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Author: Mark Williams-Cook “Want some high DA dofollow links?” This solicitation is often sent to site owners (typically via email or social media) and gives the impression that obtaining backlinks is as easy as paying for them. But, to truly understand what you might be getting into and the risks involved, you must first get to know link attributes and how they work. Although invisible to normal website visitors, “nofollow” (and, sometimes, “dofollow”) are terms you’ll hear frequently in SEO circles. This article will explore: What nofollow links are The types of nofollow links and when to use them Whether Google counts nofollow links Using nofollow links internally Easily identifying nofollow links Noindex pages and nofollow What is the nofollow link attribute? The nofollow link attribute is a way to describe your relationship with the page you are linking to, usually to show that you are not editorially endorsing that page. To do this, a rel attribute is added within your tag: Example link without a nofollow attribute: I enjoy building Wix websites. Example link using a nofollow attribute: I enjoy building Wix websites. Links with the nofollow attribute are usually referred to as “nofollow links.” Why do we use nofollow links? Since its introduction in 1997, Google’s PageRank algorithm (which is still used to this day), has been an important factor in how websites are ranked. The basis of using links as “votes” is why backlinks are still required to rank in the most competitive sectors. Since links have such a profound impact on how websites rank, Google has published very specific link guidelines describing how it wants websites to use them. It’s worth getting intimately familiar with these guidelines, but the overarching principle is: do not buy or sell links for ranking purposes. This includes: Exchanging money for links (or posts that contain links) Exchanging goods or services for links Sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link Breaking Google’s search guidelines puts you at risk of a ranking penalty that can suppress your search visibility until a successful reconsideration request has been completed, which can take months! Types of nofollow links and when to use them There are three main “rel” attributes that tell Google about the relationship between your site and the page you’re linking to. These attributes can be used on their own or combined by simply separating them with a space or comma. Note: It is absolutely fine to use rel=“nofollow” on any of the examples below (instead of the sponsored or UGC attributes). Google has simply stated it prefers that site owners be explicit about the type of link, likely to allow the company to better train its detection algorithms. Sponsored links: rel=“sponsored” If you wish to sell links on your website (like you might if you were displaying ads), you need to mark those links with a rel attribute so Google can exclude them from passing PageRank (also commonly referred to as “link equity”). Visit our sponsor Wix. Adding a rel=“sponsored” attribute (as in the example above) to a link has the same effect as adding rel=“nofollow,” but you are helping Google by more specifically identifying the nature of the link. User-generated content: rel=“ugc” The nofollow attribute was originally designed to tackle links within user-generated content (which often includes link spam in comments, forum threads, etc.), as some SEOs took to commenting simply for the purpose of gaining a backlink. Comment left by:Mark Williams-Cook. The practice of identifying these links still continues wherever users can add links. Consequently, most content management systems will automatically apply the rel=“ugc” attribute (as shown above) to comment sections and forms. The catch-all option: rel=“nofollow” You can also use the rel=“nofollow” attribute (shown below) on links to any page that you don’t want to “endorse” or be associated with. You can see the article on this site I don’t trust very much. This is a very common and overused tactic by many newspapers and online publications, who will simply “blanket” nofollow all external links from their website to avoid any risk of a Google penalty. This is not the recommended approach for editorial links; a good question to ask yourself is, “If I can’t endorse it or trust it’s good, why am I linking to it?” How to add link attributes on your Wix site It is very simple to add nofollow attributes to links on your Wix website. Ticking the “Tell Google to ignore this link” box within your link properties will add a rel=“nofollow” attribute to the link. You also have the option (highlighted in red) to “Mark as a sponsored link,” which adds the rel=“sponsored” attribute to the link. As Google’s guidelines specify, you can apply both “nofollow” and “sponsored,” or each individually—they have the same effect for your website. Does Google count nofollow links? In 2019, almost 15 years after the rel=“nofollow” was introduced, Google made an important announcement that it would change how it processes nofollow attributes on links as of March 2020. Google stated that nofollow links: 01. May be used as a “hint” for crawling or indexing 02. May be used as a “hint” for ranking The move was largely seen as an algorithmic way to handle publications that Google trusted and wanted to use within its link graph, but were taking a blanket approach to adding the nofollow attribute to all external links. This means that nofollow links from trusted websites may still contribute to improved rankings. Is it possible to tell which nofollow links Google is counting? There is no objective, data-led way to prove which nofollow links Google may be counting. It is worth exercising common sense to simply ask, “Is this website trustworthy and relevant?” If so, there should be benefits to having links from this site, whether you get a direct ranking benefit or not! Should I bother building “nofollow” links? Remember, one of Google’s core principles is that you should not try to manipulate PageRank with external links. Your aim is to convince websites to editorially place links on their site to yours, based on the strength of your content and outreach, because it adds value (not simply for the potential ranking gain). Sites that rank well and produce great content will naturally attract a proportion of nofollow links which may pass value. If you actively avoid links that are nofollow, you are not only potentially missing out on improved rankings (if Google chooses to pass PageRank over those links), but you may also be making your backlink profile “stand out” as manipulative (due to the lack of nofollow links) and, thus, may be more likely to receive a penalty. What is a “dofollow” link? There is technically no such thing as a “dofollow” link—this is simply the terminology used to describe a link that does not have a nofollow attribute (suggesting that the link therefore passes PageRank). It is worth being wary of anybody using this term, as it is commonly used when trying to sell links from link farms, private blog networks, mass guest posting, and other techniques that are against Google’s Search Essentials (formerly known as the Webmaster Guidelines). And, remember, just because a link does not have a nofollow attribute does not make it a good or valuable link to have. Useful links are the ones from authoritative websites that are relevant to your niche or industry, regardless of the attributes applied to them. Are nofollow links crawled? Yes, Google may decide to crawl nofollow links. Despite the somewhat confusing names, Google is known to crawl nofollow links and use them for discovery. This means if a page only has links with the nofollow attribute, while it may not rank well, it may still get indexed. Whether or not it gets crawled or indexed depends on whether Google treats the nofollow attribute as a “hint” or follows it as a directive. Should I use nofollow links internally? Google has stated the nofollow attribute may be used as hints for crawling and indexing, and John Mueller from Google has said: “It’s not 100% defined but the plan is to make it so that you don’t have to make any changes, so that we will continue to use these internal nofollow links as a sign that you’re telling us these pages are not as interesting: Google doesn’t need to crawl them [and] they don’t need to be used for ranking, for indexing.” There is no specified downside to using nofollow on internal links to give Google further hints about which pages may not be important. It is common to see many websites automatically apply the nofollow attribute on links to: Login pages Register pages Cart/checkout pages As with any optimization, you must balance the implementation cost versus the expected benefit. How can I easily see which links have the nofollow attribute? Instead of inspecting the source of a page, there are Chrome extensions available, such as NoFollow, which can automatically highlight links on a page for you that have the nofollow attribute by adding a red border to them (as shown below). This can be a useful tool to see how other websites that are ranking well implement the nofollow attribute. Noindex pages and nofollow Lastly, it is worth mentioning that if you block a page from indexing with “noindex,” Google has confirmed that all links on this page will “eventually” be treated as “nofollow.” This still applies even if the page has specified “noindex, follow,” and the page will essentially be treated as “noindex, nofollow.” Nofollow doesn’t mean no value Understanding nofollow attributes and knowing when to apply them can help site owners stay on the right side of Google’s policies. And, when you’re earning backlinks, being able to identify which links are valuable (even if they don’t pass PageRank) can help you bring in traffic and get closer to your business goals, which is the entire point of SEO. Mark Williams-Cook - Digital Marketing Director at Candour Mark has over 20 years of SEO experience and is co-owner of search agency Candour, the founder of AlsoAsked, and runs a pet category eCommerce business. Outside of speaking at conferences, Mark has trained over 3,000 SEOs with his Udemy course. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Chris Green In SEO, migrating from CMS to another is one of the most significant events in a website’s lifecycle. It is a great opportunity to build a faster, easier-to-use, more aesthetically pleasing website for your users. Conversely, a botched site migration can negatively (and significantly) decrease your traffic from search engines. But, with the right planning and preparation, you don’t have to lose traffic or rankings as a result of a migration. This guide covers the technical SEO foundations of the website migration process as well as guiding points that can help make your migration a success, including: What a site migration is The elements of a successful site migration Migrating to Wix from WordPress What is a site migration? “Site Migration” is a term that SEOs tend to use quite often. But, migrations themselves can differ quite significantly and being familiar with the different elements will make the process easier to handle later on. Types of website migrations Here are a few common site migration scenarios: Changing domain names Changing your domain name is common if you need to rebrand or have obtained a different/better domain. This is relatively easy to do, but also very easy to get wrong if you don’t know what to look out for. The key element here is redirecting search engines from the old pages to the new ones—this means every page, not just the homepage! We will dig into the technical steps later on, but the old URLs may have garnered backlinks that are important for your search visibility, so unless you explicitly state where that content moved to, search engines won’t know and that link equity will be lost. Migrating hosting providers This is perhaps the least-common migration, and not one many people would ever notice. If you have your website hosted with one company and want to move that hosting to another, you will need to migrate your site data. For SEOs, this kind of migration shouldn’t cause any issues, as Google or other search engines may be able to tell you have moved, but all the content should still be available at the same URLs. Changing content management systems This is potentially the most intense and risky type of migration. Migrating from one content management system (CMS), like Wix or WordPress, to another also means the following may change: The content URLs The content itself The design The navigation and/or structure If migrated improperly, each of these elements has significant potential to negatively affect your SEO, which is why we’ll be going into more detail about them a bit later in this article. All of the above In reality, migrations can be complicated by doing multiple things at once. In my experience, they can all come at the same time—for example, if you appointed a new development agency for your website whilst going through a rebrand. However, for those worried about SEO and maintaining organic traffic after a migration, the fundamental points you need to focus on are broadly the same. Best practices for website migrations This list below will help you understand some of the core points to be mindful of when migrating your website, as well as some fundamentals that can save you time, effort, and/or money later on. This process can include a lot of variables—to help you navigate those more nuanced scenarios, I’ve also written a more advanced migration guide. Prepare your development environment When building a website, everyone has a different process. Most agencies and established internal teams will likely build the website on a development site and may even build a staging site to test all the functionality, content, and data before replacing the live website with it. As an SEO, you want to ensure that there is a development site to check and test everything on before going live. All good developers should insist on this too, but without a development environment, controlling the migration process will be very, very difficult. From here on, we will assume you have a development site and can check the current (old) website against the new one. Migrating URLs URLs are your site’s bread and butter. When migrating from one website to another, keep the following in mind: URLs should remain the same wherever possible. Where it is not possible to keep the URL the same, apply 301 redirects (see the section on redirects below). If URLs are changing, ensure that the new URLs are “friendly,” human-readable URLs that include keywords to help search engines and users understand what is on the page. URLs should always be secure (HTTPS), not non-secure (HTTP). Site structure Your site’s structure isn’t just an SEO concern, as it’s important for both search engine web crawlers and users. To that end, take the following points into account: The old site structure is either maintained OR improved. Site structure changes must also involve redirects when the URL is changing. Make sure to group related content or services together where possible. The new site should have an XML sitemap that automatically updates, with the location referenced in the robots.txt file. Content and metadata Your content is what sets your website apart from others. It is also during migrations that content is cut or improperly managed—the following steps can help you avoid this: At the minimum, maintain the content that currently ranks and drives traffic. Avoid cutting/removing significant chunks of content that currently perform well. If a piece of content is no longer required, it’s fine to remove that page, but be sure to redirect the URL if there is another relevant page to send users to. Maintain (or improve) page titles and descriptions from the old website. Performance Web performance is primarily a web development concern, but since it is considered for ranking AND a crucial factor for positive user experience, you should ensure that the new website performs as well (if not better) than the old one. Your website should be no slower than the existing site. Remember to test on both mobile and desktop using Page Speed Insights or Lighthouse. Your website should not rely on JavaScript or other client-side rendered code to load key elements that may impact user experience, particularly content and functionality. Google has prepared a guide to help you understand how it processes JavaScript for Search. Note: Wix’s infrastructure is based on server-side rendering, enabling search engines to read Wix site content. Redirects and removing pages Properly implementing redirects can be the difference between a site migration success and a disaster. There are different ways to do this, and I’ll get into more detail in a more advanced version of this article. But for now, you need to be aware of the following: Redirects should serve a 301 server response (unless otherwise required). Deleted/removed content should be 301 redirected if there is a logical, relevant destination. Content can be allowed to 404 if it is no longer needed. If you want to remove a large number of pages from Google quickly, serve a 410 response. Migrating to Wix from WordPress To help illustrate the migration process, we will run through the steps of the migration journey, which I, myself, recently went through when I moved my WordPress site to Wix. Catalog your existing site content First, you need to document your current site and all the content URLs. Remember, 301 redirecting your old URLs to their new version is essential. There are many methods to do this, but one of the quickest and simplest is to use a crawling tool, such as Screaming Frog. Download the software, and run a crawl of your website—this guide can help you get started. When completed, the crawl will provide a list of all the URLs on the site, which you’ll need later. If you are unfamiliar with Screaming Frog, don’t have the budget, or just find it intimidating to start with, you can manually catalog your pages by clicking through and saving the URLs to a spreadsheet. This can be tedious if you have a large website, but for small/medium sites, it certainly is doable. Build your core landing pages Whether you are building the site yourself or have a developer doing it, you need to follow the pointers above to ensure that all the content of value is brought across to the new site. This typically includes: Service pages Product pages Blogs (especially those which have previously received notable traffic or engagement on social media) Any files, like PDFs, that have been previously used If you have a larger website or do not plan to migrate all your content, you can use Google Analytics or Google Search Console data to help you prioritize what to bring over. I’ll go into more detail about this process in the more advanced version of this migration guide. Migrate blog content Migrating your blog content can be one of the trickiest and most time-consuming parts of the process. In my case, Wix has a blog importing feature, which is a convenient timesaver. Once you have created a blog, you can start the import process. So long as your WordPress blog posts are public (the Wix importer can access them) and there are no more than 4,000, you’re ready to begin. Enter in the URL of your blog and Wix will scan the blog. If the details Wix shows you are accurate, click “Yes, Import Posts” and wait for the process to run its course. It may take some time on larger blogs, but it’ll be vastly quicker than doing it all manually. All that’s left is to ensure the blog itself is styled up and you have the essentials covered. An in-depth guide and FAQs around the process can be found here. Set up 301 redirects If your URLs are changing as part of the new site launch (which is often the case), then you will need to set up the redirects to help retain your existing search rankings. Assuming you have a list of old URLs, you will need to map them to their new location on your new site. Don’t worry, there’s a template below. To get started, navigate to the URL Redirect Manager, located within SEO Tools, under the Marketing & SEO dropdown of your Wix dashboard. You can add redirects one-by-one, which will work if you don’t have many, or you can bulk import up to 500 at a time. The import needs to be in a CSV file and follow the format shown in the image below. You can even just download the template from your own Wix site, edit it, and re-upload. Map your redirects in your spreadsheet, click upload, and you’re done. You can review and edit the redirects in the redirect manager afterwards, so don’t worry too much if you missed anything or made a mistake. Add structured data Structured data makes your content eligible for certain types of rich results. My previous blog had structured data added via a plugin (which is fairly normal for WordPress), but on Wix, you do not need to install any additional software. You can add structured data to any page via the following instructions: Within the Wix Editor, click on Pages and, for the page you’d like to mark up with structured data, select the more options (the three dots) menu, then go to SEO Basics. Next, go to the Advanced SEO tab, where you can Add New Markup. Once you click this, a field will pop up and you can add your structured data. As I already had the Schema written, I just copy/pasted that Schema into the field and made some minor modifications. To update Schema in bulk, you can navigate to the Wix SEO Settings to make bulk schema updates. If you don’t already have Schema for a given page, you can create new markup. Set up Google Analytics and/or Google Tag Manager Finally, we come to setting up our Google Analytics (GA) and/or Tag Manager (GTM). GA and GTM are two of the most popular pieces of software for web analytics and tag management, so there is a strong chance you have one (or both) of these running on your existing site. To set them up, go to the Marketing Integrations section of your Wix dashboard. Establishing the connection for Google Analytics 4 is as straightforward as just adding in your Google Analytics ID (which can be found in the Admin area of your Google Analytics dashboard.) If you use Google Tag Manager, the integration is equally simple—locate your GTM container ID, add it in, and you are ready. With both GA and GTM, there may be some specific tracking changes to make if you have goals, triggers, or tags that depend on particular page elements or URLs. It is worth mentioning that the Wix dashboard has its own Analytics & Reports section. Even if you use these reports a lot (like I do) it's still important to ensure the continuity of your data if you previously had GA set up. Plan now to preserve traffic and rankings later A successful SEO migration is, first and foremost, an exercise in maintaining rankings/traffic as best as possible. Moving content, successfully implementing redirects, and building a technically sound website are all essential for this. In this guide we have touched upon those elements and given examples of how we can make this happen. The advanced version of this post will tackle some of the more complicated areas of a migration as well as provide further tips/advice to ensure that a successful migration is within your grasp. Chris Green - Senior SEO Consultant at Torque Partnership Chris Green is an SEO consultant and trainer of over 10 years. A lover of all things digital and uses spreadsheets for more of his life than he really needs to, Chris specializes in migrations, auditing, reporting, training and standing up new processes for teams. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Maddy Osman Websites are not static entities. As they grow and change, you need to make sure users can still access your website. Every time you change an existing page’s URL on your website, you need to consider other websites that are linking to that page or a user who may have bookmarked it, for example. If you don’t redirect the traffic from the old page to the new page, you could lose potential customers or views because users won’t land in the right place. With 301 redirects, you can point traffic to the right location. This is because 301 redirects tell web browsers that the website address (URL) has moved, as well as the content’s new location. Redirects can come in handy for many occasions, such as if your small business website expands or if you want to reconfigure your blog. Plus, a 301 redirect can help you retain your URL’s SEO value, if you restructure your website. By learning how to implement 301 redirects and which mistakes to avoid, you can manage your online presence and avoid 404 error dead ends on your website. Read on to learn more about: What 301 redirects are When you need to implement a 301 redirect The relationship between 301 redirects and SEO Mistakes to avoid with 301 redirects Tips for using 301 redirects to boost traffic How to set up a 301 redirect on Wix The basics of 301 redirects A 301 redirect is an internet status code used to permanently redirect a URL to another URL. Status codes help webmasters understand if an HTTP request worked (or not). The number “301” refers to a specific HTTP status code. Other standard codes include 302 for temporary redirects, 500 for server errors, and 404 for web pages that can’t be found. A 301 redirect tells the browser that the page it’s looking for has a different location and where to find it. It consists of two fields: the old URL and the new URL. Not only do 301 redirects tell users where to find your website—they also tell search engines where your pages live. This code helps search engines keep their indexes updated, and indexability is vital for SEO. When you need a 301 redirect Any time you make changes to a URL, you need to redirect traffic. That includes when you: Change domain names Upgrade from HTTP to HTTPS Move a web page Update website structure On the surface level, it may seem like you don’t need to redirect traffic if you run a thorough social media and email campaign regarding your domain name change. But, customers may have your old website bookmarked, and won’t necessarily check to see if those links are updated. It’s your responsibility to make sure those old links take your customers to the right places. It’s a bad look for your brand if your consumers reach a 404 error page instead of your website. Moreover, you don’t want to lose that traffic or potential sale. The same goes if you update any internal links on your website. If your About Us page has links to pages you’ve moved, it doesn’t instill faith in your company if those links are broken. 301 redirects and SEO You may wonder what happens with your SEO when you redirect a page. The answer has changed over the years, but in 2016, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes confirmed that redirects don’t harm PageRank. This means that the link equity of the old page should transfer over to the new page. When you use 301 redirects, be patient as search engines update their indexes. Properly set up your redirects to make it straightforward for search engines to rank your pages. Mistakes to avoid with 301 redirects Though simple to set up, improperly using 301 redirects can lead to errors that can hurt your SEO. Here are some to mistakes to avoid: Not timing redirects correctly Don’t set up a redirect before the new URL is ready. You wouldn’t want users to navigate from a functioning website to a website that’s still under construction, or that doesn’t make sense for the content they clicked on. The opposite is true as well. Don’t move domains without ensuring that 301 redirects are set up. In that case, you’d be splitting your traffic between your old website and new website, which will confuse website users and search engine crawlers. To put this in context, consider this example: When Toys “R” Us shelled out $5.1 million for toys.com in 2010, the company made the mistake of not using a 301 redirect first. So, the SEO for toys.com suffered because Google treated it as a brand new domain. Creating a redirect chain A redirect chain is when you redirect a link, then redirect that link again. In essence, you’re giving a browser directions to go to another link that will provide it with a new set of directions. This can slow page load time and confuse search engines. Keep your redirects clear and concise. If you do a major overhaul on a website that you recently updated, look out for any unnecessary chains. As a best practice, compare potential redirects with existing redirects to make sure you’re not unintentionally creating a chain. Wix prevents this automatically when uploading redirects in bulk by catching loops before you’re able to set the redirect. Failing to verify whether a redirect works It never hurts to manually verify that a 301 redirect works and goes to the right place. You can edit your redirects on Wix and view them live to make sure they’re set up correctly. Forgetting anchor text and backlinks If you run a popular blog with many backlinks, for example, think about the way those backlinks are configured. Those links and anchor text need to remain relevant. For example, if your blog “10 Tips to Grow Your Website’s Following” is now being redirected to “5 Ways to Write a Great Blog,” users might be confused and annoyed. Techniques to boost traffic using 301 redirects More than just a tool to point users and search engines to the right destination, 301 redirects can also help you actively increase your traffic in a variety of scenarios. Fixing keyword cannibalization If you have multiple pages trying to rank for the same keyword (referred to as keyword cannibalization), you can use 301 redirects to prevent potential competition between pages on your website. The 2019 Diversity algorithm update was an effort to declutter search engine results so that a single domain wouldn’t appear more than twice in top-ranking results. Because of this (and future anticipated updates along the same lines) it’s better to try to rank for multiple different keywords than to try to corner the market on one keyword. Merging related pages When you notice two similar pages with high bounce rates (the majority of people leaving your website before visiting a second page) or moderate traffic that could be higher, you can use a 301 redirect to consolidate those pages and improve your analytics. Acquiring a similar company Merging with another business is a step that could expedite your growth. When you absorb another website, you can redirect their traffic to yours, which can enhance your site authority and views. Making your website easier for crawlers A 301 redirect can help smooth out any badly formatted paths in your URLs so you’re not confusing search engines with overly-complicated URLs. Poorly formatted paths involve adding categories and dates to URLs in addition to the content’s primary keyword and a relevant subdirectory (such as /blog) if applicable. This may become relevant as your site, and your page count, grows. Consider a URL such as choosechicago.com/blog/top-chicago-attractions compared to choosechicago.com/blog/11/2020/top-chicago-attractions—it’s easier for search engine to make sense of the first example. How to setup a redirect on Wix A single 301 redirect is simple to configure. All you need is the old URL and the new URL. Wix makes it easy to do the rest. Go to your dashboard and click SEO Tools. Next, click the URL Redirect Manager. That page will list your redirects and is also where you can create new redirects. Click the + New Redirect button. From there, you can add the old URL and the new URL. Hit Save & Close, and you’re done. If you have multiple URLs to change, you can select Group Redirect. This way, instead of changing the path for each page, you can do it all at once. This can help you save time when redirecting product pages, old landing pages, and other groups of pages, for example. You can import redirect links in bulk via spreadsheet as well. This will help you map out and upload redirects quickly. Watch this video for a step-by-step tutorial for group redirects. If you change website URLs, you can redirect one domain to another domain. For example, the-blogsmith.com redirects to theblogsmith.com. You might also set up a redirect if you change your brand name and buy a new domain, or if you want to use both the .com and .net versions of your URL. To set up the corresponding redirects, connect your second domain to Wix. From there, you can redirect the second domain to the primary domain on Wix. Direct users and search engines with 301 redirects A 301 redirect can help you maintain your SEO when you move URLs. To get even more out of your 301 redirects, you can merge similar pages with competing content or absorb a company and its content. Maddy Osman - Founder, the blogsmith Maddy Osman is the bestselling author of Writing for Humans and Robots: The New Rules of Content Style, and one of Semrush and BuzzSumo's Top 100 Content Marketers. She's also a digital native with a decade-long devotion to creating engaging content and the founder of The Blogsmith content agency. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Maddy Osman When an internet user clicks a link, they expect to go to that corresponding page. If that link takes them to an error page or a page that has nothing to do with what they clicked on, it can be a frustrating experience that reflects poorly on the website. To make sure your website functions properly and navigates people correctly, you’ll need to understand how to use redirects. Redirects are internet codes that tell servers where to find a web address (URL) that has moved. Consider a situation where web page A needs to move to web page B. To make this happen, the website owner creates a redirect. That way, when anyone clicks on a link for web page A, they’ll be sent to the correct destination, web page B. In addition to keeping your website functioning smoothly, redirects can help maintain or even improve your search engine optimization (SEO). Redirects come in handy as your website grows and they are tools you need to know. In this guide, you’ll learn: What a redirect is Why you should use redirects When to use redirects Types of redirects How long to keep a redirect Best practices for redirects How to set up a redirect in Wix Introduction to redirects A redirect is a way to guide visitors and search engines from the URL initially requested to a different URL. Instead of creating a broken link on your website, you can use redirects when migrating content, deleting web pages, or other related scenarios. Redirects are part of the HTTP response status code. There are multiple types of 3XX redirects for different purposes. Setting them up can involve temporary or permanent changes, and the one you choose can affect a web page’s indexation status. Setting up a redirect is a straightforward process—all you have to do is point one URL to another. Why redirects matter Redirects let you change the location of your web pages. This empowers your site to grow and evolve, so you’re not forever confined to your original website structure. Using redirects also keeps your website running smoothly as you expand. Users get redirected to the right page, which can decrease bounce rate. Best of all, specific redirects, like 301, pass PageRank—that means when you redirect from one page to another, the link equity you’ve built carries to the new location. This is beneficial for SEO because you don’t have to start from scratch every time you use a redirect. You can also improve your SEO using redirects, with methods such as merging two pages with similar content into one page to combine traffic. Situations to use redirects Here are some common use cases for redirects: Moving to a new domain Deleting a web page Updating website structure Fixing keyword cannibalization Changing your primary domain Testing or updating web pages without disrupting your website Repairing broken web pages Acquiring a company and pointing their website to yours Redirecting users to your website in a different language Seasonal promotions Discontinued products Moving from HTTP to HTTPS When you make website changes, it's crucial to understand when to apply redirects. It’s easy to forget to implement a redirect when you delete a page you no longer need, but make sure you direct that URL somewhere else. And, not all redirects are made equal. Which redirect you choose depends on your needs and your website. Types of redirects The most common redirects are 301 and 302, which differ in terms of how long they’re meant to be in place: A 301 redirect is used when you need to move a web page permanently. A 302 redirect is only used when a redirect is briefly required. There are other 3XX codes, but they’re not as widely used and have some downsides. For example, a 303 redirect is comparable to a 302, but it’s not cacheable by search engines. The 301 redirect is one of the most widely used, and it’s the redirect that will take care of most of the needs for your website. Common instances that aren’t redirects There are multiple internet codes and other situations commonly confused with redirects. 4XX Codes Codes within 400 to 499 usually indicate a page didn’t load. One of the most common among these codes is a 404 error, which means a web page was not found. It happens after a page has been deleted and hasn’t been redirected to a new URL. You can customize your own 404 page or use this page generated by Wix: You might see a 404 error message in your Google Search Console if you delete a page. When Google recrawls your website, it will remove it from its index. If you have no relevant content you can redirect to, you might need to use a 404 page. But, avoid it when possible and redirect content as necessary. Be aware that Google has said it ignores links leading to 404 pages, so proceed with caution. Canonical tags Canonical tags are used when there are multiple versions of a web page. Instead of using a status code number, canonical tags tell search engines that two web pages have the same content. They aren’t duplicate web pages, but there might be more than one URL that points to one page. You might need a canonical tag if two pages have similar content on them or one URL contains WWW and the other doesn’t, for example. With a canonical tag, the other URLs will still work for users. But, you’re telling a search engine not to index all the variations, which could affect SEO. Another difference between a 301 redirect and canonical tags is a 301 redirect will carry over link authority to the new link. In contrast, a canonical tag is intended for search engines to not confuse or index multiple links pointing to one page. How long to keep redirects The amount of time you should keep a redirect depends on your company and website. If you know you have popular backlinks from other websites, you might want to keep those redirects firmly in place. But, if your old website is a distant memory, then it may be okay to delete them. Google Search Advocate John Mueller says you can drop redirects after a few years. So, exercise your best judgment to do what’s right for your website. Best practices for redirects When you configure a redirect, make sure to test it works. And, every time you add a redirect, make sure you’re linking to similar content. Be aware of backlinks you’re affecting, and ask yourself whether the new locations fits the user intent. Even though they’re helpful, do not use redirects unnecessarily—it’s an extra step for the servers and can slow traffic. Creating unneeded redirects can also generate issues, like redirect chains and loops. These occur when redirects point to other redirects. Any time you make changes, keep redirects concise and straightforward so you don’t confuse the server. How to redirect on Wix When you want to implement a 301 redirect on your Wix website, head to the URL Redirect Manager. In the left-hand menu of your Wix dashboard, click on Marketing & SEO and then SEO Tools. Next, select the URL Redirect Manager and you’ll be taken to a page where you can track all of your redirects. When you want to create a new redirect, click on the + New Redirect button. From there, you can select the type of redirect you need, whether a single or group redirect. For both, you need the old URL and the new URL. Once you’re done, hit Save & Close. If you need to edit or delete your redirect, you can return to the URL Redirect Manager to do so. In addition, automatic redirects are applied whenever you change a page’s URL slug. Wix offers a maximum of 5,000 redirects per website. Redirects help improve your search visibility and user experience You can use redirects on your website when you need to point a URL to a new location. Redirects can be used for multiple situations, such as moving to a new domain, updating your website structure, or merging content. Using a redirect can improve your SEO and solve problems, including keyword cannibalization. You can also restructure your website without fear of losing link equity. Maddy Osman - Founder, the blogsmith Maddy Osman is the bestselling author of Writing for Humans and Robots: The New Rules of Content Style, and one of Semrush and BuzzSumo's Top 100 Content Marketers. She's also a digital native with a decade-long devotion to creating engaging content and the founder of The Blogsmith content agency. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Giuseppe Caltabiano No matter where you stand on the topic of AI, it’s safe to assume that it’s here to stay. The prevalence of these tools (as well as the hype) is compelling companies and marketers to ask the million-dollar question: can unsupervised AI-generated content match (or exceed) the quality of content produced by human writers? As of right now, the answer is clearly no; but that doesn’t mean AI tools can’t be useful for content creation. In fact, it makes the most sense to utilize AI in tandem with high-quality writers. So, with that in mind, let’s dive into the world of content creation and when to use AI vs. freelance writers. Table of contents: AI content creation: what we know so far AI vs. Human writers and content creators Content creation tasks that AI helps with Task automation Ideation and outlining Non-creative content creation Editing and proofreading When to use human content creators instead of AI Writing nuanced or niche content Applying brand voice and styling AI content creation: what we know so far A significant reason why AI software is making such big waves is that it is generative. That means an AI program can take data from various sources and generate a new piece of content from it based on directions from you—the human digital marketer. For example, Midjourney is an AI imaging tool that can take text prompts and turn them into photorealistic renders in a matter of minutes. The fact that these tools can deliver such content so rapidly has changed digital marketing—for better or worse. On one hand, many businesses are capitalizing on software like ChatGPT to pump out content much faster than they would be able to themselves. On the other hand, the content these programs produce is often of middling quality (if not outright terrible). Generally speaking, just because AI software can write a web page or blog post doesn’t mean it should. It’s also important to note that AI for content creation is still in its infancy, and there’s a mad rush to apply its potential for efficiency as widely as possible—particularly in the SaaS sector. Once the novelty of these programs dies down, we’ll be able to figure out what the future will look like for content creation. That said, here are a few examples of how digital marketers are currently applying AI. How content creators and digital marketers are using AI Companies, both large and small, are taking advantage of AI tools in a big way. For content creation, AI is often used to: Develop targeted content ideas to increase user engagement Generate article outlines that an editor refines Identify potential keywords to target Generate FAQs that an SEO refines Generate social media posts based on articles Beyond content creation, AI is also suitable for wider digital marketing tasks, like: Talent sourcing — While AI-generated content isn’t as nuanced or rich as what a human can create, this technology can help companies connect with compatible writers. For example, WriterAccess uses AI software to match writers to brands based on writing samples. This way, businesses don’t have to scour a database of thousands of writers to find who’s the right writer for them. Audience targeting — Some companies, like GumGum, are getting granular with audience targeting by using AI to determine where to place ads on web pages to capture users’ attention more effectively. This could help businesses dramatically increase their click-through and conversion rates. Audience segmentation — AI can segment users based on their behavior. Such tools can also help develop ideas to engage with these audiences based on the same historical data. Bonobo AI (acquired by SalesForce) made predictive analyses about marketing campaigns based on user activity. As you can see, there’s a lot of potential for marketers and content creators to use the power of AI in an ethical way. Keep in mind, though, that these examples only scratch the surface of what’s possible—and knowing when to use AI is crucial for getting ahead in an increasingly competitive marketplace. AI vs. Human writers and content creators The superior choice is obvious—for now, at least: as advanced as AI technology is, it can’t replicate the unique experiences and insights that a human can bring to a piece of content. That said, there are many ways to incorporate AI into the content creation process. And, as AI-based tools continue to advance, marketers will utilize them more effectively. Ideally, you’ll work with both AI and human content creators to develop content and optimize it more effectively for your brand or clients. Here’s a breakdown of when AI works best and when you should rely on a good old-fashioned human content creator. Content creation tasks that AI helps with The primary purpose of AI is to receive and digest mountains of data. Even generative programs like Midjourney and ChatGPT only function because of the data they’ve consumed and “learned.” Basically, without getting fed information, an AI program would be extremely limited in what it could create. So, with that caveat in mind, here are some of the ways AI can enhance your content creation process: Task automation AI tools are fantastic at learning how to perform different tasks as quickly and efficiently. Some examples include: Generating subtitles or closed captions for video content Adding trending hashtags to social media posts Suggesting potential keywords (although ChatGPT cannot access search volume data) Ideation and outlining Generative AI platforms, like ChatGPT, can help you come up with fresh content ideas. In some cases, they may suggest some ideas that you wouldn’t have discovered on your own. From there, you can create basic outlines centered around a topic or keyword (or ask ChatGPT to do it). Finally, you can polish and refine the outline or outsource it to a writer to make it pop. Non-creative content creation Sometimes, a piece of content is little more than a data set presented in a visually appealing way. For example, an infographic can take facts and statistics and make them more engaging to the reader. For these content pieces, AI is especially helpful since you don’t have to create anything unique or captivating. The data itself is the message, so the AI platform can deliver that information however you prompt it to. Editing and proofreading You may not think of a spellchecker program as an example of AI, but these tools have only become more refined in recent years. AI editing programs can spot errors in real time and help you correct them before they go live. “Once we identified the samples, we then fed them into statistical learning algorithms—along with “correct” text gathered from high-quality web sources (billions of words!)—to help us predict outcomes using stats like the frequency at which we’ve seen a specific correction occur. This process helped us build a basic spelling and grammar correction model.” — Jayakumar Hoskere, software engineer, Google Docs Since proofreading can be so time-consuming, these tools can speed up the editing and publishing process. When to use human content creators instead of AI Overall, human writers are better at actually creating valuable, thoughtful content that engages target audiences. While working with humans isn’t generally as fast as AI (or as inexpensive), the output is typically far more authentic—which really matters in high-competition verticals. Here are some tasks that are typically strengths for the right freelance content creator, but risky to entrust to AI: Writing nuanced or niche content Search engines like Google prioritize relevance over all else, so you need to create content that speaks to the searcher’s intent. Some topics and industries—due to their nuance or complexity—have to meet higher standards to rank well on Google (Google refers to these as Your Money or Your Life [YMYL] topics). “Where our algorithms detect that a user’s query relates to a ‘YMYL’ topic, we will give more weight in our ranking systems to factors like our understanding of the authoritativeness, expertise or trustworthiness [E-A-T] of the pages we present in response.” — Google, How Google Fights Disinformation, February 2019 So, for industries that can potentially affect someone’s choices regarding, for example, their health, finances, voting, and so on, Google mandates that your content show a high degree of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). The bottomline here is that AI simply does not possess the experience or expertise necessary to authoritatively create content in high-stakes industries. Fortunately, you can always rely on a human writer that has hands-on experience (preferably even decades of it) to speak to your audience. Applying brand voice and styling One way to make content more engaging for a particular audience is to stylize it to reflect that audience’s values (which would ideally align with your brand’s values). AI programs can only repackage the data it has to work with. The human mind is far more creative and can take a message and turn it into something that truly resonates with your audience. Basically, when it comes to brand voice, a human content creator is still your best option. Fortunately for those on a tighter budget, you could rely on generative AI to create the first draft and hire an in-house editor to make it sound like what your potential customers are expecting. It’s up to you to find the right balance between AI and human talent The decision to use AI or human talent isn’t an either/or situation—it’s best to leverage the qualities of each to create something superior for your brand and audience. Developing the right balance of each element for your particular situation and workflow may seem like a tall task, but keep in mind that you don’t need to have all the answers right now. In many ways, generative AI brings with it a new frontier for digital marketers, so take meticulous notes on your experience as you test out its capabilities so that you can take advantage of all its strengths without falling victim to its weaknesses. Giuseppe Caltabiano - VP of Marketing at Rock Content Giuseppe is a global marketing leader with 20+ years' experience. He excels in crafting content and marketing strategies for SaaS enterprises. Recognized as 2-time influential European B2B marketer, he has an MBA from SDA Bocconi and is trained in M&A at London Business School. Twitter | Linkedin

Matthew L. Kaminsky | 2 min This post was last updated on May 03, 2023. Video Transcript Internal links Internal links are a key part of your site's structure, giving people and search engines clear paths when navigating your site. It’s extremely important to set and structure your links correctly or else your site pages may not be found. I’m Matthew and that’s what we’re going to talk about in this video. What is an internal link? An internal link is any link that connects one page on your site to another page on your site. Search engines use them to get a better understanding of your content and the relationship between your pages. Here are 2 things to keep in mind when creating internal links: First, make sure that every page on your site has at least one link to it. The number of internal links that lead to a page help Google and other search engines determine how important a page is. So the more important the page, the more links it should have leading to it . Also think about ‘click-depth’ when setting your site structure. This is the number of clicks it takes to get to an internal page from the homepage . In general, the more important the page is, the less clicks it should take to get there. So to meet SEO best practices try to keep important pages less than 3 clicks away from your homepage. Second, use descriptive anchor text for your links. Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. It gives both users and search engines a better sense of what the linked page is about. Make sure the text is relevant and reflects the page’s content. And that’s it. Use these tips when creating your site structure to give visitors and search engines a better experience as they navigate your site. Again, I’m Matthew. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you next time.

Matthew Kaminsky | 4 min Video transcript Introduction to SEO Every second, over 70 thousand people around the world search for something on Google. That’s billions of searches every single day. And no matter what type of business you have, if you want your site to show up on search engines, SEO should be an integral part of your business and marketing strategy. I’m Matthew from the SEO team at Wix and in this video we’ll discuss search engine optimization. Optimizing for search engines is one of the most valuable things you can do to achieve your business goals, build brand awareness and drive traffic to your site. What is SEO and why is it important? Simply put, SEO is the process of improving your discoverability on search results to get quality traffic to your site. The potential here is huge. Think about how many people are already searching for a product or service you offer . Typically, when we talk about search engines, we’re referring to Google, which is the most popular search engine out there, getting over 90% of all internet searches. And the discoverability of your site is based on their algorithm. To better understand it, let’s take a closer look at how search engines work . How search engines work Google and other search engines use bots, also known as crawlers or spiders. These bots travel around the internet 24/7 and crawl web pages to understand what they’re about , their structure, content, and the links connecting one page to another . The bots then store all this data in the Index, which is basically a library containing information about pages on the web. The index is updated every time a bot crawls a page. This frequency is based on many factors including how important Google thinks your site is and how often you update it. This is why it may take time before you can actually see changes you made on your site on search results. When people search on Google, they’ll often see two types of search results on the search engine results page, also known as the SERP . The top results might be paid advertisements of business that pay to have their sites show up first for specific keywords or phrases. Underneath are organic results which are determined by the search engine’s algorithms. The higher the site, the more relevant Google thinks that site is for a specific search query. But how does Google’s algorithm qualify a specific page as relevant and trustworthy enough to rank it high on search results? While Google doesn’t release exact ranking factors, based on research, we do know about some key ones like quality of content, authority and user experience, which all play a huge role. But these are constantly changing based on what Google believes will give people the best results for their search intent. After all, there’s a reason why saying “Google it” has become second nature. Google works very hard to develop and improve its algorithm to match users with the most relevant and quality results. Getting started with SEO Now that we’ve covered how search engines work, let’s talk about how to optimize your site for search engines. When it comes to SEO there are no shortcuts. First off you need to create an SEO strategy . Every site is different so how you approach your SEO strategy should be tailored to your needs, audience and competitors . Think about your target audience and how you can capture their attention. If your site delivers the best content, navigation and user experience, ranking will come naturally. Once you have an SEO strategy, Wix has tools to help you set up the basics of SEO for your site, with the flexibility to add more advanced features if you like. But if you’re just getting started with SEO, we recommend starting with your personalized SEO plan. This plan will guide you through the basics of SEO for your site, help get your site indexed on Google and start optimizing your site performance on search . Keep in mind that SEO is a marathon not a sprint so it may take time until you see your site ranking on search results. In the meantime, you can check out our SEO learning hub to learn more. Again, I’m Matthew. Thanks for watching.

Author: Lidia Infante Going international can help your business reach countless audiences in new markets so that you can serve (and sell) to them, much in the same way as your existing customers. While that's typically the goal, international endeavors can stumble, stall, and even fail outright if the proper international SEO considerations aren't taken into account. Ignoring the particularities of international SEO can even harm your initial markets, making the business expansion completely counterproductive. This guide on international SEO will help you take your business abroad without harming your brand. By the end of this read, you will understand how to rank for the right terms in the right places and make sure your website is speaking the language of your audience—wherever they might be. Table of contents: What is international SEO? Do you need an international SEO strategy? The difference between international SEO and regular SEO Considerations for international SEO success Why is international SEO important? How to develop an international SEO strategy International SEO best practices Tools for international SEO What is international SEO? International SEO is a set of techniques dedicated to optimizing your website for users in different countries. This includes optimizing all your website content, backlinks, meta descriptions, images and any other elements you need to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) across the world. The aim of international SEO is providing a better experience for your potential users by ensuring that they land on the version of your content that’s most relevant for them. Do you need an international SEO strategy? International SEO might not be for you if your audience is mainly from the same country or searches for your services in one language. International SEO comes into play when your business uses translation strategies to target different languages or localization strategies that tackle the needs of different markets, regardless of language. If your business does plan to branch out, a well crafted international SEO strategy can help you get the most visibility for your efforts. However, if your customers are local, and you don’t intend to expand to anywhere else, you likely don’t need an international SEO strategy! What is the difference between international SEO and regular SEO? Search engines are fantastic tools, but they need a little help from site owners to provide searchers with relevant results. International SEO helps inform Google (and other search engines) which pages are in what language and which ones are created for specific countries. This is mainly achieved through the hreflang tag. If you’re targeting audiences in Eastern European or Asian countries with international SEO, you will have to learn to optimize your content for search engines such as Yandex or Baidu (which claim a larger share of the market in those regions). These have their own sets of ranking factors, particularities, and challenges. International SEO follows the same principles as traditional SEO, but with the added complexity of hreflang, market-specific analytics, international keyword research and international link building. Beyond these particular techniques, international SEO has the same aim as traditional SEO: to put the right content in front of the right user when they search for it. What you need to consider for international SEO success Just as with regular SEO, there’s much more to think about than just keywords when it comes to your international SEO strategy. You also need to take the following into account: Translation and content localization Not only will proper localization help your content convert better and perform better in search (with keywords changing to suit local demands), it will also ensure you’re speaking in a way that resonates with your audience. For example, think about a turn of phrase you might use in English content and whether it would make sense in a different country. English is a language full of sayings that won’t translate, so whether it’s “counting your chickens before they hatch,” or “assuming the grass is greener on the other side,” content localization can prevent your content from confusing your international audiences. Maintaining complex content systems Maintaining just one content system can be a big job, but when it comes to international SEO, you’ll need to keep tabs on your content for every market you serve. This will include deciding which content will be available in which languages, localizing it, adding information relevant to that country, and staying on top of your version control. Every time you update one piece of content on your site, you’ll likely need to do it in every other language that content is written in, too, or all that work you’ve put in will quickly go to waste. Alternatively, you’ll have to define a fallback option for this. We’ll speak about this more in depth in the tools section of this article, when discussing translation management systems. The intersection of SEO, UX, and culture Different design signals don’t always translate to different markets, so you’ll need to consider the overall layout of your site as well. For example, Amazon faced some challenges with its UI design in India: users were not using the search bar, as the magnifying glass looked like a table tennis paddle to them. These types of miscues can frustrate users, but are relatively easy to avoid with a proper localization strategy (as opposed to merely translating an entire site). Special characters Different languages might include special characters that you don’t typically handle in your core website. Internationally, you’ll encounter complex character sets and diacritics, along with vertical or right-to-left reading. These affect the way your content is displayed and form validation. Most of these issues can be solved with some strategic planning and good internationally-focused CSS. Why is international SEO important? In short, international SEO will help your business make more money by reaching customers in more markets. There are four main strategies for growth (according to the Ansoff Matrix): 01. Growing your market penetration 02. Launching new products or services 03. Developing new markets 04. Diversifying (by launching new products in new markets) International SEO is key in two out of those four strategies (growing your market penetration and developing new markets). Understanding why businesses go international provides very valuable context to inform your SEO decisions. This can be important because what’s best practice for SEO isn’t always what’s best for business. On occasion, businesses make what might seem like compromises on quality that can be frustrating for SEOs, such as using automated translations, not investing in a regionalized content roadmap or not fully localizing the content for all its international audiences. But, when looking at those decisions through the lens of increasing revenue and ROI, we can understand that we are optimizing for scale, not perfection. However, improper international SEO implementation can potentially hurt organic performance in the business’ core market. If search engines don’t understand how pages are targeted, users could be served the wrong page, leading to a poor user experience, reduced conversions and, ultimately, a dip in revenue. Or, your website could be seen as giving search engines unreliable signals, having duplicate content or providing the wrong canonical URL for users. This could lead to less traffic and, again, lost revenue. While international SEO can be important for business expansion, it must be executed properly to prevent damaging the business’ core market. How to develop an international SEO strategy A solid international SEO strategy is the first thing to consider before you start optimizing any content. This is made up of five key steps: 01. Understand your users’ search journeys The internet has penetrated different regions in the world at different rates. While some users will find your site through very specific search terms, less digitally mature markets may tend to focus on more generic keywords. The more generic a term is, the harder it is to understand the user’s intent. For example, a search for a generic term, like dark roast coffee, could mean that the user is looking to learn about the differences between light and dark roast, or that they’re looking to buy coffee beans, or that they’d like to learn how to roast their own beans. To solve this problem, you can build a keyword map for each new market you’re targeting and focus on the specific search intent you’re looking to satisfy. 02. Address the market’s pain points Some markets might be more price sensitive, while others may be more concerned about the quality of your services or your brand’s reputation. Some just might not trust digital transactions, which is evidenced by the popularity of cash on delivery as a payment method. Research your new market’s pain point and address them head on. If they’re worried about price, try speaking to that concern early on in the purchase journey (this helps increase the likelihood that they continue on their journey). Address quality concerns by highlighting guarantees, reviews, and awards on your website. Finally, understand your audience’s contact and payment preferences, and make sure you honor them. 03. Know your competitors’ SEO weaknesses To overtake competitors, first you need to understand them. By performing a gap analysis audit, you can understand what your competition is good at and where you can gain the advantage. For example, many European brands are great at technical SEO, but may fall short when it comes to a good content strategy and backlinks. If you know what your rivals are bad at, you can make sure you’re better. 04. Earn international links Links show Google that you’re active in the local market, giving your business credibility in different countries. If you want to rank for competitive keywords, you’re going to need links—it’s as simple as that. You can’t just translate your UK or US campaigns and hope for results—you need to create bespoke digital PR or link building campaigns that work for each specific audience. Adapt your PR topics to suit local cultures by researching the media and culture in your target countries. For example, while stories about the royal family delight the press in the UK, a fun story on the hobbies and earnings of the Spanish royal family would not be popular and can get you in real trouble. If you want to earn links internationally, you’ll have to find your (culturally appropriate) topics, choose which audience you want to go after, and do some competitor keyword research to understand where you’re likely to make your gains. International SEO best practices Now that you have a general idea of how to formulate your international SEO strategy, it’s time to put all that knowledge into practice. Below you’ll find some guidance on how to best optimize your international efforts. Define your international URL structure To target international markets, each of your landing pages will need a separate version of the content with a new URL for each language (or ideally, each market, as French speakers in Canada are a different audience than those in France, for example). This allows search engine crawlers to discover and index all versions of your content in the correct regions. The first step to understanding how to target your audience internationally is to consider your existing (or desired) website structure. Here is what different internationalization structures look like: Country code top-level domain (ccTLD) ccTLD URLs use short codes to show people and search engines where a website is registered. Some common examples of ccTLDs include .uk, .us, .kr, and so on. It’s worth noting that a ccTLD setup targets users based on their countries, not languages, so it would not be the best option for brands looking to target different languages in the same country. Pros: ccTLDs are great for targeting international audiences, as they clearly tell search engines what countries you are targeting with your content. A .co.uk URL clearly targets the UK, while a .es URL targets Spain. Cons: As the content is broken across different domains, this setup can be more costly to maintain for engineering teams and can dilute the brand authority earned through links. Generic top-level domain (gTLD) with parameters A generic top-level domain (such as .com or .net) can cater to speakers of different languages by using a URL parameter. This can look like: website.com/?lang=en for homepages, or website.com/product?lang=en for specific pages (in this example, product pages) These generic domains are widely recognizable and can instill a sense of authority (and thus, trustworthiness) amongst your audience. Pros: This configuration reduces complexity by eliminating the location factor. This can improve content governance and centralizes the brand’s backlinks onto a single domain, which can boost the domain’s authoritativeness in the eyes of search engines. Cons: This structure does not allow you to target users based on location, only language. Parameters won’t show up in the URL on the SERPs, so users might hesitate to click on this result, thinking it’s not right for their language. gTLD with subdirectories International content can also be placed in a subdirectory or subfolder, such as website.com/us. This places it on the same level as other content on your root domain, such as product pages. Pros: This configuration is cheaper to maintain and can help brands centralize their authority, as all of their backlinks are pointing to the same domain. This centralized structure can help website governance across content versions. Cons: This setup allows for less URL structure customization across languages and territories, as the website structure will need to be somewhat mirrored across languages and countries. gTLD with subdomains In this scenario, you’d place international content on a separate third-level domain, such as us.website.com. This setup is becoming less common, as it doesn’t offer a clear advantage over others. Pros: It offers a more flexible approach than its subdirectories counterpart when it comes to website architecture. Users can easily recognize (in the URL) that they are in a site intended for them. Cons: A subdomain setup can pass link equity across subdomains and to the main domain through internal linking, but for the most part, Google treats them as separate sites. This configuration is as complex and expensive to manage as the ccTLD setup, but without the added location targeting benefits. Choose the right keywords for each country Just because you rank for one term in one country doesn’t mean you will also rank everywhere else. Focus your keyword research to ensure you’re creating relevant content for the markets you’re entering. For a detailed look at how you select the right keywords to pursue, read: “Why cultural relevance is the key to international SEO success” by Veruska Anconitano “How to approach SEO localization and SEO website translations” by Adriana Stein Use the hreflang attribute There is no particular hreflang that Google prefers, but you should make sure you’re only using one consistently. This can live on your tag, your sitemap, and in your HTTP header. It must point to a canonical version of the page. However, as the man himself, Google’s John Mueller, said, this isn’t always easy. The hreflang attribute helps Google understand the relationship between the same content in different languages (for example, if you’re selling the same product for two different audiences). This can improve the product’s search visibility and helps prevent Google from mistaking it for duplicate content. Properly implementing your hreflang tags might feel a little outside of your comfort zone, particularly if you’re used to working on the content side of SEO. First, you’ll need valid hreflang attributes to be inserted into your code, including the language value, the country value, and the correct URL. You’ll also need return hreflang tags on all alternate versions of that page. Basically, you’re going to need to get into the code. If you’ve got loads of countries to manage and loads of pages to translate, that could be quite a time investment. Anglicize special characters in your URLs Most languages have their own special characters, but as technology is often produced English-first, these characters can get overlooked, creating an opportunity cost. When putting content out in different languages, it’s best to anglicize any special characters in URLs and file names to prevent any errors due to your tech stack mishandling special characters. Instead of “ñ,” you’d want to write an “n,” and omit any accent marks or punctuation in your characters. A popular redirection plugin for WordPress caused some mayhem across my international sites a few years back, as they would not recognize the input of characters such as the Spanish “ñ,” or the opening exclamation mark “¡.” These characters were present in some of our URLs and we had no way of redirecting them from the CMS, which added some friction for the marketing team managing those sites. Most search engines will view both the anglicized version and the one with unique special characters as the same, allowing you to avoid this potential issue in your organic marketing. Create a link building strategy for each market As someone who has spent years working in digital PR agencies, I know that a robust link building campaign can draw in traffic from relevant sources and, eventually, lift conversions. This is equally vital when it comes to going global. In order to earn links internationally, you can't just translate your campaign in your home market. You need to plan a global campaign or create campaigns for your target market. Market research is key here. You’ll need to look at: How many digital outlets are available. This will show you the ceiling for your digital PR strategy and help you target your campaigns more efficiently. Relevant journalists. In many international markets, journalists are fully freelance, publishing in numerous different places. Here, the focus is on building relationships with those journalists instead of the publications themselves—they could unlock the door to some valuable international links. Consumer trust. If you're publishing studies or providing quotes, you’ll need to provide solid methodologies and excellent data if you want your campaign to get published. Anything less could have an adverse effect on your brand perception. How many users pay for their news. Publications that rely on advertising are more likely to charge to feature your campaign. Those that rely on paid readers can sometimes work in your favor—you just have to be sure that what you’re pitching is more relevant for the publication’s potentially smaller readership. Tools for international SEO Most of the classic SEO tools will be able to handle your site’s needs, regardless of the URL structure you’ve chosen, but there are some aspects of international SEO that require special attention. Translation management How you translate your content is a key consideration. Even if you’re fluent in multiple languages, you’ll need a good translation management system (TMS) to assist you. You’ll want to look for one that integrates with your chosen CMS and offers features such as smart translations, different tiers of translation (so you can switch from machine or human-driven options accordingly), and a quality assurance process that suits your needs. You’ll also want to think of a fallback option if your translation source changes, as well as how to incorporate version control. Personally, my favorite TMS is Smartling, but there are many other options out there. Hreflang validation For hreflang validation, I would strongly recommend Semrush’s Site Audit tool. It checks if your language and territory tags are correct and ensures there is a return hreflang tag in place. I think it does a very thorough job and, since Semrush is a classic 360º SEO tool, you may already have an active subscription you can use. For a more casual check, you can use the SEO Minion Chrome extension. I personally use this extension for a few different on-page checks, including hreflang. It’s worth noting that it won’t check x-default tags if they are rendered in the DOM and not present in the source code. International SEO is well worth it if you make it work International SEO is a vital tool if you want your products or services to reach global customers. Doing it well depends on understanding your target market, getting to grips with translations, and staying on top of your hreflang implementation. It’s not an easy undertaking, but it’s one you need to take if you want your business to grow. Get your international SEO strategy right and you’ll achieve growth, both in terms of your Google ranking and your business revenue. Get it wrong and your website could be more difficult for search engines and users to understand, which is certain to impact your bottom line. Lidia Infante - SEO Consultant Lidia has been working in SEO for almost a decade, helping businesses in SaaS, media and eCommerce grow online. She has a BSC in Psychology and a Master in Digital Business, and is a regular speaker at international SEO events such as MozCon, BrightonSEO, and WTSFest. Twitter | Linkedin

Tuesday, November 28, 2023 | 1PM ET From AI to new tools and more SEO integrations, review a year of industry-leading SEO releases on Wix. Join our Head of Product , Einat Hoobian-Seybold, and SEO Product Manager, Shira Amit, for an inside look at our ever-evolving product suite. Meet your hosts: Einat Hoobian-Seybold Head of Product , Wix Einat began her SEO career by developing organic strategies for top global brands and later discovered her love for product development. As the Head of Product for Wix SEO, Einat builds impactful products that make SEO accessible and approachable to more than 200M users around the world. X | LinkedIn Shira Amit SEO Product Manager, Wix After working in marketing at a fintech, Shira joined Wix to build products that help users promote their business. As a Product Manager for SEO, Shira’s focus is twofold; she develops products that streamline workflows for professional SEOs while also making SEO more accessible to DIY users. X | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. X | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. X | LinkedIn

Updated: March 13, 2023 Author: Mordy Oberstein Google Search Console (GSC) is one of the most crucial tools for site owners that care about search visibility. Not only does GSC data come directly from the source itself (Google), it also offers a 360° view of your site, from how well it’s performing to the links it has acquired. By integrating Google Search Console’s Performance reports into Wix’s analytics reports, we’ve made actionable SEO data far more accessible for site owners who want to use these insights to improve their site functionality and gain more organic traffic. Let’s explore what the integration brings to the table and ways you can take advantage of the insights it offers. In this guide, we’ll cover: An overview of Wix Analytics Search Console Reports Functionality The performance data in Wix’s GSC Analytics reports Understanding the data in your Wix Analytics GSC reports Google Search Performance over Time Top Search Queries on Google Top Pages in Google Search Results Average Position in Google over Time Wix Analytics Search Console Reports: An overview This integration brings with it a trove of potential data, so it’s worthwhile to understand how the reports work and what is contained within them. Before we do, let me first tell you what Search Console Performance data is all about. The Performance data in Search Console (upon which the Wix Analytics GSC Reports are built) helps you understand what’s happening with your website on Google. You can use it to find out the following (and more): Is Google ranking my pages? Which ones? How often are those pages being shown to people searching on Google? How often are these visible pages being clicked on and bringing people to my website? All of this is part of what makes GSC the seminal SEO tool. Functionality You can access Wix’s analytics reports by selecting Analytics & Reports within the left-hand navigation menu of your Wix Dashboard (as shown below). Next, select Reports within the submenu to bring up the full array of analytics reporting available to you. Within the SEO section of the main analytics dashboard are four reports that pull in GSC data: 01. Google Search Performance Over Time 02. Top Search Queries on Google 03. Top Pages in Google Search Results 04. Average Position in Google over Time Depending on the report, you will have the option to visualize data as a line graph, a line split graph, a combo chart, or a table. Each data view has its own particular advantages, which we’ll explore more of later in this article. The top section of each report lets you filter and adjust the data to your needs. This includes setting a reporting and/or comparison period, selecting primary data metrics, etc. You can also use these settings to drill down and refine the data you want to analyze by filtering by device, country, etc. Further, you can schedule reports to automatically get sent to your email address or to download the data for further customization. Lastly, should you customize the way the data is displayed, you’ll have the option to save this as a preset for the next time you visit and review the report. The performance data available in Wix’s GSC Analytics reports Before we explore what’s contained within each of the GSC Analytics reports, let’s briefly review the data metrics available within them. These are the foundational metrics you’ll encounter: Impressions — The number of times a link to your site appeared in Google search results. Clicks — The number of times someone clicked a link to your site in Google search results. Click-through Rate (CTR) — The percentage of impressions that were clicked. Average Position — Your site's average position in Google search results (excluding paid search). These metrics are the same ones you’ll find in the Performance reports within GSC itself. If, at any time, you’re unsure as to what a metric means, simply click on the link to View report definitions located under the report’s name. Understanding the data in your Wix Analytics GSC reports Now that we’re aware of the data we’ll be working with, let’s explore the actual Wix Analytics GSC reports in greater detail. Google Search Performance over Time As opposed to the other two reports we’ll discuss, the data here (while it can be refined) offers a top-level understanding of what is happening with your site as it pertains to Google’s search results. The line chart within the Google Search Performance over Time report provides you with a historical look at how your site has performed on Google. For example (in the image below), I have the report set to show trends reflecting how many clicks my site received per month during a six-month period, compared to the previous six-month period. I can use these insights to evaluate if my SEO efforts have been effective in attracting more clicks to my site over time. The report lets you do the same for both impressions and CTR, and can be filtered to show data for a specific device, region, or search query. As an example, I’ve filtered the report to only show clicks that came from a mobile device (as shown in the image below). Right away, I can see that the dip in clicks during the previous period did not occur when desktop data was excluded (compare to the image above). That might be a good starting point to dive deeper into the data to find out what the cause might be. As I mentioned, the line chart helps me see data in aggregate—I can look at aggregate data for multiple search terms, but I would not be able to see them displayed individually. That’s where the line chart split comes in. Here, I can see impression, click, and CTR trends for specific search terms in comparison to others. This data can help me identify search queries that my site performs well for (and, just as importantly, underperforms on) and can even help me track any relationships between various search terms. For example, if the site sells sporting goods, I could see if the various search queries related to basketball all perform in a similar way. This could help me understand how relevant the site is not just at the keyword level but topically as well. Lastly, the table data view skips the trends-oriented graph so that I can work with the metrics in different ways, including comparing multiple metrics to each other all at once. This includes average position, which was not available in the trends reporting (average position has its own set of trends reports that we’ll discuss later on). Here, too, you can filter the data according to device or region, and you can select to show data only for specific search queries. In the example below, I’ve opted only to view data on a select few search terms and I’ve also set the table to show increases/decreases compared to the previous period: You can also customize which columns you want (or don’t want) to see. This way, if you wanted to be able to reference the specific search query, you could add a column to do so. This would allow you to sort the table according to search query as well. Top Search Queries on Google The Top Search Queries on Google report helps you immediately identify which queries are your site's top performers (according to impressions or clicks). Moreover, you can apply a secondary metric (either average position or CTR) to help you better qualify the data. In the screenshot below, I’ve set impressions as the primary metric (see the blue bars) and average position as the secondary metric (reflected by the individual data points). You can see there are about 750 more impressions for the search query seo podcast than there are for the term seo podcasts (plural) despite the average rank being within the same vicinity. The obvious question is, why? Are there just more searches for the term seo podcast than there are for seo podcasts? Does the small position difference mean something in terms of how the results page is structured (resulting in one term producing more impressions than the other)? The data here helps me identify inconsistencies so that I have a starting point to dive deeper. For example, one of the things I might do is head to the line split view within the Average Position over Time report (coming soon) and compare the two search queries. Perhaps there was a spike in impressions for one of them (which would indicate that, for a brief period of time, the page ranked higher than usual) as, again, we are looking at average position. It’s entirely possible that the averages for both keywords are similar, but that one of them sees fluctuations that push the page higher up in the rankings from time to time. Again, the data here is a great starting point to dive deeper so I can better understand my site’s performance. Remember, you can also adjust the report to your needs. The settings within this report let you set how many queries you want to analyze and allow you to filter according to device and region, or to select a specific query. The table view of the Top Search Queries on Google report offers you an easy way to review the entire scope of your query performance. Here, I’ve ordered the table according to country, with comparison data added in as well: Top Pages in Google Search Results Oftentimes, what we care about are not necessarily the search queries, but how the pages on the site perform overall. At the end of the day, your goal might be to understand how a page performs across all of the search queries that drive impressions and clicks from Google. For this, you can use the Top Pages In Google Search Results report. Similar to the Top Queries On Google report, you are automatically served with your top-performing assets—in this case, pages across two metrics. For example (in the screenshot below), I have impressions as the main metric (represented by the blue bars) and the average position shown as the specific data point: Check out the table view if you want a more comprehensive view of the data. In the screenshot below, I’ve removed the date column so that the table shows the aggregate totals for the entire reporting period (as opposed to a per-day breakdown): Average Position in Google over Time Where the pages on a site rank on Google (i.e., their rank position) can significantly impact the number of impressions and clicks they receive. The Average Position In Google Over Time report helps track how a site ranks over time, both for specific search queries and in aggregate. While the line graph view can show trends for specific search queries, it defaults to showing the average position for all keywords that have resulted in an impression during the data period. The line chart split graph lets you dive a little deeper by enabling you to compare the average position of multiple search queries against each other. Below is the average position for the two search queries I called into question above, seo podcast and seo podcasts: Despite them both having similar average positions at the end of the data period, you can clearly see that for most of the period seo podcast ranked higher. The most logical reason why I saw more impressions for seo podcast and not seo podcasts has little to do with how often people search each term on Google. Rather, the site ranked higher for one term and therefore received more impressions. Of course, and at the risk of sounding repetitive, you can filter and segment this data accordingly. Making SEO data more efficient and available for all In sports, there’s a famous saying: the best ability is availability. That’s what we aimed to do when integrating Google Search Console into Wix Analytics. We wanted to make some of the most important SEO data available to you in a way that makes it more accessible than ever. We manifested this in the way we display the data and in the way we made data comparisons and filtering easier than ever. At the end of the day, you now have a tool that makes the bedrock of SEO insights not only more available to you, but accessible for you as well. For an equally accessible overview of your site’s impressions and clicks over time, along with specific page and query metrics at a glance, check out the Wix SEO Dashboard, the central location for all your SEO capabilities. 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

Tuesday, September 12, 2023 | 1PM ET Unlock your online store’s full growth potential all year round. Join Cammi Pham of ThinkRenegade and Ali Flowers of Klaviyo to learn tried-and-true tactics for maximizing profits throughout seasonal highs and lows. In this webinar, we'll cover: eCommerce strategies for managing sales stability How to hook new customers and engage existing ones Tools to help you grow before, during, and after the holidays Meet your hosts: Ali Flowers Partner Marketing Leader, Klaviyo Ali is a leader in Klaviyo’s partner marketing organization. An eCommerce expert, she specializes in content development, and manages a team of marketers that offer tactical recommendations to digital marketing agencies. LinkedIn Cammi Pham Co-founder and partner, ThinkRenegade Cammi helps eCommerce stores grow revenue with data-driven, conversion-focused tactics. She is a founding member and valued partner at ThinkRenegade, a growth marketing agency which has been blazing a trail in this arena for almost a decade. 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: Turning seasonality into an eCommerce advantage Crystal Carter 0:00 Okay, so Ali flowers is joining us today, from Klaviyo. She's going to share some fantastic information on how you can get the most out of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, that sort of thing, as well, by nurture campaigns and things like that. And we are also joined by Cammi Pham, who is from ThinkRenegade, who is a fantastic marketer, with lots and lots of experience with lots of different clients, that has a particularly fantastic understanding of eCommerce. So we're really pleased to have her joining us today. And the way that today is going to work is that we are going to be recording this webinar. So this webinar will be recorded and not only that, it will also be shared on YouTube. So if we are going a little bit fast, don't worry, just take it in your stride for the minute. You can rewatch it, you can pause, you can follow along later on. And a lot of people find that that's a really a really good way to to take in this information. You will also be able to find the recording in the same place where you registered for this webinar. So when you go to Wix SEO, wix.com/SEO/ learn/webinars, you can find the webinar and you can go to the page that had and that will have the link, you will also find it on the Wix YouTube channel. And you can get lots of information there. We will also send you the YouTube link in your email. Our colleague Bar who is in the admin at the back, will be manning that for you making sure that you got all of those details. And then we are also going to be running a q&a. So one of the great things about being here live is that you can ask questions. So in our q&a, at the bottom of the screen, you can enter your questions. And we have folks from our Wix team who work on our eCommerce tools who are there to answer your questions. We are also going to be curating, sort of, themes that we see across some of the questions to be discussed after the sort of bulk of the webinar finishes. So do stick around for that. And also, we thank you so much for joining us. We run these webinars regularly. So if you are interested in these webinars or if you want to see some of the ones that we ran before, please visit the Wix SEO Learning Hub, Wix SEO, Wix.com/SEO/ learn/webinars, lots of slashes there. And you can see all of those webinars there. So order of events, we've done the introductions, we'll get into some of these details now. So we've done the introductions and our housekeeping. So yes, it's being recorded. If anyone joins late, tell them that yes, it's being recorded. And first, we're going to hear from Cammi Pham, she's going to share some fantastic insights on seasonality and great things that you can do to make your website and your campaigns really, really sing. We're also going to hear from Ali flowers about nurturing your customers and how you can get some great results from building better relationships with your customers. And then I'm going to share some specific Wix examples that you can implement on your website pretty much today, if you want to start getting some better impact from your seasonal campaigns as we go into the selling season. Finally, Mody is going to be coordinating the q&a session. So he will be making sure that we've got some high value questions and answers for you today. And we're going to be able to get through those towards the end of the session. And with that said, I think we're going to hand over to Cammi. Cammi Pham 3:36 Hi, everyone. Hello. I'm just gonna chat quickly about Black Friday, Cyber Monday and what we have learned from late last year, the previous year, and also years to date, and what you should do. 65% of us shoppers actually start shopping way before Thanksgiving. We have a client who sells holiday items. And right now the best selling item actually is Christmas trees, they are the top selling items. So it's so important right now. Every year, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, is getting earlier and earlier. Last year roughly around early October to compete with Amazon Prime, like Walmart, Target. All the big retailers actively start selling, and start listing the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, early October. And by mid October, say the third week of October, everyone starts listing the early Black Friday deals because you want to get the money before everyone spends their holiday shopping budget. Most likely by the end of early November, the majority of people's holiday shopping budget is already gone. So you want to start earlier than they are. The other day, my project manager actually sent me this ad on Instagram. And he asked me, are you kidding me? Are we launching a Black Friday ad now? Yeah, this is not an ad from last year from Black Friday, Cyber Monday, it is an ad from like the eighth of September this year. People were launching Black Friday, Cyber Monday, offers earlier and earlier. October is the new November, and I have a feeling a lot of people are gonna launch their Black Friday, Cyber Monday deals by the end of September. That's why for us, for our clients, what we do is that we actually try to get our Black Friday/ Cyber Monday assets done by mid or late, the third week of September. And we could have adjusted it based on how the industry, how everyone else, is doing it. One, we also don't want to launch way too early, because that's gonna be a two or three month sales, it's way too long. But we also don't want to launch it way too late. Because we're going to lose a lot of the market share as well. So I'm gonna share with you some of the tips on how to optimize your email and advertising to prepare for Black Friday. Oh, one of the biggest things before Q4 hits, you want to build your audience before the rush you want to get people to join your mailing list. Do any collaboration giveaway with other brands that don't compete but share the same audience because you have customers from other people. That is a great way. Some of our clients also do give guides with other brands that do not compete as well. That way they can cross promote each other to build that audience now, that will allow you to retarget them when Q4 hits and everythings going to cost more. Also try to collect the data from your customers. Anything from the first name, the gender, that could help a lot when you try to figure out the gift gifting because like, Mom, females they easily do a lot more gift giving so you can push more of that type of content towards them. Also, try to collect them. Figure out what type of product the people want, what type of gifts they're going to give to people as well as the budget, things like that. That would allow you to segment your audience when it comes to Black Friday / Cyber Monday month. And you need to increase your frequency to compete with everyone else in the market. We would send an email or even two emails a day, a lot more SMS closer to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, we sell a lot more stuff, which means you need to segment them, the audience more, without spamming people. You want to exclude anyone who purchased recently, you want to exclude people who are not inactive. Also, now it's a great time to try to narrow your email list to people who are super active subscribers, because that will help increase your reach when you need to open to the bigger audience, more are gonna end up in inboxes instead of the spam folder. Here's an example of an early access campaign: it's an Instagram ad, which leads to a lead from which people subscribe to. You have the email you can read, you can send them an email later on and then they get access to an early sale. So you have to start Black Friday two months earlier. Make sure you have your support team like everything planned out. A lot of time people spend a lot of money on advertising or email but don't actually have a support team to handle the other sales so make sure you figure that out. Make sure you have people to answer questions or else your biggest campaign of the year could be the one that ends your brand. So you want to make sure you don't want to ruin your reputation. A post purchase flow is also something good to create to make sure that you can answer all the frequently asked questions that's gonna help reduce the pressure on your support team. Figure your shipping cut off date that will change the day of all your sales, so make sure you understand that. So last year we tried to send a gift to our client's former US brand and we realized that half of our client in Canada so we had to pay duty in Texas but they did not have an option for we paid you in Texas. So we couldn't figure out how to do that, because we cannot ask your client, like, we got to send you this gift, but you have to pay the taxes. So we actually ended up going with a different brand. It was not our first or even our second choice, or third choice. But because it's accredited brands that we could actually send to our client without trouble. So you want to connect with chat or any kind of third party companies that allow you to add a prepaid duty, a custom option at checkout. Because if you sell internationally, you need to make it easy for people to send gifts overseas. Also, try to avoid changing your branding or changing your website. Now a lot of our clients asked us to launch a new website in October, or like today, the entire packaging, this is not the time to do it. Because you spend a lot of money to build awareness. If you change it, now you have risk, you are risking the chance that people are not going to recognize you and not going to purchase your products. Also make sure everything you do is automated for mobile, the majority of the sales are gonna come from mobile. So your email, your ad, your website, everything. And lastly, make sure you have a buy now and pay later service on your website. Because you want people to purchase it on the spot instead of waiting until they get the paycheck and purchase it, right. In the past year, almost 56% of consumers have been using a buy now pay later service. So that is a 50% increase, you want to make sure you have one of those on the website. On the email checklists, September is the perfect time for you to do any split tests to figure out the best time for you to stand out, because you have to have the high frequencies anyways, but the best time because you may want to send an email during the day. And as a reminder, later on, great time to do resend of emails that performed well in the past. In order to increase the frequency, you want to test plain text versus HTML to short form or long form. Make sure all the custom flow, pop ups, the callback banner reflects the sales. And especially for campaigns, I would try to do a custom template campaign. So a little bit different than your regular so people know this is your Black Friday Cyber Monday campaign. In order to research trends to figure out what people did last year, I would check out the following website. Really good emails, it's great. They have a lot of very, very good email designs, both on the design side and technical side as well. Milt.com is amazing for you if you want to kind of figure out what people in your industry did last year, what did they launch last Black Friday Cyber Monday? What is the offer? And what did they do with the design because that can help you map out your entire calendar, figure out how to launch roughly before them. My prediction is everyone's going to launch at least a week or two weeks earlier compared to last year. So keep that in mind. And for SMS Attentive has a library of a lot of templates. So if you want to start now check out the templates, it's really really good, it means that you can actually get all the templates for your Black Friday/ Cyber Monday. So be one of the first brands to start your sales. You don't want to name all your sales the same. So how are you going to do that because if you run a two month long sale, no one's going to purchase right away. So the way we do it is that we try to break them down into maybe like three or four different sales. You could have a sale for the family for pre-Black Friday, a Black Friday preview, a single day, which is November 11. That has been a very successful holiday for clients in the past as well. And then of course you have your regular Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And a lot of people actually extended the Black Friday, Cyber Monday after the sales if they especially on the app side. There's a lot of times you want to type emails to drive more sales so you can do teasers for early access. Make sure you give your VIPs early access treatment, especially if you easily sell out of products early. You want to make sure your favorite customers, the people who bring in all the money, actually have access to the inventory before everyone else. You can run daily deals. This is great to do post Black Friday, Cyber Monday as a deal. Also free shipping, it's really good after the sales is over, of course, last chance and an extension email as well. In the past four months, this is a type of email that does extremely well for all clients for sales or non sales, us versus them. I would list everyone who you compete in the market with and have an email for them. Compare why you are better as a price point rate for holiday gifts. Because everyone has a budget, make it easy for them to shop within the budget. If you have a best seller, it's good because especially if you have a lot of products, make it easy for people to find something to buy, and anything with social proof, press reviews, influencers, they do extremely well. This is very similar for art as well. So just keep that nearby. So you also want to have an overall ad on this topic. And of course unique selling position and anything to do with Steinbeck research. Yeah, that is one of the best performing emails for us in the past year. In terms of advertising, make sure you talk to your C suite, legal, everything. Make sure you have everything approved in advance, because during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you need to move very fast, you don't have the time to wait for approval. So if your advertising campaigns work very well, increase your budget by 10%. If they're good, very good 20% and amazing 30% Make sure you get that budget approved way in advance so you can increase without waiting. In previous years, Meta, Google used to crash a lot during the week prior to Black Friday, Cyber Monday. That's why you will need to spend a lot of your budget before because you wait until the last week, there's a chance that you can't even run your app. So here's some of the tips of what has worked in the past for us. Overall video has been working very well, overall the best video length is between 23 and 48 seconds long. The best video, overall, focuses on the sales, the holiday of gifting. And the more social proof the better. We try to feature the review on every header image in every single email. If you can include social proof anywhere on the website, email includes that. In our graphic, anything that is straightforward, spells out everything, makes it obvious, you have the code on your ad, make sure that you spell out how everything works, so it's easy for people to understand because they get a lot of noise. So you want to make everything easy. Make sure that the coupon code is automatically applied at checkout, so they don't have to remember. I always forget the code by the time I finish shopping. So an interesting fact is that last year prospecting actually performed better than retargeting ads. So think about that. I understand that retargeting ads are so much cheaper but don't focus on that. Make sure you have a budget to actually run the prospecting ads and what we like to do is if you can launch your Black Friday / Cyber Monday ads, only make like high reward your top of funnel offer, your welcome offer, in a way that it feels like a holiday or more, like this is a special offer, special only Black Friday offers that usually helps a lot with the performance of the ad itself. And it's important to prepare multiple ad creatives. So you can actually swap in and out if something is not doing well. So do not launch everything out of the gate. Because you will need a lot of creative. People get tired at bare facts now. So you want to have a lot of different options in case something is not working. Like try to prepare everything, by the time by the end of September. Everything is gonna move very, very fast. So here's a few trending ad styles from last year, again, us versus them works extremely well. Like also if you have your price point is lower, you want to point out that your price point versus other people in the industry. Influencer testimonials and reviews can give you a leg up. Anything that has to do with social proof, the problem, the solution, the product focus, before and after. People love that, so if you have any memes to share, anything TikTok style. Overlay the point of view. Take what is trending on TikTok and bring that over to Meta, it will work extremely well. Press headers look like if you screenshot a press piece. Anything shocking, or clients doing a lot of fun stuff, like entertaining, to try to get people's attention. ASMR, funny facts work very well. So maybe try very raw shaky videos, something ugly. Same thing with email. Printing works extremely, extremely well. So you also want to test the type of email, this is what has been working very well today. And lastly, lead forms. We're pushing out leadforms, even this year we're doing it right now, heavily running ads to try to collect leads before everything starts. So make sure that you list that column, collecting all the leads right now. So overall, yes, make sure that...like even I get stressed with Black Friday, Cyber Monday, it doesn't matter how many, I have been doing this for 10 years. So calm down, focus on trying to get as much as you can, there will be a lot of unexpected things popping up left and right and you will need to go with the flow. Yeah, let's start your Black Friday / Cyber Monday planning now. Because it's already a little bit late. If you have any questions feel free to send me an email or call me at Team Renegade, also send me a tweet on Twitter or a DM on Instagram. I'm more than happy to answer any of your questions as well. Thank you. Crystal Carter 22:14 Thank you so much for sharing that was such a deep dive into lots of different tools. There's lots there that I was not aware of as far as different tools for researching other folks's campaigns. I think that's a great way to do that. I've seen a few other ones that was a new for me, that you mentioned there and some great information overall. We'll get into more of that later on, and more in the questions as well. But thank you so much Cami for sharing those insights. Next up is Ali flowers from Klaviyo, who's going to be talking more about nurturing and building campaigns. And I think they're a great combination of topics if you're wanting to, you know, really get out there in front with your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns. And also make sure that it lasts for the long run. Ali, are you able to share your screen? Ali Flowers 23:08 I am if everyone can just bear with me while I get these slides pulled up and get started. Can everyone see in presentation mode now? Yep, fantastic. Awesome. Okay, great. Hi, everybody. Thank you guys so much for joining us today. If you're not familiar with me or Klaviyo, Klaviyo has been a longtime app partner, integration partner of Wix. So it's my first time getting to kind of join and be a part of their content, which is really exciting. I work within the Klaviyo channel team. So I actually work with a lot of folks like Cami, who are doing strategy and execution on behalf of ecommerce brands, not just during BFCM, but year round. So I've had the pleasure of having lots of conversations with different agencies and marketing specialists around how to prepare for BFCM. But most importantly, what do we do after BFCM? And so Cami gave you guys some really great insight and some strategies to execute during the busy season. And I'm going to talk to you guys a little bit about how do we approach post BFCM. And this is a really important time, I think as you probably got from Cami's presentation, the period for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and holiday buying overall keeps expanding, which means that the competitive season and ecommerce keeps getting larger and larger, which means for us in eComm, that's exciting because the opportunity gets bigger, but it also means that there's a greater risk and a bigger challenge to show return when the New Year hits back in January. And so what I'm going to talk to you guys about is how we segment the new customers that we acquire throughout the holiday season. And how do we make sure we are building journeys for each of these segments that can help improve a couple of metrics that are gonna be really key to our business like repeat purchase rate, as well as just our lifetime value from each of these customers that we acquire. And that's really going to be important coming out of busy seasons, regardless of the seasonality of your business. But when you come out of a big busy season where maybe your cost of acquisition has seen some slight increases, and you're now having to mitigate that and make sure that you're showing return from that, the best way to do that is through a strong segmentation strategy, and building really solid journeys for your new customer cohorts. So that being said, let's talk about how we slice and dice the new customers that we acquired during this busy season. First up is, we need to try to segment out those people who came to our websites or interacted with our brand, and we're shopping on behalf of someone else. This seems kind of like a really kind of weird cut to want to make. But it's important to make for a couple of reasons. The first reason that this is really important is that, from a long term nurture strategy perspective, people who engage with your brand to say shop for someone else, the relationship that we build with them is going to be quite different. And our lifetime value or LTV expectations for those segments of customers will be pretty different to as you can imagine, if I'm buying a gift for my dad from like a, I don't know, an automotive store, or potentially something that's like more of his interest, that particular brand is probably not going to want to try to build a direct relationship with me or get me into their loyalty programmes, because it's just not product that I am interested in. So if we're working at segmenting those out, there's a few smart ways that you can do that. There is one first and foremost, if you were able to ask at checkout, if somebody was giving a gift, sometimes we do this because we include gift notes. Sometimes you do this because we offer gift wrap. There's also a variety of different ways you can add a customer question at checkout sometimes. So that's something to look into to see if that's something that your store can potentially accommodate. But if not, we want to just look at other data points that could indicate to us that someone has bought a gift for someone else. Another great indication is if you had a segment of your website or a page on your website, that was like your gift guide section that was running during BFCM. Maybe you have gift baskets or gift kits that you were selling, that some of your new customers may have purchased. So if a new customer came in, and they only purchased something from your website that was flagged as a gift item, we might assume that that particular buyer is a gift giver. Granted, we would want to pair that information with other pieces of data like, have they shopped with us before, how recently did they come to our website, are they coming back to our website to help us understand if that is in fact a gift giver. But it's a good indication, we might want to make that assumption. The other assumption that you can kind of look at to see if somebody is like a gift giver is if their billing address is different from their shipping address. Again, we would want to pair this with the other purchase history. So we're not making this decision in a silo. But if they've only ever bought with you once and you notice that they sent the gift or they sent the product to a different location, could be a really good indication that that particular buyer was shopping for someone else. And we don't want to throw away these segments, right, our gift giver segments can actually be quite profitable. One of the great segments that we hear about from our partners is actually if you can identify a grandparent segment, Grandma and Grandpa are a great segment to come back and market to at other points during the year. So back to school is a great idea to reach that audience. But generally other gift giving segments we want to revisit them with one off campaigns around Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, whatever is relevant to your brand. But the idea is that we don't throw them away, but we segment them out. And we set different expectations. And we don't necessarily build towards the same journeys for them. So I'm gonna breathe for a second. So that's slice number one, in the new customer cohort is that we're going to try to pull out this gift givers. And again, this is for future campaign tactics and journeys. But it's also so that we can set our expectations from a reporting standpoint, and from a forecasting standpoint correctly, because we know that this audience is probably not going to purchase at the same rate or as frequently as other audiences who are buying for themselves. So then the rest of that cohort you might be thinking, okay, cool Ali, we can segment out gift givers, we still have a crapload of like new customers that are just like sitting in this bucket. Who are they and what do we do with them? We have two different data types that we can use to segment those particular audiences. And I said this earlier, but the best way to a strong nurture strategy is to have a really strong segmentation strategy first. So the two data types that we segment new customers by or that we recommend you segment your new customers by are called descriptive and behavioral, descriptive and behavioral they give us they each kind of tell a different story. And one is just a little bit more informational, when it comes to understanding intent and what this particular person's intent might be with your brand long term. And that's the behavioral data bucket. So when we look at behavioral data. There's kind of a branching tree that is different, like touch points that we have to leverage that help us build towards a segment strategy that's rooted in something called RFM. So does anybody realize, say in the chat, maybe if you know, RFM, if you're familiar with this strategy, but when we say RFM, what we're talking about is recency, frequency and monetary value. So how recently are they? Did they purchase it with you? How frequently do they regularly purchase with you? And then what are they spending with you when they're completing those purchases? So we're going to build some segments based off of those that kind of core RFM principle. So when we break out behavioral data, we've got essentially two types of touchpoints that we're looking at. The first is an interaction. And interaction for all intents and purposes is just an interaction that didn't result in a purchase. But that doesn't mean that we didn't learn a lot from them while they were on our website or engaging with our brand. And so within interactions and things that we'll want to evaluate is, how recently did they come to our website? How recently have they interacted with the brand? How frequently do they come to the website? How frequently are they window shopping, and then we'll use that same kind of cut on the other side of this branching tree, when we look at purchases to understand recency and frequency as they relate to purchases. And of course, we have that added layer here, once they've made a purchase with your brand, they have that monetary value. So how much did they spend. These kind of data points are what allow us to build these kind of four segments here. And then we'll talk about what each segment is, there are a lot more segments. And for that, you could build the information that we just had on that previous slide. But this is really kind of like the core four that Klaviyo recommends, you kind of look at and you really start to finesse and work with. And once you've got strong journeys for these four different segments, you can kind of extrapolate these out, you can cut them up and be a little more specific beyond just like these four. But it's a good starting point, it's a good jumping off place when you're evaluating a large cohort of new customers. So the first and foremost, that I would say like the biggest ones that we want to segment out, these are people you probably knew, but you may have even known before BFCM, or maybe they became a highroller, during the BFCM, you can kind of set up your segmentation strategy either and that I want to look holistically at all of my current customers. So the folks that were buying with me before BFCM, and the folks that were buying after. But I think for our exercise here, we're going to really look at that cohort of customers that we evaluated, maybe from, you know, as Cammi mentioned, all the way from September, all the way through the end of the year, right. So like that, that's kind of the range that we're looking at. And what we'll want to define is, who are first and foremost, our high rollers, who spent the most with us, who purchased the most frequently, and who is someone who is kind of continuing to shop. So they're coming back to your website, they're showing high intent, we're gonna call these our high rollers. And these are people who came into your brand. And like I said, they just immediately started spending over your average order value. So most of us have benchmarked average order value, we know in general, how much people spend with us on average, throughout each season. And so we can kind of easily kind of start to build a segment around these high rollers. And when we're building journeys for these high rollers, the name of the game here is retention, right, we want to make sure that we're keeping them in this segment, we don't want to have any attrition down into lower spending or less frequent segments. So the things that we're going to focus on here is, one, personalization, right. This is the segment that has done the most with us, we know the most about them. And so we should be able to deliver the most bespoke marketing experiences to this particular group. The second thing is like these are folks who clearly like your brand, they love what you're putting out. So they should be the first to know about new product drops, they should be the first to know about new product lines that are coming forward. The other thing that you might want to consider for future promotions going forward: If you know that this audience is going to spend with your brand, you might want to give them private shopping hours on discounts. So this is a great way if you're going to run a big discount, maybe for another busy season throughout the year, or even for BFCM next year. And you want to get them to buy with you quickly before they buy with competitors. Allow them to shop with your discount early. So give them early access to that and give them some private shopping hours. The other thing that's really big here is advocacy prompts. So if you are leveraging a loyalty programme, that's awesome. But we want to make sure that your high rollers are engaging with it right because your loyalty programme is only as good as it is utilized. So if you have points that are not going used, if you have high rollers who are spending a lot with you, but for whatever reason are not engaging your loyalty programme, we really want to start to better incorporate those prompts because in theory, because we've done our research when we're standing up our loyalty programme and it should be indicative of which segment that they fall into. So that's segment number one, we'll build journeys for high rollers, that's really important. The next segment is potential high rollers. So when we're looking at that time period, who were people who definitely shopped within that period, they probably purchased more than once, but maybe they didn't quite spend that average order value, which is interesting, right? So these are people who were seemingly really engaged with your brand. They're purchasing frequently, they've purchased recently within this confined time period. But for whatever reason, they're not spending a whole lot with their brand. And so some of the tactical opportunities that we'll need to do, so that we can kind of like, better target them and hopefully promote them up to that more expensive segment. First and foremost, we need to learn more about them, why are they not spending as much as we would expect, on average. And so there's a lot of work that we can do from zero and first party data gathering. If you're not familiar with zero party data, this is the information that we collect through forms and quizzes. So things that people voluntarily just hand on over to you. So maybe we need to consider deploying quizzes on our website. There's lots of wonderful quiz partners out there for you to consider. I think it's important to kind of have a quiz strategy. So understand what information you're trying to learn. Before we proceed with that, but it's a great avenue. The other thing to consider is to take a double click and look at the first party data that you've got. Which is that behavioral data that we're observing on our website? Are there particular areas of your site that they're either not resonating with or they seem to not be venturing on into? And what can that tell us about their product references? The other thing here that we'll want to do is we'll want to offer loyalty incentives, this might become a cost conscious audience for us. So how can we kind of incentivize them to move up in our loyalty programme to spend more with us, so your loyalty programme can be a great avenue to do that through. The other thing here is, as we learn more about them through that zero first party data collection, we need to start to become hyper personalized. So this is something where social proof and product recommendations can become really helpful. Because this particular audience, if you're not spending a lot, then there is a potential that maybe they're just not quite sold yet on making big investments with your brand. And so social proof can be a really wonderful way to kind of display the value that others and people like them see within your product lines. And there's also a great opportunity for us to just show how good we are at listening and learning and getting to know this audience through personalization, tactics, and customization both on our website and in our email creative. So that's another way to potentially bump these folks up into that higher spending segment. Okay, the next one here that we're going to focus and build journeys around: brand enthusiast. So this is someone, again, they have purchased a lot, or they've purchased frequently, they haven't spent at that average order value. And the other difference between like brand enthusiasts and your potential high rollers, is, excuse me, I think I just actually miscommunicated there. Potential high rollers or someone who has spent a large amount of money, but they haven't necessarily done so at the same rate, are high rollers. So your brand enthusiast, kind of the opposite here, we're looking at people who have who have spent recently, but they are not as frequent, and they are not hitting that average order value. And so we'll work on promoting related products. And you may even consider some volume discounts for this audience. And finally, waiting for a whiles, these are those individuals, if we segmented out all of our gift givers, and we still have some folks who only made one purchase, and they seem like they're tentative about engaging with our brand, like, maybe they're coming back to the website a lot, but they're just not really making that second purchase. This is a good opportunity to focus and to try to understand what is it that they're looking for time sensitive deals that basically create urgency, or good tactics for this audience. And the other kind of tactic to consider here is that we may want to leverage some social proof to again, kind of communicate the value that others see in our brands that they just haven't had the chance to realize yet. And so for each one of those audiences, we're going to create an omni channel strategy for them to try to push them towards that second point of conversion, push them towards that higher LTV. And now because we've kind of talked about all that we know about these audiences and we know what pieces of data we've got to leverage, we kind of have the tools in our toolbox to build really bespoke experiences. And so what we'll do is we'll use that particular information to create a complete journey like this. And so what I'll say here is we're going to talk through all of these touch points on the screen. Each one of these touch points can be leveraged across all four of those segments. So you can essentially use this as your journey builder. And you can also do this for each one of those segments that we just talked about. But the creative and the incentive that you offer at each touch point will obviously be different, based on what we just discussed on the previous slide. So that being said, I'm going to first introduce the different touches that we see here. And what you'll probably notice really quickly is that there's lots of technology that's being leveraged to deliver this particular type of journey. So you'll see that we've got an ad that's mentioned here, you'll see we've got website mentions here. We have email, we have SMS, we have a quiz. All of these are things that you can add to your IQ store. There's a variety of vendors that can kind of help you do that. So like If you've already working with partners that do this, well, that's awesome. But generally speaking, just want to acknowledge that this happens across a variety of tools. So there is some element of having a smart tech stack kind of already picked out to be able to support your post BFCM Audience journeys. So, that all being said, when you start deploying omni channel strategies, one of the biggest things that you have to kind of decide on as a brand is what is your segment source of truth. Sometimes if we're using different technologies that are not well integrated together, so maybe I've got email over here, I've got SMS with a different vendor over here, I have website personalization with another vendor over here. Sometimes as marketers, we can try to take the same parameters for each of those segments, and rebuild each segment in every tool. But inevitably, because of the way data works, you're not going to pull the same audience of people when you do that. So what's important is to decide what is your segment source of truth. So whether that's your marketing automation tool, rather, that's a you know, maybe you have a data lake or some other type of data infrastructure tool that you're leveraging, where you're aggregating this information, whatever it is, we just recommend that you decide your segments are all going to pull from the same place. So wherever that is in your stack, that's awesome, just make sure that you've agreed to what that is, with the rest of your teams. And so if you know where your segments are coming from, you can deploy them across your stack. So a good example of this, we're talking on touchpoint one here, a customer sees an ad. So if we say we're talking about our high rollers, and we're targeting them through Meta or Google, most of your ad platforms will integrate with your marketing automation solution. So if you're using Klaviyo, we do integrate with Meta, Criteo and Google, and what you can actually do is you can create audiences based off of your segments. So you can deploy that segment as an audience and target them through paid ads, which is really great. And then that customer, you know, they'll click through, hopefully, on your ad, because your creative was super smart and ready, they ended up on your website. And maybe they land on a product page that's customized based off of the ad that they clicked on, of course, but we want to make sure that we're customizing our website in its totality for that segment in case they choose to browse elsewhere, beyond just that product page. So there are a lot of website personalization tools that you can use out there. Dynamic Yield is a great one, there's a bunch of them that are available. So do your research, decide what works best for you. But what's important here is again, we're going to deploy the same segment from wherever our segment source of truth is to that website customization tool, so that we can create a really continuous experience from, I clicked on this ad, I landed on this product page, and I'm now browsing the site. And that's really important for us, and we're going to increase the likelihood of conversion. And in this particular journey, we're assuming that they went to other parts of our website, they didn't engage, they didn't end up purchasing but they still obviously, there was an interaction and so we capitalize on the interaction in this journey. With a quiz, this is a good opportunity for somebody you just acquired during the BFCM period to try to learn more. So you can ask them questions about what types if you're like an apparel brand, maybe you want to learn more about their style preferences, you can put like a style guide quiz together, great way to learn more about that particular individual. And after they would submit that quiz, you would anticipate as a shopper that you're gonna get an email from the brand. And if we are doing again, we're powering our email strategy with the same segments that we've used for ads and for website personalization, then our email will also be informed by that. So now, we have kind of our standard email creative that's going to match whatever we're delivering to that segment. But we can also now automate and leverage the information that we're pulling from that quiz into this follow up email. If you're using SMS, that's fantastic. SMS is an awesome tool to use. At ClearView customers who use email and SMS together actually see a five and a half times higher click rate on SMS, they do an email, but you only get that click rate if you're delivering this like journey and the way that it's intended to be done. Because at the end of the day, SMS is great for creating urgency. It's great for creating conversion. But email is still the great relationship builder. So when we think about LTV, we think about the long term return for some of these acts on these acquisition strategies that we run during BFCM. We need to continue to build relationships and emails are kind of our best opportunity for showing our ability to learn and understand someone's needs. So we'll send them that email, it'll be really smart. They'll want to go back to the website. That brings us to touch five, they click through on that website and they add something to cart, we're assuming here. So they add some product to cart unfortunately, either browse abandoned or that cart abandoned, we're assuming here, and then we're going to send them an SMS to remind them about what's in their cart. This is great if you're not leveraging abandoned cart flows today. I hope we all are, definitely consider setting one of those up. And if you have SMS consent for some of your audiences like your high rollers, then that's awesome. We want to incorporate SMS into abandoned cart flow. And then we could hit them with an SMS, as part of our first touch and that abandoned cart flow and this is the perfect role for SMS to play, right, because we've already curated our creative for this segment, we've hit them with that same creative throughout each touchpoint. In this journey, it's super smart. And it's integrated because we're leveraging a single source of truth for our segments. And then we're going to finally hit them with a crescendo of the journey, which is the SMS. And this is something that should create urgency, letting them know that there's limited stock available, letting them know that a particular deal is going to expire in trying to get them back into that checkout experience. So that you can actually secure the next sale, which is really the goal, right is increasing repeat purchase rate. So for each of those four segments that we talked about on the previous slide, we're going to try to construct something like this. And as you can see, to deliver on something like this, the most important thing is your segmentation. Because the entirety of this journey is contingent on creating a really smart segmentation strategy and then reiterating the same creative and same messages for each of those segments throughout the different tools in your stack. And making sure that those are all well integrated into your segmentation, your single source of truth. Alright, that was a lot of talking. Crystal Carter 46:13 You've been fantastic, you hit all of all of the talking points. So thank you so, so, so much, I'm gonna rattle through, Mordy while you grab your questions, I'm going to rattle through a couple of these slides, we'll send you through this deck as well. So don't worry if you're not grabbing everything. So I'm gonna share this screen now. Sure. So, on this one, we talked about a few things. These are a couple of tips for seasonal selling on Wix. First of all, just to make sure that you are aware, Ali mentioned it, but we have a Klaviyo app that allows you to do lots of things. She talked about SMS. She talked about emails, tax, growing your list, conversion tools, you know, segmenting your list, things like that. The Wix Klaviyo app allows you to do a lot of that within your Wix CMS. So do check that one out. We also talked about customer loyalty programmes, and building and nurturing those customer loyalty programmes, we have a tool that helps you to do that within Wix. Within Wix, we also have some elements that allow you to sort of help grow your customers with referral programmes with things like discounts and free shipping or points or things like that. And we also have some elements for abandoned carts. Or we also have some elements for creating custom codes. So where people go to the page, and they enter a code and they're able to apply that card. You can both use those when you're for a single product, but also for a category. And then you can apply those to things like ads, ad campaigns, social campaigns, email campaigns, all of that sort of thing as you're getting ready for your season. And you can manage those, but per single product, but you can also manage those within your marketing and SEO home where you have a section that will collect all of your coupons. And you can change them to the status to active or inactive and things like that. We also have some email automation that will allow you to send welcome, thank you, and abandoned cart emails as part of your general flow. And again, we have another place that allows you to manage those in bulk where you can see whether they're active or inactive and whether they need elements updating there. From an SEO point of view, I highly recommend thinking about the copy that you have on your website during your seasonality. So for instance, you can highlight a few products on your site. And you can select them to add an info section on your site. And you can use that to add seasonal sections in bulk. So for instance, you could add something like find out more about our back to school section. And then you can add links to that. You can also add keywords into that so that when people are searching for online for your products, they're able to find that and this will add in the section on to your product page. But it will also add h1 or h2 on to your product page as well, which allows you to demonstrate the priority to Google on search to help to solidify all of that great campaign work that you've been doing across your work. And with that, we will send you this deck as well with all of the links to everything. And with that we will go to the q&a. And thanks. Mordy Oberstein 49:34 Welcome to the q&a. Thank you everyone. First of all, great job Cami and it was really wonderful to get an early headstart on my thinking about holiday season and seasonality because I'm one of the people who doesn't think about it until way way, way later. Thank you Ali as well. By the way, as Crystal mentioned about coupon codes, I highly recommend you check out Wix Analytics. For example, you can track the performance of various coupon codes and among a million other things like have a dig around the Wix Analytics. There's a tonne in there. With that I want to have a conversation about service based businesses. There's been a lot of questions about them. I don't think we really touched them too much. And I think it really does make sense. For example, one question was around the business being a soccer coaching business. So soccer season, I'm a football fan, so I don't know when soccer season is but soccer season is only so long away. What are some ways to curb seasonality around that? There was another question around, the business was a professional development business and to see a big spike around back to school time. What are some ways to curb seasonality? Leaving aside the holiday experience? But just seasonality in terms of seasons? If you're a service based business? Open to the floor. Anybody? Ali want to take it first? Ali Flowers 50:59 I'll take a stab at that. Yeah, I think the biggest thing around seasonality is one, understanding the different types of customers you sell to, I think there's always busy seasons in every industry, but we need to know our ICPs and each ICP will probably have different needs throughout the year that maybe are not reflected in each customer type. So if you're selling, if you're selling soccer lessons, there's probably like I would imagine, during summer or when parents are working and need kids to go to lessons throughout the day, there might be some seasonality there. But during the school year, I think great ways to try to get people if your primary ICP is like the mom and dad group, I would focus on promoting gifts throughout different the type different times of the year, giving lessons as gifts. I think the other thing too, just to consider is that, you know, really, and not knowing who you sell to, I would say just understand who those individuals are. And try to think through on a very specific basis for each buyer that you've got. What are other opportunities during the year beyond just the busy seasons that you might be able to sell to them? Mordy Oberstein 52:05 Amazing, Cami, you want to weigh in? Cammi Pham 52:07 Yeah, I think it is also opportunity for the lowest season is a time for you to kind of build up your list and your customer base, especially in social media, like really create a community around your audience, and then when it's the right time you can actually target them with ads, with email. We do have a lot of clients on my ecommerce site with us this season. A seasonal product for sure. And like in the slow season, we do a lot of collaboration things with other brands, because that is a great way for us to tap into their customer base. Also engage with their community as well. Like giveaways, any kind of collaboration, packaging, bundle products with other brands as well because they keep selling the products. But now you can sell like a gift certificate or gift pack something like that with their product as well. Leverage other people's customers. Mordy Oberstein 53:17 Yeah, and you know, I did use a soccer example. My kid, one of my kids, actually goes to soccer classes from September through June. And what they actually do is the coach while he's doing this big group thing in the fall and whatever it is in the winter, I live in the desert so it's hot here all the time. So we can run through the winter. In the offseason, they do like special clinics, they run private lessons. So you know, it definitely pays to get a little bit creative. It's very similar in SEO by the way to link building. How do I build links? If I'm a gas station, how am I supposed to build links? Well look at traffic patterns, and you can you know, put data about traffic patterns and get links that way. It's very similar to my mind, the way you would deal with seasonality. If you're that kind of service business, you get a little bit creative in what you offer and how you offer it. There's often more opportunities than you might particularly think. Crystal Carter 54:11 Agreed. I think things like ebooks, things like special open days or free taster sessions, things like that can really drive similar results that you would from a standard ecommerce offering. Mordy Oberstein 54:24 This one is about the RFM method. So, I know the RFM method, but how could this be implemented? It does require tracking even digital data to some extent to further segment into RF. What are the steps to put this into motion on an ecommerce website? Ali Flowers 54:46 Yeah, I can speak to that so I would say, all the segmentation that I was referring to you can do a lot of that segmentation inside the Klaviyo app. So certainly trial, check out Klaviyo if you've not used it before. Anybody from the Wix team might be able to provide some more context on how you can do that directly in Wix. But yeah, I would say check it out. And even if you're using other marketing automation tools, most marketing automation tools have some segmentation features and functionality that should allow you to build the segments through the RFM model. Mordy Oberstein 55:14 Awesome. Okay. Here's another follow up question. Do you have any suggestions on learning more about your customer base aside from surveys, which can become tedious for clients, and by the way, some brands don't let you do surveys if you're a bigger brand, which is a complication. That's been a topic we've been discussing, a small business that isn't at the size of a discussion group. Cammi Pham 55:41 I think one of the things is like, actually pick up the phone and call some of your best customers. In klaviyo you can kind of segment that top 1% customer. And even a 15 minute call with them, I'll even send them an email asking them because you usually get very, very good feedback about your brand. And I recommend that to all my clients at least in the beginning, like, every year, I do that with like your top 10, top 15 customers, because they usually give you the insight that you're probably going to spend a lot of money to learn, that's gonna save you a tonne of time. For sure. I think social is also like, a casual way for you guys to do a survey without actually doing a survey. So if you have a social following, like me, try to do a poll and also within Klaviyo, what you could do is that you could have multiple CTAs and also you can create a split test to see where people click on and collect this data. So it's kind of an informal survey that allows you to collect data and tag those people with all the information that you collect. Ali Flowers 56:57 I would also say if you can't run a quiz if you know your brand, it doesn't accommodate like, you know, running like a haircare quiz or something on your homepage, where you can learn more about your audiences. Consider the questions that you're putting in your review requests. A lot of different review tools will allow you to ask custom questions. And if you have somebody who's willing to give you feedback on a product, it's a great opportunity to learn more about them. And so consider what you're asking in those review requests and see if there's not a creative way that you can learn more through that engagement as well. Cammi Pham 57:29 Also you can get all your reviews from Amazon or your website and run it through an AI to collect information, but based on the keywords as well. Crystal Carter 57:42 Absolutely, I was gonna say but things like things like Amazon reviews, your Google business profile reviews, as well as something called People Also Ask what shows on the SERP. And Google will give you the kinds of questions that people are asking about your brand or even about a specific topic. So if it was a shampoo, then you would enter the shop, then the brand of the shampoo and it would give you the list of questions that people have about that shampoo and the different answers and things like that. Mordy Oberstein 58:07 Yeah, and there's a great freemium tool around that called alsoask.com. And you can plug in your keyword and it'll give you all the questions people are asking on Google related to that. So definitely check that out. And I think we're actually out of time, which is amazing. Crystal Carter 58:22 We covered so much and as CAMI was saying at the beginning, there's still so much to cover. I didn't even get like scratched the surface on the things you can do on Wix. And Ali, I'm sure you didn't get to all of the amazing things that are involved with those processes. But thank you both so much. And yeah, thank you for sharing so much knowledge. Ali Flowers 58:43 Thanks for having us. Mordy Oberstein 58:48 See you next month at our next webinar. Crystal Carter 58:51 Thank you very much, everyone. Bye.

Author: Petra Kis-Herczegh Planning and implementing the right SEO approach can make or break your campaign’s success, regardless of the type of business you work for. You need to recognize that each business—be it a local cafe, growing tech startup, or well-known eCommerce brand—has unique characteristics and requirements when it comes to SEO. And, while the fundamental tactics and techniques might not change as much, the strategy you develop for each of these businesses can differ dramatically and should be tailored to their individual goals. Although some roles may be more industry-specific, SEOs are likely to work with various types of businesses throughout their careers. This also means that you need to develop the right skills and mindset to approach strategy conversations with a diverse range of clients and stakeholders. The reality is that creating customized strategies for every business you work with can be time-consuming, particularly if you work at an SEO agency where you might be managing multiple clients. Additionally, SEOs often work with an insufficient amount of information and impatient clients, which can lead us to rely on what we believe works, leading to what I call the SEO experience trap—a set-and-forget-it mindset that can affect even the most experienced professionals. In this article, I’ll briefly discuss the experience trap, along with the conversations you need to have with stakeholders to ensure that your SEO strategy actually brings in business. Table of contents: The SEO experience trap Evaluating resources for your SEO strategy Resource challenges for enterprise SEO Resource challenges for SMBs pursuing SEO Resource questions to ask your stakeholders Planning to implement your SEO strategy Understanding and addressing SEO dependencies Adapting to blockers Implementation questions to ask your client Assessing the potential impact of your SEO strategy The SEO experience trap Experience can be a double-edged sword in SEO. While it is a great asset, it can also be a disadvantage if you rely too much on your past experiences and don’t take the time to think critically and ask questions. I’ve not only been there myself, but I’ve also seen many experienced SEO professionals make mistakes because they assumed that what worked in the past will also work for the next client or situation. Mindlessly following our competitors can also lead us into the same trap. Applying a good strategy for the wrong business is the same as developing a bad strategy, and it’s something you can easily avoid by learning how to have better conversations about SEO strategy with your stakeholders. To avoid the experience trap, it’s important to focus on developing soft skills, such as critical thinking, listening, understanding, and effective communication. This will help you ask the right questions, which means you can have more fruitful conversations and effectively develop strategies that are tailored to each client’s unique needs. A lack of resource, strategy, and scaling processes are three of the top challenges SEOs face, according to Search Engine Journal’s 2023 State of SEO survey. These blockers can cause implementation challenges and result in failing to achieve the expected impact. When we look closely at the top issues mentioned (resources, strategy, and scaling processes), none of these are exclusive to SEO. As much as we like to blame algorithm updates, the core problems you’re likely to face have nothing to do with technology: They are all related to operational challenges, which come down to your ability to deal with human beings. That’s where soft skills—especially the ability to not shy away from tough conversations—can be crucial to success. To help you approach strategy conversations with decision makers, we will focus on three core areas to explore: 01. Resources 02. Implementation 03. Impact By discussing and understanding these areas when you develop a strategy, you can not only save your future self from a huge headache, but also be more effective and efficient throughout the campaign, which means you can feel more confident that you’re delivering results. This is why—if any of these topics are neglected as part of the early stage conversations—it’s best to go back to the drawing board and start again. Evaluating resources for your SEO strategy Resource allocation is a critical consideration for any successful SEO strategy. It’s about managing three components: people, time, and money. You could visualize these as equal parts of a triangle in which your project will need to be split between all three components. In SEO, you’ll sometimes face a shortage of all three, which can make our jobs challenging. This triangle of resources means that if one of the elements is missing, the other two suffer as well— you might need to make up for the missing element(s) one way or another. Too little budget can result in allocating a lot more time and people resources, and those extra resources can cost the business even more money over the long run. Let’s say you work for a retailer with hundreds of physical locations that need to be managed and updated. You can either pay for a tool and/or an agency that helps manage these for you (which will save you time and people resources) or you can decide to manage this in-house, which means that you might need a full team and time allocated towards this project. If you decide to manage everything in-house, you might find that local SEO is eating up so much of your time that either other areas of SEO get neglected, which could mean that your business is now actually losing out on revenue. If you need to carry out technical audits after every sprint, the same logic applies: Are you going to pay for a tool and analyze the site yourself, or perhaps you want to outsource certain tasks to a freelancer so you can allocate time to other high-value areas? Now this doesn’t mean that you should outsource and pay for tools every single time, but it does mean that you need to find the right balance within these three resource areas, depending on your project’s needs and your client’s (or your own) available resources. It’s also worth remembering that an overly generous budget (yes, there’s such a thing) can also be problematic: Throughout my enterprise SEO career, I’ve seen teams (including SEO) rush to create and complete projects at the end of the fiscal year with the primary purpose of clearing out their “leftover” budget. When this remaining budget isn’t spent, it is likely to be taken away the following year or reallocated to a different channel, which makes internal budget conversations competitive and not conducive to SEO. While you won’t always be in a position to change this, being aware of these politics can help you be more realistic with your planning. In larger teams, processes and prioritization are typically the biggest challenges. Although blame is frequently placed on budget limitations, the real issue is often inefficiencies in the process. This is why scaling efficient processes can really help improve prioritization. Resource challenges for enterprise SEO Generally speaking, one of the advantages of working for an enterprise is having access to significant resources, but that can also create a highly political environment internally, where different marketing channels compete with each other for those resources—from budget and prioritization to headcount. This tends to be highly inefficient for SEO outcomes, as there are rarely any optimizations that don’t support other channels. In terms of project implementation there’s usually very little that SEO fully owns: IT, brand, PR, product, and content are just a few of the teams that we heavily rely on. That’s why internal politics often hurt SEO budgets and can also make it challenging to spend that budget efficiently. For example, with well-known household or luxury brands, the brand team (and their budgets) often sit at the top of the hierarchy. The justification for that, of course, is that it’s the brand that the customers are after, therefore maintaining the brand image is the essence of the business. This often results in the majority of the available budget being spent on brand campaigns, leaving very little left for the website and organic campaigns. However, one point that sometimes goes overlooked is that brand awareness can also be built within the SERPs. Similar to traditional, out-of-home advertisements, seeing the same domain pop up for a lot of unbranded queries means that users will probably start to recognize your brand more. As an additional point, it’s just as important to start building out your online presence so that search engines start to understand your business, which can pay dividends when you create new pages (i.e., they may get indexed more quickly because search engines are already regularly crawling your content, or you might receive more visibility for relevant searches because they understand your connection to the query). So, while creating brand campaigns to build emotional connections with your audience can be highly valuable, companies often miss out on huge opportunities to reach new audiences and attract more visitors to their website. As an additional example, let’s say a brand spends millions every year on TV campaigns and the main goal of their ads is to build and maintain a relationship with their target audience. If this campaign doesn’t account for the searches that occur (i.e., searches for products or services shown in the ad) when potential customers see the ad, and your brand isn’t also spending resources to ensure that digital assets can be easily linked to and that the website can be found for these searches, than all that brand campaign budget spent was a lot less successful than it could’ve been. If only the brand team would’ve involved SEOs from the planning stage. Resource challenges for SMBs pursuing SEO In smaller businesses, budget and people are often the scarce resource. In this setting, budgets for digital marketing—especially for organic traffic—may be highly scrutinized or non-existent. As a result, SEOs may need to wear multiple hats, including IT, development, design, and content, to plan and implement initiatives. While having direct access to owners or directors can be beneficial when it comes to sounding the alarm to get things prioritized or implemented, workload can quickly add up and budgets can remain limited even if the list of things to optimize continues to grow. Whether you’re working with a large or small business, managing resources is critical for SEO success. By understanding the limitations and advantages of each resource, you can build a strategy that will effectively allocate them for the best results. Resource questions to ask your stakeholders Like I mentioned above, the resources you're managing here are money, people, and time. Below are three general questions that address each of those resources. You can use them as a jumping-off point with your clients/stakeholders to learn more about the resources available for SEO: How much budget is available and who controls it? While this question might sound obvious, most people often shy away from it or leave for later discussions, which stops you from developing a strong strategy. Get to the point to understand what you are working with: Clients sometimes like to avoid this topic too, as if disclosing this information will somehow hurt them, so make sure to establish credibility and provide enough context for this question. When talking about budget, it is important to understand whether you’re talking about already assigned budgets or if you still need to build a business case to get approval from the board. Also, make sure to understand the process around getting signatures approved. Is the SEO team in full control of the budget or does a CMO, CTO, or procurement need to be involved in order to kick things off? Understanding these steps will help with your planning and allow you to set more realistic timelines and goals. What teams will likely get involved with the SEO campaign? This is a very broad question, but depending on the client, it may be a good idea to start understanding internal relationships from day one. How do the teams currently work together and what is the process for introducing new projects and getting stakeholders involved? Perhaps your SEO strategy is heavily reliant on content and outreach, for example, in that case, you will want to establish a good relationship with the content, social media, brand, and PR teams. Understanding internal dynamics, team hierarchy, and politics will help prepare you to deal with challenges along the way and to plan how and when to engage with the right teams. What are the short- and long-term objectives of the business? That’s right, you should ask about the objectives of the business, rather than SEO objectives. That’s because at the end of the day, your main decision makers will look at how much your strategy contributed to the overall goals of the company. At this stage, it can be helpful to use some sort of maturity analysis that will help you contextualize both the current state and the future goals of the business. It will also give you an opportunity to ask follow up questions about other projects the business might be working on to achieve those goals. This will give you a good idea of their timelines, roadmap, and efforts allocated towards certain goals, which will be very helpful to to contextualize your implementation plan. Planning to implement your SEO strategy Implementing an SEO strategy can be a complex process: it usually starts with an audit, setting goals, creating a strategy, and developing a list of actions and prioritizing them based on impact, confidence, and effort (ICE) to create a roadmap. However, challenges are very likely to arise during this phase. That’s why it’s crucial to prepare a strategy with the below considerations in mind, no matter the size or type of business you’re working with. To assess the implementation phase, it helps if you understand three areas: Resource — This refers to the availability of money, people, and time (as discussed earlier). Dependencies — These can be internal or external and refer to obstacles that may hinder your roadmap. Blockers — These are high-risk dependencies that may prevent implementation altogether. You can imagine implementation like a game of Tetris: The pieces are our resources, they come in all shapes and we have to arrange them to fill up one line at a time (kind of like how we must account for dependencies). We have to navigate our resources and tasks accordingly. If we fail to do so or don’t pay attention, we end up with gaps, which prevent us from playing more as they build up. These gaps are the blockers in our strategy. Understanding and addressing SEO dependencies Since I’ve already explained resources in the section above, let’s dive into how dependencies can affect implementation. For example, the task of changing on-page SEO elements might be dependent on the development team first creating a new template that will allow the SEO and the content team to edit these elements, which can take time. This means that you would need to build more time into your roadmap and make sure that the new template gets prioritized. Now, you might say, “This isn’t part of the strategy, this is just part of having successful implementation.” Unfortunately, everything is part of the strategy, because without implementing changes, your strategy won’t be successful. And (to continue with our example) if you know that changing on-page elements will take a serious amount of effort, that already tells you a lot of information about the business you are working with—like how little ownership the SEO team currently has over the website, which will likely impact other parts of your strategy. So even without having a full roadmap planned, it is important to have a conversation with the business about potential implementation plans in order to understand their situation. Failing to plan for and around dependencies can result in wasted resources, little to no impact, and potentially even losing that business as a client. Adapting to blockers Finally, be aware of blockers. They may occur due to budget constraints, competing priorities, internal politics, or other factors that prevent the necessary resources from getting allocated to the project. To continue with our example above about being dependent on the development team creating a new template, this could easily become a blocker if it is not even on the product team’s roadmap to have templates created. It’s important to be realistic about potential blockers and plan accordingly. In some cases, it may be necessary to adjust the project scope or timeline to accommodate these. Keep in mind that blockers don’t mean that you have to give up on certain initiatives or objectives. However, they do mean that you might need a different approach. The sooner you can identify potential blockers and come up with a plan to address them, the faster you’ll be able to overcome them. It’s best to involve the relevant stakeholders early on in order to address any potential concerns and objections. This way, you can spare yourself from unpleasant surprises that can delay your roadmap. Implementation questions to ask your client All the resources and potential ROI would not mean a thing for an SEO strategy that can’t get implemented. Save yourself and your client time by asking them upfront: What is the process for prioritization and who makes the final decisions? Who owns and allocates the roadmap and the responsibilities? How does implementation take place for the teams involved? Are there sprints, content publishing calendars, etc. that you need to align to? Understanding the implementation process and its challenges will help you create a strategy that can actually get executed, which is one of the most crucial steps in order to be able to talk about the third part, which is impact. Assessing the potential impact of your SEO strategy The whole point of creating an SEO strategy is to make a positive business impact. However, due to the nature of SEO, accurately forecasting the impact of your strategy can be a challenge. Thankfully, members of the SEO community have shared a number of free resources to forecast, measure, and report on impact. Before you start taking advantage of any given resource, remember that using these tools inappropriately can cause more harm than benefit: The creators of these resources emphasize the importance of assessing the SEO impact on a business based on its unique characteristics rather than thoughtlessly following tools, industry benchmarks, or case studies. When assessing the potential impact of an SEO strategy for your client or stakeholder, consider the following factors: How popular is the brand/business? First of all, even without looking at things like domain authority, just Google the brand name and check its Google Trends to answer the following questions: - Does Google know this brand and consider it as the main entity for its name (i.e., does the brand have a knowledge panel)? - Does the brand have its own topic or is it a search team within Google Trends? - Is the popularity of the brand/search term growing or declining? It goes without saying that brands that are already well known and trusted by Google could achieve SEO results by sometimes merely optimizing on-page elements or fixing technical issues. But, that doesn’t mean that the impact will be just as fast when they publish new content or focus on link building. Especially if they are facing crawl budget challenges, and are already well established and have highly authoritative links. What is the size of the site and how frequently is content refreshed? The size of the site is a crucial consideration when it comes to technical SEO. For large sites, everything you plan has to scale and that means the number of issues can easily escalate as well. Content refreshes are similar: the higher the frequency, the more effort you need to spend on scaling your auditing process, otherwise you might end up chasing your own tail fixing issues. Consider this: If you are working with a local cafe branch that has a five-page website and ten locations within the country, you probably won’t need to worry about technical SEO. As long as the site isn’t blocked from Google (neither for crawling or indexing), your resources are probably better spent focusing on local SEO. Or, as another example, if you are working with an online marketplace that has no physical location, but has millions of pages with thousands of URLs that need to be refreshed (and more added daily), then your first instinct might be to look around into their technical SEO and crawl budget, and on-page optimization to support. But, what if this marketplace is still fairly new and not so well known? While technical SEO is still important, you might want to consider digital PR and link building to help promote the website. Clearly, the site’s size and maintenance requirements will have a large influence over your SEO strategy’s ability to move the needle for your business. Who are your competitors? SEO doesn’t happen in a vacuum—your competition will greatly impact your results. Lidia Infante has an incredible resource on how to identify and better understand your SEO competitors, and it is certainly something that should be considered before you put together a strategy. Whether you are a huge brand or a small local business, as long as you live in a capitalist society, competition will always be there. Because competitors vary based on how your business operates, it’s necessary to identify who, exactly, you’re competing with. Perhaps you are trying to help a business with physical locations improve its local presence online. In that case, local competitors come from the map pack. So, even if the franchise cafe you’re working for (in this example) aspires to have a similar look and feel as some other trendy well known coffee shop brand, it could easily be the case that your real competitors are local, family-owned cafes that are just around the corner from your franchise. That’s not to say that you should ignore what your future potential competitors are doing, it’s simply worth keeping in mind that different areas of SEO will require you to look at different competitors. Who is the target audience? At the end of the day, even if you report on numbers, you need to remember that those numbers represent a group of people—an audience, customers, clients. And they think, they feel—and most importantly for us right now—they search, click, and convert. This conversion will create our impact. Let’s take a private healthcare provider as an example. In the UK, people are entitled to free healthcare, which means that the most authoritative website in any topic about specific conditions will likely be the NHS (National Health Service). So, the target audience (people who would buy private healthcare in the UK) will likely either be thinking about the benefits of getting private healthcare over free healthcare or they have a condition that they cannot or don’t want to get treated by the NHS. Understanding this is going to be crucial when thinking about strategy, because it will heavily influence content, site structure, and other parts of SEO. Let’s say you are looking at building out content for this client and restructuring their website. Do you want to focus your content and authority on conditions or symptoms? Or perhaps you want to focus more on departments and medical professionals? Will you prioritize local SEO for private hospitals? Do your research and understand how the audience is thinking. Ask your client for information about the customer journey. What happens when someone contacts them, what’s the process like? Are customers usually well informed of their conditions before they get in touch? Now, what if this same private healthcare company also operates in the US and perhaps other parts of the world where there isn’t free healthcare to start with or there are other systems in place? One of the most crucial parts of getting international SEO right is to understand the cultural differences and how they impact user behavior. “The salespeople in your business work directly with customers everyday. They are all too familiar with competing brands and the content gaps that dissuade potential clients. Their proximity to users with transactional intent means that their insights can be particularly useful for discovering unique, high-conversion content.” — Crystal Carter, head of SEO branding at Wix The benefit of prioritizing your audience is that it helps you stay focused on the end goal and what users actually need from your business. There might be high search volume keywords and topics that are tempting to go after, but if you overlook your primary audience’s needs you can easily steer your strategy in the wrong direction. That not only means that it might be harder to rank for those topics, but even if you do, you might miss your target audience and won’t be able to generate conversions. Avoid the SEO experience trap by asking questions and communicating clearly Stay curious and keep asking questions. Even just based on the few examples above, you can see how many different questions, scenarios, and approaches could arise. This is why it is so important to have open conversations with stakeholders and to focus on improving your soft skills, especially when it comes to critical thinking, listening, understanding, and communicating clearly. Remember to always address the three areas within your discussions (resources, implementation, and potential impact) with stakeholders. By having honest conversations, you can gain more control over your strategy and avoid the experience trap. It will also help you establish effective communication with your clients and stakeholders, enabling you to better deal with unexpected scenarios. Petra Kis-Herczegh - SEO Consultant Petra is an SEO consultant with a background of working in-house for B2C & B2B brands, TUI, Jack Wills, as well as enterprise software brands, Yext, and Botify. She is also an international conference speaker. Twitter | Linkedin