Search Results

Updated: August 16, 2023 Author: Mordy Oberstein Google’s Search Console is the seminal SEO tool . With the data provided by Search Console, site owners can better understand how their site is performing on Google, assess which pages Google has (or hasn’t) indexed, and make better decisions for online business growth. Due to its central role within SEO, we (here at Wix) wanted to provide access to Search Console performance data directly within our SEO Dashboard . Not only is the dashboard the destination for a concise summary of Search Console data on Wix, it’s also your starting point to access Wix’s SEO tools and settings , as well as educational resources to strengthen your understanding of SEO. In this article, we’ll explore the SEO Dashboard within Wix, including: The Search Console data available to you via the SEO Dashboard How the SEO Dashboard helps you work more efficiently The sitewide SEO Assistant within the SEO Dashboard Tools and settings in the SEO Dashboard How the SEO Dashboard enables deeper SEO education Access Search Console data inside the Wix SEO Dashboard Wix site owners that have already connected their site to Search Console now have access to Search Console performance data from within their the SEO Dashboard (accessible from the left-hand navigation panel of the Wix dashboard by selecting Marketing & SEO > SEO ). The data shown in the dashboard consists of both performance trends data as well as a set of insights to notify you about significant performance changes. Search Console site performance overview The Wix SEO Dashboard leads with a look at the site’s overall performance within Google Search Console. The trends indicate both the number of impressions (the times a URL from your site was viewed among the Google search results) and clicks the site has received during the reporting period. As shown in the screenshot above, you’ll also be able to see the percentage change in both clicks and impressions (i.e.,the increase/decrease in both clicks and impressions seen during the displayed data period relative to the previous data period). The SEO Dashboard enables you to set the data period to show performance trends from the last 7, 30, or 90 days. If you would like to either see historical data or the full set of Search Console performance data, you can access Search Console itself via the link presented under the SEO Dashboard ’s trends chart. Search Console insights To help you use the provided data to optimize your site, we’ve added a set of insights to the SEO Dashboard . Appearing under the aforementioned performance trends data, the insights can help you understand the most significant performance changes to the site during the reporting period. These insights are broken down by pages and queries. Pages This data indicates which of the pages on your website have experienced the most significant changes in terms of impressions or clicks. You can sort the data to show pages that have seen the most drastic period-over-period increase or decrease in either impressions or clicks. This enables you to quickly understand which pages may need some attention and improvement and which pages are thriving (to which you may want to replicate what has worked here on other pages). For example, below you can see the insights for both clicks and impressions: As you can see, none of the most significantly improved pages from an impressions point of view align with the most improved pages as measured by clicks. That might tell me that either the impressions I am getting for these pages are not very aligned with what the user actually wants or that I may need to do some work on the title tags for these articles so as to better encourage users to click. Queries Like the insights afforded at the page level, the query-level insights indicate which search terms provided the most drastic increase (or decrease) in either clicks or impressions. Here, too, the data can be sorted to indicate which search queries have seen the largest increase (or decrease) in either clicks and impressions relative to the previous reporting period. With these insights, you can quickly identify pages that are suddenly underperforming on Google’s search results or, conversely, spot positive changes that produced either clicks or increased SERP visibility . In the case below, for example, three of the queries where the site saw the largest decrease in impressions all relate to the same topic (SEO for Chinese markets). This is a strong indicator that either one page of the site lost significant rankings, was perhaps deindexed, or Google no longer sees the site (overall) as being as relevant as it was previously for this specific topic. Conversely, Google may have added a SERP feature that has impacted the impressions here. The point is that the Search Console data shown in the SEO Dashboard can be extremely helpful in starting the diagnosis process. Work more efficiently with intuitively located SEO tools and settings The redesigned SEO Dashboard goes beyond Search Console data and insights by aggregating all of the SEO tools Wix offers into one location. The sitewide SEO Assistant in the SEO Dashboard The sitewide SEO Assistant panel (the parent to our page-level SEO Assistant tool ) is located at the very top of the SEO Dashboard and can help you identify potential issues that could affect your site’s search visibility. It also provides you with recommendations to resolve these issues—many of which can be implemented from directly within the SEO Assistant itself. As shown above, the first section of the SEO Assistant indicates your SEO Setup Checklist completion status. Next to it, you’ll see the number of issues, recommendations, and completed tasks. Click on View tasks for more details regarding these issues and recommendations. Tasks and recommendations can vary depending on your site. For example, an eCommerce website owner may see recommendations related to product pages, as where a blog owner might see recommendations for blog posts. Note: Site owners do not need to use (or complete) the SEO Assistant to rank well in search results. Tools and settings in the SEO Dashboard Previously, in order to access the SEO Setup Checklist and to connect to Search Console via a one-click connection, users needed to access a specific entry point (separate from the rest of Wix’s SEO tools ). With the SEO Dashboard , all of Wix’s SEO tools can be found in place, including the SEO Setup Checklist and direct Search Console connection. From the SEO Dashboard , you can access the following tools and features: SEO Setup Checklist — Complete foundational SEO tasks and connect to Google Search Console. SEO Settings — Apply folder-level settings to meta tags, robots meta tags, structured data, etc., or manage your page’s SEO at scale with the Edit by Page feature . URL Redirect Manager — Implement single, group, or bulk redirects . Site Inspection — Monitor the status of your pages within Google’s index . Site Verification — Apply meta tags to verify your site on search engines & platforms like Google, Bing, Pinterest, and beyond. Sitemaps — View the individual sitemaps Wix automatically creates and optimizes for your site. Robots.txt Editor — Custom-set the directives offered to search engines as to which pages of your site should be crawled. To better understand the capabilities of these tools and how to use them, see the Complete Guide to Wix SEO . Learn SEO with educational resources right in the dashboard Lastly, to help you get the most out of our capabilities and assist you in formulating your SEO strategy, the dashboard presents you with direct access to educational resources on a range of topics, such as SEO basics , on-site optimization , keyword research , analytics and reporting , local SEO, and more. Dynamically chosen based on how you interact with the SEO tools, the widget offers you educational resources that align with where you are on your SEO journey. Such resources can include specific, actionable tips on foundational SEO implementation, access to new Wix SEO product announcements , as well as materials to help you refine your overall SEO strategy. Additionally, the bottom of the SEO Dashboard ’s education panel presents you with a direct entry point to the Wix SEO Learning Hub . Here, you can access anything from live SEO webinars to an SEO podcast to the full spectrum of SEO articles—all to help you explore and get comfortable with the world of SEO. Easier access to data, tools, and education for better SEO The Wix SEO Dashboard unifies your search optimization work in more ways than one. Beyond centralizing all of the SEO tools available to you on Wix, the SEO Dashboard helps you better contextualize your SEO efforts with direct access to Search Console data and expands your SEO abilities with entry points to educational resources written by experts. The SEO Dashboard makes Wix SEO a far more holistic experience than ever before. Looking to analyze your site in even more detail? Now, you can monitor your organic performance with GSC data available directly within Wix Analytics . Mordy Oberstein - Head of SEO Branding, Wix Mordy is the Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Concurrently he also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Twitter | Linkedin

Speaker: Mordy Oberstein | 11 min Read More

Speaker: Mordy Oberstein | 8 min Read More

May 2, 2023 Is your website content helping or hurting your SEO? Join industry experts for a real-time review of a business website and see how the right content optimizations can help you outrank your competitors in search. In this webinar, we cover: How to evaluate your website content step-by-step Examples of what good on-page SEO looks like Best practices for optimizing your SEO content Check out the webinar deck Meet your hosts: Vahan Petrosyan Director of Technology, Search Engine Journal As Director of Technology at Search Engine Journal (SEJ), Vahan is responsible for overseeing the organization’s entire IT infrastructure. He leads all technical aspects of major initiatives including SEO, programmatic display advertising, engineering solutions, and analytics. Twitter | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, BrightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Transcript: Content review by Wix and SEJ Crystal Carter 0:00 Starting in just a few minutes, we're going to get going with our webinar. I'll be doing a live SEO audit content review with Wix and with SEJ. So we're joined by myself, my co-host, extraordinaire, Mr. Mordy Oberstein, and also by Vahan Petrosyan from SEJ. Thank you so much for joining us today, Vahan. Vahan Petrosyan 0:27 Thank you Mordy and Crystal. Thank you for having me at this amazing event. Crystal Carter 0:31 Thank you. It sounds fantastic and SEJ if you're not familiar with SEJ, which I hope that you are SEJ is Search Engine Journal, it is one of the premier destinations for search engine news and search engine knowledge. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what you do there quickly? Vahan Petrosyan 0:49 Yes, of course Search Engine Journal is a publication which provides news about SEO, PPC, and all kinds of marketing and first source for the news and marketing altogether, at least for me. And yeah, for those who are hearing about Search Engine Journal for the first time, make sure to check out our website at searchenginejournal.com Crystal Carter 1:18 Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for that. Okay, so this webinar, just so that, you know, everyone in the chat, yes, the webinar is being recorded. So if anyone else asks that later on, yes, it has been recorded. In fact, the YouTube link will be sent to you via email right after this webinar, so that you have access to that. And yes, thank you, Vahan Petroysan, indeed. So also, yes it will be sent to you, it will also be posted on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at the same URL that you registered for this session at. So you can find it on WixSEO/learn. And also you can ask questions in the Q&A panel, you're all very familiar with the Q&A panel, because you've been telling us all where you're logging in from. So that's great. And do stay tuned for future webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. We do them every month, we've got another one coming up soon with Google Search Console after this. And that's what we're doing there. So with regards to the agenda we're going to do introductions. Mordy Oberstein 2:23 The newsletter! Crystal Carter 2:25 I forgot to say! Mordy Oberstein 2:27 We have a brand new, almost brand new, the second month, a monthly SEO newsletter called Searchlight, and over at the Wix SEO Learning Hub, so wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, you can subscribe to SEO tips, curated articles, and all sorts of updates on what's happening in the wide world of SEO. Okay, sorry, Crystal. Crystal Carter 2:48 Okay, thank you, thank you. Okay, so after that fantastic plug. With regards to the agenda, we're gonna do introductions, and I'm gonna pass it over to Mordy Oberstein to do all that lovely stuff, then we're gonna get into this website and the whole live site audit. So we're going to talk about a few core pages that will apply to most things. So we're going to talk about the homepage, which applies to everybody. We're going to talk about the FAQ page, which is a page that a lot of people have, but we're going to be looking at it from the perspective of an FAQ page, but also as a static page. And we're also going to have a few notes on the blog. And then we're going to go to the Q&A. So we're going to try to answer your Q&A questions in the Q&A tool at the bottom of the screen as we go along. And then if we see some trends on the questions, we'll answer those at the end. So with that, I'm going to stop my share. And I'm going to pass it over to the extraordinary, the incredible, the fantastic, the wonderful, the amazing, the incredibly stupendous Mordy Oberstein. Mordy Oberstein 3:42 You are you are returning the favor from our podcasts and the Crystal Carter 3:50 but I think I repeated myself, which you never do. Mordy Oberstein 3:52 No, I do. I did. Okay, so before we dive into this website, which is a fabulous website, and we're going to share some lessons around content optimization, from an SEO point of view. I just wanted to give an enormous shout out to Dynamic Wave Consulting. They're a fantastic design firm based out of Philadelphia. They do all sorts of social media marketing, some SEO, marketing, digital marketing and general business development. They've done an amazing job with this website. They're an award winning design agency. So definitely do check them out. They're obviously a Wix Partner. I cannot thank them enough for sharing this website with us. It's a really fantastic website. They've done an amazing job on it. And now let's see what we can learn from the website. So the website we're looking at today. It's a local HVAC business based out of New York. And what we're going to do is take a look starting off with the homepage, and I guess I'll kick it off a little bit. The homepage does really well. First up, the site's really well designed, the information is really clear. It's really logical, the information is well written. There's all sorts of social proof throughout the website. I love the fact that it's integrated with the Google Map. This is really, really well done. What I would say, just one thing that's really interesting that people don't often realize, is how interesting Google can be. So we like to think that Google is super advanced, and they are super advanced. But sometimes, Google has what I call gaps, unexpected gaps that you wouldn't think should be there. And one of them, I think, might come up with this website. If you look at the websites, or rather their Google Business Profile? It says Manhattan HVAC experts. Awesome. It has the location and the name in there. They have reviews in there. It's a really well optimized panel. I love the fact that there are Google posts in there, this panel really appeals to me. Yeah. But if you look at the page, it's like in New York City, Manhattan, New York. So I think Google gets that. But if you scroll down, we often don't think this specific about Google. Here, it talks about Brooklyn, New York, and Brooklyn, New York and New York, New York, they're not exactly the same. For example, if we look at Semrush, which is an SEO tool we have an integration with inside of Wix, and we look for air conditioning repair in Brooklyn, there's a monthly search volume in the US of 170 searches, meaning give or take. It's a very, very, very rough estimate. 170 people look for this term air conditioning repair on Google every month, in Brooklyn, rather. If you look for air conditioning repair in New York, or New York City, that number jumps up to 210. So New York City is a more popular term. So it is theoretically possible that Google might be a little bit confused, does it service Brooklyn, does it service Manhattan, the map seems to talk about Manhattan. So even though you would not think this would be the case, because Google's Well, smart, being super explicit and super consistent in the service areas that you service is really helpful. And to that, by the way, and the last point I'll make before I turn it over to Crystal is, I like to think of a website, the homepage is who you are, what you do. And I think there's room for even going even deeper than the page already does. And it does, the Why Choose Us section is very nice. But sometimes we don't think in terms of SEO content. On the homepage, it might very well be on other pages on this website, going into what exactly are the services? Who is the audience? Or who is the customer that we target? For example, I used to be a CEO of a property manager company in New York City. So if we're targeting, let's say, commercial real estate companies, I might want to talk about all the various city agencies that I work with and how we handle violations and codes and license permits. If I'm targeting, let's say, residential, I want to talk about what services we exactly offer and where we exactly offer them. So don't be afraid on your homepage, to be explicit about who you are, where you service, in this particular case, what services in specific you offer and where you offer them. Even though you might think, well, I already have on the other pages, Google knows. But sometimes we don't. We underestimate the absolute supremacy of the homepage, which is the most important page on the site. Okay, my spiel on the homepage is done. Crystal Carter 8:32 Now, just to top up on that, I think there's a couple of things. So two things for folks who are listening. One, we have a webinar all about homepage SEO and you can hear Mordy wax political about how fantastic the homepage is, you can also hear me go into a lot of very technical details about how you can implement some of those things on your homepage. And there's also another page about location landing pages and the different ways that you can implement locations. For your point about the Brooklyn thing and the New York thing, one thing that might be nice is having an area served part on the homepage at the bottom that's in Brooklyn, New York. Yonkers, New York, I don't know, the Bronx, like whatever whatever it may be. My New York geography fell apart very quickly there but you can break them down into smaller things. I think from my end, one of the things that I always get, one of the things people always ask me at SEO sessions, what's your biggest SEO tip? And my first biggest SEO tip, and it sounds super basic, because it is super basic. And yet I see a lot of people do this in this sort of different way. So I always think about the H1 on your homepage and each H1 on your homepage, I think should be something that works really well. Now, if I look at this page, you think that's the H1 on the homepage, it's not actually the H1 on the homepage. So this is a tool that we're using. This is a free SEO tool called SEO PRO Extension. It's a great tool and you can see that residential and commercial is actually an H3. And also you can see that the H1 is actually way down on the page as Contact Us. And then there's another one that's that's Desi Does Your Air. This is a pretty simple fix. And after the webinar, you'll receive a a list of links for how you can do this. Essentially, you want to think about the priority of the text on your website. Google has a tool called SEO PRO extension. I'll link that to you in the email as well. But yeah, Google kind of has a TLDR approach to some of their content. So if you're to think about it, somebody asked me about H1s, they were like, should you have one H1, or two H1s or three H1s. And I say think about it like Beyonce, there's one Beyonce, there are other members of Destiny's Child, but there's only one Beyonce, right? So your H1 is the Beyonce of your page, and it should be the center stage. And that should essentially be what the page is about. So that applies to your homepage. and that applies to lots of pages as well. And it's a really good way to make sure that you've got good critical information front and center when Google crawls your page, and also try to make it higher up the page to where it says residential and commercial, that should probably be the H1. And make sure that has a keyword for you. So for instance, if they're optimizing for HVAC, you probably want to say, residential and commercial HVAC. You could put New York City in there if you wanted to. Speaker 1 11:36 Yeah, that sort of thing. That's what you want to do with your H1. Mordy Oberstein 11:41 And by the way, from a design point of view, the H1, Google doesn't care what it looks like. Where it says talk to an expert and the phone number, and you really want to make that the biggest thing from a design point of view, Google doesn't care. It's all HTML code. So the H1 is smaller than whatever else you wanted. So you can feel free to design it however you want it. Crystal Carter 12:04 So that tool says New York City HVAC professionals, if you wanted to make a super quick SEO optimization, you could literally just make that the H1. Mordy Oberstein 12:15 Turning over to Vahan. Vahan Petrosyan 12:17 Yeah, thank you. As Mordy mentioned, it's a nice and professionally designed website. The title tag targets the main keyword HVAC professionals, and they have a clear call to action on the page to capture the leads. I have checked also, there is an organization schema markup on the page, which will help Google better understand what is the business, where it's located. And generally including markup on the pages is a best practice I can advise. But I would like to mention a couple of improvements to the homepage and first the title tag. Could you please mouse over the title tag? And yeah, the title tag has a company name in it and title tag is a critical component of every website on page optimization. So it helps search engines understand what your page is about. And it does display the title tag in the search results. So the current title tag contains the company name, it may not be the most effective way to use the limited space available for the title tag because as you know, it has certain character limit on the search result pages. And I suggest instead of having the company name, add the relevant keywords to the title tags such as heating and cooling repair system and it will read like HVAC professionals heating and cooling repairs service in New York City. But as it will help you to target secondary longtail keywords related specifically to this business type. Second, the popup. When I land on a page, I see a popup and it has a great design. What I would suggest is to test the different variations of popup and see how it helps you to convert more leads, like you can change the colors, the type of pop up. Also I would suggest to turn off the popup and see if does help to bring more leads because you have the same lead capture form on the homepage as on the popup, and sometimes users may get frustrated when they're reading experiences is blocked. So that is something I would advise to test and turn off the pop up to see if it helps to improve conversion rates. And third, I would highly recommend to use heatmap analytics. Understanding how your visitors interact with your website is critical for identifying areas for improvement. Heatmap analytics, like Microsoft Clarity, which is a free tool, can provide valuable insights into how visitors are navigating your site, where they are clicking and how they are engaging with your content. This information can help you identify opportunities to improve your site's usability, streamline your navigation and optimize your call to actions. So consider implementing a heatmap analytics tool and implementation is as easy as copy pasting a small JavaScript code into a TMS, which I'm sure allows you to do that. Crystal Carter 16:15 I was gonna say I think testing is really important. So with regards to the title tags, you can test your title tags if you change anything. If you want to experiment in the Wix SEO Setup Checklists, we have options where you can experiment with different keywords and research different keywords. When you're trying to decide what to put in your title tag, and testing CRO or how users are clicking on your site, is also really useful as well. So yeah, testing and monitoring how people are responding to different elements on your site is a great recommendation. Mordy Oberstein 16:52 Yep. And just in case, you're looking at how to do this inside of Wix on here, I pulled up a blog post on a test website that I have, you go to the Seo Panel, you can change the title tag here. There's actually a Semrush integration, which should be here. You can use that as well, to do some keyword research in the Editor. So if you go into the Page Settings, you open up the Seo Panel and you can change your title tag here. By the way, before I move on to the FAQ page, looking at the meta description that the agency wrote, it's fabulous. Adding things like family owned and operated, these are things that Google can show in the search results. And these are things that instil confidence in the user, when they're trying to make a click and maybe it's not an actual SEO ranking factor kind of thing, but a user seeing those kind of little tidbits of information in the meta description can really help create a click, so really job well done with the meta description. Crystal Carter 17:54 I agree I think that's throughout the homepage like that big smiling faces, you know, this is our team. This is who we are. We want an award like we're here for you, we'll help you sort out your air conditioning in the depths of New York summer. Yeah, I'm here for that. Mordy Oberstein 18:08 I really like that and felt instilled with confidence looking at the page. Crystal Carter 18:12 Yeah, it's really great. Mordy Oberstein 18:13 Moving to the FAQ page, I love FAQs. I love this FAQ page. If you look, there's a bunch of really, really great information. What stood out to me, and this is part of the Google algorithmic equation is that you can tell they have firsthand experience and expertise in the topic area, it really shines through. I'm not going to read through all the content now. But if you would like to, I think it's an exemplary way of writing FAQ content, you really get a very, very strong sense that they're experts, that they care and they have first hand experience. So job well done in the actual content itself. From an SEO point of view, just a really quick win. So frequently asked questions, you know, if you wanted to add on the focus keyword, frequently asked questions about HVAC or heating and air conditioning systems. I think that would be a really quick win or something related to that focus area. Crystal Carter 19:15 A nice sub heading as well. Mordy Oberstein 19:17 Yes. And you can absolutely, absolutely add a heading. And a little bit of body text, like here's some questions you might be wondering about your heating and air conditioning system if you live in New York. So again, you're just trying to give Google a little bit more context to chew on. Again, we don't usually think this way about Google because they can make self-driving cars that can understand if a squirrel walked in front of it. But sometimes it's a bot and you have to treat the bot like a bot. Just one other quick point. So there's a page on design and installation, which again offers absolutely amazing information. If you go through it. It's really well designed. It really shows the expertise. It really shows all about what the business does. I love the image of the plans and the diagram. And one thing, though, is that all this is an image. And unfortunately, sometimes Google doesn't understand the content in the image itself. So one easy way is to keep the actual design but when we talk about who we are all this content here, just lay it over in a text box, as opposed to having it in the image itself. It's just a quick win, because this is great content that should definitely help with the ranking of the site. Crystal Carter 20:37 Yeah I agree that the FAQ content here is fantastic. I think it's really good. The first thing I see when I look at this is links, or the lack of links. So I think that adding links to your website, and again, we have some great content on the Wix SEO Hub, we have another webinar about internal linking. And he talks about lots of data that they found from internal linking. But internal links, particularly line links, are a really good way to help Google crawl your site. So basically, the way Google crawls your site is links first. So they bounce from one link, and then they go to the site, they'll find another link, then they'll find another link, then they'll find another link. So if this page is getting a lot of traffic, and FAQ pages have a high potential to do so then this is a great place to put keywords and put links to keywords. So for instance, if you have something like how do I get an HVAC quote? Well, you can get a quote, and then you link to your page for getting a quote on that link. And that would add more keyword value to that to the page that is going to and it would also help users be more helpful to users and also helps Google crawl. We'll send more information about links and using internal links and about that webinar that I've mentioned there. But links again, a really big win for both for users and for bots, and will help your help more content on your page be surfaced more highly. The other thing to think about, so this page, in terms of crawl depth, this is one stage. And so this means that when Google crawls it, they'll crawl the top page and then they'll crawl this one, this is sort of the next layer on your lovely content cake. And so it means that when you're adding links here, you can add links to things that are further down your content hierarchy, and it will help surface those things. So internal links is a big one here, if you've got a page that doesn't have internal links, add internal links to it, especially if it's a page that's this high priority. Mordy Oberstein 22:40 Low hanging fruit. And by the way, this is one add on, you can absolutely go crazy with the FAQs here. I think there's so much content, you can talk about when do I call you if I have a problem? What kind of problems? I like to think of an FAQ as a way of really being explicit about what you do. What services do I do? What do you fix? What do you specialize in? What licenses do you have? Really building that trust and again being really explicit with the search engine about who you are and what you do, and FAQs are actually a great way to do that. Anyway, Vahan. Dear sir. What's your take? Vahan Petrosyan 23:19 I'm impressed that they have an FAQ page. And yes, it's really a great way to increase conversion rates on the website, because it's one thing to bring the traffic and another what to do with the traffic, right. And I see again, the prominent call to action at the end of the FAQ to capture the leads. Great, great job. And I have few recommendations, which can probably help to enhance the FAQ page even more. I would recommend that….seeing a long Q&A screen.....let people click on small icons and expand to answer the question. Because users usually have shorter attention spans and want to find information quickly. That format allows users to quickly scan for the questions and find the information they need without having to read through the long paragraphs of text. By using the code and style format, you can improve the user experience, and of course reduce the bounce rate. Consider adding FAQ schema markup to the FAQ page and the schema markup schema can help make your website be more visible to users in the search page. It may enable rich results that show questions answered directly in the search results, which will help to capture users attention. And one way to do that is to use ChatGPT to generate the schema markup. And you can use this functionality to add that schema to the page. But make sure that you validate that schema markup through one of the online validators available for free. And Search Engine Journal, we have a great article published by Mordy, how to add a schema on a Wix website. That is an article I would advise you to check out. Crystal opened the FAQ page, and I noticed there is also translation available on the upper right corner, right? Can you click on this? Yes, Spanish flag. Yeah. So this is something I would like to recommend, not to publish pages which are kind of under construction, because I see that when you switch to that Spanish version, the text is not translated to Spanish, which means this page is the same as the FAQ page, which will cause a duplicate content issue for Google. Make sure to fully translate the page and if it isn't ready not to publish. And the same also applies for the navigation and all other sections, which are in Spanish. So it's all totally okay to not index these pages, so Google doesn't index them and you can hide them from the the public until they are ready. Crystal Carter 26:53 This is a common thing that I've seen where folks are moving through some of it, and maybe you might try to implement something, and maybe you don't have time to finish or whatever. This is something that can happen. So it's important to check those pages. With regards to the translation, Wix has a great tool that allows you to translate your pages, but you should also make sure that if you're not ready, if you haven't translated all of them, you go through and you can make some visible or you can sort of hide these from search engines, or you can can block them from visibility. So don't let search engines index this page. You can also take them out of the menu. So there's lots of things that you can do. We interviewed Elena Phyllis recently on international SEO and one of the things that she was saying, it's a little bit of a spoiler. I don't know if I'm spilling the beans here. Mordy Oberstein 27:50 Oh, no, no spill the beans. Crystal Carter 27:52 One of the things she said is that if you're planning to do international SEO, even one page of high quality, in the new language, will be of value to users. So as Vahan said you want to avoid having lots of pages that might not be done. If you can only manage one good page, do one good page. And then you can expand it later. Mordy Oberstein 28:15 Yeah, and just really, really quick. So Vahan mentioned creating structured data markup, there's a great free tool called the Schema Markup Generator from Rank Ranger, you select the kind of markup you want to create. So here, it's FAQ markup, you add your questions, the answers, you copy it, and then you go into whatever page you want in Wix, and you list the name of the markup, and you just paste it in. And that's it. We'll also validate the markup for you to make sure that it's good and ready to go. So definitely, by the way, just so you know, in many cases, Wix automatically creates markup for you. So if you look here, oops, I'm on the wrong page. If you go to the homepage. Vahan Petrosyan 28:55 Just a side note that schema markup itself is not a ranking factor. It just aims to help Google understand your content better. Mordy Oberstein 29:04 So in this particular case, we see that the local business structured markup is automatically added to the page. And that's because the team did a great job of adding the address to the bottom of the page here. And once we see that, we automatically add a local business markup to the page. Okay, on to the blog which is my favorite. So first off, kudos for having a blog. Crystal Carter 29:30 Yes. Yes Mordy Oberstein 29:32 Absolutely. Kudos for having a blog. Many sites don't take advantage of it. Crystal Carter 29:36 And we see when we look at the performance of websites overall, sites with blogs tend to perform better. Mordy Oberstein 29:44 You're giving Google some context, some meat that shows some semantic information. You're also giving yourself more ranking opportunities and showing up your expertise. In this case, the content very much does show off the website's expertise and the business expertise. Again, it's clearly written by somebody who has information about the topic, the topics are on target. Sometimes that's not the case with blogs, they're a little bit all over the place. But in this case, the content is very much on target and relevant to the audience. One real quick thing that I think you could do here, again, there's space here, or you can set up the page where you can add an H1 to the page. So you know, HVAC blog, again, being very, very simple about it, you can be a little bit more targeted with it. It just gives a little bit of context to Google just having that H1 there, this is a blog about HVAC tips, or HVAC how-tos, whatever it may be. And then of course, underneath that H1, you can have a little bit of body text, a couple of lines: This is a blog where you can learn all about how to maintain your HVAC system, I'm making that up, whatever it may be. So just really, you know, feel comfortable. Having just one or two lines of content can really help Google and make all the difference. Crystal Carter 31:13 That's huge and you can also again, add those internal links into some of because blogs tend to be more of a sort of informational pages, you can add a link to more of the transactional pages as well, like this is a blog about about how you can or can get HVAC services, and then you can link to your HVAC services, for instance, and move things forward. Mordy Oberstein 31:35 Really interesting point, and I don't know the answer. In this case, it might be absolutely the correct thing to do. So HVAC, if you're not from the property management industry, it might be a term that the average person may or may not know, I do not know, I have no idea if your target audience is, let's say your average homeowner, maybe breaking down the terms, rather than HVAC, air conditioning and heating systems. I don't know if that's exactly accurate. I know there's also venting involved with the V. So I don't know if it's accurate or not. But again, if it's a term that may or may not be readily understood by the audience. If this was a professional property management company, that's your target audience, then HVAC is definitely fine. In this particular case HVAC could be fine. It's nothing to do with this particular website. But something for any website to think about is that you are the expert, you may be using terms that the average person may or may not know about, we see this all the time in SEO, I can throw a bunch of SEO terms and to me, it's like yeah, absolutely, you know, normal jargon. But for most people, when I talk to my wife about it, it sounds like I'm from outer space. Crystal Carter 32:48 My husband goes "internet good?" And I go "yes, internet good." Mordy Oberstein 32:52 You're doing your computer thing, right? So it's one thing to consider. Pause, check yourself. Is that the right terminology? Is it too much jargon for the average user or the average person who we're targeting with our content? In this case, again, I do not know. But it's a general point that I wanted to bring up. Crystal Carter 33:15 Yeah, that's a good general point. I think one of the things I like about their blogs, I get how you were saying about how they're sharing genuine expertise. So I think, and that ultimate guide, the first thing they did was say what HVAC is, which is useful, because honestly I would not know, I did not know before I found out about this website. But one of the other things that I think is great is, I had a look on their website. And again, they're really good with their transparency. They're like, this is our address. This is where we work. This is what we look like, this is what we do. Like, you know, we're all right, that sort of thing. On their Instagram, they've got some great photos of some of their installations. If you see Mordy, if you scroll all the way down, I think you can get to their Instagram. Yeah, if you click on that one for me, they've got some great photos of like, check out this HVAC unit, look at this apartment. I think that that stuff's really useful. Those are the pictures that I want to see. If I want to see if this is a thing for me. I also love those trainers, their sneakers, like I love that. But I think that there's an opportunity to include some of that stuff in the blog. So I think including some of these real life pictures would be really good. And you can literally just take them off of Instagram and pop them onto the blog. I think that helps Google to understand that you have an experience and those pictures will be unique to you because you're the only person who installed an HVAC unit on that particular building. So that's useful. You can also add information about tags and captions that say, you know, this HVAC unit that we installed in the Bronx, I had an apartment a duplex like and that's really great. Additionally, there's an opportunity to add in some quotes so when you go on to the homepage, you've got, you know, big smiling faces of their team who are really enthusiastic about what they do, they've got the shoes to prove it. So it'd be great to have some quotes from them or even from some of their customers. Let's say they've got one that's like, how long should an HVAC system last. They can have another quote that says, "Yeah, I installed a unit and it lasted this long, and it was really great." Or you know, we generally see that the units can last this long or that long. And it's really good for adding in the experience. So Google has experience, expertise, authority and trust. And the experience point is something that is absolutely unique to your team. And it's an easy, really good way to add unique content to your blogs. Mordy Oberstein 35:49 Yeah, by the way, to your point about the images, if you include the images in the post, you can actually rank in image search. So just another one of the ranking opportunities. Crystal Carter 35:56 Right, and Wix has a tool where you can add an image to your website, it will automatically generate some tags via vision AI, which is Google's image recognition software. So they will add information for you as well. So it's something that's really useful, and especially if they already have so many great images on their Instagram. Mordy Oberstein 36:18 Amazing, Vahan. What say you? Vahan Petrosyan 36:21 So many great points you brought up. And, of course, I want to mention that having a blog is a critical component in SEO. And if you are serious about your business, you should fully explore how you can optimize your website for different types of keywords and increase your search visibility. And to the point, adding images, I would advise on top of that to also record the videos of their repairing and embedding on the page. And using video object schema again. And the more unique content you have, which belongs only to you and is not found elsewhere, the higher your content will be valued by Google. I have a couple of recommendations I would like to make regarding the blog article pages. Crystal, can you please open a blog post? Yeah, and as you may know, Google recently has introduced the double E-E update to their search rater guidelines. It means they also take into account expertise by others. And could you please open another page if possible. Regarding E-E-A-T, I would highly recommend to complete the other pages by adding social profile links, adding the author's LinkedIn, Twitter, social pages, as well as adding a short biography of the author to send Google signals about expertise and experience in the field of the topic of the blog article. This will help Google better understand that the author behind the article is a really experienced person, and it's a highly available content. Second, I would advise to shorten titles I mean, SEO titles, as well as URLs. And look titles can be often cut off in the search result as you know, which means users who search and see your blog post may not be able to see the full title and not fully understand what the article is about, so I would advise to shorten it and make it easier for users to understand. And third, I would recommend to add breadcrumbs to blog posts. Break bread crumbs can be an excellent way to help users navigate through your site and find related content. They also provide a clear hierarchy for search engines making it easier for them to understand the structure of your content. Adding breadcrumbs to blog posts that fall under the main category can help users navigate back to the main category page as well as provide context for the content they are currently viewing. This can improve the overall user experience and help keep users engaged. And I'm sure Wix has functionality for adding breadcrumbs. Mordy Oberstein 40:03 Yes, I actually have it in my blog. Crystal Carter 40:06 Yeah there's a couple of ways that you can do that. Breadcrumbs are great for allowing you to add in breadcrumb schema as well and also to add in more internal links. We're about to get to the chat but someone's asking about breadcrumbs. I've got a few people asking me—it's not from Hansel and Gretel, which didn't work out well for them. A breadcrumb is sort of a trail. So for instance, if you're on a blog, or if you are on iOS. Mordy Oberstein 40:38 Designers avert your eyes. Crystal Carter 40:42 Or if you are in something that is like a product thing, it might be that you have something that goes from the homepage to the product category to the product name. And that's a breadcrumb. So they're back there, you've got that functionality. Mordy Oberstein 40:59 I was just playing around to see how to do it on the platform, precisely. Go back to my homepage. Please avert your eyes, I apologize, I'm so embarrassed. Crystal Carter 41:10 So there's a few different ways that you can do that. We will link you to the knowledge base article that will show you how to create a breadcrumb in the email chat. And I think we've got a lot of questions. We've had a lot of people very interested. So I think we will be moving on to the Q&A portion of the session. So yes, thank you to everyone for joining us, having lots of questions and being very active today. And thank you everyone for your great insights. And for talking lots about the--- you're pronouncing it double E-A-T. And I think Sean Price is also wondering, wondering what was the heatmap tool that you mentioned? That was Microsoft Clarity. And then also, I think other ones that people use historically are Hotjar, and other things like that. Mordy have you got the document with the questions? Mordy Oberstein 42:19 I do. So someone asked me a great question about the tools, what tools were used to analyze the headers on the page. The tools we use to analyze the title tags. If you hover over a tab in Chrome, a little pop up will show up. And that's the title tag. That's a title that Google's looking at. So the tools really quickly there is the Chrome extension from Marketing Syrup called SEO Pro extension. And that's where we looked at the title tag and the headers and the status of the structured data markup. There was also a Semrush extension, that's what I used for the keyword research where there's actually an integration in Wix in the Seo Panel, and in the main SEO Setup Checklist, where you can access Semrush keyword research. It'll tell you data around how often people are searching for a given term. And that's where we say, hey, people are looking for New York City HVAC, our heating and air conditioning repair, more often than Brooklyn. Which I take personally because I was born in Brooklyn. The other tool that I showed you was from Rank Ranger, it was their free schema markup generator where they walk you through creating the code, you don't have to know how to write code and you just click Copy and Paste and paste it into Wix. So that was the third tool that we used, and I will try to send out the links for all of them so you have them. Okay, one question was about using the same city throughout the homepage. Let's say I service Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, how do I go about being consistent about telling Google where I service? I'm assuming outside of the service area, your listing and Google Business Profile, but just with the copy on the page? How do I show consistency? Crystal Carter 44:22 So in my experience of working on this, it's important to understand the kinds of keywords that people are using to find you. So in a place like Brooklyn, or Queens or Staten Island or in a big, big city like New York, where it takes a very long time to move five miles. Being neighborhood specific is really important. In a place that's a bigger spread, then you might not need to be so neighborhood specific. In a smaller town like Buffalo, New York you can say we serve Buffalo, New York, right? It's a smaller town, it's probably not so not so important to be that specific in a neighborhood in Buffalo, New York unless it's a walking distance service. But, for instance, I have done a lot of work in the West Country of England, which is also referred to as Devonshire, which is also called the southwest of England, which is also called the West of England. And there's lots of different ways that people talk about that place. So you need to think about if you're in Holland, there's Holland, there's the Netherlands, that sort of thing. So, be aware of the words that people are using, and try to optimize for them. So think about where most of your customers go, where most of your customers come from, and that should be your big headline. And then maybe in the paragraph about it, let's say you're doing HVAC for the Bronx, right? We say HVAC suppliers in the Bronx, because most of your customers come from the Bronx, right? We are the best HVAC suppliers in the Bronx. And we serve lots of people from around New York as well, in these places, these places and these places in the paragraph. But your priority should be your main customer base. And in Wix, you can actually see where a lot of your traffic is coming from geographically in your Wix Analytics, and that's definitely worth thinking about when you're looking at your location optimizations. Mordy Oberstein 46:29 Yeah, just really being consistent, not saying in one place, we service here and then another place, there. I think that's what confuses the search engines primarily. Of course, you can have different pages addressing the unique needs of HVAC in Queens versus Brooklyn. Maybe there are different regulations in New Jersey versus New York, that might be a good way to differentiate. Crystal Carter 46:57 Right. But the people searching in New Jersey are probably likely to get New York information. So yeah, you'd like the New York search results. So that's something to think about. Mordy Oberstein 47:08 Someone asked about addressing alt text, maybe you could address this. So first up, maybe let's explain what alt text is, why it's important, and why it matters. Vahan Petrosyan 47:23 The alt text? So first of all, it's helpful for users with disabilities. Alt text helps text readers read that page and understand images, as well as it helps Google also understand what is on the image. So it's important for sending Google signal words about the image, also helping users with accessibility issues to read the content. If you don't want certain images to be read by so called screen readers you can just leave alt text empty and they will just ignore that as a part of the webpage. Those are applied maybe for some kind of icons which are not relevant to the content. Mordy Oberstein 48:26 Yeah if you take a piece of content, copy and paste it and throw it into a TTS reader, you'll see that there's alt text there, it won't show the image, obviously, it'll just show what the image was described as. And it's a great way of helping people with impairments. And it does help. It's not why you should have it there, but it does help from an SEO point of view. It helps Google understand what that image might be about because again, Google doesn't look at what exactly is in your image and doesn't fully understand what's in the text. You need to tell it. What's in the image and alt texts is one way. Crystal Carter 49:06 Yeah, so Google reads images in a different way from the way that it reads text. So you need to think about how you prioritize that. Mordy Oberstein 49:13 Let's talk about light boxes. To complicate a question about do we use light boxes, can Google understand the text in the light box and so forth? So first of all, I want to mention there's something. In 2016 or 2017, Google introduced something called the Intrusive Interstitial Update, interstitial being the fancy word for pop up. And there was supposed to be intrusive interstitial Armageddon, where Google was going to penalize all the websites with intrusive pop ups, which never really happened. However, it is officially a ranking signal if the pop up is intrusive, meaning you know those ones where you can't really find the x. Not in this case, this was not intrusive, I was clearly able to click out of it, I was clearly able to find the x. But it's something to be careful about, if you're trying to, for lack of a better way of explaining it, trick people into using the forms because they can't get out. Unless they use the form. Google could, theoretically, demote the rankings of the web page in the website. So be careful with interstitials and pop ups in terms of the content. Crystal, can Google pick up the content inside of a lightbox? Crystal Carter 50:32 It will depend on how it's implemented. So I think it's worth thinking about. Always with popups, it's worth thinking about where the value is for the user, where the value is for the business. And anytime you add something to your website there's a bit of give and take with what you're doing, particularly if it's a visual element. So I think you should make sure that you think about what works best for you, and just test it and make sure that it's all set up properly. Mordy Oberstein 51:09 You were talking about conversions and the light box might be counterintuitive, and it's worth experimenting to see what actually works or doesn't work. I was wondering if maybe you could elaborate a little bit about that, because it is a great, great topic. Vahan Petrosyan 51:22 Yeah, sure and that is where a heat map can help you. If you implement the heat map you will see how basically users interact with the pop up. Do they just instantly clear and hit the back button in the browser and go back to the search results. Analyze if it really does help or negatively affects your visitors' user experience. Does it reduce conversion rates? So if you want to pop up which is not intrusive, you may consider a pop up which is not fully blocking your screen. So we like to mention that cookie constant pop ups are never gonna harm your rankings because Google's pretty smart and can figure out that it's a cookie consent pop up and never penalizes for that. Mordy Oberstein 52:16 Yes, which is so funny, because we said before, sometimes Google is incredibly smart. And that's one of those areas where Google is incredibly smart. Crystal Carter 52:22 And can I just jump in? There's a lot of people asking questions in the chat, we have the Q&A as well. On the chat, lots of people are asking what is a heat map? What does a heat map do? What's a heat map? How do you map the heat? What is the heat map? I thought we were talking about air conditioners? What is a heat map? Now Vahan, you talked a bit about heat maps, do you want to give us a quick summary of what a heat map is and why they're useful for SEO. Vahan Petrosyan 52:49 Of course, a heat map is visualizing how users interact with your website, they're basically color based information on the web pages they visit. The part they click most is highlighted in red. And you actually see that when people browse the website, they click on certain places. If you see a certain part of your web page has a high activity, users click and interact, consider putting your call to actions there, that may help drive more leads, because it's basically the part of the page which attracts users most right? Yeah, I think there is a lot of information available on the web on heat maps, and I highly recommend to check it out. Crystal Carter 53:43 Yeah, they're a useful bit of kit. No you don't download the heat map, you would add a little bit of script into your Wix website, if you go to developer tools and the scripts area, there's an area where you can manage your scripts, and you would add that onto your site. And then you go to an actual tool that you've used, and they'll save all the data and give you lots of information and give you screenshots of little sort of blobs of where everybody's clicking, and where everybody's looking and that sort of thing. Mordy Oberstein 54:13 So people have been asking about using what tools do I use? How do I know whether or not a page is performing well, if I need to do optimization, and so forth, and I'm going to go to show you something inside of Wix using my own websites, my own data, embarrassing myself. And I'll show you so if you connect to Google Search Console via Wix, you can do that with your SEO Setup Checklist. And in one click in the SEO Home inside of your dashboard, you will have automatic Google Search Console insights. Google Search Console is a tool that does many things. And we should have a webinar about this next month with Google about this. We'll get more information from them directly. So make sure that you come back for that one. But just a really quick overview of Search Console, one of the things that it does is isolate your performance, help you understand your performance on Google, in terms of impressions, which is how often your URL has appeared on the Google results. So somebody searches, your URL shows up, they scroll down, it brings up more URLs, the URL shows up, that's an impression, and actual clicks. And you can actually see here, like, this page that I did a podcast episode about doing SEO in China, which is actually a topic, believe it or not, saw an increase of 64 impressions, so great, I guess. So look at clicks, on this post, on that post, and that page saw an increase in clicks and saw a decrease in clicks. I can also look at actual queries. I saw an increase in impressions for the term SEO, I saw an increase in clicks, I didn't see any increase in clicks, I haven't posted anything in a while. So you'll be able to see an increase or decrease. And there's also a fuller set of analytics inside of the reports inside of your Wix Analytics. So check that out, you can get all sorts of information, all about how your website is performing. Now that I'm done embarrassing myself with my data. I do think it's time for us to say goodbye. Crystal Carter 56:18 Thank you all so much for joining us and for being SEO enthusiasts. It has been fantastic. I would like to tell Simon Cox that Yes, I have seen what you have posted and and thank you very much for keeping us amused. So yeah, great. Thank you. Thank you so much to Vahan for joining us from SEJ. It was an absolute pleasure. Go check out Searchenginejournal.com. They're fantastic. Mordy Oberstein 56:44 Yes. And don't forget to join us next month for our webinar around Google Search Console performance reports with Daniel Weisberg over at Google Search Console. Thank you so much Vahan. Crystal Carter 56:56 Thank you, Vahan. Mordy Oberstein 56:56 Thank you SEJ. Bye, everybody.

Updated: May 24, 2023 Author: Crystal Carter Website security is important for search engine optimization and search rankings because “Google's core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience” and because security optimizations can have a holistic impact on your SEO performance. Improvements in this area tend to provide domain-wide SEO gains (rather than page by page), and can support your overall SEO efforts in five important ways: 01. Better site-wide alignment with Google’s ranking systems 02. Improved connection time between websites 03. Improved connection time across your site’s network 04. Building and maintaining backlink value 05. Improved trust signals for users What is website security in SEO? Speaking broadly, website security can cover many specialisms, including server configuration and managing hacking attacks. For the purposes of SEO, one should focus on website security elements that impact the connections to a website, the links within a website, and transactions taking place on a website. Taking this approach helps keep users safe and sends signals to Google that can influence rankings. How proper website security can improve SEO In addition to keeping your site’s data secure, robust website security can benefit your search engine visibility in the following ways: 01. Better alignment with Google ranking systems In 2014, Google announced that it wanted to bring in “HTTPS Everywhere” to help users access the internet safely via more trustworthy websites. In line with that, it also introduced security as a search ranking factor. Google then incorporated site security into its overall Page Experience ranking system and created the HTTPs Report in Google Search Console to help users monitor performance. Secure websites are part of the Helpful Content Ranking System In 2023, Google updated its guidance, designating security as a consideration for the Helpful Content Ranking System. Within its Page Experience guidance, Google explains that secure websites “generally align with success in search ranking“ and those creating and maintaining websites should ask if “pages [are] served in a secure fashion”. When it comes to ranking on Bing, a poor level of security on your website may even block your site from being crawled and thus eligible for indexing. The Bing webmaster guidelines explain that “Bingbot has stopped crawling sites that only support RC4 cipher suites since Autumn 2015, as it has multiple vulnerabilities and [sic] deemed insecure.” So, when you make an improvement to your website security, you are adding signals that may be beneficial for ranking for every single page on your website. If you have a site with significant security issues, then improvements here may fall into the category of “quick wins” in that you may see some ranking improvements almost immediately after the updates have been made. 02. Faster connection time between websites Top websites have top security. Teams at Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other high-profile websites have adopted and prioritized website security frameworks that help them reduce data transfer latency and vulnerability across their infrastructure. Using modern website security protocols like TLS 1.3, QUIC, and HTTP/3 allows them to deliver safe, secure experiences for their users. If a user clicks a link on a high-security site to navigate to another site, when the servers make the connection, they will first try to do so via the same, high level of security. If this is not possible, they will try to connect via the next best option, and so on until they find the best connection. This means that if you have better security then connections can be made more quickly with more websites. This speed advantage can contribute to shorter page loading times between websites for organic traffic, social, and PPC as part of well-balanced digital marketing activity. For instance, I have observed that (for an average website) clicks from Facebook ads can load two to six times slower than the site average. This can be a real challenge for people who are trying to use Facebook as an advertising method or as a regular stream of traffic to their site and can have a knock-on effect for brand visibility and, thus, organic growth as well. 03. Faster connection time across your site’s network Modern websites very rarely exist on a single domain. Although people generally talk in terms of single websites, in actuality, what users often see is a patchwork collection of content coming from an assortment of websites, applications, iframes, widgets, and embeds, rendered on a single URL. For instance, a typical blog post on a site could potentially include content written on the blog itself, images served via a CDN, and embedded content from third-party platforms like YouTube or Twitter. Domain-wide, this network could include subdomains, ticketing apps, CRMs, social media feeds, live chat, review widgets and more. Looking in the Chrome DevTools Network panel, you can see a sample of the security protocols and configurations that different elements present on a single page. Each of the component parts of the website will have its own security setup. And, every time a user loads a page containing these elements, servers will need to make fresh, secure connections. When the level of security is more consistent, users experience fewer delays during loading and using the full mix of elements across a site. Since site speed is part of Google’s Page Experience ranking system, efforts here can contribute to better SEO outcomes for the site overall (particularly if you’re in a highly competitive niche). 04. Build and maintain link value with HTTPS links If a site has a valid SSL certificate, then connections to the site should always be made via the https:// link and not via http:// link. With regard to the overall security of the site, this is beneficial because “data is encrypted in transit in both directions: going to and coming from the origin server” which can reduce vulnerability to cyber attacks. HTTPS consistency has additional SEO benefits in terms of crawlability and backlink value. HTTPS internal link hygiene improves crawling Managing this does not need to involve sophisticated SEO tools, but maintaining good internal link hygiene can benefit SEO by: Reducing risky, unsafe connections to your site Reducing unnecessary redirects from the server that cause measurable page load delays and make crawling less efficient To review your internal links, you can run a simple site crawl using a tool, like Screaming Frog, and then update any links that are not https:// links. HTTPS backlinks add more value Ensuring that all your backlinks are pointing directly to the https:// URLs on your site can help increase the value of backlinks to your site by: Giving you more actionable data for SEO reporting because links are attributed to the appropriate channels, rather than being designated as “direct” in Google Analytics Concentrating the value of backlinks on the https:// link rather than splitting the value with a redirected link. To reduce the number of http:// backlinks to your site, I recommend that focus initially on the links in your immediate control. It is not uncommon for websites that have been around for 10 years or more to have old http:// backlinks around the web. While you may wish to take steps to contact external site owners to update these links, in my experience, the process can be highly time intensive. To save time, I generally start with all of the social media profiles, directories, citations, and the Google Business Profiles that our brand maintains, and ensure that each of them is pointing to the secure link. It’s also a good idea to ensure that the teams that are actively distributing content (via PR or social media, for example) are doing so using the correct https:// link. 05. Improve trust signals for users Users may not even be able to access sites with poor security because they are blocked or discouraged by search engines, social media, and cloud hosting providers. If users are getting these warnings for your site, then security is critical to your SEO success and to the value of your brand overall. Websites with these issues should be working to improve security as a matter of urgency. Which security optimizations impact SEO? Many believe that if you add an SSL to your site, you are fully secured—this is not the case. Though SSL is an important step, there are many more website security improvements that can affect SEO, such as: Improving the quality of your SSL certificate chain to reduce verification delays Enabling HTTP3 protocols Reducing access to unsecured http connections Upgrading to TLS 1.3 All this to say that security should be a core consideration when you are maintaining or building a website. Depending on the website configuration, site managers and SEOs can work with certificate authorities, server teams, hosting providers and developers to implement a suite of changes to improve security. Alternatively, when selecting a managed CMS partner, SEOs should choose a website provider that offers best-in-class website security with ongoing maintenance maintenance and support. Web security at Wix In Wix’s case, all users are supported by a dedicated security team made of industry-leading experts. These experts regularly test site infrastructure with external, independent researchers through initiatives, such as the Bug Bounty Program, and are constantly monitoring and optimizing our security solutions. Wix users can get insights into their security framework by accessing the Uptime & Security Report. However you choose to host your site, prioritizing security can have real benefits to your overall SEO activity. Beyond search visibility, it also helps to protect your users’ data, which can serve to build trust and turn those users into customers. 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: Matthew L. Kaminsky Why do you want a website? ‘Just because’ can’t be an answer here. One of the most important steps of setting up a website is to think about the end goal. If creating a website is a journey, you’re likely to end up going nowhere at all if you don't also focus on the destination. Considering your business goals and objectives will help you make better decisions when it comes to building and running your website. This process may seem challenging at first, but if you start with your company goal, the path becomes clear. From there, you can figure out your digital marketing goals and, more specifically, your website goals. What are your business goals? Having a website is a business move. For it to make sense, it needs to be tied into your business objectives. In other words, your website strategy needs to be linked to your overarching business goals. Defining your unique company goals Before jumping right into your website goals, it’s important to consider what your company is trying to achieve. Your company goals are the broader, desired outcomes that you want to accomplish at some point in the future. By definition, company goals are company-specific and mean different things for different businesses. Some examples of company goals are: to increase revenue. improve customer interaction. become an industry leader. Whatever your goals are, write them down. Moving forward, every marketing decision, strategy and objective should connect back to these goals, including your website goals. Once you’ve set your overall goal, you can think about your marketing efforts and how they contribute to that goal. Each organization has different needs. You need to brainstorm how you can use marketing to achieve your company’s headline goal. Then, you can set your marketing goals. Your marketing goals differ depending on the nature of the work you do, your resources and the maturity of your company. If your business is relatively new, you might want to start by improving brand awareness. If your business is already up and running, you’ll probably want to increase sales or generate more leads. More established businesses might have more specific goals, such as expanding to new markets, reaching new audience segments or launching new products. Setting your website goals Think of your website goals as a way to reach your business goals. Website goals are the actions you want users to take on your website before they leave. To set these goals, figure out what you would want your site visitors to do to help you achieve your business goals. For example, if you want to improve your brand awareness, your website goal could be to improve engagement with brand content. If you want to generate more leads, your website goal could be to increase contact form submissions. While only you can determine the appropriate goals for your website, keep in mind that your goals need to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely). Who is your target audience? After developing your website goals, consider your ideal visitor. Why? Your business caters to a specific set of people and, in the same sense, your website isn’t meant for every demographic. In fact, you could have the best site with the greatest product or service, but if your target audience isn’t discovering your site, it won’t meet the goals you have set. This means that your website and its content need to appeal to your target audience—to attract the right audience, you need to start by understanding and defining who they are in the first place. Building a profile of your target audience is important, but how do you actually do it? It’s all about asking the right questions: What are your users interested in? What motivates them? How do they search the web? What are their challenges? Once you put these key pieces of information together, you can build on that to provide content and services that are relevant to them, address their needs and ultimately provide value. Start by researching and compiling data about your potential (or existing) customers. Your research should focus on these five elements: Goals and values Sources of information Demographic information Challenges and pain points Browsing habits Goals and values Your users’ needs and motivations should be the main focus. If you are offering a product or service, it’s because it brings something of value to your customers and fulfills their wants and needs. To identify their goals and values, ask yourself, “What is my customer trying to accomplish (goals)?” and “What is most crucial to them (values)?” Make a list of the answers you come up with and identify the ones that are relevant for your business. This information helps you understand what to communicate to your audience. Let’s say you own a protein shake business and one of your target customers is Jane, the gym enthusiast. You want to know Jane’s motivations and interests in order to understand how your company can help them. Based on your research, Jane's goals and values are as follows: By tying these pieces of information together, it’s safe to assume that Jane will probably be interested in hearing about the special offer on your new line of vegan protein shakes, for example. Sources of information Creating an audience profile isn’t just about asking the right questions, it’s also about looking in the places (both online and in-person) where your customers get their information. To determine the “where” of your customers, think about: Where to find them Where do they like to gather? Is it at a forum, a fair, a club, a conference? Are they members of a Facebook group, a professional association? Can you think of any special events that they attend? What online content they read Are there any particular blogs that they enjoy reading? What is their go-to media outlet? Are they subscribed to any online publications or magazines? Which influencers they follow Who do they look up to in the industry? Who do they consider thought leaders? On which social media platforms are these influencers most active? Identifying where you are most likely to find your ideal customer will help you know exactly where and how to communicate. For example, Jane, our gym enthusiast, might be an avid follower of yoga communities on Instagram, have a subscription to Shape and attend a local gym twice a week. This could give you ideas on where to place your ads. Demographic information Figuring out your ideal customers’ demographic information can give them an identity and shape them into actual, relatable people. How much information you want to take into consideration is up to you. Some of the usual facts to consider include: Name Age Gender Location Marital status Income Occupation Putting some flesh on the bones of your persona not only helps you craft content that truly resonates with your audience, it also steers your marketing efforts in the right direction. Take the location of your ideal customers, for example: Are you talking to a local crowd or an international one? The answer to that question will determine how you build your website to cater to the needs of your different audiences. Nothing stops you from diving deeper into your persona’s DNA. If you want to be creative, think about notable quotes, psychological traits, everyday activities or any detail about their background (personal and professional) that defines them. Take Jane, the gym enthusiast—after some research you might describe them like this: Jane is 30 years old, unmarried and has no children. They live in Oakland, CA with their dog. After earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, they are now a PR manager for a tech company. With 5 years of work experience under their belt, they make close to $80,000 per year. They are health-conscious but too lazy to cook. They live a busy life, are often on-the-go and manage their stress with trips to the gym. They get inspiration for their fitness routines from Instagram and post their achievements there, too. Challenges and pain points What keeps your persona up at night? What are they struggling with? Just like everybody else, your persona encounters challenges in life that they want to overcome. Identifying their frustrations and problems allows you to understand how you can help them with your products or services. Our example persona's main challenges and pain points might look a bit like this: Once you have listed all of your personas’ issues, you can directly address them with your messaging and explain how you can help solve them. Browsing behavior What devices do your customers have access to? In which context do they browse the web: from their office, at home or on their commute? How often do they go on the Internet? These questions help to understand device and internet usage, which, in turn, helps to determine where your customers see your content. In our scenario, Jane’s environment could be their office, mostly on their desktop but also on their smartphone when commuting to work. For you, this means that you need to make sure the mobile version of your site provides a seamless experience. Once you have created detailed profiles of your ideal visitors and brought them to life with a name and a personality of their own, it’s time to align your site with their needs and present them with relevant content. By establishing a realistic list of goals and measurable objectives, as well as always keeping your ideal visitor in mind, you’ll greatly increase your chances of online success. Matthew Kaminsky - Wix SEO expert and online instructor Matthew is responsible for SEO education initiatives at Wix, helping people increase their sites’ visibility on search engines with SEO. Twitter | Linkedin

Carly Ellis | 2 min This post was last updated on May 03, 2023. Video Transcript How to choose the right domain Having the right domain name helps visitors find you online, adds credibility to your brand and makes your site look more professional. There are a few things to keep in mind when choosing your domain name. I’m Carly and that’s what we’re going to talk about in this video. First things first, make it memorable. Look for domain names that are short….easy to remember, spell and pronounce. This is key for word-of-mouth marketing so visitors can find your site when searching for it. Second, pick a domain name that includes your brand or something close to it - this will help strengthen your brand identity. Third - You want to avoid domain names that are ‘keyword-rich’ or simply too long. Take ‘Best-Plant-Shop-Miami Dot Com.’ In the past, this may have been considered good practice, but today people and search engines view these types of domain names negatively. Instead keep it short, catchy and brandable. Fourth, avoid acronyms, numbers and hyphens. Search engines don’t like them and frankly it makes it difficult for people to spell. Fifth - you’ll want to check to make sure your domain name doesn’t infringe on any competitors before purchasing. Research copyright databases and competitor domain names to be sure you aren’t using a similar name, even indirectly. This can cause customer confusion and in some cases, can escalate to lawsuits. (and we don’t want that happening.) Last but not least, choose the right suffix or extension for your domain. .com is the most common but there are plenty others like .org or .net. Adding a local extension like .fr is a great way to boost local SEO. But if you’re targeting an international audience, stick to a widely used extension like .com Use these guidelines to choose a professional domain name that can evolve and grow with you. Once you connect your domain, you’ll be able to instantly get your site listed on Google search results. That’s all for today. Again, I’m Carly - thanks for tuning in and...We’ll see you next time.

Author: Mordy Oberstein While analyzing the overall impact of a core update can be valuable, not enough attention is given to case-based analysis of content that is both negatively and positively impacted by an update. In this post, I’ll go through just a few of the many pages and keywords I analyzed after Google’s May 2022 core update finished rolling out. I’ll explore how the content and formatting of various pages may have impacted their rankings in Google Search. As a result, perhaps we can get a glimpse into some of the things Google looks at when ranking pages after an algorithm update. Case analysis of Google’s May 2022 core update Before we dive in, I want to state something clearly from the outset: What’s to come isn’t a judgment of any page or site. Every page has its strengths and weaknesses. All I’m aiming to do is showcase some of the ways Google might be interpreting what is (or isn’t) on a page. Secondly, the analysis to come is my best understanding of the content-related causality behind a page gaining or losing rank. I’m not Google and can’t say that the analysis is the absolute reason why a page performed the way it did as a consequence of the May update. Further, there can be many issues that impact a page’s ranking (not just one). As GSQi founder Glenn Gabe often mentions, it pays to take a “kitchen sink” approach with a core update and attempt to improve the page in as many ways as possible—you never really know what will move the needle. Lastly, I want to thank Semrush for giving me access to their data so that I could dive into the ranking changes seen during the update. Shall we begin? 01. A little context goes a long way Keyword: "Electronic check deposit" Improved rank: WellBy Financial Lost rank: Chase Top site: Wells Fargo Striking a balance between commercially oriented copy and informational copy on a landing page is hard. There’s a natural urge and, I would say, anxiety about ensuring the page converts. After all, it’s a landing page, that’s why the page exists. However, balancing the amount of content that urges conversion with context (i.e., informational content) is becoming increasingly more important for a variety of reasons. Especially in the context of Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics, which this particular keyword falls under. What we have here (with the ranking trends for this keyword) is what I believe to be a classic example of getting the balance right between informational copy and commercial copy on a YMYL page. Let’s start with the Wells Fargo page, which began to rank consistently at the #1 position on the SERP with the May update. It’s not a very dynamic page, it’s not a very complex page, and it’s not even a very wordy page. However, what it does do well—even with its relatively light content (which just goes to show you it’s not the number of words per se but what you do with them that matters)—is offer users the information they need, even within the commercial copy itself. Take the example below. The page uses marketing language like “It’s handy,” but then directly supplements that copy with informational content: In my opinion, not only does this make the marketing copy more potent (as you’re not just making claims but backing them up), it also helps the user understand the process of making deposits via this app. That’s important context right there. It’s context that is then reinforced by a series of tabs that walks the user through the process of making an electronic deposit. This is done via the use of purely informational text along with supporting images. The content here helps align expectations and potentially alleviates user pain points around the uncertainty that comes from making a deposit via an app. Again, it’s not complicated, it’s just effective. Compare this to the page that lost rank positions from Chase. The Chase page formats itself similar to the Wells Fargo page and begins with some marketing points atop of what aims to be informational copy: The devil is in the details here. While the format matches the Well Fargo page, the copy doesn’t. The Wells Fargo page told you about a lack of fees, immediate confirmation, and so on. In contrast, the informational copy on the Chase page doesn’t really provide much context at all here. The same holds true for the “How to get started” section: Again, there’s a very similar structure to the Wells Fargo page but without the level of detail needed to support it. The Wells Fargo page presented images to help the user understand how the app works and used text to offer a level of detail that addresses potential pain points: for example, the page lets users know they will get an on-screen confirmation when making a deposit via the app. The Chase page doesn’t offer the same level of context and support. That contextualization is really important because, again, this is a YMYL topic and it should clearly explain what the user is walking into. Now, let’s take the page from WellBy Financial that gained ranking via the update. To me, this page falls right between the Wells Fargo and Chase pages. It offers a bit more context than the Chase page and is wordier than the Wells Fargo page but the level of contextualization falls a bit short. Like the Wells Fargo pages, the marketing copy provides detailed information. Below, you can see that the WellBy Financial page gives specific information on when a deposit will be made available. At the same time, I felt the page could have done better at showing how the process actually works (the way the Wells Fargo page does): While the page does include an embedded video, both the video and the step-by-step content on the page itself aren't very explicit about showing how the process actually works. So again, this page, to me at least, falls somewhere between the Wells Fargo and Chase pages—which is literally where it ranks. The lesson: You don’t need to do a lot to offer informational content that explicitly contextualizes the product or service that you’re offering. Even a small amount of content can go a long way towards offering the user a more helpful experience. For YMYL content especially, that information can pay off when trying to rank a page. 02. Content accuracy is key Keyword: “Mild bipolar disorder” Improved rank: National Institute of Mental Health Lost rank: VeryWell Mind Top sites: Mayo Clinic, WebMD, Cleveland Clinic When it comes to such an important query as the one represented here, details matter and they matter a lot. Nuance is always important but even more so for a very sensitive health topic. I think what we have here is a case where Google discovered a page that didn’t handle the nuance for a sensitive YMYL query well enough and removed it from page one of the SERP. To start, there is a commonality in how the top pages (all of which show no changes in rank position during the recorded period) deal with the topic of “mild bipolar disorder.” Specifically, they don’t take a hardline stance on whether cyclothymia is a mild form of bipolar disorder. The Cleveland Clinic indicates that cyclothymia is “often considered a milder form” of the disorder, but does not conclusively define it as such: The Mayo Clinic refers to it as a “related disorder”: WebMD qualifies the relationship between bipolar disorder and cyclothymia by indicating that “many experts” (but not all) consider the latter to be a mild form of the disorder: Now, compare that to how VeryWell Mind, a page that no longer ranks on page one of the SERP following the update, speaks to the same topic: What the page essentially did here is claim that cyclothymia and bipolar disorder are equivalent in that cyclothymia is a milder form of the disorder. Whereas the top-ranking pages point to the possible distinction between bipolar disorder and cyclothymia, the VeryWell Mind page seems to equate them. That’s a very big problem from an accuracy point of view on what is already a very complex and sensitive topic. It could be that the VeryWell Mind page is trying to use the words “known as” in order to make a distinction between the two disorders, but that’s not how it comes off, and even if so, the distinction should be clearer. That may be especially true because the subheading of the page refers to cyclothymia as “The Condition Commonly Called Bipolar III.” None of the top-ranking pages mentioned above refer to cyclothymia as bipolar III. In fact, on a page dedicated to the bipolar spectrum, WebMD clearly indicates that this categorization is very much unofficial: So, what is very much unofficial labeling is treated by the VeryWell Mind page as official. While you could make the argument that the language differences here are very subtle, the gap left by the lack of nuance is huge. For this kind of query, the level of nuance has to be entirely accurate and it would seem Google thinks it’s not on the VeryWell Mind page. There’s another issue with the page here and that’s how it deals with the symptoms of cyclothymia. See how it just rattles them off: The danger here is that, without any context, it’s very easy for a person to look at this list and make their own diagnosis. How many of us are at times very irritable or feel tired and worn out? There needs to be context here. That’s why I think the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) page saw a ranking boost relative to the loss seen by the VeryWell Mind page. The NIMH doesn’t do the greatest job of distinguishing between bipolar disease and cyclothymia being an official type of the disorder. However, the page is excellent at giving the associated symptoms of the disorder some context (which is why I think it ranks higher than the VeryWell Mind page but lower than the other sites despite the NIMH being a .gov site). First and foremost, the NIMH page tells you that the associated symptoms are very different than what the average person experiences: As you can see above, the page also tries to somewhat define the symptoms so they are not totally abstract. The NIMH page then qualifies and further explains how the symptoms play out in the copy that follows the table above: This is in very sharp contrast to the listing of the symptoms shown on the VeryWell Mind page and I think Google was quite aware of this difference. The lesson: The margin for error goes way down when you start dealing with highly sensitive health queries. Google wants all of the I’s dotted and T’s crossed—this case being a great example. This applies even to an incredibly strong and generally very comprehensive site like VeryWell Mind. 03. Go beyond the surface of search intent Keyword: “Nerve pain in lower leg” Improved rank: Penn Medicine Lost rank: Lone Star Neurology This is an interesting case because you have that classic inverse relationship between the two pages, as if one page replaced the other in their respective positions on the SERP. Let me start by saying that I think both of the pages here have issues (as well as strengths, of course) that prevent them from ranking in the top five on the SERP. While there are a lot of things to focus on with these particular pages (a reminder that it’s very often not “one thing” when it comes to rank loss/gains), I’d like to specifically examine an important point of contrast: how one page makes the health content accessible to all and the other doesn’t—this is especially crucial in verticals like, but not limited to, health. For sensitive topics such as health, ensuring that your content is eye-level is really important for users and search engines. The query here, around nerve pain in the lower leg, naturally and easily segues into complex terminology around the human nervous system. As a matter of targeting intent (in that the query here is probably not looking for a medical journal), it’s important not to get lost in medical jargon. Look at how the page that went up in rank (University of Pennsylvania) considers this by starting its content with a definition: The author knows they are going to have to address the diagnosis, sciatica, but puts every user on equal ground by starting off with a definition. The page from Lone Star Neurology similarly starts off speaking at eye-level: It addresses the fact that the nervous system is complex and is written in a very accessible manner. However, the rest of the page takes a more formal turn when discussing the various causes of nerve pain in one’s leg. When discussing radiculopathy the page describes it as an issue with “nerve roots of the lumbar or sacral spine.” I personally have no idea what the nerve roots of the lumbar or sacral spine actually are. This, I think, is part of the problem here. Again, both pages have some real strengths and flaws but if I had to define the fundamental difference between the two, it’s how they are able (or not able) to speak to users in a digestible manner. The lesson: Intent is more than serving the right kind of content. It’s more than giving the user an informational page when an informational page is needed. Intent deals with how usable a piece of content is to a given type of user. In this case, the content may be quite accurate or scientific but it is not usable to the average person in the same way as content that ranks further up the SERP. 04. Include relevant topics Keyword: “Impingement of shoulder” Improved rank: MercyHealth Lost rank: Pinnacle Orthopaedics Top site: OrthoInfo (Note, this site is represented both by the green and brown lines as Google replaced the URL with a trailing slash with the same URL without the trailing slash) For a long time, I’ve talked about the notion that including certain topics or subtopics on a page enables the content to rank as it aligns with how Google profiles the topic. That is, if Google is to think of a page as both comprehensive and relevant, then it may need to address specific topics. In this case, I think the page from Pinnacle Orthopaedics would have done well if it had addressed the symptoms of shoulder impingement. In many ways, the Pinnacle Orthopedics page is higher quality than the one on the MercyHealth site that saw a rank increase (on May 26th this page began to rank among the top 20 as shown by the orange line in the graph above). As you can see below, the Pinnacle Orthopaedics page starts off providing context around the injury, as any health page should (at least, in my opinion): The content is eye-level, it’s very well written, and it makes for a high-quality page. Why then did the page lose rank for the keyword? One of the issues I see with this page when compared to other content that ranks on the SERP is that it simply doesn’t address a very important component of the topic: symptoms. While the page goes into really strong detail around how the injury can come about, it simply doesn’t talk about the symptoms of shoulder impingement. Unfortunately for this page, this means that it might be viewed as less relevant to the keyword in the eyes of Google. Conversely, the MercyHealth page, which (in my opinion) is not as strong of a page as the one from Pinnacle Orthopaedics, does cover symptoms. I’m not saying that the MercyHealth page is not good; it does a very nice job of explaining what shoulder impingement is: However, it simply lacks the level of detail and nuance seen on the Pinnacle Orthopaedics page. Just compare how the two pages handle the causality of shoulder impingement. Above, I showed how the Pinnacle Orthopaedics page went into great detail around the various types of sports movements that can cause the injury, even listing the specific names of swimming strokes that produce shoulder problems. Compare that to how the MercyHealth page discusses the same thing; it's clear that Pinnacle Orthopedic’s content is better: This leads me to think that the reason (or one of the reasons) why the MercyHealth page saw ranking gains during the update is that it is more complete from a topic perspective (in that it includes copy around symptoms). With that, the page from OrthoInfo, which has been consistently ranking at the top of the SERP, offers the best of both words and then some. Like the Pinnacle Orthopaedics page, the content from OrthoInfo starts by giving the users context around the injury, including anatomy: Like the MercyHealth page, symptoms are covered here just with a bit more detail: What differentiates the page (to me), is that OrthoInfo gives a 360-degree view of the topic from a user-centric point of view. The content here walks users through factual information (as the other pages do) but also gives you a lot more about the treatment of the injury. Take a look at how the page explains the doctor’s examination, including the imaging tests that come along with it: From a user’s point of view, you really get a more holistic understanding of the injury and of how the injury relates to your individual experience (as in, what treatment is going to entail for you). It makes sense that this content would rank at the top of the SERP consistently when you compare it to the other pages discussed above. The lesson: Sometimes, it can be really important to ensure you have the appropriate topical coverage on the page. As seen here, covering a topic comprehensively and then some can, to a degree, outperform content that might be more detailed but lacks the right topical inclusions. The real lesson with Google’s core updates The little things do matter. When it comes to meeting the right user intent, the details can play a big role. In fact, the details are often what separate a page that merely ranks from one that serves as a cornerstone for a site’s traffic (and perhaps conversions). I hope you’ve seen here that putting in the extra effort and going the extra mile can be the difference between ranking above the fold on page one of the SERP and not even appearing on the first page. When it comes to content, most definitely sweat the details. Mordy Oberstein - Head of SEO Branding, Wix Mordy is the Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Concurrently he also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Maddy Osman This post was last updated on April 28, 2023. Content marketing is powerful. Over the years, it has become an increasingly effective way to drive traffic to your website and add prospects to your sales funnel. But, it’s not enough to randomly write blog articles without a strategy. Approaching content marketing without a plan will ultimately lead to wasted time. The good news? With just a little planning and some resources, you can create blogs that help your brand reach its intended audience. In this guide, we’ll walk you through each of the steps necessary for success, including: Setting content marketing goals Creating a system for measuring goals Defining your user persona Creating an editorial calendar Creating detailed briefs Doing keyword research Creating content Publishing and promoting content Updating content 01. Set content marketing goals You don’t want to start running without a destination in mind. That's why it’s a good idea to kick off your content marketing strategy by taking the time to set goals. Specifically, this involves answering questions like, “What do we want users to do after reading our content?” Most business owners want conversions or sales as a direct result of their marketing and SEO efforts. But content marketing should address users at every stage of the buyer’s journey: Awareness Consideration Decision Ideally, you should have content aimed at each stage. But, you can also look at these stages to figure out where you can add content to best serve your website. Content marketing can also address needs beyond the traditional sales funnel, such as: Establishing branding Showcasing expertise on a topic Addressing customer questions Telling your brand story Increasing your online presence Figure out how you want your content to help your business and create a plan around that purpose. Plus, you can supplement that goal with calls to action that influence users to: Book a sales call/meeting Get in touch through a contact form Sign up for an email newsletter Make a purchase 02. Create a system to measure goals Once you’ve defined the most important goals for your content marketing strategy, it’s time to determine how to measure your progress. Start by first determining the specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that show progress towards your SEO goals. These may include search engine performance metrics such as : Organic traffic Bounce rate Conversion rate Click-through rate The best way to measure these goals is to install Google Analytics and/or GA4. Google Analytics is an entirely free analytics tool that you can add to your Wix website. It will help you measure each of these content marketing KPIs and so much more. If you want to get the most out of it, check out the free certification program at Google Analytics Academy. 03. Define your target audience If you’re an established brand, you should already have some target audience information in your brand documentation. If not, it’s something you’ll need to figure out to define your content strategy. Without goals and a clear audience, you’re wasting your time on content marketing because your efforts are not exact enough to make a difference. Before moving forward with specific topics, you need to be able to answer the questions, “What do we want to happen after visitors interact with our content?” and, on a related note, “Who is our ideal visitor?” If you have Google Analytics or GA4 up and running, the dashboard is a great place to start your target audience research. Wix users can also use Wix Analytics reports for details about the users currently accessing your website. 04. Create a content calendar A content calendar is a great way to set expectations, develop a workflow, and track progress towards content goals. Plus, it helps you plan holiday and evergreen content, so you’re not scrambling at the last minute. Try to focus on what’s realistic in terms of producing content versus your absolute ideal situation. What can you and your team handle in a given month? When are drafts due? When will you publish content? Be honest with yourself as you answer these questions so you can develop a regular schedule. Consistency is one of the most critical elements of a content strategy. Your content calendar will look different depending on your goals and how your team works best. You can create a content calendar with a system you’re already using for project and task management. But, don’t go out of your way to use a new tool if you can avoid it, especially if you’re just getting started. If you don’t have a system you can adapt to creating a content calendar, here are some simple but effective suggestions: Create a Google Sheet coding different types of content with different colored backgrounds, using tabs organized by month. HubSpot has an example content calendar you can use for free. Use Google Calendar to set due dates and reminders for planned content. Choose a third-party tool to plan content marketing efforts if you’re looking for a more robust solution. Whatever tool you pick, make sure to set specific due dates for each step of the process, and hold yourself and your team members accountable. Remember: Content isn’t necessarily just blogs—think about complementary social media posts, emails, and additional content assets that may suit your goals and audience, this can include white papers, e-books, podcasts, and webinars. 05. Create detailed briefs for each topic To coordinate each post and set yourself up for success, you should create a blog template with key areas to define: Topic name Category Keywords to target Word count Resources to reference Stage of the buyer’s journey These sections create parameters for you (or your content writer) to follow and help keep the content organized. When you define the stage of the buyer’s journey, you create a purpose for your content. You’ll write a post intended to increase awareness about a product or service differently than content aimed at the decision to buy. These templates also make it easy to outsource content creation to your team members or freelancers, if you don’t have time to do it yourself. 06. Research keywords Keyword research is one of the best ways to make sure your content has the opportunity to rank and be visible in search results. You can write the best blog post on a particular subject, but if it doesn’t target that topic effectively, then your audience may never see it. Your content will benefit from the time you take to do keyword research and identify the words and phrases your audience is using. Many tools can help you find vital keyword and SEO metrics. Some of the most relevant include: Keyword difficulty Monthly search volume Cost per click Familiarize yourself with these concepts, and make sure you use them to your advantage. If something has a high search volume, it might seem like the right choice. But, it also means you’ll be competing with several other publications to rank for the same keyword. Consider user search intent and the stage of the buyer’s journey when choosing keywords. Search intent can include: Informational Navigational Transactional Commercial Investigation You want your content to coincide with what the user needs. If they want to learn more about the product you’re selling, then rank for informational keywords instead of transactional. You can also use Google to find related and relevant keywords. Type your keyword into the search bar and look at the People Also Ask and Related Searches sections. Also, go over the Google autocomplete suggestions to get insight into what people are searching for. All of this can help you narrow down the focus of your content. Instead of a general topic, you can zero in on the issues your audience searches for and wants to know more about, and that will help drive traffic to your website. 07. Create content Creating content for the web doesn’t have to be intimidating—it’s an achievable skill and, what’s more, it’s likely to come in handy in other areas of your business. Try breaking down content creation into four steps. Do your research Start by gathering the resources and information you need to write your content. Do research on both the topic you’re writing about and your target audience. Save links to everything you want to include so you can reference them later when you’re writing your outline and draft. Create an outline An outline plots out the overall structure of the piece. Work off of your brief and use your main topic points as scaffolding to start crafting your post. Make sure that your outline lays out the article in a way that will make sense to the reader. Create headings that include your keywords wherever possible, and underneath, add bullet points of information you’ll put in the draft. Write a draft Use the content from your outline and flesh out the piece until it’s mostly finished. Since this isn’t the final stage of the process, there’s no need to focus on perfection. You can tweak and improve in the next step. Edit your content Once you finish your draft, it should go through multiple edits for content, grammar, and flow. It’s beneficial to have content reviewed by someone besides the writer. Hiring an editor or using a grammar-loving employee at your company can help catch any clunky writing or errors that might make your business look unprofessional. 08. Publish and promote content Once you’ve polished your content, the next step is to upload it to your content management system (CMS). Depending on what’s more manageable, you can work in a separate document for writing or write and edit your content directly within the CMS. Before you press that Publish button, ensure your page is properly optimized. This includes the URL slug, title on search engines (or title tag) and post description (or meta description), etc. Check your content calendar for social media posts to correspond with each blog and start promoting your content. Create a promotion checklist so that you don’t forget any crucial avenues that are relevant for your business, like: Republish on Medium and LinkedIn and consider syndicating content on other platforms Share in your email newsletter Tweet at or mention brands and sources used in your content 09. Create a process for updating content Just like any other part of your business, you need to keep content fresh. Make a plan to periodically review your content and strategy, perhaps monthly or quarterly. You can use a tool such as Google Calendar to set reminders. Also, plan to track your keywords. There are some great tracking tools that let you see keyword rankings in real-time. If your rankings decrease, this is an indication that you should update your content. Content and SEO are processes—make each step count Content is a beneficial way to market your company, provide value to your customers and build your brand. To be successful with your content strategy, start with your goals and how you’ll measure them. Define your target audience, find the right keywords, and create a brief for each post. Build a content calendar to manage when you post and how you’ll promote content. Aim for consistency and make a plan for how you’ll update your content. Then sit back and reap the rewards of a thorough content strategy. 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 As a business owner, you can only handle so many responsibilities. As your business expands, you’ll eventually need to delegate duties if you want to keep growing—this may include your SEO and digital marketing efforts. To ensure your digital marketing continues to fuel your business, you have two choices: Build an internal marketing department Hire an external SEO and/or digital marketing agency to handle the work Both have their advantages and disadvantages. In this article we’ll focus on how to choose between an in-house SEO team or outsourcing, and what to do if you decide to hire an SEO agency. Table of contents: When should you hire a marketing agency? The benefits of hiring an SEO agency How to choose the right SEO agency Single-channel SEO agencies Multi-channel marketing agencies Contract length Account management The standard process for hiring an SEO agency Common mistakes to avoid when hiring an SEO agency What to expect when partnering with an SEO agency When to hire an SEO agency The best time to hire an SEO agency is before you need one. However, that usually doesn't happen—clients tend to hire help when they’re overwhelmed and well past needing assistance. That’s okay, too. That’s still a great time to hire an SEO agency. While an urgent need for SEO help is common, it’s not the only reason you might look externally for support. Tory Gray, CEO of The Gray Dot Company, says this about when to hire an agency: “My favorite use case for brands leveraging agency support is for ‘deep’ expertise—those highly technical or specialized services that brands desire but don’t need full-time. While some brands need to staff a technical SEO, for example, many others only need periodic support.” — Tory Gray, The Gray Dot Company According to Gray, some of the most common use cases for this include: JavaScript SEO audits New social media channel exploration Data dashboarding/storytelling Custom link building asset creation (calculators and similar tools) GA4 setup “Whether it's monthly support or yearly, get the right people for the right jobs—in the right amounts!” Gray said, highlighting the flexibility of working with an external SEO agency. It’s also common to hire an SEO agency when: You’re not ranking well or getting enough traffic — If your website is not receiving enough traffic, then an SEO agency can help you identify the reasons why and create a strategy to increase traffic. You don’t have the time or resources to manage SEO — SEO can be a time-consuming process. If you don't have the resources or expertise to manage it in-house, you can gain access to both by enlisting the help of an agency. You need to stay ahead of your competition — If your competitors are investing in SEO and you’re not, then you could be losing out on potential traffic and customers. An agency can help you stay ahead of SEO industry trends, new best practices, and your competitors. The benefits of hiring an SEO agency I’ve already touched on a few benefits of hiring an SEO agency (above), but there are more reasons why doing so might be the right choice for your situation. Time-to-hire can be quicker with an SEO agency If you’re in immediate need of help, hiring an internal team member (or the entire team) might take too long. There are many things you need to do to hire an internal employee: 01. Create the job description 02. Publish the listing to job boards/websites 03. Collect resumes 04. Conduct interviews 05. Select a potential hire 06. Send the candidate an offer letter 07. Onboard the new team member to your company After all of those steps (a process that will likely take months), they can start working for you. Hiring an agency is a bit easier because you don’t have to go through all of the above steps. However, just because hiring an SEO agency can be relatively quick doesn’t mean you’ll see results quickly—SEO itself can take months before results start manifesting. If you need faster results, consider hiring an agency that also specializes in PPC services as well. PPC may not have the long-term return on investment (ROI) of SEO, but it can jumpstart your online visibility while you continue to focus on your organic efforts. SEO agencies have specialized knowledge and experience SEO agencies typically have a team of experts who specialize in various aspects of search engine optimization. They have extensive knowledge of the latest trends, techniques, and tools, and can apply them to help your website rank higher, bring in more traffic, and convert more customers. There are also a number of specialized tasks that agencies handle, including site migrations, conversion rate optimization, and A/B testing. Not only can an agency partner help free up some of your time that might otherwise be spent performing these tasks (and learning how to perform them), they’ll probably be more efficient at them due to their breadth of experience (i.e., unlikely to make novice mistakes). Beyond their SEO industry knowledge, agencies may also have experience working with other businesses in your vertical. Some agencies cater to a single vertical, whether that be SaaS, hospitality, cybersecurity, cryptocurrency, eCommerce, or others. Hiring one of these agencies ensures you have a partner that is not only focused on strategy, but also knows how to speak your vertical’s unique language. This means your strategies will be aligned with your vertical’s benchmarks, buying cycle lengths, and use cases. Outsourcing can help you free up resources What successful business owner wishes they were busier? Practically none. SEO can take time to both learn and execute, and hiring an agency can spare you (and your team) that time investment. For example, an agency can handle all the technical details of your site’s online visibility, freeing you to focus on running your business. Hiring an SEO agency may also free up monetary resources as well. While hiring an SEO agency may seem like an added expense, it can actually be cost-effective in the long run. An agency’s monthly retainer can be lower than what you’d pay an internal SEO team to do the same tasks. With the savings, you can make hires elsewhere in your company or purchase additional equipment. Consistently investing in SEO can be a competitive advantage Working on your SEO is better than not working on it, and working on it consistently is even better. Some businesses start and stop SEO work, while others ignore it altogether. Because SEO takes time, fixes may not start to yield results until months later, and websites that only sporadically tend to these issues will likely have more of a backlog to resolve. Ultimately, this can mean more time spent fixing problems than actually growing the business’s online presence. If a business within your vertical fails to take SEO seriously, you can gain a competitive advantage over them when you consistently invest in SEO. Your website is in a better position to rank higher than your competitors, making it easier for potential customers to find you instead of them. How to choose the right SEO agency To figure out which type of SEO agency is best for you, you have to understand what your particular needs are—from marketing channels to contract length and even communication with your account manager. Single-channel SEO agencies If you know you only need help with your organic search marketing channel, it’s best to find an agency that caters to only that channel. That way, you’re likely to get a focused agency with experience in what you need. In addition, working with a dedicated SEO agency might help to keep you away from additional services and upsells (in other marketing channels) that you previously may not have been interested in at all. Multi-channel marketing agencies Multi-channel digital marketing agencies offer various services to their clients, including: SEO PPC Email marketing Social media marketing Web development Content creation/marketing If you know you’ll need an agency that can handle more than one channel for you, or if you believe you’ll grow into needing multiple channels managed, this is the type of agency you should work with. Enlisting one agency partner to handle multiple aspects of your marketing can be beneficial because the agency gets a more holistic view of your business and can leverage insights from one channel for another. Contract length Some SEO agencies ask their clients to sign long-term contracts (six or more months). Some have month-to-month contracts. Others offer both. Let’s weigh out the benefits of each option. Long-term contracts Long-term contracts are good if your revenue is steady and you want to engage an SEO agency for 6–12 months (or more). This longer partnership allows an agency more time to understand your business, gather statistically significant data on your customized strategies, and maintain or pivot those strategies based on the data. This can be especially true for SEO and content marketing strategies, which can take a while to build momentum and show positive trends. Retaining an agency that knows what they’re doing and can grow your strategies isn’t just valuable for now—it can be even more valuable the longer you work with them. Month-to-month contracts Month-to-month contracts are a good option if: Your revenue is unsteady, You want to test out your agency of choice, Or, you only need marketing help for a limited amount of time. One potential drawback of month-to-month contracts is the possibility of cutting an agency too early. As stated before, channels like SEO and content can take a little longer to show statistically significant progress. It can be easy to get impatient and fire an agency when it looks like its strategies aren’t progressing as quickly as you had initially expected. After you’ve decided what type of contract best suits your situation, it’s time to think about your account manager. Account management It is important to get to know the account manager who will be working with you on your SEO. The account manager should be your main point of contact. They’re responsible for: Understanding your business goals Assisting in developing SEO strategies to meet those goals Overseeing the execution of those strategies Communicating progress to you (the client) By getting to know the account manager, you can determine if they have the skills, expertise, and experience necessary to help achieve your goals. The SMB can ask questions about the account manager’s experience, their approach to developing a strategy, and their communication style to determine if they are the right fit. If you don’t get along with the account manager, feel uncomfortable communicating with them, or don’t trust their expertise, it can lead to miscommunication, misunderstandings, and ultimately, an unsuccessful partnership. Meeting your potential account manager while you shop for agencies can help determine whether you can work with the team and trust them to achieve your business goals. The standard process for hiring an SEO agency With the landscape of decision factors now laid out for you, let’s turn our discussion to the actual steps you’ll likely have to take when you approach an SEO agency. 01. Fill out a lead form Most agencies have a call-to-action button on their website that takes you to a lead form. Fill out the form and someone from the agency should contact you shortly to schedule a discovery call. 02. Meet the agency at the discovery/pitch call Depending on how much information the agency collects on their form, they’ll reach out to you to schedule a discovery call or a pitch call. What’s the difference between the two? Discovery call Some SEO agencies will ask for a limited amount of information on their form—just enough to understand the channels that are most important to you, your company’s website, and a contact email so they can schedule a discovery call. This call allows you and the agency to get to know each other and for the agency to learn more about your company. Pitch call After your discovery call (or after the agency collects the requisite information through their online form), they’ll schedule a pitch call with you. During this call, the agency will present a customized SEO strategy based on your company’s goals and also present the price and terms of their services to you. 03. Choose your agency After you’ve heard pitches from different agencies, it’s time to choose the one you want to work with. After you’ve chosen your agency, they’ll send you a contract that outlines: The services you’ll receive, The monthly retainer you’ll pay, And the length of time for the relationship. Common mistakes to avoid when hiring an SEO agency Your particular needs and goals will heavily influence what SEO agency you partner with, but even so, it’s important to steer clear of some potential pitfalls that can negatively affect your success. Looking for a bargain The more you save on costs, the less an agency can offer you. At a certain point, the bargain isn’t worth the sacrifice. When you hire an SEO or digital marketing agency, you’re hiring multiple people with numerous years in the industry. Due to their collective experience and success with prior clients, services will likely run you a couple of thousand dollars a month. Not only are you paying for the hours your agency works with your company, but you’re also paying for the tech stack, the data reporting stack, and any proprietary technology the agency uses to enhance and automate its services. Having unclear goals for the partnership Before you hire an SEO agency, make sure you know what you want from the partnership. Ask yourself: What channels do you want the agency to manage? What responsibilities within those channels do you want the SEO agency to handle? Who will be their point of contact? How do you want them to present their reports? How often do you want the agency to send you reports? How often do you want to meet with the agency? These are all things you should have answers to before you start your SEO agency search since defining them can help you control the relationship. When you don’t know what you want or can’t clearly communicate what you want, it’s harder to cultivate a successful relationship. No matter how good an agency is, only you and your internal team know the intricacies of your business. To that end, be explicit with your goals and needs, so your agency can devise strategies to achieve them. With regard to this point, Amalia Fowler of Good AF Consulting, an agency that works with local services businesses, had this to say: “It isn’t only goals for the partnership you want to look for, but also someone who understands how to track the actual online goals you have in Google Analytics. Having a marketing partner who sticks to their channels and never looks at outside data to verify success can be a red flag.” — Amalia Fowler, Good AF Consulting Having an unclear budget for ads If you’re hiring an SEO agency, it’s common for them to bundle PPC alongside their services. If you ask them to run your paid ads (or enlist a dedicated PPC agency), you should have an established monthly budget in mind when engaging in a partnership. A consistent budget helps your agency in several ways: Effective campaign planning A well-defined budget allows your digital marketing agency to plan and execute effective campaigns that align with your business goals. By understanding the amount of money available for paid advertising, your agency can determine the best platforms, ad types, and targeting options to use for your campaigns. Avoid overspending With a clear budget in place, your digital marketing agency can ensure that they don't overspend on your campaigns. Overspending can result in wasted ad spend, inefficient targeting, and a negative ROI. Maximize ROI A clear paid ad budget allows your digital marketing agency to optimize your campaigns for maximum ROI. They can adjust bids, targeting, and ad creative to ensure that your ad spend is used effectively and efficiently. Hiring an SEO agency without checking their experience and references Just like hiring a full-time employee, you should check the references of any marketing agency you want to hire. Here are a few reasons why: Ensure the agency can deliver results You’re hiring an SEO agency to improve your company’s online presence and increase revenue. Therefore, it’s crucial to check references to ensure the agency has a track record of delivering results. The references should provide insight into the agency’s ability to achieve your goals. “However, you don’t want to work with someone who promises the moon,” Fowler said. “When it comes to ads and channel management, there are too many external factors for someone to be able to promise specific results. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Assess service quality Another factor to ask for references about is the quality of service the SEO agency offers. The references should give you an idea of how the agency interacts with its clients, its level of professionalism, and its overall approach to delivering services. If an agency can deliver results but is unprofessional and difficult to work with, you might choose to work with another agency. Gauge their industry knowledge SEO is constantly evolving, and you need to work with an agency that keeps up with the latest trends, technologies, and updates. References can help you assess the agency’s industry knowledge and its ability to stay up-to-date. This information is vital as it ensures the agency can provide innovative solutions to help your business achieve its goals. Verify their credibility Working with an SEO agency requires a significant investment, both in terms of time and money. So, ensure you are working with a reputable agency by asking for and checking references to verify the agency’s credibility and determine whether they are trustworthy and reliable. Hiring an agency because they are local If your company is a small brick-and-mortar business with a couple of locations in the same city, it might make sense to hire a local marketing agency. Otherwise, you can hire an agency from anywhere—generally speaking, there is no inherent advantage to hiring an SEO agency that is local to you. As a matter of fact, looking more widely may yield more SEO agencies that are potentially suitable for your budget/goals. What to expect when partnering with an SEO agency Once you’re ready to hire an agency, knowing what you can expect from them can help the first weeks run smoothly. Let’s dig into a couple of the first steps you can expect the agency to take. Onboarding questionnaire Most agencies will have some onboarding forms for you to fill out. The forms are used to gather: Additional information about your company Your current digital marketing campaigns and channels Updates on products or services you offer Any other data the SEO agency might need to add to the strategies they presented during the pitch call Analytics and reporting Your historical data can help inform the additional strategies your SEO agency develops for you during the onboarding phase (to go with the ones they formulated for the pitch meeting). The agency also needs to see up-to-date data to gauge the effectiveness of the SEO efforts you’re running together and to provide regular reports highlighting key performance indicators and their progress. These reports provide insights into how impactful the strategies have been toward achieving your business goals and if any changes need to be made. You should also talk to your agency about how you want them to report to you. Most agencies build PowerPoint or Google Sheets presentations, but you should work with them to customize the layout of those decks to highlight the most important metrics. Additional strategy development Once the agency can access your internal data, it can develop a more comprehensive strategy for your business. The strategy it presents during the pitch call is usually based on the limited information you can give them before a contract and NDAs are signed. Examples of these additional strategies can include: Conversion rate optimization Once an agency has a deeper look into your analytics, including your conversion data, they can offer recommendations to optimize the process. This can include refreshing the content on your transaction pages, ensuring that pages have internal links pointing to them from other pages on your site, and making transaction buttons more visible and easier to access. UX/UI design User experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design are important components of website design and development. Again, once an SEO agency has access to your analytics, they can see which of your pages are seen the most, which should be seen the most, and offer optimizations. These optimizations can help ensure that your website is easy to use and navigate, and that the design is visually appealing and consistent with your brand identity—ultimately, these elements work together to improve your user engagement and conversions. Ongoing execution The initial strategies are just to get started. Every quarter, based on data they’ve collected and your business goals, your agency should present a couple of new strategies they want to execute in addition to the successful ones they want to continue. Everyone needs a helping hand from time to time Hiring an SEO agency can seem daunting, but if you make sure you’re ready for their help, know what service(s) you want them to manage, verify their references, and get to know them during the discovery or pitch calls, it’ll be easier to make the right choice. After that, it’s up to the agency to provide the strategies and execution to achieve your business goals. 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: Marcus Tober If someone on the street asked you “where is the nearest coffee shop?” you’d have a pretty good idea of what they were looking for out of that exchange. If they were more specific and asked for a branded coffee shop, their intent would be even clearer and you might give them a different answer to help them out. The fact that most people now turn to search engines for these kinds of questions gives you an idea of how important that intent is online as well. To get in front of these potential customers, who may be planning a future purchase or looking to convert immediately, marketers must optimize their content to point them in the right direction. There are numerous ways in which people search to discover, explore, and buy products and services online, so we’re taking a look at the key motivators behind those searches to help you refocus your content and SEO strategy—and, give prospective customers more of what they’re looking for, and less of what they’re not. In this article, we'll discuss: What keyword intent is Why keyword intent is important for SEO How to use keyword intent in your content strategy Using keyword intent to identify optimization opportunities Applying keyword intent to your own strategy What is keyword intent? Keyword intent (also sometimes referred to as “search intent” or “user intent”) is a notion of the type of result people expect to find when they use search engines. Their chosen search terms can indicate the nature of the content they want to see in the search results and are traditionally grouped into four distinct categories: Informational, Navigational, Commercial, and Transactional. Here’s how they’re defined. Why is keyword intent important? These categorizations help site owners and SEOs structure their content strategies so they can better serve users up and down the buying funnel (shown below). If someone uses an informational term, for instance, they are more likely to be at the “awareness” end of the funnel, whereas a transactional term may indicate they are ready to convert. Navigational and commercial terms (also referred to as “purchase research” in the image above) might mean that they are somewhere in the middle. A deeper understanding of user intentions can make for a more robust plan to appeal to those intentions. Building your content strategy around this allows you to plan the most appropriate formats accordingly, from how-to guides to product comparisons, and use them to drive people down the funnel and closer to conversion. How to use keyword intent in your content strategy Understanding intent is a great way to learn about your existing and prospective audiences, and it gives you invaluable insight into their needs, so you can appeal to them with content that addresses those needs. Whether a keyword is informational or not, for example, is determined by the type of content shown in the search results, the presence of certain search result features, or certain words in the search term itself. Let’s look at how you can read the search engine results pages (SERPs) to determine the intent attributed to different types of search terms. Informational intent When people are looking for information, they often use question words, such as “how,” “what,” and “why,” in their search terms. You can spot SERP features like knowledge panels, featured snippets, and the “People also ask” box in the SERPs when Google thinks that the searcher is looking for information. These kinds of keywords might not immediately generate conversions for you, but they can indicate the types of answers your prospective customers are looking for. Top-of-the-funnel content that caters to informational searches is valuable because it allows you to develop authority in your industry by providing answers early on in the customer’s journey (which could make your brand a familiar name to them by the end of their journey). You can also use informational keywords to search for content your competitors have published. This may help you identify content gaps you can fill as an expert in your industry. Navigational intent Search terms that show a customer is looking for specific information in relation to a brand, product, or location are known as navigational keywords. They are common for well-known businesses, places, things, and people, and can provide a stream of organic traffic for well-known brands. You can spot that Google has interpreted a search term as navigational when it shows main domain names or features like maps and local knowledge panels in the search results. Analyze the SERPs for your own brand name to evaluate how easily potential customers performing a navigational search will find you. Marking up your content with structured data is one way to help search engines learn more about and contextualize your business, which may lead to better search visibility for navigational keywords. For local businesses in particular, ensuring that your citations are consistent can help customers physically navigate to your business. Commercial intent When a searcher includes a product name (or type of product) in their search term, it’s likely that they’re considering a purchase, so a search like home coffee roaster would be a good example of a keyword with commercial intent. The SERP features displayed for that term include reviews, product carousels, and comparison articles, which shows that Google is serving content that aligns with the commercial and transactional ends of the customer journey. Evaluate the landscape of the SERP for products or services you sell (or those that you’re competing against): Are there customer reviews on the product pages? Is the information about the product or service clear and comprehensive? Are there how-to videos showing you how to use them? Answers to these types of questions can help potential customers move from the commercial phase to the transactional phase. Transactional intent People who are ready to take an action, such as making a purchase, use transactional keywords. These can include words or phrases like buy or for sale and signal the strongest intent to convert. Google’s search results tend to contain ads, product listings, and customer reviews for such terms. Usually, these searchers have already carried out their informational queries at the top of the funnel and, to an extent, know what they want. At this stage, search engines want to serve timely results that help users complete their intended action. So, ensure that your pages that are ranking for transactional terms are well-written and conversion-focused (customers can easily complete their desired action)—after all, this is the point of the funnel that all your efforts have been leading up to. Keywords with multiple possible intents Where there are multiple possible intents behind a search term, there are multiple opportunities to create different kinds of content to appeal to them. Take the search term Italian dark roast coffee, for instance—it can have both informational and transactional intent behind it. One searcher might want to read about its history, while another might want to go straight to an online shop to buy some. So, a long-form article about the history of Italian roast coffee might be just as fitting for your content plan as a product page that contains reviews and brewing instructions. Sites like eBay are good examples of how non-transactional content can attract people at the top of the buying funnel: As a marketplace, eBay doesn’t solely focus on its product pages. It also provides buying guides and lifestyle ideas in the form of articles and social ads. Factoring segmented keyword intent into your content strategy can help you create targeted content in the right areas and in the right formats to reach customers at multiple stages of their journey. You can save some time with this part of the content creation process by automating it—tools like Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool can help identify the intent behind search terms, which can be especially helpful if you’re looking to segment keywords at scale. Use keyword intent to identify optimization opportunities Filtering your keywords by intent can help you track your progress against your KPIs and competitors. Start by running a basic audit of your target keywords and those of your chosen competitors—all major SEO tools like Semrush, for instance, allow you to run a keyword gap analysis to pull the most important search terms into a list. Analyze this list and apply your own tags according to keyword intent. Next, use the list to manually review your competitors’ performance in the search results for each keyword. From this, you can determine what the landscape looks like according to keyword intent and how your top pages stack up in terms of ranking positions. Be sure to dig deeper into your own traffic for those pages, too, using Google Analytics and Google Search Console to determine the levels of engagement your content is receiving. If, for example, you’re getting good traffic and engagement via navigational keywords, but visitors who find you via informational keywords are bouncing straight away or spending no time at all on your site, you might need to look at the breadth and depth of your content. Do bear in mind, though, that levels of engagement typically vary according to keyword intent—informational keywords tend to have lower engagement metrics than transactional ones, but their search volumes are higher and SERPs are less crowded with ads by comparison. As you improve your site, maintain and update this list with regular audits of competitor keywords and assess evolving keyword intents to monitor your progress against them. Remember, there’s nuance required within your keyword list, too—your transactional pages might be competing against Amazon, eBay or Walmart, for instance, while your informational pages might be competing against other authoritative blogs and news sites, so segmenting your top pages is crucial to effectively track each area. Applying keyword intent to your own strategy It’s all too easy to get distracted by straightforward search volume when you’re crafting your content strategy, but high numbers rarely translate to immediate success. Ask yourself if you’re attracting the right kind of traffic with the content you’re creating. Delve into the detail on individual keywords and their respective intent to determine whether or not you’ve got a diverse spread of content that can cater to all types of searchers. Think about what the user is searching for at every phase of the customer journey and create holistic content so that you can capture the user at each stage. Avoid tunnel vision. Outdo the competition with your various user-centric content pieces by conducting regular audits. Search behaviors change all the time, so the way you adapt to them should, too. Marcus Tober - Head of Enterprise, Semrush Marcus Tober is a leading global SEO specialist and speaker, named a top-8 Online Influencer in Digital Marketing and EU Search Personality of the Year 2016. He previously founded and led Searchmetrics, a global search experience platform, and joined Semrush as Head of Enterprise in 2022. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Yana Arad Raduzky Cybersecurity is a competitive industry, and with 12.4% annual growth (swelling up to $150 billion in worldwide spending in 2021), that competition is only going to heat up. Marketing in this field is complex and constantly evolving, mostly because the buying personas for cybersecurity products are often sophisticated decision makers who require a high level of trust and credibility from the companies they do business with. As such, it’s essential for cybersecurity companies to implement SEO strategies that build visibility, credibility, and authority in order to reach and convert their target audience. With 10 years of SEO experience under my belt, I joined a cybersecurity startup in 2020 to establish its SEO department. To my surprise, there was a lot of nuance to learn and relearn in order to succeed! This industry is unique and best practices are not widely discussed online. In this article, I’ll empower others going on a similar journey. With the help of the talented Roey Libfeld, head of marketing at Apono, here are the insights you need to bring search visibility to your cybersecurity firm and build trust with potential customers. Table of contents: Why is SEO important for cybersecurity companies? Cybersecurity SEO: Get into the right mindset Start your research with personas Planning your content Amplifying your visibility with off-site SEO Why is SEO important for cybersecurity companies? First, the cybersecurity market is highly competitive, which can make pay-per-click advertising expensive and risky (due to shifts in industry trends and buzzwords, which can translate to volatile ROI). Ranking organically via SEO can help cybersecurity companies reach their goals without breaking the bank. Additionally, SEO enables remarketing for cybersecurity companies, helping them reach and convert their target audience over time. Finally (and perhaps most importantly), buyer personas are generally sophisticated, heavily scrutinizing the credibility of the companies they may do business with. By creating tailored, value-driven content, cybersecurity companies can demonstrate their understanding of their audience’s needs and establish the trust needed to advance the relationship. What distinguishes cybersecurity SEO from other verticals? Cybersecurity SEO is unique in that it involves creating content for both hands-on and decision maker personas. Additionally, the industry is heavily affected by trends, such as research from organizations like Gartner and news of attacks and breaches. Some of the key challenges of cybersecurity SEO include the long buyer’s journey and low conversion rates that are common in the B2B space, the difficulty of attributing success to SEO efforts, ever-growing competition due to new players constantly entering the industry, the need to consider multiple decision makers, and the complex requirements and pain points of hands-on personas. Additionally, cybersecurity SEO often involves category creation, in which new demand is created through PR efforts and traffic is then attracted through targeted content. To establish your company as an authority in the industry, you must: Create trustworthy content for each pain point, at each stage of the funnel Pursue thought leadership activities (such as publishing on major industry publications and conducting webinars) Engage in editorial PR (like getting industry publications to write about you and mention your products) Additionally, you’ll need to stay up-to-date on industry trends so that you can be proactive in addressing your potential customers’ concerns and requirements. This enables you to build trust and credibility that can eventually help audiences feel more confident transacting with your business. Cybersecurity SEO: Get into the right mindset Keeping in mind the nuances and idiosyncrasies of the industry (discussed above), the keys to success with cybersecurity SEO are: 01. Prioritizing low volume keywords and long tail keywords in the form of questions (e.g., How does passwordless login work?, etc.) 02. Generating better (higher intent) traffic rather than simply more traffic 03. Considering the point of view of the audience rather than that of the company (i.e., the decision makers and practitioners, although the company’s vertical does contextualize their needs) 04. Be open-minded about where organic traffic may lead (for example, consider the value of sending traffic to discussions on platforms like Quora and Reddit) The points listed above will contextualize your goals and implementation. Now, let’s take a look at what that strategic implementation may look like. Start your research with personas The first step in the research process for cybersecurity SEO is to identify your target personas and map the decision makers. This will likely involve determining whether the personas are business or technical decision makers. For business personas, it can be helpful to identify industry trends and pains that the company’s product addresses, and to translate this information into terminology that business stakeholders will understand. For example, one of the personas may be the CISO, managing IT and cyber risks. It is this person’s job to prevent IT security breaches. This may involve managing multiple security technologies and ensuring they work together. Their main concern is adhering to security standards and ensuring compatibility with the existing technology stack. Instead of emphasizing the business value, you should instead create content that underscores that your product meets best practices and standards set by regulatory bodies. For technical personas, it may be more effective to focus on creating detailed documentation and technical guides that address knowledge gaps and help the audience understand and implement the company’s product. Topic research While keyword research mechanics for the cybersecurity sector is similar to what you’d encounter in other industries, there are important distinctions: Search engines interpret many queries as primarily informational, so it can be a challenge to rank conversion-oriented product pages. Many relevant queries have low search volume. SEOs working in cybersecurity must become comfortable with best practices and industry lingo/jargon, as it’s very easy to inadvertently publish inaccurate content. Since expertise and trustworthiness are key staples in this niche, these mistakes could have serious repercussions. To discover the target audience’s top pains and concerns as well as to identify trends and subjects of discussion within the industry, explore relevant professional online communities and forums (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, etc). Additionally, talking to customers, target audience members, and customer-facing teams (such as support, customer service, and sales) can provide valuable insights. Planning your content It is important to tailor your approach to the needs and concerns of the specific target persona. Targeting business personas For business personas, this may involve creating educational content, answering high-level questions from executive stakeholders, and providing honest and unbiased reviews of the company’s product (against those of your competitors). Here are a few examples of content that may be suitable for these decision makers: 01. A wiki and/or glossary for industry terms and concepts 02. FAQs for executive stakeholders 03. Product reviews and comparisons featuring competitor offerings (example) Targeting technical personas For technical personas, it may be more effective to focus on technical how-tos and actionable guides that help solve specific issues, as well as emphasizing product features that lower barriers to adoption and make it easier for practitioners to implement solutions. Here are some examples of content that may be valuable for this audience: 01. A developer wiki for technical terms and concepts 02. Technical how-to’s with actionable solutions 03. List of product features that lower barriers to entry (ease of use, deployment time, integrations, etc.) 04. Useful resources and free tools (example) As you would in any other sector, add internal links pointing to strategic pages from the many PDFs and other downloadables you produce. Oftentimes, white papers, infographics, e-books, and so on are overlooked in this aspect, and that’s a shame since PDFs are crawled and indexed by Google, so those links count. All of these efforts need to be underpinned by credibility in order for them to move the needle for your business. To establish E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) with Google and prospective customers, publish content written by credible industry professionals (not generalist content writers or AI-generated content). This will help your company establish itself as a helpful industry resource. Amplify your visibility with off-site SEO It is important for cybersecurity companies to focus on building backlinks and earning referral traffic. This can be achieved through a variety of tactics, including guest blogging, participating in online communities and forums, and leveraging PR and thought leadership activities such as webinars. Remember, SEO is about organic visibility and conversions—not just about getting traffic to the company’s website. If a user wants to read reviews or compare similar products, you need to make sure that your product is featured in the leading websites providing reviews and comparison. An additional outcome of this presence will be valuable backlinks. Opportunities not to miss when doing SEO for B2B (in general, but especially for cybersecurity) companies include: 01. Platforms and marketplaces (such as AWS Marketplace, Azure Marketplace, etc.) will have a page for each company they work with, but not always link to the correct page or to the website in general. All it takes to add a link is to request it politely. 02. Add your company page to review sites like G2, etc. 03. Work with experts and influencers who publish on Medium, Forbes, etc. For example, you can suggest that they use an infographic (that your company created) related to an article they’ve published—if they agree, you can politely request a link to your site. 04. Perform surveys and create infographics and research papers to surface unique information others may find useful. This will help you earn mentions and backlinks. 05. Very often, potential buyers will encounter Wikipedia articles during their research stage. Cybersecurity is a relatively new, rapidly evolving field, so many of the Wikipedia pages around terminology, technical concepts, and methodologies are thin and lacking. This gap provides an interesting opportunity for SEOs to add value and potentially get links. You can find a vendor with experience contributing to Wikipedia. They can contribute to articles relevant to your audiences, with a link to additional information on your site. If you try to add the edits yourself, the Wiki community will very likely delete the changes. This can help you build your company’s authority and lead to referral traffic. The vendor can also help you create an official Wiki entry for your company, which will likely appear in knowledge panels for branded queries. Note: While this tactic does not technically violate Wikipedia’s guidelines, it is strongly discouraged by the Wiki community and there is no guarantee that the content will not be deleted by other editors. You can’t have cybersecurity without trust Now you have a framework for reaching potential cybersecurity clients or working in-house for a cybersecurity company and influencing both technical and business decision makers. Remember, though, that success in this sector depends on establishing trust with your audience by demonstrating expertise. To do so, you’ll need to consistently stay up-to-date with industry advancements and trends, and updating your content to reflect those new developments. Yana Arad Raduzky - Senior SEO Expert at Wix Yana Raduzky is an SEO expert at Wix, setting up a robust SEO infrastructure and built-in solutions. Previously, she led organic growth for eCommerce, media & tech companies and educated teams on SEO best practices. Yana enjoys long walks, furniture assembly and SEO audits. Twitter | Linkedin