities of LLMs by considering their performance on two different aspects of language use: ‘formal linguistic competence’, which includes knowledge of rules and patterns of a given language, and ‘functional linguistic competence’, a host of cognitive abilities required for language understanding and use in the real world. Drawing on evidence from cognitive neuroscience, we show that formal competence in humans relies on specialized language processing mechanisms, whereas functional competence recruits multiple extralinguistic capacities that comprise human thought, such as formal reasoning, world knowledge, situation modeling, and social cognition. In line with this distinction, LLMs show impressive (although imperfect) performance on tasks requiring formal linguistic competence, but fail on many tests requiring functional competence.” — Mahowald et al. (2023) What is highlighted here is precisely the limitations I described earlier: AI doesn’t understand specific linguistic contexts like a human can. With the concept of “formal competence,” we humans create stems from language processing mechanisms that are deep within our brain and built on years of experience. While AI can mimic and summarize our human experiences, it’s not the same as an actual person. So, will AI replace human translators and multilingual SEO strategists? Not even close. Considerations for using AI tools in your multilingual SEO strategy I’m not saying that you should avoid AI completely—it could be quite useful for certain types of tasks. A lot depends on the complexity of your business and your particular role within the company. In the end, it’s up to you to decide whether AI helps or hinders your efforts. If you do want to try to use AI to help with your multilingual SEO strategy, you need to use it strategically. From my experience, some of the biggest takeaways include: Fact-check everything: AI tools often summarize sources without verifying whether they’re actually trustworthy or accurate. Instead, do your own research and fact check any AI outputs, regardless of whether they’re translated or in a single language. Steer away from “set it and forget it” mass translation: Solely relying on AI outputs and copy/pasting them across your website is bound to be harmful over the long run. Any content directly translated by AI needs to be manually reviewed by a human digital marketing strategist for brand messaging , product information, and legal accuracy, as well as reviewed by a fluent speaker for language accuracy. Focus on SEO localization: SEO localization needs to happen during keyword research in order for multilingual SEO to be truly successful. AI can’t handle SEO localization, so translators and SEO strategists still need to be intimately involved in reviewing outputs. Do your own audience and market research: Again, AI summarizes information—often without context. The majority of digital marketers recognize the value of talking to real customers and understanding their experiences—it’s a crucial element of business success. Priel Manes, founder of Two Dots Consulting and business growth strategist for 350+ companies, emphasizes the importance of deeply understanding customer needs : So even if AI is in your tech stack, don’t let it fully replace your SEO strategists and translators—they remain essential for successful international SEO and digital marketing. Examples of ChatGPT for multilingual SEO localization To help you determine whether or not generative AI is useful for your situation, I’ve put together five examples demonstrating how ChatGPT could be used for multilingual SEO. Market-specific buyer personas Here, I wanted to see if ChatGPT could create market-specific buyer personas for a CRM (customer relationship management) company that’s based in the US, but wants to expand into Germany. I entered following prompt into the platform: Summarize buyer personas for a CRM company based in the US that wants to expand into Germany. List customer pain points, buying obstacles, and topics of importance in the German market surrounding data, lead generation, and marketing automation The output is decently accurate, but I know this because of my own experience (I’m from the US and have been living in Germany for the better part of a decade). Many companies outside of Germany don’t realize the importance of GDPR or how it affects brand messaging on a website in Germany. It’s also absolutely true that businesses must offer German language sales and customer service to be successful in the German market, so at least ChatGTP caught that. Nevertheless, the information is still basic and only a starting point. The potential I see here is that the output could be used to formulate appropriate customer research questions for a business that is entirely new to the market (but it definitely doesn’t fully replace doing your own in-depth customer research ). If I was using ChatGPT for a market I was unfamiliar with, I’d still 100% check with a local market representative to understand if what’s listed is correct. Never accept what ChatGPT gives you at face value, because the risk of misinformation is simply too high to ignore. Keyword localization Next, I wanted to see how ChatGTP handles SEO keyword localization for a heated tobacco company that’s based in the UK and wants to expand into Italy. I entered the following prompt: Localize the following English keywords into Italian and list the search volume (the English keywords were listed) The results were a direct translation, which isn’t the same as keyword localization. While this can be helpful as a starting point, Google Translate has long provided the same level of usefulness. For multilingual SEO to work, you need to identify search intent match keywords with search volume , which (in many cases) aren’t direct translations. ChatGPT isn’t capable of providing search volume either, so you’d still need to look that up manually, meaning that this use of AI is absolutely not a replacement for an SEO tool. In this context, I don’t really find AI useful at all, as both a human SEO strategist and SEO tools are still required. International SEO blog post Next, I wanted to see how well ChatGPT could write an SEO blog article for a contract management software company that’s based in the US, but has target audiences in France and Germany. I used the following prompt: Translate this blog article to French https://conga.com/resources/blog/5-reasons-why-your-business-needs-automated-contract-renewal-strategy My notes for this are similar to the above: it’s about as useful as Google Translate. ChatGPT removed internal links and missed some parts of the web page. So, in that regard, the output is actually even worse than doing your own copy/paste translation with Google Translate. While it seems like this could be relatively useful for easy topics, the output should still be manually proofread by a native speaker SEO strategist that understands the particular target market, target audience, and product nuances. However, the original blog didn’t adhere to SEO best practices , so if the original content were of better quality, the translation output might also improve. Meta description translation Another SEO task I wanted to test was to create meta description translations for the same contract management software company that’s based in the US but has target audiences in France and Germany (referred to in the example above). I entered the following prompt into ChatGTP: Translate the following German meta descriptions to English in the form of a table. Yet again, it translates the same as Google Translate, so I’m not really sure that it saves any time from what automatic translators already do. The one benefit is that you can copy/paste plain text and AI adjusts the formatting into a table (when you prompt it to). Regardless, if you’re doing true SEO localization, the meta description would need to include the new target keyword to support on-page optimization (as I explained above). So, this part will still require a manual proofread from a multilingual SEO strategist who has already identified the relevant keywords. B2B homepage hero section translation For my last attempt at using AI for multilingual translation, I tried translating a B2B homepage hero section for the same CRM company that’s based in the US and wants to expand into Germany and France. I entered the following prompt: Translate to German with 5 variations The World’s Most Loved CRM Platform​ With a commitment to creating customers for life, X Brand ranks as a Champion CRM platform two years in a row for the only people that matter—CRM users. ​ It’s time to let the platform do the work. I found the translation very basic, but the variations could be useful for localization. Many homepages go through iterations with copy variations, so this could be beneficial for A/B testing . However, as always, a native speaker marketing strategist (that understands the focus market, target audience, and product nuances) should proofread the output. AI is a translation and localization tool, not a human replacement Languages are one of the most subjective and abstract concepts in existence, so it’s hard to imagine AI being able to come anywhere close to human experiential understanding. With the various nuances that come from localizing one language to another, topped with the layer of SEO and a unique business strategy, humans will still be the ones driving your marketing (at least for the foreseeable future). However, I predict that many companies will perceive AI knowledge as an efficient skillset (regardless of whether it’s actually used in practice). So, regardless of how you view it, learning how to work with AI is a must to remain in the game. Adriana Stein - CEO and Founder at AS Marketing Originally from the US and now living in Germany, Adriana Stein is the CEO and founder of the marketing agency AS Marketing . She leads a team of multi-language SEO experts who develop holistic international marketing strategies for global companies. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Crystal Carter In technical SEO , validating structured data markup (also known as schema markup) is the process of testing and confirming that your structured data can be read (or “parsed”) by search engine crawlers and bots. If the code is valid then it is “parsable,” and if it’s not valid, then it is “non-parsable.” It is important to validate your structured data markup because parsable markup on your website can help your business enjoy the many benefits of structured data, including Google rich results and better semantic entity recognition for your content. On the other hand, non-parsable structured data can trigger errors in Google Search Console , prevent rich results from showing, and potentially reduce your visibility in the SERP . So, whether it’s for new or existing content, validating your structured data should be an important part of your SEO workflow. Table of contents: How to validate structured data Understanding and resolving errors in a structured data validator Parsing errors Warnings Errors Tools to validate structured data Tools to validate structured data at scale How do you validate structured data? To validate your structured data markup, use a tool to test the code for parsability, identify errors, and verify that the code can be read by machines. Ideally, this should be carried out before you add any code to a live web page, but validators can also be an important tool to find and fix errors on existing pages. You can use structured data markup validator tools to test: The code snippet (independent of the page) by extracting the markup and testing the code itself. You’ll typically test the code if you created your markup using a structured data generator or have access to the original code. The benefit of this tool is that you can see the code in a clear, uncluttered way, making it easy to find and fix errors on a single section of your markup. The URL , which includes the structured data. For this purpose it should be a live URL, but does not need to be indexed. When you are validating a whole page, you may see multiple types of structured data markup at the same time if you have structured data present in the , , and/or of your HTML. The benefit of this approach is that your page is likely to be crawled by the testing tool. This means that if you have included any URL based node identifiers, then the tool will be able to extract the schema from those pages and show it in the test result. In my experience, it pays to use more than one validator to confirm that your schema is parsable. Different tools will have different configurations and priorities (for instance, some check primarily for rich results and will ignore other markup), so getting a second opinion makes it more likely that everything will be in working order. What do the errors mean in a structured data validator? When validating your code, here are some examples of warnings and errors that you may come across: Parsing errors Warnings Errors What is a “Parsing error” in schema? Parsing errors occur when schema validator tools cannot read your schema markup. Consequently, if you have a parsing error when you input your URL or code into a validator tool, you may not see any schema markup declared. This doesn’t mean that the code isn’t there, but it does likely mean that there is a syntax error or that the code has been added to the page incorrectly. It is important to validate that your code is parsable because unparsable structured data is not machine-readable—it is also not eligible for rich results. In cases where there is more than one set of structured data on a page, search engines may be able to parse some of the code but not all of it. In these cases, you will need to update and revalidate that section that is broken, taking care not to compromise the other code. In the example below, the validator on the SEO Pro Extension shows a message reading “No Structured Data found” when the code cannot be parsed. Alternatively, you may see a note for an “Uncategorised Error,” as in this example from Schema.org . In this case, we see that the markup has an extra comma and the validator highlights the line of code that is incorrect with an X. Common syntax mistakes that can prevent your schema from being machine readable include: Missing or unbalanced commas, [], {}, or () Using curly “” instead of straight "" quotation marks Using straight quotation marks in the content of the schema so that it breaks the string. How do you fix a parsing error in your JSON-LD schema markup? If the error is in the code, you will need to find which part of the code is incorrectly written and update the code with the correct syntax. What are “Warnings” in structured data validation? If you see a yellow warning for “Non-critical issues detected” in the Rich Results Testing tool (RRTT) or Google Search Console, this does not mean that your schema is unreadable. This is because these alerts typically show in Google tools when you omit a recommended schema property or type, rather than a required schema property. But, these “nice-to-have” recommendations are general guidelines and may or may not accurately reflect your content. Google’s documentation explains that accuracy is key: “In general, defining more recommended features can make it more likely that your information can appear in Search results with enhanced display. However, it is more important to supply fewer but complete and accurate recommended properties rather than trying to provide every possible recommended property with less complete, badly-formed, or inaccurate data.” — Google So, while you should certainly review these warnings, you should do so with the understanding that they may or may not apply to your current content. If the recommendations do not apply to your content, then you can ignore them and still be eligible for rich results. Examples of how to resolve structured data validation warnings Here are a few potential ways you can respond to structured data validation warnings: Update your schema if you have content on the page that could address the warning, or change your code to be more accurate. Plan to improve your page or adjust your strategy if you could eventually add content to your page or site that matches the field. Ignore the warning if you do not have content that matches the field and don’t plan to create any. If you see a warning for your product listing pages, review the Google Merchant listing structured data requirements . The requirements for Google Merchant Center are slightly different from the requirements for product snippets. Some product types, like clothing, have unique requirements, so review the required fields for your product type and include the relevant attributes in your markup. To illustrate what I mean, here are a few assessment scenarios: Warning on video schema without “contentURL” or “embedURL” when there is a video URL In this example, the warning suggests that the “VideoObject” schema markup doesn’t declare a “contentURL” or “embedURL.” Since the video has either: 1) a URL for where the content is hosted on the site, or 2) an embed link, you can fix this warning by updating the schema and reinspecting the page. The code includes a property that is not related to the schema type If you include a property that is not related to the schema type, you may see a warning that looks like this: In this case, where we have an author property added to restaurant schema, the easiest way to fix this is to delete the author property because it is nonsensical to assume that a restaurant has an author. But when I create schema, I sometimes see this warning for information that’s relevant. When this happens, you can visit the page for the Schema.org type , find a more relevant property and update your code with the best property for the page. For instance, in this case, I have changed the code to indicate that Bryant Terry is the founder of the restaurant (not the author). Product listing pages with warnings for “review” schema when the site has no reviews Product schema often includes warnings recommending that you add information like “review” and “aggregateRatings” into the schema. This is here because (generally speaking) reviews have the potential to offer great value to product listing pages for users and search engines. So, this warning is a general recommendation for product reviews. However, if you do not have reviews or ratings for this particular product, there is no current requirement to add them to your schema. Though you will still be eligible for rich results without these fields, you should review this recommendation for possible updates in the future. “Often warnings are a signal of future requirements,” said SEO consultant Jeannie Hill , “These schema warnings are a fantastic chance to give a business a competitive lead.” Blog pages with warnings for missing author “url” when there is no author page URL In this example from real BlogPosting markup on a blog article, there is a non-critical issue for Missing field "url" (optional) . When I reviewed this warning, the most important thing I looked for was whether the website actually had an author page with a URL. If it had an author page, then adding the URL here could improve the demonstrable E-E-A-T for the page and site overall. But in this case, the blog did not have an author page, so we initially ignored this warning and planned to start incorporating linkable author pages into the SEO strategy for the site. If you follow this workflow, you can update the BlogPosting schema when the author page URLs are live. What are “Errors” in structured data validation? General errors can be identified via structured data validation and they should be addressed immediately. In a non-Google validator, you may see errors that mean that your content cannot be read properly by machines. In Google’s validators (i.e., GSC and RRTT) the errors may be directly related to Google’s requirements for rich results eligibility. It is therefore possible to be error-free on a tool like validator.schema.org but also generate warnings on Google Search Console. Consequently, it’s very important to ensure that your code is valid across multiple validators. To illustrate what I mean, here are examples of when an error might occur in structured data validation: Using a schema type or property that is not a defined type Within Schema.org ’s vocabulary, there are over 1,000 schema types and properties. But when you write schema, you can only use types and properties that are referenced in this documentation. If you misspell or mistype a name for a property or type, you will get an error. The code is missing the required properties or types for Google’s rich results. Google’s documentation explains that certain aspects of the structured data are required in order to be eligible for rich results. In the example below, this web page is not displaying price information for their product within their structured data. This means that even though the markup is technically valid (i.e., would show as valid on validator.schema.org ) it still doesn’t meet Google’s specifications, triggering an error in Google Search Console. Fixing these errors can help to improve your SEO quickly, so it is worth investing time here. Which tools can you use to validate structured data? Whether you are carrying out a technical SEO audit or reviewing the SEO on a single page, you will need to use tools to test if your structured data is machine readable. The following tools can help you to validate, troubleshoot, and optimize the structured data on a single page or on your website at large. Validator.schema.org Created by Schema.org (which manages the schema vocabulary), this tool replaced Google’s structure data testing tool in 2020 and can help you troubleshoot syntax issues and parsing problems. Validator.schema.org allows you to test your schema markup via URL or using a code snippet. ChatGPT ChatGPT is also a reliable tool for troubleshooting errors in your structured data. If I notice an error and I am having difficulty identifying which part of the syntax is causing the problem, sometimes I can run it through ChatGPT to find the issue. I tend not to use ChatGPT for creating and validating code because if you are not careful with your prompts, then it will output code that is not valid and adds additional irrelevant information into your fields. So if you’re using a generative AI tool for schema review, always be sure to get a second opinion. Test.schema.dev Test.schema.dev is a free schema validation tool and has the added bonus of being able to prettify your schema. This makes it easier to see which lines in the code have issues or can be amended. Additionally, this validator is particularly strict with what is and is not allowed. When testing code, I have occasionally seen markup that showed as valid in validator.schema.org, but did not show as valid here. This can be an important tool in making sure that your code is robust and readable on multiple devices. Rich Results Testing tool The Rich Results Testing tool (RRTT) is a validator from Google that tells you if the schema on your page is valid and eligible for rich results. If you test your page or your code with this tool, you may not see all of the schema elements reflected in the testing output. That is because this tool specifically focuses on schema that generates rich results on Google. If you have a page that includes schema that does not trigger rich results, you may not see that schema in the RRTT. If the page includes structured data that has a combination of rich result-eligible schema markup and general schema markup, the RRTT may only validate the schema that is eligible for rich results. In the example below, the URL includes AboutPage structured data but the only structured data that the RRTT recognizes is the rich results-eligible FAQ. SEO Pro Extension SEO Pro Extension’s Schema panel gives you a snapshot of the valid schema that is present when your page loads. Since it’s a browser extension and doesn’t require you to leave the page, this tool is incredibly useful for a quick assessment of your content. Though you cannot manipulate the code to make corrections or adjustments, you can see the order of your schema types as they load on the page. If you added schema to your page and you do not see it displayed in the Schema panel, then there is an error in your code. Wix Advanced SEO panel Wix site owners have a built-in schema markup validator that will not allow you to submit schema markup unless your code is error-free. Accessible via the Advanced SEO panel in Wix pages , this is a tool that is incredibly helpful and allows you to mitigate mistakes before they happen. “We know writing structured data code may be a bit complex at times, so to make sure users don’t add broken and non-functional code to their site, we added validations to make sure there are no errors,” Einat Hoobian-Seybold , SEO product lead at Wix, said about the Wix structured data validator, adding, “If a Wix user has an error in the syntax, they will be notified about it before they push it live” Wix Velo In Velo , the Wix JavaScript Framework, you can also create schema markup using the Wix SEO API. Here, you can create variables based on visual elements on the page and add dynamic markup to your pages. Within this framework, you have a structured data markup validator that will trigger an error message if your code is incorrectly parsing and will suggest how you can improve your code. Single page validator URL inspection Code block inspection All schema Rich results validation Code editor panel Validator.schema.org Supported Supported Supported Not supported Yes ​ ChatGPT N/A Supported N/A N/A No ​ Test.schema.dev Supported Supported (freemium) Supported Not supported Yes Rich Results Testing tool Supported Supported Not supported Supported Yes SEO Pro Extension Supported Not supported Supported Not supported No Wix SEO tools N/A Supported N/A N/A Yes Wix Velo N/A Supported N/A N/A Yes GSC URL Inspection Supported Supported Not supported Some rich results No Tools to validate structured data in bulk While single-page assessments are valuable, bulk validation of websites or website folders can help you identify systemic issues in your schema markup. When you have content that uses the same schema template (such as a collection of recipes, for example) it is possible to have the same error repeat on multiple pages. Google Search Console Google Search Console Enhancements reports can show you which pages have valid schema markup and which pages are invalid. They also show warnings or errors for structured data that is eligible for the rich results that are included in these reports. For the purposes of SEO and general search visibility, this report is extremely important and any errors here should be resolved as quickly as possible. Brenda Malone , SEO technical strategist at NP Digital, carries out regular GSC audits and explains that structured data is an integral part of the process: “Correcting schema that is ‘on-error’ has made the [client’s] website eligible for rich snippets again,” she said, adding that these tasks are “crucial to maintaining the advantages that good, connected, properly-implemented schema provides.” It is important to remember that Google’s rich results reports do not include all of the structured data that is eligible for rich results. For instance, BlogPosting and LocalBusiness structured data markup are eligible for rich results and are present on the rich results gallery, however there is no dedicated rich results report for these structured data types in Google Search Console. In the past, I worked with teams that worried that since they do not see LocalBusiness results in Google Search Console, that the code is not valid, but this should be assessed separately with another tool. Screaming Frog With Screaming Frog , you can configure your web crawl to show which schema markup is valid across each of your web pages. This can allow you to identify gaps in your structured data markup and to audit your content at scale. For instance, in the example output below, you can see there are warnings for one of the pages. You can use Screaming Frog to generate a report and give recommendations for how to fix the issue. Semrush Markup Report The Semrush Markup report gives you information on which pages you have with: Valid structured data for Google rich results, and Valid Schema.org structured data. Wix GSC Site Inspection Using data from the Google Search Console API, you can carry out a bulk inspection of your Wix website with the Wix Site Inspection tool . Within the full report you can filter your results to show valid rich results or issues, optional fixes, unspecified issues, or no data. As you can see in the example below, there are filters to show the pages that have valid rich results. From the bulk report, you can click on a single page to see which rich results type is valid or to address other issues. Auditing your structured data: More than a valid argument Structured data can provide a range of benefits (including greater search visibility) depending on your business and how it operates online. But, your rich results must be valid in the first place to start seeing any of those benefits. Whether you’re working with just a few web pages or thousands, there are tools available to help you turn errors into parsable structured data that enhances the content you’re already creating. Start by validating schema on your high-value pages, then keep the momentum going until every part of your customer journey is enhanced with the relevant schema to improve your audience’s experience with your brand. Crystal Carter - Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO & digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush, and more. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Nati Elimelech As the digital landscape evolves, so do our strategies and perspectives. I’ve been a long-standing proponent of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP; introduced in 2015 ), even advocating for it in lectures and client consultations during my time running an SEO agency. However, with the web becoming increasingly mobile-optimized and Google lifting AMP’s preferential treatment in its search features, I find my stance on AMP changing. I ran an informal poll on X/Twitter and realized that other SEOs were no longer recommending it either: In the next sections, I’ll explain why some SEOs are—after the better part of a decade—stepping back from AMP so that you can make the right decision for your website. Table of contents: The AMP conundrum Limited functionality due to JavaScript restrictions Design constraints due to AMP’s strict layout rules Dependency on Google for serving AMP ages Complexities in tracking user behavior Maintenance on both AMP and non-AMP versions of a page Limited ad formats (potentially affecting monetization) Google’s policy shift: The final nail in AMP’s coffin? Case study: Barry Schwartz’s experience AMP is trending downward, but it might still be valuable The AMP conundrum AMP, with its promise of faster load times, seemed like an ideal solution for the mobile web. However, it also presents significant challenges: Limited functionality due to JavaScript restrictions Design constraints due to strict layout rules Dependency on Google for serving pages Difficulties in tracking user behavior The need to maintain both AMP and non-AMP versions of a page Limited ad formats (potentially affecting monetization) These challenges highlight the complexities and trade-offs involved with using AMP. While it offers benefits in terms of speed and mobile optimization, these must be weighed against the limitations and dependencies that come with the platform. 01. Limited functionality due to JavaScript restrictions AMP restricts the use of custom JavaScript, limiting the functionality that can be implemented on a page. For example, if you want to create a unique interactive feature on your site, you might find that AMP’s JavaScript limitations prevent you from doing so. This can hinder creativity and innovation, leading to a more generic user experience (which can be the tipping factor for businesses in high-competition verticals). 02. Design constraints due to AMP’s strict layout rules AMP enforces strict layout rules to ensure fast loading times. While this can lead to quicker page loads, it also means that designers have less flexibility in creating visually appealing layouts. For instance, if you want to use a specific font or layout that doesn’t comply with AMP’s rules, you’ll have to compromise your design vision. This can make it challenging to create a distinctive and engaging visual identity for your site, impacting your overall branding efforts . 03. Dependency on Google for serving AMP ages AMP pages are often served directly from Google’s cache. While this can improve load times, it also means that you’re relying on Google to deliver your content. If there are any issues with Google’s servers or if Google changes its policies, it could affect how your pages are displayed. This dependency places a significant portion of control in the hands of a third party, which can be a risk for some businesses. 04. Complexities in tracking user behavior Tracking user behavior on AMP pages can be more complex than on regular web pages. Standard tracking tools might not work as seamlessly with AMP, requiring additional configuration or alternative solutions. For example, if you want to analyze how users interact with a specific element on your AMP page, you might find that your usual analytics tools don’t provide the insights you need. This can make it harder to understand your audience and optimize your site accordingly. 05. Maintenance on both AMP and non-AMP versions of a page If you implement AMP, you’ll often need to maintain two versions of each page: one AMP version and one regular version. This essentially doubles the work required for updates, maintenance, and quality assurance. In the context of SEO, this means that all structured data markup and other SEO tags must be present in both versions, and keeping parity between them can be challenging. For example, if you update content or fix a bug on the regular version of a page, you’ll need to make the same changes to the AMP version, including any related structured data. This can increase the time and resources needed to manage your site, making it harder to ensure consistency across both versions. 06. Limited ad formats (potentially affecting monetization) AMP places restrictions on the types of ads that can be displayed, limiting the options available to advertisers. If you rely on advertising revenue, this could impact your ability to monetize your site effectively. For instance, a specific ad format that performs well on your regular pages might not be allowed on AMP pages, leading to lower ad revenue. This constraint can be a significant consideration for sites that depend on diverse and flexible advertising options. Google’s policy shift: The final nail in AMP’s coffin? AMP’s appeal was significantly reduced when Google opened its “Top Stories” carousel to all pages meeting its page experience criteria in June 2021 . AMP’s decline (even in the eyes of Google) along with the inherent challenges mentioned above call into question its practicality in many scenarios. Case study: Barry Schwartz’s experience Barry Schwartz, a prominent figure in the SEO community, shared his experience with removing AMP from his site, Search Engine Roundtable. He reported no significant changes in overall traffic, a temporary spike in crawl rates, an increase in AMP errors, and some visibility issues in Google Discover. However, these issues were resolved and Schwartz concluded that the removal of AMP went smoothly overall. AMP is trending downward, but it might still be valuable for some websites As the web becomes more mobile-optimized, the need for a separate solution like AMP diminishes, and indeed, Google Trends data shows a declining interest in AMP over the years. You should base your decision to continue with or remove AMP on a careful evaluation of your specific circumstances. One way to assess the risk of moving away from AMP is to compare your site’s mobile performance against the AMP performance. If there isn’t a significant gap, it might be worth considering a move. However, it’s important to remember that, while performance is crucial, it’s just one signal incorporated into the page experience system/algorithm. AMP: The writing’s on the wall While AMP has played a significant role in the mobile web (and in shaping the technologies that the news industry relies on), it might be time to rethink its role in your SEO strategy. As someone who once advocated for AMP, I now find myself questioning this stance. This shift in perspective is a testament to the dynamic nature of SEO, reminding us to stay adaptable and forward-thinking in our approach. In short, let’s kill it with fire. 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

Author: Gus Pelogia Writing page titles, performing keyword research, adding hreflang tags—typically, these SEO tasks don’t get any pushback and you can start doing them straight away, leading to quick wins. But what if you want to focus on larger, more ambitious SEO projects? Perhaps a project that will take several months before it goes live (and several more months after before you can even prove impact)? Let’s talk about the steps you can take to write an accurate and effective SEO proposal to get your clients or C-suite on board with your big plans. Table of contents: Why write an SEO proposal? From idea to project validation How to write a business case for your SEO proposal Pitching your proposal as an in-house SEO Pitching your proposal to SEO clients How to measure impact Why write an SEO proposal? First of all, winning a client is different from keeping a client over the long term. There are many reasons why clients may switch to different SEO agencies , but there’s also a powerful reason behind why they renew: trust in the people doing the work. While in-house SEOs work under a different set of circumstances, that same trust is crucial if you want to achieve results that justify your salary/retainer. To keep your clients or C-suite happy and build trust, you need to show in detail what optimizations you would like to implement, how they will potentially improve the business, and get everyone involved to understand and bet on these ideas with you.  The most important part of explaining and getting your client/stakeholders on board with a large project is getting them to understand their own involvement. Often, clients hire SEO agencies and expect them to simply “do their magic.” This can work for some, but what happens when you need other stakeholders to actively work on something? Here are some examples: Stakeholder SEO project Internal subject matter experts Article review for blog Internal UX employee Design a new page type Client POC (marketing or sales) Send you a weekly report of locations that clients/customers/patients are converting from Other service suppliers (i.e., dev agency, design agency, freelance writers, etc.) Get the client to secure additional budget to hire other suppliers If you need resources from your client or C-suite, it’s crucial to discuss and reiterate deadlines, meet the other stakeholders, and make it very clear that, without their involvement, you cannot deliver what the business needs.  Understanding their role will allow them to secure the resources required, even if it’s as simple as a weekly file export or as complex as meeting other suppliers and creating a new workflow from scratch. From idea to project validation It’s easy to fall in love with an idea—it happens to me every other day. SEOs are always learning and trying to figure out what is “working” right now and Google is always rolling out new updates or features—a new featured snippet, a new speed metric, a new acronym. Some of these new SEO considerations can have a huge impact, but others might just end up being “nice to have.” Do you need all your pages to have a “Good” INP score ? Do you need to nest every structured data field? Since I started working as an SEO product manager, I’ve changed my approach on SEO from “ticking all boxes” to “prioritize what I can prove will have an impact.” It’s not a matter of not executing certain work, but instead choosing your priorities, because we don’t have unlimited time or resources. This alone takes a lot of tasks out of consideration.  Let’s say, for example, you want to create an internal linking  project for an eCommerce marketplace. You found a way to link related categories and display links to pages that fall under certain criteria (e.g., most popular this month, certain search volume , on sale, etc). Your proposal involves lots of high-value pages and you believe it can improve business metrics, so you’re all in. However, if this feature just works on blog pages, you might not have a large impact on the business. Traffic may increase, but that alone usually doesn’t pay the bills. If you have a small number of 404 pages , unless those pages earned external backlinks or users are reaching them often, fixing them won’t have a direct SEO impact. Sure, you don’t want users to have a poor experience, but you can’t come back to your client/boss and justify a month’s work by fixing 404s in deep pages and hoping that it’ll lead to more sales. You might agree or disagree with me on the importance of those tasks, and that’s okay. The mindset I want to share here is:  How can you validate the success of your project? What metric do you expect to improve by doing this activity? Do you see yourself and the client understanding the impact of this project three, six months down the road? Here are some easy examples: Optimization & expected outcome Associated metric By adding this structured data, I expect to increase CTR to [page type].  CTR increase By blocking [Bingbot], I expect to be removed from [Bing Chat].  Pages removed By creating an HTML sitemap, I expect [pages] to get indexed quicker.  Indexing speed By redirecting these broken links, I expect to gain [50] backlinks to [page type]. Number of backlinks Over time, you start realizing that some optimizations are simply nice to have, but you won’t be able to pinpoint an impact (SEO or business-wise) and since these tasks can’t be validated, they will naturally be a smaller priority. How to write a business case for your SEO proposal You can and should find potential pitfalls before your clients do. When I started writing business cases (before bringing an SEO proposal forward) was when I started distinguishing whether certain ideas could get validated and actually had a strong chance of bringing in ROI…or whether I just fell in love with an idea (that actually didn’t have potential). My business cases have images but are written in a word document (Google Docs or Microsoft Word), not slides. You might need slides to pitch this in a room full of people, but I personally only fully understand and get confident about my idea once I have a long-from document. Why not also share this ahead of the meeting with your stakeholders, so they are prepared when they meet you, instead of trying to understand everything with you looking at them? For your business case, you can use Wix’s SEO agency project proposal template  or this detailed business case example  that I created. Below is a shorter version of the latter, in which I pitch to create “near” pages for a hotel chain: Background Provide background and set the scene for your pitch. Explain the problem you have, how this would be a solution, and the issues with taking a simpler route or keeping things the way they are now. Example: Hotels have huge competition from Online Travel Agencies (OTAs; e.g., Booking.com , Tripadvisor, etc). While your main target keywords are wide terms such as hotels in [city], the bigger the city, the more search results are dominated by OTAs. Opportunity How big is the opportunity? What page types are covered? How many sessions, impressions, or sales can be earned? Example: Although OTAs own the organic results, you can still rank on Google Maps and in the local pack. We believe that Google could display your hotel in these spaces if you have a page targeting specific nearby attractions (e.g., hotels near [attraction]) and got reviews  from guests mentioning the nearby attractions (Note: this is a hypothesis, not a guarantee). Technical debt This is an overall view of optimizations to be implemented. These should be double-checked by the teams/people who are executing them to make sure they're relevant and representative of their work (also a great chance to get them up to date and build excitement). I tend to keep this top level, not adding every single task, because that might add noise, especially developer tasks (not being read by developers). Example: SEO: Keyword research to map opportunities Creative: Take photos of the hotel and nearby attractions UX: Design new page template Dev: Code new page template created by UX Sales: Offer a special package for guests going to the attraction Receptionist: Remind guests to leave a review when they check out Minimum viable product (MVP) The smallest possible version of this project, required just to test impact, before a full release. Example: Five attractions (Client needs to decide which ones align with their goals) Three unique photos per page (Client needs to hire a photographer) Timeline Expected milestones for various parts of the project. This keeps the project top-of-mind for stakeholders and shows progress. Example: Page prototype to be presented by [date] and approved by [date] Page content to be written by [date] Release pages by [date] Measure early impact in [30 days] Measure final impact in [90 days] Decide if expansion to [50] more pages is worthwhile Estimated impact The metrics you’ll use to measure the success of this project. You can have SEO metrics in the early stages (indexation, rankings) but ultimately, you need to tie this to business metrics (bookings, leads, sales). Example: Increase Google Business Profile (GBP)  impressions by [%] Increase GBP booking by [%] Generate [XX] bookings to special packages related to attractions I find it more advantageous to write out and refine my business cases instead of creating slides—you can do either or both, as long as there’s an opportunity for your client or manager(s) to give feedback on your proposal. Pitching your proposal as an in-house SEO In-house SEOs have some great advantages when it comes to obtaining support from other teams. You’re more aware of the people available, their skills, and competing projects (from SEO and other departments), so the pitch is more about who can work on it and when. I recommend that you meet with stakeholders (one on one, if possible). Sit down with the decision makers in design, UX, product, content, and other departments to show them your idea and to hear their opinions, questions, criticism, and potential integrations. And, highlight what those teams stand to gain from your initiative so that expectations are aligned. Working for a global enterprise, I noticed it’s much easier to sell a project when everyone gets some impact instead of just doing something for “SEO reasons”:  Can you identify pages using a common taxonomy or tags and use this to display related products to buyers, but also to improve internal linking? How about the classic case that faster-loading pages are good for users, even though we’re aiming to get a “Good” score from Google? Can you create a top menu or footer that points to your high-conversion pages, but is also the most common destination a user wants to navigate to once they’re on your website? If you can cover several needs with one project, you’re saving the business money and building a stronger proposal. Pitching your proposal to SEO clients Now that I have the experience of working in-house, when I look back on my agency years, I realize that I didn’t have as much context as I assumed about my clients’ needs and issues. They won’t always have time to give you every detail about why something is not a priority or can’t be done. Having worked on both sides, I learned to work with the resources available to me: Does the client care about being in the press? You can consider digital PR campaigns. Do you want to implement structured data but don’t have access to the back end? Use Google Tag Manager. Try to understand if they have a developer you can rely on and what resources they can commit to your SEO proposal. Half-day per week for three months? Great, here are the five things we’re going to implement over this period.  Each SEO will have their own strategy, but I find it best to start small (you can call it an MVP, minimum viable product), implement a few things to show that all these tags, links, response codes, and JavaScript can actually bring business through the door, before you ask for more. Once the small projects start showing results (remember, each project should have an execution, estimated impact, and measuring plan), then you grow to bigger ones. Do you want a new CMS feature? Need to give different directives to different bots? Do you want to run six months of link building campaigns ?  For all of those potential projects, go back to the business case chapter to check if your SEO proposal is comprehensive.  How to measure impact I know it can be hard to measure SEO impact given so many factors that can affect the SERP— algorithm updates , new competitor pages, seasonality, external events, and then finally the SEO changes you implemented. Although it’s hard to pinpoint, you can still look for ways to isolate changes to evaluate impact, even if it’s directional. Consider our hotel example above in the business case section :  Can we measure if the new attractions-related pages started ranking? Did the hotel start showing up in the local pack after the change? It’s essential to plan how you intend to track impact. Discuss with your team or client and agree on which metrics and/or data you’ll assess and stick to these metrics during your analysis period. I learned the hard way, but you don’t need to: start tracking everything and take screenshots ahead of time, so you can show a before and after. Organize them in a folder and name your files appropriately. If possible, I recommend testing first on your personal website. For instance, when I started trying to get a knowledge panel , I first did it for my own name. This way, I could come to my manager and show a great example first—and then get the buy-in to spend time building one for my company. I learned how to execute first, nearly risk-free and without the pressure—if I failed, no one would even know. Even failing would tell me that something doesn’t work, which would allow me to move on to other tasks and strategies. If you want to get serious about measuring impact at scale, I highly recommend SEO A/B testing . There are a few tools available that help with this, such as SearchPilot and SplitSignal, but you can also try doing it yourself for free. Giulia Panozzo wrote a great causal impact guide  for Women in Tech SEO, where she explains step-by-step how to set up SEO A/B tests using free tools. I use a similar methodology and this removed a lot of guesswork, while supporting my current and future initiatives. I do think about SEO differently since I started doing SEO A/B tests. Be aware that not every test will be positive or reliable. Framing these as experiments is very important because you can take some of the pressure off and, even if something doesn’t go according to the plan, you tick an experiment off of the opportunity list and can move on to the next. To avoid getting disheartened by a test that didn’t have a positive outcome, I try to always have a few tests going at the same (ideally, to different pages), so even if something didn’t work, something else does. Lastly, I recommend you reflect on what went wrong: Can you still reframe a test? Let’s say if you added a lot of internal links with commercial anchor text but saw no uplift. Can you run this again using anchors and pages that have lower competition? Can you add more internal links to these pages? Did you give enough time for Google to recrawl all pages? The point is: don’t give up on the first negative result. Create a winning SEO proposal and focus on continuous improvements SEO is rarely a case of implementing and leaving. We’re always chasing more links, monitoring indexed pages, working to maintain a “Good” page speed score, optimizing content, and so on. But, there has to be a method to the madness if you want to keep your C-suite happy or maintain profitable client relationships. Proving the impact of specific changes in SEO isn’t always easy, so if you find something that works well for a website, keep trying to improve further. A lot of initiatives I work on as an SEO product manager happen on the back of a previous test, an MVP, or a test done in one locale that’s expanding to others. Whether you’re working to get a new client or to keep a delighted one, building SEO proposals can help you do more with less, build trust, and secure more resources (and budget) to grow with them! Gus Pelogia - SEO Product Manager Gus Pelogia is a journalist turned SEO since 2012. He’s currently an SEO product manager at Indeed, the top job site in the world. Every day, he writes tickets for small and large initiatives and works in a cross-functional team with writers, UX, engineers, and product managers. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Duane Brown As a marketer or business owner, you need to get the most return on investment as possible from the platforms and tools you use. If Google Ads is one of those platforms, you might wonder how you can get your budget to go further (after all, who has an unlimited ads budget?). Sharing your first-party data—the data you already have from your customers—with Google Ads can enable you to do just that. With Wix’s Zapier integration, you can automate data sharing with Google Ads to not only improve your audience lists and conversions, but also free up more time to focus on other strategic aspects of your business.  Let’s get started. Table of contents: Why you should share your first-party data with Google Ads Tools to automate ad management and optimization The customer data you’ll send to Google Ads How to use Zapier to automate data sharing between Wix and Google Ads Getting started Ways to use Wix customer data and Google Ads together Why you should share your first-party data with Google Ads Feeding customer data to Google Ads helps you guide the machine learning algorithms that power your campaigns. The more data Google Ads has about what resonates with your customers, the more efficiently it can run your campaign, which can translate to higher ROI and decreased costs. Plus you’ll be less stressed, which is already a huge bonus. First-party data is your life preserver as Google deprecates third-party cookies  As Google gets ready to remove third-party cookies  from its Chrome browser, more businesses are starting to pay attention to their first-party data (the data you own related to customers that have made a purchase on your website). This is because Google’s changes don’t affect your first-party data. What’s more, the privacy changes baked into Apple’s iOS 14.5 update  showed many marketers and business owners how valuable all that first-party data could be in this new privacy landscape.  So, how can you leverage your first-party data? How first-party data fuels better ad campaigns The big reason you want to get your customer data into Google Ads is to help Google’s AI learn more about your customers. Google can only optimize your campaigns when it has accurate data. So, the more data you can feed Google’s AI, the better your ads will potentially perform.  Now, just because you feed Google this data doesn’t mean your campaigns will magically improve. You still need to build the right campaigns and manage them correctly. If you’re already on top of this and you do share your customer data with Google Ads, then you are going to enable your campaigns to work even better.  Also, when it comes to optimizing your Ads account, keep in mind that Google only looks at data over the last 30 days . So keeping your data fresh in Google Ads is another reason to do this (in addition to the time saved by automating this task).  Next, let’s look at some tools you can use to automate various aspects of campaign management and optimization. Tools to automate ad management and optimization There are lots of ways you can automate porting your customer data into Google Ads. Plus, there are lots of tools you can use to automate work being done in and outside of Google Ads.  While the sections after this one will focus on leveraging Zapier to automate data sharing between Wix websites and Google Ads, the tools and options below are excellent complements that are valuable in their own right. Optmyzr Optmyzr  is excellent if you need to manage your Google campaigns and want more flexibility then what Google Ad Manager offers. You can set up more advanced rules and scripts that alert you to issues inside your Ads account. Plus, the platform also works with Microsoft and Amazon Ads, which means you have one central place to manage your different paid search campaigns.  The time savings alone is worth the price of entry. You should probably be spending at least $5,000/month to even consider using a tool like this, but it is helpful if you want something to use alongside Google Ad Manager. Feedonomics Shopping feeds are eCommerce brands’ bread and butter. If you run shopping campaigns (including Standard Shopping or Performance Max), then you are going to need a shopping feed. If your store has thousands of SKUs, then you would likely be better off using a third-party feed management tool to manage your shopping feed.  Feedonomics  should be the first tool you look at when it comes to feed management. My agency, Take Some Risk, has used tons of tools and apps and Feedonomics is the best of the best.  For example, it has a support team located around the world, which means you can get support almost 24/7. Their team has worked on thousands of feeds and understands the value of well built shopping feeds. Their data governance product  means you get alerts when something goes wrong. And, the platform’s relationship with Google gives users access to betas and alphas before many large advertisers.  Supermetrics Reporting  and pulling conversions data might be your least favorite task, but we all have to report or monitor how our campaigns perform. Tools like Supermetrics  enable you to pull data from Wix, Google Ads, and many other platforms so you can build custom reports.  Let’s say, for example, that you want to pull purchase data from Google Ads but you also get offline leads on your site. You can use Supermetrics to pull data from multiple sources and centralize that data in a report you have built in Google Sheets or Looker Studio . Unlike Zapier, that moves data from platform A to platform B, Supermetrics is about pulling data from platform A and B, and letting you use it to build reports in your tool of choice.  Zapier If you need to connect two platforms together and there is no native integration between the two platforms, then Zapier  should be your first port of call. There are tons of competitors on the market these days but Zapier is the grandfather of the industry.  My agency has been using it the last few years and we love how simple and easy it is. If I have data in Wix and I want to send that data to Google ads, Zapier can create that connection between the two platforms and automatically send the data on a regular basis. The customer data you’ll send to Google Ads As I mentioned before, you generally want to upload customer data to Google Ads to either help build audience lists or increase the conversion data the platform has access to. There are limits on what data you can upload to Google Ads, which includes (but is not limited to): Email address Phone number First name Last name City State/Province Country Zip/Postal code Attribution data (e.g., currency and conversion names) The above is the minimum data that Google Ads will accept. Sometimes you can upload other data, but it will depend on what you are trying to do. If you want to upload something else, you may be trying to do something more advanced, which I don’t recommend for your first attempt with tools like Zapier. How to use Zapier to automate data sharing between Wix and Google Ads Let's say you want to update your Google Ads audience lists once per day: Perhaps you have a remarketing list of people who abandoned their shopping carts and you want to show them ads after leaving your online store, or you may have customers that already purchased items and you want to stop showing them ads from your brand on Google.  In both cases, you’ll want to keep our audience lists updated to make sure that you are showing (or not showing) ads to the right people. Let’s walk through how to do this with Wix and Zapier. Getting started First, start by heading to Wix’s Zapier page . From here, use the search bar to search for Google Ads (the app you want to send your data to).  Of course, you could also send your data to Microsoft Ads, your CRM tool, or any number of other platforms, but for this article, we’re going to keep the focus on sending data from Wix to Google Ads. Under the “Create your first workflow” section, Zapier lists the most popular workflows (or what they call “recipes”). For this particular example, the one we want is “Add Contact to Customer List With Email in Google Ads for Automation Rule in Wix,” as it lets us add our customer data from Wix into Google Ads to build an audience list.  Once you click on the workflow card, you will see the integration screen for this workflow. Click on “Try this template” to be taken to the workflow dashboard, where you can log into your platform and set up the workflow. The first thing to do is sign into your Wix account.  Then, you will need to sign into your Google Ads account. If you happen to have a Google Ads Manager account, you will need to designate which sub-account has the audience list you want to automate updating. You only need to do this if this is the first time you are using Zapier. Next, look to set up filters or other actions to tell Zapier how it should handle your data when it goes from Wix to Google Ads.  There may be certain scenarios where you do not want to import your data, such as when you only want to import data based on a type of email address (e.g., Gmail vs. Yahoo) or only data from customers that spend a certain amount of money with your business. Once you pick the filter option, you can tell Zapier how to filter your data. If I want to filter by email provider, then I can tell Zapier to filter based on what the email address does (or does not) contain. For Google Ads, I only want to share the email addresses that end in “ gmail.com ” because Google has a hard time matching non-gmail addresses to Google Accounts (Google needs to match the email address so they know who they are showing the ads to). I will simply pick “(Text) Contains” and then in the next box, add “ gmail.com .”  This will tell Zapier to only send customer data to Google Ads if it’s a Gmail address. Save the changes and then run a test workflow. If you don't get any errors, you are ready to publish your workflow and have your audiences (with Gmail accounts) uploaded in Google Ads. This is just one example use case—there are tons of other ways you can use Wix customer data and Google Ads together.  Ways to use Wix customer data and Google Ads together Here are some of the other amazing options that could help save your business time while optimizing conversions: Send offline conversions to Google Ads If you have products that have longer sales cycles, you can capture that customer data in Wix and then, when that person does purchase, you can send that customer data to Google Ads using Zapier.  You will need to combine Zapier and offline conversions  tracking in Google Ads, but this is a great way to automate this longer sales cycle and upload the conversion data. This works well if your business also gets a lot of phone calls before someone buys. Update Google Ads campaign statuses If someone makes a new purchase on your site, you could add a rule to update your campaigns in Google Ads.  If you have just run low on inventory for a popular product, you can have Zapier pause your campaign so you don’t advertise something that is nearly out of stock. Generate Google Ads reporting If Google Ads is your only marketing channel, you could set up a workflow to generate a report every time you make 10 sales. That way, you can keep track of how well your business is doing as you grow in sales each week. Track leads If your business uses an intake form, you can have Zapier send that lead data to Google Ads so you can track which of your campaigns is driving a lead on your site.  Of course, you can still send and track purchases on your site, but this helps you see which campaigns are driving a lead and then  a purchase for your business. Online privacy is evolving—leveraging your first-party data helps your business evolve, too There are lots of ways you can capture customer data on your Wix site. The first thing you always want to do is figure out what customer data (AKA first-party data) you have access to, and then consider how you can use that data to your advantage in your Google Ads account. Once you do that, you can look at how to automate that data to help drive better results and more efficient campaigns for your business. Duane Browne - Founder & Head of Strategy at Take Some Risk Inc. Duane has lived in 6 cities across 3 continents and visited 55+ countries globally. He works with brands including LARQ, Birdies, Pela Case, FTD, and Tiger Companies. Him and his team, at Take Some Risk, help eCommerce brands grow through strategy, PPC marketing, and data. Linkedin

Author: Colt Sliva Google Trends is one of the mightiest SEO research tools available. It’s also free, and if you know how to take full advantage of its features, it may become one of the most impactful options in your tool belt. In this article, I’ll walk you through Google Trends use cases and features so you can identify opportunities to use the tool for competitive insights. Whether you’re a small business owner learning how people search for your products or a working SEO, these techniques have an evergreen place in your strategy. As a brief overview, the competitive advantages lie in a few key areas: Google Trends provides years of historical data, sometimes going as far back as 2004 for some search terms. This is a superpower when data sources like Google Search Console are limited to 16 months. While the data is relative and doesn’t give absolute traffic numbers, it does help you estimate the current macro environment for a search trend. If you do have traffic data for a term, you can use Google Trends to review its historical trends to estimate previous ranges of traffic. Google Trends is as close to real-time data as you can get within Google’s black box of search data. The “ Trending Now ” section provides current trending entities and events based on news sources and active searches. Lastly, Google Trends can yield insights into how Google groups traffic together, which can help inform the topics you cover on your website. So, let’s jump into five Google Trends tactics that can make it a potent tool for your search optimizations. Table of Contents: 01. Explore search intent 02. Identify top, rising, and breakout keywords 03. Target the right distribution channel 04. Target the right location 05. Compare time frames 01. Explore search intent Understanding the questions people are asking (so you can create a document with the answer) is a big part of SEO. When you can find the right questions to answer, that is a working definition of addressing search intent . Google Trends provides some insight into search intent by tagging different types of searches (as shown in the example below). Let’s take the query Apple , for example—it could be the technology company or it could be the fruit. The search volume for the keyword is the sum of intent for both of those. Additionally, the Apple topic can receive traffic from similar searches, like Mac , because the intent is the same. The example Google’s documentation gives is London, Capital of UK, and Londres all being included under the same topic: “Topics are a group of terms that share the same concept in any language. You can find topics below your search term. For example, if you search London, and choose the corresponding topic, your search includes results for topics like ‘Capital of the UK’ and ‘Londres,’ which is ‘London’ in Spanish.” — Google Trends Help This helps take many unstructured searches that people make and consolidate it into a single search result. Pick the search term with the topic that is the most specific option for your audience. That is the version of the keyword that will best represent potential traffic. Compare this to the broader “Search Term” (this is the blue line in the example above) and look at the size of the difference. That gap will inform the competitiveness between topics. In the example above, the fruit will rarely receive traffic from its head term Apple , whereas the topic and the technology company are far more likely to receive traffic for this keyword. 02. Identify top, rising, and breakout keywords Google Trends highlights “Breakout” keywords (terms that had a tremendous increase in search frequency, probably because these queries are new and had few, if any, prior searches). This gives you access to near-real-time insights (whereas most search reporting is generally lagging behind by days). These breakout trends can last anywhere from a few hours to months. They can also change the SERPs in that content surrounding a trending topic is more likely to rank while people are searching for a breakout term. After entering your search term, you can use the Related Queries card (shown above), to sort related search terms by “Rising” or “Top.” The “Top” option can help you find certain niches (or long tail variations ) around a topic that are driving interest in real time, which may be helpful for building a breadth and depth of keywords around a topic . Select the “Rising” option to sort queries with the largest increase in search frequency since the last time period. You can use this option to identify trends early on and create content for them. Being early to a search trend is like creating luck for yourself. In addition to the related queries for a specific topic, you can look at what is trending in real time or within the last day . This search trends list is organized by a common topic as well as a trending piece of content. You are also provided with an estimated number of searches that made the topic trend. This number is sometimes not as high as you would expect and provides a rough estimate on what it takes to get content trending . 03. Target the right distribution channel Organic search starts with the search box, but has many distribution channels (YouTube, Google News, Google Shopping, etc). Google Trends offers a few of those distribution channels as filterable options. This is because these channels offer very different experiences tailored to a particular search intent (like seeking out breaking news with News Search or eCommerce via Google Shopping, for example). If you are a news publisher, filtering by “News Search” is key. Search behavior in Google News is oriented toward content that has a short half-life. So, this filter can help identify trending content opportunities to cover in Google News. If you create video content, filtering by “YouTube Search” can help you discover how viewers may be hunting for content. This type of content commonly leans toward multimedia-related queries, such as music, entertainment, movies, or video of an event. For eCommerce businesses, the most helpful filter will be “Google Shopping.” There is generally less data for this filter, but it does have very clear product intent behind it. 04. Target the right location Location can be a very important ranking factor in organic search. Different regions have different cultures, experiences, and search behaviors . Take the topic of Air Conditioning , as an example: In the southern United States, air conditioning is in greater demand year round. In a northern US state, the demand actually peaks higher than the south briefly, but quickly dissipates. That experience could inform how companies should operate and market in different locations. To filter and compare locations, hover over a searched keyword and click the three vertical dots that appear. Then select “Change filters” and modify the location (this option will only appear if you are comparing two or more keywords). 05. Compare time frames Similar to filtering locations, you can also filter over different time frames. This can help answer questions around turbulent times (like during core algorithm updates and holidays). Check Google Trends to see if your traffic changes are related to seasonality or if it is related to ranking changes. Looking back at the Christmas season for 2021 compared to 2022, there is a sizable gap between the two (2022 peaks at a relative score of 84 out of 100). This dip in search interest might have contributed to traffic and/or conversion declines for Christmas-related content from 2021 to 2022, for example. Hanukkah inverted that trend, with 2022 trending higher. During the 2022 Hanukkah season, sites on the topic of Hanukkah and Judaism would have likely experienced a higher number of search impressions. Understanding how these macro trends shift around the holidays can help explain what is going on with site traffic or how to better market to your website visitors. Stay ahead of consumer interest with Google Trends It’s instinctual for people to be curious about the next big thing. Creating content early and often is a powerful strategy, whether it’s SEO, SEM, or social media marketing. Target your locale with the right distribution strategy and during peak seasons for a potent marketing combination that can put you and your website ahead of competitors. Colt Sliva - Senior Technical SEO Analyst Colt Sliva is a technical SEO who has experience working with SaaS, eCommerce, UGC Platforms, and News Publishers across the Fortune 500. His main area of study is SEO at scale, automations, and breaking things to see how they really work. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Abby Gleason TikTok is where pop culture begins. The social media platform has invented its own language. “BookTok,” “cottagecore,” “hair theory”—the list goes on. None of these terms existed before TikTok emerged, but they now have a huge impact on how people search across platforms. Yes, I am saying that the unique terms you see on TikTok have ripple effects on Google Search, advertising, and across other social media. They are keywords , and should be seen as such. Want an example? Let’s refer back to “BookTok,” a term that references the reading community on TikTok. This is a word that did not exist prior to TikTok’s arrival in 2016, but since then has become a pop culture phenomenon, impacting Google Search, Instagram, Twitter and more: Put simply, if you aren’t using TikTok for keyword research, you’re missing out on major opportunities. This platform is one of the best places to find emerging keywords in your niche—an SEO tactic that has become especially important since traditional keyword research tools do not do a great job of surfacing trending terms (like ChatGPT). In this article, I’ll show you exactly how TikTok and SEO intersect, and how you can take advantage of that overlap to attract more visitors to your site. Table of contents: What does TikTok have to do with SEO? Examples of SEO content that leverage TikTok trends But, what if my audience isn’t on TikTok? How to conduct keyword research on TikTok How write about TikTok topics for SEO What does TikTok have to do with SEO? TikTok is where you can find high volume, low competition search trends that very few are writing about for SEO. I am suggesting that search marketers should view TikTok keywords as viable, valuable search terms that they can target to rank in Google. The logic goes as follows: If a topic like “BookTok” has 135 billion views on TikTok, one can assume that some of that interest carries over to Google Search. As you can see from the Google Trends results I shared earlier , that search interest has grown exponentially and has brought websites targeting BookTok a lot of SEO traffic. It may help to think about TikTok trends somewhat akin to cultural phenomena, like the Super Bowl. The event creates waves of search demand for everything from tourism in the host city to buffalo dip recipes. (Just for fun, check out search spikes for “buffalo dip recipes” in the past five years. Recognize a pattern?) What’s trending in the world—which is essentially culture—is a driving force in search demand. Traditional SEO keyword research tools don’t do a great job of staying up to date with emerging or seasonal keywords , so you need to equip yourself with other methods to find them. While there are many ways to find trending keywords , I want to hyperfocus on TikTok because it’s a cultural epicenter, and therefore a topic idea gold mine that few search marketers seem to be taking advantage of. I ran a poll in early 2023 asking who used TikTok for keyword research, and 83% (of the 150 respondents) said no. If you target trending topics as they’re happening, you’ll have the first-mover advantage for driving SEO traffic, and the added benefit of showing your audience your brand has its finger on the pulse. Relevance + awesome content = brand loyalty. Examples of SEO content that leverage TikTok trends While targeting TikTok trends in your SEO content might not be mainstream yet, there are plenty of brands that have used this tactic successfully: Architectural Digest writes about the TikTok design trend “cluttercore,” which refers to the joy of cluttering your space with items that make you happy—the antithesis of minimalism. The brand shared an editorial perspective on this trend and it’s been rewarded in search results. This page currently ranks #1 in Google for the term cluttercore , which drives 53,000 searches per year, with a 0/100 keyword difficulty (according to Keywords Everywhere ). In another example, Glamour covers one of TikTok’s latest beauty philosophies: “hair theory,” which sets out to prove that your hairstyle can transform your entire appearance and the way you’re perceived. The article defines the term “hair theory,” recognizing that the audience might see this term on TikTok or hear about it in conversation, and want to understand what it means. This page currently ranks #2 in Google for the term hair theory , which drives 29,000 searches per year, with a 0/100 keyword difficulty, according to Keywords Everywhere. I could share dozens more examples, but you get the point: TikTok trends are often low-hanging fruit, and brands are earning SEO traffic by sharing their perspectives on them. But, what if my audience isn’t on TikTok? I hear you. Depending on your business, your audience might very well be completely inactive on TikTok. I’m certainly not suggesting your brand invest resources in creating your own TikTok trend-related content if it doesn’t make sense to. The idea isn't necessarily that your audience has TikTok accounts and is actively engaged on the platform, but that TikTok is still a valid place to identify cultural trends in your industry. For instance, Chia Pets have been one of TikTok’s many obsessions. If you're a garden center, you may not think your audience is impacted by TikTok. However, you may see Chia Pet sales rise as your customer base expands as a result of this trend. Your results with this strategy will depend on your industry, your brand, and your creativity. So, keep an open mind and do a bit of research on TikTok to see if this process could work to attract more web traffic to your site. How to conduct keyword research on TikTok While finding relevant topic ideas on TikTok may initially seem like finding a needle in a haystack, it’s actually fairly straightforward. 01. Start with audience research Before you start with keyword research, you have to know your audience. What are they interested in? What questions do they have about your product or industry? To understand your customer base, conduct user interviews, talk to customer-facing teams , or use tools like Sparktoro to get a sense for where your audience spends time online. For instance, if you sell young adult clothing, and your audience research reveals that your potential customers also spend time watching Netflix, that can give you more ideas for topics to dig into. Example: After the hit TV show Wednesday aired on Netflix, searches for Wednesday clothes skyrocketed. If your young adult clothing brand created a “ Wednesday ” category page, you can imagine how the traffic might start flooding in. 02. Check out TikTok’s Creative Center Want to find topic ideas on TikTok? An excellent place to start is TikTok’s free Creative Center . This is one of the most efficient ways to browse what’s trending in your country for a variety of industries and topics. I like to look through top hashtags and videos to see what topics come up. Keep a spreadsheet handy, and get ready to jot down ideas. Note: The popular hashtags shared here can be a bit broad. For instance, looking up “Home Improvement” trends takes me to topics like #gardening and #PlantTok (a community for plant parents on TikTok). Clicking into a hashtag gives you more specific information about each topic. For instance, #PlantTok shows me trends over time, top videos, and audience insights (like age range and related interests). This may have been how I discovered Chia Pets were back in style… 03. Browse specific topics on TikTok The Creative Center can provide some quick wins, but to get the widest breadth of topic ideas, you’ll need to roll up your sleeves and dig into some videos. Do a TikTok search for your industry or product and look for themes. For example, check out the interior design hashtag on TikTok. In five minutes of searching, I identified that top videos included topics like: NYC thrifting How to furnish a 7x7 foot room Material combinations The videos in each hashtag are sorted by popularity, and many videos boast millions of views. One can assume that topics that drive that much engagement on one platform might also perform well in search. 04. Search Google for “[industry] TikTok trends” It may seem deceptively simple, but searching Google for TikTok roundups can quickly clue you into what people are most interested in about your industry on the platform. For example, a search for interior design TikTok trends gave me ideas like: Cottagecore Grandmillennial Maximalism Boho decor Monochrome These are topics that may not easily be found through more traditional keyword research methods, as many are relatively new terms, like “cottagecore” or “grandmillennial.” 05. Follow creators in your industry A great way to stay on top of TikTok trends is to simply be active on TikTok. Follow creators and hashtags to stay up-to-date on the latest trending topics, and track them for your keyword research efforts. And if you simply can’t dedicate time to monitoring another marketing channel, see if top creators on TikTok are active on other platforms you use. Maybe they’re also active on Instagram, or perhaps they have a weekly newsletter summarizing their content. By keeping an eye on creators in your industry, you’ll stay up to date with the latest trends and can create content that ranks based on it. How write about TikTok topics for SEO You’ve got your list of topics—now what? Depending on the topic, there are several effective ways to target each keyword. Here are a few ideas to get you started: 01. Define the term/trend Terms like “hair theory” or “cottagecore” do not refer to obvious or mainstream trends. People who hear about these trends in conversation or see them pop up on social media might naturally look for a definition. For example, they might search What is cottagecore? (It’s an aesthetic that celebrates a rural lifestyle, but it’s impossible to know that without context). You can seize this opportunity by creating content that clearly defines the term and the context behind it: What does it mean? How did it become popular? What are some examples of this concept? You may even go a step further and share how it’s impacting an industry (like yours) or culture (like your audience’s). Tip: Google your term and see what the autocomplete and People Also Ask features reveal. This can clue you into popular questions about your topic or give you even more topic ideas to run with. 02. Explain how to lean into the trend Your brand may be in a unique position to explain how readers can incorporate the trend into their lifestyle. For example, “How to embrace the cottagecore aesthetic in your home” could be an effective angle. This content will be especially compelling if your brand has authority on the topic and solutions to fit the need. If you’re a home goods retailer, this content could even drive users to your product pages as a way to embrace the trend. 03. Roundups Another approach is to create roundups related to each topic. Sticking with the “cottagecore” example, this could include: Homes that are embracing the “cottagecore” trend Our favorite “cottagecore” influencers on Instagram Most affordable “cottagecore” brands To get ideas for roundup topics, you could do a Google search for best [topic] and see what autocomplete comes up with. 04. Product-focused content TikTok trends might even influence your product offerings. You can tweak your positioning to capitalize on a popular trend and reap the benefits in search. Consider showcasing your product(s) which reflect a popular trend. Going back to the home goods retailer example, this may involve creating an entire category dedicated to “cottagecore” and featuring it on your homepage or linking to it from your blog. Culture = keywords New search terms are created on TikTok constantly, and if you want to keep up, you have to be there. This may involve spending one hour on TikTok each month to gather new content ideas, or it may mean regularly checking in with top creators to see what’s trending. Regardless of the frequency, incorporate this platform into your keyword research process and you’ll almost certainly find emerging, low competition topics to target. Or at the very least, you may get some new interior design ideas for your home. 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: Joshua George More relevant content means more potential traffic from search engines, right? No, not always. Too much similar content (i.e., duplicate content) can actually hurt your Google rankings. For eCommerce stores, one of the first issues to look into and resolve is keyword cannibalization, which can result in wasted effort, user confusion, and essentially competing against yourself in search results. To help you get the most return (and organic visibility) from your SEO efforts, let’s take a look at what keyword cannibalization is, how it can affect eCommerce sites, and how you can go about resolving it for potentially more traffic and conversions. Table of contents: What is keyword cannibalization? How cannibalized keywords can hurt your SEO How keyword cannibalization happens on eCommerce websites How to identify cannibalized keywords on your eCommerce site How to resolve keyword cannibalization 01. Combine content into a single page 02. Delete unnecessary pages and implement 301 redirects 03. Determine the canonical URL Tactical tips to resolve common eCommerce keyword cannibalization issues What is keyword cannibalization? In a nutshell, keyword cannibalization refers to having two or more pages on your website rank for the same keyword. This could result in weaker rankings, competing against your own content in search results for the same query, and even confusing potential customers. The most common occurrence of cannibalized keywords in a website is when a site owner (mistakenly or otherwise) creates content identical to something that was already published on the site. Both pages would likely contain similar (if not the same) content, leading Google to index them both for the same search term. How cannibalized keywords can hurt your SEO At first, keyword cannibalization doesn’t seem too bad. So what if multiple pages rank for the same keyword? That means there’s more opportunity for you to get more clicks on your website when shoppers search that term, right? This line of thinking assumes that your pages rank on the first page of Google Search for their keyword(s). Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. While you could get a few clicks to these pages, addressing this issue is much better over the long run because keyword cannibalization can: Diminish the authority of the more relevant page. If you have a page already ranking for its target keyword, its position could drop if search crawlers find another page with similar content. So, while the identical page may get indexed for the search terms, you may lose organic traffic that would have otherwise gone to the original page. Decrease the impact of your links and anchor text. Cannibalization affects your link building efforts because you have to spread your link acquisition to both pages instead of just one. Waste crawl budget. Google (and other search engines) will only spend a finite amount of time crawling your site (i.e., “crawl budget”). Unmitigated keyword cannibalization may mean that the search engines are crawling duplicate content instead of new pages, which could result in other important pages not getting crawled or indexed (thus not appearing in search results). Be a sign of poor page quality. Optimizing two or more pages for the same keyword (intentional or otherwise) shows that you don’t have a proper eCommerce SEO strategy . Let’s put additional context to the disadvantages cannibalized keywords bring to your site’s SEO performance: The top three positions on search engine results pages (SERPs) generate click-through rates of 25.6%, 10.15%, and 6.87%, respectively (as of February 2023, according to Advanced Web Ranking ). As an example, let’s pretend one of your most important pages ranks at the top of search results for a keyword. If you create content that significantly overlaps and isn’t substantively unique or distinct from an existing page, Google may knock your existing page down a position or two, if not even lower (because of the reasons listed above). That means even if your pages rank on the second and third positions on SERPs for the same keyword, you’re still likely to lose traffic because the first position gets more clicks than any other two search results positions combined. How keyword cannibalization happens on eCommerce websites Among the various website types, eCommerce sites are the most prone to keyword cannibalization. This is because an online store’s site structure and product inventory can give rise to SEO issues that make crawling more difficult for search engines. Below are instances when keyword cannibalization may happen on eCommerce websites: Faceted navigation Faceted navigation helps users find pages or products on your online shop with much more granularity than a regular navigation menu. It enables users to filter product listings according to attributes like price, customer rating, weight, brand, and others. Amazon lets you do this when you visit one of its category pages (as shown below). While faceted navigation provides value for visitors and helps convert them into customers, it doesn’t have the same positive effect on your SEO. Some sites generate new URLs whenever visitors create filters to find the products they’re looking for. If you don’t address these additional URLs, Google will crawl and index them. And if you have thousands of visitors using your faceted navigation, that means thousands more pages for the search engine to crawl and index. This becomes a problem, especially when multiple URLs with similar (if not the same) content rank for keywords that you optimized your product pages for. The original page’s ranking might be negatively impacted because Google will also spread out its resources to continue indexing for the page(s) generated using faceted navigation. URL parameters in ad campaigns You may have run ad campaigns for your landing pages and created URL parameters to monitor their performance. Tools like Google’s Campaign URL Builder let you add URL parameters to help you track where users found your page, the marketing channel used to promote the page, and others. If you track the page on Google Analytics , you will see more information about its overall performance. From here, you can make the necessary changes to the campaign and improve its results. However, here’s the caveat: Google considers the original page URL different from your landing page with URL parameters, even though the content may be identical. If your landing page with URL parameters gains traction, Google may crawl and index it for the same keyword as the landing page without the parameters. Poor keyword optimization This beginner’s mistake usually happens when you target the wrong keywords for your pages. In the case of eCommerce sites, you may have targeted a long tail keyword that overlaps with a short tail keyword you’re already ranking for. For example, you optimized for the keyword best deadbolt smart lock with a product page but you also created another page for the keyword what is the best deadbolt smart lock. You may argue that, because they don’t have the same number of words within them, one keyword is different from the other. But, Google treats them identically because they have similar search intent . A quick Google search should confirm this. Below are the results for best deadbolt smart lock: Barring the featured snippet, the results are the same when you search for what is the best deadbolt smart lock: How to identify cannibalized keywords on your eCommerce site Now that you’re familiar with some of the causes of keyword cannibalization that can plague eCommerce sites, it is up to you to identify these pages and assess whether these issues threaten your SEO performance, and find the best approach to fix them. That said, below are ways you can identify them: Run a “site:URL + keyword” search Google Search can give you an overview of indexed pages that may be cannibalizing keywords. To do this, use the “site:[URL]” search operator . It searches pages exclusively on the domain you enter here. In this case, replace [URL] with your domain URL and enter your keyword beside it in the search bar. As for the keyword, you’ll need to have an idea of the terms you want to check. Get started by typing in your most valuable keywords or search terms that your product pages are already ranking for. You want to see if your site has similar pages that may cannibalize your search position for the same keyword. In this case, let’s look at the online store Slimfold for the keyword thin wallets. Here’s what the search query would look like: site:slimfoldwallet.com “thin wallets” I enclosed the keyword with quotation marks because I want Google to check pages on the site that include the exact phrase within the content. Below is a snapshot of the results: Six pages match the query. However, Google may return vaguely matching results, meaning the pages aren’t necessarily ranking for the same keyword. To know for sure, visit each page in the results and verify if the content is identical to the other pages on the list. Perform host clustering While using “site:[URL]” helps you find potential keyword cannibalization issues, it doesn’t give any insight into a given page’s value on the search results for a keyword. In a regular Google search, the search engine only shows you up to two of the best-performing pages from a domain . So, if the domain has multiple pages ranking for the same term, you wouldn’t necessarily find out about them all here. However, you can show all pages ranking for a keyword (regardless of domain) by adding “&filter=0” at the end of the SERP URL. This is referred to as “host clustering” and by doing so, you reveal potential keyword cannibalization issues on your eCommerce site. As an example, here’s a snapshot of the SERP for the search query thin wallets: The SERP URL for this query is: https://www.google.com/search?q=thin+wallets As you can see, there’s only one result from Amazon on the page. Now, check the search results after performing host clustering by changing the URL to: https://www.google.com/search?q=thin+wallets&filter=0 As you can see, Amazon has multiple pages indexed for the search term! This normally happens in eCommerce sites that sell products with similar and identical descriptions. Since they share words like “slim,” “thin,” and “ultra thin” in the page’s title tag , Google treats each page with varying degrees of attention. That means it will try to show these pages on search results for terms like “thin wallets,” “slim wallets,” and other similar queries. So, instead of just focusing on ranking the page optimized for “thin wallets,” Google also picks up the other pages with synonymous titles. As a result, these pages pull down the top Amazon page intended to rank for the query. Suppose you have the same issue on your online store. In that case, you need to learn how to differentiate identical yet different product pages from one another to prevent Google from indexing them for the same keywords. We will discuss potential ways you can resolve this problem later in this guide. Use Google Search Console Google Search Console (GSC) can also show you possible keyword cannibalization issues by giving you direct access to queries that your pages rank for. Upon logging into your account, go to your Performance report . Review the Queries table (below the search performance chart) and select one to review what pages rank for that keyword (the search performance chart and tables will update according to your selection). Next, select the Pages tab (as shown below) to see which pages on your online store get impressions and clicks from the search term. If you see more than one page here, that means Google indexed multiple URLs from your site for this keyword. However, in certain instances the URLs may come from the same page. For example, if you use a table of contents with jump links on your blog posts (like this article does), Google can crawl your page for these sections and show them in search results. In this case, you don’t need to do anything. Refer to your SEO tool Instead of manually searching for cannibalized pages on your site, you can automate the process using Semrush’s Cannibalization Report. Other tools offer similar capabilities, but for our purposes, I’m just going to focus on this particular tool. Semrush’s Cannibalization Report lists the cannibalized keywords that need your attention. To access this feature, you must enter keywords you want to track on your site from the Position Tracker page. After setting up the keywords in Semrush, you will see a Cannibalization Health score (on a scale of 0–100). A score of 100 means Semrush didn’t detect keyword cannibalization issues on your website. From the report, click on the cannibal page that you want to analyze. It’ll show you keywords the page is showing for on SERPs. Next, identify which keywords are irrelevant to the page and make the necessary changes. How to resolve keyword cannibalization Once you have confirmed which pages on your site cannibalize keywords, you need to know which approach is the best for fixing them. Below are potential solutions to each of the keyword cannibalization issues mentioned above. 01. Combine content into a single page Merging pages that rank for the same keyword is ideal if the affected pages have the same search intent (i.e., commercial, transactional, informational). This also makes link building easier, as you can just point backlinks to a single page instead of scattering them to different pages. To do this, identify the page you must keep (i.e., distinguish it from the other pages ranking for the same keyword). Again, host clustering is an excellent way to find out which page Google values the most—the higher the page’s ranking is, the more important Google deems the page to be. However, this process doesn’t consider the number of actual keywords the page is ranking for or its backlink profile. To get more context about the page (for better decision making), use Google Search Console to determine which pages generate the most impressions and clicks from which queries. You can also use a tool, like Ahrefs, to identify which page has the most backlinks pointing to it. 02. Delete unnecessary pages and implement 301 redirects Next, you’ll consolidate content and delete the extra pages. The goal is to salvage as much content as possible from the pages you plan to delete and to continue to put it to good use. If the content of the pages repeats information that already exists on the page you’re keeping, you can go straight to deleting their URLs. However, consider keeping a draft of the content for future use (i.e. repurposing it as a guest post or social media post). Before deleting the rest of the URLs, replace the internal links to pages you plan on removing with the one you will keep. Doing so prevents broken links on your website, which facilitates crawlability for search engines and the user experience for your human visitors. Below, I’ve used Ahrefs to find links pointing to the pages to replace (although you can also do this on other backlink tools). In Ahrefs, go to Backlink profile > Internal backlinks and find the URL of the page you’ll delete. Here, you will see the pages linking to it that you will need to update the link URL for. After deleting the pages, redirect them to the page you will keep. This helps prevent 404 error pages that disrupt the user experience and points visitors to the correct page. You can do this manually by configuring your .htaccess found in the root directory of your web host. If the file doesn’t exist, create one. When editing the file, use the template below: Redirect /old-url-path /new=url-path Replace “/old-url-path” with the page you deleted and “/new-url-path” with the one you kept. Enter the same command on the next lines until all the deleted pages redirect to the correct one. If done correctly, your site will redirect users visiting the deleted pages to the correct one. Note: Wix site owners can also set up single 301 redirects or redirect multiple URLs at once using the Group Redirect feature. 03. Determine the canonical URL Canonicalization helps point search engines to the original or correct version of a page. This makes it ideal when the pages ranking for the same keywords are URL parameters (you probably don’t want to delete pages with URL parameters since you’re tracking them for your ad campaigns). At the same time, trying to delete the pages that your faceted navigation automatically generates would be cumbersome, especially if you have thousands of pages using this feature on your site. To set the canonical URL, add the canonical tag inside using the code below: Replace the URL with one where you want the pages with URL parameters to point to. Note: Wix site owners can set the canonical URL within the Wix Editor to help Google acknowledge the correct page on your site. Tactical tips to resolve common eCommerce keyword cannibalization issues Here are some additional tips to help you address the common eCommerce keyword cannibalization scenarios I described earlier : Faceted navigation — Go to GSC and identify pages generated by faceted navigation. Add the canonical tags in these pages’ section and link back to the page that you want Google to crawl and index. URL parameters in ad campaigns — Before launching your campaign, add the canonical URL on the section of the landing page. This tells Google not to index the page from the outset, helping you to avoid cannibalization altogether. Poor keyword optimization — Identify product pages that are ranking for an incorrect intent. Then re-optimize them for queries that reflect the appropriate intent. If your cannibal pages are blog posts, consider merging them to form a single resource page instead of maintaining multiple posts. It will also help if you create a keyword matrix to prioritize keywords you must optimize for your site. For keyword cannibalization, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure Keyword cannibalization is just one of the many culprits of poor SEO performance. But if not addressed properly, it can be a significant roadblock to achieving success with your eCommerce website. After all, if potential customers aren’t able to find your brand in the search results or are confused on which listing to click on, they’ll likely go elsewhere. Following the steps outlined above helps you identify and remedy this issue, but you should also continuously monitor for cannibal pages to ensure your eCommerce website isn’t wasting its crawl budget. If done correctly, you should be able to drive more organic traffic to your store and enjoy more sales and conversions! Joshua George - Founder of ClickSlice Joshua is the founder of ClickSlice , a results driven SEO agency in London. He has almost a decade of experience as an SEO consultant and has provided SEO training for the British government. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Lily Ugbaja I once ran a blog that barely scratched 100 organic sessions per day in the first two years—the majority of its traffic came from Pinterest. One day, as I scrolled through Pinterest, I noticed a topic that I would never have come up with on my own, so I published a blog post on it. What happened next was wonderful, but curious: My blog’s Google search traffic went from less than 100 daily sessions to nearly 1,000 daily sessions in less than two months. It turns out I had stumbled on a high-volume keyword that was just starting to trend. Over the next weeks, I looked for patterns to understand how I could find more SEO keywords like that: I discovered a keyword research technique that helps to grow traffic to new domains by finding and analyzing keywords on competitor sites with skewed traffic profiles (i.e., when a site's two or three top-performing pages receive significantly more traffic compared to the rest of the site). Testing my theory on another website (which was four to six months old at the time), I saw the site go from 0 to 100 daily organic sessions within three months. That number of sessions may not seem impressive, but it certainly shows that I achieved the goal of ranking the new domain and it’s a great starting point to gather data to formulate a longer-term SEO strategy. You don’t need to wait six months for traffic to start rolling in, and you don’t need to build tons of links first. Just find the keywords your less obvious competitors are ranking for, and target them. Table of contents: How skewed traffic profiles offer opportunities for new domains 01. Find the first 100 URLs ranking for your main keyword 02. Filter ranking domains by age 03. Isolate domains with skewed website traffic distribution 04. Analyze top-ranking pages to identify potential keywords How skewed traffic profiles offer opportunities for new domains Skewed traffic profiles can often be attributed to high-volume keywords that a site inadvertently targeted. The site owner likely published a blog post based on a personal interest or reader requests and doesn’t have a strategy to replicate their results. This often means that the keyword they’re ranking for is one that many other publishers haven’t discovered yet—making it a low-competition keyword. Here’s an example of what this might look like in practice: A site has published 100 blog posts and is getting 20,000 monthly pageviews. But, 15,000 of those pageviews come from only three (of the 100) blog posts. It’s likely that the publisher didn’t intend to target the keywords that are bringing in traffic for those three posts. This tactic is even more effective when you identify a new domain with a skewed traffic profile: Older domains often have backlinks (which are a search ranking factor) from other sites. This means they tend to rank higher for relevant keywords. If your skewed traffic site is on an older domain, there’s a chance the brand/site owner has just started doing SEO and are ranking for keywords that a newer site like yours may struggle to rank for. But, if you have a new domain, it’s highly likely that you can rank for the same keywords as other, younger domains, since you’re also likely to be starting from scratch in terms of your backlink profile. Why not just target the keywords your obvious competitors are targeting? Your obvious competitors are the ones that show up in the search results for your core keywords. In the eCommerce industry, that’s often Amazon, eBay, Etsy, or other well-known retailers. For local search queries, the top results are often Yelp or Tripadvisor pages. This looks different for each keyword and industry, but the point is that you’re unlikely to outrank these mature brands with your relatively new domain. This is because there are many factors that can work in favor of older domains: Google might still be “figuring out” what your new domain is about, whereas the top domains for that keyword may be over a decade old. Mature businesses/domains likely dedicate resources to SEO, which might be tougher for newer brands that simply don’t have those resources. Established competitors may have generated valuable backlinks from other reputable publishers, which would be unlikely for a new domain to replicate. For these reasons (and many more that I won’t list here), targeting keywords with low competition at the domain level (by identifying skewed traffic profiles) is an effective way to get Google to rank your new domain. 01. Find the first 100 URLs ranking for your main keyword The first step of this process is to conduct keyword research to find as many relevant competitor domains as possible for your skewed organic analysis. Start your research with your main keyword so that you’re accounting for every domain that is loosely related to your niche. If you’re not sure what your main keyword is , think about your main offering (what you sell or provide) and who your audience is. I’ll use the keyword content marketing as an example for this article. It’s unlikely that the sites you’re looking for would rank in the first ten, twenty, or even thirty results for your main keyword because they just don’t have enough authority. That’s why we want to cover at least 100 URLs. You’ll need access to an SEO tool , like Semrush , for several steps in this process. First, plug your keyword into the tool to see what sites rank for the term. Next, export the search analysis so that you can use it in the next step. 02. Filter ranking domains by age I use domain age instead of domain authority (DA) because a higher DA is often a byproduct of rankings, which are influenced by the site’s backlink profile (which you’re not in a good position to compete against as a new domain). If a site about your domain age or less is ranking for a keyword, there’s a high chance you can rank for it as well (even if your DA is not as high). How to check domain age To identify the age of relevant domains, copy the URLs you extracted in the last section and paste them into a bulk domain age checker tool (like Bulk SEO Tools , shown below) to find their registration dates. Next, you’ll need to organize your findings. Sort the domain list by “Date created” and export it as a CSV. In your CSV file, delete all sites older than yours and filter out domains that are outside your niche. For URLs with incomplete data in this tool, you can review the URL’s historic ranking data by using a rank tracking tool to see when the page started ranking. In the example below, you can discern that the domain is around three years old (at the time of publishing). 03. Isolate domains with skewed website traffic distribution Analyze the traffic profile of each of the remaining domains in your CSV file with a tool like Semrush. You’re looking for sites with a handful of posts (mostly one or two) driving the majority of the pageviews to the domain overall. For illustrative purposes, a skewed traffic profile may look something like the example below. Notice that there’s a relatively large dip in pageviews between the top page and the second-highest performing page, and there’s also a large dip between the second-highest performing page and all other pages. Page Skewed traffic profile ✅ Distributed traffic profile ❌ Top blog post 1 74.5% of pageviews 27.9% of pageviews Top blog post 2 16% of pageviews 23.2% of pageviews Top blog post 3 3.5% of pageviews ​18.6% of pageviews Top blog post 4 3% of pageviews 16.2% of pageviews Top blog post 5 2.8% of pageviews 13.9% of pageviews​ Here’s what a skewed traffic profile would look like in a tool like Semrush: Here we have a website with overall monthly traffic of around 45K, where two blog posts are driving over 17% of traffic with just six keywords. You can see that these two blog posts account for nearly 47% of traffic to the site. Though there are 306 ranking pages on the website, almost half the traffic is via these two pages. This traffic suggests that the keywords those two blog posts rank for are low-competition keywords that the publisher inadvertently targeted. 04. Analyze top-ranking pages to identify potential keywords Once you find a site with a skewed traffic profile, analyze the top-ranking pages to see what keywords they rank for. Let’s say you’re analyzing a page about personal loans from Nerdwallet, for example. You can run an organic research report in a tool like Semrush for that exact URL. That way, you’ll see only the keywords that page is ranking for. Filter the results by traffic to find the main keyword the page ranks for. This will be the primary keyword you target for your article because it’s already proven to have the best chances for a new domain. For example, if a page about personal loans gets the majority of its traffic from the keyword best personal loans , then the latter will be your primary keyword. Rule out variables To rule out extenuating circumstances that could lead to outliers in your data (like a link-building campaign , for example), run a quick analysis to find the top-ranking pages for that keyword as well. Your keyword tool should show at least three to five sites around your site’s DA rating in the top 10 for that keyword to be viable for your website. You have the keywords—all that’s left is to create the content Even without optimizing every aspect of your content, the keywords you’ll find using this keyword research method should be relatively easy to rank well for. But, of course, the best results come from publishing search-optimized articles that consider search intent and focus on creating value for the reader. To that end, always: Analyze what’s ranking on the search engine ranking pages (SERPs) for your keyword. Evaluate the content you create for logic and actionability . Utilize keywords naturally in your content. Add keyword rich meta descriptions and descriptive alt tags for image search. But, look beyond individual keywords, too. After a while, more competitors tend to discover hidden-gem keywords and if their brand has greater authority than yours, they could displace your content. Invest in content around the entire topic (we call them topic clusters ). That way, you don’t just rank for a keyword, you completely own the SERPs for those topics. Lily Ugbaja - Fractional Content & Growth Manager Lily is a content marketing consultant for brands like Zapier and HubSpot. For seven years, she has built and managed content sites (including three of her own) that rely on SEO as the main distribution channel. In her spare time, she writes the marketing newsletter Marketing Cyborg . Twitter | Linkedin