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

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

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

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

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

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.