Search Results

Author: James Clark Discovery is the very first step in SEO—if a search engine can’t discover your content, it will never crawl and index it, which means searchers won’t be able to access it. An XML sitemap is an optional, but powerful, tool to support the discovery process (and by extension, your technical SEO efforts). But, what should your sitemap contain? How do you create it? And how do you tell search engines about it? Let’s go on a discovery process of our own—drawing from the official sitemaps protocol and Google’s documentation—to understand how to use sitemaps for better SEO. Table of contents: What is an XML sitemap? How XML sitemaps help your SEO Types of sitemap What an XML sitemap should (and shouldn’t) contain Static and dynamic sitemaps Size limits for XML sitemaps and sitemap indexes How to generate an XML sitemap Sitemaps on Wix Generate sitemaps with Screaming Frog Submitting your XML sitemap to Google and Bing Validating your XML sitemap HTML vs. XML sitemaps What is an XML sitemap? Before Google and other search engines can crawl and index your pages, they must first discover them. A sitemap is a document that facilitates the discovery process by telling search engines about the pages on a website that are available to crawl. Although sitemaps can come in different formats, the most common is XML (extensible markup language)—a language that uses tags to “mark up” and structure information (a bit like HTML). One of the benefits of XML is that both people and computer programs can easily read it. XML sitemaps follow the sitemaps protocol, which Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all support. This protocol defines what a sitemap can contain, how to format it, and even how to submit it to search engines. How XML sitemaps help your SEO The main way a search engine discovers web pages on a site is by following backlinks. These could be links from your own site (internal links), or links on another site (external links). Some pages can be difficult for search engines to find. An “orphan page” is one that doesn’t have any inbound links pointing to it, meaning that search engines will never discover it by following links. Your website can even have small groups of orphan pages that only link to each other. Another challenge that search engines face is knowing when pages were updated. Although search engines will periodically revisit crawled pages to see whether the content has changed, this isn’t particularly efficient either for search engines or website owners. Sitemaps solve both of those SEO problems: They tell search engines about pages that are available to crawl, even orphan pages. And, they can also tell search engines when a page was last significantly changed, making crawling more efficient. That isn’t to say that a sitemap can replace an effective internal linking policy. Remember, links don’t just help discovery, they also tell search engines about the relationship between pages—something that sitemaps can’t do. Types of sitemap You might think that “sitemap” and “XML sitemap” are synonymous, but the sitemaps protocol defines three valid sitemap formats: XML Text file Syndication feed Google and other major search engines can work with any of these formats. In most cases, you’ll want an XML sitemap—but if your platform or CMS doesn’t provide you with this, consider the other two formats: A text sitemap is a text file (with a .txt extension) that lists all your page URLs, one per line. It can’t contain any other information.  Text sitemaps are simple to create, so this is a good option if you have a very small site and rarely add new pages—though in that situation, you may not need a sitemap at all. A syndication feed is a way of distributing content, especially news content. Although feeds are less popular than they used to be, many platforms still provide them in either the RSS or Atom format. News sites often create feeds for individual categories (or “channels”)—here’s the start of The Guardian’s RSS feed for its culture category: One big drawback of using a feed as a sitemap is that it usually only contains the most recent content. Nonetheless, it can still help search engines discover that content (and, through internal links, other content on your site). The rest of this article focuses on XML sitemaps as these are the most common, and versatile, type of sitemap. What an XML sitemap should (and shouldn’t) contain Your sitemap should contain the URLs of all the pages you want search engines to crawl (and subsequently show in search results). Each page has its own pair of opening and closing tags, containing a element that specifies the page’s location—like this: https://example.com/myurl1/ https://example.com/myurl2/ There are plenty of pages you shouldn’t include in your sitemap, for example: Pages that aren’t the canonical version of the content Pages that are blocked by robots.txt Pages set as noindex In other words, pages you wouldn’t want Google to attempt to crawl and index. The element is mandatory, but there are other optional elements you can include with each URL to add more guidance for crawlers: : The date the page was last significantly modified : How frequently the page is likely to change (e.g., “monthly”) : “The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site”—the higher the value (from 0.0 to 1.0), the more important you want crawlers to perceive the page as Google says it ignores and values, while Bing says it “largely disregards” them. The tag, then, is the most useful way of indicating to search engines that a previously discovered page needs to be recrawled. Sitemap extensions The sitemap protocol only specifies how to include URLs in a sitemap. However, one of the most powerful features of the protocol is that you can use it to include other types of content (the “X” in “XML” stands for “eXtensible”). There are Google-supported extensions for the following content types: Images News Video You can create separate sitemaps for these content types or include them in your existing sitemap. The extensions introduce many new mandatory and optional elements. For example, video content requires the tag pointing to the location of the video thumbnail. Static and dynamic sitemaps Dynamic sitemaps are generated each time they are requested from the server, so they will always be up to date. In other words, if you create a new page on your website, then load your dynamic XML sitemap in a browser tab, it should list your new page. Likewise, if you change an existing page, the sitemap should update the value for that page. (If your sitemap is supposed to be dynamic but isn’t updating, you might have a caching issue.) Static sitemaps, on the other hand, aren’t generated on the fly and don’t automatically update. As the name suggests, they are just static files. In almost all cases, a dynamic sitemap is a better option. After all, if one of the main roles of a sitemap is to tell search engines about new content, you want your sitemap to include that content as soon as it is published. Size limits for XML sitemaps and sitemap indexes The sitemaps protocol specifies size limits for XML sitemaps “to ensure that your web server does not get bogged down serving very large files” (but also to make the process more efficient for search engines). Your XML sitemap should: Be no larger than 50MB (52,428,800 bytes) Contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs The size limit refers to the size of the uncompressed file, so compressing the file won’t help you get around this requirement. Instead you should follow the advice given in the protocol: “If your site contains more than 50,000 URLs or your Sitemap is bigger than 50MB, you must create multiple Sitemap files and use a Sitemap index file. You should use a Sitemap index file even if you have a small site but plan on growing beyond 50,000 URLs or a file size of 50MB.” A sitemap index is an XML file that lists multiple XML sitemaps. You might have one sitemap for your posts, one for your pages, and another for your categories—all listed in your index. Sitemap index files have size limits, too. Similar to individual sitemaps, they should: Not exceed 50MB (52,428,800 bytes) Include up to 50,000 sitemaps The sitemaps protocol also has restrictions around content. Some characters must be “escaped”—an ampersand (“&”) is written as “&”, for example. If you’re using your web platform or CMS to generate your sitemap, it will likely follow the protocol, so you only need to worry about these restrictions if you’re creating your sitemap manually (which is rare). How to generate an XML sitemap How you generate your XML sitemap will depend on the CMS or platform you use for your website. Let’s look at how this works for Wix websites as well as how to do this with Screaming Frog, a popular SEO tool. Sitemaps on Wix Wix websites come with sitemaps automatically. I say “sitemaps” because the platform provides different sitemaps for different types of pages. The sitemap index lives at https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, but this could link to sitemaps for events, forum posts, or more, depending on the functionality your site uses. For example, this London barbershop has a sitemap specifically for the products it sells on its Wix website: Also, when you complete your Wix SEO Setup Checklist, Wix automatically submits your XML sitemap to Google for you. You’ll need a Premium plan and your own domain to take advantage of this. Generate sitemaps with Screaming Frog Maybe your platform or CMS doesn’t generate an XML sitemap for you. Maybe you aren’t even using a platform or CMS and instead hand-coded your site from scratch! In these situations, you’ll have to get a little creative. If your site is small, you could use the text sitemap format we looked at earlier, create the file manually, and host it on your server. But, this isn’t very practical if you have more than a couple dozen pages. Instead, you could use an SEO tool called Screaming Frog to crawl your site and create an XML sitemap for you. This is a powerful option as it will automatically exclude pages that are blocked by robots.txt, set as “noindex,” or have a canonical tag pointing to a different URL—in other words, all the pages you ordinarily wouldn’t want Google to attempt to crawl and index. The free version of Screaming Frog will crawl up to 500 URLs, so if your site is bigger than this then you’ll need to pay for a license. Just as with a text sitemap, the next step is to host your new XML sitemap on your server (preferably in the root directory) then submit it to Google. If your site changes often, you could even look at scheduling an automated crawl. One downside of the Screaming Frog approach is that it gives you a static sitemap. If you create a new page or update an existing one, the sitemap won’t automatically change to reflect that. Submitting your XML sitemap to Google (and Bing) Once you’ve generated your sitemap, the next step is to inform the major search engines so they can use it. There are two ways to do this. The first is to specify the path to your sitemap or sitemap index in your robots.txt file, like this example from the Manchester United website: This small change will enable Google and other search engines to find your sitemap the next time they crawl your robots.txt file. The downside here is that you don’t get any feedback: you won’t know when those search engines last read your sitemap, how many pages they discovered, and so on. For that, you’ll need special tools provided by the search engines themselves. These tools let you both submit your sitemap and see how it is being read: For Google, the tool to use is Google Search Console. Our complete guide to Google Search Console walks you through the process of first verifying your site in Search Console and then submitting your sitemap (or sitemap index). If you manage a number of sites and want to submit your sitemaps to Google programmatically, use the Search Console API. Bing has its own equivalent of Search Console, called Bing Webmaster Tools, and the submission process here is also straightforward. You don’t have to choose one approach or the other. It’s definitely worth both specifying the path to your sitemap in your robots.txt file and submitting your sitemap to search engines individually. Validating your XML sitemap It may seem strange to talk about validating your XML sitemap after submitting it, but that’s because submitting your sitemap is actually the best way to validate it. When you submit your sitemap to Google using Search Console (or Bing using Bing Webmaster Tools), the tool will tell you whether your sitemap is valid. In Search Console, you get a green “success” message if everything is OK: But if you get a red message instead, something has gone wrong. Just click on the error to find out more: Once you’ve fixed any errors, resubmit it to prompt Google to fetch it again. There are also free third-party tools you can use to validate your XML sitemap, either by pasting in a link or uploading an XML file. However, even if your XML is valid, there might be another reason why Google can’t fetch your sitemap: Perhaps your robots.txt file is blocking Googlebot from accessing it. Unlike Google Search Console, a third-party validation tool wouldn’t pick up on this kind of issue. HTML vs. XML sitemaps We’ve seen that XML sitemaps are intended for search engines, but there’s another type of sitemap aimed at human users: the HTML sitemap. This is a directory of the main pages or sections on a site, and can help users quickly understand the site’s structure and navigate around. Your HTML sitemap may sit on a dedicated page, or perhaps in the footer—as with this example from Apple: So called “mega menus” in the site header are, in effect, another kind of HTML sitemap: HTML sitemaps do serve an SEO purpose, too: They are a collection of internal links, which Googlebot will happily use to discover new pages and understand the value of those pages. So in that sense they complement the work of your XML sitemaps. That doesn’t mean you should use just an HTML sitemap. Thinking specifically about search engine discovery, they have some major drawbacks compared to XML sitemaps: HTML sitemaps are limited by space on the page, so don’t usually include individual articles, blog posts, or product pages (likely to be the bulk of your new content). HTML sitemaps don’t tell search engines when content was updated. HTML sitemaps usually need to be updated manually, so they may not be completely up to date. For those reasons, you should focus on providing an XML sitemap that is useful to search engines and an HTML sitemap that is useful to your users. If an HTML sitemap wouldn’t be useful to your users, simply don’t include one. Take control over your discoverability with XML sitemaps Now, you have an in-depth understanding of sitemaps. Put your knowledge into practice by working through the following questions: Does my website have an XML sitemap? Does it list (only) the pages I want to be crawled? Does it contain all the detail I want it to (e.g., the time)? Is it valid XML and within the size limit? Does my sitemap update automatically (or do I have a way of updating it)? Have I submitted it to Google and Bing? Have I specified the path to my sitemap in my robots.txt file? Would my users benefit from an HTML sitemap? The exercise will help you come up with a plan for your site, revealing any actions you need to take to improve your sitemap coverage and boost page discoverability. And, if you’re in doubt about anything, refer to the sitemaps protocol and Google’s documentation! James Clark - Web Analyst James Clark is a web analyst from London, with a background in the publishing sector. When he isn't helping businesses with their analytics, he's usually writing how-to guides over on his website Technically Product. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Debbie Chew Building backlinks for your SaaS business the same way you would for an online store or a local business is a mistake—one that could end up costing you time and giving you little ROI in return. From buying cycles to stakeholders to the types of content those stakeholders look at, your link building must cater specifically to the demands of your SaaS company if you want to increase your exposure, rankings, or traffic. For the past few years, I’ve focused specifically on SaaS link building at Dialpad, working with dozens of clients and enabling me to conduct a study of SaaS link building tactics, which I presented at SearchLove 2023. You’ll find some of those tactics in this article, along with a framework that specifically focuses on what SaaS companies should know about link building. Table of contents: The benefits of link building for SaaS businesses How to get started with SaaS link building Identify pages that need links Conduct a competitor audit Create linkable assets How to secure links for your SaaS business Via other SaaS companies Via relationships with journalists and writers The benefits of link building for SaaS businesses Despite any link building myths you may have heard, backlinks play several crucial roles in SEO. They help search engines find and understand your content, as well as evaluate your relation to other websites. I’ve previously written about why link building is important, and now I want to highlight three key benefits in this section: E-E-A-T Better rankings More leads and revenue E-E-A-T Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) is one way that Google measures web page credibility. Google relies on E-E-A-T (amongst other signals) to determine which pages to rank. Links and mentions of your site contribute to E-E-A-T, which can lead to better rankings for your SaaS business. “Google’s algorithms identify signals about pages that correlate with trustworthiness and authoritativeness. The best known of these signals is PageRank, which uses links on the web to understand authoritativeness.” — Google, How Google Fights Disinformation Better rankings If we were to simplify what the SEO process typically looks like for a SaaS company, there are four key steps: Research keywords to identify what your audience searches for. Create content for those keywords. Optimize the content to rank. Drive signups and revenue, and repeat. Link building helps contribute to the third step—optimizing your content to rank. Especially in competitive and saturated niches, quality content and a fast-loading site alone may not be enough to rank well, so having quality links to your page can act as a tiebreaker. Leads and revenue Let’s say, for example, you’re an SEO at a project management SaaS business. A backlink from a listicle about the “Top 10 Kanban Software” not only increases your visibility to potential leads, but it also makes it easy for them to navigate directly to your site to sign up (and possibly become a paying customer that drives revenue). This referral traffic is extremely valuable for SaaS companies. It’s one of those links that you want to have even if links did not matter to search engines. Going back to search engines, this backlink (and its referring article about the top kanban software) can also help Google understand your company as an entity. In semantic SEO, entities are real-world concepts like people, places, and organizations. Google relies on various sources (including your relationship with other entities) and what others have said about you to understand your SaaS company. How to get started with SaaS link building In this section, I’ll cover what you should do before you start building links to your site (outreach and securing links to your SaaS business are covered in the next section). By now, your site should already have foundational pages (like a homepage, pricing page, and a product page). Unlike local SEO link building, which focuses more heavily on citations and links to the homepage, SaaS link building primarily focuses on SEO pages—pages that target specific keywords your potential customers are searching for. Identifying these keywords requires a bit of research and an understanding of your audience. You can also ask yourself (or your wider team) questions like, “What are decision-makers searching for?” and “What are pain points that our product helps solve?” After identifying these keywords, you can turn them into feature pages and blog posts that cover the entire customer journey. Using the example from earlier (for a project management SaaS), your site should have feature pages that target keywords related to how your product can be used, like [gantt chart] and [todo list]. To address customers higher up in your marketing funnel, you should also publish high-level blog posts that inform or educate your audience on more general topics, like [how to manage tasks] and [what is scrum]. Identify pages that need links After giving your SEO pages some time to rank, you’ll need to review their search rankings to see how they perform. Let’s say, for example, you created a page to rank for the keyword [gantt chart templates] but you’re not ranking on page one. Assuming you created better content than your competitors, building links to your page can help it eclipse the competition. As you can see in the screenshot below, the top five pages have a handful of domains that link to those pages. However, understand that this does not mean you need at least 90 links from different domains to rank, as the quality of those links may vary (from highly authoritative to nearly worthless). This also doesn’t guarantee that you will outrank competitors if you get that many links. What this does indicate is that Google prefers recommending content that has “proven itself” to be helpful, and those backlinks are an indication of that. Now, you might end up with a long list of pages that aren’t ranking as well as you hoped—this is normal. So, how do you prioritize? There are a few things you can consider: Pages that have high conversion rates Pages that target keywords with high cost-per-click (CPC) Pages that target keywords with lower keyword difficulty You should prioritize the metrics that align best with your business or campaign’s goals (e.g., if your primary goal is traffic, then you can prioritize pages based on keyword difficulty). I’ll explain how to actually get links to these pages in the section about how to secure links for your SaaS business. Conduct a competitor audit When auditing a competitor’s links, many guides recommend a link gap analysis to help you identify sites that link to your competitors (but not to your website). This data is often difficult to act on since there may be a large gap between you and your competitors, especially if they have strong brands and/or have been link building for much longer. Other link building guides may also tell you to find your competitors’ links and try to replace them, also known as the “skyscraper technique.” Generally, this tactic doesn’t work so well in practice—particularly when your competitor’s brand is more widely known than yours. Instead, understand what actually gets links in your niche, why, and then start ideating from there. To do this, find your competitor’s top pages by links (while skipping over any foundational pages, like the homepage and pricing page). If you’re an Ahrefs user, you can use the Site Explorer’s “Best by links” report to find this information (although similar functionality is available on many SEO tools). In the example below, I’ve used this report to explore Asana’s backlink profile: This analysis can help you understand: What types of pages get links: Are they feature pages? Glossary pages? How-to guides? Infer how your competitors earned the link: Was it a guest post? Did they contribute a quote? Did they conduct a study? Was their page much more helpful than others? Which domains linked to them: Can you outreach to these domains? Are there similar businesses you can also reach out to? I highly recommend analyzing at least three to five competitors, but the more the better as this helps you get a less biased view of how your niche builds links and the pages that they go to. These insights help inform the types of pages to create and topics that you may want to cover for your own SaaS website to earn backlinks. Create linkable assets Your competitor audit (from the previous section) should help you understand what page or content types tend to get links in your niche. These are the linkable assets for your specific industry. Put simply, linkable assets are pages on your site that others can’t help but want to link to. They may be extremely helpful, unique, informative, authoritative, or all of the above. Aside from link building to your existing SEO pages, creating linkable assets can help attract links with little to no outreach. In a backlink tactics study I conducted in early 2023, I looked at the top five pages (according to backlinks) for 23 companies in six industries. Of these companies, 19 of them are SaaS businesses and you can access the raw data to see which companies were included. The most popular page or content type that received the most links were product/feature pages, guides, glossary pages, and research reports. An honorable mention goes to statistics roundups, such as [project management stats]. This is another type of linkable asset that tends to work well no matter what industry your SaaS business is in. How to secure links for your SaaS business To build links to your SaaS tool, there are many tactics you can try with varying success rates, difficulties, resource requirements, impacts, and ultimately, ROI. For example, you could sponsor a conference and get a link that way, but those types of links should have a “sponsored” attribute. Also, those links tend to go to your homepage instead of your SEO pages, which may not have much impact on how you rank for non-branded keywords (though it may bring in valuable referral traffic). Link building for SaaS tends to center around two major concepts: Creating linkable assets Building relationships Becoming proficient in these two areas is how you succeed in link building for your SaaS business. Since I’ve already covered linkable assets that can help you get backlinks naturally, I’ll go into more detail about building relationships. This can be split into two target groups: other SaaS companies and journalists/writers. Building relationships with other SaaS companies Before going further, I want to emphasize that building relationships isn’t so much striking a deal that’s “if you link to me, I’ll link to you”—Google calls this behavior “excessive link exchanges” in its link spam policies. Instead, you should approach relationships with other SaaS companies with the same care as you would if you were building co-marketing relationships (think demand generation partnerships with other companies with a similar audience). Essentially, you should not knock on every single door (or accept everyone that comes knocking on your door), but rather filter opportunities that actually make sense for the SaaS brand that you represent and its audience. Start a list of relevant companies Some companies/industries will naturally complement your own. Compiling a list of these industries and companies to research will help increase the odds that the relationship works out for both parties. For a task management SaaS provider, for example, there are a number of other SaaS companies that share a similar audience or provide tools that are also used in project management. For instance, time tracking tools or collaboration tools would be ideal relationships to build and cross-promote. On the other hand, certain niches like telemedicine (e.g., Teledoc) or point of sales systems for restaurants (e.g., Toast) wouldn’t be the most beneficial (or relevant) partners to have. Once you have a list of potential companies, take a look at their websites. You can use an SEO tool to see what their top organic pages are, or do a site search to see if they have published content related to your industry. Then, you’ll need to identify the point of contact to reach out to. This could be the company’s content manager, SEO manager, or someone similar. You can use LinkedIn or an email finder tool to find their contact information. The next step after that is to work on your email outreach. Define your request Before you compose your outreach email, you first need to decide on your request. There are typically two types of outreach requests: a link insert or a guest post. A link insert, also known as a “niche edit,” is when a link is added to an existing web page—typically, these should be informational pages like blog posts or guides. Let’s say you notice that the time tracking tool that you want to collaborate with has a blog post titled “Guide to workplace tools,” which covers the use of task management tools. Your email should explicitly highlight this request. The other type of request is a guest post, which is when you write a blog post for another website and link back to your own site (guest posts should never be spammy in nature, otherwise the backlink is unlikely to improve your SEO). Instead, I’d recommend guest posts as a way to share your company’s expertise with a new audience. Therefore, your end goal should be sharing knowledge that another company’s audience would find helpful—rather than writing a mediocre piece of content in order to get a link to your site. Email outreach tips Since email outreach is complex and can be its own standalone guide, I’ve outlined some key points to remember when writing emails for link building: The best cold outreach is warm. As a SaaS product, you may have existing relations with other companies (such as ones that integrate with your app). Cross-promotion with these companies is often the easiest to secure. Avoid using templates and email blasts. Oftentimes, people (especially SEOs) are tired of getting the same emails in their inbox. If you want to build a relationship with another company, personalized outreach is a way to show you value the opportunity to collaborate with their company. Add value. Most link building outreach emails sound something like this: “I saw your blog about X. Can you link to my blog about Y?” This kind of outreach lacks motivation for someone to act on your request. Being able to provide value to the email recipient can help cultivate a win-win relationship. It can be in the form of promoting their blog post in your newsletter, including a quote from their team in a future blog post, and more—just be sure not to offer cash as that violates Google’s guidelines. Personalize and follow-up, but don’t overdo it. Personalization ties back to my earlier point about not using email templates, but you should be careful to avoid coming off as creepy (e.g., “You recently posted about how your brother likes sushi and I like sushi too!”). Also, following up once or twice is acceptable, but constantly following up increases the risk of getting your emails marked as spam (which can hurt deliverability) or an angry response from the recipient. Building relationships with journalists and writers Another group of people that you can build relationships with—and not just to get a link from—are journalists and writers. Journalists and writers often look for experts to quote for a story that they’re covering or a topic that they don’t have expertise in. Journalists are also on the lookout for stories that may interest their readers, and this is where digital PR comes into play. “As an editor at Search Engine Land, professionals from Microsoft, Google, Yelp, etc. would reach out to me with news from their companies to see if I wanted to write a story about it. I would also reach out to them for quotes about industry developments. These partnerships were mutually beneficial and were far more effective because we had relationships, instead of simply acting transactionally.” — George Nguyen, Director of SEO Editorial at Wix, former Editor at Search Engine Land Use HARO, Help a B2B Writer, or similar services HARO, which stands for “Help a Reporter Out,” is a free service that connects journalists to sources. The journalists that use this platform tend to be quite broad, from entertainment to health to technology and beyond, so you’ll need a system to help you filter out irrelevant requests. You can refer to the HARO link building guide for a step-by-step overview of how to do just that. Another similar platform is called Featured (previously Terkel) that requires a subscription if you want to answer queries on their platform. If you’re in B2B SaaS, be sure to subscribe to Help a B2B Writer. And if you’re SaaS company based in the UK, you can monitor the #journorequest tag on X (formerly Twitter) to see if there are any relevant opportunities. When you find a source request that you can respond to, be sure to craft your response according to the requirements and deadline (when applicable). You should avoid using AI content creation tools because those submitting the request are looking for expertise and opinions about a certain topic, not an AI-generated answer. With this link building tactic, there are some disadvantages you should be aware of: You may not always get a backlink If you get a backlink, it may be to your homepage It may take a while for the quote (and your link, if applicable) to get published With that said, the advantages of these types of platforms are that they’re a less resource-intensive way to get links. Also, this is a great way to build up a network of journalists that you can potentially reach out to for future PR campaigns. Run digital PR campaigns Digital PR is about getting online publications to mention or talk about you. Digital PR campaigns aim to create interesting stories about your SaaS company that relate to topics that journalists want to write about. Oftentimes, they tend to be reactive or latch onto trending topics. One common example of a digital PR campaign is identifying a recent (or upcoming) event and pulling relevant data (such as a statistic) that journalists can then use to contextualize what’s going on. For example, AAA (American Automobile Association) publishes an annual study to predict the busiest days to drive during the Thanksgiving holiday. It releases the study ahead of Thanksgiving and shares it with journalists so that if they’re writing a news article about Thanksgiving travel, it would be very relevant to mention AAA’s findings. As for a campaign that utilizes a trending topic, here’s one that HubSpot published shortly after the adoption of ChatGPT in early 2023. The company conducted a survey to understand how sales professionals use AI and created a report based on the findings. This report has links from publications like Business Insider and Yahoo! News. Now onto the pros and cons: Digital PR campaigns are one of your best bets to get backlinks from very authoritative publications—think The Verge or Wired, for example. They’re also some of the hardest links to get, but the advantage is that they have a very wide reach, which can lead to a lot of positive brand exposure and referral traffic. Also, when top-tier publications talk about you, it’s almost guaranteed that mid-tier publications will also do the same. Therefore, it’s a way to potentially get a lot of backlinks and visibility. On the other hand, digital PR campaigns tend to cost a pretty penny. They’re one of the most resource-intensive link building tactics. And with any tactic, results are not guaranteed, so you’d be taking on risk. Like HARO, another disadvantage to consider is that journalists are not required to link to you (it may even be against their publication’s guidelines). And if they do, you’re either getting links to your homepage or whatever page the campaign is focused around. Measure and optimize your link building efforts for continued success Once you begin link building for SaaS, it’s important to also keep a record of your activities. You might find that certain linkable assets work better than others, which will inform your future strategy. Similarly, you might find more success building relationships with other SaaS companies rather than doing the same with journalists. I’ve previously covered how to measure your link building efforts, including the different metrics that will help you understand the impact that link building has and what areas you can improve on. Remember that if you’re in a competitive niche, link building (amongst other areas of SEO) is an important lever to stay competitive and improve your organic visibility. Good luck out there, and may the odds be ever in your favor! Debbie Chew - Global SEO Manager Debbie Chew is an SEO Manager at Dialpad with over 8 years of experience in digital marketing. She specializes in content and link building, and is passionate about sharing her learnings with other marketers. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Maddy Osman If you’re in a new town and looking for a cafe to visit, you might head to Google for a “coffee shops near me” search. The results that pop up directing you to your next latte are Google Business Profiles, which function both as online listings and marketing tools for your business. Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is like a snapshot of your business, providing searchers all the essential information they need, such as location, phone number, hours of operation, reviews and more. GBP is growing in importance, especially for SEO and local search. It can be a valuable way to help you connect with your customers and, best of all, it’s straightforward to set up. Making your business easier to find for searchers is a no-brainer. And, Wix has made it even easier to create and manage your GBP profile by partnering with the service to make it accessible from your Wix dashboard. In this post, we’ll go over some of the most important info about GBP and how you can best optimize your profile on Wix. What’s in this guide: Google Business Profile 101 Why GBP is important for your business Best practices for your GBP Managing customer reviews How to create your GBP on Wix Using GBP Insights on Wix Google Business Profile 101 Google Business Profile is a free tool on Google Search and Google Maps. It serves as a listing for your business and contains basic information about it, including: Contact info Address Business category Hours of operation Link to your site But, GBP isn’t just an online business card. Customers can view photos and reviews left by others, which can help them decide whether to visit you. For business owners, GBP can enable you to schedule bookings or showcase your products or services. Not every business will qualify for a listing. The requirement to have a GBP is in-person contact with customers through a physical location or a business that travels to customers where they are, such as a plumber or delivery service. Why GBP is important for your business It’s no secret that Google is used for almost everything. So, if a customer Googles your business specifically (or a term that is relevant to your business), your GBP can help them find the information they’re looking for. For example, if someone searches “San Antonio bakery,” they’ll have plenty of bakery GBP listings to choose from in the area, and you want yours to be one of them. What’s more, 50% of users who did a local search on their smartphone went to a store within a day, according to a Google and Ipsos study. And, GBP is the number one local ranking factor, according to Whitespark. In addition to helping you more easily connect with your customers and improve your online visibility, your GBP can potentially further your reputation and give you insight into your customer experience. You might think you don’t need a GBP profile if you rank well for relevant searches. But, if your competitor’s GBP profile pops up and yours doesn’t, it might steer people to another business before they even see your site. Best practices for your GBP Follow these tips to optimize your profile for search. Fill out your listing completely and strategically Create a comprehensive profile for your business on GBP to answer questions your customers may have and convey professionalism. Pay special attention to the category you’re listing your business in, as it can help you better connect with searchers. You’ll have more competition if you choose a generic category like “restaurant” than if you choose “Mexican restaurant,” for example. Plus, the more accurately you convey your business, the more you’ll be able to frame expectations for potential customers. Add visuals Photos may be an important factor for potential customers. Make sure your listing has a cover and profile photo. Then, consider adding other interior, product, or service images. Businesses with more than 100 images on their profile had 520% more calls, 1,065% more site visits and 2,717% more direction requests than businesses that didn’t, according to a BrightLocal study. Adding videos to your profile is another great way to stand out and give users a feel for your business. Explore GPB’s extended capabilities GBP has a host of features that could help your business, such as: Messaging Posts Bookings Pricing Menus Depending on your industry, you might be able to list your amenities or services. Look into the features that would serve your business. Making it easy for customers to book an appointment through Google could increase your conversions. Or, if you’re in the food industry, adding your menu can help you stand out from competitors in your area. You might want to turn on the messaging feature so customers can easily reach you with questions. And, use posts to let users know about relevant updates and/or promotions. Managing customer reviews Reviews are an essential part of your GBP. They can make you stand out—positively or negatively—to customers. According to Whitespark’s report, positive reviews are the second most important conversion factor. To attract reviews, you can encourage customers to share their experience through signage at your business location or on your social channels. Note that Google discourages offering promotions for reviews in order to keep them impartial. Instead, focus on providing quality products and services that drive customers to take the initiative and leave a positive review. And, make it easy for them to do so by sharing your GBP link in your receipts, thank you emails and at the end of chat interactions, for example. Another helpful tactic is to respond to reviews regularly. That way, customers build trust with your business and feel heard. In fact, businesses that respond to reviews are seen as 1.7x more trustworthy than businesses that don’t, according to Google. This also goes for negative reviews, which can be tricky, yet beneficial, to reply to. Remember that reviews live on your profile, so it’s an example potential customers will have of how your business handles unhappy customers. Stay professional, courteous, and authentic. Offer compassion and solutions where appropriate. How to create your GBP on Wix Setting up a GBP is simple and now you can do it in Wix. Here’s how: Go to the Marketing & SEO section in the left-hand menu of your Wix dashboard Select Google Business Profile Click Start Now to fill out all the information about your business If your business is already set up, you’ll go to the Verify & Manage page If it is not set up, you will create your business’s profile The next step is to verify your business to prove you own it. You can confirm ownership over the phone, by email, or postcard. Once verified, you’ll want to set your profile up for success. Using GBP Insights GBP Insights can help you figure out whether you’re meeting your SEO goals or if you need to put in more work to make your profile more attractive to search engines and users. You can access Insights by going to your Google Business Profile within the Wix dashboard. From there, you can get an overview of your profile’s performance, including: Views: How many people viewed your listing Direct searches: When someone directly searches for your business name or address Discover searches: When someone searched for a category, product, or service your site offers, and your Business Profile appeared Branded searches: When someone searched for your brand or a brand related to your business Activity: The actions users took on your listing (for example, if they called your business, visited your site, requested directions, viewed photos, etc.) This information is invaluable for understanding how people found your business. Analyzing the metrics can enable you to identify trends or patterns and adjust your strategy accordingly. Your GBP is a doorway for many customers and, with Insights, you can narrow down what’s working and what’s not. Beyond your Google Business Profile Google Business Profile is a tool that helps you stand out on Google—a crucial element for any local business. Your listing provides quick and essential information to your customers while also letting you engage with them in a variety of ways. By optimizing your listing, you set your business up for success and can connect with your customers more easily through search. 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: Jamar Ramos This post was last updated on May 18, 2023. Creating an effective, repeatable SEO and digital marketing strategy can be a challenge for small or medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Limited bandwidth and personnel, budget restraints, and even analysis paralysis can contribute to the inertia that’s holding your business back. Fortunately, many aspects of marketing your online business are about process. Once you set up your workflows, building awareness, driving clicks and leads, and winning over new customers can be quite gratifying. At that point, gradually iterating on your processes and trying out new channels and tactics can actually be fun. To get your business to that point, let’s discuss how you can build a set of repeatable digital marketing strategies as an SMB. We’ll start with setting lead-generation goals, but here’s the table of contents if you’d like to skip to the most relevant guidance for your particular situation: How to set lead generation goals SEO and organic marketing strategies for sustainable business growth Optimize your website for search engines Consider adding a blog Consider social media marketing Consider email marketing Paid marketing strategies for instant exposure and amplification Establish your monthly budget Choose your paid search or paid social channels Create paid landing pages How do you set lead generation goals? Simply put, break down organizational silos so that you’re marketing and selling to the right audience. This, in turn, helps to ensure that you’re opening up your business to the largest pool of potential leads. Just as marketers can use data from paid media campaigns to inform some of their on-page optimizations, data from one of your internal departments can inform decisions made by a different department. While this may be easier for some businesses than others, fundamentally, all you need to do is break down those silos and ensure internal departments are talking to each other and sharing critical data. Communication is particularly imperative in two departments: your marketing department and your sales department. Align sales and marketing Sales and marketing need to align on marketing strategy to ensure your business grows and scales appropriately—after all, you wouldn’t want your marketing team to target audiences that your sales team is unfamiliar with. One solution is to enable these two teams to create and implement lead generation guidelines to alleviate some handover headaches. Some of the things they need to align on include: Lead scoring — Both teams need to define what a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) is, what a sales-qualified lead (SQL) is, and even what an opportunity to get a customer into your customer journey looks like. This can help you decide where to place individual leads in your buying funnel. In addition, this can help the marketing team understand when an MQL becomes an SQL and pass it to the sales team for contract development. Service-level agreements (SLAs) — Both teams must agree on the SLAs offered to potential clients. Having these in place helps the teams put together the best package for a lead. This sets the partnership up for success because all parties know what is promised and what should be delivered. Key performance indicators (KPIs) — To ensure both teams are iterating toward higher prospect-to-close numbers, monitoring KPIs is essential. You’ll want to keep track of the following: 01. Number of incoming leads 02. Number of converted leads 03. Lifetime converted lead value By tracking the above, you can monitor your outreach numbers, how many leads turn into paying customers, and how much those customers are worth over time. Once you have the marketing and sales teams aligned on goals, it’s time to set your SEO, organic, and paid marketing strategies. SEO and organic marketing strategies for sustainable business growth While there are a number of organic (“free”) marketing channels that can help small businesses, we’re starting with your website because having a website and updating it is essential to bringing organic leads to your business, making it the one channel you must use. The others we’ll discuss are great to have, but you can pick and choose which to add to your plan depending on how relevant each strategy is for your particular type of business. The goal of these additional strategies (as outlined below) is to drive potential customers back to your website, where they can actually transact with you. Optimize your website for search engines You want potential customers to easily find information about your products/services on Google and purchase them. Your website’s job is to convert people based on your marketing strategies. So, you want your website to shine when new visitors show up thanks to your SEO and marketing strategies. You need to optimize your website for search engines to ensure ease of use as well as discoverability on Google—fortunately, what’s good for users is also generally good for search engines. The first step in optimizing your website is ensuring each page has a goal. Align each webpage to a goal Each page on your website should convey one message clearly and concisely. For example, product pages should focus on your product's unique benefits and features. Your contact page should give visitors information on how to get in contact with your company through email, phone, and social media. When pages talk about multiple subjects, they confuse visitors and search engines. This can result in lower rankings, lower visibility, and lower sales. Instead, pages should have a single goal and work toward achieving that goal. If you find that your pages are not meeting those goals, audit them by answering the following questions: What is the goal of this page? E.g., brand awareness, conversion, etc. How well is the page achieving that goal? Does the content on the page help it achieve that goal? Does the content on the page help the visitor achieve their goal? I.e., does it address why they came to this page? Is there any content missing that would help the page achieve that goal? I.e., information or even navigation. Is this page duplicative of another page? Does this page need to exist? Answering the questions above can help you discover effective ways to optimize your site for search queries, get started with keyword research, and update your web pages. Prioritize internal linking Similar to how maps guide us toward our destination, your website’s internal linking guides visitors toward their destination—if implemented correctly, that is. Internal linking is more than your top navigation, footer, and breadcrumbs. Proper internal linking utilizes landing page content to link to deeper, relevant pages that answer visitors’ questions. In addition, carefully placed call-to-action buttons can move visitors to your transactional pages via internal links. Websites need proper internal linking because it’s difficult to predict how visitors will move from page to page once they reach your site. We can add guardrails to assist their journey, but sometimes they’ll choose pages independently. In SEO, internal linking also helps search engines efficiently crawl more of your website. If there are few ways to find a particular page, chances are a search engine bot may miss that page, meaning it won’t be shown as a result in search engines. Add transaction buttons to your pages You’ve optimized your website content, aligned each page to a specific goal, ensured your pages are indexable, and updated your internal linking. But, is it easy for your potential customers to get in touch with you or purchase your products or services? Make sure that, at any given time, your customers are only a single button click from transacting with your business. As mentioned earlier, you cannot guarantee when customers will buy from you or what page will spur their transaction. What you can control, however, are the number of opportunities they have to buy from you. One of the simplest ways to facilitate easy transactions is to add a CTA in your header and make your header sticky (always in view, even if the user scrolls down). That way, the CTA follows the website visitor and gives them quick access to a transaction button to easily purchase your products/services when they're ready to shop. Remember, conversions can be more than a website visitor buying your products/services. They can also refer to an email newsletter signup (as is the case in the example above), someone contacting you for a sales call, making a reservation, etc. For a deeper dive into pairing your objectives with the right CTA, read Lazarina Stoy’s guide on how to choose the right CTA for your business goals to maximize your website’s transaction opportunities. Consider adding a blog A blog provides space for long-form content to educate visitors about your business, your products/services, your employees, and your industry-specific thought leadership. A blog isn’t necessary for every business, but you should consider it part of your multi-channel marketing strategy due to the SEO value, longevity, and reusability of blog content. You can repurpose blog content in many ways: Email newsletters — Send links to your email subscribers filled with pertinent information, including new blog posts. Organic social media posts — One of the best ways to promote your blog posts is through your social media channels. You can create shortened links to track how many people click on them and what channels they’re coming from. Sharing blog posts on social media may bring in new customers that might never have interacted with your business otherwise. Paid social media — Many social media platforms allow you to boost the reach of your organic posts. This is a fantastic way to get conversion-centric content in front of new social media audiences. Video content — You can convert your text blogs into videos (which may help your content appeal to more people) and add those videos to the existing page. The text becomes the transcript. You can also upload those videos to a dedicated YouTube account. This is especially excellent content marketing if you create how-to blogs about your products/services. While SEO content creation and marketing is an excellent addition to your multi-channel efforts, it isn’t easy. You’ll need someone who can consistently research topics, write, edit, and publish blog posts. You don’t need an aggressive publishing cadence: one or two blog posts a month to start are sufficient to build a healthy corpus of knowledge. Check out Crystal Carter's great guide if you want to learn how to source ideas for user-first content and start writing your own customer-centric blog posts. Consider social media marketing Social media can help you reach a new audience daily by posting your content, sharing others’ content, and replying to your followers and other accounts. You can build a community of brand ambassadors who amplify your message, content, and story. The first step in building your community is picking which platform(s) to use. Each platform has its advantages and drawbacks. Let’s take a look at a few of your options. Twitter — This platform is excellent for sharing content and building a community. Most businesses use Twitter to share other accounts’ content, respond to their followers, and handle customer service requests. Pepper in posts about your business sparingly. You want to add value to your follower’s timelines—spamming them with promotional posts about your business may drive them to unfollow your brand. Facebook — In addition to posting content on Facebook, you can create a dedicated business page that gives your followers quick access to your operating hours and contact information. You can also add a CTA button for quick transactions directly from your Facebook page and even set up a Facebook Messenger chatbot that interacts with your customer’s specific questions. Instagram — IG is a great place to post product photos and business-related images. You can share “behind the scenes” pictures, infographics, other visualized data, and videos. If you sell a product that is enhanced with a visual component, IG is your platform. TikTok — Video, video, video. That’s what TikTok is all about. One way to use the platform is to ask your customer to record videos while using your products. Sharing videos of happy customers is a great way to entice more people to buy your products. Consider email marketing Email marketing has several benefits for your business. It can help you: Nurture and generate leads by asking website visitors and social media followers to leave their emails in exchange for an incentive (like an exclusive offer, for example). Build brand awareness by keeping your company and your products/services top-of-mind for new leads. Use content marketing to answer questions about your products/services for new leads. Best of all, like social media, email marketing can help you build a community. Building a community is better than having customers. A community will promote your brand, leave reviews, and suggest your products/services to friends and family. A community, if treated with respect and grown with care, will provide higher lifetime value to your business. If you’ve been collecting emails through signup forms, you should retarget those potential (or repeat) customers. Send them special offers and coupon codes. Send monthly newsletters containing your latest content to give your blog additional visibility. While email marketing puts you directly in front of your audience, that can become an issue. If you send too many emails, your subscribers will mark you as spam or unsubscribe from your list. Both are bad for business. You can avoid oversaturating your community by outlining the types of emails you send and their cadence. For example, you can provide dates for your upcoming deals in a monthly newsletter, send out a reminder for the sale a week in advance, and one once the deal has launched. Paid marketing strategies for instant exposure and amplification Now that you’ve thought through your SEO and organic marketing strategies, it’s time to layer on some paid marketing to amplify your content and drive traffic to your site. While organic marketing typically only requires your time and energy, you need money to launch paid marketing strategies. As an SMB, dipping into your revenue to pay for ads can be intimidating. Let’s remove the fear with a plan of action. Establish your monthly budget The first step is determining how much you’ll spend per month on your campaigns. Start with a comfortable amount—you can always raise it when you start experiencing some success. Let’s say you have $12,000 budgeted annually for your paid media campaigns (meaning you have $1000 to spend each month). This $1000 dollars, however, may need to cover more than just ads. Unless you run the campaigns yourself, you’ll need some help. Make sure to account for any money you’ll spend on consulting help for your paid campaigns. A great way to keep track of your ad spend is to create a spreadsheet or document that will monitor your spending habits each month. This will help you stay within the budget limits. Choose your paid search or paid social channels Once you’ve established your budget, you’ll need to choose your advertising platforms. With paid search, you run ads on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. With paid social, you run ads on social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). You don’t need to use all of them to start. If you have a small budget, you may want to limit the number of platforms you use so your money goes farther as you begin. Whatever you choose, remember to periodically test out other channels to ensure you’re acting on the greatest marketing opportunities. Create paid landing pages When you launch your ads, ensure you have individual, noindexed (not discoverable via search results) landing pages for your paid traffic. Why? So that you don’t mix your organic search traffic with your paid traffic. Proper tracking and attribution are essential so that you can gauge the true success of your ads. For example, if you send paid traffic to your organic pages, you’ll have muddied data and little-to-no way to tell if your paid traffic converts. You also want to ensure your paid landing pages are noindexed so search engines don’t rank them. If your paid ad landing pages are indexable, they might rank ahead (or instead) of your organic pages. This can harm your SEO strategies and muddy your tracking and reporting data. Success later starts with the basics now The guidance above just covers the fundamentals of marketing for most SMBs—we haven’t even started scratching the surface of more advanced strategies yet. Before you set your sights higher, review the advice I’ve laid out to ensure that you understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. A solid foundation of basics will not only take you far (think the 80/20 rule), it’ll increase the efficacy of your advanced strategies later on. Jamar Ramos - Content Marketer Jamar Ramos is a 10-year digital marketing veteran with SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing experience. He enjoys writing, playing volleyball, and fighting back against anyone who claims that Shakespeare isn't the greatest writer to ever put pen to paper. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Crystal Carter Good homepages present visitors with what they’re looking for, but great homepages do so while also working to achieve business goals as efficiently as possible. The way you design your homepage can direct traffic to certain sections of your site, filter visitors to the appropriate pages for whatever stage of the customer journey they’re currently in, or even direct them to complete a single task (like a newsletter signup). Each one of those objectives carries different implications for not only your homepage’s SEO, but the SEO of your site overall. In this article, we will explore the importance of homepage SEO and how it can impact your SEO activity. Table of contents: What is a homepage? What is meant by homepage SEO? Does changing your homepage affect SEO? Homepage style examples and how they impact SEO outcomes The Funneler The Converter The Informer The Feeder The Billboard What is a homepage? The “homepage” is the term used for the first page that users see when they arrive at the root of your domain . For most sites, this tends to be the one of most visited pages. Because of the traffic homepages receive and the fact that search engine bots often crawl the homepage first, performing well here can impact your overall SEO. What do we mean by homepage SEO? Homepage SEO is the process of focusing your SEO efforts on improving the value of your homepage, both as a standalone page and as something that has a significant influence over your wider site and domain. Along with the UX and copy, decisions regarding internal linking, structured data, keyword priority, and content feeds can change how your site is crawled and ranked. As such, optimizations to the homepage can include reviewing your copy, images , content structure, linking, and so on. The aim with homepage SEO should be to think about your homepage as a uniquely important part of your SEO funnel. Does changing your homepage affect SEO? In a recent Wix SEO webinar , Mordy Oberstein shared a number of ways that changing your homepage can impact the brand positioning of your website. In addition, here are three more significant ways that your homepage can affect your technical SEO: Crawlability — Pages that are linked from the homepage will have increased crawl priority. This means that they will move further up the queue in terms of which pages Google crawls when it visits the site. Since crawl priority is a signal that helps Google understand which pages are the most important for a site, strategic internal linking from your homepage can influence how pages rank in search. Backlinks — There are many things to consider with regards to backlink strategy , but the evergreen nature of the link is certainly a factor. And, since your homepage is the face of your root domain, there is nothing more evergreen than that. Links pointing to the homepage are less likely to be lost through link rot and are more likely to add value to your site for a long time. Sites that clearly align their homepage content and tech configuration with relevant brand keywords and information will be able to benefit the most from consistent link growth to their homepages. CWV — Core Web Vitals are a Google ranking factor that assess how users experience your website in terms of loading time, UX, and site interactivity. These metrics are calculated in terms of the percentage of page views, meaning that 75% of user page views should pass these metrics. On smaller sites, the visits to the homepage can contribute to a large portion of that traffic, so if this page is well optimized it can help you achieve sitewide performance goals. Examples of how different homepage styles impact SEO outcomes Looking at five distinct but common homepage types, you can get a clear idea of how different homepage configurations can have a wider effect on the SEO of a site. The Funneler Some homepages essentially act as a conduit for funneling users to more specific elements of a brand—I like to call these pages “Funnelers . ” These pages tend to be used by brands and businesses that serve a range of audiences under the same brand name. So, users are not expected to dwell on the page but rather to move quickly to more targeted content on the same site or within the brand’s ecosystem. A good example of this kind of page is Virgin.com, where the page quickly filters site visitors to a range of business offerings, including space travel and mobile phones. Use this type of homepage to: Point users to high-value content Funnel traffic and audiences to distinct business offerings, even if they are on a different domain or subdomain Create this type of homepage by: Prioritizing the placement of your most popular segments Segmenting UX with contrasting colors and distinct sections Adding buttons with CTAs Optimize for this type of homepage by: Using top keywords for each segment Using the keywords for top segments in the page title and meta description Providing context for your segments with richer copy below the fold How does a Funneler homepage impact SEO on the wider site? The SEO impact of a Funneler is predominantly seen in the backlink profile of the business. So, in the case of Virgin.com, more than 80% of the backlinks for the domain go to the homepage, which is highly unusual. This aligns with Virgin’s brand and business model because it is dynamic, but the brand and homepage remain consistent no matter how Virgin manages its segments or subsidiary businesses. For smaller brands, this tactic can be applied to direct funnel audiences based on need (think “buyers” or “sellers”) or to help users navigate straight to your top products or services when they land on the site. The Converter A “Converter” homepage serves to get users to complete tasks on the site (e.g., sign in, register, or purchase). This is used consistently across eCommerce sites like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay. This highly actionable homepage style aligns with brands that help users achieve goals and create solutions. SaaS provider Later uses a Converter configuration on its homepage to great effect. The page drives traffic to its sign-up and upgrade pages. And, as is the case with many SaaS tools, when users are logged in, they can use the homepage URL to be redirected to the app itself. Use a conversion-focused homepage to: Reduce friction for users who wish to complete a single task on your site Direct traffic to distinct transaction points Create this type of homepage with: Buttons with CTAs to drive activity to eCommerce and bookings pages Interactive elements like forms and chat for services Unique selling points for eCommerce Optimize the type of homepage by adding: Headers with relevant keywords to contextualize forms for search engines Context to conversion points with links to deeper content where users can learn more Add CTAs like “Buy,” “Shop,” “Reserve,” etc. to copy and meta descriptions How does a Converter homepage impact SEO? Taking Later (the SaaS company mentioned above) as an example, the homepage is the single most popular page on the site, garnering 20% of site search traffic and a significant portion of PPC traffic. In terms of keywords, this page has the most ranking terms and twice as many keywords as the next best-performing page. This is a sign of efficiency. Later has aligned its business goals with its homepage strategy, meaning that the users who visit this page from paid, organic, and other channels are able to get what they expect from the homepage, which (in this case) is to learn about or sign up for Later’s services. How does a Converter homepage impact SEO on the wider site? In the case of Later and converter pages like those seen on Etsy and eBay, the conversion focus of the homepage helps to balance the overall keyword profile of the site. So, in each case, the homepage is the top page for commercial intent on the whole domain. And in many cases, the proportion of commercial keywords on the homepage surpasses that of the wider domain by about a ratio of two-to-one. This suggests that if you want to change the overall keyword intent for your website, then significant priority should be placed on the homepage. The Informer An “Informer” homepage is a constantly updating source of information. These pages align well with brands that provide data and insights as a core part of their business. A good example of this is the London Stock Exchange website, which provides up-to-the-second information on stocks and trading. Of the sites that I surveyed, this one had the most internal links, coming in with 378 internal links on the homepage. Sites with the latest information (like surf reports, local news, weather, and other time-sensitive information) or that publish throughout the day (like news articles and job listings) should leverage internal linking well. These internal links help Google to crawl and index new content at high volume, as the content is created. Use an Informer-style homepage to: Show new content to Google and users as it’s created Drive traffic to subsections of a website with similar content Create an Informer-style homepage using: Blog and content feeds Strategic internal linking Headers with keywords Optimize for this type of homepage by: Submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools Utilizing RSS feeds Focusing on link hierarchy and priority How does an Informer homepage impact SEO? This kind of page reflects a wider content strategy for high-frequency publishing. If this is your kind of site, then creating systematic ways to surface content is key to getting content indexed quickly, making it more likely to rank. For example, “All the Food,” a food blog that publishes around four articles per day, uses the latest post feeds and curated blog feeds to great effect on its homepage. For users, this sends a signal that the site is dynamic and full of fresh ideas. For search engines, these feeds provide a path to the latest content, increasing the likelihood that it can start showing up in search results sooner. How does an Informer homepage impact SEO on the wider site? In the case of the London Stock Exchange, the homepage is pulling through almost 6% of the site’s overall keywords. This percentage is higher than any other site that was reviewed for this article. This reflects the strategic value of this page for search engines. And, for high-frequency publishers that may be creating content with a wide range of keywords, we see that a homepage that is strategically focused on certain terms can help Google add context to the site overall. The Feeder A “Feeder”-style homepage works much in the same way that a directory does: with the aim of surfacing lots of content at the category or folder level. This is common for eCommerce sites that work with curated collections of links. This style of the homepage is worth considering if you have a large collection of content that will be more accessible to users when it is curated into clear groups. With these pages, the goal is to be strategic about the links that you show or target at any given time, so seasonality and localization should be considered here to add context to the collections. Use a Feeder-style homepage to: Surface new content as it’s created Support indexation Create a Feeder-style homepage using: Product, blog, or job feeds Strategic menu configurations Optimize this type of homepage by: Adding strategic internal linking Adding headers and keyword copy for feed collections Automating and adding keywords to blog summaries Resurfacing high-performing and seasonal content How does a Feeder homepage impact SEO? In the case of Fandom (shown above), we see that the homepage is more of a conduit for the wider activity of the website. Compared to the other homepage types that were reviewed, the Fandom homepage had the lowest proportion of: Total site backlinks going to the homepage Total site keywords originating at the homepage Total traffic to the homepage While this may seem counterintuitive, it is actually fitting for the overall objective of Fandom’s website, which is to drive traffic across its network of content. Depending on your objectives, a strategy of shifting traffic from the homepage across your wider site can form part of an effective SEO approach. How does a Feeder homepage impact SEO on the wider site? Since a Feeder homepage does not aim to be a destination page, it is something that should facilitate the SEO performance of other pages across the website. Through strategic internal links, the page can add value to the subfolders that matter most. Fandom was the largest domain that I reviewed, with over five million ranking pages and many of the pages being generated directly by users. So, creating a directory of content categories, rather than showcasing every piece of new content (as with the Informer) allows Fandom to drive traffic to new content folders and to drill down further from there. This helps homepages for larger sites to remain organized, but also responsive to seasonal needs and trends. The Billboard A “Billboard” homepage is a page that is visually fairly sparse and often includes very little crawlable text. Some pages (e.g., The Potter Trail, shown above) will use this tactic above the fold and then add more links as users scroll down the page. But larger companies, like ZARA (shown below), can rely heavily on the strength of their brand recognition and use a billboard for the full structure of the page. At first glance, this page seems like there is very little going on, but in actuality, the page has stripped back the text and other content in order to direct users to take a single action (in this case, selecting a local region from a dropdown that creates a number of backlinks across the domain). When used wisely, this highly focused tactic could be applied to send users to a promotion or event. Use a Billboard-style homepage to: Focus users on a single task Visually display your brand identity Create a Billboard-style homepage with: Images that are optimized for search Clean composition above the fold Dropdown menus and content To optimize Billboard-style homepages: Implement structured data for images and your site overall. This can sit underneath your visuals and provide context when you have limited text on the page. Add image attributes like alt text, alt tags, descriptions, and file names. Use well-linked drop-down menus to help you maintain an aesthetic while also providing links to your wider site. How does a Billboard homepage impact SEO? Of the sites that were surveyed, the ZARA homepage was the only page that had a majority of keywords with navigational intent. I do not believe pages of this kind are more likely to have navigational intent than others. But, it’s clear that this was the singular goal of ZARA’s homepage, making this a powerful demonstration of what a Billboard-style homepage page can do. How does a Billboard homepage impact SEO on the wider site? The impact of a billboard page on a site will vary depending on the main objective of the page. For ZARA, its homepage is highly functional despite the thin amount of text. The navigational focus of the homepage is even demonstrated within the SERP, where indented results show international subfolders. Thus, the homepage is a fundamental part of this global brand’s international SEO strategy. Your homepage needs to serve your brand as well as your audience When designing your homepage, your most important priority is to create whatever it is that your audience expects to see there. But, it’s also important to consider how your homepage impacts your site’s overall SEO. To that end, you’ll need to factor in your business’s goals and make the right decisions regarding internal links, layout, and even menus, to ensure that your homepage is doing everything it can for your brand and its online presence. Crystal Carter - Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO & digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush, and more. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Sophie Brannon In high-competition sectors like eCommerce, where customers may have many similar product options to choose from, higher-quality backlinks can help you stand out with better rankings and a stronger presence in relevant search results. What makes link building for online stores, in particular, unique is that these websites can include thousands of pages that need to work together to turn visitors into customers. To be successful, you need to understand how to effectively drive authority to your various eCommerce page types. Let’s get started. Table of contents: What are backlinks and why are they important for eCommerce websites? eCommerce link building techniques eCommerce page types and appropriate link building techniques eCommerce homepages PLPs and category pages Product display pages (PDPs) eCommerce blogs How to prioritize and optimize your eCommerce link building Authority (backlink quality) Niche relevance Competitor backlink gap Anchor text Link attributes Natural links vs. Manipulated links Branded vs. Unbranded link building Agency vs. In-house link building What are backlinks and why are they important for eCommerce websites? Backlinks are hyperlinks pointing from one website to another. They act as a hypothetical endorsement or “thumbs up” to Google, suggesting that the target URL is a valuable resource. Backlinks are not all equally valuable. The relevance and quality of the backlinks (as opposed to quantity) are the most important aspects to consider. Understanding the fundamentals of backlinks can help you accurately assess the value of link building for your SEO strategy. Backlinks are just as essential for eCommerce websites as they are for lead generation or information-based sites. They form a core part of the trifecta of SEO: content, technical SEO (UX), and links. Many eCommerce websites target high-intent and high-competition terms in order to attract as large an audience as possible from search engines. While backlinks alone are unlikely to make or break your online store’s SEO, relevant, high quality backlinks from highly authoritative websites can better instill trust amongst your potential customers and search engines alike. Combined with good technical SEO and content that adheres to search intent, they are the winning formula for just about any eCommerce SEO strategy. Before we move on to the best ways to build links for your online shop, let’s first go over the relevant techniques and the pages you’ll want to apply them to. eCommerce link building techniques There are many different ways to gain links, but here are some of the most common techniques that SEO professionals use for eCommerce link building eCommerce page types and appropriate link building techniques eCommerce websites are generally made up of the following types of pages: Homepage: Links to your homepage can help you grow branded keyword rankings, increasing brand visibility across the web. This can attract more potential customers to your site while showcasing your expertise in your niche. Category and subcategory pages: These often target the most competitive keywords. Driving more authority to these pages can help to enhance your search visibility for non-branded keywords. Product listings pages (PLP): These also typically target competitive keywords so additional authority can help these pages rank. Links can also help Google to discover these pages, which may be a few clicks from the homepage depending on the site’s architecture. Product detail pages (PDP): PDP’s are becoming more important in SEO with the rise of generative AI (i.e., Google’s Search Generative Experience) and the additional visibility this may give them for competitive keywords. Blog posts: These are often highly resourceful and can capture informational intent, which is a key opportunity for eCommerce stores to help nurture customers at the start of their conversion journey. Gaining links to these pages can help improve their prominence in SERPs. With strong internal linking within blogs to priority pages on the site, you can also pass authority on to those target pages. For some eCommerce stores, PLPs and category/subcategory pages are the same (which is why I cover them in the same section of this article). Certain approaches to link building have a higher success rate for certain types of eCommerce pages. Let’s break down the most appropriate link building techniques per eCommerce page type to give you a jump start for your next campaign. Link building for eCommerce homepages The homepage is the most commonly linked page of most eCommerce websites. Naturally, the homepage holds more authority—to take advantage of that authority, you need to ensure your proper internal linking between your homepage and your most important category and subcategory pages. Relevant link building techniques: You can use a range of methods for homepage link building, including: Expert commentary (HARO, etc.) Reactive campaigns Data-led campaigns Creative campaigns Link insert Journalists often attribute a comment or backlink to a creative campaign with a brand name, making them more likely to link to your homepage. Top tip: There are many instances where your brand name may be mentioned but without a link to your eCommerce site. Use tools such as Mention, Google Alerts, and BuzzSumo to identify these mentions and reach out to the writer or website manager to try to turn these into links. Some publications have guidelines against linking out to other sites, but you are likely to see some of these converted to links simply by reaching out to the right individuals. Be aware: Ensure the sites that link back to you are relevant and that the stories that mention your products are positive. While many SEOs will see a link as the end goal, ensuring any exposure about the brand is positive can help you achieve the wider brand awareness benefits. Link building for PLPs and category pages A PLP or category/subcategory page displays many products, showcasing a broad range within a section of your site. PLPs and category pages typically include: Product thumbnail images Faceted navigation (allowing users to refine the product type and features they are searching for) Basic product information (i.e., product name, pricing, star ratings, etc.) Ancillary content and FAQs (usually below the fold) Relevant link building techniques: The types of link building that work best for these pages include guest posts and expert commentary (when related to a specific product type). Most journalists will not offer an “inner” link, and will naturally link to the homepage, so be prepared to ask nicely and negotiate for this. Top tip: Always explicitly include the inner link with your press release/outreach. Don’t rely on writers/journalists to find the most appropriate link, as they will generally link to your brand’s homepage. Be aware: Many publications have begun adding tracking links to their external links. This can dilute the SEO value of that link. Try to negotiate a direct link where you can. Link building for product display pages (PDPs) A product display page (or just product page), houses one product and all of the essential information related to that product. PDPs typically include: Product description Shipping information Specifications Pricing Reviews FAQs Related products Relevant link building techniques: One of the most effective ways to drive authority and traffic to your PDP is by getting it featured in a relevant listicle article (as shown in the example below). Journalists can reach out on platforms like HARO or Qwoted, or even X/Twitter (often using #journorequest). In some cases, they may already know your product offering and may naturally include it. Don’t hesitate to reach out to journalists who are looking for products similar to what you offer on your website. A strong affiliate partnership or influencer campaign can also effectively drive traffic to your website as well, but this doesn’t have a big impact on your SEO. Top tip: Take advantage of seasonality when looking to drive traffic to these types of pages. Big shopping holidays like Valentine’s Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas are the best times to find journalists looking for products to include in their articles. Also, monitor the news cycle to identify reactive link building opportunities to include your product in articles. For example, if you’re a jewelry brand and a popular celebrity gets engaged, and you offer a product similar to the proposal ring, a campaign around this could generate both links and conversions. Be aware: This type of link building is one of the most difficult, particularly for smaller brands. This is why a more creative angle for a product can be the most effective way to gain relevant links. Link building for eCommerce blogs eCommerce blogs are important because they capture specific search queries and long-tail traffic, which can attract shoppers that are close to converting. Relevant link building techniques: The Skyscraper technique and creative campaigns perform best when link building for eCommerce blogs. Identify the types of linkable content and assets (whether on competitors’ sites or other successful eCommerce sites, like Amazon, etc.) to get an idea of the type of content that you could create to pitch to website owners (if using the Skyscraper technique) or promote (in the case of creative campaigns). The top-performing types of blog content generally include data-led content (i.e., surveys, reports, etc.) and infographics, but this could vary depending on your niche. Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to identify top performing content from your competitors to discover opportunities for you to create something better. Cross-check URLs that drive high volumes of traffic and ranking for high-volume keywords. Top tip: Niche down to appeal to a smaller, but higher-intent audience, which can also help you increase engagement and ranking opportunities. Being hyper-focused on your target audience can lead to them sharing your blog within their own communities, and it will give you a template of content types to create regularly for different audience groups. Be aware: It’s important to analyze top-performing content, but not to copy it. Your content should always be unique—whether that’s a new angle, new dataset, or different approach. What works for a competitor or someone else in a similar industry isn’t necessarily going to resonate with your audience. How to prioritize and optimize your eCommerce link building Now that you know what link building techniques work best for your various eCommerce page types, let’s look at the factors you need to consider when evaluating backlink opportunities and how you can leverage them to achieve the greatest SEO gains. Authority (backlink quality) As with any form of link building, always prioritize quality over quantity. Gaining one link from a highly authoritative, relevant site will be more impactful than gaining 10 links from mediocre, irrelevant, low-traffic domains. This is where link building techniques like digital PR can be exceptionally powerful for your site, significantly benefitting your SEO. Popular databases like MuckRack, Cision, and Roxhill can help you identify journalists and bloggers that work at these high-authority publications and websites. Niche relevance Signal relevance to Google via backlinks (among other SEO techniques) to help it understand what your website is about. This, in turn, can help you rank higher for keywords related to your niche, service, or product offering. The best way to do this is to pursue backlinks from websites in your niche or in a complementary niche. Other relevant websites can indicate that you are an authority on that particular topic or industry, which can help improve your site’s organic visibility across the board. Contextual significance is important as it highlights the topical authority of your site, reinforcing your website’s relevance for certain topics or keywords. Prioritize websites that closely align with your business. For example, if you sell kitchenware, you would consider home and food-related websites to be a directly relevant link. However, you may also extend this further to mommy blogs, fitness sites (if you’re selling products focused on nutrition), or even finance if your products are a more affordable option on the market. Links from less-relevant websites can still be powerful, but they may not carry as much weight when it comes to your search rankings. Competitor backlink gap Analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles to identify: How many links they’re gaining Their rate of link acquisition (also referred to as “link velocity”) The domains that link to them The techniques they use to build links Their high-performing assets or pages This data can help inform your strategy, indicate how far ahead (or behind) your competitors are, and identify the types of publications that you should reach out to. There are a number of tools that you can use for a competitor backlink gap analysis. Ahrefs’ “Link intersect” report can help you uncover linking patterns (i.e., sites that link to your competitors regularly) as well as the sites that link to your top competitors but not to you. Semrush also offers a similar function with its Backlink Gap tool, providing insights on which prospects are “Best,” “Weak,” “Strong,” “Shared,” and “Unique.” Anchor text Anchor text refers to the clickable text containing a backlink or internal link. This element can provide important context about the linked page to both users and to Google. So, it makes sense to strive for descriptive and relevant anchor text in your backlinks. You have a lot of control over the anchor text if you’re publishing a guest post. However, over-optimization is a common mistake that SEOs make, assuming it will signal more relevance for a particular keyword. While this practice did work in the past, too many of the same anchor text/link combinations (particularly an unnatural one like [wedding dresses summer], for example) can be counterproductive and actually signal link manipulation. Link attributes A link attribute can contextualize backlinks for search engines, which can affect how search engines evaluate them when ranking web pages. There are a number of link attributes to be aware of: rel=“sponsored” — This attribute identifies advertisements or paid placements. rel=“ugc” — This identifies user-generated content, such as comments or forum links. rel=“nofollow” — This should be used when the other values don’t apply and you do not want Google to associate your site with, or crawl, the linked page. Learn more about nofollow links and when to use them. Be aware that there is no such thing as a “dofollow” or “follow” link attribute. Links that do not feature one of the above attributes are automatically a “follow” link. Natural links vs. Manipulated links Keeping your link profile natural is important—and easy to do if you’re building links organically (read: not attempting to cheat the search algorithm). Many sites have been penalized in the past due to link manipulation techniques, which can negatively affect your search visibility and, ultimately, revenue. While backlinks are important, you should always be ethical with your tactics to avoid future issues and potential manual or partial actions on your site. Avoid suspicious link building patterns (like those associated with simply paying for links) and ensure the links that you are actively pursuing are from high-authority publications and reputable sites. Branded vs. Unbranded link building With link building there are two opportunities to harness: branded and unbranded links. Branded link building typically points to the homepage of your website using your brand name as the anchor text. Other pages can also be referenced using your brand name. Unbranded links can point to your homepage or any other page on the site (e.g., an asset or product) and use a keyword, related phrase, or combination of both as the anchor text. Both are equally important and can help to keep your link profile natural. Brand authority (via branded links) can help to drive trust as well as overall search visibility. Unbranded links can help your other pages rank for relevant keywords, which could bring in more potential customers and conversions. Agency vs. In-house link building Your online store’s goals and resources will influence whether you should outsource your link building to an agency or do it in-house. Here is a breakdown of the pros and cons associated with each method: Learn more about how to hire an SEO agency to help with your link building and other strategic efforts. Link building for eCommerce: Tip the scales in your favor At the end of the day, customers typically only end up buying one product from one website. That means a large portion of your success hinges upon successfully differentiating yourself from the competition. In the search results, where similar brands often show up with similar content, backlinks could tip the scales in your favor, working to distinguish your content with better rankings. Use the framework I’ve laid out above to seize this advantage for your online store. Sophie Brannon - SEO Specialist Sophie is an SEO specialist with 7 years of agency experience. She's led strategy, implementation, and communication for local campaigns through to multi-language international campaigns. She's also an industry speaker and led the Web Almanac 2022 SEO chapter. Twitter | Linkedin

Updated: March 31, 2023 Author: Crystal Carter Millions of web pages are created every day, making it more and more difficult to find original ideas for content marketing campaigns. With many SEOs and digital marketers using similar keyword research and AI content writing tools, the process of discovering truly unique topics for blogs and web copy can get tough. What if we could simplify the ideation process? What if we could uncover free sources of content ideas that will improve search engine optimization, serve your audience, add brand value, and build trust in your business? In this article, I outline how speaking with your team, thinking consciously about your own search experience, and listening to your customers can help you identify original ideas for user-first SEO content topics and keywords phrases. I also share a Google Sheet template to help you organize it all. How does user-centric content help your SEO? SEOs should look to create content in order to add more value to their websites for users and for search engines. With the introduction of it’s Helpful Content algorithm system in 2022, Google announced changes that incentivize publishers to “create content for people, not for search engines.” In the documentation, the company explained that its goal is to ensure that when users visit a website, they encounter “original, helpful content written by people, for people,” and that the site offers a “satisfying experience” for visitors. While the overall impact of the Helpful Content update was not as extreme as many SEOs predicted, it is clear that the update is part of an initiative to help surface content that is “made for humans” and not primarily to attract people from search engines. This follows previous updates (like the Panda and the Passage Ranking update) to surface web content from more diverse, primary sources. For SEO specialists, this may call to mind the question, “If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?” Or, to put it another way, “If I don't make content for search engines, will anyone ever see it?” Well, if you are making content that is responding directly to user needs, then yes, they will. The SEO benefits of creating unique user-first content Digital marketers that make user-first content based on research, ideas, and interactions with their audience can: Be certain their work addresses users’ needs. Share content directly with the users that requested it. Assess the value of the content with users before publishing more widely. Build robust, conversational relationships between the audience and their brand. Discover unique long tail keywords that engage with high-intent users. In this article, I outline how speaking with your team, thinking consciously about your own search experience, and listening to your customers can help you source ideas for user-first SEO content. What are the best sources for user-first keyword and topic research? If you and your team are regularly engaging with your target audience then you can find user-centric content topics for SEO by: Speaking to sale teams Reviewing customer care queries Identifying training gaps Identifying research gaps Addressing client/industry concerns Creating a resource for your team Reviewing site searches Answering GBP questions Answering Amazon product questions Replying to user comments Addressing reviews Asking your audience directly Blogs, videos, podcasts and other brand assets that are created from user-first sources are more likely to contain the kind of fresh approach that will help you to stand out on search. Speak to customer-facing teams to identify content gaps Stakeholders from across your brand understand the content gaps that shape their conversations with current and potential clients. To create more user-first content, you can take inspiration from a few sources. Sales teams 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. I usually ask the sales and customer service teams to record the questions they get from prospects and existing clients . . . . This, for me, is one of the best ways to create content without relying on volumes and, at the same time, create content that converts and generates leads.—Veruska Anconitano, international and multilingual SEO manager at Momentive.ai In my experience working with salespeople at businesses large and small, this team is likely to be very proactive in terms of providing ideas and ongoing feedback. They will also be able to offer insights into the content formats and SERP features that are most likely to connect with your audiences. To connect with this team, external SEO project leaders (like freelancers or agencies) may wish to book some time for qualitative interviews with sales team members using transcription software, like Otter.ai or even Zoom, to record the interviews for future reference. In-house teams and those managing enterprise SEO projects may be able to access CRM (customer relationship management) archives in order to surface this information at scale or to coordinate with sales teams to strategically manage content recommendations. “I usually ask the sales and customer service teams to record the questions they get from prospects and existing clients,” Veruska Anconitano, international and multilingual SEO manager at Momentive.ai, said, adding that she reviews the questions on a quarterly basis to identify customer-focused topics. Next, she identifies relevant existing content that can be refreshed and creates new articles to address any outstanding customer needs. “This, for me, is one of the best ways to create content without relying on [search] volumes and, at the same time, create content that converts and generates leads,” she said, noting that since the subject matter tends to be a fresh response to customer needs, “the majority of the topics coming out of this approach have zero or extremely low volume, but they have proven to have an incredibly high CTR and incredible conversion power.” Customer care and front-of-house teams Like your sales team, your customer relationship team handles real-time questions from a range of clients. This team will have a good understanding of content opportunities that can help you retain clients and build long-term trust. Discussions and questions from members in a community of practice or product [are a great place to source user-first content ideas]. If the company has its own community, the community manager is a great person to work with since they spend a lot of time engaging with members and have a pulse on topics of interest. —Shivani Shah, senior copywriter at Commsor Depending on the size of your business, this team may include dedicated customer care professionals, but also those who work closely with customers. Teams working on the shop floor, those attending promotional events, and community managers will be able to distill some of the common concerns they encounter. “If the company has its own community, the community manager is a great person to work with since they spend a lot of time engaging with members and have a pulse on topics of interest,” said Shivani Shah, senior copywriter at Commsor. And, involving your customer support teams not only helps you source user-first content ideas, it also shows those teams that you’re working to facilitate them with resources that they can share when clients express a pain point. Simply put, engaging your front-of-house team(s) as part of the marketing for your SMB can help you add value for customers quickly and effectively. Training for juniors Training and educating junior talent is incredibly rewarding but can often be time consuming. Why? Because interns and new recruits don’t know industry jargon and they don’t know the historic context behind certain tactics, and so they ask questions. Lots of them. The questions that they ask will be very similar to the ones that new customers are likely to have and help you to address content gaps in your marketing funnel. If you don’t have an existing blog or content that you can reference when training juniors, then you should consider creating this content yourself and sharing it with your users. Keep track of these questions on a document then review them for keyword search volume to see if there are opportunities to add value for other users. Answering these questions could prove helpful for juniors, for your business, and for the wider web. Draw from your topical search experience Your user-first content can also be shaped by your experience as a user. The content you are able to find, the communities that you connect with, and the questions that you have can be a ripe source for original content that connects with similar audiences. Content you wanted but couldn’t find Have you ever ventured down a rabbit hole because you couldn’t find the information that you needed from your initial search? Did you have to read and understand multiple sources in order to get a complete picture? Congratulations, you’ve found a content gap. Me reading things or learning things and not ‘getting it’ [helps me identify potential user-first content gaps]. Once I do understand it, that's a prime content opportunity: help other people fill that same gap. —Tory Gray, CEO at The Gray Company Creating new (and needed) content that addresses the query will enable you to help your audiences while giving Google the content it needs to potentially point searchers to your brand. And, if the content is present but overly complex or full of jargon, then crafting something more readable from your findings can also be genuinely useful. Tory Gray, CEO at The Gray Company, uses this tactic regularly, explaining her content ideas often come from “reading things or learning things and not ‘getting it.’ Once I do understand it, that’s a prime content opportunity: help other people fill that same gap.” In some cases, identifying missing content based on a genuine connection to the topic can form the basis for an entire online project or website (as shown in the example below). Common client/industry questions Sourcing content from questions that people commonly ask online is something that Google, itself, does often. In John Mueller’s Ask Google Bot web series, he begins every episode showing that someone asked him the question he’s about to answer. In the example above, the question comes from a user on YouTube, but for the series, Mueller regularly takes questions from Twitter and other channels. You can also identify these kinds of queries on: Industry web forums Quora Reddit Slack communities Discord Facebook groups To hone in on the kinds of answers that best satisfy such questions, become an active member of your industry’s communities before you start crafting longer-form content like blogs or videos. Furthermore, many Q&A forums include options to “upvote” or “like” replies, so you can gauge responses before you invest resources towards making content. And, if you are replying to existing questions, then you can post your content to a grateful audience once it’s complete. Content you are likely to use again Have you carried out significant research and, as a part of that process, created a document with your findings? If you or your team use this document frequently, then it is a tried and tested piece of content. Sharing this with others via a blog, guide, or template can help drive organic traffic because it is satisfying a need. Listen to your customers Whether directly or indirectly, your customers will happily tell you what information they need or cannot easily find. Internal site searches When users visit your site and enter a query into internal site search, this may be a signal that you have content that is either difficult to discover or yet to be made. If you create content based on these searches, then you will absolutely be saving time for your customers and directing them to the answers they need. You won't even need an external third-party tool to provide you with this data, as you already own it. In the example above, we can see that Amazon took advantage of its position as the dominant platform for product-related searches by using that search data to inform decisions, such as launching its own line of skin care products. Google Business Profile questions When you create a Google Business Profile, you are also creating a means for the public to contact you directly, ask questions, leave reviews, and engage with your business. This is an incredibly valuable asset for local SEO keywords. Questions that users submit here can serve as recommendations for content that should be added to your GBP profile, GBP posts, long tail keywords for your website, or even a new business offering. Amazon product questions Amazon is a major player in eCommerce product search. One of the reasons why is that Amazon has always provided an outlet for users to ask questions and review products directly. This interactive relationship helps to build trust signals for brands and products. This also means that brands are expected to reply to customer questions. In the “Customer questions & answers” section of Amazon product listing pages, you can see some of the queries that users have about your product (and potentially similar products from competitors as well). By creating content that is optimized for these queries, you can empower users to make better decisions about the purchases or services they are considering. The questions asked here can help you add value to your eCommerce SEO efforts when you use this information to create effective copy for product pages and blogs. Content comments and UGC If you have UGC (user-generated content) on your blog or an engaged audience on social media, then make note of the questions that they ask to identify common keywords and phrases. Comments and questions on your existing content can offer incredible opportunities to pay service to an audience that has high informational search intent. When done correctly, this can become source material for content refreshes and topic cluster-related content. With some practice, savvy content creators can anticipate the questions that are most likely to arise and support users before they ask. For instance, the comments section on a recipe blog is often filled with questions about substituting ingredients. So, savvy recipe bloggers will build notes about substitutions into their copy before they publish (as shown in the example above). Reviews As well as helping to improve SERP visibility for local SEO and demonstrating EEAT, customer reviews allow you to understand what your customers genuinely value about your products. Reviews will tell you what information your customers require to be successful with your products or services. Sometimes negative reviews will talk about the product’s deficiencies, but many times they will include comments about customer service, delivery, and product instructions. I remember working with a client in the leisure industry where I was tasked with creating a strategy around golf. Though I have limited personal experience on the fairways, by looking at the reviews, I quickly learned the things that patrons really valued and saw as unique about the course. This helped me shape the kinds of content to recommend to clients in this industry while allowing me to find opportunities to refine keyword intent to better serve users. Chima Mmeje, founder of Zenith Copy, audits reviews to shape long-form content based on the problems that people repeatedly bring up about competing brands. This lets her differentiate her content while shaping it to also serve as a sales enablement asset. She explains that, for sales prospects, product comparison content can be “more valuable than a quick answer because it touches on the problem they faced with a competing brand.” For the purposes of SEO, user reviews can be particularly useful when the reviews contain requests or issues with something for which a solution already exists, but has not been communicated clearly. If you know how to solve some of those pain points, then you can improve your review ratings by making content that will help users get better outcomes. Then, you can reply to these reviews with a link to a blog or documentation created specifically based on their feedback. This can build trust with your customers and create an authentic relationship with your brand. Ask your audience There are a few ways to do this, but this most public example of this tactic comes from YouTube. Successful YouTubers do this all the time. Once viewers have been asked to “smash that subscribe button,” YouTubers look straight into the camera and ask their subscribers which topics they should cover next. Channels like Screen Junkies will often include the replies they received on older videos to frame the content of new videos (as shown above). Demonstrating that your brand listens helps to establish a relationship with the audience and encourages more recommendations, which ultimately means more ideas for user-first content. If you are not a YouTuber, then consider using more traditional methods of gathering customer insights, including: Customer surveys Client interviews Feedback forms Focus groups Each of these sources will help you assess and prioritize the content your customers need right now. JJ Nato-Pascasio, senior SEO strategist at Balsam International Unlimited, uses customer surveys to get “insights on what is currently working and is not working well with our customers.” Where they discover information gaps, Nato-Pascasio uses the notes to “create content, usually in an FAQ form or a full article with video and image guides, depending on the complexity.” Combine primary sources with keyword research tools to help more of your audience The primary sources that I have shared here help you create content based directly on user needs. This is not to say that third-party keyword research tools are not valuable—they are, but they should be used in tandem with more qualitative, user-centric sources of information. Keyword tools use historic data to show search volumes, and historical data can’t help you predict new ways your customers may be using your products or how your industry may evolve. So, taking this combined approach can help your brand serve customers now and in the future. Crystal Carter - Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO & digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush, and more. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Lidia Infante Competitor analysis is one of the most fundamental marketing strategies, yet many businesses miss the mark, which could ultimately lead to uninformed decisions and lost revenue. Often, this comes down to incorrectly identifying competitors. This is true for search marketers and SEOs, too. Competitor analysis is key to developing an effective SEO strategy, but your idea of who your competitors are could be just the tip of the iceberg, or worse yet, completely off. When trying to identify our competitors, many of our own biases can get in the way. We might overestimate how significant a competitor is if we’re familiar with that brand or let our ego get in the way by thinking we’re competing against bigger fish than we really are. The solution to biases in competitor identification is adopting a data-led approach. In this article, I will cover the different ways you can identify search competitors and how to choose the right method for your business. Table of contents: Why competitor identification matters What constitutes an SEO competitor How to identify your SEO competitors Manual analysis Bottom-up analysis Top-down analysis Competitor research tools Why does competitor identification matter? SEO is a zero-sum game. Every position you gain in the rankings is a position that someone else loses. Your ranking efforts don’t happen in a vacuum, so understanding who your competitors are and what they are doing is completely essential. Competitor identification is a foundational step in various SEO techniques, like an SEO gap analysis, a content gap analysis, tracking your share of search, and different link building techniques. I cannot stress this enough: you are not alone in the SERPs and every part of your SEO strategy is context-dependent. What constitutes an SEO competitor? Most organizations have a clear view of who they think their commercial competitors are. An SEO competitor is a little bit different, though. For a brand to be a real SEO competitor for your business, it needs to meet these three criteria: 01. The business targets the same keywords as your brand This is the most obvious piece of criteria, but it’s often mistaken as the only criteria. An SEO competitor is a brand that’s trying to gain visibility in the same SERPs as you. This is independent of how the business chooses to rank, be it a blue link, a local search listing, or a video. 02. The business speaks to your target audience I will illustrate this with an example: a B2C eCommerce brand probably does not need to worry about big B2B distributors, even if they’re ranking for the same keywords. This is because they are targeting different audiences and different types of buyers. In practice, even if a B2B brand ranks number one, the intent of the B2C consumer will not be met and they will move on to the next result. 03. The business answers the same consumer needs This is closely related to point number two, but it’s important enough to give it a section of its own. To understand this, let’s consider an example. A user is looking to buy a bodysuit and two different results come up at the top of the SERP: The first result is a product listing from an eCommerce store, with all the relevant information, like product description, reviews, size and color options, and price. The next results are opinion articles about the product, as tested by various individuals. The user is looking to buy the product, so the second result does not address the same consumer needs, even if it’s technically about the same product. How to identify your SEO competitors You can identify your real SEO competitors via a manual analysis or using data. Let’s take a look at these methods in more detail. Manual analysis Manual analysis is the process of conducting a manual search for your target keywords and then skimming the results to identify your SEO competitors. It’s possible for this approach to lead to a biased or inaccurate competitor list, but even so, this method is not without merit. Manually browsing SERPs for your target keywords and getting familiar with what they look like can have a ton of value. Who this is for This approach is best for businesses with a small pool of target keywords or a limited marketing budget. Pros and cons This analysis is completely free to perform (since it doesn’t require any paid tools) and provides a great overview of what users see when they interact with your brand in search. Unfortunately, this approach is the most likely to result in an inaccurate or biased list of competitors. Bottom-up analysis This approach is more quantitative than the manual method above, which could help you create a more compelling case with stakeholders that might need to approve additional resources for you to take on the competitors you’ve identified. Who this is for This approach is best for new sites that aren’t currently ranking for many of their target keywords and for businesses with a broad set of products or keywords. Pros and cons This method is slow, but provides the most accurate results. Since it’s driven by tools, it can keep marketers a little bit in the dark when it comes to what actual users see when they search. Another wonderful advantage of this process is being able to analyze competition by topic and surface the SERP features that Google shows users. How to conduct a bottom-up competitor analysis 01. Identify target keywords and group them into topics or clusters. 02. Download SERP results. For each keyword, you are going to download the SERP results, including the top 10 and the first results page. You can do this with most SEO tools, such as Semrush, Moz or Ahrefs. We will cover these in a later section. 03. Analyze your SERP data. Analyze the data to surface what websites show up in your search results more often. The more frequently a given business appears, the more relevant they are as SEO competitors. 04. Filter out false competitors. Review your results to weed out irrelevant sites that do not match the SEO competitor criteria listed above. 05. Analyze your competition by topic. Group your SERP results data by topic cluster and pick your top competitor(s) by product/topic. From here, you can drill down even further to classify the SERP features that are showing for each cluster. This can help you identify whether your best strategy might include infographics, video, images, or other formats. Template Since you’ll be working through several steps and a lot of data, I’ve provided a free template that you can use for the bottom-up approach. Top-down analysis The top-down method is the fastest data-driven method you can use. However, unlike the bottom-up method, it emphasizes organizational knowledge as opposed to relying so heavily on the SERP. Who this is for This method is best for established sites that are already ranking for their core keywords. This will work best if you have a clear idea of who your product and commercial competitors are. Pros and cons A very interesting advantage of this approach is that it can help you foster stronger connections and communication across departments. It may even increase your stakeholder buy-in, since other teams will have contributed to your efforts. However, the results will not be as detailed at the bottom-up approach, with the inability to dig deep into topics. How to conduct a top-down competitor analysis 01. Ask other departments. Connect with the teams in your organization that are in charge of sales, product, support, and marketing, and ask them who they think your brand’s competitors are. 02. Prioritize the list. Sort the list by how often each competitor comes up in each department’s responses (from the first step above). The more a competitor is mentioned, the higher up the list it goes. 03. Compare it with an SEO research tool. Use an SEO research tool and read through the list of SEO competitors it provides (more on this in the section below). Cross-reference it with your prioritized list and find the overlap. Competitor research tools There are many SEO tools available that you can use for competitor research. In fact, most SEO tools offer some form of competitor research capability. Below, I’ve shared some of my favorites and why I love them—and no, these are not sponsored mentions. Semrush Semrush has the broadest offering I’ve seen in the market for competitor identification, tracking, and market analysis. When it comes to competitor identification, it offers the basics, like a list of SEO competitors and a rich database for PPC competitors, which makes it a solid choice. When it comes to competitor tracking once you’ve identified them, Semrush offers tracking for both organic rankings and paid keywords in search, as well as social media tracking. What really makes it stand out for me is the traffic analytics for any domain, segmented by channel, and the market explorer feature for analyzing your competitor’s audience and benchmarking your traffic. I use Semrush Eye On to schedule a weekly report that gets sent to my whole team. The report shows new pages, blog posts, or ads that our competitors have published in the last week. Moz I have tried Moz’s True Competitor tool and it’s really effective. I used it a few times as part of my top-down approach and I was surprised to find that it delivered very similar results to my bottom-up approach. If you’re short on time, but need more accuracy than the top-down approach provides, this would be my tool of choice. SISTRIX SISTRIX stands out when it comes to competitor analysis and identification thanks to its Visibility Index. This proprietary metric combines search volume and expected CTR for a domain’s main keywords and allows you to compare your visibility against your competitors’ over time. Ahrefs Ahrefs is very efficient when it comes to analyzing competitors using a bottom-up approach. Its ability to export SERP results in bulk for your selected keywords into a CSV file makes this method work a little faster without losing accuracy. The export also includes SERP features and the parent topic for each keyword, which can facilitate clustering and analysis of your target search results. Now that you know who you’re up against… Now that you have a clear idea of who your competitors are, you can get started with a few different SEO techniques to grow your organic traffic. If you’re looking to create a full SEO strategy from scratch, you should look into performing an SEO gap analysis. This will help you uncover the most impactful tactics to help you reach your audience online. You might find that you need to invest in your technical SEO, that you need to create more content, or that you need to get to work on building your brand. If you have a solid strategy in place and you’re looking for content ideas, a content gap analysis will be an excellent next step. You will also want to set up some form of tracking for your closest competitors. I recommend that you keep an eye on the closest competitors performing both below and above you, as well as an aspirational competitor. This way, you can keep an eye out for the underdog trying to take over your rankings, as well as gain inspiration from the businesses that are doing well in your industry. 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

Author: Simon Cox There’s always a little bit of apprehension before hitting the “Publish” button on a new piece of content. By this point in the process, the content should have been completed, checked, and approved for release. This prevents issues like accidental publishing or site visitors getting a half-finished article—which could lead to user frustration and make your brand (or yourself, if you’re an SEO freelancer or at an agency) seem unprofessional. Instead of working directly within the Wix platform, I use a Google Docs content template that I have developed over the years to help me sidestep these issues and ensure consistently optimized, quality content. The template is simply a placeholder for all the elements needed to create a content piece, but it facilitates on-page SEO, workflows (both in a collaborative or solo setting), and distribution. Let’s first look at why content templates can be such a valuable resource, and then we’ll dive into how to use the Wix content template that I’ve developed. Better workflows create better deliverables A template might feel like more work or just seem unnecessary to some, but they enable you to work smarter so that you don’t have to work harder to rectify mistakes later on. Here’s how content templates can help you achieve efficiency while simultaneously keeping everyone on the same page and reinforcing SEO fundamentals: Support on-page SEO Consistency is the key, and getting all the elements needed means putting together a process—a template can really help with that. For example: A missing meta description means that your page may be less inviting to potential visitors on the search engine results page (SERP). A missing social media image can result in the default image being shown, which is probably not optimal for getting traffic to your content. Improper formatting can make it more difficult for search engines and users to understand your content, which is bad for search visibility and won’t help you move users down your sales funnel. In my template, I have repeated some of the recommendations that are in the Wix blog fields and added some of my own. This not only saves time, but subliminally trains others in the art of SEO as well. Enhance collaborative capabilities I find it easier to collaborate via a Google Docs template as I often work with subject matter experts (SMEs) who discuss the content’s finer details by leaving comments, suggestions, and edits in the Doc. The SMEs can track changes and edit without compromising anything on the website, and I can then edit the document to ensure it reads well, is optimized for search, and then get a final OK from the SMEs and other stakeholders. This also means people can be invited to contribute to the article without having to give them access to your Wix website. Improve content quality with a reliable approval process Once the template is completely filled out, you can submit it to the relevant parties for approval so that you can publish your content. That process will be unique to your situation—if you’re responsible for the final approval, this would be a good time to stop, work on something else, and then come back to the article with fresh eyes and conduct your final review. Once the content is approved, I can then quickly copy and paste all the relevant details into a Wix blog post. This template can also be used for pages on Wix websites, but you will find it most useful for blog posts. The content template I keep a locked version of the template in my Google Drive and make a copy to use for new content, usually naming the file with the title and date for future reference. Your naming system is up to you, but you’ll want to stick to it, so make sure it includes all the details you need at a glance. Here’s my Google Docs content template for Wix—please make a copy and improve it for your own use. The content template breakdown Now, let’s take a look at what the template includes. Campaign: The name of the campaign this piece of content belongs to. This helps with organization and focus. Title: (100 character limit, including spaces) This is terribly important as it’s the title of the page. This will also end up being the post's URL slug (spaces get converted to hyphens automatically and some special characters will get dropped). The title should be unique, on topic, and capture the imagination of your intended audience. You may well want to come back to this and rewrite it after you have completed the actual post—this is why I like to get everything approved before it goes into Wix as it makes sense to have the URL resemble the final title! Summary / meta description: (140 character limit, including spaces) I use the Summary / Meta description field (in the template) to populate the description field (within the Post Settings in the Wix Editor), which is used as the description in the blog listings page. What you enter into this field also automatically populates the meta description field in your SEO Settings. The page’s meta description is picked up by the search engines and may be used as the page description in the SERPs. You are limited to 140 characters for the post description, but the SEO meta description field allows up to 500 characters. You may want to enhance your meta description to improve your click-through rate in the SERPs. Google has been known to adjust the amount of content it shows in the SERP description of the page and will also rewrite this depending on the search term used, so the current best practice is to ensure the main marketing message and topic for this page are mentioned in the first 140 characters. Meta Image URL: (square - shows on news list page) I usually use the Magazine layout for the list of posts on a Wix site, so this needs a square image. Change this to match the Wix list format your site uses. This field is for a URL to the image—don’t add the image into the doc as it is really annoying to extract an image from Google Docs for use in your article! Add the image into the appropriate folder in your Google Drive and put the link to it here. This will enable others to quickly open and see it. Alternatively, someone else can add the link to the file, enabling you to download it and upload it to your site for use in the article. Social Image URL: (1200x630 pixels) As with the meta image, this is a link to the image you will use. Any social media shares or links (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) pointing to the page will automatically pick up the social image if you have included one. If you don’t upload a social image, users on those platforms will get the default image. If you are using a square image for the meta image, then you will need to create a second landscape image for social. It is a really good idea to coordinate this image with your social team—the social image should be crafted to grab attention and bring traffic to the page. Wix will use the first image in the content of a page for both meta images by default, and that’s often not what you want. Upload the meta image first and then the social image. If you upload the social image first, this could get overwritten when you add the meta image. Primary Page Location: This is the location of the page. I use this not only for blog posts but also for static pages, so it’s important to understand where this content fits on the site so that you can ensure there are internal links to the main page. Link to the Primary Page Location from: Edit this section of the template to include a checklist of the main pages on the site. “Other” can be used as a catch-all for anything that isn’t a main page. Categories: (Tick all that apply - will appear in these category news/article pages) You will likely have categories set up in your blog—here is where you can tick those that need to be assigned to the article. It also allows the person writing the content to see what categories are available on the site, which is also quite handy. Related Posts: (max 3 - these appear at bottom of the page - Please provide post title, not the URL) By default, Wix will show the three most recent posts after this content. However, there might be other posts you want to link to and this is where you can add up to three. Add the title of the related posts (not the URL) to make it easier to search for. Publish date/time: This field gives everyone an ETA for when the content is intended to be published. It can also be used to discuss when to schedule the post to publish (by leaving comments in the Google Doc). Credited Author: Choose who the article is attributed to in Wix. You can choose a writer from the dropdown menu or set up a new one. The author can be listed on the blog template and blog lists. Social: (Add # or @ tags that must be included) This field helps your social team target the right audiences with the appropriate hashtags and mentions. Final URL: I use this field when I am building out the post in Wix—not before. It is already filled out with the default URL and post structure (https://www.example.com/post/) so the post URL can be easily appended to it. You can grab the final URL before you publish a blog post by going to the SEO Settings (as shown above), copy that and paste it into the field in the template Doc. Adding the URL here can make internal linking easier and enable your social team to access the URL as they are building and scheduling new social posts to attract traffic back to the site. Newsletter Groups: Oftentimes, there are different audiences or lists that your newsletters will go to. Document who is targeted here so your newsletter team has the right information to work with. Call to Action: To complete your content, consider adding a call to action (CTA)—see Lazarina Stoy’s “Beginner’s guide to CTAs” article on this for a great amount of in-depth advice. Post Body Content When creating a new post in Wix, you can add the headline but you cannot save the post or add things like the cover image until you have something in the main text body. Using my template, you will of course have this, but if you are not using it, you need to type something even if it is just placeholder text. Sometimes I do this while others are still working on the template to meet a looming deadline—I will ready the page for the finalized copy and wait for the nod from my team to grab the content and copy/paste it into Wix. More fields in Wix I have covered all the main fields that are in the Wix blog system, but not all. There are some that may be part of your workflow and you can easily add these to the template to suit your needs by adding extra rows. Tags Separate multiple tags with a comma. You can add up to 30 different tags per post. Tags appear at the end of your post and will also auto-generate a tag list page with a list of posts on that tag topic. Structured data markup Wix blog posts already have really good structured data built into them, but you may have some additional requirements. Add this row to the table so that you can insert your custom Schema. This is a handy place to refer back to it as well. Robots meta tag Yes, you can hide the post from search engines—but then, no one will be able to find it in the search results. There are use cases where this might be important to you, though, and using the noindex tag at the page level is the best way to do this. Other options are also available to prevent snippets and archiving (as shown above). Templates allow you to “measure twice, cut once” Creating a manageable workflow for publishing content is a key discipline that saves time and provides consistency. Templates are an important element in this process. My template was created for my purposes, but it can also serve as a jumping-off point for your needs. However, if you decide to change the template, keep the following in mind: Put together a workflow that suits your environment and conditions. Use Google Docs to enable coordination between subject matter experts and editors. Use the Google Docs version history to keep track of the changes. Template the elements you need to be able to publish an article and ensure they are completed before the article is submitted for approval. Although templates add a layer to your workflow, they also enforce discipline in the publishing process and provide you with all the content elements you need, as well as a track record of changes so that you don’t have to miss opportunities for greater visibility or spend extra time optimizing posts after they’re already live. Simon Cox - Technical SEO Consultant at Cox and Co Creative Simon Cox has been building, managing, optimizing, measuring, and taking websites apart since 1995. In-house at a global financial corporate for many years, he now freelances, bakes bread, and crafts technical SEO audits. Find him at simoncox.com. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Olga Zarr Running a site audit is all about knowing what to look for and where to look for it. Since some sites can have tens of thousands of pages (or even more), this task can be quite a challenge for SEOs and site owners. Nevertheless, with the right guidance from an SEO that has run hundreds of audits (me), you can still conduct a successful, informative site audit—even if you’re a relative novice. This guide will help you learn how to get started with a site audit, including: Why site audits are important Best practices for comprehensive site audits Common site auditing mistakes to avoid Tools to help you conduct successful site audits Why are SEO site audits important? Site audits are like regular health checks with your doctor: In order to stay healthy and perform at your best, you need to undergo regular health exams. It’s no different with websites, except that now, you are the doctor. Moving beyond that analogy, here are some more compelling reasons to regularly audit your site: Site audits help you diagnose critical technical issues before they become a huge problem (e.g., a noindex tag “accidentally” added to pages that should be indexed or improperly implemented redirects that would result in 404 errors). Site audits help you get a comprehensive overview of your site’s (or your client’s site’s) SEO, enabling you to come up with a prioritized list of recommendations. Site audits can help you identify low-hanging fruit—these are low-effort, high-impact optimization opportunities that may result in quick SEO wins. This can be especially valuable as PPC typically brings quick results, while SEO generally takes some time. An in-depth SEO audit can be a solid foundation for a successful long-term SEO strategy. Site audits help you familiarize yourself with and understand the website. If you are auditing a new client’s site, this knowledge will be invaluable. Now that I’ve gone over some of the opportunities that site audits can help you take advantage of, I want to share with you the gist of my many years of experience as an SEO and a site auditor. Best practices for comprehensive SEO site audits Fundamentally, site audits are a communication tool: They convey potentially business-critical information to you, your teammates, as well as other important decision makers (i.e., your client or your head of marketing). You don’t want to create a useless report that no one will understand and want to read. What you want to do is provide a map to remove roadblocks that are preventing the site you’re auditing from bringing in more visitors and/or revenue. Here are my three best practices to help you perform SEO audits that actually move the needle. 01. Start with a manual review This step is crucial and will help you get to know the site from the perspective of the target audience—at the end of the day, it’s all about users and their experience, isn’t it? All you need to do is simply open the website and browse it as if you were a typical user. Don’t forget to use your phone to see what it looks like on a mobile device as well. Navigate through the main menu to visit its main pages and get a general feel for the site. Ask yourself: 01. Do you immediately see something amiss? (e.g., the site is loaded with “Read more” and “Learn more” links or it barely works on mobile) 02. Is the site taking too long to load (especially compared to competitors’ sites)? 03. Do all the elements load correctly? (e.g., does the Mobile-Friendly Test screenshot show all the elements or are there blanks in place of text or images) 04. Is it easy to navigate the site? 05. Are there any frustrating aspects of the site? (e.g., intrusive pop-ups or unexpected layout shifts) I often spot a ton of opportunities for optimization during this very first step. With time and experience, this will become second nature for you. Once you’ve conducted your manual review and answered the questions above (and wrote notes about what you discovered to include in your full audit), it’s time to look at the site as if you were Googlebot. 02. Analyze Google Search Console data Your next step (before diving deep into the main auditing part), should be to check Google Search Console. Google Search Console (GSC), a free technical SEO tool provided by Google, lets you literally see the site through Google’s eyes. Listen to what Google has to say about the site first and do your own SEO analysis next. Some of the GSC reports you should pay special attention to include: The Indexing reports, which let you see how many pages are indexed and if there are indexing issues The Experience reports (especially the Core Web Vitals report), which let you check whether real-world users struggle with the site’s performance The Enhancements reports, which let you validate your structured data The Security & Manual Actions reports, which let you check if the site has been hacked or penalized by Google The Crawl Stats report, lets you see how Google has been crawling the site and if there have been any recent issues When you spot potentially serious issues in your GSC reports, make sure to prioritize and investigate them in your site audit! 03. Use multiple site crawlers The crawling part of an SEO audit is extremely important. During this step, you gather all the crucial information you’ll need for further analysis. Each crawler works a bit differently and will draw your attention to slightly different issues or SEO elements. That’s why I strongly recommend using multiple crawlers to get the entire picture. My favorite setup consists of: Screaming Frog SEO Spider (desktop-based) Sitebulb (desktop-based) JetOctopus (cloud-based) Ahrefs or Semrush site audit (cloud-based) I crawl the site with at least two of these tools (one cloud-based and one desktop-based crawler) and analyze what each tool has to say about the site. Each tool works a bit differently and has a slightly different scope of SEO issues it analyzes, so it is worth using both tools to get a more complete picture of the website. Next, I make a decision about which issues are actually important and what I want to highlight in my SEO audit. Caveat: The size of the site matters Depending on the size of the site, it may not always be a good idea to crawl it with multiple crawlers. For example, if you are auditing a huge eCommerce site that has millions of pages, you can probably stick with one fast crawler, like JetOctopus. In that case, you will most likely be looking for patterns across groups of pages instead of providing detailed recommendations for specific pages. Conversely, if you are auditing a small or medium-sized site, you can go very deep and use multiple crawlers. This is an awesome learning exercise for you as an SEO, too. Not only will you get to know the site very well, but you will also get familiar with those crawlers and how they work. Common SEO site auditing mistakes to avoid For obvious reasons, it’s important to be aware of best practices. But, it can be just as useful (and potentially timesaving) to know what mistakes to avoid as well. Steer clear of these three mistakes and you will be on your way to creating informative, actionable site audits. 01. Don’t mindlessly follow SEO tool recommendations Each SEO crawler has its own checklist of elements it analyzes and a list of its own recommendations. One of the biggest SEO audit mistakes you can make is to thoughtlessly follow what the tool suggests. The tool does not know the context of the website. Only you know it. The crawler just knows what it’s programmed to look for. It is you—a human SEO with a brain—that should determine whether the issue a tool has flagged is actually an issue. For example, the tool may tell you that there are critical indexing problems with the site. You dig deep and see that one page (out of 10,000) has a noindex tag. Moreover, this is a relatively unimportant page. Should you raise the alarm about indexing issues in your audit? Nope! What if this noindex tag was present across the entire site? Should you raise an alarm then? It depends! You should if this is a production site, for example. You definitely should not if this is a staging site. It all depends on the context. That’s why you should create your own list of SEO elements to check with the help of a crawler (or two). It should never be the crawler that tells you what to check and, even worse, what the priority of that element is. Crawlers rarely get it right. You need to. If you have not come up with your own site audit checklist yet, you may want to use my SEO audit guide. 02. Carefully assess the scale and severity of each issue Automated site audits generated by SEO crawlers are always full of red and orange alerts screaming that this issue is critical or high priority. As noted in the section above, they rarely have anything to do with the actual state of things. You should create your site audit based on your analysis of the data gathered during the crawling process and your knowledge of the context of the website. That’s why you need to always take into account the following when assessing potential issues: The actual scale of the issue (whether it concerns one page or 95% of pages) The actual severity of the issue (whether it directly affects the site’s organic traffic or revenue) For example, not having one already-indexed URL in the sitemap is not really an issue. However, having one million non-indexable URLs in an eCommerce site’s XML sitemap definitely is. For auditing tools, those two will be viewed as similar issues, but you definitely know that they are not. That’s why you—the human SEO or site owner—is so crucial in each step of the site audit. 03. Don’t forget to execute JavaScript when crawling Depending on how the site is set up, the source code and the rendered HTML may differ significantly. If those differences relate to the main content of the site or SEO elements (like titles or meta descriptions), the site may have a serious problem. That’s why it is critical to always execute JavaScript when crawling a site that has JS functionalities. Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, and JetOctopus all let you execute JavaScript and compare the rendered content against source code. However, they may not execute JavaScript by default, which means you need to remember to configure them properly to do that for you. To do so, check the tool provider’s documentation. Tools to help you conduct successful site audits Here are some site auditing tools that I recommend, along with how I use them. Additionally, you can also download Wix's free SEO site audit template to organize your audit. Auditing tools from Google As mentioned in the section above (about using GSC for your audits), Google tools will show you how the search engine actually sees your site. I could argue that these are the most important SEO audit tools: Google Search Console to show you what Googlebot actually sees on the site Mobile-Friendly Test to check if the site is suitable for mobile users and to see if the rendered mobile screenshot looks correct PageSpeed Insights to learn about the performance of the site and possibly get some tips on how to improve it (Note: Wix users can access PageSpeed Insights from directly within their Wix Site Speed dashboard) Note that Google Search Console is actually made of multiple tools and reports that are critically important. If you haven’t already, make it a priority to learn Google Search Console from A to Z. It’s even possible to audit a site using just Google Search Console. Chrome extensions for site audits There are lots of super useful Chrome extensions that will help you analyze various SEO elements. At a bare minimum, you should be using: Chrome Web Developer to check how the site works without JavaScript Detailed SEO to view the SEO elements of a given page (title, meta description, headings, images, Schema, etc.) Link Redirect Trace to see the entire redirect path and status codes of a given page NoFollow to immediately see all nofollow links on a given page Site crawlers In most cases, you won’t be able to perform a decent SEO audit without crawling the site. Here are the crawlers I recommend: Screaming Frog SEO Spider (paid or free with limits) is a desktop-based crawler that includes recommendations. Sitebulb (paid) is a desktop-based crawler that contains a ton of explanations and links to relevant articles about specific issues (ideal if you want to learn while auditing). JetOctopus (paid) is cloud-based and the fastest crawler, making it suitable for larger websites that may have trouble crawling with desktop-based crawlers. Ahrefs and/or Semrush (paid) both offer cloud-based crawlers that are good for ongoing site monitoring and learning about potential issues (like 404 pages) before they start affecting your users and traffic. As mentioned earlier, I recommend using a combination of these crawlers during your audit to uncover as many potential issues as you can. Site audits provide a roadmap, it’s up to you to follow it Once you’ve completed your audit, you’ll have a list of issues that likely needs to be prioritized (from most to least impactful) so that you can act on them. But, fixing issues is not usually flashy work, even though it could lead to more conversions for your business. That’s why it’s important to continuously report on your SEO efforts, so that stakeholders can see the business impact from your site audit, providing you with a stronger case for more SEO resources in the future. Olga Zarr - SEO Consultant & CEO at SEOSLY Olga is the founder and CEO of SEOSLY, where she shares her knowledge in the form of in-depth articles, tutorials, and videos. As an SEO consultant with 10+ years of experience working at agencies and in-house, she specializes in technical SEO and in-depth audits. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Ashwin Balakrishnan If search engine optimization had its own currency, there are few better candidates than the backlink. In the past, digital marketers would plan elaborate strategies to acquire as many backlinks as possible. It’s not an exaggeration to say they were once the building blocks of organic traffic growth. Today’s search algorithms are more adept at deciphering user intent, which allows Google to rank sites based on much more than referrals. But, backlinks are still valuable, even if they’re no longer the determining factor in ranking websites. If you’re curious about how to best use backlinks for your website—or just want to get started from the very beginning—this article will walk you through: Backlink fundamentals: What they are and how they work How and why backlinks are beneficial Scenarios where backlinks are especially valuable Website attributes that influence link quality Tips and resources to win more, better backlinks Frequently asked questions about backlinks The secret to a winning link building strategy Note: This article refers to Google as the default search engine due to its market share and advanced language processing capabilities. Many of the principles and concepts discussed here are applicable to other search engines as well. What are backlinks? The fundamentals Backlinks aren’t complicated. In SEO, backlinks are hyperlinks that take users from one web page to another, and they form the strongest referral network in online search. Before we get into the details of how backlinks work, here are some helpful terms that are universally applicable to all websites, SEO practitioners, and link-building programs. Important backlink terminology You’ll run into some of these terms when using keyword tools, such as Ahrefs (shown below), Semrush, RankRanger, etc. Reminder: Not all backlinks are made equal When building a strong backlink profile, the most critical factors are the quality and relevance of referring domains and pages. Relevant backlinks from authoritative sites signal to Google that your page is worthy of attention. You might hear SEO practitioners refer to this associated equity as “link juice.” To get the most benefit from the link juice you’ve earned, aim for quality over quantity—as suggested by the search engine with some of the world’s most sophisticated language processing capabilities. Pages can rank even with “one really good link from one website . . . . that is, for us, a really important sign that we should treat this website as something that is relevant because it has that one link,” said Google Search Advocate John Mueller during a webinar from early 2021. In other words, the total number of backlinks to a page does not matter. So, what does that mean for link building? Let’s say you’re trying to rank a blog post about how to improve your CTAs (calls to action). Focus your link building strategy on websites that Google deems to be authorities in related domains, such as conversion rate optimization or digital advertising. You’ll do better with a couple of those links, rather than dozens from low-quality sites or ones with no connection to your topic. How do backlinks add value to your website? It’s clear that backlinks make the internet go round, but what exactly do they do? And why does virtually every large business seem ready to invest in a link building program? These are some reasons why marketing teams find link building valuable. Increased organic traffic: Backlinks remain one of the leading search ranking factors. All other considerations being equal, a page with relevant, authoritative backlinks is more likely to rank on page one of Google for its target queries. Increased referral traffic: Links from high-traffic sites and pages tend to increase traffic to your website via clicks from the referring page. Credibility with Google: Google assesses a site’s content quality based on signals that indicate expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T). Backlinks are a sign that your page knows what it’s talking about and can be trusted. Credibility with readers: Pages with links from websites established in their industry are more likely to be convincing and reliable to the people you want to reach. Faster indexing time: When you publish a page with internal backlinks from already-indexed pages, Google is faster to discover and crawl the new page. Situations where backlinks are especially valuable There are no instances where the right backlinks are detrimental to search rank and quality. Investing in link building is rarely a bad idea as long as your site is well structured and optimized for search. However, some scenarios make the investment truly worthwhile. Your content is truly unique: Expert interviews and proprietary research are two examples of content that’s often original and difficult to replicate, making it a natural target for link building. Your target keywords aren’t generic: If you’re writing a blog post targeting generic keywords like “best lipstick colors,” you’ll have a much harder time building backlinks than someone doing so for a listicle targeting the “top 10 plant-based lipstick brands.” Not only is there likely to be more competition for backlinks for more generic topics, but that heightened competition will also play out in the search results as well. You’re writing for search terms with no data: Some keywords have a low number of monthly searches or are so specific that it's tough to find search history data for them. Many businesses ignore the opportunities these keywords offer, such as acquiring high-intent customers or dominating the results for a query. As you publish content to win more of this traffic, you’ll likely earn relevant backlinks, which signals to Google (and your readers) that you’re the new authority on the subject. Referring domain attributes that influence link quality When searching for a new job, a reference from a respected expert in your industry can put you ahead of the competition. Similarly, being associated with websites in good standing with Google can decrease the time it takes for your online content to rank. Here are a few factors that make some referrals more valuable than others. Site quality: Google tends to view referring domains with strong E-A-T, site structure, and user experience more favorably. Backlinks from these sites are preferable to similar websites without those qualities. Site relevance: The proximity and relevance of a referring domain/page to the target page on your website makes a huge difference in terms of backlink quality. It doesn’t have to be exact, but it should be close. For example, Google is likely to more favorably value links between sites from two different digital marketing disciplines, as opposed to those links existing between a site about marketing and a site about pet adoption. Anchor text: Google looks at anchor text to better understand what a page is about, as well as what a given link is trying to indicate. The more direct and relevant the anchor text is to the topic it links to, the more context Google will have to be able to rank it appropriately for relevant queries. Link type: Follow links tell Google’s crawlers to “follow” the link and crawl the target page. These are the most valuable type of backlink for passing link equity and are typically the default setting (although some brands and publishers do elect to nofollow all external links). Nofollow links use a specific tag to cut off link juice (although Google treats this attribute as a hint rather than a directive, meaning that it may choose to pass link equity anyway), while UGC (user-generated content) and sponsored tags tell Google that a link is either outside a site’s control or paid for. 3 under-utilized link-building tactics for a better backlink profile Link building isn’t easy, but it’s one of the most crucial parts of a successful SEO strategy. While every business and site should make the right strategic choices for their particular goals, there are some best practices everyone can apply to earn and retain the best backlinks possible. 01. Nurture relationships with your industry’s top creators and brands One of the easiest ways to win links consistently over time is to approach it like a good sales rep: treating people like people. Take a genuine interest in what they do, give and help more than you take, and even add a personal facet to your rapport. Cold emails might work some of the time, but even relevant pitches can feel transactional. It’s far easier to make relevant, appropriate backlink requests of someone with whom you have a relationship. Just be sure not to take liberties with the relationships you cultivate; they can take months to build, but minutes to undo. Avoid behaviors such as: Asking for backlinks too frequently or in multiples Pitching pages or sites that aren’t mutually relevant Making it their job to find/suggest anchor text 02. Monitor and resolve broken backlinks Once you earn a backlink, it’s not safe forever. Referring domains change, pages get deprecated, and even their subject matter can move in a completely different direction. You want to stay on top of these links, but you also want to make sure that the pages they point to are active and accessible. Backlink monitoring is as much a part of SEO as winning the initial link. Tools popular with many SEO practitioners include: Google Search Console, which is free forever SEO Spider from Screaming Frog, which is free for up to 500 URLs Semrush, which offers a seven-day free trial with full access SEO Spyglass, which is free to try and offers deep backlink insights Free template: Download our backlink tracking template to organize your link building for efficiency and better results. 03. Explore niche sites Ever come across a recipe blog where all the recipes are from the southern US? Or a website dedicated to Dungeons and Dragons novices making their first characters? Both of these are examples of niche websites. Niche sites typically cater to a very specific topic and audience, and are often one of few sites competing for a sizable chunk of traffic. If they align with your website’s topic, it may provide an opportunity to build a relationship that comes with a steady supply of backlinks. In addition to niche sites, there are other opportunities to win different types of backlinks (beware: many are nofollow links, which are better for traffic than authority). Examples include: Social media profiles and bios, including those of the key employees at your company Directory sites like G2, Capterra, Yelp, and other aggregators that allow you to edit a profile Community sites like Reddit, Quora, and topic- or niche-specific forums Backlink FAQ How many backlinks do I need for my website? Google has confirmed that there is no minimum number of backlinks required to rank a page or website. When PageRank was Google’s only search ranking algorithm, link quantity played a role in determining SEO success. While the ranking algorithms today are more varied and complex, it’s likely that outdated best practices still play a role in the remaining emphasis on backlink count. If traffic is your primary concern, emphasize quality; a single, relevant referring domain can provide you with far more traffic than thousands of backlinks on less relevant, lower-quality sites. What should I do with backlinks I don’t want? All websites receive links they don’t want. Some are irrelevant; others are inappropriate or spammy. From adult websites to low-quality content aggregators, there are many reasons a backlink can be undesirable. According to Google, you can simply ignore them. But, if you have a manual action against your site for unnatural backlinks, you can use Google’s own disavow feature in Search Console. Is building backlinks enough to rank? Sorry, it’s not; content quality is paramount. However, when comparing two pages of similar quality about the same topic, the one with more quality backlinks is much more likely to rank higher. And, since we can’t know exactly what factors Google uses to determine content quality, any successful SEO strategy should prioritize both content and backlinks. I don’t want to spend time building links. Can’t I buy them instead? This is a bit of a gray area in SEO: Google’s Search Central documentation states that “​​any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.” While it’s always better to build links organically over time, many websites do bend these rules to finance a paid link building strategy with no penalties. If you decide to pursue a strategy that violates Google’s guidelines, know that you risk incurring ranking penalties or even being removed from the results entirely. The secret to a winning link building strategy Like all other parts of SEO, link building doesn’t translate to success in isolation. Some of the reasons why link building fails (or why businesses give up on it too soon) include: Expecting overnight results Content that isn’t original or high-quality Neglecting internal linking Poor site structure and experience No cohesion between organic and paid content Every site has to work harder at the beginning of its link building journey. But, backlinks are one of marketing’s best examples of the Snowball Effect, where initial slow momentum gives way to compounding benefits that require less effort. As you publish more high-quality content and win more relevant backlinks, more people will discover those pages organically (through search and referrals). That leads to more pages linking to your content without any effort from you (known as passive link building). Link building isn’t about flash and wizardry. It’s about getting the basics right day after day, week after week, year after year. Great SEO is a marathon that never ends; there’s no destination, only a journey that can prove to be either very rewarding or very expensive. Ashwin Balakrishnan - Head of Marketing at Optmyzr Ashwin Balakrishnan is a B2B SaaS marketer specializing in organic growth, backlinks, and content SEO. He leads the marketing team at Optmyzr, where he hosts the Search Marketing Academy podcast. His personal backlink profile includes gaming, Lego, and electronic music. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Yagmur Simsek By publishing optimized, high-quality content that takes target audiences into account, tech startups can amplify their brand visibility on search engine results pages. For newer businesses, this could provide a direct path to the decision makers who are in charge of purchasing products or services like yours, allowing you to potentially leapfrog over more established brands. In addition to helping you attract site visitors and leads, a proper B2B SEO content strategy can also help you demonstrate leadership in your field and subject matter authority for the topics you cover—both of which are important for buyers and for organic visibility. Crafting such a strategy generally takes planning, effort, and experience. Fortunately, there are specific guidelines and recommendations that you can follow to make the process simpler (but just as effective). In this article, I share an in-depth introduction to B2B SEO content strategy and instructions on how to put it into practice for your startup, including: How to create a B2B content strategy for your tech startup Step 1: Establish your goals Step 2: Understand your tech buyers Step 3: Create evergreen and sustainable content strategies Content auditing Content gap analysis Keyword research and mapping Content briefing and management Tips for B2B content strategy success Conduct A/B testing Analyze your competitors’ menu navigation How to create a B2B content strategy for your tech startup As a tech startup, your need for credibility, reputable content, and brand awareness is more critical than it might be for the established brands that you’re competing against. You may need to: Make your audience aware of your service or product. Fill knowledge gaps about your brand. Consider the user journey stages (awareness, interest, consideration, evaluation, purchase, post-purchase). Account for search intent (informational, navigational, commercial, transactional). Brainstorming around these parameters will help you speak to your audience while furthering your own business goals (such as increasing brand awareness or leads, for example). With content marketing, you’ll do this by creating and publishing content that engages your customers and answers their questions. This can include any number of offerings, such as blog posts, white papers, case studies, lead magnets, how-to videos, workshops, guides, FAQ pages, glossaries, educational hubs, and more. Step 1: Establish your goals As with any industry, it is imperative that you define the metrics that you will use to measure your success. For example, you could aim to increase your visitors by 65% in the next six months. Or, you could try to rank #1 on Google within the next three to four months for your most important keywords. While not mutually exclusive, these are two distinct goals, and so you need to prioritize wisely as your most important goals will determine your content needs. Below is a free Google Sheets template that I created to help you understand your needs, get clear ideas about your future success metrics before you start your journey, and define your goals. You can click on the table, make a copy of the Google Sheet and type your answers into your copy to have it as a reference to guide your team’s efforts moving forward. Step 2: Understand your tech buyers A thorough understanding of your target audience is absolutely necessary for success: What are their pain points? How can you help address those pain points? What solutions (content, products, or services) do you have to offer them? This is why many companies meticulously craft buyer personas, which enable them to better understand how to guide their customers from start to finish. In order to create your buyer personas, study your current and/or ideal clients. Look at their demographics, both business and personal. These factors can include: Size of their company Their firm’s estimated annual revenue Position within their company The amount of influence that they have in their firm Cultural background Age Education Most importantly, your buyer personas should also account for your audience’s business goals. How can you help them reach their goals with your tech solutions? You can get even more granular by creating an empathy map for your potential customers: Put your personas in a hypothetical situation and think about what keeps them awake at night, what would worry them within the context of your industry, and any other factors that may potentially affect their buying decisions. The more you expand your research, the more you can narrow down your audience, which will eventually help with your keyword research and content strategy for long tail keywords. To learn more about this part of the process, here is a link to some useful reads about creating buyer personas and empathy maps. Step 3: Create evergreen and sustainable content strategies Many companies, including tech startups, attempt to create content that would likely be too ambitious for a relative newcomer to the industry. So instead, start small and focus on one powerful area of your site: your company blog or resource section (including guides, checklists, or tools, for example). From there, you can build your audience, focus on identifying relevant keywords, and write content tailored to your customer's pain points by offering them solutions and informative resources. For instance, a FinTech company could create blog posts about the benefits of its wealth management application by appealing to its customers’ desire to learn more about AI-enabled tools and their advantages. The options are endless, but you have to be willing to research and focus on what you can start with, not what you envision once your firm has amassed significant success. You are a startup—probably with a limited marketing budget and resources. Reflecting those constraints in your content strategy provides you with the most realistic shot at success, which is why you’ll likely need to prioritize evergreen content to get the most out of your effort. Depending on the content you already have on your website, I recommend either starting with a content audit or content gap analysis and moving forward with your content strategy from there. Content auditing A content audit enables you to examine your website’s existing content to identify what performs best or in which areas you need to improve in terms of accuracy, engagement, relevance, readability, and discoverability. This helps you identify content areas that are outdated and no longer useful for your strategy so you can clean them up by removing them from the website, repurposing them to create evergreen content, or optimizing them to improve quality. To help you organize this process, I have created a free content audit template (shown in the image below) with fields for relevant data and metrics for you to add while you audit your site’s content. Make a copy of the Google Sheet and keep the columns that you want to include in your content audit. Within the template, there are also suggested tools to find data about your website content performance to add to the relevant fields. Content gap analysis Although this phase could be a follow-up analysis after you are done with your content audit, you can also analyze content gaps as a starting point if you are going to create content from scratch and feel lost about what topics or categories to prioritize. Before you can begin a competitor content gap analysis, you first need to identify your competitors, considering both brand competitors and organic search competitors. Note: If you don’t use paid SEO tools, you can also discover your competitors by reviewing the first and second pages of Google results when you search for your target keywords in the targeted location. After you come up with a well-researched list of competitors, you can merge the competitors list and start analyzing: Their organic traffic Their top-performing categories, blog posts, and other relevant pages The number of indexed pages on their site The keywords they are ranking for but you are not Then, clean the keyword gap data (remove any branded keywords related to your competitors including product or collection name searches specific to your competitors, irrelevant keywords, etc.) and group the missing or weak keywords to use within your own content strategy. At this stage, I tend to use either Semrush’s Keyword Gap Tool or Ahrefs’ Content Gap Tool to come up with a full list and then dive deep into the data. Depending on your needs, there are different methods that SEO strategists use to identify competitors and keywords to focus on. For example, Lidia Infante has created a very well-structured competitor identification template that you can make a copy of and use as a guide for this task. Keyword research and mapping SEO professionals have different methods and perspectives when it comes to keyword research and mapping. Below is my method when I need to think from the scratch and complete comprehensive keyword research with a limited budget. Consider yourself a playwright: How would you describe the characters in your play? What would be their habits, beliefs, needs, and desires? Then start thinking about how your tech product or service can relate to their personalities and needs. Try to write down 10 potential transactional search queries and 10 informational search queries, considering your target audience and buyer personas. What would they search for? You can then expand on this data using tools with free versions, such as AnswerThePublic, AlsoAsked, People Also Search For, Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension, Google Trends, and so on. Spend some time on your website’s Google Search Console account and analyze which keywords your website is already ranking for within the last 12 months (or 6 months depending on your website history). Download the keyword list. Collect insights and search alternatives, taking into account your customer service and support channel data, social media comments, chatbot conversations, and site search queries (if you are tracking them). These are all valuable assets as they include the data from your niche audience and have the potential to turn visitors into customers or partners, depending on your industry. After discovering your potential target keywords from different platforms, gather all the data together and start analyzing and cleaning the keyword list for your business purposes. I know there are various tools and formulas that can make this process easier and faster. However, from my point of view (and especially if you are dealing with just one business website for a new startup), this is the phase in which you need to spend adequate time and effort to create some clarity for your organic growth strategy. Once you have a well-structured keyword list, you can use it for different purposes, including content strategy and briefing, category naming, URL structuring, internal linking, product descriptions, link building efforts, social media activities, and more. While you are cleaning and grouping your keyword data, there are a few things to consider which could save you time in the future. Below are the elements I always try to include in my keyword research list: Keyword data source: Include the source of the keywords to reference later in case you would like to be consistent in terms of search volumes, etc. Keywords grouped by user intent: I usually group my keywords as shown below and then add additional tags regarding the common concepts, etc. in another column of my spreadsheet. This usually depends on your business niche, competitors' strategies, and your goal with your new content strategy as well. Grouping: Transactional Informational Navigational Commercial Additional Tags: Article/Blog Post/Guide/Checklist/Report Product Page (if there is one) Category Page (if there is one) FAQ (I add this tag to the keywords that I think have the potential for an FAQ-style page) Digital PR Ideation (I add this tag if there is any PR and link building project potential for a specific keyword group) Generic (I add this tag if the keyword represents a very broad search intent.) Content briefing and management After you’ve audited your content, analyzed gaps, and conducted your keyword research, you’ll likely need to create content briefs in order to maintain your content calendar and instruct your writers/creators. While the content brief process may vary depending on content type and business niche, here I have created a content brief checklist that you can make a copy of and fill out to keep your startup’s marketing team and efforts moving in the right direction. Tips for B2B content strategy success There’s nothing worse than publishing content only to find out later that something’s not working—and then continuing along the same path anyway! As a tech startup, you must find the best way to reach your corporate audience. Below are some tactics that I rely on to identify and take advantage of content opportunities. Conduct A/B testing A/B test your content to identify what works best and what doesn’t. This can be extremely useful and set you apart from others in the industry. It will also cut down on the time you spend figuring out the best course for your SEO content as the results of your A/B tests will inform your content workflow. At this stage, make sure to consider your target audience and buyer personas when choosing the content to test, as your audience is who will eventually contribute to your KPIs and success metrics. To learn more about what elements you should test on your website, read Wix’s guide on “What is A/B testing and how to use it to reach your website’s goal.” Analyze your competitors’ menu navigation There are various examples in the tech industry, from HR Tech to FinTech to EdTech, of how SEO content strategies can shape the main website content strategy. When I am about to create a content strategy for a website, I first research and analyze (using the techniques outlined above) to see what content strategies my competitors have used. I then take note of different types of content I came across to do further research later. Although I may use different methods and tools for different websites and topics, here I wanted to share one of my tips specifically for B2B content strategy, as you’ll likely need more insights to gain a useful understanding of the competitive landscape. 01. I prepare my competitors list. 02. I create a new spreadsheet and add the competitors’ names and website URLs. 03. I head to the competitors’ websites and analyze their main menu navigation for both categories and editorial perspectives. If I see any common category name used, I take note of it. In addition, if I see unique content or page ideas, such as tools, calculators, different types of reports, visual content, learning hubs, etc., I make note of them, too. Here are a few examples of how you can quickly analyze the overall content types and structures that tech startups in different niches have used to shape their content strategy through their website. HR Tech: Breathe HR Take a quick glimpse at Breathe’s menu navigation and you can see that the startup’s team has structured its content by categorizing the resources they created. Categories include “calculators,” “guides,” and “content hubs.” Some of the categories also have their own subsections, including content types such as “factsheets,” “webinars,” “videos,” “podcasts,” and so on. For a new HR tech startup, analyzing a few competitors could be a starting point to identifying what really works well in terms of the content type or format. This type of analysis can enable your brand to get started with a strategy that may already be working well for competitors. It can also point you to the strategy that’s likely to yield the highest ROI, as there may not yet be enough budget for a more comprehensive content strategy. Accounting: Xero Even with a quick analysis of menu navigation, you can come up with a few of Xero’s buyer personas (as well as the wider target audience) and compare them with your audience data. Xero’s site strives to make it clear that if you are a small business, or an accountant or bookkeeper, that it has a solution for you. This kind of consideration might also save you some time on the keyword groups you need to focus on and show if you’re missing any potential marketing angles. Health Tech: Unmind B2B health tech startup Unmind also has simple yet eye-catching main menu and resource categorization. The startup has created a “handbook” category to share tips, methods, and professional guidance with HR and business leaders to motivate and support them professionally. After discovering this category within Unmind’s resources dropdown menu, you can start exploring which handbook topics and pieces of content are performing best on their website to see if those topics and areas work within your content strategy as well. Focus on your buyers and the rest will follow With a focus on the right people, their needs, and their roles, tech startups can achieve sustainable SEO success with content marketing. Forget about pursuing irrelevant (and possibly unrealistic) high search volume terms and concentrate on the keywords that will eventually bring you decision makers and future business leads. No matter what industry you are in, start with these tips, keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, be aware of content areas to analyze, continue to iterate and improve on your strategy as your brand matures and you'll have a strong foundation to help take you from relative newcomer to top-of-mind in your industry. Yagmur Simsek - SEO Strategist at Philip Morris International With six years of experience, Yagmur is an SEO and content strategist currently working under Philip Morris International’s roof and has spoken at conferences including International Search Summit Barcelona, Search Y Paris, and Brighton SEO. Linkedin