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Author: James Clark When Google launched the latest version of its analytics tool, Google Analytics 4 , back in 2020, it was missing several features that longstanding Google Analytics users relied on. Since then, Google has been adding these features back into GA4: 2022 gave us bounce rate , 2023 brought scheduled email reports, and, in 2024, it was the return of benchmarking. In this article, I’ll show you how to use GA4’s benchmarking feature—both from a technical and (more importantly) a business perspective. I’ll also suggest some alternatives to GA4 in case Google Analytics doesn’t meet your benchmarking requirements. Table of contents: What is benchmarking? Benchmarking in GA4: What you need to know Before you start benchmarking Where to find benchmarking in GA4 How to set and change your peer group Metrics available for benchmarking Troubleshooting: Why can’t I see any data? How to benchmark for maximum impact Alternatives to benchmarking in GA4 Third-party tools Wix Analytics Benchmarks Industry reports Create your own benchmarking group What is benchmarking? Benchmarking is a form of comparison for website, campaign, or business performance. In Google’s words , you “compare your business performance against the performance of other businesses in your industry.” In my role as a freelance analyst, my clients often ask me how well their site is performing. To answer that question, I look at relevant metrics. For example, if the client’s focus is content engagement, I might consider time on page, bounce rate, and so on. But, let’s say the site’s bounce rate is 40%—is that cause for concern, or celebration? There are different ways of answering this question, all of which involve making some sort of comparison. For example, you could look at change over time (say, by comparing this year to last year). If the bounce rate was 50% last year, but 40% this year, that suggests a positive change. Comparing the current period against the preceding period is one way to measure performance. You could also compare one part of the site against another. If your how-to guides have a bounce rate of 20% against a site average of 30%, that suggests the section is performing well. Benchmarking against other businesses is just another form of comparison. If your bounce rate is 40%, but similar businesses have an average bounce rate of 20%, that suggests you are doing something different. You should look into that to make sure there isn’t an issue with your content, site performance, or tracking. Benchmarking can also provide insight into industry or seasonal trends . If your bounce rate spikes in the lead up to Christmas, it can be reassuring to know that your peers are experiencing the same. Benchmarking in GA4: What you need to know Google is in a great position to offer benchmarking because GA4’s user base is so large. Even if you’re operating in a niche industry, many other businesses in that niche are likely using GA4. Google can aggregate the analytics data from those businesses to provide useful and anonymized benchmarking data. Before you start benchmarking To use benchmarking in GA4, you must first enable it by ticking the “Modelling contributions & business insights” box in Admin > Account Details : This is a ‘give and get’ arrangement—you can only use the benchmarking feature if you agree to contribute your own data to it as well. And, as this option is at the account level, you can’t choose to share data from certain properties in the account but not others. I recommend that you select an industry category for your property (under Admin > Property Details ). If you didn’t do this on initial setup, the field will say “Select one”: Although you don’t need to select an industry category to use benchmarking, it’s one of the signals that Google uses to set your default “benchmarking peer group” (i.e., the group of websites you’ll compare yours against). Where to find benchmarking in GA4 Benchmarking in GA4 doesn’t have its own dedicated report. Instead, it’s only available on the “Overview” card on the homepage. This is the card that consists of a trendline with a number of ‘score cards’ above it, each of them displaying a single metric. You can only view benchmarking data for one metric at a time. Here’s how: Click on one of the score cards so that it is highlighted in blue. Click on the ‘medal’ icon in the top-right of the Overview card (highlighted in yellow above). If benchmarking data is available for this metric, you’ll see a slider to turn it on. Once you’ve enabled benchmarking for a specific metric, the trendline will change to include two new elements: The green dotted line shows the median average figure for businesses in the benchmarking group. The shaded section shows the “peer range” from the 25th to the 75th percentile. In other words, if you fall above this range, you’re in the top quarter of businesses in your peer group for this metric; if you fall below this range, you’re in the bottom quarter. Hover over any point on the trendline to see specific figures for the median, 25th percentile and 75th percentile, along with your own site’s performance. Historic benchmarking data is available immediately; this isn’t like Google Search Console , where you need to wait for data to appear after verifying your site. However, this historic data only goes back to May 30, 2024 (or more recently, for some properties). Choose a time frame using the picker to the bottom-left of the trendline. If your date range includes the current date, or covers a period of 60 days or more, you won’t see any benchmarking data. How to set and change your peer group When you clicked the medal icon to enable benchmarking, you may have noticed that the panel here also lists your benchmarking peer group. Google selects this group based on a number of signals: Your industry category (if you’ve chosen one) Your URL Your GA4 property attributes I’ve seen properties with a peer group of “none selected,” so perhaps Google doesn’t always have enough data to work with. Whether Google has set your peer group or not, you’re always free to select your own. The first level of the peer group taxonomy is the same as Google’s industry category taxonomy, but then it goes into greater detail (up to three further levels): Some of the peer groups appear in more than one category: for example, “Sports News” appears under both “Sports” and “News.” Where that happens, it doesn’t matter how you select the peer group as long as it’s the right one for your business. In addition to browsing the taxonomy, you can use the search box at the top of the panel to look for particular terms. Try a few different synonyms—“recruitment” and “career” as well as “job,” for example—to make sure you see all the relevant results. Metrics available for benchmarking Benchmarking is only available for some of GA4’s metrics. Broadly speaking, these are metrics that indicate performance per session or per user. So, that could relate to engagement (e.g., “average session duration”), eCommerce (“add to carts per active user”), or revenue (“average revenue per user”). Metrics that indicate the overall size of your audience or business, such as new users or total purchasers, aren’t available for benchmarking. Any custom metrics you’ve created can’t be used for benchmarking either. You can freely change the metric shown in any of the scorecards by clicking on the down arrow alongside the metric name. This opens a panel detailing all available metrics. The metrics are divided into categories on the left, with one of those categories listing all the metrics that work with GA4’s benchmarking feature: Troubleshooting: Why can’t I see any data? If you aren’t seeing any benchmarking data, check the following: You’ve enabled “Modelling contributions & business insights” in your Account Details. You’ve clicked the medal icon and turned “Benchmarking data on.” You’ve selected a metric from the “benchmarking” category. You’ve selected a time frame that doesn’t include today. You’ve selected a time frame that is less than 60 days. You’re looking at data after May 30, 2024. A benchmarking peer group is set for your property. What about traffic levels? You might think that low-traffic sites wouldn’t be able to use the benchmarking feature. After all, Google says  “properties must also have a minimum volume of users and be generating a minimum volume of meaningful data in order to be included in a peer group and contribute to its benchmarking metrics.” However, I’ve seen properties with “no data received from your website yet” that have benchmarking working. So it looks like you can use benchmarking even if your traffic is too small for you to contribute your own data. How to benchmark for maximum impact  Now that you know how to use benchmarking in GA4, let’s look at how to use it effectively for your business. Here are my three top tips: Focus on the right metrics Select your peer group wisely Understand the limitations of benchmarking Focus on the right metrics Start with your business goals and work backwards from there to identify relevant key metrics. I often work with B2B publishers, where the target audiences are niche and subscriptions are high-value, so retention is vital. A metric such as “WAU/MAU” (showing the proportion of monthly users who are active on a weekly basis) is a great choice here. This site struggled with user retention over the holiday period compared to its peers. You can interpret most metrics in more than one way. If your site has low “views per session,” it could mean that users are finding the content irrelevant so they are clicking straight out. Or, it could mean that the content is so perfectly meeting their search intent  that they have no need to view more than one page on your site.  That’s why you should never look at a single metric in isolation. To put the low views per session into context, for example, you could also consider “average engagement time per session.” Select your peer group wisely Be as specific as you can when choosing a peer group. If you run a sports news and results website, you could select “Sports” or “News,” but you’re better off benchmarking against “Sports News” or even “Sports Scores & Statistics.”  If your peer group is too broad, you’ll compare yourself against businesses that are quite different from yours and possibly make harmful business decisions as a result. Consider business type as well as topic: Are the other businesses in a peer group likely to be similar to yours? If you run a news website about infosec, you might be tempted to select the “Computer Security” peer group. But, that group will contain businesses that offer security services. Instead, you might consider “Technology News” so you can benchmark against other news sites. There’s another benefit to choosing the right peer group—an altruistic one. By opting into benchmarking, you agree to contribute your own site data to Google’s benchmarking metrics. Google hasn’t confirmed this, but I assume that your data counts towards whichever peer group you select. So by taking the time to select the most relevant peer group, you’re making the feature more useful for other GA4 users. Understand the limitations of benchmarking Industry sector isn’t the only criteria by which you should identify your peers. Business size is also important. For example, take the category “Pizzerias.” This might contain businesses ranging from single family restaurants to multinational chains. If you run a family pizza restaurant, you wouldn’t consider a multinational chain to be a ‘peer.’ It’s unclear whether GA4 takes business size into account when benchmarking. There isn’t an option within benchmarking itself to set this, but it is data you would have given Google when originally creating the property: And, as I’ve seen two different properties in the same benchmarking peer group give different benchmarking figures, I suspect Google does take business size or other hidden factors into account. However, there’s no way to change your business size in GA4 after you’ve created the property. So if this does play a role in benchmarking, and your business has grown since you created the property, you may find yourself compared against businesses of the wrong size. Also, some of GA4’s metrics tell you more about analytics implementation than business performance. For example, if your “events per session” is lower than your peers, is this because your users are less engaged or because you are tracking fewer events  on your site? Your tag settings will also have an impact (e.g., reducing your session timeout could increase your “sessions per active user”). When it comes to benchmarking, either using GA4 or elsewhere, remember Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Avoid the temptation to ‘game the system’ to boost individual metrics, as this won’t help your business. Alternatives to benchmarking in GA4 If you feel benchmarking would be useful for your business, but limitations with GA4 are holding you back, there are other approaches you can consider, including: Third-party tools Wix Analytics Benchmarks Industry reports Creating your own benchmarking group Use third-party tools GA4 benchmarking only uses GA4 data. This means you can benchmark effectively in some areas, such as engagement or eCommerce, but not in others, such as SEO  or social performance.  A third-party tool that works with a range of data sources widens your benchmarking capabilities. An example is Benchmark Groups from Databox , which pulls in data from a range of Google sources (GA4, Search Console, Google Ads) as well as non-Google sources (Facebook, LinkedIn, HubSpot, and so on): Benchmark Groups from Databox is not limited to a single data source. Use Wix Analytics Benchmarks If your site is built with Wix, you have access to Wix Analytics Benchmarks  right in your Wix dashboard. To get started, go to Analytics > Benchmarks . Like Google, Wix is in an excellent position for benchmarking data because so many sites use the platform. And, similar to Google, Wix sets a default category for your site and lets you change this at any time. Wix summarizes benchmarking data both as a table and a radar. Wix takes a different approach to displaying its benchmarking data, summarizing the key results rather than only allowing you to view one metric at a time. It also recommends specific actions you can take to improve your site performance. Use industry reports With a little desk research, you may be able to unearth an industry report or study containing benchmarking data. Platforms or agencies will publish these reports to position themselves as experts in a particular field and attract inbound links. For example, the Oniva event platform has shared benchmarks for events  carried out on its platform, with metrics including event invitation open rate and response rate. These reports often include first-party data that can’t be found anywhere else. On the downside, reports age quickly and are unlikely to be updated more than once a year (if at all). Create your own benchmarking group You can also create your own benchmarking group(s), which you might be well positioned to do if you work with multiple clients in the same sector.  In this scenario, you could create your own benchmarks by aggregating your clients’ data with respect to both business type and business size. The more businesses you include in your benchmarking group, the more robust your benchmarks will be. Your clients may be perfectly happy to be included in the group in return for access to the benchmarking figures.  The advantage of this approach is the transparency and control it gives you; the disadvantage is the time you need to set up the group and generate the benchmarks. Benchmarking: Because competition is an ongoing process I seem to end most of my Wix SEO Learning Hub articles  by saying that analytics should be an ongoing process, not a one-off exercise. Benchmarking is no exception! Set yourself a schedule to review your benchmarking data regularly. Monthly might be a good interval here—if you check too often, you’ll find yourself reacting to every blip. And, while it’s important to be consistent with your approach, peer group, and choice of metrics, review these occasionally as well to make sure they are still relevant to your business. Above all, benchmarking data is meant to be actionable ; it generates insights that prompt you to take action. Google’s Analytics Help site has some great example scenarios  here. Once you’ve taken action, benchmarking also enables you to observe the impact of the action, decide on your next course of action, and act again. This virtuous circle is called the “action research cycle.” As long as you keep the focus on improving business performance rather than individual metrics, I’m confident you’ll be able to make your (bench) mark. James Clark - Web Analyst   James Clark is a web analyst from London, with a background in the publishing sector. When he isn't helping businesses with their analytics, he's usually writing how-to guides over on his website Technically Product . Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen Create with Wix→ LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini) are now available to help SEOs grow their capabilities and productivity by leaps and bounds. But, what’s even more useful than a generative AI tool? An AI-powered assistant that’s integrated with your Wix website, enabling it to perform tasks right from the chat box. With Astro , not only can you manage back-office tasks, you can also improve your SEO by reviewing keyword performance, drawing user behavior insights, and even generating full blog posts, product or event pages. Working in parallel with our AI powered SEO tools , you’re able to optimize your site at speed. In this guide, I’ll walk you through some core SEO use cases so that you can adapt those workflows to achieve even more with the Astro AI assistant in Wix and Wix Studio. Table of contents: What is the Astro AI-powered assistant? How to use Astro for better SEO Evaluate SEO performance Monitor user behavior Generate content Blog post Product page Event page Create Schema markup Astro is your asset for better SEO What is the Astro AI-powered assistant? Astro is an AI-powered chat tool that simplifies your website management experience by enabling you to query and perform tasks right from the chat interface. It’s the first in a series of AI agents that will roll out to Wix and Wix Studio users to help enhance productivity and grow businesses. For SEO purposes, this helps you work more efficiently by:  Drawing on performance and user behavior data from your website (as opposed to exporting the right reports and uploading it to an external LLM for analysis) Streamlining content creation by creating drafts of your blogs, product, and event pages directly within Wix and Wix Studio (as opposed to copying and pasting the output from an external LLM) When combined with the appropriate team and permission settings , this helps your business or agency spend more time implementing optimizations instead of flipping between platforms to cobble automations together. How to use Astro for better SEO There are potentially endless ways you can use Astro to improve your SEO. Below are the fundamentals you’ll want to master before exploring more advanced or novel use cases. Evaluate SEO performance Monitor user behavior Generate content Create Schema markup Evaluate SEO performance Dig into data trends and extract strategic insights about how your website is performing in Google Search by asking Astro any questions that you would typically have to rummage through your Google Search Console  reports to answer. (Note: You must first connect your Wix website to Google Search Console for Astro to surface this data for you.) For the prompt above ( “show me analytics for new search terms” ), Astro will generate a report that looks like this: Use the following Astro prompts to learn more about your site’s Google Search performance: “Show me clicks and impressions data for last month” “Show me analytics for new search terms” “Which pages got the most clicks from Google search?” “Which pages got the most new visitors from Google search?” “Which pages lost the most clicks from Google search last month?” “What are my biggest traffic referrers from last month?” If you’d rather explore your data to draw insights, consider browsing your SEO dashboard to get a quick overview. And remember, Astro can only access your Google Search data if you’ve connected your site to Google Search Console. If you’re not connected, you can still use Astro to review other important aspects of website performance (more on that below). Monitor user behavior The Insights report in Wix Analytics. Wix Analytics  is a robust reporting tool that you already have access to, but those newer to reporting and analytics may need some help spotting trends and identifying opportunities. This is what our Insights  report  (shown above) is for.  Access your Insights report by asking Astro to “Analyze user behavior” To help you stay organized, the Insights  report is split into three categories: Attention required Growth opportunities Trends The ‘Growth opportunities’ tab in the Insights report. You can click the down arrow on each insight card to get more details: If you’re connected to GSC, useful information such as your most popular traffic sources, may be shown. There are tons of ways to apply these insights for incremental gains. For example: If your site sees a major traffic decrease from a particular source (e.g., Facebook, Google), you might want to investigate whether it’s industrywide or just affects your brand. If many visitors go to a specific product page in your online store, you could consider adding an incentive to buy. If you’re a local business and traffic declines in a given region you serve, you could investigate new competitors in that area.  You can also use Astro to call upon specific reports. If you’re looking to drill down into a specific set of metrics, Astro can also help you by generating filtered reports. The report generated by Astro based on my request. In this example, I asked for the highest-performing blog posts, but you can also ask for the lowest-performing posts (or products), which buttons get the most clicks, sales information, and more. Generate content In the examples below, I’ll show you how to use Astro to create a blog post, a product page, and an event page, as well as how to take those pages a step further in terms of optimization and value. Blog post To get started with creating a blog post, just tell Astro: “Create a blog post” Astro will ask you about the topic of your post, its purpose, target audience, and key points or messaging. In the example below, I told Astro: “The topic is ‘what are vegan candles?’. The purpose is to differentiate vegan from non-vegan candles, highlight the benefits and potential drawbacks of this candle type, and help customers decide what type of candle to buy. The target audience is craft and hobby enthusiasts in their teens to late 50s.” Like any other piece of content (LLM-generated or human-written), you’ll need to edit the output  before publishing it. This draft is mostly complete, though: it has an optimized title, satisfies the intent behind the query, has a proper heading structure, and features images with alt text. Next, all I have to do is generate a meta description , tag a category, and add internal links  and the right CTAs . Product page Start by telling Astro: “Create a new product” Astro will ask you about the name of your product, whether it’s physical or digital, its price, and key features to generate your description and fill in product details. The backend of the product page created by Astro. Check your new product page and add your product images/video as well as any other relevant information. If you’re selling digital products, you can even use Wix to generate product images  for you. Since Astro saves me a lot of time in the early stages of uploading a new product, I have more time to spend on conversion-driven optimizations , like improving my store’s overall user journey or showcasing reviews on key pages. Event page Much in the same way as above, you’ll start by asking Astro to: “Create a new event” Astro will guide you through the process: You’ll provide your event’s name, the type of event (ticketed or RSVP), date, location. Astro then generates a number of descriptions for you to choose from, and may even include a map to the venue (depending on your template).  Astro also saves you time by generating an optimized title tag, meta description, and structured data for your new event. Create Schema markup If you have pages that aren’t already marked up with structured data  (which makes you eligible for various rich results ), then there isn’t really an easier method to get the right markup than to ask Astro and paste its output into the Wix Editor. In this example, I asked Astro to “ Write structured data for my recipe. ” I provided the ingredients, instructions, and prep time; here’s a preview of what it generated for me: The bottom of Astro’s response shows directions on where to add this custom structured data. You can repeat this process for whatever type of structured data you want to implement, but remember, Wix Stores product pages, Wix Bookings services pages, Wix Blog posts, Wix Forum posts, and Wix Events pages come with preset markup , and local business markup is added when you add your business name and location. Astro is your asset for better SEO The examples above are just a selection of the most common ways to use Astro to improve your search visibility. There are far more potential use cases out there—you just need to see the opportunity and ask. For example, you could ask it to teach you how to optimize for ‘semantic triples’ (a semantic SEO concept), like we did in the webinar  above. Or, you can ask it to help you better understand how search works, like I did here: You can find your own use cases by first asking Astro whether it can help you with that specific task and continuing the conversation from there. The more you use it, the more you’ll discover new ways to use it to save time and manage your website’s SEO.  George Nguyen - Director of SEO Editorial, Wix   George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen Search engines are integrating LLM technology, like AI overviews, to provide more chat-like experiences in search, but the impact of this convergence doesn’t end there—it’s allowing search engines to rely less on keyword matching and more on semantic search  to understand both user queries and the document (e.g., web page) under consideration. In our webinar on SEO for conversational search , Mike King, CEO and founder of iPullRank, explained the technical underpinnings of modern, LLM-powered search engines , emphasizing the crucial role of vector embeddings.  In this article, I’ll explain what vector embeddings are and their significance in SEO, drawing on insights and examples from King’s presentation. Table of contents: What are vector embeddings in SEO? How vector embeddings work Measure relevance with cosine similarity Should you use vector-based techniques for SEO? Get started with vectorizing using Screaming Frog What are vector embeddings in SEO? For those that want a short and sweet explanation of vector embedding, SEO Specialist Kwame Shorter  contributed this excellent description during the webinar. Vector embedding is a method LLMs use to assess the relationships between different pieces of content. They are numerical representations of words, phrases, or documents in a multi-dimensional space. These representations capture the semantic meaning of the text, allowing search engines to understand these relationships closer to the way a human would.  “Search engines operate on what’s called the vector space model,” King said during the webinar. “What they're doing is creating vector representations of your query and vector representations of documents—these are effectively coordinates in multi-dimensional space. And so, whichever documents are physically closest in space to the query are considered the most relevant.” — Mike King, Founder & CEO, iPullRank This technique transforms the traditional view of relevance (which is often a qualitative notion) into a quantitative measure.  This means that relevance (as far as SEOs in 2025 and beyond  are concerned) is not just about matching keywords, but about understanding the underlying meaning and context of the text. How vector embeddings work “You’re literally taking these documents, breaking the sentences down, turning those into numbers, and then based on those numbers, two things that are saying the same thing will have similar representations in that multi-dimensional space," King said. For example, “If you take the vector representation of the word ‘king,’ and you subtract the vector representation for the word ‘man,’ and then you add the vector representation for the word ‘woman,’ the closest match will be the vector representation for the word ‘queen,’” he explained. This demonstrates how mathematical operations on vector embeddings can reveal semantic relationships between words. Measure relevance with cosine similarity Once vectorized, you can use cosine similarity to measure the distance between vectors in this multi-dimensional space. “[Cosine similarity] is basically measuring the distance between angles. So if you get a cosine similarity that's close to one, that means it's really similar or highly relevant. If it’s close to zero, that means it’s orthogonal or not related. And if it's close to negative one, that means it’s opposite. ” — Mike King, Founder & CEO, iPullRank This suggests that search engines calculate the relevance of content by determining how close the vector representation of a document is to the vector representation of the user’s query. The closer the vectors, the more relevant the document is considered to be. Should you use vector-based techniques for SEO? You do not need to focus on all possible SEO techniques; just the ones that are right for your particular business, niche, and level of competition. Keep that in mind as you evaluate whether vector-based workflows are right for your brand—for example, if you are a small business that hasn’t even set up Google Search Console  yet, you should cover those SEO basics  before moving on to advanced strategies. “Vector embeddings are fundamental to how both modern search engines and conversational search make sense of content,” King said when asked what type of businesses should adopt vector embedding for SEO, explaining, “There is value in any business that wants to appear in them using them.”  “If you're looking to engineer the relevance of your content to perform better, [vector embedding] is a good place to start. That said, if you are a small business, you should focus on building your brand  and aligning with your audience expectations first. Dig into advanced techniques like this once you have a solid foundation.” — Mike King, Founder & CEO, iPullRank During the webinar, I commented that the ‘spirit’ of vector embedding is very similar to journalistic and content creation best practices. So, if I (like many other editors and content marketers) already adhere to those standards, should I pursue vector-based techniques?  While these tactics are not mutually exclusive, King advised that I keep doing what I’ve been doing: “It’s how Google is modeling what it is that you do. What you’re describing is exactly what you should continue doing (e.g., deep research on the topic, adding a lot of information related to that topic).” Get started with vectorizing using Screaming Frog Vectorizing your content can serve a range of SEO use cases, including clustering, classifying, making recommendations, measuring similarity/diversity, detecting anomalies, retrieving information, and generating and translating text. To get started, check out Vector Embeddings is All You Need: SEO Use Cases for Vectorizing the Web with Screaming Frog , where King provides a tutorial on setting up Screaming Frog for vector analysis (including a custom GPT to help you write your code).  Google already adopted vector embedding—so should you By representing content (text, images, etc.) as numerical vectors, search engines can capture the semantic meaning and relationships between words and documents. As search engines move further towards semantic search  and conversational AI, optimizing content for relevance goes beyond simply using keywords. It involves creating content that clearly conveys meaning and context. “As natural language processing technology has yielded denser embeddings (as compared to the sparse embeddings featured in approaches like TF-IDF), Google has improved its ability to capture and associate information on a passage, page, site, and author level. Google moved on a long time ago, but with the rapid advancements in vector embeddings, we can catch up.” — Mike King, Founder & CEO, iPullRank George Nguyen - Director of SEO Editorial, Wix   George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen After the disruption of Google’s Helpful Content Update (HCU), SEOs have relied on a mixture of best practices and novel tactics to ensure that their content has the best chances of meeting standards for users and Google.  That formula for content success post-HCU  includes: Delivering experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) Satisfying searcher intent Featuring unique content angles To do that, you’ll need data on how your audience searches and what they’re looking to find. I’ll provide suggestions for tools to use, based on suggestions from experts Ashley Segura , head of content at ContentYum, and Crystal Carter , head of SEO communications at Wix, during our webinar on content optimization strategies after Google’s HCU . But first, let’s begin with a quick primer on E-E-A-T. Table of contents: E-E-A-T in a nutshell Content tools to help you post-HCU Maximize your content by auditing customer journey & UX Cover critical elements with Wix For successful content, E-E-A-T before all else Potential customers are constantly on the lookout for signs of expertise, experience, trustworthiness, and authoritativeness when comparing brands and businesses. For in-person businesses, that might mean maintaining a clean environment (a signal that an establishment might be more trustworthy), but we’re without those types of physical indicators in the digital space.  That’s why the term “ E-E-A-T ” exists—to refer to the qualities that you need to showcase in the digital space (via our website/content) to help users make the right choice for their needs.  In practice, this has manifested as a set of tactics, strategies, and best practices to create content that ranks well on Google (especially after the Helpful Content Update ) . To truly take advantage of this knowledge, you’ll need tools (especially if you work on large websites or with a lot of clients).  Here’s what we recommend… Content tools to help you post-HCU “‘Optimization’ is making it so easy for the user to find exactly what they’re trying to figure out,” Segura explained during the webinar , “And that’s why it’s so important to understand the user intent behind a specific topic or keyword before you even write it.” Segura recommends Semrush  for multiple aspects of topic and keyword research, including searcher intent . Wix website managers can see search intent, volume, and trends using the Semrush app for Wix . Going beyond the basics, “I like to use Semrush’s Topic Research Tool  here to really identify the ‘who, what, where, when, why, how’ questions that people are actively searching for around a specific keyword,” Segura said, highlighting the tool’s side-by-side feature that shows the top 10 current ranking articles. “So, it kind of gives you a snapshot of how you should package this information as well—if most of everything is a ‘how-to’ or a guide, that’s a good indicator that you should probably package this information similar to that, but of course, with your unique angle.” Semrush’s Topic Research Tool can inform your topic clusters and pillar pages . Segura also uses Semrush to conduct content gap analyses , which can help you identify ways to distinguish your brand online.  “If you have solutions to the things that people are complaining about from your competitors, that’s a great [content] win for you and your brand.” — Crystal Carter , Head of SEO Communications at Wix Sometimes, though, relying on SEO tools means you’re getting the same data that’s available to everyone else. For the best odds at gaining the first-mover advantage  and creating content that’s actually useful for your potential customers, include a user-first approach  in your content strategy. Use our user-first keyword ideation worksheet  to manage your insights and inform your content. Another way to tap into first-hand data and feedback is via discussions that happen on forums or in communities . “Say you have an idea for a new piece of content that you want to write,” Segura said, “I would take the primary topic for that (or the primary keyword), I would go to Reddit , Quora, Facebook and go into the search bar, drop the topic or the keyword in there, and start to understand—what are people talking about? What’s the sentiment behind what they're talking about? Are people angry? Are they excited? Do they have brands they’re recommending?” Maximize your content by auditing customer journey & UX “Make your content so incredibly helpful and focus on addressing exactly what the user needs and meeting their intent. You want to optimize for a natural engagement.” — Ashley Segura , Head of Content at ContentYum Getting a given piece of content to show up exactly when a user is ready for it positions you for the most natural engagement. Creating a user journey map  can help you cover the bases when it comes to various topics and move your users along their path to becoming your customer.  To create pillar pages for your user journey, Segura recommends tools like Answer the Public  (shown above). Wix Studio users can also take advantage of our AI-powered visual sitemap generator  to deliver better UX and SEO  at scale (shown below). In terms of improving your existing user experience, you can use heatmaps and recordings (via Microsoft Clarity)  to minimize instances that may cause rage clicks, excessive scrolling, quick backs, and so on.  The Microsoft Clarity integration within Wix. Cover critical elements with Wix In addition to the specific considerations above, there are additional ways that your website should showcase your brand’s E-E-A-T for better search visibility.  For instance, you can use Wix Studio templates  to create your ‘about us’ page and profile pages, informing users about your brand and the people (i.e., expertise) behind the content. An example of a Wix Studio template. In addition to listing your social accounts in the footer or menu , consolidate your presence for search engines by also adding your social links to your structured data . The structured data editor in Wix. And if you sell products, get your customers to vouch for them using Wix Reviews . Services-based businesses can use their ‘about’ page or a dedicated testimonials page to highlight customer experiences or reviews from their GBP . “If you can get video reviews, it is so helpful to have on your site, but then also have the transcript below  so, as crawlers are identifying the website, they’re able to see what people are actually saying,” Segura said, adding, “Especially with LLMs  now—language learning models that are trying to identify if you are an authority in the mix—they’re taking patterns within sentences and piecing them together [to identify your specific expertise].” Search visibility is about quality and relevance—not tools You need to display solid judgment when creating the content that represents your brand—in this regard, no amount of tools can replace a focused, intentioned digital marketer at the helm. To that end, make sure to balance out your data from the tools with first-hand experience (via user-first research, etc.) to ensure that your digital strategy is grounded in the real world. George Nguyen - Director of SEO Editorial, Wix   George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen This past year has been one of the most disruptive years in SEO history. Many of us are trying to figure out where generative AI best fits into our workflows, while others are still trying to recover from the aftermath of Google’s Helpful Content Update.   It’s easy to feel as though the ground beneath us has yet to settle. Nevertheless, 2025 is here and it brings with it a new set of challenges.  To help you overcome those challenges, I’ve asked 25 of the SEO industry’s top experts to tell you about the approaches and tactics that are top-of-mind as we start the year. No matter where you are in your career, there’s something for everybody: Generative AI Content eCommerce Local SEO On-site optimization Reporting and analytics Career development Collaborating across teams Video SEO Branding SEO on Wix You can also check out our 2025 SEO tips and trends webinar below: Note: The text beneath the expert’s names are direct quotes. Generative AI LLMs not only help you create content, they’re also answer engines that can drive visibility and traffic. Read tips on both these aspects of generative AI, from Crystal Carter, Bengü Sarıca Dinçer, and Mike King. Within LLMs, monitor your brand entity, track traffic, and give feedback — Crystal Carter Understand how different LLMs operate to maximize impact — Bengü Sarıca Dinçer Generate content in components — Mike King Within LLMs, monitor your brand entity, track traffic, and give feedback Crystal Carter , Head of SEO Communications at Wix Studio Take steps to influence and monitor your brand’s presence in LLM responses. This can include managing your entity, giving feedback on good and bad responses, tracking traffic from tools like ChatGPT, and more. Transcript “Hi, my name is Crystal Carter. I am the head of SEO Communications at Wix Studio and I am here at BrightonSEO.  In 2025, SEOs should be treating tools, like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Meta AI, all of these LLM tools like channels and they should be making sure that they're managing their traffic and driving visibility on these channels because users are using these actively to find solutions, answers, and businesses.  My article on the Wix SEO Hub, will be talking all about how you can increase and manage your brand visibility on LLMs and it's not one to miss.” Though tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot have yet to overtake Google's market share, they continue to gain ground, so taking steps to manage this process now will yield better results for the future. Understand how different LLMs operate to maximize impact Bengü Sarıca Dinçer , SEO Manager If the audience you’re targeting is transitioning from traditional click-based behavior to conversational, task-oriented interactions, then you must update your SEO strategies  accordingly.  It’s no longer about simply ranking for keywords but ensuring your website aligns with the query processing mechanisms of LLMs. These models prioritize freshness, relevance, depth, as well as well-cited and structured content in ways traditional search engines do not. Moreover, in this brand new world, we need to adapt our strategies not only to meet dynamic user expectations, but also to make them compatible with the way these LLM models process, prioritize, and serve content.  Obviously, brand mentions have always been important for digital marketing, but with LLMs, getting your brand mentioned in content from others (news outlets, competitors, industry publications, review platforms, social, etc.) is actually more important the backlinks—keep this in mind for your digital PR and outreach campaigns. And, as we enter 2025, it’ll be more important than ever to understand the distinctions between LLM platforms. For example, I was able to get freshly published content to show up in SearchGPT in 20-60 minutes, but I know not to expect that kind of performance on Gemini, for example. How these answer engines work depends on their training systems, which you need to keep in mind if you want to diversify your channels. Generate content in components Mike King , Founder at iPullRank Transcript “I'm Mike King, CEO and founder at iPullRank. Use retrieval-augmented generation for creating content with generative AI. And when you do it, generate the content in components.  Don't just say, ‘give me a giant blog post.’ Give me the intro to the blog post. Give me the main body area. Give me the TLDR; like, break it down into components in alignment with the design of the website and you're going to get much more usable content a lot faster.” Title: Spell it out for me, Mike “Yeah, so it's generating it on the component level. The components are going to be driven by the web design, so if you have a block that is an H2 or an H1, then yes you're going to want to have prompts at that level. But if your blocks are like, a H2 plus a paragraph, then you want to generate it at that level. So whatever aligns with how things are structured in your CMS. That's how you should be generating the content.” Content Content remains the bread and butter of online visibility. Ashwin Balakrishnan has some north star guidance that will help you appeal to the most important stakeholder—your potential customers. Skip the SEO conjecture and go straight to satisfying your audience Ashwin Balakrishnan , Owner, The Copy Trail In 2025, I’d be judicious with whose advice I take—technical site optimization (stuff like having canonicals in order and helpful 404 pages ) rarely goes amiss, but a lot of what people say about ‘what Google rewards’ is conjecture.  You’ll rarely go wrong if you deliver a great experience for your target audience. That means content relevant to your domain/audience , a non-intrusive on-page experience, and authoritative links from others in your space (or similar ones).  Appease your audience and they will signal to Google that you deserve to be featured prominently. eCommerce  Online stores need to understand how Google’s eCommerce SERP features and generative AI have shifted the landscape for customers. Get up to speed with these tips from Naomi Francis-Parker, Mark Williams-Cook, Paul Baterina, and Chris Long. Reinforce your brand identity across all search and answer engines — Naomi Francis-Parker Take a nuanced approach with discontinued products — Mark Williams-Cook Use Google in tandem with enterprise tools to audit for issues — Paul Baterina Google is replacing your category page, so focus on products instead — Chris Long Reinforce your brand identity across all search and answer engines Naomi Francis-Parker , SEO Manager, Charlotte Tilbury Beauty  Pay attention to your brand identity and make sure it’s clear across all places of search. This includes social media, GPTs , and traditional search engines (like Google and Bing). If 2024 taught us anything, it’s that the way users are searching is changing at a much faster pace than anyone (platforms included) anticipated. Couple that with the constantly changing SERP and it’s clear that ‘ranking’ as a concept is becoming outdated. Entity SEO  has been around for a long time because it’s how search engines understand brands, people, etc. But, it’s arguably more important now than ever before because search visibility is no longer just about how you appear in Google, it’s about how you appear online at all. The landscape has completely opened up by bringing generative AI into the mix, so it’s more important now than ever before to make sure your brand’s entity is clear and, crucially, accurately reflects what your brand is. It’s the only way to really futureproof your brand’s online visibility and you will almost certainly fare better than brands that don’t do this when aspects of search change again (which they definitely will). Top tips to get started: Structured data  is your best friend here. Make sure you have the basics in place, like Product, Offer, and Review, as a minimum. Use tools like Inlinks  and Profound  to help you figure out what LLMs understand about your brand and go from there. You can also just ask ChatGPT and Copilot what they know about your brand and see how they respond. If you get overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, find out which platform provides the most traffic to your site and start there.  Don’t panic. Search is changing but SEO has always been about continuous improvement, so remind yourself that this is nothing new and just embrace the change. Take a nuanced approach with discontinued products Mark Williams-Cook , Director at Candour / AlsoAsked It can be confusing to know what to do when a product is permanently discontinued on an eCommerce site. While some SEOs are keen to 301 redirect  everything, that’s not always the best thing to do and can confuse your potential customers. My agency, Candour, has developed a generalized flowchart to help with decision making. Direct replacements: If a product has a ‘direct replacement’ (for instance, a cooktop that’s just released a new version with some updated electronics, but it functions the same, fits the same, and serves the exact same purpose), then usually a redirect directly to the new product is acceptable. It can be a good idea (especially if there is search volume  for the old model) to add a clear notice that this is the new version of the discontinued model to let searchers know they are in the right place. You can even be super smart and only show this if the user has followed the redirect from the old version of the product. No direct replacements: If a product is discontinued and you only have similar products, it’s usually a good idea to leave the product page up and explain that it was discontinued. If you simply remove the page, a user may then return to search and try and find it somewhere else, perhaps losing you a sale and increasing their frustration. You can use this opportunity to link to similar products, categories, or even a guide to alternatives to catch new search terms as audiences become aware that this product is discontinued. When to redirect/410: At this point, it is worth reviewing every few months to see how search traffic has evolved. If searches for that product persist, it is worth keeping the page live. In almost all instances, the traffic will gradually die off as demand reduces. At this point, investigate and decide whether the page has any valuable backlinks . If there are no good links, letting the page 4xx (410 Gone)  is completely fine, as redirects do add overhead. If there are links you wish to keep, it’s usually best to redirect the page to the most similar asset for the user, whether it is a product, article, or category. Update your site: Whenever you’re doing redirects, you want to make sure those pages are removed from your sitemap  and you have updated all of your internal links as well. Use Google in tandem with enterprise tools to audit for issues  Paul Baterina , SEO Manager at REVOLVE I noticed that the biggest opportunities from a technical perspective aren’t necessarily found through enterprise tools. You can manually find some of these issues just by looking directly in the SERPS using search operators. We found a significant issue that was impacting our organic traffic and rankings simply by putting “site: revolve.com ” in Google. We saw that there were URLs (staging sites) that were outranking our main site on various keywords, inadvertently stealing traffic from our actual site. The fix: We implemented canonical tags  on all the staging sites, pointing them back to the main site. This change basically signals to search engines which version should be prioritized. The result? We saw a strong correlation, with an average 72% traffic drop from the staging sites, while our main site saw an increase of 24%. Prior to the fix, the staging sites were gaining visibility month-over-month. After we added the canonical tags, we started seeing a decrease in the staging sites’ traffic over time (implemented in summer 2024).  The overall takeaway: Manually inspecting the SERPS can give you the answer/provide opportunities for your overall organic visibility and growth.  Google is replacing your category page, so focus on products instead Chris Long , VP of Marketing at Go Fish Digital Retailers: Google is becoming your new category page. In an effort to compete with Amazon, Google is turning the search results into a de facto category page experience.  Faceted navigation, pricing, comparisons, product grids, and more are all directly available in the search results. This means that you need to spend even more time on your products as opposed to category pages. Local SEO Don’t treat local SEO like a monolith. Optimize with nuances in mind using these tips from Darren Shaw, Greg Sterling, and Celeste Gonzalez. Highlight promotions and USPs in GBP with your Q&A — Darren Show Recognize and account for varying consumer behavior across local verticals — Greg Sterling Don’t put all your eggs in one SEO basket—be where your audience is — Celeste Gonzalez Highlight promotions and USPs in GBP with your Q&A  Darren Shaw , Founder, Whitespark Here’s a helpful Google Business Profile  tip that very few people take advantage of: The Q&A that has the most upvotes will be featured prominently on your Profile (as long as it has at least three or more upvotes). This highlighted question is highly visible on both desktop and mobile, so it’s a valuable place to get extra messaging out to your potential customers. You can use this space to: Answer a super common question your customers have. Highlight a special promotion you’re running. Explain why you’re the best business in your category (this one is my fave). Here’s what you need to do: Create a super compelling question and response for your Q&A section. I like: “Why do people choose [business name]?” Google will highlight the question with the MOST upvotes, so you will need to make your chosen question the most upvoted one. If none of your Q&As have upvotes, get at least three people to upvote your chosen question. Additionally, you can update the featured question seasonally  or whenever you want to highlight new info. Just have the people who upvoted the old question downvote it, then upvote the new one (our team regularly does this for our clients). Recognize and account for varying consumer behavior across local verticals Greg Sterling , Co-founder, Near Media ​​The traditional approach in local SEO  is generally ‘horizontal’. But local consists of a hundred verticals that each see differences and nuances in consumer behavior. This is something we’ve learned at Near Media through direct observation and user research across multiple categories.  So while there are certain best practices (e.g., review management) that you should follow, local marketers need to deeply understand user behavior in their specific categories. What consumers care about or emphasize when making buying decisions will vary—sometimes significantly. Considerations like proximity, reviews , directories, images, zero-click, LSAs, brand awareness, and other factors have different weight and impact. While this makes intuitive and logical sense, it often isn’t fully recognized by local marketers.  In some verticals (e.g., legal, restaurants) key directories  rank prominently and can heavily influence buying decisions; in others they have almost no presence or influence (e.g., home remodeling). Similarly, local websites play a much larger role in some categories than others.  Searchers looking for restaurants and self-storage tend to be much more GBP-focused and use websites less often (zero-click) than those looking for lawyers or home contractors. And while reviews are usually one of the top two decision factors, they’re less influential, for example, in self-storage where price and proximity tend to have greater influence.  The influence of ads also varies. In some categories, searchers scrupulously avoid ads. In others, they’re less sensitive and more likely to click on them. In home remodeling and legal, for example, people were more likely to click on ads than in healthcare. And when Local Services Ads appeared in the SERP (which aren’t present in every local category), they often captured a surprisingly significant share of clicks.  While there are baseline practices that everyone should follow in local SEO, what consumers care about will differ by vertical and failure to recognize and address that behavior could cost clicks and revenue. Don’t put all your eggs in one SEO basket—be where your audience is Celeste Gonzalez , Director of RooLabs at RicketyRoo Transcript “Hi, I'm Celeste Gonzalez. I'm the director of RooLabs at RicketyRoo. My one SEO tip for 2025 would be towards local businesses: Don't put all your eggs in one SEO basket. Diversify your channels; be where your audience is.” Title: But what channels should I try? “I would say, look at where your competitors are, that's a good indicator of where part of your audience is at least. With that being said, it could be social channels, like Instagram. It could be TikTok if you have a more visual business. And it could be Reddit if people have lots of questions and concerns about something that you're selling” On-site optimization Go beyond stale best practices by analyzing audience data, controlling crawlers, and testing ways to help customers convert with these tips from Gus Pelogia, Abby Gleason, and Jamie Indigo. Speed up your data analysis with ChatGPT and Google Colab — Gus Pelogia Get the most out of the traffic you still get by testing conversion rate optimizations — Abby Gleason Build like your career depends on usefulness — Jamie Indigo Speed up your data analysis with ChatGPT and Google Colab Gus Pelogia , Senior SEO Product Manager at Indeed Using LLMs to analyze data will become a standard. To get this right, it’s all about learning what you can ask and tweaking your questions until you find relevant answers. Here are three common scenarios: Identify the best and worst month a page had in terms of traffic over the last year. Find the overlap between traffic and revenue so you know which pages are truly the most important to protect. Call out traffic trends (e.g., which pages are trending up or down over the course of the last 12 months). You can ask all of these questions to ChatGPT or other LLMs. If you don’t want LLMs to have access to your data, you could ask for a Python script that works on Google Colab (a Python notebook that runs on your browser without any installation). You literally copy and paste the code from ChatGPT to Google Colab and upload your sheet. I don’t know how to code, but I’ve been doing small apps every other day. Here's a prompt example: “ I need a Python script for Google Colab that can  - Calculate and display the cumulative percentages for both traffic and revenue, showing how many pages represent 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, and 100% of the total.  - Plot two graphs: one for cumulative traffic and one for cumulative revenue distribution across the pages. Find the URLs that represent 50% of the traffic and revenue.  - The input will be given by a CSV file I’ll upload. Combine the URLs into one file and automatically export this data to a new CSV file. ” This way, you can speed up manual analysis and spend time on your strategy instead of sorting data. Get the most out of the traffic you still get by testing conversion rate optimizations Abby Gleason , Senior Product Manager, SEO at Scribd We are in an era of declining traffic and it seems like only major brands and forums like Reddit  are winning in the SERPs. SEOs may feel (understandably) daunted when it comes time to report traffic and you’re down year-over-year despite doing all the right things. Now’s an amazing time to pivot to CRO (conversion rate optimization). Optimizing your top-trafficked surfaces for conversions is a way to capitalize on the traffic you do get, and drive growth you can actually control. Consider potential site conversions—do you want users to enter an email? Follow you on social? Sign up for a free trial? Visit a specific product or category page? Track these metrics (if you aren’t already) and run tests to encourage more people to take these actions. My advice as a first step: Audit your key pages from a CRO point of view. What action do you want people to take? Is that clear? Is there friction? Note everything in a spreadsheet and begin brainstorming test ideas to tackle each point of friction. Ensure this is baked into your 2025 SEO strategy, because you’re not just optimizing your site to drive traffic from search engines, you’re building a web experience that converts visitors into customers. Build like your career depends on usefulness Jamie Indigo , Director of Technical SEO at Cox Automotive More content was created in 2023 than 2012–2018 combined. Bing discovers more than 70 billion new pages a day. Before the boom of genAI content, 60% of the internet was already duplicate content . Google has no moat but braced for impact with the Helpful Content Update : “Any content — not just unhelpful content — on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search” In the end, success here is about the ROI of your site. It costs Google 1.06¢ to execute a query for an ROI of 1.61¢. Helpful content is profitable content. In the face of this content boom, Google wants to crawl less . Its new crawl priorities focus on saving money by reducing data consumption and relying on dynamic triggers to control crawl. Quality (or rather search demand) matters. What does that mean for you? Here’s five tips to get you started on success in 2025: Learn how to control the crawlers.  There are more crawlers  and more controls. While a noarchive directive is worthless to most crawlers, it’s how you keep Bing Chat. But if you want to keep content out of AI overviews, you need to use nosnippet. These controls are becoming more nuanced and critical. The Internet Engineering Task Force  is actively looking for ways to improve AI crawler handling  in the robots.txt  protocol. No one likes wasting time and resources—especially Google.  Crawl budget refers to all the resources spent. Use as few resources as feasible to offer users a great experience. Disallow personalization resources. Use X-robots directives on endpoints. Curate the best of your content without the slog of your tech debt. Regurgitated AI is the new extended car warranty.  If your incredible content is made of the same stuff as every over commercially available genAI model, there's no boon in crawling or indexing you. Great content wrapped in a bad experience is bad content.  While search engines can’t get frustrated, users certainly can. That engagement (or lack thereof) is captured, calculated, and considered in how you appear in the SERP next time. Make new allies.  This industry is a rapidly changing landscape. You need relationships with developers, analytics, UX, and CRO to help adapt your strategies to upcoming changes. Reporting and analytics Without context, your reports may just be numbers and lines to the stakeholder. Influence their decisions with these tips from Maeva Cifuentes and Giulia Panozzo. Contextualize your reporting for better client relations and retention — Maeva Cifuentes Start looking outside the SERP and collaborate with your UX and CX teams — Giulia Panozzo Contextualize your reporting for better client relations and retention Maeva Cifuentes , Founder and CEO at Flying Cat Don’t forget the simple things that are often overlooked when it comes to reporting progress to your clients.  Highlight where you want the eye to go to with a big red circle instead of just providing a screenshot of a bunch of data. Always explain what the reader is looking at (e.g., What’s the time frame of this data? What’s the source? What are we actually looking at here?). Explain what you actually worked on and DID—not only the results. Tie every insight to a ‘what are we going to do about this’ action or takeaway. Make it easy to understand the report  for someone with no context for what you’ve been working on. Start looking outside the SERP and collaborate with your UX and CX teams Giulia Panozzo , Founder at Neuroscientive It’s nothing new—search has evolved and so has search behavior, and yet we keep measuring (and being measured) on last year’s metrics.  For SEOs, it’s an uncomfortable position to be in, but an exciting one too: with all these changes rolling out and the focus shifting to new aspects of the search journey, you have the power to really shape what your role is going to look like next year. There are three things I would recommend to my fellow SEOs for 2025: 01. Educate your stakeholders/clients on the challenges your industry has faced —  You shouldn’t use these as excuses for not reaching goals, but you should provide some context on why site performance cannot be benchmarked and compared to previous years. AI overviews, organic product carousels, and new SERP filters (that provide the user with direct comparisons and information without leaving Google) have elongated the journey to a click on our websites. If you’ve noticed traffic drops, you can easily show the dates of these SERP feature launches overlaid on your performance. By contextualizing your regular reporting, you have an opportunity to influence what the real goals of your channel should be—rather than relying on KPIs that are no longer representative of SEO success. 02. Start monitoring and measuring user behavior  — The focus of SEO should have always been about reaching the user and meeting the intent behind their search , but even if you wanted to keep the conversation strictly search-engine oriented, there seems to be evidence  that user behavior signals shape ranking and post-ranking algorithms.  Source: Justice.gov (DOJ vs. Google trial) There are several ways to go beyond surface-level data: Start looking at metrics within web analytics (such as a drop in engaged sessions or engagement time, higher internal searches that might indicate poor site architecture, low CTA  clicks, scrolls and points of abandonment) and dig deeper with heatmaps and session recordings  that might inform where the journey from query to action encounters roadblocks.  If you can rely on a dedicated team, leverage advanced techniques like eye-tracking or neuroforecasting to predict performance based on attention patterns. You can then use all of these behavioral insights to tailor content and design to your audience, ensuring your site not only attracts visitors but keeps them engaged until (and beyond) conversions. Source: Nielsen Norman Group. 03. Play the long game and collaborate with teams that enable you to make the journey from search to transaction flawless  — Research by Baymard  shows that a substantial portion of checkout abandonment is attributable to factors that are easily resolved by either SEO or UX teams (e.g., 404 pages  or lack of proper information that affects trust in the website). So, collaborate with your UX, CX, and product teams. Leverage their insights for a common roadmap that prevents you from losing potential customers: customer service logs, reviews, and online forums can help you proactively identify and address some of the issues that might be cutting your customer journey short (even before they land on your website!). Keep in mind that a satisfied visitor is a potential converting (and returning) customer, so prioritize changes that improve the journey of the user as a whole. Source: Baymard. Make 2025 the year you really put the user first. Understanding and addressing user intent, behavior, and needs are the real roadmap to SEO success in the future. Career development Whether you’re in-house, at an agency, or looking to start your own consultancy, these tips from Alec Cole, Victor Pan, and Vinnie Wong will help you think outside the box for career gains . Start with personal relationships when launching your agency, consultancy, or freelancing — Alec Cole Last year’s crises can be this year’s wins — Victor Pan Find mentorship and network where you can — Vinnie Wong Start with personal relationships when launching your agency, consultancy, or freelancing Alec Cole , Founder at Salt Rock SEO This one goes out to any fellow SEOs striking out on their own (or thinking about striking out on their own) and wondering how to build a client base.  As SEOs, there’s a temptation to look at organic channels as the cornerstones of a client acquisition strategy. They’ve got their place, but if you’re just starting out? Relationships are everything.  I invested a lot of time building out a rudimentary website, contracting out design and brand work, and piecing together a local SEO strategy . To date, leads from that site have resulted in less than 5% of my revenue. The income that actually makes Salt Rock sustainable (early days, knock on wood) has come either from people who worked with me previously and liked me, or from people who talked to the previous group and decided I was worth a call.  In an industry that's increasingly defined by AI-driven strategies, reputation and connection matter more than ever.  It comes down to people. If you think that freelancing or leading an agency is part of your future career path, evaluate your relationships. Ask yourself:  Would your current clients and colleagues leap at the chance to work with you again? Would they act to support you if they knew you were taking a step into independent work?  The answers to those two questions might be the difference between you hitting the ground running or landing with a splat.  And if you’re just starting out? By all means lay the groundwork of an online business, but recognize that activating your personal and professional networks is probably going to be a much more critical step in getting your fledgling venture off the ground.  Last year’s crises can be this year’s wins Victor Pan , SEO at HubSpot Don’t waste a crisis. When site traffic is down, it's easy to patch this with short-term solutions. For example, with 2025 here, depending on how many [content+year] keywords your site ranks for, you’ll have a predictable traffic decline on pages ranking for 2024 keywords. The short-term solution would be to scrape and update page content and titles manually. Gross. Don’t waste this crisis or forget the lesson from yesteryear. Quantify the loss from last year. Document an editorial process to proactively avoid future traffic declines while elevating content quality. Record the win and wear it proudly with your colleagues. When you lose traffic, don’t lose the lesson. Find mentorship and network where you can Vinnie Wong , Senior SEO & Content Specialist  I’m much newer to the SEO scene than my peers. At first, it was overwhelming trying to catch up. What I found most helpful was leaning on the wisdom of giants and my respective seniors. Finding mentors helps a lot. I’ve spoken with a lot of wicked smart people in different specializations, and they’ve all helped me in different ways. You should always be looking to learn from others in your industry. SEO is dynamic, and so you and your knowledge base should be, too. If you can’t learn from anyone within your company (e.g., you’re a one-person team), then reach out to others outside your company. There are a lot of good people in our industry who will give you some of their precious time to help if they can. I’ve found the most success by just staying genuine and authentic as to why I’m reaching out to that person. I might leave a note with a LinkedIn connection request, something like “Hey X, I heard you talk about canonicalization in Lenny’s Podcast. Blew my mind away, never thought of it like that. Can I ask you a question related to my site?” Email works too, but be brief and to the point. The last thing I’ll say about mentors is that not every mentorship works out, for various reasons. And that’s fine. There’ll be seasons you vibe and have a great relationship with someone, which might end after some time due to different priorities or time commitments. The key is that you keep learning from others and discover how to apply their hard-earned knowledge to your career. Collaborating across teams ‘Breaking out of your silos’ doesn’t just mean a monthly meeting with your entire marketing organization—it means finding new ways to leverage data and piggyback off one another’s efforts for maximum ROI. Get into the right mindset with these tips from Debbie Chew and Ray Saddiq. Work with other teams for better data and more levers Debbie Chew , SEO Manager at Stripe.com Transcript “I am Debbie Chew and I am an SEO manager at Stripe. One tip for SEO in 2025 would be to break out of your silos. So in SEO, we kind of live in a bubble sometimes. Maybe if we're lucky we might be working with paid, but there are a bunch of other teams that really understand our customer and that we can tap into. So let's look at our sales team, our customer service team—what data can they share with us about our customers and what data can the SEO team share back with them?  Title: How can I get buy-in from other teams? Yeah, I would see, kind of like, what are their concerns behind SEO? Do they think it's snake oil? And figure out like, how do we go from, you know, them being skeptical about SEO and then finding a place where, okay, what are their goals? And then what are some goals that are relevant for SEO? And how can we align on those?  When we kind of understand who those different teams that we're trying to work with, what they care about, and align on that, that's gonna really help break down those barriers.” Ray Saddiq , Global Head of Marketing at Rise at Seven Transcript “Hi, I'm Ray and I work at Rise at Seven. I'm the global head of marketing. So I think the search has changed massively and it's time for you as an SEO to start working with the other teams in your department. So if you're in-house, go ahead and start speaking to your social team because social searches the thing at the moment, so it's time that you go and start speaking to them. But also, speak to your PR team as well, because it's crazy how many links can be built. And I've noticed over here on the US side, especially, how many people aren't working directly with their PR team to build links into the right places on their website. So have a look at that. Check that out. Look into digital PR as well if you haven't already, it's a huge thing. I know there's still a few people I spoke to today who aren't really looking into it at the moment. So, now's the time.” Video SEO Everywhere your customers go to learn about your brand and offerings, they’ll be able to do so with video. Learn how to get to page one with this tip from Paul Andre de Vera. Livestream for boosted visibility Paul Andre de Vera , Host and Producer at SEO Video Show Transcript “Hey, what's up? I'm Paul Andre de Vera, AKA Dre, the host of the SEO Video Show, here at BrightonSEO San Diego. My one tip for SEO in 2025 is live streaming. What's the freshest content out there? What's fresher than fresh? Livestreaming—live video!  Last year, I was talking about ‘videos are great’, get videos ranking on page one on Google. But, if you look at right now, every time I schedule a live on my YouTube, they're ranking on page one, almost instantly. So check it out, livestreaming is my number one tip for 2025.” Branding When generic, AI-generated content floods the SERPs, your brand may be the only thing that distinguishes you from the competition. Highlight your identity with these tips from Mordy Oberstein and Aleyda Solis. Prioritize topics that will resonate over chasing metrics — Mordy Oberstein Grow brand authority via your knowledge panel, structured data, and branded queries — Aleyda Solis Prioritize topics that will resonate over chasing metrics Mordy Oberstein , Head of SEO Branding at Wix Studio The web is very quickly moving to a paradigm where resonance (i.e., whether your target audience can connect or identify with your branding) is the determining factor. The value of resonating in the current digital ecosystem has skyrocketed and it’s only going to continue as the web gets flooded with more digital noise. Not only are you going to have to resonate more because of this exponential increase in noise, but because offline experiences are a driving force like never before.  SEOs would do well to remember that your brand is everything you do—it is everything you say. Every piece of content you publish speaks volumes about who your brand is, what it does, and who it’s for. So the next time you want to ‘target a keyword’, ask yourself if the content will help the brand resonate with its audience the way it wants to. If not, I wouldn’t target it. Smart brands are going to target what resonates first and what drives performance KPIs second. Grow brand authority via your knowledge panel, structured data, and branded queries Aleyda Solis , SEO Consultant and Founder, Orainti & SEOFOMO It’s clear that Google wants to feature real, authoritative brands at the top of the SERPs (which is also clearly helpful to increase CTR and optimize conversions).  Grow your brand authority  by understanding your company brand positioning and taking it into account in your SEO strategy:  Target your branded queries Optimize your knowledge panel  details Specify your brand details with structured data , etc. SEO on Wix At Wix, we approach SEO with an eye for efficiency and scale. Check out these tips from Sean Del Galdo and myself (George Nguyen). Save time by auditing and editing alt text in bulk — Sean Del Galdo Manage your author pages and listings with the Wix Studio CMS — George Nguyen Save time by auditing and editing alt text in bulk Sean Del Galdo , SEO Product Advisor at Wix.com Transcript “I am Sean Del Galdo, I work on the product advisor team within the success management organization. I focus on the SEO product as well as just talking to Partners about SEO best practices. One of my favorite features that we have is bulk alt text updates and optimizations within the SEO setup checklist. So in the past when you had to edit alt text, or even see that you have all text that needs to be updated, you had to go to the specific page itself in the Editor, click on each image, and then realize which image is missing that alt text. Now within the SEO setup checklist, if you have that little red dot there that says ‘you need alt text on this page’ or ‘images are missing alt text’, you click into that and there's a little button there that says, ‘add alt text’.  When you click that, there’s gonna be a little window that pops up and it's going to say, you know, you have five images on that page. If all images have alt text, they'll say five out of five images complete with alt text and it'll show each single one with the alt text right next to it.  If there are any missing, you'll see there's a gap. There's a blank there. You can just go in, type the alt text lined up next to the image, so you can see what you're actually right now alt text for.  Once all that's complete, you just click ‘add alt text’, submit, and then all the images on that page that you did optimize for will now have that alt text. And hopefully, you get that little checkmark within that SEO setup checklist. I'm Sean Del Galdo, Happy New Year from the Wix Playground in New York City.” Manage your author pages and listings with the Wix Studio CMS George Nguyen , Director of SEO Editorial at Wix Studio If you’re in a competitive niche, you need the ability to scale if you want to gain any traction. The Wix Studio CMS  helps me do that by enabling me to manage the SEO Learning Hub’s expert author profiles  via a database collection that connects to dynamic pages.  Essentially, I’m able to upload author profiles in seconds and manage them in bulk—doing this manually would otherwise take hours. For any brand with a blog, you can use this the same way I do (i.e., to highlight your author/blog’s E-E-A-T ). Or, you could use them to publish and manage: Podcast landing pages (this is how we manage our SERP’s Up  podcast’s pages) Job listings Real estate listings Etc. Dig into our archive for 2024’s best takeaways  For even more guidance from the industry’s best—sourced from our own live events as well as the most prestigious SEO conferences worldwide—check out our past coverage: Elevate your branding to attract more leads: Takeaways from Wix Studio & SEJ’s digital marketing meetup in NYC Future-forward techniques for SEO teams from MozCon 2024 SEO in the newsroom: Tips from the SEO for News meetup Agency takeaways and tips from BrightonSEO (April 2024) Google’s SGE: Insights from SEOFOMO x Wix George Nguyen - Director of SEO Editorial, Wix   George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen Get started by: Creating a website → Remember how easy it was to manage your business website (or your client’s) when it first launched? Well, in addition to growing over time, your site may also evolve, adding new sections that have to scale with your business. That was the case for this publication—the SEO Learning Hub. As we expanded to offer different content mediums and adapted our strategy for the latest SEO best practices, we turned to the Wix Studio CMS  to generate pages for that content dynamically, saving us time on both content creation as well as optimization. Let’s take a look at: What the Wix Studio CMS does How the SEO Learning Hub uses the Wix Studio CMS Highlight E-E-A-T with dynamic author pages Manage content at scale to define entities and relationships for Google How to create and optimize dynamic content with the Wix Studio CMS Note:  The ‘Wix Studio CMS’ refers specifically to our tool for organizing and managing dynamic content and pages. What the Wix Studio CMS does The Wix Studio CMS enables you to store your content in database collections. You can then connect the data to elements or pages that display them dynamically (as shown above). The main benefit here is efficient scalability—you can design a dynamic page once and add items to your collection to automatically create new URLs for each item (we call these ‘dynamic item pages’ and I’ll explain them later on).  You can generate an unlimited number of dynamic pages this way, which is useful for content management, author pages, job listings and more. You can even engage your users by allowing them to submit content directly to collections on your live site . The Wix Studio CMS on the SEO Learning Hub: How we use it On the SEO Learning Hub, we use the the Wix Studio CMS to: Showcase our experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness ( E-E-A-T ) via The main experts page Individual expert pages ( example ) Experts contributor carousel Manage and promote weekly episodes of our SERP’s Up podcast Let’s take a look under the hood to see how the Wix Studio CMS helps us perform these core SEO tasks. Highlight E-E-A-T with dynamic author pages During the first year or so of the SEO Learning Hub’s life, we didn't have bio pages for our expert authors (shown in the example below). Consequently, there was no way to view all of an expert’s articles in one place and what readers (and search engines) could learn about them on our domain was limited to their byline at the end of their content. Implementing author pages for our expert contributors not only remedied the issues above (improving UX, internal linking , and E-E-A-T), it also helps us rank in search results for the industry’s top experts, boosting our brand in SERPs and giving readers more reason to trust in our content. All of this SEO value/content comes from: Designing the individual expert pages and expert collection page Creating a CMS collection to house our expert author details Adding new experts (as they become SEO Learning Hub authors) as well as internal links (between the individual expert page and the expert collection page, the individual expert page and the expert’s articles, etc.) The first two items above are one-time tasks, so after they were set up, all I have to do is add new author details to the CMS collection to automatically create their individual expert page as well as add them to the main experts page  (shown below). I even use this collection to power an element on the Hub’s main landing page—our experts carousel: Manage content at scale to define entities and relationships for Google The SERP’s Up podcast episode collection page on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. We also use the Wix Studio CMS to create landing pages for episodes of our SERP’s Up podcast . As you can see from the image above, we have nearly 100 episodes (at the time of writing), which would be a very time-consuming task if you had to create those pages manually: “My SEO Rant podcast  is a low-effort community-focused asset. For it, I don’t use the Wix Studio CMS, but instead rely on traditional blog pages (as opposed to SERP’s Up, where we use the CMS). The irony is that—from a formatting point of view—SERP’s Up is less effort than my low-effort podcast. On the SEO Rant’s episode pages, despite the fact that I don’t offer a robust summary, etc., I still have to format it. The formatting itself is not scalable and not streamlined. Using the CMS for SERP’s Up removes all of that effort as the format is simply templated. Upon thinking about it now, I should have definitely used the CMS for the SEO Rant (despite my thinking that it is low-effort content output).” — Mordy Oberstein , co-host of SERP’s Up and host of The SEO Rant We don’t just upload the content—we take advantage of the dynamic fields for the following optimizations: This week’s guests — Listeners expect these details, so we provide them to instill trust and confidence that our podcast guests are experienced marketing experts (i.e., E-E-A-T). Notes — We add internal links to our expert pages and relevant SEO Hub articles , as well as external links to our podcast guests’ profiles or other relevant resources. Transcript — In addition to facilitating accessibility , the transcript tells search engines exactly what the episode is about. These optimizations help us outline the SEO Learning Hub’s topical authority  for search engines via keyword-rich text that establishes entities  as well as our relationships with those entities. Create and optimize dynamic content with the Wix Studio CMS Now that you’ve seen how the SEO Learning Hub deploys the Wix Studio CMS, you probably have some use cases of your own to test out.  First, you need to add the CMS to your site:  Open your Wix Editor. Click CMS  on the left side of the Editor. Click Start Now  or Add to site . Finally, either select a preset layout  or start from scratch by creating a collection  and adding to it.  Collections are where you’ll store your content (text, images, videos) for use within dynamic pages and elements. You can input data manually or scale the process by importing a CSV file. A CMS collection in Wix. You can select your preferred collection layout: table, list, or gallery. Dynamic pages  maintain the same design layout across your site while dynamically updating their content based on the collection items you connect them to.  And, as mentioned above, you can create an unlimited number of dynamic pages to meet any client requirement. There are two types of dynamic pages  you can use to display the content in your CMS collections: Dynamic list pages  — Display multiple collection items in a repeater, gallery, or table. On the SEO Learning Hub, this would be the main experts page  and the main SERP’s Up page . Dynamic item pages  — These are automatically generated for each item in your connected collection. Each page has its own unique URL and provides more details about that particular item. On the SEO Learning Hub, this would be an individual expert page ( example ) or an individual SERP’s Up episode page ( example ). There are many other potential uses for CMS collections, but for the purposes of this article, let's focus on some on-page optimization tips so that your collections can help improve your site’s SEO. Header tags :  While you can assign these within various CMS collection fields, it’s best to assign header tags within the template of your dynamic list and item pages if you know a certain field (e.g., an author’s name) will always be assigned the H1, for example. Title tags, meta descriptions, alt text:  For dynamic item pages, use fields within your CMS collection to optimize these elements. For dynamic list pages, use the Edit by Page  settings in your SEO dashboard  to format your title tags, meta descriptions, and define OG tags. You can even leverage variables to populate these fields. URL slug :  You can edit the formatting that defines your dynamic page URLs in the SEO tab of your page settings. Below are the default structures. Dynamic list pages: https://www.{your-domain.com}/{collection-name} Dynamic item pages: https://www.{your-domain.com}/{collection-name}/{primary-field} You can also add variables to your URL slug structure to ensure that each item has a unique URL (make sure your items don’t have the same URL). As a final note, certain fields within your CMS collections allow you to add links—remember to use these opportunities to improve your site’s internal linking. The Wix Studio CMS: Build optimized, content-rich websites faster You’ve seen how we use the Wix Studio CMS to promote the SEO Learning Hub, but there’s so much more you can do —you can even have our AI Collection Creator  jump start the process for you. Whether you’re a recruiter working on dozens of job postings per day, a real estate agency that needs to keep listings up-to-date, or anything in between, Wix Studio’s dynamic pages help you effectively create, manage, and optimize your content for better search optimization at scale. George Nguyen - Director of SEO Editorial, Wix   George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen Get started by: Creating a website → Branding can be the all-important differentiator, which is especially true in high-competition sectors like digital marketing services. While there are countless ways you can bolster your brand, the infinite options can also lead you to indecision, inertia, and scattered messaging. To give you a peak at the values and strategies that some of the search marketing industry’s top experts rely to keep them (and their businesses) relevant year after year, Wix and Search Engine Journal  hosted a digital marketing meetup on July 22, 2024, at the Wix Playground in NYC. Keep on reading for some of the top takeaways from the event, including: Get growing with an editorial-first focus Convert your ‘one and dones’ to regular users Editorial-first publications should focus on ‘reader service,’ not ‘SEO’ Pull in your sales teams and business KPIs for continuous improvement Leverage community for growth opportunities Trust is the foundation of your community as well as your sales pitch Take your audience from community platform to email newsletter ASAP Personal branding has a real impact—if you do it correctly Engage your audience: What, how much, and where to share Cover the entire funnel with your brand influencers Avoid the potential drawbacks of your influencer marketing Convert branding into actual leads: Micro moments and character branding Your branding is worth its weight in gold, but not if you rush it Special thanks to the live attendees, as well as the expert panelists and hosts: Claudio Cabrera, The Athletic Domenica D’Ottavio, Journey Further Nick Eubanks, Semrush/Traffic Think Tank Ray Martinez, Archer Education Katie Morton, Search Engine Journal Mordy Oberstein, Wix Lily Ray, Amsive Terry Rice, Good People Digital Carrie Rose, Rise at Seven Erica Schneider, Cut the Fluff John Shehata, Newzdash Get growing with an editorial-first focus Many publications try to maintain separation between editorial and the business side of things. This is noble, but if the business that funds your publication relies on the search visibility of your content to support its marketing funnel, then you’re already aware of how important it is that you attract users.  During the editorial-focused session of the event, the expert panelists shared the tactics they use to make editorial and search work together to bring in users without sacrificing the quality that publications have worked so hard to be known for. Convert your ‘one and dones’ to regular users If you know why someone came to your website, then you can leverage editorial to create a direct relationship with that person and potentially turn them into a regular user.  “People read or come to your site for three reasons: they are interested in the topic, interested in the author, or interested in the brand,” said John Shehata, CEO and founder of NewzDash.  “So, how can I convert someone who is coming to read about chicken recipes into a regular user? Remember the three reasons,” Shehata said, pointing to the topic (not the brand or the author) as the driver behind user intent.  “So instead of saying, ‘Hey, would you like to subscribe to our newsletter?’ I said, ‘Hey, would you like to get more chicken recipes?’—I increased conversions by 20%. Why? Because people were interested in the topic,” he explained. This pivot in positioning helps move users downward from the top of your funnel and it enables you to move them to channels that you own (i.e., email newsletters, SMS, your app) so that you’re somewhat sheltered from Google or social media algorithm updates. Editorial-first publications should focus on ‘reader service,’ not ‘SEO’ A lot of SEO implementation comes down to convincing your peers that it’s worth their time, which can be very challenging when it comes to asking writers or reporters to reflect SEO best practices in their work. “I try to stay away from the word ‘SEO’. At organizations like The [New York] Times  or The Athletic , where there’s such a focus on original content on a daily basis, I like to call it a ‘reader service’ and that kind of changes the mindset for a lot of editors and reporters, because at that point, they’re thinking about it more like serving the reader, when initially a lot of them think about it as serving clicks.” — Claudio Cabrera, VP of Newsroom Strategy and Audience at The Athletic While a lot of it centers around language, ‘reader service’ isn’t simply a white labeling of SEO. “A lot of times when editors see something that’s trending, they say ‘We would never write that,’” Cabrera said, “But my thinking is, ‘How can we talk to you in a way that you feel like you can write it in a way that is native to The New York Times , or to The Athletic , or wherever it may be.” This approach can also apply to your writers’ content strategy. “I think a lot of times when people think of owning a storyline, owning a coverage line, driving subscriptions, these writers produce 20 articles,” Cabrera said, “[But] you can produce six really, really good [articles] that target everything that people are looking for: Who is this candidate? What do they stand for? All those types of things versus tackling the 20 things that may not necessarily bring it to a quality level.” Pull in your sales teams and business KPIs for continuous improvement Low quality content often translates to lost lead opportunities. For editors, content marketing managers , and SEOs, meeting with your sales teams can be a treasure trove of user-first content ideas .  “I have the privilege of working with an admissions team that acts as an active sales team, so I’m able to actually incorporate live feedback directly into my content strategy to address a lot of problems beforehand.” — Ray Martinez, Vice President SEO at Archer Education Improving the content is only one component of the challenge, though. The other part is proving that your optimizations moved the needle for the audience and the brand—an absolute necessity if you need to get stakeholder buy-in for more of your recommendations. To that end, Martinez advocates for understanding your business’s KPIs to see what success should look like and how your content plays into it. While this will look different for every organization, “For me, I can understand the quality of my organic traffic by looking at my cost per action,” he said, “So I look at cost for enrollment (in higher ed) and I can tell you that by the cost of a program, if my cost per enrollment exceeds more than a third, then I am not doing my job from an organic standpoint.” Leverage community for growth opportunities Places where communities engage online, like Reddit  or brand forums, have surged in search visibility as Google prioritizes the ‘experience’ in E-E-A-T and as a potential counterbalance for AI overviews . The search demand for [Reddit] from 2009 to March 2024. But, building your own brand or industry-related community won’t get resources from stakeholders if that community doesn’t yield ROI. To that end, Erica Schneider, founder at Cut the Fluff, and Nick Eubanks, vice president of owned media at Semrush and co-founder of Traffic Think Tank, shared how they balance selling with branding. Trust is the foundation of your community as well as your sales pitch Schneider attracts leads by addressing “some amorphous idea that is bothering my audience.” She identifies what that audience’s challenges are through engaging with them on social media (LinkedIn and X/Twitter).  “I went through a phase of serving people a lot at one point,” she said, “And so I got a lot of big answers to the question people were struggling with and then all you are doing is projecting that back to [the audience] in a way where they can see themselves in a mirror through your content.” “The most common response that I get to anything that I write is, ‘I feel like you’re two steps ahead of what I’m thinking and you articulated it before I could,’ and so when you can do that really well people believe that when you say, ‘I have something that’s going to help you,’ or ‘I have something worth joining,’ or ‘I have something to buy,’ they believe you and believing you is most of the hurdle.” — Erica Schneider, Founder at Cut the Fluff Taking another trust-based approach, Eubanks prefers the ‘anti-sell,’ where he contextualizes the other solutions available for the potential prospect.  “So the intention of Traffic Think Tank was never to generate leads for my agency, but it did end up generating a lot of leads for the agency and it was from just trying to be solution-forward. People would ask questions or they would present a problem and people would weigh in and I would just try to be useful.” — Nick Eubanks, Vice President of Owned Media at Semrush and Co-founder of Traffic Think Tank If your audience sees you, your community, and your brand as someone/something they can trust, then you’re more likely to be top-of-mind when they’re further down the funnel and looking for services you provide. Take your audience from community platform to email newsletter ASAP Wherever you build your community (e.g., Facebook, Slack), it’s crucial that you move those community members into an audience that you own—namely your email newsletter audience. “If you have somebody’s email address or their phone number, you actually have complete control of that communication. There’s a lot of people that just put a ton of time and energy into Quora and generated a lot of traffic and leads with it—until it didn’t. And people are doing the same thing with Reddit right now and it’s going to work until it doesn’t and I would rather be in their inbox.” — Nick Eubanks, Vice President of Owned Media at Semrush and Co-founder of Traffic Think Tank “When I send an email and there is a CTA  in it, people click on it and buy way more than anywhere else,” Schneider said. This means that you can build your community wherever the audience happens to frequent—be it a social platform, a forum, or something different altogether—and insulate your lead pipeline from trends and updates that affect the platform the community is hosted on.  “There's no guarantee that [your community members] are going to stay and so I would say, build your home base, which is your email, as soon as you can,” Schneider said, recommending that “If you don’t have a newsletter, start one and then put your little beacons everywhere else and move as the market moves.” Personal branding has a huge impact—if you do it correctly “The thing that I wasn't really expecting when I started to do this was how beneficial it is for the agency. Oh my goodness, this puts our agency on the map so much, and we’ve gotten so many clients from it—so much visibility from it.” — Lily Ray, Vice President, SEO Strategy & Research at Amsive Thought leadership elevates professionals as well as the businesses they work for—and the benefits can be lucrative. Achieving that status and getting it to actually bring in business, however, requires commitment and consideration. During the personal branding for agency and consultancy growth session, Lily Ray, vice president, SEO strategy & research at Amsive, Carrie Rose, CEO and founder of Rise at Seven, and Katie Morton, editor-in-chief at Search Engine Journal, shared how they became some of the most sought-out voices in the search industry. Engage your audience: What, how much, and where to share “Most people have a problem within their brands and I just talked about that problem every single day—so much that when they had that problem or they thought about that problem, they thought about me and they called me up.” — Carrie Rose, CEO & Founder of Rise at Seven Sharing commentary, tips, and engaging in discussions relevant to your target audience (as Rose advises above) helps you filter the audience and appeal to higher-intent leads. But even within that bucket of relevant topics, there’s a lot an aspiring influencer  can discuss. In search marketing alone, you could post about the latest Google algorithm update , the state of third-party cookies, or generative AI. To that end, monitor your engagement as you share about various topics and make note of where those conversations go. This can help you better understand your audience and their concerns, as well as which topics are hotter for leads. If you’re wondering how much  of your best tips and workflows to share, both Rose and Ray say they’re open with nearly everything.  “Eighty percent of the people in this room won’t see [what you share] because they haven’t got the time, they haven’t got the skill signs, they haven’t got the team to do it,” Rose said, suggesting that sharing your best tips is unlikely to devalue you as a professional. “Well, 20% will see it, and that's okay, because ultimately what we are doing is also building an industry and if we grow the market, then we make more money because there’s more for everybody,” she added. “I share everything, to be honest … I found that sharing all these things just brings more and more attention and people asking you questions and interest. It definitely isn't the case that people take what you know and then just go steal it and do it themselves—they can’t.” — Lily Ray, Vice President, SEO Strategy & Research at Amsive While both Ray and Rose cite authenticity as a cornerstone of their online presence, they equally embrace curation. “I’m not trying to build a million followers on TikTok, I’m not trying to build a million followers on YouTube, I’m just trying to get in front of potential clients and so I don’t need to share what I ate for breakfast,” Ray said.  At numerous points during the event, both speakers and attendees commented on the diminished quality of engagement on X (formerly Twitter), with Rose and Ray advocating for LinkedIn as the current go-to platform for B2B influencers. “[In the last year,] the ROI of posting on LinkedIn, the amount of visibility you can get to clients has skyrocketed,” Ray said. “So, we have a form on our website and essentially we ask, ‘How did you find us?’ and it’s like, 85% are LinkedIn,” Rose added. Cover the entire funnel with your brand influencers “With anything you teach, don’t leave your audience behind.” — Katie Morton, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Journal Education and support are foundational for all brands looking to leverage influencers and thought leaders. If bringing attention to your company is the goal, then it only makes sense to address users at every level of expertise to maximize your audience size (and potential leads). It’s the same reason why this publication, the SEO Learning Hub, covers both SEO basics  and advanced SEO  strategies and tactics. While this is generally true, there are certain brands that cater specifically to expert-level users. But, no one is born an expert, so you can still adapt a top-of-funnel influencer strategy to ‘speak up’ to the audience that you may eventually sell to without diluting your USP. Avoid the potential drawbacks of your influencer marketing Just like how relying on one channel for all your marketing is risky, so too is hitching your entire business’s marketing to one or two people.  “It’s very dangerous and I’ve definitely seen that in the past. I think the message that I try to send to people, especially my staff, is that this isn’t an ego thing and often it is—let’s all admit, some people get likes and followers and, you know, community that listens to them. The thing that a lot of people miss is the branding part—the brand part of that message is ‘why?’ Why Rise at Seven? Come on, you guys have got competitors, I’ve got competitors. Why them versus us? And I think, ultimately, what we've got to do is teach our own employees to understand that ‘why?’” — Carrie Rose, CEO & Founder of Rise at Seven Educating your influencers on how to properly represent your brand enables them to differentiate you from competitors at every opportunity and turn more prospects into leads. Ray’s team also approaches this issue proactively by cultivating the agency’s next generation of experts. This includes referring them for speaking opportunities, interviews, and public speaking coaching. Convert branding into actual leads: Micro moments and character branding Typically, marketers and stakeholders approach branding as a top-of-funnel initiative—more effective for the awareness stage, but less important than other factors when it’s finally decision time. This mindset may leave opportunities on the table, as many of the event speakers shared how branding generated important leads for their businesses. “Most of our best leads and our best new clients were word-of-mouth referrals, based on relationships that our staff had or that they nurtured over time. I think it’s all about these micro moments that build up his momentum.” — Domenica D’Ottavio, Associate Director of Digital PR at Journey Further Micro moments refer to the numerous touchpoints that a potential lead has with your brand and how those interactions convey what it’s like to work with your business and the value you provide (i.e., a glimpse at what it’s like to be your client). Putting your best foot forward during these instances makes a big difference as “sometimes people come to you and you don’t really know exactly where the moment was that they decided to convert,” Domenica D’Ottavio, associate director of digital PR at Journey Further, said. But, how do you treat every opportunity like it could be a client-winning micro moment? This goes beyond the traditional ‘branding’ that many of us immediately think of (i.e., fonts and colors) and touches on character branding. “Character branding is far more important, especially with the rise of AI—we can all have a cool looking video, cool looking content, so on and so forth—but you’re talking about the character of the community that you’re working with as well as your brand. I think that’s really what stands out, because you’re going above the fluff, you’re going to the substance of what you're about. ” — Terry Rice, Managing Director: Growth & Strategic Partnerships at Good People Digital Unlike some other levers in marketing, character branding is not something you can just turn on for more leads right now. “So the things that you’re doing today, which may seem fruitless, may seem like, ‘Why am I even doing this?’—Years later, someone will say, ‘Oh yeah, I saw that one post you did on LinkedIn,’” said Terry Rice, managing director: growth and strategic partnerships at Good People Digital. Your branding is worth its weight in gold, but not if you rush it Branding can persuade potential clients at every point in the customer journey. Some of the event speakers even mentioned that their branding-based leads were their best clients. But, the experts also agreed that it’s a long-term strategy, so if you want to maximize ROI from your branding, you’ll need to commit and show consistency so that prospects can gain enough familiarity that they begin to trust you.  “Brand is like SEO: It all compounds on each other and what you're looking for is long-term, stable growth and loyal audiences—and that doesn't happen overnight.” — Mordy Oberstein , Head of SEO Brand at Wix Don’t rush it. As my esteemed colleague Mordy Oberstein said to cap off the event, “Unlike SEO, if you make a mistake, you redo the title tag, you redo the H1, you redo the content; if you mess with people, it's very hard to get them back on your side.” For more coverage from digital marketing events at the Wix Playground, check out our other articles: Future-forward techniques for SEO teams from MozCon 2024 SEO in the newsroom: Tips from the SEO for News meetup Agency takeaways and tips from BrightonSEO (April 2024) Google’s SGE: Insights from SEOFOMO x Wix George Nguyen - Director of SEO Editorial, Wix   George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen I can’t go to a single digital marketing event in 2024 without someone asking whether I feel threatened that AI will replace me as the editor-in-chief of the Wix SEO Learning Hub.  I’m confident that won’t be the case because generative AI  doesn’t think like target audiences (as a matter of fact, it doesn’t ‘think’ at all). By adopting unwavering editorial standards in tandem with extensive knowledge of the audience, my expert contributors  and I have brought industry-wide attention to this publication within the first two years of its launch. In this article, I’ll walk you through a few of my editorial practices so that you can adapt and adopt them for your own publication and for the benefit of your potential customers. If you’re a writer, these tips can also help you self-edit and improve your output for your client(s).  Table of contents: Record first impressions on a private copy of the draft Troubleshoot content by identifying and labeling sentence functions Trim the fat by reviewing the beginning of each section Honor user context and intent in your copy and structure Finalize the content by comparing the final draft against your feedback Before we get started: Editorial workflow overview The tips I’m going to provide you are widely applicable (so you can jump straight to them if you prefer), but those tips are more valuable when you have an overview of my editorial workflow. Additionally, you may find this information helpful if you’re starting your own publication or looking to streamline your processes. After determining a topic, vetting the outline, and receiving the first draft, I: Create a private, unshared copy of the first draft  — I do this when I’m about to read a draft for the first time. I use this document to mark up the content and jot down all of my thoughts—all of them, which is why this file is unshared. I’ll cover this in more detail in the next section of this article. Conduct the first review  — When you return the draft to your writer, ensure that it includes all suggestions and feedback that the writer will need to re-submit their draft without the need for a second round of revisions (although this is not always avoidable). Conduct the second review  — This would ideally be your final review before sending the content to get staged. Typically, you’ll have plenty of time between rounds of reviews so that you’ll come back to the content with ‘fresh eyes’. If you’re self-editing, I strongly recommend asking a peer to give it a final read before staging. Stage and schedule the content for publication  — You may want to make another copy of the article to add production notes for the person staging the content on your CMS. My entire publishing workflow involves more steps, but for the purposes of this article, I’ll focus purely on the editorial process. Make a new, private copy of the first draft to record your first impressions Seeing the forest for the trees is one of the toughest challenges when editing lengthier content. Taking notes on an unshared version of the draft gives you the freedom to monitor and record your thoughts and reactions as you proceed through the article like a reader encountering it for the very first time. Anticipate your readership’s initial reaction to your content to identify opportunities to improve clarity and language. This helps you answer questions like:  Where are the flaws in logic? Is the overall positioning right for the audience? Where doesn’t the tone match brand or style guidelines? What transition sentences does the author need to add? Do headers adopt the appropriate format (i.e., imperative sentence, gerund phrase, etc)? Which sections need more multimedia? Are the CTAs  contextually appropriate? What sections provide little to no value? What can the author reformat for concision, readability, skimability, or visualization? Which sections require bolstering or take up too much of the content? This step saves you time by ensuring that your subsequent line edits move the content closer to achieving its goal—instead of potentially editing to improve sentences that may get cut later on because there are positioning problems with the article. When I edit, I keep this unshared draft in an open tab on a second monitor so that I can reference it as I perform the line edits. I also keep a physical notepad on-hand so that I can jot down notes that are not specific to a particular section of content (e.g., other blog posts from which to link to this one, follow-up article ideas for later, etc). At the very least, review this document before sending your revisions back to the author so that you don’t omit any crucial feedback that necessitates another round of revisions. Troubleshoot content by identifying and labeling sentence functions By identifying the function of surrounding sections or sentences, you can more easily see what copy is missing or inadequate. Do this in an unshared copy of the draft so as not to litter the working doc with comments. This is one of my go-to tactics when I feel like something isn’t right with the copy, but cannot pinpoint the cause. It’s also a useful tactic to help break through writer’s block. When you can see what functions the sentences perform, you can more easily reverse engineer what’s missing and provide that feedback to the writer. In the example below, I identified the purposes of these sections to determine that more explanation was needed to support the claim (highlighted in orange): Identifying the purpose of the surrounding sections (highlighted) enabled me to add the missing context (green). If you’re self-editing, this is also a great practice because it allows you to compare what you wrote against the intended function of the sentence/section. Review the beginning of each section to trim the fat If your content is slow to get to the point, users will bounce, defeating the purpose of your content to begin with and creating a less-than-satisfactory association with your brand. If you find that your content reads slow, but are stuck when it comes to making it more impactful and concise, review your section headers and the first few sentences that follow. If the first sentences don’t meaningfully contextualize for the reader or expand on the header, delete those sentences and review the section. Without the text in blue, the author can get straight to addressing the user’s intent. This is a great practice because it also helps your writers understand that they can cover more ground in fewer words—an absolute non-negotiable when you have to compete for your audience’s attention against just about everything else that can pop up on their desktop or mobile device. Honor user context and intent in your copy and structure Sure, you have to address your users’ pain points, but the way you do that speaks volumes about your customer experience. So, exercise some creativity to invoke a solution to a pain point or just honor their time by getting straight to business (this is my preferred method). This opening is concise and effective because it’s meant for experienced digital marketers, enabling them to go straight to the tactics without making them question whether they’re the target audience. In the example above, the introduction accounts for just 4% of the entire content (92 words out of a total 2,745). But, that sliver of the article adequately frames the content for the searcher (as annotated in the image) without extra fluff. In contrast, a different author might have: Wrote an overly detailed introduction to the Meta Ads platform , which would be excessive because this is not an introductory-level article; it’s for digital marketers already running campaigns that know what they need (i.e., to increase sales).  Included vague statistics (the way so much marketing content does) that may apply to the industry at large but are inappropriate to generalize onto specific businesses Used a needless analogy that oversimplifies or just misrepresents the topic (another hallmark of poorly organized, beginner-level content) I’m always working on ways to improve my feedback for my authors and this area is amongst the most challenging (because sometimes it’s more of a feeling than clear language or positioning errors). Here are some of the tips I commonly provide them: Eliminate unnecessary FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).  E.g., “ Without rental car insurance, you risk being liable for all damage to your rental vehicle or others and their property… ”Instead, a less manipulative approach might discuss how additional rental car insurance provides peace of mind and protects you in the event of the unexpected. Earn your audience’s trust via transparency. Sidestepping your users’ critical decision factors or obfuscating publicly available information is disrespectful and, by definition, means your content is not comprehensive, which could hinder rankings and traffic. Picking up from the example above, this fictional car rental company could tell its audience that their personal auto policy may already include rental coverage. Lean into your users’ intent.  There’s keyword intent  and then there’s implicit search intent —you must account for both if you want to rank and actually convert users. This is one area in which subject matter expertise is invaluable as it allows you to signal who the content is actually for, potentially increasing your conversion rate and minimizing low quality leads. Review the language and structure of your content: Does it appropriately incorporate industry terminology/lingo? Are all sections relevant to the target audience? Is the main content easy to access (or do they have to watch an entire webinar to answer a single question, for example)? When you greet your high-intent, bottom-of-the-funnel users with introductory definitions that speak to beginners or make them work to find what they came for (or vice versa), those visitors may bounce believing that the content was not meant for them—and the bottom is probably the worst place to drop out of your marketing funnel. Compare the final draft against your feedback to finalize the content Experienced creators know that it’s easy to keep reworking content to improve it—so easy that it’s hard to know when it's actually ‘finished’.  Don’t let the deadline dictate when your content is complete.  Instead, after your first round of revisions, save the working doc (where you added all your suggestions and line edits before returning them to the author) as a new, unshared document.  Refer to this document during the final review of the draft (before you stage it). This tells you whether the author followed all your guidance (since you can review the first draft side-by-side against the second draft) and you can see how they approached your suggestions.  You can do this natively within Google Sheets and Microsoft Word via the version history feature, but writers often dismiss comments when they address them or inadvertently remove them when the text they’re anchored to gets deleted. I download post-revision drafts in Word so that I can access them offline. If you’ve thoroughly covered your bases during your first revision, then the author has everything they need to complete the assignment, and you have an easy method to verify whether they added everything you requested.  This step is valuable from a contributorship standpoint as well, since it speaks to the writer’s attention to detail and willingness—it’s how the best writers identify themselves, and unfortunately, if you’re not actively looking for that, you may miss it, which means it’s harder to know who you want to retain on your roster. Pro tip:  You can also ask your writers to make their revisions in ‘suggestion’ mode so that you can see exactly what they changed. Personally, I do not ask my writers to do this because I like to read their final revision as if it was the published content; this sometimes yields new insights that can help me further improve the content. Combine editorial skill and subject matter expertise for an industry-leading publication In addition to the tips I laid out above, subject matter expertise in the field you’re editing for will dramatically improve your publication by: Minimizing inaccuracies Saving time spent fact-checking Attracting expert contributors Strengthening the expertise within each article And, perhaps most importantly, subject matter expertise means you understand the factors that affect your audience’s buying decisions, which is the best way to turn them into customers. George Nguyen - Director of SEO Editorial, Wix   George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen Search marketers barely had time to process the potential impact of AI overviews before the internal Google Search documentation leak, and both served as the backdrop for this year’s MozCon  in Seattle. To help you navigate the chaos, stay on the right side of AI usage, and develop workflows that will drive your agency or brand’s success into the future, here are four takeaways for SEO teams from MozCon 2024: Move past the checklist mentality with context and critical thinking — Lily Ray Use AI to recommend, not write — Andy Crestodina Adopt perspective-led content to stand out against consensus-based AI overviews — Bernard Huang Overcome flawed analytics with directional data reporting — Dana DiTomaso Move past the checklist mentality with context and critical thinking “SEO is not a bag of tricks. When you approach SEO that way, more often than not, you’re not going to see any meaningful results.” — Lily Ray, Vice President, SEO Strategy & Research at Amsive Marketing teams can combat the ‘SEO by checklist’ mentality and achieve better visibility for clients by thinking more critically, holistically, and long-term, said Lily Ray, VP, SEO strategy & research at Amsive, during her MozCon session. Ray’s advice is a remedy for the increasingly widespread and generic checklist-based SEO resources that some amateur (or just bad) SEOs position as a one-size-fits-all solution. On top of that, a “vicious cycle of SEO tunnel vision” (illustrated below) that Ray has witnessed over and over during her career managing agency SEO teams is adding to the noise that’s drowning out your client’s actual needs. This overreliance on tools (like ChatGPT ) and tactics that worked in the past (regardless of relevance for the current client’s business/situation) can add inertia and, at best, generate lackluster outcomes. Documented workflows (e.g., checklists) will always be important, especially as a resource for newer SEOs . However, to recommend relevant optimizations that will actually pave the way for business results, you also need to approach each client and their website with fresh eyes—not boilerplate workflows. To that end, Ray recommends building as much context for the business as possible to develop a holistic SEO roadmap: Learning the business’s purpose and how it makes money  — “The first most important thing that often (for some reason) gets overlooked by many SEOs is learning the website’s purpose and how it makes money,” Ray said. “Why is this part first? Because ultimately, anything else is likely an SEO vanity metric that probably doesn’t matter very much.” SEO can vary dramatically between website categories and business models. Knowing the type of website and the algorithm updates that affect them is a good starting point. Establish and track KPIs based on revenue-generating activities  — This will enable you to establish a baseline and measure your progress. Setting up key events in GA4  to track revenue-generating activities is essential from the outset, Ray said. Understand the target audience — Look at your various tools and traffic sources to understand where your users come from (referring sites), their age, gender distribution, etc. to discover who your target audience actually is. During her session, Ray recommended tools like SparkToro, BuzzSumo, and SimilarWeb for this purpose. You can also conduct user-first research  to identify pain points, potential topics, and other opportunities. Audit the site’s SEO history — “In 2024, you’re rarely starting from scratch—most of these companies have done some form of SEO and, most of the time, they have some type of skeletons in their closet,” Ray said. Have an ‘SEO therapy session’ with your client and ask them what algorithm updates they were impacted by, whether they’ve ever had manual actions, and if other agencies have worked on the site (if so, ask about their strategies and review their reports). You can also use third-party tools to get ahead of these conversations with your clients, Ray said, recommending Darwin Santos’ GSC Guardian Chrome extension  that overlays Google algorithm updates over your GSC charts . Evaluate the site’s SEO footprint  — Find out what’s ranking for your target keywords and get a lay of the digital landscape. Conduct a thorough site: search  as well as crawl the site to identify opportunities. This is where your expertise as an SEO comes into play. You need to pair the data from your analysis with your knowledge of SEO (and what’s happening on the SERP) to see who your true SEO competitors are . Strategize with a group  — “If you can get a paid search expert in the room, a tech SEO, a local SEO, a content writer, UX designer, Google algorithm updates  specialist, and of course the client, you’re going to get a more holistic understanding of what the business’s needs are and what is the best approach,” Ray said. Success here often depends on getting buy-in for your SEO proposal  from a senior stakeholder. But even so, you’ll need to include (and incentivize) every stakeholder  whose expertise you’re looking to leverage. Evaluate the potential risk of AI overviews — SEOs can monitor AI overviews that trigger for their target keywords using a tool like ZipTie , Ray said. This enables you to communicate these risks to your client(s) more proactively. Develop a holistic, data-driven SEO roadmap — This is the culmination of the steps above. Some rules to keep in mind here are: Every time you introduce a new SEO tactic, you need to be able to answer “Why?” and connect it to business goals. If you don’t know the answer to a client’s question, just say so and be honest (and find out later for them)—this can help build trust. Always be proactive — Inform your client(s) about search updates before they impact them. This can also include new Google product launches, SERP features , spam violations, etc. Use AI to recommend, not write “You’ll notice actually, I don’t really use AI to write. I’m using it to do analysis and make minor recommendations.” — Andy Crestodina, Co-founder and CMO at Orbit Media Studios When it comes to generative AI, much of the buzz focuses on the end goal of creating high-quality, bespoke content in seconds. However, generative AI has largely failed in this regard —especially when compared to human-generated content.  Instead of trying to get ChatGPT to create a ready-to-publish piece of content or copy, you can make more effective use of it by training it to provide relevant recommendations, according to Andy Crestodina, co-founder and CMO at Orbit Media Studios. While you can always feed it your first-party data, businesses that are starting from scratch can use a variation of Crestodina’s example ChatGPT prompt for B2B businesses: “Build me a persona of a [job title] at a [industry and/or company size] responsible for [responsibilities/challenges]. This person is looking for [needs/requirements] and they are considering a new [product/service].” “I want 4 things from AI: [the audience’s] hopes and dreams, their fears and concerns, their emotional triggers, and their decision criteria for selecting a company like mine,” Crestodina said. When analyzing the output (or generative AI outputs in general), Crestodina reminded attendees that the AI also stands for: Average information — Outputs are generic, making it harder for you to distinguish your brand. Assume incorrect — Generative AI predicts words; it’s not looking to provide truth. You must double check everything. Another input — AI is just another tool, which means its potency depends on the person wielding it. Before moving on to topic brainstorming, Crestodina recommends bolstering the output (based on the example persona prompt above) with some of your own findings about the target audience (as shown below). Once you’ve vetted your persona, you’re ready to do some brainstorming. Use a prompt like: “You’re an expert content strategist, skilled at selecting topics that build awareness and trust with a target audience. What information does this person need to do their job well?” Finally, you can zoom in on particular topics and prompt ChatGPT to provide you with some potential ideas and angles for content. In the example above, Crestodina told ChatGPT to make the article topics compelling and memorable. “Add those words that work for you, add those words that align with your content strategy,” Crestodina said. “If you want to stay top of mind, I’m telling [the AI] to make it memorable, make it surprising, make it impactful, make it unexpected—whatever the words are that work with your brand, put those in the prompt and copy and paste in that person’s information needs.” “That, to me, is the right way to use these tools,” he said. “Don’t expect anything good until you train it on your audience, and then talk to it a bit before you get to the point where you’re looking for topics,” Crestodina added, emphasizing that even if only 20% of the outputs are viable, that can still be a worthwhile efficiency gain. Adopt perspective-led content to stand out against consensus-based AI overviews “AI overviews are designed to answer the consensus queries that everybody is more or less agreeing upon. And what we’re seeing then, is perhaps the biggest cannibalization of keywords and queries that we’ve ever seen in Google Search by Google. If they’re taking a look at the ‘What is,’ and the ‘How-to’s,’ [Google is] just saying, ‘Yeah, everybody’s more or less saying the same thing—so, we’ll say it.” — Bernard Huang, Co-founder at Clearscope If Google reserves the top of the SERP for its AI overviews, then what’s left for brands and SEOs? During his session, Bernard Huang, co-founder at Clearscope, reconciled Google’s guidance on experience -rich content with its most recent and controversial SERP feature, pointing to information gain  and ‘ perspective-led content ’ as the type of content that Google now rewards. ‘Consensus topics/queries’ (mentioned above) represent agreement on an established topic and are therefore more likely to trigger an AI overview that disincentivizes clicks. Information gain, on the other hand, adds new entities  to Google’s knowledge graph, enabling it to better understand (and provide results for) new queries, potentially avoiding AI overviews as well (due to a lack of consensus on the topic).  To that end, “instead of this ‘skyscraper’-type content that we’ve all been encouraged to do over the last 5-10 years, what we need to really be thinking about is perspective-led content,” Huang said, urging SEOs to switch from targeting keywords to instead targeting perspectives. Reddit ’s recent prevalence in SERPs seems to support this interpretation. Huang recommends that SEOs and content creators view their topic through the perspectives that users are likely to engage with, such as: Things I wish I knew (e.g, “7 things I wish I knew before starting the keto diet”) Can anyone learn XYZ? (e.g., “Can anyone learn to code?”) Should you XYZ? (e.g., “Should you try the keto diet?”) For all skill levels (e.g., “Marathon training plans for every runner”) Time urgency (e.g., “How to train for a marathon in a short time period”) Without XYZ (e.g., “10 ways to control high blood pressure without medication”) DIY (e.g., “10 do-it-yourself SEO tips to save money”) And, for sustained performance, Huang advises that brands and SEOs be vigilant in monitoring and refreshing their content —this best practice is even more important as new AI-generated content enters the ecosystem. Overcome flawed analytics with directional data reporting “[Analytics is] actually getting worse: Consent management, ad blockers, Safari—lots of things are making it very, very difficult for us to get any sort of accuracy whatsoever when it comes to our data.” — Dana DiTomaso, Founder and Lead Instructor at Kick Point Playbook Analytics has always had its limitations, like web browsers, for example: “If I go to your website on my phone and I go to your website and my desktop computer, I am two people,” said Dana DiTomaso, founder and lead instructor at Kick Point Playbook. “There is nothing in GA4 that is going to tie these people together.” To make matters worse, shifting consumer privacy preferences (and how each tech giant seems to want to approach the issue) has only added more caveats and nuance to work around and convey to clients. Source: Link Building HQ. With these challenges in mind, DiTomaso presented attendees with two paths: “We could continue to pretend that we can track everything—wrap ourselves up in a cozy blanket of lies —or we can accept the truth of the situation … So, instead of trying to be like, ‘This totally happened and this is how many times it happened,’ how about we embrace ‘just good enough?’” ‘Accepting the truth of the situation’ means acknowledging that the data is far from perfect while still referencing it for strategic decision making and reporting. Since the data is not 100% accurate, DiTomaso recommends using ‘directional data’ in your reporting  instead of aiming for precision. Directional data points at what you need to know and helps you answer directional questions, like: Which landing page is doing a better job of driving signups? By providing metrics as percentages and including bar graphs (as shown in the example below), it’s far easier to discern which pages contribute the most to conversions (against their respective shares of total sessions). “There's no actual numbers. It's a percentage of the overall, knowing that what we can track isn't complete, but what we're recording is complete with the data that we do have,” DiTomaso said. Is our organic traffic increasing or decreasing? Similar to the tactic above, you can also use percentages to convey your performance over a time. And in most cases, it’s okay to round off percentages to simplify the report for stakeholders. Is this video encouraging people to buy our products?  For this example, DiTomaso created two audiences in GA4 (people who had a video start event and people who have never had a video start event) and compared their conversion rates (key events). DiTomaso also introduced ‘effectiveness’ as a directional reporting concept. “‘Effectiveness is a measure of how good your marketing is at hitting your goals,” she said, explaining, “It’s based on two metrics—they may not even be metrics in the same system; you just see how they relate to each other and that’s it—that’s your effectiveness.” For example, you could evaluate device sessions against conversions (as shown below). “Do the slices match up? If they don’t, something is wrong,” DiTomaso said, adding that this particular example could be used to solicit buy-in for a mobile site redesign. This type of analysis can help you answer directional questions like: Are your emails spurring action? Did those technical SEO fixes improve revenue? Did we reduce churn with our new learning series? Stay up to date with live SEO events on the Wix SEO Learning Hub This year, MozCon featured over 24 expert speakers. In addition to this recap, I encourage you to check out their sessions ; these were some of my favorites: On the Hunt for Hidden Gems: Perspectives on UGC in the SERP — Crystal Carter The Future of Search — Rand Fishkin & Dr. Pete Meyers SEO Mind Games: Decode Searcher Bias for Content Success — Garrett Sussman The Power of Emotion: How To Create Content That (Actually) Converts — Talia Wolf Build a Story-Driven Marketing Machine — Joel Klettke Multimedia Marvels - A Symphony of Audio and Visual Marketing Narratives — Azeem Ahmad For their full decks, see MozCon’s schedule page .  If you enjoyed this recap, subscribe to Searchlight , the Wix SEO Learning Hub’s monthly newsletter, to find out about our most recent resources and event coverage. And, check out our previous event coverage from this year: SEO in the newsroom: Tips from the SEO for News meetup Agency takeaways and tips from BrightonSEO (April 2024) Google’s SGE: Insights from SEOFOMO x Wix George Nguyen - Director of SEO Editorial, Wix   George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen The relationship between news publishers and Google has long been contentious. For news SEOs, the opportunities for traffic only seem to erode, and when traffic is up for grabs, the search engine has been known to make publishers jump through hoops (e.g., AMP ) to be eligible. To share experiences and help peers in the industry navigate optimizing news for Google Search, some of the top SEO experts from across the news industry gathered on May 20, 2024, for New York’s first-ever News for SEO meetup, organized by Newzdash  and Wix Studio . Below are key takeaways from the event’s panel discussion, including: Embedding yourself into the newsroom Providing initial and ongoing SEO training Optimizing the stories that really matter for your audience AI adoption across news publications Tactical tips for increasing writer E-E-A-T Embed yourself into the newsroom “Good SEO and great journalism are not mutually exclusive.”   — Jake Becker, Sr. Director, SEO at New York Post During the panel, the experts agreed that embedding yourself into the newsroom and learning how journalists operate is crucial to prove your value and earn buy-in from the reporters actually writing (and potentially optimizing) the stories.  “Take a step back and see what the journalists are doing, how they’re doing it, and learn a little bit from them. But at the same time, also think about where the opportunities and the gaps lie that you can actually assist with.” — Binti Pawa, VP, Audience Growth at Forbes Successfully embedding yourself with the news team makes them more receptive to your ideas and SEO guidance, enabling you to scale SEO for your publication without asking for more resources. Opportunities to collaborate with your news team might come in the form of daily standups or Slack channels where they discuss what’s on the publishing calendar. In these meetings, you can offer ways to optimize upcoming content or pitch your own story ideas, which might be exactly what some reporters need on a slow news day. “We’ve been able to very quickly get integrated and then pitch those ideas,” said Binti Pawa, VP, audience growth at Forbes . “When they do get picked up, they actually perform. Now, this is where the key is: Showing those results, the performance—that’s huge because that’s where you’re going to get a buy-in.”  Embedding yourself with the news team, however, can be tricky. “I’ve never come across a reporter who’s been like, ‘Okay, I’ll make that change. You’re not my editor, but right, that sounds like a great idea,’” Gabriella Iannetta, deputy head, SEO at The Sun , said. One way to sidestep potential friction is to be flexible with your approach.  “If you’re the reporter with the exclusive and you know it’s going to blow up, then let’s test it. Let’s try it out and then we can work on what that result was. Did it actually blow up the way you thought or was there something we could have done better?” — Gabriella Iannetta, Deputy Head, SEO at The Sun “It’s easy being on the business side, but I think you have to absolutely be on the editorial side to get things done,” Iannetta added. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with your publication’s editorial workflows and embedded yourself with the news team, the next step is to find ways to scale your success. “My approach is to empower as many people as possible as thoroughly as possible to adopt SEO. Also when you think about it, the reporters are handling the coverage, they know the most crucial facets—the most important things and terms. If they’re the ones who hold the SEO knowledge, they’ll be able to optimize better than I can if I’m jumping in to write a headline really quickly with whatever I can get from the draft that they have.” — Maddie Shepherd, Director, SEO at CBS News Another common approach is to relegate all SEO duties to a dedicated team. However, not only does this create silos, but “for the people in the non-SEO writing roles, it may give them an implicit pass to not optimize,” Jake Becker, senior director, SEO, at New York Post  added. This dynamic can lead to even greater friction between teams (reporters may be unhappy with how the SEO team adjusts their articles, teams may try to ‘claim’ their wins, etc). Provide initial SEO training and reinforce it To become the most visible, reputable publication in your niche, you need to ensure that everyone who touches the website understands the impact that they can have on its SEO. “I work with the HR team to give me the names of every new hire that will touch the company’s content. And I made sure, from the top, that it’s mandatory for any new hire to go through SEO training within three months—that changed the whole game.” — John Shehata, CEO and Founder at NewzDash Quarterly SEO training for new hires allows you to shape the relationship early on and communicate that everyone who works on the website also shares responsibility for the publication’s search visibility.  The education shouldn’t end at training for new hires, though. You’ll need to keep everyone updated on the latest best practices (which is easier if you’ve embedded yourself with the newsroom) and remind reporters of the SEO guidance you’ve provided. “Repetition is the most important thing. That could just be if you see even a small mistake—a kicker at the front of the headline that shouldn’t be there [for example]—send individual Slack messages or individual emails. Explain to them, ‘Okay, Google sees the first 60 to 70 characters of a headline, we want to put this higher up in the headline because it’s more likely to get crawled and more likely to be seen.’” — Jeremy Layton, US Head, Editorial SEO at Daily Mail The potential pitfall here is that you’re relying on people who aren’t necessarily accountable to SEO KPIs to implement optimizations. To motivate your reporters, Jeremy Layton, US head, editorial SEO at Daily Mail , recommends putting the results of your recommendations (and their implementation) front and center. “If we change a headline, I’ll highlight the minute the headline was changed and lines will go up,” Layton said. “So if you just show them how important it is, people will slowly start to buy in,” he added, emphasizing that it’s best to get personal with your approach to motivating your reporters and journalists. Optimize the stories that really matter to your audience News publications are distinct from marketing blogs or industry publications, for example, because of their breadth. So, news SEOs need to decide whether they’ll divide their attention evenly across all the news content or concentrate their efforts on certain categories or types of stories. “I would love to hit every single story, but that’s just impossible.” — Edward Hyatt, Director, Newsroom SEO at The Wall Street Journal When deciding where to focus, the panelists largely agreed that the publication’s audience and branding should guide the way.  “Rather than advising and recommending optimizations for every headline, we’re targeting what we think will do well,” Becker said. “We’re not trying to reach everybody—we’re trying to reach people who will read the Wall Street Journal  for this topic that they care about, so we stay as focused as possible on that,” Edward Hyatt, director, newsroom SEO at The Wall Street Journal , said. “That means we don’t touch every single story, but we stay sort of narrow on those key topics and those key stories of the day.” AI adoption varies across news publications News SEOs have started realizing the potential of AI in the workflows leading up to a news story draft, but attitudes about the technology and levels of adoption vary. “The way our SEOs have been using AI, it’s been more about prompting them, helping them with headline optimization or building out content briefs—again, guided and not simply like, ‘Here’s what’s getting pushed out to us, so I’m just going to push it back to our writers.’” — Binti Pawa, VP, Audience Growth at Forbes During the panel, “guided content” was a term used to describe ethical and reliable uses of AI in content creation. The panelists agreed that AI is suitable for basic (albeit time-consuming) tasks, such as: Outlining Meta description  creation Summarizing bulk content (e.g., SEO competitor analysis  or court records for reporters) Outside of news stories, AI has the potential to scale your publication’s reach via more traditional SEO strategies, like directly answering user questions. “No matter where this AI era takes us, I know that it will only be valuable to us to continue to tap into that and to serve those utility needs, whether it’s ‘How to watch (keyword),’ or ‘What does (this) mean?’ or ‘How does (blank) work?’” said Louisa Frahm, director, SEO at ESPN . Even with AI’s potential benefits, some of the panelists emphasized caution as part of their roles. “For the company I work at, we’re happy not to be pioneers in wholesale changes into AI workflows,” Becker said. “I think my first rule is to be cautious as well,” Hyatt added. Tactical tips for increasing your writers’ E-E-A-T By now, everybody has author pages ( including this publication ) as a means of conveying their writers’ E-E-A-T . When asked how they help their authors showcase E-E-A-T, the panelists responded with the following examples: Helping one of their premier columnists set up a Google knowledge panel . Instilling a sense of ownership over particular news beats to motivate journalists while centralizing their expertise on one topic. Highlighting reporting location in the byline (e.g., “Jennifer Cannon reporting from TD Garden in Boston, Mass.”) to take advantage of the priority that Google gives to local reporting. Hiring an editor with deep subject matter expertise (depending on your publication) to ensure a high standard of trustworthiness across all content. Creating “roundtable” content or articles where multiple authors can come together in one concise resource. Encouraging your journalists and reporters to share their news article via social media platforms. More takeaways from the latest SEO events Stay up-to-date with the latest guidance from experts at live industry events: Agency takeaways and tips from BrightonSEO (April 2024) Google’s SGE: Insights from SEOFOMO x Wix In the second half of this year, you can look forward to recaps from MozCon, BrightonSEO in San Diego, and more SEO meetups hosted at the Wix Playground in NYC. George Nguyen - Director of SEO Editorial, Wix   George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen For SEO agencies, client website optimization is just one aspect of the job. If you want your agency to actually thrive throughout industry shifts (and challenges from competitors), you also need to keep a watchful eye on upcoming changes to the SERP and algorithm, opportunities to leverage novel multi-channel strategies, the client relationship, as well as the satisfaction of the employees that carry out all that work. At BrightonSEO in April 2024, some of the SEO industry’s top experts shared their experiences on these topics and the approaches that have worked best for their agencies and clients. Table of contents: Why social & SEO are multi-channel MVPs in 2024 How to report on SGE’s potential impact to stakeholders Why honesty is the best client relations policy How agencies can go from employee turnover to tenure Why social & SEO are multi-channel MVPs in 2024 SERP’s Up at BrightonSEO, April 2024, featuring Sukhjinder Singh, Carmen Dominguez, Crystal Carter, Grace Frohlich, and Barry Adams. In the age of TikTok (and other social platforms and formats, like Reddit), social media can work in tandem with SEO better than ever, according to the experts on the live session of the SERP’s Up  podcast at BrightonSEO. While the experts did mention the well established benefits, they also highlighted novel ways to discover emerging search demand or potentially even rank pages. “I was just thinking about social media bolstering E-E-A-T ,” said SEO Consultant Sukhjinder Singh, referencing the now-commonly evangelized practice of including links to authors’ social profiles as a way to convey real-life experience and authority. “But it’s also a good research tool,” he added, citing an earlier BrightonSEO session by Ray Saddiq . “You need to be different to stand out—to do that, you need to look outside of Google (at organic social channels). But looking outside of Google often leads to terms or phrases with low search volume . Stop being afraid of zero SV keywords. Using these keywords might get you first-mover advantage, helping you to serve a search intent when it emerges. This is also an opportunity to show Google you are covering topics as whole and in depth by targeting topics your competitors may not have even thought about.” — Ray Saddiq, SEO Consultant “If the phrase or topic is popular on two social platforms, I’ve found it will pick up search on Google.” — Ray Saddiq Beyond using TikTok for keyword research , Carmen Dominguez, head of organic at Hallam, noticed that inbound links from the platform may help move the needle on the SERP: “I recently did a test on TikTok and Instagram with one of my eCommerce clients and getting lots of links coming from TikTok got people to click on my products and they now rank, even though I no longer have people coming from TikTok—just because the clicks made Google recognize my product.” “But also, my brand is now much better recognized on TikTok because of that, so people come from brand much more often,” Dominguez said, reminding attendees that time invested into social can pay dividends all on its own. “So I think it’s all related to making sure that we do an organic strategy where we look at all the different channels all at once, rather than just single points in different areas.” How to report on SGE’s potential impact to stakeholders “Stakeholders who sign contracts, who sign checks—they still think ChatGPT equals AI; they think all they have to worry about is the content” said Dan Taylor , head of technical SEO at SALT.agency , during his session on communicating SEO risk potential to stakeholders . “The fact that SGE  is around the corner, they’re completely blindsided by.”  While some stakeholders will focus on how they can put generative AI to use in their own campaigns, SEO professionals must also assess and communicate how search engines apply generative AI to reshape content on the SERP—potentially affecting all the businesses that rank on that SERP. Dan Taylor’s modified Torino scale for SGE threat assessment. The blue dot is an example of where SGE might land for eCommerce businesses. To communicate both the likelihood and severity of SGE’s potential impact on clients, Taylor adapted NASA’s Torino scale (shown above). And to further aid your stakeholders’ decision making, Taylor recommends a PESTLE analysis  to provide strategic context. A PESTLE analysis includes a review of the following macro-environmental factors: Politics Economics Society Technology Legislation Environment The final step to communicating the risks associated with SGE is to organize all the information in a simple, easily referenceable format. “The easiest way to explain this to stakeholders is using this one slide—it’s a little four-box that can essentially be tailored to anything or any business,” Taylor said. “It gives [the client] an idea of some key aspects of the project, so they feel involved, they feel like they know what is happening,” Taylor said, adding that this also creates a paper trail that you can reference later. Why honesty is the best client relations policy “When you’re working as part of a collaborative SEO venture, sometimes there’s awkward conversations,” said Crystal Carter , head of SEO communications at Wix. “Like somebody takes credit for something that you’re pretty sure was you or sometimes you’re working with a client and they say ‘Hey we want to bring in this other agency,’ and you're like, ‘who are they?’” The live recording of SERP’s Up at BrightonSEO. “The most important part when building relationships is being able to have the hard conversations at the very beginning. If you don't have the hard conversations, trust breaks and if trust breaks, you’re going to have a competitor coming in and that is actually your own fault.” — Carmen Dominguez, Head of Organic at Hallam Whether they were trying to maintain a client or on the client side (hiring the digital marketing agency), the “hard” conversations that the expert panelists provided as examples shared one important thread: honesty. “My old boss was really honest with people, [she would say] ‘This is what we’re good at,’ and they would appreciate that and stick with us,” Singh said. While the addition of a second SEO agency could certainly catch you by surprise, the expert panelists were quick to highlight the opportunities and positive experiences they’ve had. “The client’s website is on the line, so it’s their right to bring in a second opinion. In that sense, I think I’m more okay with it, especially if that other agency proves my point. So it's more like an opportunity to do that.” — Grace Frohlich , SEO Consultant at Brainlabs “This exact thing happened to me where I was brought in to do a specific piece of work for a client and they told me there was another agency who’s also doing the exact same piece of work,” said Barry Adams, SEO consultant at Polemic Digital and co-founder of the News & Editorial SEO Summit, explaining that it was a fairly big agency and that he was a freelancer at the time. “It turned out that other agency took a slightly different angle and our work complemented each other really, really well—it gave the client the whole holistic view they were looking for so that turned out to be fantastic,” he added. How agencies can go from employee turnover to tenure “We were a very small agency, clients came through the door, we needed to get things going,” said Miguel Varela, managing director at Unik SEO, during his session on talent retention for agencies .  So, Varela’s agency started hiring SEOs , but the lack of process and support for these new employees created issues for the culture of the agency: Senior SEOs did not have time to train newer SEOs because they were busy with client work, processes were skipped, and talent started to leave. The need to “get things going” for clients is often at the center of decision making, and while results ultimately drive agency retainers, you also need to support the staff that delivers those results if you want your agency to survive over the long run. To retain top talent and keep your agency competitive, Valera recommends that agency managers: Monitor motivation  — Understanding why people leave is only a piece of the picture. Valera recommends that employers schedule regular “ stay interviews ” (in addition to standard exit interviews when employees leave) to find out what you can do to improve. “Maybe [the employee] wants to move somewhere and be remote because they’re from outside the country—many things can change, so you should be aware of what’s going on,” he said, adding that the interviews should be conducted by the HR department or a neutral party. You can also take anonymous “pulse checks” (Valera’s agency uses a Slack integration for this) to monitor motivation across the company. With the recent prevalence of “ quiet quitting ,” these tactics can be a crucial boon for talent retention. Prioritize your employer brand as much as your consumer brand  — Labor trends are constantly evolving, with more people turning to social media to help them choose where to work. There are many ways you can revamp your image to appeal to the professionals you want to attract, but Valera recommends bucketing your employer brand content into three categories: Entertainment, education, and inspiration. Entertainment-related content includes your office pizza parties or all-hands/happy hours, for example. Education-related content includes in-depth articles, white papers, and thought leadership. And, inspiration-related content includes in-person events (like SEO conferences), charitable events, pro bono work, etc. “Sometimes this last one [inspiration] is the most important for people to want to work with you,” Valera said. Diversify the age of your workforce  — SEO is a younger marketing discipline and so it naturally attracts a younger workforce. However, a mix of both younger and older employees can balance fresh perspectives with experience, facilitate retention (as older employees may prioritize stability over career growth), and empower all parties involved through mentorship programs. Recognize performance  — There are many ways agencies recognize employees, including performance reviews, feedback sessions, bonuses (or other compensation), etc. Instead of focusing on the reward component, Valera focused on recognizing employees based on KPIs for individual performance. “KPIs are important because people can understand where they’re going and what they need to do to excel,” he said, adding that this helps distinguish what success looks like at your particular agency.  More takeaways from the latest SEO industry events on the Wix SEO Learning Hub In addition to our regular tactical and strategic articles on SEO (and related digital marketing disciplines), the Wix SEO Learning Hub will be on-site for live events throughout the year, including in-person industry meetups at the Wix Playground in New York, MozCon, BrightonSEO in San Diego, and more. To keep you updated with the latest challenges and how the industry’s experts are addressing them, we’ll publish takeaways from these events shortly after they occur. If you didn’t catch our first edition of this series, you can read about in my article Google’s SGE: Insights from SEOFOMO x Wix . George Nguyen - Director of SEO Editorial, Wix   George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen Nearly a year ago, Google unveiled its AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE)—the company’s competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4, which powers Microsoft Bing. And although Google has been tight-lipped about its plans for a wider SGE rollout, it’s clear that generative AI will be a key component of search results in the near future.  This means major brands and SEOs need to pay attention to SGE and its AI overviews if they want to maintain a competitive edge—especially in industries like eCommerce and publishing. On April 16, 2024, Aleyda Solis, SEO consultant and founder at Orainti, hosted the SEOFOMO Meetup at the Wix Playground in New York.  At this event, some of the industry’s top SEOs discussed SGE’s impact on their strategies, how Google’s business model may need to adapt, and their new priorities in this AI-powered search environment. Insights: AI overviews disincentivize top-of-funnel content creation Google needs to bridge AI overviews and ad revenue SGE or not, capture low-hanging fruit for SEO clients Despite uncertainty, you can still position your clients for SGE Structured data is more important than ever AI overviews disincentivize top-of-funnel content creation “If people don’t have the incentive to create this content that [Google has] been learning from, at some point, it will stop and they won’t have access to information to learn from.” — Aleyda Solis , SEO Consultant and Founder at Orainti “[Google] is, let’s say, ‘bridging’ all of the product reviews, et cetera, from publications, but also all the PLPs  and category and facets from actual merchants, because they recreate that experience directly in the [SGE] snapshot,” Solis said. Google’s SGE summarizes information, decreasing the need to click through. For many shopping-related queries, Google’s AI overviews summarize content so that users don’t need to click through to the original publisher’s domain. At the same time, Google can show links directly to product pages, effectively disincentivizing top-of-the-funnel content creation by appropriating it for the SERP. But, “if you cull a blog because it’s not generating revenue, well, you don’t know what revenue that was generating further on down the line,” Chris Green , senior SEO consultant at Torque Partnerships, cautioned attendees.  Naturally, Google’s changes will impact businesses differently. “I think investing in really understanding what traffic is commercially valuable—even if it’s not absolutely important to conversion—is super important,” Green said, adding, “So find out what’s actually a risk, but present some scenarios [to your stakeholders],” so that you can map out some potential ways to adapt your strategy. Google needs to bridge AI overviews and ad revenue The question of “If no one’s creating top-of-funnel content for Google to train its AI on, then where will the data come from?” isn’t the only dilemma the search engine has to solve—it also has to offset any potential ad revenue losses associated with SGE. “There is also the other part in Google, which feels that they’re going to be losing a ton of revenue—especially in display ads,” said event attendee John Shehata. “Imagine you are a parent with two kids looking for a trip in Florida, in a place that’s family friendly and so on, and it takes you two weeks to find the right hotels. SGE—good or bad—can solve it for you in a couple of days in a journey with like three or four different questions. So, you reduced a hundred pages full of display ads into like three, four SGE questions.” — John Shehata, CEO and Founder at NewzDash Google will need to recoup any lost revenue as a result of fewer ads shown to users. There are many levers that the company can pull to do this, including only showing AI overviews when it doesn’t show ads and even putting its generative AI features behind a paywall  (which poses another question: Are users willing to pay for what they’re used to getting for free?). At any rate, this situation lacks a clear solution and, without one, SGE is less likely to roll out globally (at least not in the implementation that Google has tested so far). Source: Google. SGE or not, capture low-hanging fruit for SEO clients “There’s still so much fruit that is just left to die on the tree. Case in point: I’m constantly encouraging clients, ‘Let’s do some linear regressions  to see which of your data points predict increased revenue!’ Google can’t take that from you.” — Annie Cushing, Senior Marketing Analyst at Annielytics Generative AI  opens up a world of possibilities and a universe of questions to go with them—many of which are just distractions given how often businesses and clients overlook the basics. And, while these possibilities and questions are exciting, they don’t overshadow existing digital marketing and SEO best practices when it comes to moving the needle for your business (or your clients’). “The beauty of machine learning is that you just take all of your data columns—throw all that spaghetti against the wall—and see which are most predictive,” Annie Cushing, senior marketing analyst at Annielytics, recommended. “Sometimes it may be gender, age group, location, the category of your website, but there are data points out there that you can use very simple, linear regression [to predict increased revenue],” she said, adding, “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, ask [Chat]GPT —you can take the first 10 rows of a dataset with 50–60 columns and ask it to generate Python code for you. There’s no excuse not to learn this.” Even for larger businesses/clients, low-hanging fruit can make your work more impactful while you assess the opportunities that generative AI may bring to your brand in search results. “I don’t know about you, I work a lot with enterprise-level clients that still have ‘Home’ for their homepage title tags,” said event attendee Nick LeRoy, freelance SEO consultant and owner of SEOjobs.com . “There’s so much that we can still do to bring them from their current state to something higher, despite SGE and the level that it rolls out,” he added. Despite uncertainty, you can still position your clients for SGE “For the first few months, your traffic is frankly going to drop. And so what we’ve been telling our clients is, ‘Do you actually show up in these AI overviews?’” — Michael King, Founder and CEO at iPullRank  Google has yet to fully reveal if, when, or how SGE’s capabilities will roll out to users. But in its current implementation, the presence of AI overviews for your target keywords may fundamentally impact the value of those keywords for your SEO strategy.  Without SGE, users can click on traditional search listings, ads, or SERP features . With SGE, while Google still shows the aforementioned search elements, they all currently appear below ads and the AI overview, meaning that your traffic will likely decrease unless you’re featured in the AI overview (or you’re close to the top of the results).  “We’ve been doing these things that we call our ‘SGE threat reports,’ where we take all the keywords that are driving the most traffic for you and then we scrape what SGE is doing right now (as far as what it returns),” said Michael King, founder and CEO at iPullRank, explaining that the threat reports include the AI overview and how long it takes to load. Source: iPullRank. “[The loading time] has changed dramatically since we started doing this,” King said. “When we first started, they were taking up to 30 seconds to load—now, they’re all taking less than a second.” That substantial load time improvement is a threat to website traffic, according to King, because (in the event of a wider rollout) users will be intrigued by SGE’s novel capabilities. “For the first few months, your traffic is frankly going to drop,” King said of queries affected by SGE, “And so what we’ve been telling our clients is, ‘Do you actually show up in these AI overviews?’”  If so, that’s the best case scenario, since appearing in such a prominent spot is a valuable branding opportunity and you’re likely to attract some traffic (akin to earning a featured snippet ). “If you don’t appear in the AI overviews, then you need to think about which keywords don’t show AI overviews—then, let’s focus our efforts more there so we can get the traffic from those keywords,” King said. Structured data is more important than ever “In the large language model environment, it uses all of the available vocabulary. So I would encourage all of you to mark up all your sites. We [as SEOs] all just look at Schema like, ‘Oh what’s going to show up in Google?’ No—use everything.” — Michael King, Founder and CEO at iPullRank “So we all think of structured data as like, ‘I want the reviews snippets, the star ratings, the how-to results , or whatever,” King said, emphasizing that Schema markup has wider implications now that search engines are augmenting their capabilities with generative AI. “All large language models leverage structured data.” This is also why King does not advise that businesses block large language models (LLMs) from their websites. “If I go to ChatGPT and your brand is not there, then I’m not necessarily going to consider your brand,” he said. For eCommerce brands, structured data  will continue to be a cornerstone of your strategy. “In a year or so, I’m pretty sure we will be seeing a completely different experience and search results for shopping—independently of SGE or not,” Solis said. “If you take a look at the releases in The Keyword blog  [Google’s official blog for product and technology updates], when they do all of these announcements every three months or so, they announce a new experience—more support of structured data to provide new search features, a rich result, deals, dedicated page—they’re pretty much creating a new layer, a UI experience to become a competitor of Amazon,” Solis said, recommending that eCommerce marketers strengthen their focus on structured data, especially to take advantage of the types and properties Google supports. SGE is just the beginning We don’t know exactly how Google will implement and roll out generative AI to its users beyond the current SGE experiment. Even so, as Google learns how users respond to its AI overviews, we, as SEOs, also learn. Whatever shape it ultimately takes, we now have a preview of its impact on SEO. Use this knowledge to help your colleagues, clients, and managers understand how Google is evolving and what you recommend they focus on to stay visible as AI permeates the search results. George Nguyen - Director of SEO Editorial, Wix   George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin