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Watch this webinar on AI Tools for SEO: From LLM Workflows to MCP Generative AI is opening up powerful new workflows for SEOs—and knowing how to use large language models (LLMs) effectively can give you a major edge.  In this webinar, Gus Pelogia (Indeed) shows you how to use ChatGPT and Colab to automate SEO analysis through code, even if you're not a developer. He’ll walk through practical use cases like measuring traffic and revenue overlap across URLs and finding seasonal performance patterns per page.  Download Gus Pelogia's Presentation Constance Chen (Moving Traffic Media) will introduce you use MCP (Model Context Protocol) for SEO , a new standard that helps LLMs interact more effectively with other web applications. You’ll leave with a clear understanding of what it is, why it matters, and how it could be utilized in your marketing. Download Constance Chen's Presentation And, Wix Studio's Crystal Carter will give you a preview of resources to help you get the most out of Wix Studio's MCP server  to expedite SEO and website management. What you'll learn: How to use LLMs to generate code for common SEO tasks and analysis An overview of Model Context Protocol (MCP) and what it means for SEOs and site owners How Wix’s MCP server helps you optimize for search and expedite site management The session offers advanced SEO workflows . Those new to the topic may wish to explore more about semantic search , brand visibility in LLMs , and content creation for AI. Meet your hosts: Gus Pelogia SEO Product Manager, Indeed Gus Pelogia is a journalist turned SEO since 2012. He’s currently an SEO product manager at Indeed, the #1 job site in the world. Every day, he writes tickets for small and large initiatives and works in a cross-functional team with writers, UX, engineers, and product managers. Twitter  | LinkedIn   Constance Chen Search Marketing Director, Moving Traffic Media Constance Chen is the Director of Search Marketing at Moving Traffic Media in New York. She specializes in marketing strategy, building Gen AI-driven marketing systems, technical SEO, and content strategy. She studies, explores, and writes about AI developments and emerging innovations. LinkedIn   Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, OMR, brightonSEO, Moz, DeepCrawl (Lumar), Semrush and more. Twitter  | LinkedIn

SEO Webinar on Conversational Search with Mike King Is your website ready for the rise of conversational search in the era of AI-powered search on Google? This webinar provided SEO strategies for creating content that ranks and resonates in the age of conversational search on LLMs like ChatGPT. Learn how to move beyond outdated keyword tactics and develop a future-proof semantic SEO approach that prioritizes natural language, user intent , and direct answers. This webinar explores how search engines are adapting to conversational queries and provides actionable takeaways to ensure content thrives in the years to come. Hosted by Mike King , Founder of iPullRank Agency and SEOWeek , alongside Wix Studio’s Crystal Carter and George Nguyen . In this webinar replay, you will learn about: How to evolve your content tactics for the AI age How to prioritize natural language and user intent in your content creation Which tactics will help you future-proof content for presence on Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT How to use Astro Agentic AI Assistant in Wix Studio to support semantic content optimizations How the Wix Blog's Content AI to support you as you refresh content for semantic search. Download the deck Download the Mike King's deck on Conversational Search and Crystal Carter's deck on Wix Studio tools to help marketers improve content for semantic search . The session offers advanced SEO strategies and insights. Those who are new to the topic may wish to explore more about semantic search , brand visibility in LLMs and content creation with AI tools . Meet your hosts: Michael King Founder and CEO, iPullRank An artist and a technologist all rolled into one, Mike is the Founder and CEO of digital marketing agency, iPullRank. Mike consults with companies all over the world, including brands ranging from SAP, American Express, HSBC, SanDisk, General Mills, and FTD, to a laundry list of promising eCommerce, publisher, and financial services organizations. Twitter  | LinkedIn   Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, DeepCrawl (Lumar), Semrush and more. Twitter  | LinkedIn   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 and how to use Wix SEO tools. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Twitter  | LinkedIn

Prepare Your Website for the European Accessibility Act Watch this webinar for insights as SEO professionals and site owners gear up for the introduction of the European Accessibility Act . It’s crucial to assess whether your website accessibility meets the new standards. Ensuring your website's compliance with accessibility guidelines not only enhances user experience, but your SEO and accessibility goals can often help you add value and growth to your website audience. Watch this Webinar on Website Accessibility This informative webinar is tailored for SEO professionals and site owners who are eager to create more accessible and user-friendly websites. Join digital accessibility expert, Flora Bazie, and Wix’s own Accessibility Product Manager, Tal Bavli, as we share effective tactics and tools to ensure your website is compliant with the European Accessibility Act. Hosted by George Nguyen and Crystal Carter, this is not one to miss. What You'll Learn Understanding the European Accessibility Act and its implications for your website Best practices for improving website accessibility Tools and resources to help you assess and enhance your website's accessibility Strategies to integrate accessibility into your SEO efforts Resources from this webinar: Download Flora Bazie's presentation on Accessibility & SEO Essentials Download Tal Bavli's presentation on Accessibility Tools on Wix and Wix Studio Download real-time webinar transcript Meet your hosts: Flora Bazie Accessibility Expert, LinoraTech Flora Bazie is a digital accessibility expert and speaker. She helps organizations meet legal compliance, boost SEO, and design for all abilities. Founder of LinoraTech Inc., She empowers and inspires teams and professionals. LinkedIn   Tal Bavli Accessibility Product Manager, Wix Tal Bavli is a leading Product Manager for accessibilty on Wix. Her team manages the pioneering Wix Accessibility Wizard and contributed to making Wix the Most Accessible Web Builder in 2024. LinkedIn   Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, DeepCrawl (Lumar), Semrush and more. Twitter  | LinkedIn   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 and how to use Wix SEO tools. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Twitter  | LinkedIn

Author: Gus Pelogia Learning to code was an aspirational goal I had for years. I’ve tried many times across several coding languages, but didn’t quite learn enough to create the applications I had in mind. Declare variables? API? Test environment? I know the words and what they do, but I would quickly get frustrated with my broken code and move on to something else. But that was all back when the only way to create applications was to pay someone or learn how to do it yourself. Large language models  opened a new world of possibilities for people like me to write usable code and create small applications.  In this article, I'll show you how easy it can be to ask ChatGPT to write code for you and how to use Google Colab to simply copy and paste the code, creating a useful application in just a few minutes. You’re free to use my prompts and applications or create your own improved versions. Depending on what you want to build, you’ll need two or three different applications: An LLM to prompt and generate your code (e.g. ChatGPT) A connector, like an API Google Colab, available in Google accounts for free, to run your code Table of contents: What is a prompt? What is a connector? What is Google Colab? How to run your Colab notebook Why use Colab instead of ChatGPT directly? How to generate code for Google Colab Example 1: Traffic and revenue overlap Example 2: Knowledge panel explorer Example 3: Best and worst month analysis Example 4: Crawler with AI prompts Example 5: ChatGPT query extractor Example 6: Related articles What is a prompt? If you use ChatGPT  or any other LLM, you’ve already written prompts. A prompt is just what you ask the LLM.  For ChatGPT, write your prompt in the box labeled ‘Ask ChatGPT anything’. Since prompting is a step into creating your own apps, here’s an example prompt I’ll explain with more detail later in this article: I need a Python script that calculates and displays 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. Remember that you can keep iterating your prompt on ChatGPT and other LLMs. If you’re not happy with the results (i.e., your code doesn’t do exactly what you want), you can continue the ‘conversation’ until the results are satisfactory. What is a connector? For the purposes of this tutorial, a ‘connector’ is any external tool you need to collect information (e.g., an API or SEO tool ). This allows you to pull information from a Google knowledge panel or extract vector embeddings using a crawler like Screaming Frog. This is an optional step, depending on the tool you want to build. It can be as simple as providing the API key that requests the information you’re asking for.  Once we get to the examples, I’ll show exactly how to use them and how simple they are. What is Google Colab? First of all, Colab is short for “Colaboratory.” And, as described in its FAQ , “Colab is a hosted Jupyter Notebook service that requires no setup to use”.  In other words, it’s a Python environment that runs on your browser, requires no software installation, and comes with several pre-installed packages. If you have a Google account (e.g., Gmail), you probably already have access to Google Colab. It’s free to use and you can share your code the way you would any Google Doc. How to run your Colab notebook Plain and simple:  You tell ChatGPT (or your preferred LLM) what you want in your code. ChatGPT generates the Python code. You copy and paste the code in Google Colab and click on “Run.”  While this is a straightforward task, errors are likely to come up. Don’t worry too much, because you can return to ChatGPT to identify errors and fix them. After pasting your code, click on the Play button to run the code. Make sure to ask for “Python code for Google Colab,” so your code is limited to packages available there. If you ask for Python code without specifying Google Colab, it might try to use packages that are not available . If you start getting errors, show ChatGPT which errors you had and it’ll adapt the code for you. It usually takes me up to three interactions to get the results I’m looking for. Little prompt tweaks are enough to solve issues. Why use Colab instead of ChatGPT directly? If ChatGPT is generating the code for you, couldn’t you just ask it directly for the results? The answer is yes, you could. However, not everyone is comfortable or allowed to upload their company data into ChatGPT. Even with the option to prevent your prompts from being used to train models, I still don’t feel like uploading sales, revenue, or conversion numbers directly. This is a workaround, since the files are run in Google Colab, which uses your Google Drive or files you upload directly.  This way, ChatGPT will never see your data, so it couldn’t possibly train on it. How to generate code for Google Colab I hope you’re still hooked on the idea of creating your own tools. I explained all the technical steps above, but you still need to know what (and how) to ask ChatGPT to generate your code. Let’s focus on that now. Depending on your use case, you’ll still need to learn some concepts or explain that you want to use a certain connector, like an API. Here’s an example: Write a Python script that calls the Google Knowledge Graph API, searches for a specific query (e.g., 'Taylor Swift'), and prints the fields @id, name, @type, description, url, and resultScore. In this case, I’m connecting to the Google Knowledge Graph API  and need to know which fields are available to pull data from.  Sometimes an idea is clear in your head and, when talking to a human, you can make a lot of assumptions (e.g., your colleagues know what a ‘conversion’ means in your company), but the LLM doesn’t, so be very explicit in your prompt.  For instance, say things like: Adapt this code to Google Colab I will upload a CSV with headers [A, B] I want a file that downloads automatically after the numbers are calculated Combine both results in one CSV file Change the input source to use Excel files If your code doesn’t do what you expected, just ask ChatGPT your next request, copy and paste the new code and test again. Tweak your prompt with new requests to get an updated Python code. Example 1: Traffic and revenue overlap A while ago, I was at a crossroads: we could only invest in optimizing a percentage of pages. One KPI was to protect traffic, another was to grow revenue. Not every page has the same potential, so how could I address both? By creating a small app on Google Colab, I could upload all my data and put together some groups of pages showing the percentage of traffic represented by those groups. I found that 20% of the pages represented nearly 80% of all traffic. You can find your ideal group (e.g., 50% traffic, 50% revenue) and drive the conversation with stakeholders  by proposing to only optimize a percentage of pages and listing exactly which ones. An easy table to show how much ‘coverage’ a group of pages represents. 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. Try to overlap URLs as much as possible, but it's ok if there's no perfect match. Traffic or revenue might be a little higher than 50%. 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. Use your intuition to adapt this prompt to your needs. This prompt shows that you can create an application with graphs and how specific your prompt instructions should be. You’re saying the results don’t need to be an exact percentage (which is nearly impossible to reach), that you’ll upload the data in a spreadsheet, and that you want the results to be downloaded automatically. This way, you’re not rambling through Google Colab to find where the file saved. While it’s not hard to locate the output file, this will save you a few minutes each time. Beyond the table with the results shown above, you can also plot some graphics that will facilitate the conversation when you’re pitching an SEO initiative . This graph shows that 30% of pages return around 70% of revenue. This graphic was automatically generated using Google Colab. Example 2: Knowledge panel explorer I’ve written on Wix about how to get a knowledge panel —this tool allows you to extract the confidence score Google has for specific entities, such as a person, company, or any other ‘thing’ (e.g., concepts, books, events, etc). Similar versions of this tool already exist, but I wanted to see if I could make my own just for the learning process. I also made an improved version where you can automatically track your confidence score  daily, but let’s stick to the basics below. Prompt example Write a Python script that calls the Google Knowledge Graph API, searches for a specific query (e.g., 'Taylor Swift'), and prints the fields @id, name, @type, description, url, and resultScore. If the query doesn't return a valid result, please print the message ‘Query is not present on Knowledge Graph panel’. This is meant to work on Google Colab. This is a case where you’d use a connector—the Google Knowledge Graph API.  To get an API key, to create your own Google Cloud API . It’ll generate an API key (a random mix of letters and numbers, such as 4gD2yB5lf9rqWiAm2nqGCkTyoU3&2x) that you need to copy and paste into your code.  Create an account on Google Cloud to generate your API key. Add your API key in the first red box and the query you want to check on the second. When you get it right, it should look like the example below: Google Colab output for ‘Semrush’ entity. Example 3: Best and worst month analysis This is an example of how a small application can save you precious time.  Traffic and conversions to different pages go up and down at different times. If you’re analyzing to find out when pages performed the best, the first step is to know when a page was at its peak and then compare your ranking positions at that time vs. now. This is quick to do for a handful of pages, but if you need to find the best and worst months for hundreds of pages, just finding the dates is a manual and boring task—all of that before analyzing what happened and putting together a recovery plan. This tool looks at your full list of pages and extracts the best and worst month for any metric (traffic, conversions, revenue), as long as the data is present in the source.  Prompt example Write a Python script for Google Colab that checks the best and worst month of traffic for a URL. I'll upload a CSV file with Date, URL and Sessions headers, including sessions for every month over a large period. Once you read the data, automatically export a CSV file including the Date, URL and Session for the best and worst month for every URL. The output should look like this: You can make adjustments on how you want to display the data, but this looked good enough for me. The first column is the URL, then the month, and number of sessions. Example 4: Crawler with AI prompts There are plenty of SEO crawlers on the market, so I’m not suggesting you should create your own to compete with them. I just wanted to see if it's possible to create a simple crawler that would extract the page content and pass through a ChatGPT prompt, all in a Google Sheet. It works, and it is surprisingly easy! The prompt example you see below worked in the first attempt. Always keep in mind that LLMs are overly confident. Sometimes you could ask it to read the content inside a URL, and it would throw an answer, even though it didn’t really read it. I tested this one more time, asking for the first phrase in each article. If it had hallucinated, it’d be easy to spot. Now I know it’s actually reading the page since these are exact phrases that exist on each crawled page. One of the most popular SEO crawlers in the market, Screaming Frog, has multiple AI-related features where you can do the same as I did here, and much more. For instance, you can extract only segments of a page (e.g. exclude headers and footer, for example), generate alt text automatically and plenty more using OpenAI's API. If, for some reason, you can’t afford a license or need a free option (apart from the OpenAI API keys usage), this could do the trick.

 Prompt example Please write me a Python code to use with Google Colab. I'll provide you with a URL, which you need to crawl / scrape the content. The URLs are in column A. Then, run this by the prompt in Column B. This will make a call OpenAI (I'll provide an API key) and return the answer in a CSV. Example 5: ChaptGPT query extractor As everyone in SEO is currently trying to discover how ChatGPT works and influence how their brand and clients are mentioned, multiple SEOs took Chrome Dev Tools (a feature inside Google’s browser, Chrome) to find clues. One of these SEOs is Jérôme Salomon . He found out that ChatGPT breaks our long requests into multiple phrases and sends them to Bing to fetch relevant sources (URLs). You can replicate these findings by prompting on ChatGPT. After that, click with the right button on your browser, then choose Inspect > Network > “Conversation” > Response Inside the response, a field called search_query reveals the queries ChatGPT ask to Bing This process happens when ChatGPT needs to consult external sources to validate its answers and display the sources (URLs) to users. This process is part of an AI framework known as RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). Another SEO professional, Ziggy Shtrosberg , used an LLM to create a bookmarklet you can add to your browser and after doing a search on ChatGPT, you simply click on the bookmarklet and the queries ChatGPT made to Bing are revealed. Ziggy said his process included asking Claude (another LLM) what he wanted, doing one step at a time, and testing it. After reading his blog post and some others on this topic, I learned that the information I want is under a field called search_query. Trying to replicate his steps, I simply asked for a JavaScript bookmarklet that would extract this field in any page (or return an error message). While Ziggy's tool has a better design, I still managed to extract the same information with a two-line prompt. The hardest part was discovering what I should ask. Prompt example I want to create a javascript bookmarklet to add on Chrome. It should extract the contents inside search_query. Example 6: Find related articles This is a more advanced case that I already covered in another blog post , but it was very popular at the time, so it’s worth a mention. You can map pages with similar topics together by using vector embeddings and cosine similarity. This allows you to find related products, add internal links, off-topic pages, and more. In short, vector embeddings are a numerical representation of text that captures its semantic meaning and relationships. This way, you can analyze what a whole page is about. Then, use cosine similarity to compare these pages to each other to find out how similar or different they are. I used Screaming Frog as a connector. They have a feature where you can crawl a page and extract the embeddings at the same time. You could also create a small crawler that extracts vector embeddings to work directly on ChatGPT or on your Google Colab. Remember that you only need to add your API key, press the play button on Google Colab, and upload your spreadsheet—nothing too complicated. Collect vector embeddings at scale and use cosine similarity to measure how similar the pages are. You can even reuse the prompt in example 3 (Crawler + AI) and run everything on your own machine. I've tested and got an error (“You tried to access openai. Embedding, but this is no longer supported in openai>=1.0.0”). To solve it, I've fed the error to my conversation with ChatGPT and got an updated code that works. Here's the Colab Script if you want. Simply add your API key and a spreadsheet with the header “url”. The next step is to use this other Google Colab script to measure the cosine similarity between each page and find the three most similar. Prompt example Please write me a Python code to use with Google Colab. I'll provide you with a URL, which you need to crawl / scrape the content. The URLs are in column A. Then return the embeddings for these pages in column B. This will make a call OpenAI (I'll provide an API key) and return the answer in a CSV. Use a newer version of the openai library (v1.0 or above) Experiment, validate, and iterate to maximize LLMs for SEO Beyond the examples I shared above, this post was meant to inspire you to come up with your own applications based on your specific needs. Start simple, test the tools, and whether the results are actually correct (LLMs sometimes have too much confidence, even if they’re plain wrong). Remember, you can ask for text, tables, graphics, and pretty visuals. There are advanced cases, such as content decay , that also help you tell a story to stakeholders, and making it visual is a great way to strengthen your recommendations. Even a color scale on a table can make a huge difference, and you can ask ChatGPT to include this in your code.  This example shows how many unique queries a website ranks for (per position and per month).    Some of these apps may look very simple, not fully fleshed like the SaaS tools you may be used to, but they are still an improvement from your spreadsheet or manual work. They may be shared in your company or remain your secret. Either way, you can build something powerful!  Gus Pelogia - SEO Product Manager Gus Pelogia is a journalist turned SEO since 2012. He’s currently an SEO product manager at Indeed, the top job site in the world. Every day, he writes tickets for small and large initiatives and works in a cross-functional team with writers, UX, engineers, and product managers. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Miriam Ellis The About page is an asset you know you need to have, but if you’re like many site owners, you aren’t quite sure what to fill it with. You are not alone! Most of the clients I’ve consulted, both large and small, seem to freeze when it comes to talking proudly about their business.  I find this kind of humility rather heartwarming—even if we work in marketing, we tend to blush a bit over blowing our own horn.  It’s totally normal to feel like this, but it creates a huge lost opportunity if this page isn’t designed for conversions. The About page can make the difference between being chosen by a visitor with specific criteria they need fulfilled or losing the sale to a competitor. It may be your one chance to prove that you are the best of all the options they are considering, and it deserves to be one of the strongest pages on your site, rather than an afterthought. So, here’s the good news: your About page is not about you—it’s about your visitor. Hopefully this distinction can help you move past self-consciousness and towards creating an About page that converts. Let’s get started. Table of contents: The problem: What typical About pages sound like How your About page should read What belongs on your About page and how should you organize it? 01. Opening statement 02. Summary of core products and services 03. Persuasive statistics 04. Positive reviews and user-generated content 05. Compelling images and videos 06. Ways to connect with your business 07. Mission statement 08. Company timeline 09. Call-to-action The problem: What typical About pages sound like to potential customers Let’s start with an example of how your About page shouldn’t read.  Imagine you’re a homeowner in Marin County, California, who is looking to hire a sustainable landscape designer to turn your non-ecological front lawn into a biodiverse wildlife garden. Here are your priorities as the customer: You want the service provider to both install the landscape design and to maintain it on a quarterly basis. You want a provider that’s local so that you won’t need to pay any extra travel-related surcharges. You want proof that the firm understands and is qualified to undertake native plant landscaping for wildlife and will not use any kind of materials or chemicals that could harm wildlife or your family. You want a company with a proven record of beautiful work and an excellent reputation in the local community. You want transparent information about fees so you know if you can afford this service. You want to work with friendly, communicative people who treat you respectfully and want to form a real relationship with you (since you will be letting them onto your property at least four times a year). With this list of priorities in mind, let’s look at a fictitious example of typical About page content that incorporates elements from multiple real websites: What you see above is one of the most common failings of About pages: The company says “We, we, we,” instead of “you, you, you,” to the visitor and misses the opportunity to check off items on the potential customer’s priority list. There is no mention of location, no sense that the visitor is being directly addressed, and little by way of how choosing this business will benefit the customer.  Let’s fix this with some better examples that will help you turn this important page away from internal-speak about your business and toward the visitor and their needs. How your About page should read to visitors There are three main points your improved About page should address to the customer: 01. Your problem solved Directly address your reader by acknowledging the most common problems that prompt them to contact you. 02. Your life made better Directly explain how your solution improves the lives of clients/customers, whether that means benefits to their home, health, finances, quality of life, or whatever your product or service provides. 03. Your proof Directly showcase all of the aspects of your business that prove you are the best choice. Proof can come in the form of reviews , testimonials, statistics, data, case studies, photos or videos of completed work, awards , and a variety of other assets, all with the goal of demonstrating your credibility. All three points are geared directly toward the customer so that your About page becomes their  resource for discovering whether their priorities will be met by your company. How you design the layout of your page is up to you, but let’s look at a framework for inspiration. What belongs on your About page and how should you organize it? Below, I will walk you through how to create a compelling, customer-first About page that includes the following elements: 01. Opening statement 02. Core products and services 03. Stats 04. User-generated content and reviews 05. Images and video 06. Contact information 07. Mission statement 08. Timeline 09. Call-to-action 01. An opening statement that speaks one-on-one to your visitor We’ve already looked at an example of typical About page text that fails to engage the reader. Take inspiration from this more effective example: This example speaks directly to your potential customer using words like “you” and mentions their needs and budget, suggesting that they can handle a wide range of customer requests and circumstances. 02. A summary of your core products and services Don’t assume that visitors already know what you’re offering. Create a summary of each of your core products and services, with links to relevant landing pages where they can learn more.  If practicable, include pricing information to avoid wasting your time and the visitors’ if their budget doesn’t match your costs. Here’s an example to inspire you: 03. Showcase your most persuasive statistics Numbers tell a story of their own. Whether it’s customers served, projects completed, or the size of your software’s link index, pick three to five stunning stats to highlight, like this: 04. Showcase reviews and user-generated content In surveys I’ve conducted in the past, I discovered that the majority of consumers trust what customers say about a business more than what a business says about itself. Because of this, one of your most influential About page sections should feature your best reviews .  If you have a separate page on the site for reviews and testimonials, you can link to it from this section. In the enterprise arena, this is also where you should showcase your most impressive clients (if you are permitted to do so). Some review platforms enable you to embed reviews from your profiles, but always read the guidelines of each platform before republishing its contents.  05. Include compelling images and videos A video summarizing key factors about your business can provide a shortcut for visitors who don’t want to read through your entire About page (this can be especially true for mobile users).  You should include:  An introduction from the business owner The benefits customers receive from working with you Impressive statistics Snapshots of your reviews Footage of your premises Information about your most important products and services  Video testimonials can also be a major asset for brands in almost any industry. Meanwhile, imagery plays a role in most businesses:  Service area businesses , like plumbers and landscapers, can share photos of company vehicles and uniforms to instill trust. Before-and-after photography works like magic for house painters, carpet cleaners, remediation services, and similar businesses. Brick-and-mortar companies can photograph exterior and interior premises as well as amenities, such as patio dining, gender-neutral restrooms, and accessibility features. For fully virtual businesses, such as software companies, screenshots of your dashboards or reports could add interest to this section.  06. List every possible way to connect with your business If your business is local, you should find room near the top of your About page to list your complete company name, address, and phone number.  In addition, create a list of every possible way in which a potential customer might connect with you: Alternate phone numbers SMS/text numbers After-hours support numbers Links to all your social media profiles Forms Booking buttons and calendars Email addresses Fax numbers 07. Only after all of the above, include your mission statement While a mission statement may be a primary consideration in the non-profit sector, it tends to take second place for customers in most other industries. Only when the contents of your About page have directly addressed as many of your customers’ questions as possible should you dive into the deeper story behind your company.  Once again, even though your mission statement is technically all about your business, orient its language toward the visitor, like this: 08. Instill trust with your company timeline While you don’t have to include a timeline of your business’s history, this can be an excellent way to quickly convey further information that will matter to the visitor. Here is a starter list of points that can make your timeline a sales asset: Founding date Awards won Community involvement Growth or expansion Major projects Acquisitions Relocations Top achievements 09. Add a prominent call-to-action Wix’s About page includes CTAs in the header and within the body. Prompt the visitor to take the next action along their customer journey  after viewing your About page. That next step is likely something on this list: Phone your business Fill out a form Book an appointment Text your business Buy something Visit your premises Move to a different page on the site Contact you via email You can sprinkle calls-to-action (CTAs)  throughout your About page, but don’t forget to close the page out with one. Make it as easy as possible for the visitor to understand what they can do next. Your About page is as much about your business as your customers’ needs There are many additional elements that could be incorporated into your About page. For example, it might be smart to feature notifications of sales and specials, or coupons. You could have links to a Careers page or a Press section. It may even be necessary to disclose your policies, licensing agreements, or similar information. Begin with the basics you’ve learned about in this article and add to it to make your About page as influential as possible. The one rule of thumb to keep in mind is that what you write is meant to solve the visitor’s problems. Answer their questions and meet their needs. Speak directly to the potential customer, as the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described, “that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader.” When a visitor to your About page feels that you are speaking to them one-on-one, with genuine consideration for their wishes and feelings, their journey toward conversion will be quicker because you have already met them halfway by proving you know how to serve your audience. Miriam Ellis - Local SEO Subject Matter Expert at Moz   Miriam Ellis is a local SEO columnist and consultant. She has been cited as one of the top five most prolific women writers in the SEO industry. Miriam is also an award-winning fine artist and her work can be seen at MiriamEllis.com . Twitter  | Linkedin

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 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