Tuesday, April 30, 2024 | 1PM ET Our panel of SEO and content experts will be live auditing sites in this session. Submit your site on sign-up for the chance to receive invaluable feedback. In addition to live auditing, this webinar will cover: How can you make AI content unique  The keys that make good AI content–great How to identify opportunities for differentiation Meet your hosts: Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with over 15 years’ experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter | LinkedIn Ben Steele Managing Editor, Search Engine Journal Ben is a proud content goblin with over 10 years of experience as a writer, editor, and content strategist. At SEJ, Ben manages the ebooks program and assists the Editor-in-Chief with editorial operations. You'll find his personal touch on every new ebook SEJ releases. LinkedIn

Tuesday, February 27, 2024 | 1PM ET Market smarter by leveraging AI and automation in your workflows. Join industry-leading growth strategists, Duane Brown and Menachem Ani, to learn how to build data-driven digital marketing campaigns that drive max conversions.  In this webinar, we’ll cover: Tips for getting started with automation Using AI to ramp up marketing productivity How to put time-saving tools like Zapier to work Meet your hosts: Duane Brown, CEO & Head of Strategy, Take Some Risk Inc. Duane heads up ad agency Take Some Risk Inc., where he helps brands drive growth through strategy, data, and PPC. He has more than 17 years’ digital marketing experience advising global clients like ASOS, Walmart and Jack Wills.  His LinkedIn Learning course has been taken by 25K+ people LinkedIn Menachem Ani, Founder & CEO, JXT Group Menachem is the founder of JXT Group, an agency that specializes in multi-channel online advertising. A pro-automation, paid media specialist, he’s one of today’s leading authorities on Google Ads tactics. He has written for many publications including Search Engine Journal. X (Twitter) | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. X (Twitter)  |  LinkedIn George Nguyen,  Director of SEO Editorial, Wix As Director of SEO Editorial at Wix, George creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. Formerly a search news journalist, he has spoken at many industry events and endeavors to improve the general public’s knowledge of search engines. X (Twitter)  | LinkedIn

Author: Mordy Oberstein It’s impossible for Google to manually sort through billions of web pages in order to match the best ones to a given search term. That’s why Google employs algorithms to provide searchers with a relevant set of results in a scalable manner. More accurately, Google uses a collection of algorithms that work harmoniously to offer the right kind of information for the given search term.  That makes understanding what Google’s algorithms are and why they exist vital for every digital marketer, brand, business owner, or person that needs to get traffic to their website from search.  Let’s get started with what you need to know. Table of contents: What is the Google algorithm? Why SEOs pay attention to Google’s algorithms Why Google updates its algorithms Google’s most important algorithms and ranking systems PageRank Hummingbird & RankBrain BERT MUM Helpful Content & the Core Algorithm Do ranking factors affect Google’s algorithms? What is the Google algorithm? What digital marketers refer to as the “Google Algorithm” is a collection of integrated algorithms and ranking systems that determine which results and features Google shows for a given search term or keyword.  These systems use data from web crawls, user behavior, machine learning, and other signals to sort and rank web content. So rather than being a static entity, the so-called “Google Algorithm” is made up of many constantly moving parts. Why SEOs pay attention to Google’s algorithms Changes to the Google algorithm (also known as “algorithm updates”) can sometimes result in sudden traffic and visibility drops for websites. The professionals supporting search engine optimization (SEO) clients at digital marketing agencies or consultancies keep track of these updates to fine-tune their SEO strategies and approach. By monitoring and assessing the impact of Google algorithm updates  on your website, you can create a plan to address changes in your organic traffic. Why Google updates its algorithms Since new content is constantly getting added to the web, the machine learning behind the algorithms constantly recalibrates how it understands content, adds additional considerations to the mix, and makes changes.  Google also wants to ensure that it meets the changing needs of users and attempts to align its algorithm with evolving consumption trends. When Google makes changes to its ranking systems, big or small, these are called algorithm updates. Google’s most important algorithms and ranking systems Though Google has never disclosed a complete list of the criteria it uses for ranking, the company does share some information around some of its most important ranking systems.  For those working in SEO today, knowledge of the following algorithms can help you better manage your SEO priorities: PageRank Hummingbird & RankBrain BERT MUM Helpful Content System & the Core Algorithm  PageRank Google’s original search algorithm is called PageRank and it has been a central part of the company’s algorithm since it was founded. This algorithm heavily relies on the number and quality of backlinks  a site/page receives to rank content. This model views links as an affirmation of a page’s content quality—if high-quality sites linked to a page often, then Google assumed it must contain quality content.  The problem, however, is that links are a secondary signal. The number of links doesn’t tell the search engine about the actual content quality, only the probability that it contains quality content (since many people linked to it). Websites could easily game the algorithm through spammy links and illicit content practices.  Hummingbird & RankBrain In 2013, Google essentially restructured its core algorithm to focus less on linear interpretation and more on semantic understanding. The update, known as Hummingbird, introduced the concept of “things, not strings” to the SEO vernacular.  In short, Hummingbird gave Google the ability to understand context to better connect various concepts and “things” together. This resulted in the search engine being able to move beyond directly matching the terms used in a search query with the content on a page.  In this way, Google was able to understand that when someone searched for [New York’s oldest pro hockey team], for example, that the intent was to find the New York Rangers. Moreover, the ranking pages would not need to necessarily include the term “New York’s oldest pro hockey team” to rank, as Hummingbird was able to make the semantic connection. Then in 2015, RankBrain’s release ushered in the age of machine learning. RankBrain extended and amplified what was possible with Hummingbird (to the best of our understanding, RankBrain operates “within” HummingBird ).  With RankBrain, Google could analyze a massive amount of user data to see what pages satisfied users’ intent when searching for a specific query. With this information, RankBrain could build models to understand which on-page factors or content signals were more (or less) important to a searcher and use them to structure search results. For example, when you searched for [buy car insurance] prior to RankBrain, the search results page would list car insurance providers. However, Google quickly realized that, for such queries, users often wanted information about buying the product or service (in this case, car insurance). Now, Google shows a healthy mix of providers that educate users on how to choose the best insurance: Similarly, because of RankBrain, Google discovered that users preferred an image of the finished dish alongside recipe results. To now rank for a recipe-related keyword, a page must contain an image (all things other considerations being equal): Moving beyond secondary signals, Google has implemented technology like  neural matching , Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) and Multitask Unified Model (MUM) to better understand user queries. BERT Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers) is a machine learning algorithm that helps Google codify the relationships between words and word sequences to better interpret the meaning of content. This is considered to be a foundational algorithm and is used to identify sentiment, questions, and predict text with more natural language.  Formally introduced to Google Search in 2019, Pandu Nayak, the company’s VP of search, explained that BERT  models can “consider the full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it—particularly useful for understanding the intent behind search queries.” For SEOs, this change signals the introduction of more emphasis on semantic search , the intent behind keywords , and also the implicit intent of a given search . MUM Publicly launched in 2021, Google’s Multitask Unified Model (MUM)  has 1000x more machine learning power than BERT and signaled an intention from Google to better integrate multimedia into its search queries and user journeys .  The company teased the potential applications of this new algorithm via significant integrations with Google Lens and visual search as ways to search Google. Like BERT before it, this algorithm is designed to help Google better understand content, including multimedia, rather than to assess the quality of a website. To date, MUM’s application has been limited compared to other algorithms and ranking systems. MUM was first implemented to better help Google understand the various ways searchers were referencing COVID vaccines across the globe. MUM also helps Google improve quality by  identifying consensus on the web . As time goes on, the most logical assumption is that Google will find additional ways for MUM to play a role in the ranking process.  Helpful Content & the Core Algorithm  In August 2022, Google released the Helpful Content Update  (HCU), an algorithm designed to target low-quality “that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.” The HCU follows in the tradition of historic, now-retired algorithms, like Panda, which tended to reward (and devalue) domains based on perceived quality. But unlike those updates, the Helpful Content classifier “runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly-launched sites and existing ones,” Google explained , “As it determines that the unhelpful content has not returned in the long-term, the classification will no longer apply.” At Pubcon in February 2023, Gary Illyes , analyst on the Google Search team, suggested that recovering organic visibility  after being negatively impacted by the HCU may be particularly difficult. And although SEOs observed minimal impact from the HCU’s initial release, following updates in 2023 showed this algorithm’s significance.  In March 2024, Google announced it would no longer rely on one system to determine “helpfulness” but rather would assess sites for “helpfulness in a multitude of ways, following the path of previous heavy-weight algorithms such as the aforementioned Panda update as well as Penguin (which focuses on devaluing spammy link practices ). Having the core algorithm determine helpfulness prevents a scenario where the HCU competes with other algorithms. Think of the “core algorithm” as a stew, where each spice and ingredient works in relative harmony with the others. An update to the core algorithm might mean a change in how those various ingredients factor into each other and the role they play in the overall stew—among other things (such as advancements that enable the elements within the core algorithm to function at a higher level). Do ranking factors affect Google’s algorithms? Don’t get confused: While the  SEO  industry has long discussed specific “ranking factors” or “ranking signals,” there’s a lot of misinformation out there and I strongly advocate for a holistic approach. Google allegedly uses more than 200 official ranking signals to decide what content should (or should not) rank for a query. These factors include anything from links to content relevance. Many SEO professionals debate one ranking factor’s importance over another, while others will try to “optimize” for as many “factors” as possible. This is a mistake. For starters, there is no universal list of the most weighted factors. The factors Google uses vary from query to query and from vertical to vertical. Google uses a complex process to evaluate content, employing machine learning to understand language and better classify and profile content to determine its quality: “It’s something where, if you have an overview of the whole web (or kind of a large part of the web) and you see which type of content is reasonable for which individual topics, then that is something where you could potentially infer from that. Like for this particular topic, we need to cover these subtopics, we need to have this information, we need to add more images or fewer images on a page. That is something that perhaps you can look at something like that. I am sure our algorithms are quite a bit more complicated than that, though.” — John Mueller, Senior Search Analyst at Google via Search Engine Roundtable For example, trustworthy medical content can greatly impact a reader’s health, so it should look, sound, and feel different than a gossip column. So for health information, Google trains a machine learning model to identify a content profile based on its leaders, such as the Mayo Clinic. The assessment of “good” vs. “bad” content happens in what I’ll call the “pre-algorithmic” or “meta-algorithmic” stage and impacts what kinds of pages rank beyond a specific ranking factor. Simply put, don’t worry about “ranking factors.” Instead, write highly-targeted, substantial content. Cater your content to your target audience’s needs, knowledge level, and frame of reference. Make sure your content genuinely helps them. That’s the most important thing. Google aligns its algorithms to users Though the tooling may change, ultimately each Google algorithm works to more closely understand user behavior, to put users first. So to better understand Google’s algorithms, it helps to look at your site and its pages from the perspective of a new user.  What signals are you latently sending? If your tone is not serious enough (or perhaps too serious given the niche), what will users feel?  When you take a step back and look at the subtle signals your pages give off, you are aligning with Google. You’re putting yourself in a position to go beyond Google’s current capabilities, which, in turn, puts your site in a prime position to improve its rankings as algorithms change or when a core update releases. Mordy Oberstein - Head of SEO Branding, Wix   Mordy is the Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Concurrently he also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Twitter  | Linkedin

Monday, January 22, 2024 | 1PM ET Speed up the process of getting your pages crawled and indexed . Join Microsoft Bing’s Fabrice Canel and Wix’s Crystal Carter to learn about tools that help you manage indexing more efficiently—and hear real user questions get answered.  In this webinar, we'll cover: IndexNow and tools that support quicker indexing  Troubleshooting common indexing challenges Tips for optimizing your crawl on Wix Meet your hosts: Fabrice Canel Principal Product Manager, Microsoft Bing A 25-year search veteran at Microsoft, Fabrice leads the team crawling, processing and indexing at Bing. He drives the evolution of the Bing Web Data platform to maximize index freshness and comprehensiveness. He’s also responsible for search protocols and standards.  Twitter | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter | LinkedIn

July 16, 2024 Google leaks, AI overviews, new Google algorithm ranking systems —2024 has been a year. It’s time to ask some real questions about the future of Search as we rocket towards a whole new frontier. In this webinar, we'll cover: The arrival and staying power of 2024’s major SEO changes What additional trends our experts are  observing Practical, future-proofing advice for the new search paradigm You can also explore Crystal's deck  for more resources on what was discussed during the webinar. Meet your hosts: Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with over 15 years’ experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, BrightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Michael King Founder & CEO, iPullRank An artist and a technologist all rolled into one, Mike is the Founder and CEO of digital marketing agency, iPullRank. Mike consults with companies all over the world, including brands ranging from SAP, American Express, HSBC, SanDisk, General Mills, and FTD, to a laundry list of promising eCommerce, publisher, and financial services organizations. Twitter | LinkedIn Lily Ray Sr. Director of SEO & Head of Organic Research , Amsive Digital Lily has been making waves in the SEO industry since 2010. Shifting from start-up to agency–she has helped develop and establish an award-winning SEO department at Amsive Digital, delivering high impact work for a long-list of notable clients, including several Fortune 500 companies. Twitter | LinkedIn

Wednesday, September 4, 2024 | 11AM ET See what goes down in this live stream of SERP’s Up—mishaps and all. To mark their 100th podcast episode, our much-loved hosts will welcome an all-star panel to hash out some of the hottest topics facing the SEO industry. Got a burning question? Now’s your chance to get it answered. This live podcast will dive into: Is SEO still a powerhouse?  New local ranking factors to have on your radar Whether AI will ever get where we need it to be  SEO news from him who makes the news (IYKYK) Can't make it? Register and we'll send you the recording anyway. Meet the guests and your hosts: Barry Schwartz   CEO, RustryBrick In addition to leading the web consulting firm RustyBrick, Barry is a news editor at Search Engine Land and runs the popular blog, Search Engine Roundtable. He has previously been recognized for Outstanding Community Services by Search Engine Land, and was named the US Search Personality Of The Year. LinkedIn  | X  (Twitter) Chima Mmeje Senior Content Marketing Manager, Moz Chima is a content marketer and strategist at Moz, where she positions the company as the authoritative source of truth in the SEO industry. She's also the founder of The Freelance Coalition for Developing Countries, a UK nonprofit providing free resources and training for marketers of color.   LinkedIn  |  X (Twitter) Lidia Infante  Head of SEO, Survey Monkey Skilled at driving online growth for SaaS, media and eCommerce companies, Lidia brings a decade of SEO experience to her senior role at SurveyMonkey. With a BSc in Psychology and a Masters in Digital Business, she’s a regular speaker at SEO events such as MozCon, BrightonSEO, and WTSFest. LinkedIn  |  X (Twitter) Darren Shaw Founder and President, Whitespark Darren is the founder of Whitespark, a company that helps businesses win at local SEO through smart tools and consulting services.  He’s been teaching business owners, marketers, and agencies how to rank at the top of Google’s local map-pack for over 14 years through extensive research, writing and speaking. LinkedIn  | X (Twitter) Joy Hawkins Owner and President, Sterling Sky Inc. Joy heads up Sterling Sky Inc., Local Search Forum, and LocalU.  She’s written for publications like Search Engine Land and spoken at marketing conferences such as Mozcon, SearchLove, and State of Search. Joy also enjoys volunteering as a Google Business Profile product expert. LinkedIn  |  X (Twitter) Eli Schwartz  Growth Advisor and SEO Consultant Eli is the bestselling author of Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy . A growth advisor and enterprise SEO consultant, his ability to demystify and craft organic marketing strategies has generated billions in value for some of the internet's top sites. LinkedIn  |  X (Twitter) Kevin Indig Growth Advisor Kevin Indig is a strategic growth advisor, creator of the Growth Memo newsletter and host of the Tech Bound podcast. He has led SEO efforts for companies like Shopify, G2 and Atlassian, consulted for big brands like Ramp, Eventbrite, and Finder and is an active angel investor. LinkedIn  |  X (Twitter) Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Brand, Wix In addition to leading SEO branding at Wix, Mordy serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. A passionate SEO educator, Mordy authored the Wix SEO Guide  and is a popular industry speaker. Catch him chatting all things SEO on SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. LinkedIn   |   X   (Twitter) Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with over 15 years’ experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, BrightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. LinkedIn  |  X   (Twitter)

Tuesday, May 23, 2023 Make smarter SEO decisions with your website’s Google Search Console data. Join Google’s own Daniel Waisberg to get a big picture understanding of why your traffic fluctuates, what it means, and how these insights can help your site bounce back stronger than before. In this webinar, we'll cover: An introduction to the data in Google Search Console How to use GSC reports to identify traffic issues The most common reasons for drops in organic traffic Putting key insights to work for better results in Google search Check out the webinar deck Meet your hosts: Daniel Waisberg Search Advocate, Google Daniel is part of the Search Relations team at Google, where his role is divided into two key areas: educating the SEO community and working with engineering teams to develop new Search Console capabilities. A regular contributor to the Search Central blog, he speaks at events around the world and presents a popular YouTube series called Search Console Training. Twitter | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter | LinkedIn Upcoming SEO webinars: We’re running a monthly webinar covering SEO hot topics, hosted by industry experts. Reserve your place to get valuable SEO insights, ask questions and stay up-to-date. June 27, 2023 at 1PM ET Conducting a competitor link analysis

October 17, 2023 Turn your site’s untapped potential into rapid SEO gains. Watch in real-time as our hosts, along with Search Engine Journal’s Angie Nikoleychuk, analyze a business website and reveal which tricks of the trade offer the highest return in the least time. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to: Identify low-hanging SEO opportunities Implement a low risk, high-reward SEO strategy Develop a roadmap for future SEO wins Check out Crystal's deck Meet your hosts: Angie Nikoleychuk Content Marketing Manager, Search Engine Journal As well as heading up content marketing at SEJ, Angie has more than 15 years’ experience as a writer, researcher, UX, and CRO specialist. She is currently adding to her expertise with a BA/BSc in psychology and computer science. Twitter | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter | LinkedIn Transcript: Live SEO audit: Quick wins and opportunities 00:00 Crystal We're going to talk about SEO audits, we're going to do a live SEO audit about quick wins and opportunities. And there's me Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications. There's Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding at Wix. And we are also joined today by Angie and I should have checked how to say her last name, I'm gonna do my best, Nikoleychuk. 00:21 Angie Nikoleychuk, pretty close, you just kind of have to Nit when you start.  00:31 Crystal  She’s joining us for this fantastic session. So and she's joining us from SEJ. I know a lot of you found out about the webinar from SEJ, from Search Engine Journal. It's a fantastic, wonderful publication. And we're so pleased to have Angie onboard today to go through this.  So if you've not joined us for a webinar before, if you are not Simon Cox, who comes to all of the webinars, then you might want to know that yes, this webinar is being recorded. Sometimes people join late and they ask is it being recorded? Yes, it is. There will be a YouTube link that is sent to you in the email following the recording as well that you can watch everything back.   We're going to cover a lot of topics. And that's okay, if you don't take everything in, just in the first instance. That's alright, we're gonna go through a lot of things. But at the webinar, you can slow it down, you can pause you can go back and forth, as you need to. So go to the YouTube channel after the webinar to really get stuck into things.  We have the chat panel, which you're all very familiar with and have gotten right involved in, we also have the Q&A panel. We have people who are answering your questions there. So if you have a question that comes up while we're talking about different websites and things, jump into the Q&A panel, and we will try to answer them where we can. Anything we're not able to answer or any themes that we see in some of the questions that are coming up, we will try to answer them in the Q&A at the end of the session.  Finally, to learn more about our future webinars, we think we do them about once a month, go to the Wix SEO Learning Hub at Wix.com forward slash SEO, forward slash learn, forward slash webinars. And you will find all of our SEO webinars that are coming up and you can see all of the ones that we've done previously. Now to agendas. Mordy, did you want to get in on the agenda? Or shall I keep going. 02:12 Mordy Oh, no, I can do that. Before I do that I just wanna remind you, we have our newsletter, which is Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/newsletter , you can sign up to a monthly newsletter. And you can also make sure to sign up to SEJ has a great newsletter as well. So over at searchenginejournal.com , to sign up for their newsletter as well.   The agenda, we've done the introductions, we're going to actually go through a few actual websites and offer, I hate to call them quick wins because nothing is quick in SEO, usually, sometimes, but it's very rare. But some, I guess, low-hanging fruit that websites can do in order to position themselves to rank better on Google and bring in more traffic. And what we did was, we each picked a domain and a website of a different type.  So Crystal is going to run through a new website that's new to the market, I'm gonna run through an established domain and what they can do. And then Angie is going to go through an audit of a website in a very competitive space, which is obviously a little bit more difficult, then if you're not in a competitive space, that sounds painfully obvious now that I say that.  At the end, we're going to do a Q&A session. So please ask your questions. If there are moderators don't answer them. We'll try to get to them in the Q&A at the end. And I think with that Crystal, I think you're first up.  03:32 Crystal Yeah, so we're gonna share some links afterwards, as well. It's alright. These are some of the links we're going to talk about for new domains. And if I can just stop sharing while I grab this link for you.  So they'll be as Mordy said, the website that I'm going to be looking at today is a new domain. So the one that I found, it was somebody very kindly submitted, was a website called One Cake Street. And One Cake Street has a lot of great things going on. And a lot of things that I've seen quite regularly for new domains, and for folks who are new to managing a website, and some of the things that they might want to think about while they're going through there.  So you can see that this is clearly, you know, this is clearly optimized for their name. So they've got their their logo up here, they've got their name here, they've got that sort of thing contact us, it's very clear what they do. They’re you know, they're involved in cake. And they're getting some good first results for this. Now, if you are a new domain, and you're not sure which pages you're ranking for, one of the things you can do is you can use a search operator to see which pages you're ranking for. Now this page is ranking for 11 pages. Now the tricky thing with that is that there's about 20 pages on the website. And so that suggests that there's a few things that they could do to get a bit more visibility for some of their other pieces of content.  The other thing that we look at when we look at the SERP, is that we can see that they're ranking for their name. So there's One Cake Street, which is their Facebook page, we also see that they're ranking for their website, we can also see they've got their YouTube and we've got a few other things that are going through as well. So they're doing pretty good. And again, they've got their their Google Business Profile showing here. Now, there's a few core opportunities that we can see just from this, as well.  So first of all, we can see that they're ranking for their homepage, or they’re ranking for their name, that's great. They have their Google business profile, that's also great. They also have all these reviews, which are saying this cake was fantastic, look at these beautiful pictures, look at all of these wonderful things, all of that sort of stuff. One of the things that's tricky that new domains that I see really often for new domains is they very often don't have a lot of content. So this is their blog, for instance. And they're a little bit thin on content here. So they haven't got a blog here, but they could use some of the content that they got from around some of their different profiles to create a blog, or to create more content. Now at the moment, they don't have a page that is talking very much about testimonials. But they could create a reviews page that pulls through some of these fantastic reviews from Google. And they can create a webpage that has those reviews on them, talks about the reviews that they get, talks about how they manage their clients. And they can have that on their website. Similarly, they have a web, they have an Instagram account, which has a great number of followers. So they've got 1000s and 1000s of followers, here they are getting you know, 800 likes on some of their things. And they've got some great content here. So another thing that they can potentially do is use some of their content, like they have their recipe blog here. This is a recipe that's got a full sort of breakdown of how to bake that cake, for instance, and it's got a video for that. And again, they can add that to their blog. So that's one thing that they can do, for instance, to get some content going on the blog.  Once they have the content, they're going to need to do some things about links. So looking at this homepage, you can see that there's not many internal links. And if people don't know what an internal link is, essentially, when you have a link that's underneath a piece of content here. Now buttons and things are great, but line links are even better. So when you have line links through to the other parts of your content, it can help Google to crawl your website and can also help your content to be better discovered.  Additionally, they got a couple of technical SEO things. Now I want to show you something. And again, if you're new to managing websites, if you're new to SEO, this is something that you might not be familiar with. Yours might not look like this, because I have a few things here. But one of the things you can do is you can use Chrome, the Chrome Dev Tools to see a little bit more about your website. Now on this one, I want to see what it looks like on mobile. So I'm going to click refresh. And look, it goes into mobile. And when I do that, I can see the idea of what it looks like on a different type of phone. So these are different types of phones and different types of things there. And I can see the menu here. Now the thing that's funny about this is that the menu is here, but the menu is not on this page. So Google is able to crawl these because they crawl mobile first. But users are not able to find this content, which is on this menu. So one of the things they could do really quickly is to optimize to make sure that their menu is showing on their on their desktop page, as it is on mobile, that's called mobile desktop parity. And they can make sure that that's working well, they can get a great uptake from that.  Additionally, as I said, they can also do something around with their content. So they can use some of the some of the great work that they're doing across their Instagram. And they can pull that through to create content on their website. And they can also use some of the content that they got from their Google Business Profile, where they've got lots of images, and they've got lots of reviews and things like that. And they can also use that to create some more content. So I think the recommendation I would make particularly for new businesses and folks who are doing new SEO is to think about making sure that you've got good content across your site, making sure that it's also well linked. And making sure that anything that's on desktop is also visible on mobile, so that people can see the content and that user and then Google can crawl your content appropriately. 09:15 Mordy And that's one of the great things you have in there is that you're able to take content, say from your Google Business Profile, and repurpose the content. And if you're getting started, and generally if you're running a new site, or you're creating a new site, there's usually a gazillion things that you're trying to do all at once. And being able to be efficient and repurpose one piece of content in one part of the ecosystem, in this case, your Google Business Profile and then use it on your actual website is a win because you just want to be as efficient as possible when you're getting started. 09:44 Crystal  Absolutely. And I had a few people ask a few questions just now. We'll get to them mostly at the end. But just to say I spoke very quickly, but I think I had a couple of questions about a search operator there. So Google has lots of things called a search operator. I think Mordy is answering that question now. There's also a tool called Chrome Dev Tools. So as I said, if you right click within Chrome, you can see. If you right click on any website in Chrome, you can see this. So essentially, you click Inspect and then you can see lots of things. You can see lots of things over here and stuff like that, that you can see what your website looks like on mobile, which is really good. And I think that in terms of repurposing content, yeah, it's a great opportunity, particularly if you are somebody like this business, and I see lots of businesses like this, who started on social, got a really good start there. And maybe they think, okay, I should have a website now. And then they think that all of the work that they did on social has to stay on social. And that's not the case, you can take some of those wins, you can take that content, and you can move it over to your blog, you can move it over to your website so that everyone can see all of that content, including Google. 10:57 Angie Yeah, another really nice thing about reusing that social content is you can almost use it as a really good litmus test. So you can use it to figure out what your audience actually likes on, you know, in general, but if you notice big differences between your social audience and your website audience, you can kind of find different opportunities that you might be missing, too, which is always kind of nice.  11:21 Crystal  Yeah, absolutely and that testing things, you know, for instance, if you test something in a short post, or if you test a blog like this one, for instance, has 518 likes, like, that's gonna be a pretty good post on your website. And if, but sometimes you're particularly if you're in a new blog, you might not know if like, this is something that's gonna resonate with your audience. But if you test it on social, and let's say you get a good response from it, then yeah, you're gonna know that works for you, before you invest all the time that it takes to create a blog to to do all of that stuff. 11:57 Mordy By the way, on the search operators question, if you go into the chat, the great Simon Cox threw in a link to an article that will run through all the various operators that are there, the sight commands that are there that you can do, and it'll explain it for you. I was going to answer the question in the Q&A. That's why I've marked it live. 12:16 Crystal There you go. Search operators are really useful in Google. But this is a great way to see which pages Google sees on your website. And it's really important to make sure that you understand that the number of results here responds to the number that you would expect to see there.  Mordy Awesome.  Crsytal Mordy, do you want to pass it over? 12:37 Mordy Yeah, let's pass it on over. Okay. Let me see. Too many. I have too many screens open.  Crystal So many screens.  Mordy Too many screens. Okay. I'm going to start. Can you see my screen? Okay. Yes. Okay, great. I'm gonna move it over. This way I can look directly into the camera.  One second, stop. Sorry. Apologies. Let’s try this again. One more time, the always awkward moment where you're trying to share the right screen. 13:08 Crystal Just don't share the wrong screen.  13:13 Mordy Yeah, with that, okay. Do we see the right screen with the website?  Crystal Yes.  Mordy Perfect. And we're on the right on the right track. This is a great website. It's a website about Mediterranean diets. And I basically eat a Mediterranean diet so it really resonated with me in particular. And it's been around for a bit and I ran it through a tool called Semrush. And by the way, for if you're a Wix user, you can access Semrush, directly in your SEO dashboard and your SEO Setup Checklist inside of Wix and connect to this and it'll actually pull you over to here, if you want to go into the actual Semrush tool. Long story short, because it looks a little bit overwhelming. I do understand, I was checking to see what kind of keywords the website is already ranking for. And we can see that they are ranking for 51 keywords. They've been around for a bit. But it was interesting to me that they weren't ranking for a lot of Mediterranean diet keywords, there's a few, but a lot of them weren't and I just want to make the point that it's sometimes great to get traffic, it's always good to get traffic I guess. But sometimes the traffic might not be aligned to what you're exactly trying to do with the website. So I'm going to try to explain a little bit of what I mean by that. I'm gonna focus on the site creating a little bit more identity around what it's doing. And it's a good lesson in what you do in order to translate your business to users in a clear and concise and digestible and explicit way [that] immediately translates into good SEO. They are really one in the same in a lot of ways.  So let's take a quick look. First off, I just want to point out that while the website does want to showcase their recipes if they are indeed a recipe website. I probably want to do this as the first thing coming off. I wouldn't want to first establish a rapport with the user, who I am, what I do, what the website is and then sort of push you into the the second click content, in this case, the recipes. So I’d probably remove that. Also, side, side, side point, I’d try to make sure that the hover over was a little bit more accessible to someone who might be visually impaired. There's a low contrast between the background image and hover over of the text itself, side point.  Let's just—when I looked at the website, the first thing I really noticed was I wasn't really sure what the website exactly did. You know, is it about Maya here? Is she a nutrition consultant? Is this really a website for recipes? Is [are] the recipes really secondary and the consultancy around the Mediterranean diet nutrition program is that the main thing? It wasn't very clear to me. And if it's not clear to me, I think I'm generally smart, it’s definitely not clear to a bot and it's not clear to Google. And we have to make that a little bit clearer. And so one of the first things I would do is move this down the page, this little recipe, repeater up here, pull down the page, and I would have a more explicit H1, right. Maya, Mediterranean nutrition consultant or Mediterranean, healthy Mediterranean recipes, or whatever it is. There's a great little tool, it's called Marketing Syrup, it's a Chrome extension. And it will tell you things like what the headers on the page are. And you can see there's an H2 of Hi, I’m Maya or H3 rather Hi I’m Maya. We don't really have an H1 on the page. So the best practice is to have an H1 header on the page, the H1 header is like your overall title of the page as a whole. Then you can have H2 headers, which are for the sections on the page and the section within a section would be an H3, you can go to H4, H5, you don't really generally have to. So we really need to have an H1 on the page. And that H1 should be about what the site specifically does, whether that's offering recipes, whether that's offering nutrition consultancy around Mediterranean diets, and so forth. And it should be about Mediterranean diets, because that's what the website seems to focus on, for example, here, the body content inspired by the Mediterranean diet, you know, etc, etc, etc. So that's really my first thing here to really focus on that, the site identity. And to also do that in the title tag.  The title tag is a, it's a piece of, it's a tag that goes in the header of a webpage. And it's sometimes or usually, it depends what Google shows on the actual results page. So when someone goes to Google, and they see this website, they will see you know, this web page, rather, they'll see Mediterranean diet and the name of the website. However, that's not very explicit. And by the way, even when Google doesn't show that particular title on the results page, because sometimes they do rewrite them, they'd still look at that in the HTML code to understand what the page is all about. I would be again, more explicit, Mediterranean diet what, Mediterranean diet recipes, but it's already in diet, diet, nutrition, consultancy, and so forth. So that's my number one thing.  The second thing I want to focus on is the about page. And I love about pages. We actually did a webinar, I think it was with Semrush, Crystal and I. We talked about the value of an about page, because about pages really, I know, we generally think of them as, okay, it's a place where we can offer you know our history of the company kind of thing. But it's really a page where you can establish trust and your expertise and your experience. And you could do it really explicitly. And it's a rare opportunity on a website, it’s really only the homepage and the about page where you can tell users and Google who you are, what you do. So again, we have about Maya, I would make the H1 to be again about what the name, the business, you know about Maya’s consultancy or about Maya’s Mediterranean recipes and so forth.  The second thing I would really do and and this is great, actually, because it leans into something that Google calls EEAT is called Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. In a nutshell it's what Google sort of kind of looks at to be able to understand that you're a trustworthy, relevant, expert source of material. And one of the great things that this webpage does is it goes to the personal experience, like this person, the consultant here grew up in Syria, and they grew up living and breathing a Mediterranean diet. So they have a lot, not just education around nutrition in the Mediterranean diet, but they have actual experience, it’s part of their very culture and that's a real advantage to a webpage like this, to a website like this, and I would really harp on that I would talk about that a lot more.  I would also list any certifications, any licenses here. Anything that would really tell you again because we're in, we're possibly in a YMYL space. I love throwing acronyms out [there], it’s what we do in SEO, SEO is an acronym. YMYL is Your Money Your Life, which means basically the webpage can either help or hurt you physically, emotionally, financially. So a health website, an investing website, Google takes those more seriously and wanted to make sure that it gets it right. So showcasing their expertise in terms of their licensing, education, any you know, places they've been featured or so forth really helps drive home, you should trust me in terms of either consulting or the recipes, because I know what I'm talking about.  Okay. Let's go to the actual nutrition page. And here again, like we don't have a lot of content here, what is this page meant to do? What is this webpage about? You know putting an H1 here and some and a little bit, just a few lines of content sort of give context of what this page is. If we look at the title tag, the title tag is just nutrition. Well, what about nutrition? Is it nutrition education? Is it nutrition education about Mediterranean diets. And again, that goes back to what I was trying to say before. If we're trying, if the business model is about the Mediterranean diet, then the title tag here should explicitly say, nutrition education for Mediterranean diets, and so forth. And it's a little bit confusing, because in some places, the website, it seems to be talking about nutrition as a whole. And then in some places the website seems to be talking about the Mediterranean diet, having that strong site identity would really do this site well, and again, having some headers on the page and so forth. And again, even the content itself, oh, by the way, just another accessibility issue, the hover over content here, when they set up the hover over when you hover over the actual title turns it to white, and it can't read it anymore. But um, again, some of the content here Mediterranean Diet 101. Great, that seems to be on target. Staying healthy, cold and flu season nutrition guide. Is that a Mediterranean nutrition guide? Or is it again, just general nutrition? Do we really want to focus on the actual niche of the Mediterranean vertical? Then we should make sure that all of the content, at least when we're getting started in establishing that identity is about that. And it's the same thing with the recipes, and I'll end on this. 22:30 Mordy Again, a lot of the recipes do hit on the Mediterranean diet, a lot of them don't. Again, having a, they have a title here, Mediterranean Diet Recipes, and that's great. But then a lot of the recipes don't seem to be that, maybe they are, but they should be explicit. So I know. okay, it's tacos, but it's the Mediterranean diet version of tacos. So I don't feel guilty about eating it and I love tacos. Let's take a look again, at the H1, I'm sorry, the title tag. We're again, just writing recipes. But it should be Mediterranean recipes. So again, the site has been around, it has some traffic. But I don't feel like it's getting the traffic that it’s really going after because I don't think the site is consistently focused and explicitly focused on all things Mediterranean diet. 23:19 Angie Yeah, I think I was looking at that too. And I think one of the, I think kind of at the heart of that problem is just not quite knowing exactly who it is that you're actually writing and who you're building your website for. I think if you kind of look at, you know, your competitors, people who are like you, or even people who are, you know, attracting the kind of people you're interested in, I think that would give that site like a really good cohesive direction to go in, and probably reduce a lot of their workload that they're doing for, in terms of like SEO and website management. Yeah. 23:56 Mordy And that, that understanding your audience, and the whole business model really sets you up to either succeed or fail in SEO. And you pointed out we were talking about this last week, you know, to break the fourth wall a little bit. We're going over these sites last week. And you mentioned actually, like they have like, you know, the accreditations up here, MBA RDN. You ask, we know why is the MBA there? What's the relevancy to the website, you might have an MBA you might want to you know, that's great. You could talk about it on the about page, but to list it as the first credential, when you're dealing with a nutrition website, Angie made the point that maybe that's not the most relevant thing.  24:33 Angie Yeah, particularly because like when we look at a website, we're always processing from top to bottom and from left to right. I mean, generally, right, like if you're typing and speaking English, you're gonna read from left to right. So the first thing and the last thing that you read are going to be the things that people notice the most, but also the things they remember the most and I mean, well, I understand why those credentials are in that order, and I kind of get why she would have them there, I think in this, in that particular space, that's not doing her a big benefit. 25:09 Mordy Yeah. And again, you can list the MBA on the about page. But as like the top, you know, it's part of the header of the entire website, the first thing, that's a great point. 25:20 Crystal  And I think it's important to bring in opportunities to, like, I think you were talking about which kind of topics she was covering over it. And I think like, it's a great opportunity to think about where you're focusing, and your keyword research, the way you do your keyword research. A lot of times people think keyword research has to be like loads and loads of tools and lots of things. And like, there are wonderful, fantastic tools. But with something like this, you can do keyword research in a lot of different ways. Someone in the questions asked, where can I get ideas, for for a website like this? You can get ideas from people that you know, you can get ideas from a website, or sorry, from like a Facebook group. If people are talking about about Mediterranean diets and a Facebook group and you see people discussing the same topics, then you can write something about that. And then you can post it back into the group, for instance, you can go on to Google and look at their related searches, you can look at their predictive searches, Google Trends and things like that, you don't necessarily have to have a big complicated tool in order to get that detail, but it helps you to get and make sure that the content that you're making is right on target 26:27 Angie 100%. And I find too, sometimes you have to watch because when you use a lot of the tools, you kind of start walking down a tunnel when you're doing your keyword research. And you kind of forget about all of these little incidental things that sort of align with that. Whereas if you go to your actual audience and the people that you're, you know, hoping to communicate with or sell to or have visit your site. You sometimes get like these really nice keyword clusters that you wouldn't have not like necessarily found even in like very good keyword tools. 26:59 Mordy I always say this, like keyword research tools are great to get started. But you at some point really actually need to have some sort of inkling about what you're talking about, or what's going on in that vertical, some way, somehow, in some shape or form. 27:15 Angie 100%, and the site I've looked at actually is a really good example. But before I get into that, I will let you just like, you know, share your links and resources.  27:27 Crystal Yes.  Mordy I don’t think I have any links or resources for that one. Do I?  Crsytal I have some.  Mordy Oh, you have them. See, Crystal always has my back. 27:37 Crystal   We do our best. So yeah, so I will share these to everyone afterwards. But yeah, we have a few different resources which are available. So these are the ones that are useful for new domains. We talked about a few different things around like adding links. And then we also have sort of internal linking strategies, how to do on-page SEO. So Mordy talked about a lot of things about like H1s and things like that. So we have an article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, which talks about how to do on-page SEO. And it explains all of that. We also have stuff about content strategy. So we talked about, you know, thinking about your ideas, and so making sure that they make sense, your content strategy can help you be more solid on that. And thinking about building brand authority is also something that's worth considering. And thinking and that builds into this sort of, you know, do you need to declare your MBA on your recipe blog? Maybe not. You know, unless you maybe, you're writing, maybe you’re a business chef,  maybe you're a chef for business people that go to work, potentially. But yeah, so we will be sending these links as well. And before we get, we'll share some links from Angie after she shares her site audit as well. 28:45 Angie All right, let's see if I can share my screen. Huh, excellent. So does that work for everybody?  Crystal  Yes.  Mordy Yep.  Angie Excellent. So I took a bit of more of an established website. And if we have a look in here, you can see that it's, you know, doing pretty good. It's got a fair number, it's ranking for a fair number of keywords here, you can see there's four point two thousand. So it's a bit more established than the other ones. And of course, it's in the financial space, they offer small business loans, and they seem to actually be targeting people who are typically like not your typical, you know, bank type client. So I had a look through their site operators and had a look to see what was indexed and I noticed that what is indexed, what Semrush is seeing and what Bing [is] seeing are quite different. So that was kind of one the first quick little things I thought would be worth having a look at.  Overall, though, I have to say that, you know, like the on-page SEO was generally pretty solid. The, if you can see here, the page titles and things were all pretty good. When I did a search for their name, when I did a brand search, I really liked that things like Trustpilot, and stuff were showing up. Because, like Mordy had mentioned with the diet website, financial is very much your money or your life content. So things like trust, and you know, showing that you are who you are, and that you're good to work with—super, super important. Authority and experience were absolutely huge.  One thing I did notice, when I went running through the website was backlinks. Um, and when I went through their backlinks, I noticed that they had some really, really nice links. But it's probably worth spending some time for them to do a bit more back, a bit of link building. And I will tell you why. One of the reasons for that is one of the good ways to build some links, particularly to these types of sites, is through things like you know, videos and stuff. They've got a ton of customers, if we go to their Instagram site, they have a ton of like, really nice, quick testimonials. But we don't actually know anything about these people and that's kind of a shame. I realized that things like, you know, keeping people, keeping their identities and stuff safe is really important. But I think there's always nice ways to get around it. One of the really good examples of how to tell personal stories without, you know, outing a person is Humans of New York. I'm not sure if people have seen that. But years ago, it was really, really big. And when they started particularly, they were really good at showing pictures and telling stories without actually getting into the identity of the person. So it was about, it focused on their story and kind of, you know, their issue, right.  The other thing I noticed when I was on the site has to deal a lot with the content. So you can tell that a lot of this content has been written to help customers and also to help kind of rank in the right places. And that is fantastic. But here's one of the things I noticed. One of these, where is it here? Is it this one? One of these talks about great business ideas for women or for women led businesses or something to that effect, great business ideas for women. They're the ultimate guide to business ideas for women. And here's the thing that sticks out to me. If I'm looking for a business loan, I already have an idea of what I'm doing as a business. So this might not quite be what you want to like, this might not be quite attracting the traffic that's going to qualify you right. It might be generating tons of traffic, not necessarily people who are quite there yet, but it is really good for that, you know if they're just getting started.  But when I looked through the keywords that they have optimized for, I noticed that a lot of the keywords were very much kind of around the basic sort of, you know, women-owned business grants, those types of things, right. So one of the side suggestions I actually have is that when you are doing your content research, and also, when you're looking at doing your keyword research, if you expand that out a little bit, and spend a little time doing, you know, some competitive analysis, and also looking at the people who are not currently coming to the site. Why are they not coming? Look for keywords that might attract those people that might align a little better with what they're doing, right? These people are not in like, anybody who's got a business idea or doesn't have a business idea yet is probably not close enough to even be thinking about a loan.  Another thing I was thinking about was what other types of things do people need to know when they are getting a business loan? Right. So I need to know am I ready for a business loan? In fact, that might actually be one of the main pages you want to add in here somewhere, particularly in sections like this. The other thing I noticed on the blog in the content is when we look through the content, we do find some, this one is an internal link, no, we do find some internal links. But the internal links are not necessarily going where you would expect them to go. So I would say a) not enough of them and b) they don't necessarily go where you would expect them to go. The example I was looking at earlier had, you know it links back to the page, for example. So I would think about when you're setting up your internal linking, Mordy actually shared some really good tips on that. But when you're thinking about your internal linking, think about the journey very holistically. If I'm landing on, you know, alternative business loans and financing, what kind of problems am I experiencing? I'm betting that's going to be something like say, scaling up, for example. I have a proven idea, and I'm having issues scaling up. So you know, if you have other posts that are along that line, that follow that journey really nicely, it’s well worth having a look at.  The other thing that, these are not necessarily SEO, but they were definitely things that I would look at, um, we have a really nice header image. But I'm wondering if that's almost self selecting against the keywords and the content, the market, that all of that other stuff seems to be targeting. So I would definitely be looking at testing this nice big key image here, as well as things like this, right? Yes, that's absolutely important. But it might be worth almost testing, particularly as you get into things like content and customer journeys.  Another thing, when I looked at the blog, we have like no way to kind of filter and kind of go through things. So from a usability standpoint, it might be worth considering having something there that kind of divides it, at least by audience, right? You might even want to consider having like a specific women business section that's written by women and tells those, you know, the story of successful women who have maybe used One Park at one point or another.  The other thing is we have in some of these women based, I'm just going to use women as an example, because it was really prominent when I went through the content. But when you go through some of this women based content, I would seriously consider testing some of these call-to-actions and some of these buttons. I think that they would, I think that different audiences are going to see that differently. So you know, the chances of, you know, wanting to get funding now. Yeah, that's absolutely what they want and like what they're going to want, but women tend to be a lot more risk adverse. So they're more likely to look for information first, right? So you might want to test different things like that. 38:26 Angie Also alternative media. So when I went through Semrush, there were some really, really nice SERP features. So they're really getting into a lot of the different SERP features. But I'd love to see them start working on a bit more of that and working on some, you know, different videos and images. Again, make use of this really nice social, there's a fairly good number of followers there. But when we look at the posts, we see that they're not getting a whole ton of engagement. So I would love to see, you know, something really unified between the YouTube that they're doing with the you know, the various stories and things that they have with their website and their Instagram. So yeah, that was kind of what I noticed as I was going through. 39:30 Crystal  I think that's some great insights on a competitive niche. I think one of the things that a lot of people forget is that with SEO, you can test things. And you mentioned testing a few times. And I think that sometimes people treat websites like their print, like you know, you print a book and then it's done. But with a website, you can publish it. Then you can watch it for a little while. And then you can see how people respond and then you can re-edit it, resubmit it, republish it, you can go, oh, no, actually maybe not green, maybe blue, or maybe maybe not this H1, maybe a different H1, that sort of thing.  40:08 Angie Yeah, 100%. And I mean, the other thing is, I noticed, I don't know about other SEOs. But I know like, for me, if I'm working on a website, I kind of start testing and I kind of start getting sort of tunnel vision. So I'll start working on one thing, and I'll work on that for months. And then all of a sudden, I test something and it's like, oh, wait a minute, I bet you it's caused by this other thing, right? You know, or I will focus on a specific, you know, ranking factor. For example, let's say I'll focus on, you know, title tags, for example, on a website. But when you're testing title tags, sometimes you pick up on, you know, an accidental phrasing that works better, or, you know, a different strategy that then leads you to another, you know, another thing that, you know, might pay off more, might have bigger bang for your buck, for example. 41:00 Crystal  Hmm. And it's not always clear sometimes which thing is the, you know, what caused the result?  Mordy Roll the dice and get it.  Crystal Yeah, exactly. So I think that it can sometimes be important to sort of test and maybe test again. So test. If you have one website, then it's kind of tricky to test it on lots of different things. But, for instance, you can test audience response to a piece of copy across maybe your website, maybe across your social, we think we mentioned that before, but you can also test it in different sections as well. So yeah, testing is a great thing to get in the habit of doing.  41:39 Mordy Especially when you are trying to target more than one audience or to segments of an audience because you don't know what does resonate, what doesn't resonate, how Google is going to understand you as you're trying to deal with trying, to navigate multiple audiences all at once, and what's going to stick and not going to stick. And I think a lot of businesses and websites fall into that category of there's multiple audiences or maybe a secondary audience that you need to consider. That makes it a little bit more complicated to go about how do I structure the website? How do I create content? How do I make changes and all that kind of stuff? 42:09 Angie Yeah, yeah. 100%. And again, like the value of your competitors, I cannot stress the importance of doing competitor research, see what they're doing, find out what's working, find out what's not working, find out what their customers are complaining about, because their customer complaints are your absolute goldmine, like, absolutely rank yourself for that stuff. Absolutely, rank yourself for that stuff. Because if I'm with your competitor, and I have like a massive complaint, I'm likely searching for how to fix that complaint, or, you know, whatever that happens to be, offer them an answer.  42:46 Crystal  Yeah. Absolutely. And I think that it's sometimes things that people overlook, so that, you know, maybe they don't want to face the ugly truth. So it could be a good opportunity for you. And I think also, sometimes people forget if you're going, so if you are a new domain, if you're going into a new space, you can also look at your potential competitors. So like maybe you haven't launched your website yet, you can look at the kinds of things that people, the kinds of pain points that people who are looking for that kind of product are experiencing. You can look at the pain points from people who are in that vertical and what they're experiencing in order to get a good idea of what works and what works best there. How are we doing on the questions, the chat and the questions? 43:31 Mordy We have questions. Crystal  Very lively.  Mordy Let’s share the resources. 43:36 Crystal  I’ll share the resources, just a second.  43:42 Mordy I’ve got your back this time.  Angie We get along so well.  43:48 Crystal  Yeah, just going to share these resources. So as I discussed, we are going to be sharing this content with you after the webinar. So these were the ones from Mordy and after the webinar, we are going to be sharing this deck, which includes all of these links. So we have E-E-A-T article, which is from the [Wix] SEO Learning Hub. But we also have some great content from SEJ.  Angie you'll be very pleased to see in the chat people have been bigging up SEJ the whole time. They have such great resources. They're really great. So yeah, it says, we've got the SEO Site Audit Workbook, which is really good if people are getting used to doing a site audit, which is sort of going through and kicking the tires, really on your website, whether you've just got a new website or whether it was working before. Also ranking factors for 2023, which are always good fun to figure out what is considered a ranking factor and what's not and how that all works. Competitive Analysis Guide, which as Angie was talking about competitor analysis is something that's really, really important, because no one's only going to look at your website, they're going to look at other websites too. It's important to know what they're looking at. And also how to research your audience. Understanding your audience is super important. So that's a great resource as well. And with that, I think we're gonna go over to questions Mordy. Have you got a few questions? 45:05 Mordy I have questions. There's many, many questions,  Crystal Many questions.  Mordy I’ll try to get to as many as I possibly can. First of all, thank you both Crystal and Angie, that was amazing. Angie, thank you so much for that. Where to start with the questions. So one question wasn’t in the Q&A, but I was scouring the chat also. And I wanted to bring it up, Google algorithm update, someone was surprised we didn't talk about them. How can we not talk about them? What is, this audit was about just you know, getting started and getting some some momentum going and some wins. But yes, Google does update its algorithm. We're technically in the middle of an official algorithm update, the October 2023 Core algorithm update, which followed the October Spam algorithm update which followed the September 2023 Helpful Content update, which was preceded by the August 2023 Core update. There's been a lot of algorithm updates lately is what I'm trying to say. I know what you’re talking about, there's been a lot of updates. And I think the tips that we're all offering are trying to get you to a point where, there's, no website is safe from the algorithm, you're going to see rank movement, rank fluctuations, it is the norm. I was recently looking at a whole heap of Semrush data about this. Just rank in general has gotten a little bit less consistent as a whole. So it's normal to see that you're ranking number five, or four, three, or two or one. And then one day, you jumped down one ranking position, you're making number one to ranking number five, and number seven, then you jump back up again, there's all sorts of shifts. The tips that we're offering you while I can't guarantee you are future proofing your website, as you know, in a guarantee, are generally the kind of tips and creating the kind of content that Google is preferring, which means that when an algorithm update does come around, we would hope that following these sorts of tips and really mindset about how to look at content, and how to look at your website, and how to focus your website identity and targeting your audience  and quality content would see you being positively impacted by an algorithm update. 47:12 Angie Yeah, and it's not just that, like, I know, a lot of times, SEOs will, or, you know, website owners will, you know, look at their analytics, and they'll be like, oh, my goodness, it must have been an update, because all of a sudden, my traffic dropped, or, you know, the opposite is true, where they'll, you know, they'll update and they'll do a lot of SEO work. And they'll get very frustrated, because they don't see those rankings change, right. Within. So part of that is just being patient because things do like you said, things do fluctuate all the time. But it's not just that. It may not actually be an update, or it may not actually be you, it could be shifts within that whole industry or within that whole, you know, type of keyword or within that whole portion of the index within Google, right, because Google tinkers with things and has different priorities than what we do as business owners and what we do as site owners, right. So I wouldn't panic either is I guess what I'm saying.  48:08 Crystal  Yeah, so I have an article about how to diagnose the Google algorithm update change and essentially, like, it’s not one thing like, it might not be an algorithm update. It could be that the SERP changed, like there's some parts of the SERP that have a 3D layer on them and they've just added it, like literally. And so sometimes they add different parts to the SERP and that might be the reason why it was affected. Sometimes it's something like, they've literally changed around the SERPs. People who remember COVID will remember that, like, they just stopped ranking certain businesses for certain things like you couldn't rank for like facemask, for instance, unless you were like the WHO or you know, the CDC or that sort, of thing. Sometimes they sort of will just manage a SERP. There's lots of reasons why it can happen. So I have an article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, which talks about that. But I think, as Mordy was saying, you know, it is the case that you kind of have to keep your nose clean, and following some of the best practices and following some of the good content guidelines will help see you through that.  Additionally, you'll notice that we all sort of looked at a few different channels for different websites. One of the things that can be useful for algorithm challenges if you you're in a website, if you're in a vertical that is vulnerable to algorithm updates, or where you've seen a few, it's useful to have a foothold in a couple of different channels. I used to work with a client who was in YMYL, for instance, and we always had some paid running because Google tinkers a lot with the YMYL thing. So they used to rank for a really important, they had a test that was a medical test. And Google just changed around the SERP. It wasn't anything to do with anything they did. They haven't done anything wrong. But they changed the SERP so that you couldn’t rank for that. So we had some paid running and you could run paid ads for it, but you couldn't run, but you couldn't do organic. So if you have a few things going on in your social, you have a little bit going on in your paid, you have a little bit, those sorts of things, you can be a little bit more resilient during algorithm updates. 50:17 Angie So literally, sorry, Mordy.  50:20 Mordy Oh no, go ahead. 50:20 Angie I was just gonna say I cannot tell you the horror stories I have of companies that have put all of their eggs in one basket. And then all of a sudden that company changes the way that they do business or, you know, Google changed the way it ranks something. And they absolutely lose everything, like I have absolutely horrid, like, they just got rid of FAQ, for example. Right. There was how to FAQ. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, how many people spent 100s and 1000s of dollars, building all of that stuff. And now all of a sudden, none of that. I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean that Google's not still using that, but it's not showing up anymore. 51:01 Mordy And by the way, to get to that point, not putting your eggs in one basket, I've been like analyzing this stuff for like the better part of like, eight, nine years, like really diving into the algorithm. There are simply keywords. And I've seen this literally 1000 times over where the rankings are just not stable for whatever particular reason whether Google has a hard time understanding the content, or the intent around that keyword, whatever it is. Certain keywords are relatively stable with some movement, and certain keywords are just off the wall bananas, you will never no matter what you do, be able to rank consistently because Google themselves was having a hard time with that keyword. And you probably want to diversify, where you're trying to get traffic from if that's the case with that keyword. Let's get to some other questions really quick. So somebody wanted to ask about why Crystal, you said that the line links for internal links are better than a button?  51:53 Crystal  Okay, so Google perceives line links differently from buttons when they're crawling them. And so it's easiest for them to crawl the line links. And it's really easy for you to add them. So if you have an important piece of content, I would highly recommend that you also add a line link even if you have a button to make sure that people can, Google can crawl it in the most effective manner. Sometimes a button is to do a thing, a link is to go to a thing. So if you want someone to do something like to open a form, or to open a window or something like that, use a button. If you want to send someone to from one page to another use a link. And the line links are the best way to do that. From navigational point of view, things like related posts and like things like that, that have sort of those kinds of buttons from a navigational point of view, that's great. But don't rely solely on those. They'll get crawled, of course, but they don't get crawled in the same way. So add a line link, line links are your friends, add them lots, super easy. That could it'll take you 10 minutes to learn it. And you can and it will improve the crawlability of your website immensely. 53:01 Angie I can't give away too many details, because I don't want to get into trouble. But I can tell you that from testing, I can tell you that there are a lot of audiences who will click and buy through a like a line link long before they'll ever click on a button. And I can't give you the space. But I can tell you that it bit, spaces that tend to be a little bit you know, they have trust issues. From an audience perspective, the buttons themselves, research is showing that they're a little more suspect, they might have a little like, your audience will have a little less trust in a button than they will in a link and I'm not 100% sure why. But that's what I can tell you like, from some research, I may or may not be involved in.  53:55 Crystal That’s very hush-hush Angie Mordy It sounds quite intriguing. One thing I want to get to, a bunch of people have asked how do I do SEO inside of Wix, how do I implement? Is there a guide? I'm going to now literally right now, throw a link into the chat to our Wix SEO Guide. It's massive. It's like 90 pages. So look for the topic that you're looking for. It really goes through everything that we have going on inside of Wix, we're about to just update it again. We update it once a quarter. So expect some new things to be in there relatively soon. But it will help you walk through how to say update your title tag inside of Wix. So please have a look. If you have questions. I'm out there on Twitter and LinkedIn. Just ask me I will be happy to answer whatever I can. Okay, on to, and Angie, this one is for you. Finding user pain points, analyzing competitors, how do you go about finding user pain points? 54:53 Angie Um, so I have a bit of a unique way, I think, of researching my users. So you have to keep in mind when you're looking through your client content, so like emails and things like that, or you're looking at your social specifically, you're already looking at information from people who have already converted. So that doesn't tell me a whole lot. That essentially tells me how my marketing is doing. So I don't do a whole lot of that at the beginning. When I'm looking for optimizing for user journeys and stuff, I want to identify examples, crowds, people, users, whatever, that kind of fit my idea of who it is that I should be converting, and I am not. Ads, paid ads is a really good way to figure that out. When I have that, I go through that language and I'm looking at what are they sharing, what's the language that they're using? What are the issues that are having, that they're having, what are the other things related to what I offer, that they're searching and tinkering with? The language that they use when they're talking in general to when they're talking directly to you and they’re a customer is going to be very, very different. And that difference is your sweet spot, right. Because that difference is what you haven't been meeting, that's the needs you haven't been meeting yet. So I spend a lot of time kind of digging through a lot of content, particularly social, at least up until recently has been fantastic. I will essentially crawl a ton of that.  For people who don't have those kinds of technical skills, or you know, they're not quite there yet. Just go through and just have a look to see, when you go through a forum, if you go through a social network or something, what are people talking about? What are the issues that they're facing? Right. Um, you know, for the cake industry, for example, you know, a really big thing is, you know, what are they getting versus, you know, what are they paying for? What are their, what is their dream wedding? How does that fit into things, right? So you have to just kind of think very, very holistically. If you are like really, really new and really, really tiny, just simply have really nice open conversations with people that you know, right? If I'm, if I want to start a baking website, I will literally kind of like, watch the local bakery to see who comes out. And I'll just say, hey, look, can I ask you a couple of questions? You know, and just be really open and honest. And nine times out of 10, they will answer you, right. Just keep in mind that what users say they want and what they actually want are not always the same thing. Don't fall into that trap. It's a good starting point. But always be checking to make sure that you're not misunderstanding that. 58:01 Mordy I want to, I know we're out of time, but just want to say that very last point. I just saw yesterday a social media post where someone referenced an experiment that Sony did. Remember, the old Walkman, they had the sport one, the yellow one, and the traditional black one. And they asked the focus group, which one do you like better? And they all said the yellow one. And then when they left, Sony said, hey, you, thank you for your feedback, take a Walkman with you. And they all took the black one. And Sony was like, ah, so you said the other one, but you didn't take it?  58:36 Angie Oh, it's good research like that. It's so much good research like that. They did a test where they actually they give you a choice of two items. And they tell you to pick one and then they then they offer it to half of the group. They said look, in a week, we're going to offer you the chance to exchange and if you allow people the chance to exchange that item, they are actually less happy with the item that they purchased initially. It's fantastic.  59:00 Mordy Wow, that's amazing. We should totally dive into this but we’re already over.  Crystal We’re way over time.  Mordy Angie, thank you so much for that.  Crystal   Thank you. 59:10 Mordy Thank you to SEJ for sending you over and partnering with us and sharing you with us. 59:15 Angie Thank you so much for having me. I love this. I'm like a big Mordy fan and a big Crystal fan and a huge Wix fan. So it's an absolute honor and a thrill to be here. 59:26 Crystal  Oh, you can come back. Thank you so much. I'm just going to wind things up. And just to remind everyone, yes, this will be, this is recorded, you will get a link, you will get the deck with all of the other links that we've shared. We will also email it to you and it will be on YouTube so you will have all of the things that you need to get going with your quick wins. Thank you so much to Angie, to Mordy, thank you to everyone. Bye. 59:52 Mordy Bye, everybody.

Author: Luke Carthy Whether you’re focusing on organic (SEO) or paid campaigns, product detail pages (PDPs) are central to how your potential customers browse your offerings, perform research, and ultimately buy from your business. For most online stores, every single PDP is constructed from and powered by a single page template that is solely responsible for connecting shoppers to thousands of products and URLs. That being said, many eCommerce websites leave money and opportunity on the table by failing to maximize their template’s potential. If you’re using an off-the-shelf theme for your eCommerce store, there are almost always opportunities to optimize the stock PDP template to improve consumer confidence and give your shoppers all the details they need to convert. With that in mind, let’s dig into the key elements your PDPs need to have for increased conversions and sales. Table of contents: Mobile-first design Breadcrumbs Product images Image performance Image galleries Link to the product’s brand category Product descriptions Key calls-to-action Quantity fields (optional) How to increase trust signals and shopper confidence Social proof and UGC Show off your other unique selling points Structured data markup Minimize JavaScript dependency Check how dependent your website is on JavaScript Avoid pop-ups Mobile-first design We couldn’t talk about PDPs without first addressing the devices that your potential customers use to access them. It’s not atypical for 70% of traffic to PDPs to come from mobile devices. With the lion’s share of traffic going to mobile (particularly for D2C brands), it’s critical that you apply a mobile-first philosophy when designing a great product page. Pro tip: If you’re primarily serving B2B customers, you’ll find the mobile/desktop split to be more even. In these cases, I’d still recommend focusing on mobile first as we expect a greater shift to mobile over the coming years. B2B commerce is typically up to five years behind the curve. My advice here is to cater and design your PDP for mobile users first, then take advantage of the greater real estate for desktop shoppers later. Plenty of brands start the other way around and romanticize the desktop UX whilst neglecting mobile. This is where a lot of issues can creep in, resulting in a lackluster PDP experience. If you’re running search ads, a large proportion of your shoppers will be visiting from a mobile device. Mobile traffic via search ads is typically much more expensive, so you should prioritize your mobile experience first. With that being said, let’s jump into what makes a great PDP experience for potential customers—starting from the top of the page and moving downwards. Breadcrumbs A wonderfully simple (yet hugely beneficial) feature on PDPs, breadcrumbs actively reduce bounce rate and help customers explore similar products with just a single click—but only if they’re designed well. There’s a lot of pressure to display the right product for each visitor on the first click. If what you’re showing isn’t quite what your customer is looking for, a quick click into the breadcrumbs can reveal more options from the same category. Here, the challenge for mobile users is: how do you effectively display breadcrumbs with such little screen real estate? The trick here is to only show the deepest category for the product, as that’s often the most relevant and most engaging breadcrumb level. For example, let’s say you’re a luxury furniture retailer. A potential customer has landed on a leather corner sofa. The category hierarchy could look like this: Home > Sofas > Leather Sofas > Leather Corner Sofas The mobile breadcrumb would just display “Leather Corner Sofas” as that’s the deepest category for the product being viewed. Showing all levels of your website hierarchy on mobile can make the page look cluttered—the breadcrumbs would likely spill onto multiple lines and it would take up more precious screen space. Comparatively on a desktop, you have the real estate to show all levels simultaneously: Product images Product images are the gateway between your product and your potential customers, helping to close the gap between shopping online and shopping on the high street. Your images can make or break your conversions and sales, so they’re an absolutely critical factor for eCommerce success. Image performance Images are often the largest element on the page (in terms of file size), so this is where you typically have the most leverage when it comes to influencing load times. Using image compression tools, like TinyPNG , to compress your website images (product images, etc.) can shave up to 70% off the file size without impacting quality. Separately, to make your images even more lightweight, consider next-gen image formats, such as JPEG 2000 or WEBP which are much more efficient and lightweight than JPEG or PNG alone. Note: Wix will convert your images to WebP format for you automatically (for browsers that support it), ensuring the fastest possible experience for your customers. Image galleries Having worked with and extensively tested many iterations of gallery designs and layouts, here are the key points I recommend you consider: Thumbnails are a must. If you have multiple images, displaying “dots” (to indicate additional images) isn’t enough. Allow shoppers to scan thumbnails and select the images they want to see, rather than forcing them to scroll through each image sequentially. Make it easy for shoppers to zoom and pan. Customers should be able to easily zoom and pan images just like they would on their phone’s gallery. Pinch-to-zoom and being able to pan an image help close the gap between in-person and online shopping. Don’t forget about video. Video can really bring products to life. If you sell tactile products (such as apparel or fabrics), showing a video of someone modeling a garment or squeezing a cushion can really help your customers get a stronger idea of what the product is like and how it fits their needs. Showcase user-generated content. Extreme Terrain (in the image below) is a brand that implements user-generated content (UGC) to inspire shoppers with ways that other customers have used their products. This can really help to reduce buyer anxiety and improve conversion. Lazy load gallery images. Even highly optimized and compressed images can have large file sizes (especially GIFs). So, to improve initial page load times and provide a smooth UX for shoppers, lazy load images where possible. Note: Wix websites lazy load images by default. Link to the product’s brand category One of the biggest omissions I see on PDPs is not linking to brand categories for eCommerce sites that sell a multitude of brands. Brand is often one of the most considered factors when customers shop, particularly at the luxury/premium end of the market. So, make it easy for customers to explore a brand from your PDPs. Let’s look at two retailers side-by-side to explore the difference here. Currys is an electronics retailer that sells products from thousands of brands. As you can see from the example below, there’s no easy way to navigate all SHARK brand products from the PDP. Toolstation , on the other hand, makes it easy for customers to browse all products from a brand, empowering brand-aware customers to explore more. Pro tip: Linking to brand categories from PDPs also contributes to your internal linking efforts. Doing this can help your brand categories rank better, capturing more brand-focused, bottom-of-funnel search traffic. If you only sell one brand, but have multiple collections, you can deploy the same strategy here to instead link to the different collections within your brand. Product descriptions Product description design is all about making this section of your PDP as intuitive and interactive as possible for customers (while also ensuring that the content is SEO-friendly, as I’ll discuss in the JavaScript section below). Firstly, hastily throwing together a complete product description is often bad news, particularly if the description is lengthy. You want to avoid making your product descriptions look unwelcoming or feel like a chore. Getting customers to read your content is already a challenge in itself—don’t make it more difficult than it needs to be. Breaking up your description into sections and using a tab or accordion for each section of your description can help make your product’s written content more approachable. In addition, it allows your customers to quickly jump to specific parts of your description, rather than having to scan it all or take the extra step of searching the text on the page to get to what they’re looking for. Here’s a great example of using accordions/toggles to break up content and make it more accessible: Speaking of your written content, your PDP is also a great place to take snippets of key content from elsewhere to minimize distraction and reduce the chance of visitors going to other pages to get the information they need. Examples of these supporting, product-related details include: Size guides FAQs Return policies Delivery option By serving these key pieces of information on the PDP, it’s easier for customers to buy on the page (instead of potentially getting distracted right before checkout). Key calls-to-action Naturally, your “Add to Cart/Basket” button is a crucial action you want customers to take, so make it convenient to access from anywhere on the PDP to minimize friction. A great way to do this is by making the “Add to Basket” button persistent alongside the price at the bottom of the screen (once it’s out of view). Just ensure it doesn’t clash with any live chat or loyalty icons, etc. The color of your (call-to-action) CTA will depend on the design of the rest of the product page, so make sure there’s a high level of contrast so it stands out. For extra “flair,” a gentle animation can add a nice, dynamic touch. To learn more about the subtle art of calls-to-action, bookmark this CTA guide by Lazarina Stoy . Quantity fields (optional) As insignificant as this might seem on the surface, screen space on your PDPs is at a real premium. Removing your quantity field can free up precious space, but deleting it isn’t necessarily the right choice for every online store. Be sure to look at your purchase data to understand what quantities people typically purchase. For example, when it comes to sofas, most customers will only purchase one of each item. Sure, they may purchase multiple unique items, but typically only one of each. In contrast, in the world of beauty products, your customers may be more likely to buy multiples of the same item. This is especially the case for brand-loyal customers stocking up on their staple items. It also goes without saying that if you’re serving B2B customers , you’re more likely to need a quantity field as many customers may purchase items in bulk (taking advantage of price break discounts, for example). Pro tip: If you decide to remove the quantity field from your PDP, make sure you have it on the basket page so people can easily tweak their quantity before checking out. How to increase trust signals and shopper confidence From product and site-wide reviews to UGC that showcases your brand’s loyal audience/community, trust signals and social proof can help instill confidence and encourage first-time customers to buy from your online store. Pro tip: For maximum impact, I recommend that you place your reviews widget/badge underneath the “Add to Cart” CTA. This encourages customers to take that action and allows them to engage with your convincing trust signals and commerce functions without scrolling. Social proof and UGC Featuring real customer testimonials, images, videos, and even FAQs can all help encourage visitors to turn into customers (whilst building trust and authority with brand new audiences). Word-of-mouth is (and always has been) a powerful marketing tool for brands. User-generated content digitizes this form of marketing and works to bring new customers onboard or even encourages repeat customers. With an impressive 79% of consumers suggesting that user-generated content influences their purchase decisions, it’s certainly worth investing in UGC on your PDPs. Platforms, such as reviews.com , allow you to collect product and merchant reviews from your customers, but they also have add-ons available to more seamlessly integrate UGC into your overall workflow. Show off your other unique selling points Free delivery, extended returns window, generous guarantees, etc.—your key and distinguishing benefits will further reduce shopper anxiety and encourage visitors to buy. When possible, it’s a great idea to position these unique selling points near the “Add to Cart” CTA, too, so as to eliminate any last-second apprehension that might deter a potential customer. Structured data markup Structured data markup (in the form of Schema) helps contextualize your web page content for search engines. It fundamentally helps search engines get a better understanding of the page or product. Additionally, product schema can help your website take advantage of “ rich results ” (shown above) within the search results to entice potential shoppers before they even click through. These include: Pricing and stock information Breadcrumbs and category hierarchy Product ratings Item condition Shipping information Brand Colors and attributes etc. Note: Wix automates structured data markup on all Wix Stores product pages, Wix Bookings services pages, Wix Blog posts, Wix Forum posts, and Wix Events pages with preset markup , facilitating rich results without site owners having to implement it themselves. Minimize JavaScript dependency Relying too heavily on JavaScript (JS) rendering to display content can mean that search engines can’t (or won’t) load that content, which could have negative implications for your SEO (and potentially make your website bloated and slower to load, too). To be clear here, I’m not suggesting that using JavaScript is bad—far from it. In fact, your eCommerce site likely needs JavaScript for some commerce functions to work as planned. The issue creeps in when JavaScript needs to be rendered in order to display text, images, and content on the page. Not all search engines are created equal—and most search engines cannot render JS. There are multiple reasons for this, but one of the key factors here is that rendering JS is resource-intensive and is expensive for search engines to execute . This means accessing crucial content on pages is a real challenge for search engines when they depend on JS rendering to display content. It’s worth mentioning that Google can actually render JS. However, due JS rendering demanding far more of Google’s resources, Google crawls fewer pages and does so less frequently. This can impact how fast new content appears in organic results and influence how soon updates make it to Google results, too, which could be a fairly acute challenge for eCommerce sites where stock, pricing, and availability change frequently. Here’s a visual example of a website that entirely depends on JS to make its content visible—if a search engine can’t/won’t run the JS, all it will “see” is the image on the left: ​ JavaScript Off JavaScript On Check how dependent your website is on JavaScript For me, the easiest way to check JavaScript dependency is to use a free and simple Google Chrome extension to toggle JS on and off in your browser—it’s called Quick JavaScript Switcher . Turning JavaScript off will allow you to see how your website would look and feel to most search engines. Ensure all your content is there, hyperlinks are intact, and images are present. If your content mostly or completely disappears from the page, your website is likely too dependent on JavaScript . Avoid pop-ups So many eCommerce sites utilize marketing pop-ups to encourage sales, collect leads, incentivize sales with discounts or promotions, etc. However, the worst place on an eCommerce site to show an “on-entry” pop-up is the PDP. The PDP is often the template that’s most affiliated with the strongest buying signals and queries—specific, detailed and truly bottom of the funnel. If a visitor enters your site via a PDP, there’s a greater chance that they’re going to convert as it’s more likely that they’ve specifically searched for an item or they’ve used a long tail query to land on one of your PDPs. Therefore, displaying intrusive and potentially frustrating pop-ups is likely to erode conversions and negatively impact sales. Having tested this across multiple sites, removing pop-ups and interstitials from PDPs has always delivered a positive outcome. PDP optimizations work together to grow sales, but some are more important than others When it comes to creating effective PDPs, remember that there’s no silver bullet on offer here; rather a collective of incremental design changes and components that jointly help you to move the needle and grow sales. However, designing for mobile-first is the most important recommendation of them all. Failing to do so will cost you sales and customers. Not prioritizing mobile users compromises all of the other suggestions here. Additionally, there’s no sign of consumers’ preference for mobile slowing down either. In fact, quite the opposite— consumer spend on mobile continues to grow . Look after your mobile audience and in return, they’ll look after you! Luke Carthy - eCommerce Consultant Luke is a well-seasoned eCommerce SEO & CRO consultant, online store founder and international speaker with years of hands-on and strategic experience. Luke delivers double / triple-digit growth for global eCommerce brands and growth-hungry startups. Twitter | Linkedin

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